MSPs: How notifications stop you from buying a better car

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Welcome to Episode 258 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• How notifications stop you from buying a better car: Your job as the business owner is to find quality time to work ON the business and make sure you’re operating in “the zone” where nothing distracts you. Your biggest threat to this is notifications… turn them off, all of them.
• Are you up against a Super MSP? This is why you have nothing to fear: Super MSPs are huge companies that buy MSPs and merge them together. But fear not, these present three opportunities for you.
• Why your brand is so much more than your logo: Your brand is actually how people feel about you based on everything they see or hear about you. This is why your brand tone must be consistent across every way you communicate with everyone.
• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Terry, from an MSP in Pennsylvania, is concerned about the risk of forgetting the things that might help him grow his MSP. He wants to know the best way to keep great business books alive in the long-term.

How notifications stop you from buying a better car

One of the hard facts that you soon learn as a business owner is if you want to grow your business, you have to find and protect substantial chunks of time in order for you to work on your business. It’s this time where you make the forward progress because you are implementing things that will generate new clients, retain existing clients, and encourage your existing clients to buy more services from you. But there’s a problem, you see, I believe you have to spend this time in the zone completely focused on the task in hand. And this is especially true if you’re an MSP doing marketing activities, and that’s not a natural skillset for you. Yet the vast majority of MSPs, they never get into this state of full focus. And there’s a specific reason why.

Many, many years ago, I used to do one-on-one consults with MSPs here in the UK. We’d hire a business meeting room and we’d spend the day exploring their business goals, their marketing, what was going well and what was not going well. And I probably did about, I don’t know, 20 or 30 of these over about 18 months. And it’s not something I do anymore, but it was a great way for me to learn about MSPs and of course for me to help them with their marketing. That was before we had our MSP Marketing Edge service.

But I’ll never forget one of the meetings I had, which was almost like a comedy situation, like it could have been in a sitcom. So let’s just take the context of this meeting. The MSP that I’m meeting with has paid a few thousand pounds for my time and attention. And the whole purpose of the day is to examine their marketing and make it better so that they can win new clients and ultimately grow their business, which is the way that of course, they’ll grow their own personal income and ultimately have a better lifestyle. So to me, that makes the meeting a very big deal indeed. And in fact, most of the MSPs that I met with, they took their meeting very seriously. But one of them didn’t. And it wasn’t that he didn’t want to, he was desperate to grow his business and I knew that he valued my advice.

The trouble was he was caught up in the notifications of what was happening in his business at that exact moment. The first hour or so, I could barely drag him away from his laptop. He was looking at Teams messages, he was looking at his PSA, and he was just generally distracted. And I challenged him on this when we had our coffee break and I said, look, I don’t believe that you can spend quality time working on your business while your brain is trapped on notifications about things that are happening in the business. Oh, and I’ve got to say, it wasn’t like there was a big incident going off, there was no cyber attack or anything like that. It was just the regular day-to-day stuff between him and his techs.

As you can imagine, this MSP was trapped working in his business on a day-to-day basis. And even though he wasn’t there in his office, he was sat in a meeting room with me. He was still mentally in his office with his techs. You know what I mean by that? So after that first coffee break, I did manage to persuade him to log out of his PSA, to shut down Teams and to spend more time focused on what we were doing, what him and I were doing in the room. And that’s when his phone started pinging. Ping a text message. I could see his eyes jumped down to the phone and he was desperate to read it and see if it was from his team.

And when he didn’t read it and didn’t respond, they WhatsApped him, ping. And he almost started sweating as he could see the name of one of his staff on his phone. And he wasn’t reading the message because he’d promised to pay attention to me. And then the phone started ringing and both of us could see the word office on the screen. So I let him answer that, and I kind of mentally gave up on that session because I realised he was never going to spend quality time thinking about the growth of his own business.

