Happy client? Ask for a testimonial NOW

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Welcome to Episode 276 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• Happy client? Ask for a testimonial NOW: There is a perfect moment to ask your clients for a testimonial or review. This social proof is really important, and when you systemise collecting it, it’s going to make your life so much easier.
• Why MSPs should add new LinkedIn connections every day: LinkedIn is the single most important place for MSPs to go marketing right now and I’m going to tell you the best way to leverage it.
• How this MSP marketer grew the business: There’s no better way for you to find the right ideas to market your business than listening to other people who are doing it right now. My guest talks us through what he’s done and what you can take away and implement quickly.
• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Do you know what a vanity URL is and have you ever wondered if you need one? An MSP has asked the question which I answer in this episode.

Happy client? Ask for a testimonial NOW

What if I told you there was a perfect moment to ask your MSP’s clients for a testimonial or review. But you must act on it super quickly, as that moment will very fast vanish. If you struggle to collect social proof from your clients, this is going to make your life so much easier and even allow you to systemise getting testimonials and reviews from your happiest clients.

So we all know that social proof is really, really important. Social proof is when people see other people like them acting in a certain way, and it gives them kind of a feeling of safety to know that other people have already tread the path that they are thinking of treading. And what I mean by that is collecting testimonials, reviews, and case studies from your existing clients, and then using that “social proof”, as it’s called, to persuade other people to pick your MSP.

You’ll be perceived as a safer choice by business owners and managers if they see that other business owners and managers have already picked you and are happy to endorse you.

Now, you’ve probably heard this before, but maybe there’s been something that’s been holding you back from collecting lots of social proof. Maybe it’s just been you simply haven’t had enough time, too many things to do, right? Or maybe you felt a little awkward asking your clients to give you a review or a testimonial. I mean, they’re already paying you money every month, surely you can’t ask them for something else, can you? Well, as a side note, yes you can. In fact, your best clients are often the most delighted to give you a testimonial or review because they want to see you succeed so that they can continue to enjoy your service.

Whatever the reason you don’t have enough social proof yet, let me tell you the perfect moment to go asking for it. You’re looking for the point at which your client is at their happiest, and we can actually predict when this will be. There are two, maybe three times that they’re most likely to be at their happiest, and the first will be about 90 days after they very first joined you. So that first month is always a little bit manic, isn’t it? As you are onboarding them and you are migrating any services away from their previous MSP. And then the second and third months are where you work your magic and where the really good stuff happens. So they see little problems that never got sorted with the previous MSP get fixed by you. And you probably over service them a little in that first month or so, so everyone is very happy with you, they’re all glad that they switched over to you. And can you see why that would be an exceptionally good time to ask them for a review or a testimonial?

Also, after 90 days, they feel as though they’ve sampled enough of your service to endorse you, and they wouldn’t do that in the first week or so. Another great time to ask them for social proof is after you’ve completed a big project for them, especially if it’s perhaps a massive, complex project with lots of moving parts. The relief from them that the project has been completed and the pleasure of the benefits that that project brings them are both things that you can leverage when you are asking for some social proof at this stage. Now, with both of these two examples I’ve just given you, can you see how you can systemise asking for social proof into the process of onboarding or completing a project? You can actually set a reminder for 90 days into a new relationship with a new client or at the point that the project has been successfully delivered, you can build it in and add it as a to-do, as a task to contact your client and ask them for social proof.

And there is actually one more ideal opportunity, a great place to ask them for a testimonial or a review. And that’s when you have completed a major fix or a rescue for your clients. Now, let’s say they’ve had some kind of massive breakdown in something that was out of your control, you didn’t know and couldn’t have predicted it would’ve gone wrong, but you had to jump in and fix it. Maybe they’ve been compromised in some way and you’ve swept in, you’ve done your magic and you’ve rescued them, and now everything is fantastic again. This is the perfect moment to ask for social proof because even though technology has been a nightmare for them for the last few days, maybe even weeks, you’ve rescued them like a knight in shining armour. And you can’t systemise a moment like this because you don’t know when it’s going to happen. But can you see how really this is no different to the previous two examples, you are asking your clients for social proof at the exact moment they are emotionally overwhelmed with gratitude for you.

