Why MSPs procrastinate (and how to cure it)

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Welcome to Episode 264 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• Why MSPs procrastinate (and how to cure it): Don’t confuse busyness with business.  Keeping yourself busy doing things that you really shouldn’t be doing, at the expense of the things that matter, is a form of procrastination.
• What technicians write in tickets can damage your brand: Your brand is YOU, and your team, and the way you communicate. And critically… how that makes people feel.
• Why successful MSPs use PowerPoint to tell stories: Eliminate ‘death by PowerPoint’ using storytelling to simplify complex information and help your presentations come to life.
• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Want to fire a problematic client but don’t know how? I have the answer…

Why MSPs procrastinate (and how to cure it)

One of the dangers of doing a podcast every week and appearing in lots of YouTube videos is that at some point your friends and family stumble across your content. And every now and then I get a message from a friend saying, Hey, I just watched your latest video on YouTube, I’ve no idea what you were talking about Paul, but it seemed okay. Now, the reason that this is a risk is because I do try and put a lot of my life into my content, because as a working parent and a business owner myself, that helps you and me to relate to each other. So the story I want to tell you today is about a friend who I hope never stumbles across this recording because I know he will recognise himself immediately and no one likes to be talked about in a negative way.

Now, this friend of mine runs his own business. Don’t worry, he’s not an MSP. In fact, what he does is almost irrelevant, but times sadly are not very good for him right now. He’s lost a lot of clients over the last few years and his business is not in great shape. We do occasionally talk about marketing. Of course, I give him as much advice as I can, but he rarely takes action on it. I think the problem is that he hasn’t yet emotionally dealt with the fact that a business that he’s been building up for decades has flattened out. In fact, it’s in decline now. He needs to do things differently to rescue it and turn it around.

If you were in a situation like this where you’re actually struggling to meet payroll in some months, you’d think that your full attention would be on the rescue and the recovery, right? I mean, that would certainly be the case for me, but not for my friend because the other day when we were chatting and I asked what he was doing that day, he said he was going on a training course. Not a training course on anything that would be useful to him in terms of turning his business around or improving the service. It was a very low level training course around some minor changes to regulations regarding the service that he sells. So really, he could have just sent one of his staff or just skipped it altogether. It really wasn’t an important training course, but it was an entire day of his time.

I was utterly gobsmacked when he told me about this because just a few days before, he was telling me that he didn’t have any time to implement all of the new marketing ideas that we discussed to help him win new clients. And then I had an epiphany. Him going on a training course was a form of procrastination. My friend had confused busyness with business. To him going on a training course, was doing some work, but the reality is it wasn’t productive work. It was just him passing the time and maybe not even having to think about his problems for a few hours. Maybe that was the appeal.

People think procrastination is about doing nothing when you should be doing something. But procrastination comes in the form of us doing things that we really shouldn’t be doing at the expense of doing the things that matter.

Now, I see this in marketing implementation all the time, and of course to an MSP, marketing is hard. It’s a dark art if you are actually a technical person, anything that’s hard is at risk of being held back through procrastination. Do you have this problem?

Well, let me tell you what I’ve just agreed with my friend to see if this would help you. I took him out for a beer. I told him in a much gentler manner than I’ve told you how I thought he was procrastinating and then I agreed to be his accountability buddy. So what we’re going to do, we’re going to start this next week. We’re going to have a brief chat at the start of every week where he tells me about a couple of tasks he’s going to do to win new clients. So the tasks that he wants to implement that week. He’ll tell me about them at the start of the week and then at the end of the week, he has to give me a progress report. Now, as I say, we’re only going to start next week and I think it’s going to go well because what I think is going to happen is every time my friend catches himself procrastinating, he will remind himself that he doesn’t want to be on a phone call with me at the end of the week admitting he didn’t get those two or three tasks done. Now, I don’t care whether he gets them done or not, but internally to him, it’s very important that he gets those done.

