3 big MSP marketing priorities for 2025

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Welcome to Episode 266 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• 3 big MSP marketing priorities for 2025: The silver bullet to getting new clients and growing your MSP lies in consistent and persistent marketing. Make it easy by prioritising these three things.
• And 3 big questions to ask yourself: Before the new year begins, take some time to answer these questions and focus yourself on your future goals, in life and in business.
• This MSP is using a clever backdoor marketing tactic: My guest this week tells us what his special marketing tactic is, how it makes finding clients easier, and how you can do a version of this in your MSP.
• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Graham, an MSP owner in Omaha, reflects on how little he feels his MSP has achieved in terms of lead generation this year. He wants to know why his marking projects take so long to implement.

3 big MSP marketing priorities for 2025

Did your MSP sales engine feel broken in 2024? Well, here’s the fix. The best new revenue comes from lead gen that’s driven by a marketing machine, but don’t be scared. It’s dead easy and it’s built with just a few simple parts and it’s going to make 2025 your best year yet.

Right now let’s go through why your current marketing isn’t working, how to find more people to speak to and how to make all your marketing easier. I do love this time of year because everyone has a collective pause and after you’ve had a few days off to enjoy some time with your family, you move on to time to just kind of take stock of what’s happened in the last 12 months. And you figure out what it is that you want to improve next year.

Most of the MSPs that I’ve spoken to this year just want to win more new clients, and keep their existing ones and make sure those clients are happy.

And of course, make sure their staff are happy and service quality is important too. These are all important things to MSPs, but ultimately, if you nail it down to what’s the one thing that you would do to improve your business, if you could wave a magic wand, for most MSPs it would be to win new clients.

So let me suggest to you three marketing priorities to focus your business on next year. These are not difficult concepts to understand. In fact, I’ve deliberately made this as easy as I can, as I try to do with all the marketing that we talk about in our podcast and on the YouTube videos.

My first recommendation is to create a marketing system rather than a series of one-off activities. Now, the reason I suggest this is because the whole channel seems to be geared around helping you to do one-off activities. You get big vendors giving you marketing campaigns or social media that you can just roll out in one go. Now, don’t get me wrong, I think doing a one-off campaign or being all over social media for a couple of months is better than no marketing at all. But the very best kind of marketing is consistent and persistent, and that comes from having a marketing system.

A system means you have a series of tasks that are happening on a regular basis. Ideally, you personally as the owner of the MSP, is not doing them. You have someone doing them on your behalf, whether that’s someone who works for you or a trusted outsource person. If you’ve been listening to my podcast or watching my videos for a while, you’ll know the marketing system that I recommend. I suggest you build audiences of people to listen to you, starting with your LinkedIn and your email list. And then grow relationships with those people using educational and entertaining content posted on LinkedIn and email to them. And then you convert relationships using marketing campaigns and calling people on the phone.

My entire MSP Marketing Edge service is based around this 3 step system, and the beauty of it is that you are doing marketing 365 days a year. Even when you’re taking some time off, like in the weeks ahead, your marketing still happens every single day. And that’s necessary because people only buy when they are ready to buy, and you don’t know when that is. It’s only by doing marketing every day that you can get in front of them at exactly the right moment.

My next recommendation is to build up the numbers of people that you’re talking to. Now, you may have heard people say that marketing is a numbers game, and yeah, that’s kind of true in that the more people you market to, the more likely you are to find someone who’s nearly ready, willing, and able to speak to you about switching to your MSP.

It takes the same amount of time and costs the same amount of money to market to a hundred people on LinkedIn as it does a thousand people, or even 10,000 people. The more people you market to, the more successful your marketing will be and ultimately the more new clients you will win.

And then my final recommendation is to do a little bit every day. And this seems to be the one that MSP owners find the hardest, and yet it’s one of the most critical things in marketing. This is the most important part of growing a business. You’ve probably already got too many things to do and not enough personal time, right? And yet, I highly recommend that you find 60 to 90 minutes every single weekday to work on your business rather than in it.

This is what I’ve been doing for years and it’s what’s helped me to build up my last business, the one I sold in 2016. It’s what’s helped me to grow my current business, the MSP Marketing Edge. Every single weekday, I try to find a minimum of 60 to 90 minutes to get things done. And when I’m in that 60 to 90 minute window, I’m not doing email or Facebook or anything that robs my time. I’m just working on the business.