Great social proof comes from the heart and not from the brain. You want people to be talking about how they feel about you and your team, not the logical fact about working with you. Good social proof persuades people to pick you at an emotional level. And the only way you can do this is to get emotional content from your existing clients to put in front of your leads and your prospects. So let me ask you, which of these three moments are you going to use to collect more social proof from your clients? you. But a project is the most obvious small thing to sell people.

Why MSPs should add new LinkedIn connections every day

If you only had 10 minutes a day to market your MSP, there’s one single place where I would recommend you invested all of that time. It’s the single most important place for MSPs to go marketing in 2025. And if you’re not there building it up every single day, you really are missing a massive marketing opportunity.

Let me tell you what it is, how to leverage it, and a way to make it seem so easy that it feels like you’re doing almost no work every day yet across a year, you are going to see huge results.

I made a big decision with my MSP Marketing Edge product development team at the backend of last year, and we’ve launched an exciting new project, which is now helping our members reach more decision makers on LinkedIn. And better influence them there as well. But why my obsession with LinkedIn? Well, that’s kind of easy. It is the most powerful social network for MSPs. Every prospect you could ever want is there and you can easily reach them.

Do you know what kind of businesses you’d most like to work with? Well start by looking for them on LinkedIn.

You want to connect with the decision makers and the influencers. And there are a few ways to do this. You could make a list of business names and run a LinkedIn search, or you could decide on several verticals you like and search for, let’s say lawyers in your town, accountants in your town, etc etc. You can also repeat this search on Google, adding the word LinkedIn of course for a shortcut. Find someone in your town who’s already connected to the people you want to reach. Connect to them and then connect to their connections. And by the way, there is a setting in LinkedIn that hides your connections to stop someone doing this to you.

Every weekday I recommend you attempt to connect to 10 new people, and yes, you may need a paid LinkedIn subscription to do this. Also maybe only two of them will accept your connection request, which doesn’t sound a lot until you look at the big picture figures. Two connections a day, times five days, times 50 weeks equals 500 new connections a year, every year. And suddenly the power of a marketing system strikes again. This is why you want to turn this activity into a regular, probably even daily task. It’s 10, maybe 15 minutes of work every day, which is nothing but over a year in the grand scheme of things, it compounds and all of those tiny actions turn into something impressive.

If you want to be really smart with this, then you’ll personally not do this work yourself. Go and find a virtual assistant or a member of your team to make these connection requests every day for you. All you need to do is brief this person on the kind of connections that you want to make and then give them access to your personal LinkedIn. You do it all in your LinkedIn. Now, I know that that might make you feel funny having someone else sat there in your LinkedIn, but so long as you find an assistant or a member of your team that you can trust and you put in place some checks, it will be okay. In fact, I’ve been operating this way for years on LinkedIn. If you and I have ever chatted on LinkedIn, well, if it was a very simple conversation that we had, it was probably not me, it was probably my virtual assistant Christelle. Or if it was a more complex conversation than it would’ve been me jumping in, but you wouldn’t have known. It does mean that christelle is doing 80% of the work on building up my LinkedIn and having basic conversations, and I just have to swoop in and do the 20% of stuff that really only I can do.

Now, that’s a really smart way of doing any marketing, and it’s a great way of protecting your personal time while getting more solid marketing done. So let’s summarise that… building a simple system that attempts new connections every day and getting someone else to do this for you. This is very, very smart marketing that over time will give you a great big base of people to start talking to a whole ton of leads that you can start working and generating prospects from.

How this MSP marketer grew the business

Heads up, here’s someone who’s there in the trenches marketing an MSP day in day out. There’s no better way for you to find the right ideas to market your business than listening to other people who have shovels in their hand and are doing it right now. Let’s explore what he’s done over the last three years and which great ideas you can take away and implement quickly.

Hi, I’m Dan Grech. I’m the founder and CEO of Biz Hack Academy, and we are a marketing training and consulting company, and we provide fractional CMO services to MSPs around the world.

And thank you so much for joining me on the podcast, Dan. You’ve got an amazing to tell about an MSP that you’ve been working with for three years, and you’ve taken them from literally zero marketing to a nice complex marketing machine that’s really delivering results for them. So we’re going to look at what you’ve done that’s worked well, what you’ve tried that didn’t work, and then let’s have a look at what you’re thinking of doing with them for the next three years. Before we tell that story, let’s find out a little bit about you. What’s your background? How did you get into this wonderful world of marketing MSPs?

