Golden rules of MSP sales & marketing

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Welcome to Episode 259 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• Golden rules of MSP sales & marketing: I asked my MSP marketing Facebook group what their golden rules of sales and marketing would be, and I’ve got the highlights for you.
• 3 ways to kill your MSP’s sales: There are many mistakes MSPs make that stop them from winning new clients. Here are three that I see holding back MSPs everywhere.
• How MSPs can build self managing teams: If you have to turn up every day in order for your business to function, then you need to start paying special attention to your team and developing them. My guest explains how.
• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Jonah in California wants to know whether to include trust badges on his MSP’s website and I have a very clear answer.

Golden rules of MSP sales & marketing

One of the best things about working in the channel is just how collaborative MSPs are, and I see this in communities all the time. I’m sure you do too. In fact, I’ve watched people who are in direct competition with each other – they literally lose clients to each other – I’ve watched them collaborate and help each other in times of need. Recently, I asked a bunch of MSPs who are in my Facebook group what their golden rules of sales and marketing would be, and I’ve got the highlights for you right here.

So I have this Facebook group, which you really should join if you’re determined to improve your marketing and get new clients for your MSP. Just go into Facebook, search for MSP marketing, but do make sure you’re looking in the group search and not in the pages search, and it is free to join. It’s also a vendor free zone, something we did about five years ago, kicking all the vendors out. The quality as you can imagine, has been much higher since because there’s no one there doing any selling. There’s just people adding value.

I asked the two and a half thousand members of my MSP Marketing Facebook group what their golden rules would be for marketing and sales, and here are some of the many replies that we received…

So I kicked off with my own, which is to never discount. I think that you should add value when you need to do a deal, but never cut your prices. Cutting prices is such a dangerous thing to do. Now, sticking with pricing, Dan Baird said it’s better to over-price rather than under-price. I agree with you there, thank you, Dan.  And Don Mangiarelli said, never disclose pricing in an email – you should always be at a sit down meeting.

Keith Nelson said, never price on commodity sales. Good, better, or best packages. Keith also dropped some more value bombs. He said, never think that you are too small for a big contract; never sell technology, sell business outcomes, enhanced with secure technical solutions; and never do a QBR on how great you are, only report on business outcomes and measurable business results. I love these, thank you very much, Keith.

Aaron Weir then dropped a comment, and Aaron always brings value to the conversation. He said, never send a contract over email, always present in person.  I completely agree with you on that, Aaron. It is a lot harder to get the meeting and to sit down with someone, but you’re much more likely to get the sale if you do it.

Okay, a few more. Rob Williams said, never over promise. Jonathan Scofield said, wherever your prospect is, there thou shall also be – it’s quite hard to talk in kind of biblical text like that. And Jeff Weight said, have a yearly price increase called out in your contract.

Now there were loads more comments with more great advice in that thread. And if I didn’t mention you this time, apologies, it really was a great thread. Do you know, I’d be interested to know though, what your golden rules would be for marketing or selling your MSP. Will you drop me an email and let me know? My email is hello@mspmarketingedge.com

3 ways to kill your MSP’s sales

Most MSPs want new clients and yet most scupper themselves in several ways. Mostly it’s through a complete lack of having a marketing system, and the keyword there is “system”. You can’t do marketing haphazardly now and again and expect to build a solid pipeline of leads and prospects.

Good marketing requires consistently implementing a small number of actions that identifies potential future clients, qualifies them so you know you want to work with them, engages with them, builds a relationship with them and puts you in front of them at the exact moment they are ready to consider buying what it is that you do.

There are many mistakes MSPs make that stop them from winning new clients. Here are three sales killers that I see holding back MSPs everywhere.

Sales killer number one is an IVR, you know what an IVR is, don’t you – when you ring up and you press one for this, press two for that. And you do know that people hate IVRs, don’t you? Rather than making your business stand out as bigger than it actually is, it just comes across as impersonal. There’s one MSP that I ring every now and again and they’ve got five options on their IVR. I’ve pressed all five buttons and each time I get through to the same first line support guy and I wonder how many potential clients just put down the phone when they hear an IVR menu. People buy from people, they hate automation that they perceive gets in their way. And just because you have a clever IVR solution in your VoIP toolkit, doesn’t really mean that you should use it.

Sales killer number two is marketing from your point of view. Most MSP’s website and marketing materials are bland and lack impact and far too often they’re created from the business’s point of view. We do this, we do that. Who cares? Now you might, but your prospects don’t. They don’t care about you. They only care about what you can do for them. So put yourself in their shoes, be them, work out their buyer persona. What do they need? What do they want? Most importantly, what do they fear?

