Episode 40: How to position your MSP as THE experts

Episode 40: How to position your MSP as THE experts

Paul Green

Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast
Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast
Episode 40: How to position your MSP as THE experts
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In this week’s episode

  • Has Coronavirus impacted your MSP? Maybe some clients have cancelled contracts. Or perhaps you’ve actually grown due to clients requesting more WFH projects. Whatever YOUR experience, it can be useful to hear how other MSPs are getting on. And in this week’s episode Paul’s joined by a special guest from Datto to discuss their latest ‘State of the MSP report’
  • Also this week Paul answers a brilliant question from a listener on how to use marketing to beat the competition, and position yourself as THE expert in your field
  • Plus, Paul looks at the link between confidence and competence and why addressing these two factors can improve your team’s performance. Also, Google has made some things that could affect your search engine optimisation… you need to hear this.

Show notes

Episode transcription

Voiceover:
Made in the UK for MSPs around the world. This is Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast.

Paul Green:
Hello, and welcome to episode 40. I’ve got a cracking one for you today. Here’s what’s coming up.

Alan Butler:
MSPs that are not traditionally in security, but they have end users asking them to support them, are now considering, how do I do this?

Paul Green:
I’m also answering a question from an MSP on how to position yourself as the expert in your marketplace. And we’ll look at something very important from Google that you may never have heard of. It’s called Core Web Vitals, and I’ll tell you how it’s going to affect your website’s performance in Google searches.

Voiceover:
Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast.

Paul Green:
Take a typical broken tech job that comes into your help desk today. Not something simple like setting up a new user or a password change, but something that actually requires you to use your cognitive skills and your intuition and your years of experience to fix it.

Paul Green:
Now, let’s imagine that you get the job and one of your newest first-line technicians gets the same job. You both get versions of exactly the same thing, which of you is more likely to tackle that with vigour and with enthusiasm, just know that you can get the job done? Well, you and I would probably suggest it’s you. And I’m assuming that you’re the owner of the business or the manager and that you’ve got quite a few years of technical experience under your belt. So what makes the difference between you and your first line tech that’s perhaps one or two years into their career? Is it just experience or is it confidence?

Paul Green:
I believe that there is a link between competence and confidence, and the more confident you are about something, typically the more competent you are as well. This comes down to just observing people and watching people as they become more comfortable in workplaces. You and I don’t have jobs, we run our own businesses, but when you do have a job and you start in a job on day one, you can be very competent at what it is that you’re doing, but your confidence can sometimes be a little bit lower because of course you are in new surroundings, you’re working with new people, you’ve got new processes and systems and stuff, and good employers always take account of this, when they’ve got new people starting on their team. It’s about making them feel welcome and relaxed as much as it is helping them understand all of the tools and the different ways of doing things here.

Paul Green:
So there is, I believe a link between confidence and competence. And as leaders, you and I should be constantly working on both of those in our employees. We should be helping them with their competence, which is a pure training thing, as in getting them onto courses and getting them improving their skill sets, but we should also be working on their confidence. And I think that confidence is the thing that you improve with your coaching skills. I’ve been a big fan of coaching for many, many years, more than 20 years in fact, since I was working in radio and coaching and going on a specific coaching course actually gave me the tools that I needed to coach people who were better than I was.

Paul Green:
My job at the time, or part of my job was to coach radio presenters who’d been on air longer than I had, who were technically better than I was. And I couldn’t tell them how to do their job, but I knew that they knew inside where they were cutting corners, what they could be doing to produce better output on air. And I put myself through the coaching course to give myself the tools to bring that out of those people. And it was a very successful course and had some very successful outcomes with the people I was managing. This is something that you should be doing as well, and you’re looking to improve their confidence at the same rate that they improve their competence.

Paul Green:
In fact, this makes employees feel great. Could you imagine how you’d feel if you were working for someone who’s investing in your training and your hard skills at exactly the same time as coaching you and helping you talk through situations and look at things that make quite a difference. That’s the perfect blend of improving competence and confidence at the same time. Now there is a risk of someone’s confidence growing before their competence does. I’ve just found some research online by a couple of psychology researchers from a few years ago, who asked the question, why do so many incompetent people get promoted to positions of authority? Which is of course laid out in a book by Laurence J Peter it’s called the Peter Principle.

Paul Green:
And the Peter principle is that you get promoted to one position just above your level of competence. I think the reason that this seems to happen according to that research I’ve just been reading, is that people who are very, very confident are seemingly unaware of their lack of competence. And you might see this in some of your workforce, where actually they don’t seem to have the skills that they think they have, but what they have got is they are brimful of confidence that you throw any tech problem at them and they will figure a way around it, which gives them huge amounts of confidence, yet it doesn’t really match up to their levels of competence.