Absolutely. Well, thank you so much for being here and I’m really excited to tell you about this story of one MSP. We work with many different MSPs, but the story of this particular MSP, we’re not going to mention their name, is I think really illustrative of the opportunity and the challenges of marketing your MSP online – it’s a very crowded space. MSPs tend to be “me too” businesses, in other words there’s a lot of competition that looks very similar on the surface, and we’ve developed some really good lessons and best practices that we hope that all of your MSPs who are listening can share.

My background actually is as a journalist, I spent 15 years in the United States working for NPR and PBS and the Miami Herald and the Washington Post, and I was a storyteller basically. I even got my master’s degree in storytelling. And then about 10 years ago, like so many other journalists, I lost my job. I had to reinvent. I reinvented myself first as a digital marketer, then as a trainer of digital marketing. I love to train people in what I want to learn. I love to learn by teaching, if you will. And then finally, as a business owner, starting my own training and consulting company, which I’ve been running now for almost 10 years – Biz Hack Academy.

And one of the services that we provide is fractional CMO services. This is a part-time outsourced head of marketing. Basically providing thought partnership to the CEO and helping oversee and lead a team of marketers and agencies in support of accomplishing the CEO’s vision. Most MSP heads are technical people. They’re very operationally focused, and generally speaking they’re terrible at marketing. And so it’s really important that most MSPs that are looking to grow have someone in that seat, that head of marketing role, who can help them filter all their good ideas and then make sure that the team is executing against the best ones.

Over the course of these three years, we’ve learned a lot of lessons about what works and what doesn’t. And I’m excited to share that journey. And we’re just right now as we plan for next year, we’re recording this in December, right before the new year 2025, we’re now actually creating our next three year strategy because we have had so much success over these three years building a great foundation.

What kind of situation was the MSP in when you first started working with them? They must have had a website, they must have had a LinkedIn presence, but was that it? Were they doing any marketing at all?

First of all, this MSP has three divisions, and I think this is really important because in one sense, I would almost say that this MSP didn’t follow necessarily marketing best practices because they had such a large Chinese menu of services. So the first service they offer is security and access control, these are cameras, access control for garages and doors like physical installations. Second, they offered unified communications, so this is like VoIP. And then third, they offer IT managed services, which includes things like cyber security, it’s a massive field.

One of the biggest challenges that we faced early on was you have these three divisions and most of the products, the services, the vendors that they work with weren’t even listed on their website. I described internally, I would say it’s like you guys are a Chinese food restaurant where you don’t even list everything on your menu. So that was one big issue. As far as the website itself, this was the worst website situation I’d ever seen. They were using some old platform, I don’t even remember the name, that wasn’t indexed or indexable by Google – they were literally invisible on the internet. So though they had a 35 year history, in this case, they were invisible online.

In terms of the marketing that they were doing at the time, they had one individual who was sort of like their social media video person. And then they had a couple of divisional salespeople for each of the three divisions who also oversaw marketing communications. And so the very first thing that we did with them is we ran all three of them as well as the CEO through a training program. And this served a couple of really important functions. Number one is it gave them a shared language for marketing. At Biz Hack Academy we call it the lead building system. I think it’s worth just quickly talking about what is the lead building system because it’s a really simplified form of marketing that’s very relevant to MSPs.

The foundation of a lead building system is your business story. This is the founder’s reason for starting the company and the purpose of the company in the world… why you do what you do and why it matters.

I’d love to dig into that a little bit and how defining the owner’s business story was an unlocking mechanism for growth for this company. That’s the foundation, ultimately, people only do business with people they like and trust, but if you’re actually looking to generate leads, there are six pillars. You need to identify what is the campaign objective? How are we going to measure success? Are you looking to get them to watch a video, click on it, click on a link, open an email, etc. Then you need to really narrowly identify your target audience and give them an irresistible offer.