This is one of the core psychological weapons of influence as outlined by Dr. Robert Cialdini in his classic book, which is called Influence. The weapon is called commitment and consistency. When we say we’re going to do something, we want to be very consistent with following through and doing that because to be seen to do that is an important part of our self-image. So just by getting my friend to declare what he’s going to do and then holding him to account for that, he’s getting stuff done. And I know that he’s going to start to win new clients soon by implementing new marketing and he will rescue his business, which is fantastic. What a great thing that I can do to help him for just an investment of, 10, 15 minutes a week. Would this work for you?

If you are struggling to get your marketing implemented, why not find yourself an accountability buddy? Now sadly, I can’t personally do it with you, but I bet you could find another MSP or just indeed another business owning friend, and it definitely needs to be someone who is a business owner and understands your world because then they won’t let you use the usual interruptions of, oh, we had a busy week as an excuse for not getting things done. If you do try this, will you let me know? I would love to see some examples of this being done successfully by MSPs.

What technicians write in tickets can damage your brand

Being a marketing expert is a little bit like being an IT expert. It’s a very broad canvas and just as you might be good at many things, but not blowing fluff out of an RS 232 port, I’m good at many marketing subjects, but not all of them.

You’ll rarely hear me giving detailed advice on pay per click or search engine optimisation, SEO, as they’re very technical subjects that change constantly. Another area I’ve never really been comfortable discussing is branding. But recently I’ve been interviewing some very smart branding experts for future episodes of my podcast and it’s helped me get a better grip on what branding really is.

It’s not your logo, it’s not the design of your website, it’s not your accreditations. Your brand is YOU and YOUR TEAM and the way that you COMMUNICATE.

And critically how all of that makes people feel. Because that’s really what a brand is. It’s the reflection of how people feel about something. Their feelings affect whether they buy or not. Most purchases are driven by the heart rather than by the brain, especially picking a new MSP.

So let’s take some big consumer brands. How do you feel about Microsoft, about Apple, about Coke or Pepsi? You’ll have negative or positive feelings towards these brands based on your past experiences with them. And of course, these big consumer brands, they spend millions every year to influence you. Well really a B2B brand like your MSP is no different, except you are not spending advertising dollars to try to change people’s emotional response to you and neither should you.

The way that people feel is based on every possible kind of communication you do. That includes what’s on your website, what you say on social media, the blogs and the articles you write and the videos that you make. But it’s also affected by how the phone is answered, the way your technicians talk on live chat, what’s written in tickets. You see your brand is everything you do. And so the only way to influence that brand perception is to create the right culture within your business. Because you can’t control freak everything every technician says every day, and you don’t really want to, right? That’s the route to divorce and a heart attack. But you can set out what your MSP’s mission is and constantly train and encourage your team to serve that mission with everything they do.

As an example, my MSP Marketing Edge’s mission is to make marketing and winning new clients easy for MSPs. And I have a team of 12 and a constant focus on this mission in all of our internal conversations, which allows my team to make the correct decisions every day without having to refer back to me. So whatever a member of ours asks, my team can think If I do this or if I advise this does it make marketing easy for this MSP? And when you add that up over a thousand communications, it becomes a solid, clear brand, based on how people feel.

So let me finish with three questions for you. No.1: Do you know how you want people to feel about your MSP? No.2: Is this reflected in your business’s mission? And No.3: If I asked your technicians tomorrow, would they be very clear on what that mission is?

Why successful MSPs use PowerPoint to tell stories

As an MSP, if you think about all of the marketing tools at your disposal, you probably wouldn’t think that PowerPoint was one of them. But of course, PowerPoint is just a way of presenting information to people. And anywhere you can communicate, you can improve that communication to influence people.

My special guest today is an expert in telling stories through PowerPoint and using it to drive sales.

Hi, I am Emily Schneider. I’m a visual storyteller specialising in PowerPoint design. I have a magical knack of simplifying complex information to help stories come to life.

And what a fantastic skill. And as you and I were just saying just before we started recording this interview, what a great world we live in that you can have a very, very, very specific talent and skillset and be able to work with people all around the world in all sorts of different industries. You certainly couldn’t have done that 20 years ago.