You might find this easy to do at seven in the morning every day before your staff arrive at the office or maybe seven at night when they’ve left. Or you find an hour during lunch to lock your office door and put a sign on the door that says, do not enter unless the building is on fire. And I suggest that you do this at the same time every day. Don’t think that you can compile it into one day a week such as all of Friday, as a) you won’t get as much done in a day compared to five 90 minute sessions, I promise you that. And b) there’ll always be some crisis that steals your time from that day. There is a direct link between your ability to find 60 to 90 minutes every single weekday to work on the business and you getting closer to the future that you really want.

Literally everything I’ve achieved in the last 19, 20 years has come in 60 to 90 minute chunks. And it’s been a real compound effect of lots and lots of small things adding up over thousands of thousands of days. It’s the only silver bullet to grow your business, spending that time every single day, making sure that you are implementing the right strategies and the right tactics.

And 3 big questions to ask yourself

When you are an MSP owner wanting to grow the business, vacations might as well be cancelled.

There’s just no such thing as time off, but not in the way that you might think. No, this is nothing to do with being too busy with client issues to have time off.

What I mean is when you do take time off, you just can’t help it, this always happens… you find yourself thinking about the business, right?

So over the Christmas break, after you get your child’s new drone stuck in a tree and make them cry…

Here are three big questions to ask yourself for when you inevitably start mulling over how to grow your MSP business even further in 2025.

Let’s start with big question number one: What’s your personal vision for the future? This is not a question about the business. This is about real life, family and stuff that matters a hell of a lot more than the business frankly. Close your eyes right now, unless you are driving, and dream about how you’d like your life to be in the next two to three years. What kind of house would you like to own? What kind of car would you like to drive? What kind of vacations, holidays would you like to take? And where would you like to take those vacations? Who would you like to take those vacations with? How much time would you have to yourself every single week to do the things that you truly love doing?

I know that you love working in your business, but I also know that you probably wish you could do more golf or hang gliding or spend more time with your kids or knitting, whatever it is that you like doing. Our brains are incredibly powerful computers and the more that we can sit and dream about the future and picture where we want to be, the more likely it is that our brains will act on that and move us in that direction.

Okay, big question number two: What are the smart goals for the business? Smart, of course, is an acronym. You’ve heard this before and it stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. And a bad goal for your business is I just want to grow revenue because you never quite know when you’ve actually got there. You never know really what you are working towards. But a great and smart goal would be, I want to grow my net profit from 200,000 to 400,000 by the 31st of December, 2025, because that’s a very specific and measurable goal. And of course you’ll know exactly when you’ve achieved that. It is definitely achievable by the way to double your net profits in a year.

We as people always overestimate what we can achieve in a small amount of time and underestimate what we can achieve in a long period of time. So its relevancy depends on how much this fits into your personal vision for the future. If you have a vision of spending much more time at home doing things you enjoy with your family, but your smart goal requires you to spend twice as long in the office, well that’s not a relevant goal to your personal vision.

Then time bound, that’s the next thing and it needs to have a deadline, and the deadline shouldn’t really be more than 12 to 15 months away, which is why at this time of the year, it’s great to set a calendar deadline of the end of next year. Now, you may have smart goals that are just for you and then smart goals that are for your staff. I would never set a smart goal for net profit and communicate that to my team because very few employees are motivated to make the boss even richer.

You might have a smart goal that’s revenue based or related to other items that you can tell your team about and perhaps even motivate them to help you achieve. But your real smart goal would definitely be around profit. Revenue goals aren’t really goals at all because of course, revenue or turnover is vanity. It’s profit that’s sanity, (you’ve heard this before) and it’s cash that’s reality. You want to be growing your net profitability this year. You can’t spend revenue on holidays. You can spend profit on holidays.

And then finally, big question number three: What are the right marketing strategies and tactics to hit the goals? If you’ve got a very clear personal vision for the future and you’ve translated that into some smart goals for your business, picking the right marketing strategies and tactics are so much easier. And typically there are of course three strategies to grow any business. Number one is to get more new clients. Number two is to get those clients to buy from you more often. And number three is to get your clients to choose to spend more every single time they buy from you. Once you are clear on those three strategies, the tactics to make them happen, become very, very simple.