For most MSPs, you’re really offering them knowledge in exchange for their contact information. So you’re establishing yourself as an expert and then ultimately, ideally collecting their contact information, email and phone number so you can follow up with them. That’s the core of strategy. Who’s your audience and what are you giving them of value in exchange for their contact info? Next is thumb stopping visuals and compelling messaging. That’s the essence of tactical marketing – images, videos, audio, text, and obviously leveraging AI to the hilt to do that. Those are pillars four and five. And then pillar six is the customer journey, the buyer’s journey. How do they go from never having heard of you to a sale? And each campaign takes them on a next step in their customer journey. And so it’s an iterative process. You run an ad that leads them to click on a button and takes them to a landing page – so the objective to the ad is clicks. Then on the landing page, they fill out a form – so the objective of the landing page is form fills. And it’s iterative like that. And then now they’ve given you their email address -the objective of them is to open the email and book a call and so forth. And so you do this iterative process and this is how you market.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. And it’s obviously taken you three years and I can see why it’s taken you three years, there’s a lot of stuff in there. You’ve built an entire marketing platform. So in terms of results, go back three years when they had an unindexable website, which I’ve never heard of in 2025, that’s nuts. But where were they getting their leads from? Was it just word of mouth? Was it just doing some networking locally? And then today, what kind of a difference is there? Is it a reliable amount of leads coming in? Do they have a reliable amount of discovery calls booked? What’s the difference from before to after?

They’d been in business for 35 years, and so they were getting the business and they still get most of their business in ways that are going to be familiar to any MSP, through personal networking and referrals. The problem was they were losing a lot of business that would get referred to them. They would check out their online presence, they’d say this isn’t a serious company – too small, not a good risk to take. I mean, one of the things about MSPs is MSPs are basically CYAs, right? The head of IT for a company, the chief information officer of a company is looking to hire a partner for an MSP that’s going to make them not look bad, that’s going to keep things working, that’s going to largely be invisible, and then when things go wrong, we’ll be immediately accessible and available to them. So it’s a very heavy on risk vendor relationship. And if you aren’t really on point with your digital presence, they’re going to disqualify you. So this is an invisible cost to a poor digital presence. You need a good functioning website, a decently active presence on social media, good blogs, ideally some really good educational content. It’s not going to necessarily close you the business, but it won’t lose you the business.

The first thing was building up that platform so that they weren’t losing the business that was already coming to them. It was all manual, it was all about them going networking. They were in three different markets, they had three different divisions, they had a pretty large sales team. It was very much of a sales driven company, and marketing was at best just kind of trickling out some email and social media.

So now fast forward three years, I’m actually looking at their data right now. They have dramatically increased. They have more than 1200 back links, which are different links from other organisations sending to their site. We’re on the track now to make that 20,000 back links over the next three years. They have an authority score from nothing to 16, we’re going to have that up to 40 over the next three years. And their organic traffic, which was literally in the dozens when we first met, is now breaking 5,000 per month, on its way to 50,000 and beyond. We’re right now in the early stages of the L curve, the hockey stick of growth. Because SEO in particular is very much a long-term additive strategy.

Our goal over the first three years, which we hit, was to build out a thousand articles and landing pages. We have a landing page now for every item on that Chinese menu. In other words, every product or service that they have, every vendor they work with will have pages and often multiple pages, and there’ll be localised versions of each of those pages for the geographies that they serve. Because as you know, a lot of search is best communications or best VoIP provider in Chicago. So need those geographically specific landing pages. And so this is a massive undertaking to get everything on their website listed with accuracy and length. And so a big part of those three years was just getting that Chinese menu with geographically localised pages onto the website.

And then we also did a ton with email acquiring lists, generating lists through our content. And then finally, social media has primarily been just kind of showing that the company’s alive. We have the technicians sending photos before and after as part of the due diligence process, and then we post those photos and they do shockingly well. People love seeing messy cords turned into clean cords. So the before and afters do really well for us. So that’s kind of the social media.

And then of course, PPC paid advertising, and that’s a challenge. It’s expensive, but it’s the primary driver to date of new business.

Yeah, no, absolutely. And obviously all that work you’ve done over the last three years putting in place the basics, the solid basics is going to contribute, well, I’m sure that’s going to contribute more in the next 3, 4, 5 years ahead. Two very quick final questions for you, Dan. First of one, you mentioned earlier on about the business owner story. I just wanted to pick up on that and just close that loop if we could. And secondly, just give us a sneak preview of some of the ideas that you’re thinking about doing with this MSP over the next three years.