Emily, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast. We are going to talk about how you use visual aids such as, and I know you specialise in PowerPoints, but how you use those to influence people to choose your MSP to buy more services from you, and of course, just generally to communicate better. So let’s first of all learn a little bit about you. So whereabouts are you based and what got you to this point in your life where you have this set of superpowers?

Oh, thanks Paul. I’m so happy to be here. I’d love to tell more. So I am based outside of Chicago, in the suburbs, in Arlington Heights. My journey began when I was 16 with my sweet 16 invitation which was the first thing I ever digitally created. What I remember most was about the way people responded and the smiles and the emotional connection that helped when I created something that then somebody responded to, and then in the end, they all showed up for my party. So it was fabulous. It was a win-win.

What I have learned is that my creative curiosity and my emotional intelligence or just my ability to want to help people has created this beautiful harmony with my design skills and my skillset. So I came from the agency marketing world. I was an art director. I worked on shopper marketing and more traditional below the line stuff. But what I loved was connecting with the decision makers and helping to tell the story so that they bought the product of what we were selling. Those visuals for the marketing materials.

And I have streamlined from a general creative director into niching myself into PowerPoint because that’s where my magic happens. That’s my zone of genius. I see the world in simple forms and shapes, and I love being able to bring that to other people so that they can tell their stories with more confidence and more clarity and create stronger connections. Again, I’m such an empathetic person. I love connecting with people. And so when I can empower somebody else to do that and I get to be in my zone of genius and then they get to shine bright, win-win for everybody. So it is pretty magical that I get to do what I do, I think because it definitely lights me up and I love helping other people light up too.

That’s amazing. That’s great to hear. It really is. And there’s something about PowerPoint that seems to bring out the worst in people, isn’t there? I mean, I had a corporate career up until I started my first business 20 odd years ago, and I’ve sat through more than enough bad PowerPoint sessions. But even then as a business owner, I’ve been presented to, I’ve been sold at, what is it about PowerPoint that seems to make us just make bad decisions and make bad design choices?

Well, I think it goes back to, and I think the term I always hear is like death by PowerPoint. Everybody does. It used to be like a negative word, to be honest, in my world too. It’s kind of cringey. I think that’s part of the reason I have embraced it and love it even more is the challenge to just change those expectations to flip the script for other people.

But PowerPoint is a tool, it’s a storytelling tool. It is a presentation tool. It’s not meant for us to be brainstorming and to be creating ideas and to be building things. It’s meant to house that information that we bring in from offline and bring it together. And it’s kind of that package in that wrapper.

I think death by PowerPoint comes, or as I say, the cringiness comes from a couple things. One is when we don’t know what to say or how to say it, we over communicate and so we start to share everything or we think we should tell them everything we know and we lose that kind of connection with our audience. And now we’re just cringing at these slides full of data or information that doesn’t make sense.  

Also, I think PowerPoint does a great job of trying to help us make it better, but what we lose is the simplicity, consistency and intentionality that comes with really strong stories, whether they’re verbal, whether you have the supporting presentations or just in a conversation. And when you can be intentional with how you tell your story, you create that stronger connection and you’re more seen and you’re more heard. And again, so I think sometimes we default, thinking that we’re making it easier but we’re actually making it more complex for ourselves.

And lack of training. People from the corporate world, even as a designer having to work in PowerPoint to get to my clients,

nobody ever trains you on presentations or how to use the platform. You’re just kind of thrown in and expected to use it. Some people have a way with it, where it just comes naturally but a lot of us don’t.

And so I think there’s that beautiful balance and I love helping to train and educate and do for people because it is a tool that has a lot of power if you use it right.

I’ve forgotten that phrase, death by PowerPoint. And you’re absolutely right. And what’s probably the most depressing thing in the world is where someone presents the PowerPoint. I always thought of PowerPoint as a visual aid to help you with the thing that you’re trying to say, but when someone brings it up and it’s on the screen and they say, right, second slide, third bullet down. So as you can see here in this 12 point text, and then they read the words that are in front of you. And I think that’s the death by PowerPoint.