This MSP is using a clever backdoor marketing tactic

You are safe. No one’s calling the cops. This is the one time that you can be a thief and not get arrested for it. When you are an MSP business owner wanting to find new clients and make more money, new ideas that actually work for other MSPs are like gold dust. But with permission, please go ahead and steal the smart ideas you’re about to hear from my guest this week.

In this interview, you’ll learn three things – what his special tactic is, how it makes finding clients easier, and how you can do a version of this in your MSP.

Hi, my name is Omar Romero and I’m the owner of an MSP based in beautiful Trinidad and Toba.

And congratulations because after five years of the podcast, you are the first ever person, the first ever guest from Trinidad and Tobago to appear on the podcast. So congratulations and thank you so much. You and I have actually been talking for what feels like a year, I think, and it’s taken quite a time to get our calendars together and I’m so excited to get you on the show, primarily because you are using a marketing tactic that I don’t think we’ve ever spoken about before.

I’m going to give it the name of Backdoor Marketing. I don’t think you ever set out to do it when you did it. And obviously you’re going to describe what you’ve done and the results you’ve had from it, but I’m calling it backdoor marketing because you started marketing to businesses without them even realising they were being marketed to. And we’re going to explain the whole thing here in layout what you’re doing. Let’s first of all hear a little bit of your story. So how did you get into tech and how did you end up owning an MSP?

Yeah, so my career started here in Trinidad and Tobago, and I think throughout the years I’ve worked in different areas of IT. So I started out working for a vendor on application support, payroll application vendor. And then I started working for the bank where I did some programming. And sometime around 2005, I actually moved to the UK. I lived in London at the time working for one of the largest IT firms there, but that was as a database analyst. And I had always had the idea of doing IT and doing things my own way and having my own thing. I never really crystallised what that would look like.

When I left the UK, I moved to New York City and I was doing an MBA. And a professor in the program at the time had introduced me to someone in New York who owned an MSP. And that was my first experience of understanding what an MSP is or what an MSP does. The company was Greenhouse it, and they were very generous in sharing the time and knowledge and explaining all those things. And it just ticked so many of the boxes for me because I just saw the beauty of managed services and how you can really structure things and help so many people. And it was just a different way of doing IT traditionally to what I was accustomed to. So after I finished my MBA, I moved back to Trinidad and Tobago and started my company Rose IT Services. We’ve been here providing MSP services ever since.

Amazing. You’ve lived everywhere. It’s like you’ve lived in all the cool cities, which is really cool. London, New York, Trinidad and Tobago. It doesn’t get any better than those three. I bet the weather where you are is a lot better today than the weather is here, where it’s kind of dark and horrible outside. I think that’s the one thing we can guarantee. So you’ve got your MSP, I know you’re quite successful at what you do, but you started a second business. So briefly tell us a little bit about what that business does. And this, by the way, is a critical part of the story.

So one of the sectors we provide services for is credit union, in Trinidad and Tobago and the region. And we had an MSP client who we are the IT provider for, and sometime around 2013 were credit unions, and this is not just in Trinidad, but this is across the world, they have to do something called an annual general meeting once a year, which is a public event where they invite all their members or clients to attend. And part of that annual general meeting is there’s an election that happens.

Years ago that used to be physical ballots by hand, and it was a process that took hours to finish. And sometime around 2013, our client, they had an electronic ballot accounting system and they asked if they could help us run the ballot accounting system. So that was a high speed scanner on a desk and we would have pre-printed ballots that people would shade, and we basically reduced the process from four hours to probably 30 minutes. What happened is that a lot of other credit unions saw us doing it and reached out to us to do that. So apart from the MSP business, this was a new service we provided, which we built out to preprinting all the ballots and managing that election process and we would give them the returning officer everything packaged for an election.

Then in 2020 we had gotten pretty popular in the space doing that. And then covid happened and these events can be over a thousand people at a physical venue and it has to happen and a lot of our clients reached out to us to figure out how do we have this event that we need to have and how do we move that online?