I once helped an MSP to rewrite his homepage and his company was an education specialist here in the UK. And so we were asking the questions of what’s the average head teacher scared of? They’re scared of lost learning time, they’re scared of a bad Ofsted, which is the regulator here in the UK, and they’re scared of the school screwing up from the head teacher’s point of view. An MSP that already specialises in education and already supports, let’s say 1500 teachers is so much safer than one that doesn’t.

And we don’t need to talk about the business. We just need to look at it from the head teacher’s point of view and demonstrate that they can mitigate most of their fears with one no-brainer decision. Interestingly, by the way, thinking this way makes price just a factor in the buying decision and not the factor in the buying decision, even in the price sensitive education market.

Sales killer number three is being samey. If you go and Google IT support in your town and click on the first 10 websites that come up, regardless of whether they’re in the adverts, in the map listing or the organic listing, that doesn’t matter. You’ll notice they’re all really similar, different words, different pictures, but the same themes, the same offerings, no real clear differentiation.

And now look at your website and compare it to those other 10 websites. It’s probably the same problem. Your website probably says more of the same things that all the other guys are saying. But samey kills sales, because the people you want to talk to are an uneducated audience. They don’t know what they don’t know, so they make buying decisions at an emotional level and not using their brains. They pick an MSP that feels good to them. If your marketing is the same as everyone else’s, you’ll just be compared to everyone else and you don’t want that because then you have a one in 10 or even worse chance of engaging with them. Always better to stand out and to be different. Standing out and being different is the key to having more conversations with more of the right people.

How MSPs can build self managing teams

I once read something in a business book that you don’t really have a business until it’s completely self-sustaining without you. If it can continue to win, service and delight clients, regardless of whether you are physically there or not, then yes, that’s a proper business. But if you have to turn up every day in order for the business to function, then you’re just in a job. And yes, sure, that might be a job that pays you more money and where you have more control. Although I do appreciate your job may not pay you more money, but it’s still just a job.

My guest today believes that the only route from you working yourself to death in the business, to a business that thrives without you is to pay special attention to your team and start developing them on a one-to-one basis.

Today’s guest believes growing. Your MSP is always, always, always about getting the balance of working on the business and in it, right? He says, no matter how busy you are, you must spend one-to-one time with your team. And you can start with one person for one hour a week. Soon they’ll be taking work off your desk and helping you to fix the problems in your business.

Hey, my name is Joe Travaglione. I’m the owner of Future State Cyber and I help build self-managing teams.

And Joe, it’s so good to have you here on the podcast because building self-managing teams, what that really means is creating a business that thrives without you, the owner having to be there, which I would say is the dream for most MSPs, if not all MSPs. Wouldn’t it be great to make money and have a business that you are so proud of, where the quality is really high without you having to turn up every single day. It gives you the choice, the choice of whether to go in or not. So that’s what we’re going to talk about in our interview today, but you have a fascinating history. Tell us about what you’ve done and all of the MSPs that you’ve scaled over your career.

Well, it’s been pretty amazing. I’ve been lucky. I started out when I was very young and got into the MSP industry probably when I was 20. And along my journey I got lucky enough to work for a printer company who gave me and one gentleman the keys to build the company. We started with one engineer and two clients and we were able to scale it in six years up to about 60 clients and about 6 million in revenue. It was a great journey too because we were able to focus more on working on the business and thinking to scale big. So right off the bat they’re like, we’re making a $10 million company and you need to think that way right off the beginning.

So it was really amazing to go through and think about those things and learn about it and really start to think about melding the managing and the business and the leadership portions with all the technical things that I’ve learned over all the years.

So in a way, you kind of got lucky from the start there, and I say lucky not because you were given that opportunity, but because that printing company said to you essentially you didn’t have to get caught up in the minutiae, the small details and the cashflow difficulties that the owner operator has to deal with. So you were able to go in and from day one you were able to think, right, it’s not going to be a case of we will be $10 million, maybe one day this has to be a $10 million business or I’m going to get fired. So how do we need to think and how do we need to act in order to get that way?

Was that a difficult thing for you to do? I mean, were you an employee at the time when you went into that or did you already have some entrepreneurial spirit, whether you’re employed or whether you do that for yourself – you still need that kind of big entrepreneur thinking, don’t you?

Yeah, no, I’ve always wanted to run my own business, but I was employed. So I was taken under their wing and we were able to operate it in its own segmented environment where we had to think of it as its own business and run it scrappily in its own ways of we weren’t getting any extra resources. But you’re right, we did have the added benefits of the marketing and the inside sales and the aspect of – Hey, we are a printer company, so we see all these printer people every day, so we were able to cherry pick that very easily. But I did get a lot of training and learning and development on how to manage a team and how to build a team from scratch and really how do you leverage what you have and slowly build it over time.