Now let me be clear, I’m not in any way being critical of this business owner, although he did waste a couple of thousand pounds on me and the meeting room that day. The point that I’m trying to make is that if you’re going to do important work, you’ve got to get into the zone. You’ve got to get into that deep mode where you are implementing important things that are going to grow your business in the years ahead. And you cannot do that if every five seconds there’s a ping, ping, ping of something somewhere going off. In this respect, Teams is evil, your PSA is evil, your phone is evil, your children are evil. I’m just joking about the children, one, I’m not really joking, but it’s true. You cannot do quality work on your business if you are constantly being interrupted.

Let me tell you something that you and I might disagree with. Multitasking is a myth. I genuinely believe it is. I know that you think you can multitask because you can set up a new user while you are resetting someone else’s password and you can be on the phone to a third person. You can do this all at the same time, and you might think that you’re one of those really clever people whose brain is set up that way and you can genuinely multitask. And yes, indeed, that may be the case.

But when you are doing important jobs that you are not good at, things like marketing and especially when they’re really important, they’re not just a trivial thing like a password reset. They need your full brain capacity.

Every single time a notification grabs your attention, you are pushing your progress backwards.

And this is why I actually have very few notifications on my phone. I have a couple of select people on WhatsApp who I’m notified about, and a couple of select apps which don’t abuse the notifications, but there’s very little else that gets through on my phone. And if I’m doing really important work, I enable do not disturb on my phone and on my laptop. It feels like the whole world’s going to explode and you won’t know about it if you’re on do not disturb for an hour or 90 minutes, doesn’t it? But I promise you that is not the case. What will happen is that you’ll spend quality time working on things that grow your MSP.

The MSP owners who are growing their businesses do this on a regular basis, I promise you. So the next time you see a car that you’d love to own or a house that you would love to move into, but you can’t yet afford it, ask yourself if the blame lies with the ping, ping, ping.

Are you up against a Super MSP? This is why you have nothing to fear

A Super MSP that has hundreds of employees buys a local competitor of yours and suddenly they’re in your town. Has this happened to you or do you fear coming up against a super MSP?

I don’t think you have anything to worry about from Super MSPs. In fact, I believe they create lots of opportunities for you.

Super MSPs are huge companies that buy MSPs and merge them together. And here are three reasons why I believe they create marketing opportunities for other MSPs like yours.

Here’s the first one – At your old competitor, the clients, once the acquisition has gone through, watch the service levels go down and the prices go up. And all of the people that they’ve known for years just seem to vanish. And this makes them sometimes reluctant to sign another contract. So here are some ideas to capitalise on this. Look at an archived copy of your old competitor’s website to get names from testimonials and call them. Run paid ads with a headline – Does your business miss old competitor’s name?

Number two – Some of the technicians who were transferred to the Super MSP will hate working for a big company, so reach out to all of them on LinkedIn and meet for a coffee, just to connect. Bingo. You now have a pipeline of potential new technicians. Hire the one who can remember the contact names of all of the clients of your old competitor.

And number three – Sure, the Super MSP will always be better resourced than you with more marketing and salespeople, but none of them will have your passion or your speed. The bigger a business, the slower it is to react. You are a speedboat. They are a super tanker. You can adapt to the winds on a whim and they take three miles to change course. Never be scared when you’re up against a super MSP.

Why your brand is so much more than your logo

Your MSP’s brand is so much more than your logo. Your brand is actually how people feel about you based on everything they see or hear about you. My guest expert today is going to tell us why your brand tone must be consistent across everywhere you communicate with everyone, including on live chat in PSA tickets and when technicians pick up the phone.

Today’s guest believes so strongly in the power of a good brand. He says it helps you truly differentiate from all the other MSPs.

Hi, I am Jim Pietruszynski. I am the CEO of Soulsite. We are a full service brand design agency. I’ve been with the company since the inception, three of us now up to 80, and just as of the last month acquired another agency on the east coast. So brand agency and growing.