The challenge of these is they’re not regular webinars or Zoom or anything like that. These are highly, highly interactive. These are hundreds of people who need to be heard, who need to vote on motions, who need to do an election for board and committees. And we just fell in a really good space because we were, by design, technical people, but we also understood that credit union space. We developed a template of how to run those virtual meetings online that grew into hybrid meetings and it became a subsidiary side business where we have our MSP business now, but we also have a business that does large virtual and hybrid events.

Got it. So you were telling me just before the interview you can have up to a thousand people taking part in essentially a massive video call?

Well, we know we actually have capacity for 100,000 people on our Zoom.

Oh, wow, okay.

The largest we’ve registered is we probably just under 4,000 people on our live Zoom. But, and so it’s very, very involved and you have a lot of technical elements in the background. Everyone has to participate and feel like they’re accommodated. So it’s very demanding.

That’s a very unique business, I have to say. That’s a very cool side business and wonderful to hear how, actually, Covid for you was the making of that business. It allowed you to pivot and change and invent something new, which is really cool. Now obviously what we’re talking about here today is backdoor marketing, which is where we are selling to people and we are influencing them to choose you as an MSP without them realising. And the reason I wanted you to explain that second business is because of course that second business is where the backdoor marketing happens.

So tell us your experience of what happened as you started setting up more clients and onboarding more clients onto your video platform. How has that actually generated work for your MSP?

So those events are very, very involved, there’s registration, there’s a month of work that happens before the actual day of the event. And within that month there’s a lot of technical pieces that have to happen. I mean, we have to work with the client on what goes on their website, we have to do content email marketing blast, we may have to look at what happens on the internet onsite. So there are a lot of technology pieces, and through that, we either work alongside the clients IT department or maybe they don’t have an IT department, and we have to step in.

So that gave us one, a really good understanding of where these clients who were working with us on the virtual services were on the IT spectrum. And also, that gave our clients understanding of how we worked, because some of our resources from the MSP side do help out on the virtual side. Because of that, it was a good conversation if we executed really well on the virtual to say, Hey, by the way, do you know we also offer these MSP services that may be of value to you? And that has worked really well because it’s not like we are coming in cold. It’s someone we are familiar with, someone who knows us, someone we’ve executed for, and we found that there are a lot of people who would be happy to work with us on a more permanent basis as an MSP provider.

Got it. So essentially, if I was to summarise that, because what I want is for everyone listening this or watching this on YouTube to not think, okay, it’s about having a unique business. It’s something extra. And we’ll talk about what any MSP could do in a second. But essentially you are building a relationship with people who have bought something else from you. And as you are building that relationship, it allows you to influence them and talk to them about the technical problems that you are finding in their business, which is obviously a natural in for you to talk about the solutions. Have I got that right? Is that correct?

Yeah, and I don’t even think it’s that intentional because actually a weird thing started happening in that our MSP clients started, they knew us as technology providers, that’s what most people know us as bread and butter. But then our virtual clients know us as virtual meeting providers, and none of these people know we do the other thing. 

After we execute an event, I would just call and say, Hey, I’d like to pop by and share with you some of the other things we do. We know that we have a solution that can solve problems for them, and they know how we work, so it’s a natural fit.

And it’s usually very, very informal. We usually just are having a chat and I would just say, Hey, did you know we provide IT services, we provide cyber security services, we can do penetration testing, vulnerability assessment, all of these things. And usually it’s like, I had no idea you guys did this because this is actually a current requirement for us. And then that’s where that conversation would start. So it’s really, really natural. 

Exactly. So the actual sales conversation, as you say, is natural, but you are leveraging the existing relationship, and I think that’s the key part of this. Here’s a question for you, Omar, if you ran another MSP or you were advising another MSP and they don’t have a side business, obviously I can imagine you’re a very busy person with two big businesses to run, and I’m sure you’ve got a fantastic team, but if you were advising another MSP who didn’t have a side business and didn’t want a side business, how can you take that principle of working with someone on something else before you sell them managed services? What would you recommend they do?