Yeah, I can imagine. I know you’ve done this a couple of times, haven’t you? So that experience presumably set you up to go into the next experience thinking the right way.

Yeah. The other thing they always thought about too is a lot of places I worked at, a lot of entrepreneurs work in isolation. They don’t leverage other business leaders to help themselves or they don’t have business coaches. They don’t leverage people like you to help them with marketing. So why don’t you find the industry experts to help you? So the other thing was we were a part of a lot of masterminds, we leveraged a lot of other mastermind groups to help. And they believed in a lot of peer groups and the peer groups led us into what are the best operations and delivery methods. And it made you always focus on working in the business and on the business at the same time. You have to do both. It’s like how do we divide and conquer and make sure every day I’m working on something to improve the business?

So it’s really interesting. This is a subject we talk about a lot in the podcast, and it’s kind of strange that as a marketing podcast, we talk a lot about productivity and where to partition your time, but I agree with you, it’s so important. And you and I know that the vast majority of MSPs are so trapped or so focused on working in the business, so delivering, looking after the clients’, account management, which is all really working in the business, that they never take quality time out to work on the business. Over the MSPs that you worked at, and as you did that again and again, how did you make sure that you were spending enough time or maybe more of your time working on than you were working in?

Yeah, it’s really a tough balance. A lot of self-discipline and as a team working through it. I fool around and say the videos on YouTube where they do the golf balls and the pebbles and the sand, we really always go through that – what one big golf ball are we putting in the bucket today? What is the one major task every day we’re doing towards our initiative for this quarter? And then what are the couple rocks that we’re going to do that are customer service, that we’re going to make sure everything’s going. And then we can waste the rest of our time on the sand and the tactical items.

If we could focus every day on doing one thing and getting people to be 1% better, at the end of 90 days it’s crazy how much work you’ll have succeeded at doing.

Yeah, no, I bet. And I’m going to ask you to explain the rock, pebble, sand thing. I know exactly what you’re talking about, but it’s not something that I regularly talk about. So whereas clearly you’ve seen it and lived it, can you just briefly explain what that’s about, about getting those big rocks in before you pour the sand in.

Yeah, there’s a video on YouTube and ultimately it’s a professor and he is talking to his class and he puts the rocks, all these golf balls in a bucket. And he is like, is it full? And everybody looks at it, the balls are to the top and they’re like, yes, it’s full. And then he puts in the little rocks right after and he is like, well, is it full now? And they’re like, yes, it’s full. And he is like, no. So then he puts in sand and that fills in all the gaps. And what he says is the big golf balls are the most important moments in your life. They’re like getting married and having kids and things like that. And then the little rocks are the next important things, like going on trips and vacations and things like that. And the sand is the every day minutiae. It’s like everything, it’s going to work, it’s maybe working out. It’s just the little things. And what I found so valuable out of that, it’s like we always spend our time doing the little things every day in the MSP, what’s broken, what service issues going on, and we’re never working on fixing our team or building that self-managing team so the owner could be out of the business.

Yeah, I completely agree. And it is so easy to be overwhelmed by that minutiae. We all do it. I was just telling you before this recording, I’ve just been away on a vacation and I’ve come back and my life has been filled with minutiae for two days – my computer’s logged me out of everything and my AV equipment stopped working. And actually that means that I’ve spent two days not focusing on big things within my business, which can be frustrating. I guess the difference is I’m very self-aware of that, and I can draw a line in the sand as it were, the minutiae sand and do something about that.

Let’s talk about what MSP owners can do quickly to start to make a difference with this. I know that you work with a growing number of MSPs, helping them on exactly the subject, how they can create teams that thrive without them. And we will talk about exactly what you do in a second, but let’s assume I’m your typical MSP owner. So let’s say I’m heading up to somewhere near a million in revenue, I’ve got 5, 6, 7 techs, I’ve probably got an admin person, I might have a little part-time marketing person. And I’ve got all of these people and they’re all supposed to be doing their functions. And yet even though I’m paying all of this money, I’m still working 60, 70 hours a week. I’m still talking to all the key clients myself. I’m still the third line tech. And there seems to be so much stuff that gets escalated to third line. I’m sure this is a very common scenario that you hear what’s some of the first things that I can do to get a grip on this massive 60 hour a week monster that I’ve created and start to spend some time developing the big things and focusing on the big things?