You talked about storytelling there, do you think that part of the problem is people often don’t know how to tell a story and so therefore the PowerPoint they’re creating is trying to back up something that isn’t yet fully formed? Does that make sense?

I mean, it totally makes sense. When you say why is there this challenge, I actually want to back up to the presenter reading all the slides. I kind of described it as, and I like to empower people to be conversation conductors. So think about it, when you go to see an orchestra, you have this conductor that stands on stage. He stands up in front of the orchestra, you have all these different sections, all these musicians, and he helps the music come to life. He says, when instruments start, how loud, how soft, when they go, when they don’t go, how they harmonise together. And as this audience member, you create this emotional connection as you hear this harmonious, beautiful sound. And so when you think of your slides as that harmonious music to your voiceover, to your story, I think that changes the way you present or that changes the way you set yourself up to tell your story.

I think the other challenge like you say, is that people don’t have a plan or they don’t know what their story is. I find a lot of my clients don’t really know, they know they need something as visuals, but they don’t have to just be a picture. A visual story is highlighting and focusing on what the key topic, those key takeaways, what your main objective is, and streaming that through so that you can really lead your audience side by slide, section by section to pay attention to the story and highlight what you want. Data is visuals, copy can be visuals, pictures of course, illustrations, icons, there’s so many ways. But again, I always preach simplicity, consistency and intentionality. And when you can simplify what you’re saying, be consistent with your treatments and be intentional with your choices, you start to set yourself up for a strong visual story. There’s really no other way around it.

Yeah, no, I love that. And it is funny, back in October, I went to ScaleCon 24 in Las Vegas, and I was one of the speakers. I did the keynote marketing talk at the end of day one. And Nigel Moore from The Tech Tribe did the wrap up on day three. I thought my PowerPoint was okay verging on good. And I’d have two big words on a slide and I’m thinking I’ve nailed that. And then when Nigel was doing his talk, his PowerPoint was a mix of exactly what you’ve just said, a mix of images, and he had graphics but not overly graphics. His whole thing was structured around different parts of the brain. And so he used – and I can’t remember exactly, I’m sorry, Nigel, I can’t remember the exact thing you said, but then people don’t do that, they go away from it, remember how they feel which was, that was epic – but he used the  brain and related it back to technology, and he was using the visuals to back up the story that he was telling us from the stage.

Initially I’m like, this is brilliant. And then I felt a bit depressed thinking because I’m going back next year and I’m thinking, I’ve got to up my PowerPoint game. Seriously, I’ve just given you a sales lead by the way there, Emily, just in case you weren’t completely obvious what that was. So when you, and I know you’ve worked with MSPs and you’ve worked with all sorts of different businesses around the planet, when you work with someone on their PowerPoint, and obviously you are coming at it from a design point of view, but I guess the last thing you look at is what the design should be when you are looking at a PowerPoint. I mean, let’s go back a step. When you start working with someone, do you have to look at it from a what point are you trying to get over point of view or do you even have to much earlier than that, have a conversation about here’s why the default templates in PowerPoints aren’t going to help you out and here’s why you need something bespoke. Or actually, by the time people reach you, are they ready to invest in something better?

By the time people reach me, they’re usually seeking something better. I do work within existing templates because sometimes you have to, but I’m a rule refiner, so give me a template and let’s see how we can push it, right? Because templates are built for standard information. When you’re giving keynotes, when you’re telling a new story, when you’re giving business updates, you don’t always have existing slides or existing template layouts that navigate or that will set you up for success. And so we have to be, again, intentional with what we’re saying and how we’re saying it. But I think that there’s so much power in that.