Amazing congratulations on your recent acquisition, but 80 staff. Oh my goodness, you must have either a very good management team in place or a very busy schedule. But we’re not here to talk about staff. We are here to talk about branding and in fact, I’m going to challenge you in the next couple of minutes, Jim, about how important branding really is for an MSP that’s looking to grow. I suspect that you and I may have conflicting opinions on this, we will find out in the next few minutes. But first of all, tell us a little bit about you. So how did you come to be a branding expert sitting in a fast growing business like you are now?

Yeah, so I have a background in Design, bachelor of Fine Arts and Graphic Design actually, and started in the industry working with consumer packaged goods and branding in B2B and working at a small agency. Then moved on to a very large agency which was global worldwide, and realised that neither of those places were right for me and that I needed to find something in the centre. So Soulsite was born in 1997, focused on more mid-size companies, working with their brand and helping develop their brand and grow their brand and help add value to business by maintaining those brands.

We are on a pretty fast growth trajectory through I would say the last 20 years and in the last 10 have really grown quite considerably, especially as I talk about the acquisition that we’ve made on the east coast. I think what’s next is really to look for other opportunities for us to engage in partnerships in the UK so that we do actually have a global presence because we do work on iconic brands that are global in the marketplace.

I wouldn’t bother with the UK, it’s a terrible place, really is very downbeat. I wouldn’t bother with that at all. In your whole career, what’s the most famous brand you’ve ever worked on?

Coca-Cola probably comes to the top of my head. And then if you’re into beer, Molson Coors, which is Miller and Coors products and Molson project projects in Canada. They’ve been a client of ours over 20 years. So that’s been kind of our pride and joy as we’ve grown the business.

Yeah, that’s pretty impressive. There’s some good brands there, but let’s talk about MSPs and B2B. So obviously most MSPs are business to business. I know some MSPs do still do domestic work, consumer work, but that’s not the majority of the audience who listen to this podcast and watch these YouTube videos. From a B2B point of view, I don’t see a great deal of investment into branding from MSPs. So your average MSP, even up to a million, maybe a couple of million turnover will look at their brand as being that logo that was done, which can either be done by someone on the cheap, maybe on Fiverr, on Upwork, or it was just done by their website people. And for most MSPs, they see that as their brand. I guess when you hear something like that, that just makes your heart go cold inside.

Yeah, we’ve had this conversation a lot and talking to companies that are B2B and companies that we work with that are B2B, there’s always a C, there’s always a C. There’s always someone that is reciprocating that brand or feeling that brand or using that brand. So there is nuanced differences in how MSPs work in a B2B space, but in general, the value of the brand becomes more important, especially as technology has grown and as these MSPs are, and again, I don’t run an MSP, but work with a lot of MSPs that are mostly virtual or remote. So it’s a voice on a phone. That’s all part of the brand.

It is the way that you present yourselves, your response times, how well you are equipped to intellectually lead someone to help them with whatever problem or nuance might exist for them.

We are a service company, MSPs are service companies, and that service component becomes a very important piece when we talk about the brand and when we work with MSPs, we really try to strike the balance of helping them understand that there is a purpose that they need to have. There is a vision, there is a mission, and there have to be values that are formed so that characteristics can really start to build the company. I mean the brand in most MSPs is really not a logo. It is the experience that you feel working with an MSP.

Now that’s really interesting because most MSPs really struggle with differentiation with explaining in any way what makes them different from, well explaining in a non-technical way, what makes them different from their competitors. Because the MSPs will know, Hey, my tech stack is better, we’re better at security, we outsource, we have an outsourced help desk overseas overnight. So they know all of those things. But translating those features into benefits and use them as a point of differentiation is really hard for most MSPs because they’re not marketers.