Absolutely. So if I could give one takeaway to your MSPs, this is the single marketing tip that will make the biggest difference in the speed of your growth. And it’s almost counterintuitive, which is talk more about yourself. Everything in marketing is, it’s all about them. It’s all about solving the customer’s pain points. But you have to remember if they’re the hero, if they’re the Luke Skywalker, you as the business owner are the Jedi knight who is going to help them become the hero they’re meant to be. They don’t just hire anybody off the street. They hire someone that they like and they trust, and how do you build liking and trusting? It’s through a personal story. And so identifying why you do what you do, why you are personally committed and dedicated to being an MSP, to providing these services, to helping solve the technology challenges of your clients, while you have that sort of servant mentality describing where that came from, who taught you to value service, how you started your career, the startup story of your company, and then who you serve and why you serve them and why you love to serve them. Those are all things that will take a boutique MSP and help them stand out from the crowd because it’s a very crowded and undifferentiated space. And if you do not speak to who the owner is and why he or she does what she does, you will lose business. So that is my number one growth tip.

Now in terms of what we’re going to do over the next three years, so first of all, aligned with that is we’re going to position the CEO as a thought leader in his industry. We’re going to get very noisy about that online. We’re running webinars and webinar series. We’re then cutting them up to create social video. We’re partnering with vendors. We actually, the company bought a cyber truck, and we’re actually partnering with vendors and doing cyber truck demo videos using the vendors. So we’re doing all sorts of creative campaigns like that.

We’re leveraging social media like IMGUR is a platform, Reddit, Quora. So all of those platforms we’re expanding into in these first three years. We just didn’t have the resources to do that, now we have the bandwidth to do that, and we are doubling down on SEO, accelerating the content creation, doing it in the niches and the keywords that we know are winnable through our research. And then really focusing our paid on the security division, which we know is the most winnable, the least competitive, and the one that when they come in for the security division, they tend to get upsold into the IT services and the unified communications. So being really smart about where we’re spending our advertising dollars to maximise. We also are finding incredible results from Bing ads, which is a much cheaper and less competitive marketplace. And it’s all really on a foundation of content creation, being an expert, creating videos and blog posts that answer the specific questions that IT professionals have. The analogy is just like people go to YouTube to learn techniques, to fix their sink or do some home improvement. MSP clients are doing similar things except with their more advanced technologies. And so if you can be that person that they see giving that expert advice, you’re positioned to win that sale.

We are getting you back on this show in 2028, so we can hear what’s happened at the end of the six years. Maybe we should just get you on every three years. Dan, just for those MSPs that want to have a chat with you, see if maybe your fractional CMO services is something that would sit well with them, what’s the best way to get in touch?

Yeah, thank you. So go to BizHack.com, and they’ll see at the top that one of our services is fractional CMO services, and they should book a call with me, and I’m happy to talk to them. We have more than 80 fractional CMOs. We work with dozens of MSPs around the country. We have a deep expertise in exactly what they need and how to approach it, and we will help you grow faster.

Paul’s Personal Peer Group

Patrick is in Newcastle with his MSP in the northeast of England, and he has two questions in relation to his website. Firstly, What is a vanity URL? And secondly, Do I need one?

There’s a quick and easy answer to this one. A vanity URL is used to hide a real URL for a promotion. It’s typically used in offline media where someone has to type something in. So for example, you might have an advert in a magazine or a billboard (which side note, it isn’t something I’d recommend, but let’s just go with the example), and let’s say the call to action on the magazine advert is to go to a special landing page at yourwebsite.com/landingpage. And the reason you’re sending them to that special page is to measure how much traffic you get from the advert. It’s really important that there’s no other way that they can get to that URL, it’s not in your website navigation or anything like that. You don’t advertise it elsewhere. It just shows you all the traffic that’s come to this page must have come from the magazine advert.

The risk is as they’re typing it in that they get to the.com and they stop. That’s natural human behaviour, but that means they’ll be visiting your homepage and not the special landing page. So that skews your results. It’ll completely screw your stats up, and you’d think that the advert generated no traffic. In fact, then you’d be crying and the advertising people will be crying as well, and it would all just get horribly messy. So instead, you buy a vanity URL such as getbetterIT.com, and then you divert it to the actual URL, that one that had the slash, and that way the people responding to the advert cannot get it wrong. There’s no slashes, there’s no extensions, it’s just the base URL, and you get to know exactly what response you get. Another way of doing this, of course, would be to have a QR code, and personally, I would actually do both of these in a magazine advert, which as I said, I don’t really recommend you do anyway. But if you do, now you know how to judge whether or not you’ll get any response from it.

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, Dan Grech on LinkedIn, and visit the BizHack website.
• Got a question about your MSP’s marketing? Submit one here for Paul’s Personal Peer Group.