I just want to hit on a little bit more that neuroscience, as you were saying, like Nigel was talking about the brain. So we naturally will hear something and we’ll get kind of sidetracked on our own story. Again, you’re talking about his brain and I’m thinking about this neuroscience that comes with presentation and storytelling. I automatically went into my own story. So naturally as an audience member, when you’re there listening, however long that is, you do lose engagement, you lose them. And so when you can simplify that and elevate that visual story, you keep them engaged. So I wouldn’t harp too much on your few words or your simple slides because what you did is you gave your audience the key message or those key notes that you were talking about during while that slide was up. So if they heard something and they went in their own head, they could easily come back because you’ve given them those key points that are really easy to digest. Again, that slide, third bullet, 12 point font, I’m not going to be able to find that again, I’m gone for that whole slide, but when you make it really simple, you keep your audience engaged.

We’re also 65% more likely to retain information when it’s visually designed. So if you think about the power of, again, highlighting copy, visuals using colour, using really streamlined data, it helps your audience listen better. We all also are used to all this information coming at us at all the time. So when we can set ourselves up to lay out the story that follows our verbal story, it becomes so easy for people to be engaged. Think about picture books. They do a beautiful job of telling stories and you don’t always need words.

And it’s the storytelling aspect of it that I wanted to pick up on next, because I remember I’ve read hundreds of business books, and particularly the psychology of business and marketing, and I’ve read something somewhere, and it’s not coming back to me in which book, but something somewhere that we as humans respond to stories and thrive on storytelling because back in like 12,000 years ago, before we could write, that was the only way we had to pass information on from one generation to another.  We would tell stories around the campfire while the dinosaurs were roaming around us, and that’s how we passed information on. And so today, if you and I were doing a podcast interview and we just listed fact, bullet point, bullet point, fact, fact, that wouldn’t be as compelling as us talking and actually telling stories. And I just told you a story of me sitting at the back of an audience watching a master at work and feeling my soul deflate because I thought his stuff is better than my stuff. And of course, I want to be the very best I can be. And that’s a story, right? That’s not a fact. That was a story with emotions within it.

And I believe there are parts of our brain, or if you put someone inside a functional MRI machine, so that’s like an MRI where you see in real time what’s happening, and if you read someone some facts, one part of their brain lights up, you put those same facts into a story such as a fairytale, for example, which of course, they’re the classic stories, multiple parts of the brain light up, and that’s why we remember that. My question is, if you are using PowerPoint or doing a presentation, whether it’s a sales meeting, whether it’s a strategic review with a client, maybe even if you’re talking in front of a room and you don’t consider yourself to be a natural storyteller, even though all humans have that ability built in, Emily, where would you start with starting to pull out how do I get this across within a story?

Yeah, that’s a great question. So I just want to be super transparent. That is not my expertise, but I do coach my clients to help craft their story better. So where I start and what I have actually on my website is a tip page with four steps, and the first one is really you have to first start with knowing who your audience is and what your key objectives are, what you want them to think, feel, and do. You have to lay that out before you get started.

And then the second phase is crafting your narrative. And I don’t think that should be done on a computer or on any kind of screen. I think I actually encourage post-it notes and a marker or a sharpie. So you can’t really erase either. Just start writing down what you want to say. And when you have those post-it notes, what you’ll start to see is a cadence of a story. You’ll start to see that set up.

So you’re going to start actually with the end in mind. You’re going to lay the groundwork of what the goal is, why you brought everybody in the room. Again, we all come from different places. So when you can get everybody on the same page, you’re going to connect with them, then you’re going to just like a traditional fairytale or story, you’re going to start from the beginning. You’re going to talk about the key updates, remind them why they’re there. That’s where your personal narrative story comes in. So you create this emotional connection.

I love how you’re saying it’s just part of our human nature and our human evolution that stories are how we share information. It’s how we know things from the past. I mean, you can get very technical with biblical and testaments and all that stuff too. That’s where it is. That’s creation, right? But once you start them, you engage them. Once you tell them what they’re going to do there and why they’re there and you connect them emotionally with some kind of story. It doesn’t have to be super personal, but something that is relevant to that audience.

You then go to the middle part, which is where you give them all the, that’s the heart of your presentation. You spend the most time there. It’s laying the details and the data and the specifics and really telling them where this tension is or what you need to update or what you’re teaching them. And then at the end, you’re going to wrap it up. You’re going to drive home that impact. You’re going to remind them why they’re there. You’re going to create a call to action and you’re going to summarise your key takeaways or your key points.