If we were to look at something like, let’s take Coca-Cola for example, so we all know and there’s Pepsi and call me a heathen, but they taste similar, right? I know everyone has their preference, but let’s be honest, that preference is probably more built up over marketing to us our entire lives because all of us who are alive now have been marketed to our entire lives by those colas, and our preference is probably dictated by our parents’ preference by what happened to us when we were children, all of that kind of stuff.

So I think it’s really easy for a business owner, an MSP owner to look at Coke and Pepsi and say, Hey, obviously marketing and branding is really important to those because ultimately they’re just the same product. They’re the same product with slightly different chemicals in slightly different tastes, but it’s the brand that makes the difference. How does that translate to my MSP? So you were saying that it gives good branding is a point of differentiation to look at all of those things. Practically, how do you do that if it’s not about the logo? How do you help ordinary business owners and managers to feel something about the MSP that they’re thinking of choosing?

Yeah, it’s a great question. I think one of them is to have a story. I think that as we look at MSPs and we talk to them, you look for a point of difference, everyone started in a different place. So where is it that you began? And as an MSP, it could mean the service that you provide is very vast, but what do you really specialise in? I think that it’s important to understand where do you shine and what is shining best for you and looking at that service and then understanding what characteristics then are built from that service that become important to how people feel and how you’re expressing yourself.

So I think to build a vision and to build a system, values is something that has to be almost an internal playbook for an MSP on how their team or their teammates or their partners or whatever you want to call your co-workers, are all embodying that same vision and they understand the service and when someone is calling you, for the most part, they’re usually in some sort of state of distress or in need of help.

There is a personality type that needs to be looked at to fulfill roles in management and in service for them. So again, that still builds from the story. You want to make sure that the characters that are part of your brand also relate to the story that is being built, so that there is a relationship that’s happening even internally within the company. If you need to be transferred to a specialist to work on a specific assignment or someone’s not well equipped to handle the issue that you have at hand. So for us, MSPs have really been looking at, what are average response times for your clients, what are all the things that you’re familiar with, and how often are teams reaching out to you? How often do you feel that problems are being resolved? And then what did that interaction feel like? There’s a little bit of research that we can do it in understanding and doing some interviewing to understand what is the playback that you’re getting from your current partners or your clients, and then use that to develop a, I wouldn’t say a total script, but a personality profile and kind of the do’s and don’ts of how to manage a wide array of different types of businesses. They don’t all think the same as a creative agency like ours.

Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. I guess what you’re talking about here is a coherence. So the brand of the business is based on the values of the people that work within their business and the reactions of the clients. If the values are, you’re reliable, you’re trusted, and people feel safe with you, and that’s what your entire brand is built on, but then a user picks up the phone for support and a 12-year-old technician answers saying, Hello, no, I can’t help you with that. I’m too busy. Or, Yeah, that’s not important. I’ll log a ticket, it is the complete opposite experience of what you’re trying. I get what you’re saying there. The brand isn’t just what’s on the website, the brand is everything. It’s the way the company acts, it’s the way it feels. Would that be a correct thing to say?

Correct. We call it brand world or brand experience, and I think a lot of that’s connected to the user experience and what that user experience is, not just in a conversation on the phone or directions on the phone, but how easy is it to reach you? What does the interface look like when we’re working together? And we see a lot of really great ones and we see a lot of really bad ones. So how you appear in the communication platform that you’re using is also just as important as your brand. I think you said a logo, a brand is more than just what your logo is. Your logo hopefully would be something that someday for many people would become memorable based on positive experiences that they’ve had with you over time and have recommended you to multiple other people in the business industry. But yeah, you’re correct. Brand is very holistic, and it also involves pretty much all of our senses, except for taste, I guess you’re, you’re not going to be licking your MSP provider hopefully.

But you might be licking the screen of your computer, I’m sure Steve Jobs said that once about one of the Macs that they designed. It was so lovely you wanted to lick it.