Yeah, I think we have to set aside time for quarterly planning and pick three initiatives. But besides the quarterly planning, that’s the easy part, I think the really big thing that we miss at the $1 million MSP, is how we develop our team. What are we doing to one-on-one develop everybody. And I really say one-on-one development and spending that time is necessary. I hate to say that, but if you have five engineers, I know it’s five hours of your time a week, but if you immediately spend time doing one-on-one development with your team and giving them feedback loops, you can slowly start to build and move initiatives forward.

The biggest thing is you have to cut out that time and make it mandatory. It’s the rock, or the golf ball, we have to put the golf ball in and it’s one on one development. And I really think we don’t do developmental plans. If you want to fix X, Y, Z in your business, let’s get your team to fix X, Y, Z. How do you get them to do it? I really think it’s in one-on-one management and making development really easy. And there’s a million other management tips and techniques, but simple one right off the bat is let’s get one-on-one development and start clearly defining to our team what we want good to look like and measure it.

Yeah, I completely agree with that. And would you agree that if you’re in that 60 hour a week work pattern, and you’re taking three days vacation a year, even if you just get started with one person and spend one hour a week with one person, perhaps your most important right-hand person, that in itself can be a massive jump forward.

Yeah, always, I love saying that. I was listening to a book recently and they were talking about a guy who would go to the gym for one minute, or he would go for five minutes, because he was building the habit you just said, I think it might’ve been in Atomic Habits, but he’s building the habit to go to the gym every day. So he is like, I’m going to go in, I’m going to do one exercise for five minutes and I’m leaving. And slowly over time, it was longer. So I agree. Let’s just do one person – the most important person that can help you move that initiative, that one rock, and then two people and then three people. You’re right, I agree. Let’s build that tribe.

Yeah, exactly that. And actually I found this. I ran a marketing agency which I sold in 2016, and that was the classic hell business where, in the first few years I had no time. Every time I employed someone, it added to my workload rather than reduced it. And actually it was when I got a right-hand person, a lady called Claire, that I started spending time with her in developing her. Then over a period of time she actually started saying – What can I do to take stuff off your plate? How can I help you with that? I’ve noticed there’s a problem here. I would like to do this to fix it. Is that the right thing? And I had that. I didn’t have someone smart like you to suggest that to me. I had this amazing realisation that Claire was part of the answer.

And then I started doing one-to-ones with someone else and someone else and someone else. And I think, exactly as you’re saying, I think it is Atomic Habits where the guy goes to the gym for five minutes to form the habit. Once you’ve got that habit and you realise that good people want to do more stuff, they want to take your work away from you, they want to do more, they want more responsibility, they want to fix all the problems – once you realise that, it’s an awesome thing.

Joe, thank you so much for joining us on the show. Just tell us a little bit more about what you do with MSPs right now and how can we get in touch with you?

My name’s Joe Travaglione. I’m with Future State Cyber. My LinkedIn is Joe Travaglione. I like to help leaders build self-managing teams. And my real goal is how do we help you to work on the business and not in the business.

Paul’s Personal Peer Group

It’s a website question this week, from Jonah in California. He is about to revamp his MSP’s website. There are some associations and partnerships that he’s very proud of, but he’s not sure whether he should put them online for prospects and clients to see. His question is, should I put the Microsoft and Cisco logos on my website?

These are called trust badges. And a trust badge is any logo or any other kind of image on your website that makes you seem more trustworthy. It’s kind of a way of sucking up credibility from businesses and organisations that you are associated with. Now, many MSPs put vendor logos on their websites, but I don’t think you should do that. In fact, don’t do that. Trust badges only work when the person looking at them has heard of the company, and ordinary people don’t know what Kaseya is. Of course, they’ve heard of Microsoft, but every MSP works with Microsoft, so there’s no differentiation there.

A better form of trust badge is to put media logos on. The mainstream media might not have big audiences anymore, but they do still have huge credibility. So if you’ve been featured in a relevant newspaper or a blog, a radio station or TV station in the last five years or so, you can justifiably get a badge made up that says, as heard on or as featured in, and then you have the media title name. Of course as long as your appearance was in editorial and not the consumer complaints section. That was a joke. Oh, and no, by the way, you don’t need to ask them if you can use their logo this way. This isn’t legal advice, but often it’s better to seek forgiveness than it is to ask permission.

If you don’t have any media appearances, then you can use client logos. And of course, if you have a specific vertical, then any clients will do because in a vertical, all of the clients are in the same kind of business, so they recognise they’re in the same kind of business, but for general business in a geographical area, pick your best known clients who are the prolific networkers or the infamous businesses around town… every town has infamous businesses within business circles.

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 Joe Travaglione on LinkedIn and check out his website.
• Mentioned book: Atomic Habits by James Clear
• Got a question about your MSP’s marketing? Submit one here for Paul’s Personal Peer Group.