Well, I think what I would say is that for us in this region, the concept of an MSP is not very well understood. And I don’t know if it’s like that commonly across the world, I wouldn’t be able to say. But usually people just see us as an IT company, so they would come to us for different things. And sometimes we do things on a project basis. So they may say, we want to do an office 365 implementation, and we may work with the client on that. But then sometimes you do something like that for a client and you execute it and the client has worked with you on a project basis and it becomes an easy conversation, if you can execute that really well to say, Hey, we did this for you and we can actually support you on a more permanent basis. Did you know we do these other things and this is how we work and this is what works for other clients who have done an office 365 implementation. And then that is where the conversation can become really natural. Obviously what underpins it is you have to execute on that thing you’re doing so that the client has had a good experience working with you, and then that opens the conversation for a more fixed, permanent relationship.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. To answer your question about around the world, do people understand what MSPs are? I think yes, probably there is a greater understanding of it, but still, you look at the average decision maker, so the average business owner or manager, and they don’t know what the term MSP is, they don’t know what a managed service provider is. I think a lot of people still do think of their IT company as just an IT company.

Yeah, that IT company… you do the IT, you do the websites, you do the social, you do everything that involves a computer.

Exactly right. And actually that in itself can be a double-edged sword. It’s good because you just mentioned websites. I’ve never understood why most MSPs don’t sell websites, because ordinary business owners see you as the technical people. And even though websites is a marketing thing, if they’re thinking, oh, well I trust you with my IT, I trust you with this, you can do my website. And I’ve always thought that most MSPs should have a website building partner that builds websites for them to sell. But anyway, that’s a whole other conversation. But yeah, so I think a lot of MSPs will treat project work as just something they do in order to onboard a new monthly recurring revenue client. And actually what you’re saying here is, go and do the project work to build a relationship, and then a more deeper engagement, a monthly commitment, monthly recurring revenue engagement will come off the back of that, which I think is absolutely spot on.

So Omar, thank you so much. That’s such a great idea. It’s awesome to hear that you’ve got two very good companies going there. And there’s a little piece of me that hears that you can put a hundred thousand people onto a call. And I am thinking, right, there’s 40,000 MSPs in the world. If I could get two or three people from each of those MSPs on a call simultaneously, I want to test the limits of your system. You say you’ve done 4,000, do you reckon you’re ever going to get past four or 5,000 on a simultaneous call?

Well yeah, I mean, we work closely with Zoom actually. And so that’s how they have expanded the capacity. It used to be 3000, they went up to 6,000. And I think where we want to go with that is to curate these large events. I often ask people, is there something you want to tell the world? Is there message you want to get out to the world? And you have this open online event. We do hybrid events as well, where everything is happening at a venue but it’s also open to online. Our job is really to get as many people and engage as many people to come onto your event and have a more professional experience than anything that is out there. It’s a Zoom product that they sell. So obviously there is a market for it. And this is actually a lot more fun than MSP stuff because we have ideas to do large events, we could do a music concert online. We could do really creative and crazy things, and sometimes people come to us with ideas and we just have to figure out how to make it happen. So yeah, that’s the fun side of it.

I love that. I can see why that’s a lot more interesting than setting up new users and resetting passwords. Omar, thank you very much for your time. Just tell us, for those MSPs that have been listening to this or watching you on YouTube, what’s the best way for them to just find out a little bit more and perhaps even connect with you on LinkedIn?

Yeah, so I am on LinkedIn. I usually post everything we do there. Just find me Omar Romero. My website is www.rose-it.com, and we are on social media. Our company is on LinkedIn. We are on Instagram, we are on Facebook – RoseITSL.

Paul’s Personal Peer Group

Graham in Omaha has reflected on how little he feels his MSP has achieved in terms of lead generation over the last 12 months. His question is: Why do my marketing projects take so long to implement?

Okay, well, there are a couple of potential reasons for this. The first is that maybe you are overthinking marketing. So just stop overthinking it, because marketing is already difficult enough. You just need to get a piece of advice from someone you trust and then implement that advice. And I realise that that cuts off several different ways of potentially doing something. But surely the goal here is just to get it done.

The other option is, or the other possibility is that you are disorganised. So you need to treat a marketing project like a technical project and use your project management software to break it down into easily digested chunks.

The other possibility is that you’re trying to do it all yourself. And you know my opinion on this, that you should only do, what only you can do. So next year, find yourself a virtual assistant who can help you, or members of your team who have some capacity and are interested in helping to grow the business, and they could be your secret weapons in 2025.

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, Omar Romero, on LinkedIn, and visit his website.
• Got a question about your MSP’s marketing? Submit one here for Paul’s Personal Peer Group.