Final question for you, Jim, because what you just said there makes a lot of sense and it is difficult. I think we can all see, particularly for small MSPs to get a consistency across live chat in the ticketing system, the PSA on the phone, on the website, in emails that are sent out, particularly for a small business, there’s lots of different channels there to get a coherence, and I can see the difficulty in that For bigger MSPs, it’s kind of easy. They just pull out their, not a checkbook anymore, you pull out your credit card and you go and talk to someone like yourself. But for smaller MSPs, what would you recommend is a good first step or something that they could do themselves to start going down that route of getting some kind of brand coherence?

That’s a great question, and it’s kind of how we began our company here too, is really through empathy. I mean, I think thinking about what does it feel like to be in someone else’s shoes when you’re working with them and really understand what is the need or the problem to be solved is a great starting place. And when you try to take yourself out of your own world and put yourself into someone else’s shoes, you start to understand where those needs are and ask yourself, are we really fulfilling these needs or not? And those are the things that are going to be remembered by that brand, and those are the things that emotionally are going to start to make connections that keep your brand growing, but also keep your brand healthy.

Yeah, I completely agree. And I read in a book somewhere, I can’t remember which book, but it was to influence what John Smith buys. You must look through John Smith’s eyes, and I think that applies not just to brand, but to all marketing as well. Jim, an amazing interview. Thank you so much. You’ve made big high level brand concepts, very simple for us there, which I appreciate. Just tell us a little bit more about your business and what you do for MSPs and how can we get in touch with you?

Yeah, so we are a full service brand design agency, which includes the strategy. We can help MSPs uncover what their secret sauce is or how they should position themselves in the marketplace, by doing audits and we have tools that help us understand how to help individual MSPs stand out from one another. We can actually do the design work, we can help with that user experience and help define really what that holistic brand experience is across many of the touch points that I would need, even when it comes to digital advertising or if they’re doing any social work or thought leadership in the marketplace, we can help them prepare what visually, what that might feel like. We can’t write it, but we can help visually articulate what that would feel like for someone and does it feel helpful? Does it feel simple? Does it feel succinct? And making sure it’s communications are coming over in a way that people can absorb quickly. So that’s a lot of what we focus on. We also do a lot of CPG along with MSP, and there is a lot of overlap. I think that MSPs, they need to think of themselves as, like I said, I know it is B2B, but there’s always the C and thinking about there as a consumer on the other end of who you’re working with.

The best way to get in touch with me is info@soulsite.com. It’s S-O-U-L-S-I-G-H-T. I’m also on LinkedIn. You can look up my name James Pietruszynski, or our website is soulsite.com is another way to see some of our work.

Paul’s Personal Peer Group

This week there is an interesting question from Terry, who’s based in Pennsylvania and he’s got a concern about the risk of forgetting the things that might help him grow his MSP. His question is… I’ve listened to some great business books and loved them, but what’s the best way to keep them alive for me in the long-term?

Oh yes. I mean, this is a common problem for prolific readers. I’ve read and listened to hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of business and marketing books, and I’ve probably only retained so much knowledge from them because that’s my job, but in reality, I’ve forgotten way more than I remember.

So here’s a clever idea. Go and get yourself some visual summaries of your favourite books, and you could then frame those visual summaries and hang them on the walls of your office. I don’t think they’ll ever replace the books, but they do act like an aide memoir.

I’ve got a few sites for you to look at. One’s called Visual Synopsis – these are very beautiful and quite clever summaries of books. There’s another one called Reading Graphics, which has got book summaries as infographics. And also it’s kind of surprising what you can just find on Pinterest. Just put the book title into Pinterest.

Mentioned links

• This podcast is in conjunction with the MSP Marketing Edge, the world’s leading white label content marketing and growth training subscription.
• Join me in MSP Marketing Facebook group.
• Connect with me on LinkedIn.
• Connect with my guest, Jim Pietruszynski on LinkedIn and check out his Soulsight website.
• Got a question about your MSP’s marketing? Submit one here for Paul’s Personal Peer Group.