Again, we need that kind of wrapper and that information just again, like a story. You set it up, you lay all this drama and what’s happening and these character development, and then you kind of bring it all together and there’s this beautiful ending or there is an ending of some sort or that call to action that leads to the next thing that engages in the right conversation. So you drive your audience along so that you get them where you want at the end, but you got to know where you’re going before you even start.

Yeah, no, I love that. And you said that that’s on your website. We’ll give out your website address in just a few minutes. You mentioned about religion, it’s just occurred to me that all Bibles are rule books told through storytelling. If you look at it that way, if you take the faith aspect out of it, that’s what a Bible is, right? This is how you should live your life. These are the good things, these are the bad things, and it was a very, very easy way of communicating that to people who couldn’t read because obviously the vast majority of people couldn’t read, but they could go into church and enjoy stories thousands of years ago. So that’s absolutely fascinating. Final question for you, Emily, and I’m hoping this is a chuckle moment for you. What’s the worst thing that you’ve ever seen in a PowerPoint?

Oh, that is a really good question. I think it’s the death by PowerPoint. It’s the slide that has everything up there with all your voiceover and everything’s black and white. So yeah, I think it’s just that overwhelmingness of like, I’m going to shut this down and come back another day because it doesn’t make any sense. It’s just words, and I don’t want to read them. I’m a visual person. I don’t want to read all the words.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Emily, thank you so much. Thank you for your time. Let’s talk about what you do for MSPs. So tell us what you do and please give us your website address and how we can get in touch with you.

So like I said, I describe myself as a visual storyteller. My specialisation is in simplifying complex content and data and information. I think I work a lot with MSPs to help them synergise information so that they can lead their conversation so that they can present with confidence, with knowledge, they can create those authentic connections that drive impact, that create engagement, and that leave a lasting impression for your audience to do and act as you want so your business can move forward. And my website is Iamemilyschneider.com. I’m also super active. I love connecting and networking on LinkedIn as well, so you can find me there.

Paul’s Personal Peer Group

This week we have a question from Gordon in Arizona, who has had quite a tough week with his MSP. His question is, How do I fire a client?

Oh, nothing beats the feeling of firing a noisy idiot relieving you and your team from their crippling mental and emotional burden, and trust me on this, I promise you, 1,000000%, new revenue always, always turns up to replace their toxic cash. Life’s too short to tolerate these fools. So here are three steps to make it easy for you.

Number 1: Don’t overthink it. By the time you are considering firing a client, your team already hates them. You’ll always be slow to fire clients because you are keeping an eye on your cashflow and your profitability, the bigger picture stuff. And sometimes bad clients just do get better, but if they get rid of them. Much of the time, they’re so obnoxious that they’ve been fired by suppliers before because they’re not just horrible to you. They’re horrible to everyone. Get rid of them.

Number 2: When you do this, tell them in the most straightforward way you can pick up the phone and just tell it like it is. Our businesses are not a good fit for each other. We are releasing you from your contract in X days time. And we will work fully to hand over to your new IT support company and be very wary of introducing any ambiguity. They need to hear it a hundred percent straight and definite, and they’ll probably rant and rave, so just take it. Just take it and don’t be defensive. Don’t be drawn into their world of hate. Acknowledge their complaints, but please avoid an argument. And if they do threaten to ruin you or put this all over social media, just ignore them. People like this can do little real harm. In fact, one bad review says more about them than it does about you. But do remember to confirm the conversation, maybe even send it out tracked mail. Actually, physically send it to them in the mail so that you can prove that you delivered the news and their deadline to them.

Number 3: It’s simply to cooperate fully with their new MSP. You are a professional, so make this a textbook handover and resist the temptation to warn their new MSP. The less you’re involved with your soon to be ex client, the better.

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 Emily Schneider on LinkedIn and check out her website.
• Mentioned book: Influence by Dr. Robert Cialdini.
• Got a question about your MSP’s marketing? Submit one here for Paul’s Personal Peer Group.