Paul Green:
I think this is something to look out for in your team. A number of times over the years, I’ve worked with people who seem incredibly confident on the surface. And so you trust them more and more and more, and quickly and quickly, you give them more and more stuff to do and you break them, because actually they didn’t have that core competence underneath. And they were unaware that they had that core competence underneath. So for us to be fair leaders, to promote people correctly, to develop people correctly, we’ve got to work on both of those things at the same time.

Paul Green:
Yeah, it’s easy to just send someone off on a training course or put them through some online training and just tick a box and say, yep, I’ve invested in my team, but I believe it’s actually quite dangerous to do that, if at the same time you’re not working on their confidence by coaching them one on one. Just a quick note on the coaching, there are three classic questions to ask people, what’s gone well? What’s not gone so well? And what should you do differently next time? And those three questions give you a framework for a 10 to 15 minute meeting which you can repeat weekly, fortnightly, monthly, as often as you possibly can and preferably on a regular pattern. And that’s the way to improve the confidence and really grow your team.

Voiceover:
Here’s this week’s clever idea.

Paul Green:
The only constant with Google is change. It’s constantly changing things, tweaking things, coming up with new ways to do things. And over the last few months, it’s introduced something called Core Web Vitals. And you may not have heard about this, but it’s something you do need to be aware of because it affects the performance of your website in Google searches.

Paul Green:
Now don’t beat yourself up if you haven’t heard about it, because it’s just kind of sneaked in, in the back door. You see back in a round about May this year, in the Google search console, there was something called a speed report. And the speed reports was just a part of Google’s way of showing how fast your website loads. And then they made some changes to it in May. It was around about the time that all this lockdown stuff was going on. So it’s no wonder we didn’t notice. They changed the speed report to track three key metrics, something called Largest Contentful Paint, which basically measures when the largest content element becomes visible. So essentially when is the main content of the page finished rendering on someone’s device?

Paul Green:
The second one was something called First Input Delay. And this measures the time from when a user first interacts with your site, they click on a link or they tap on a button or something, to the time when the browser is actually able to respond to that interaction.

Paul Green:
And the third one is something called Cumulative Layout Shift. And this actually relates to the phenomenon that drives me and probably you as well crazy. You know when you’re looking at something on your phone, reading some content and things suddenly shift, like the content moves around or something loads, and it drives people crazy. Well, for Google now, that’s one of the three critical things that they’re measuring on every website is part of Core Web Vitals.

Paul Green:
Now, as I say, you’d be forgiven for not having heard this back in May, because actually this is all a bit geeky, this stuff, this is proper search engine optimisation stuff. Even I hadn’t heard of it back then. But then at the end of May they announced that these three Core Web Vitals metrics were going to be rammed together with the existing page experience ranking signals. And what that means is, if your site is slow, it loads too slow, or it’s too slow when someone presses a button or the content moves around and frustrates people. Then that’s going to have an impact on your performance in search engine results.

Paul Green:
Now, there’s no need to panic. This isn’t an urgent thing to do because they did say that this stuff will not be incorporated until next year at least. And they’ll give us at least six months notice before it’s included in the ranking engine. So before, the core Google search actually takes these factors into account. But like everything with Google, it’s something you’re going to have to do at some point. You’re going to have to spend some time looking at the Core Web Vitals and speeding up your site, making it a more pleasant experience, because otherwise you will be penalised by Google down the line.

Paul Green:
It’s like a few years ago when they announced that all websites had to be optimised for mobile phones. And it’s very rare these days, isn’t it? To find a site that isn’t optimised in some way for mobile phones. And if you do, they tend not to rank very well because of course more traffic looks at websites via phones than it does on desktops these days. Well, clearly Google is trying to push us forward to the next level. It’s trying to have even faster and faster content. It wants faster reaction times from websites, and it wants us not to be frustrated with that content.

Paul Green:
I’m not going to attempt to give you a guide on a podcast of how to optimise your site for this, frankly, just Google it, just Google the phrase Core Web Vitals. You’ll find loads of guides from people like Yoast, which is an SEO plugin. And I think moz.com has a guide as well. There’s loads of different guides online, but certainly you can take this as yet another signal that you need to take your website even more seriously, because Google really is watching. Already it’s looking at your mobile friendliness. It’s looking at how safe it is for people to browse on your website. It’s looking at making sure you’ve got an SSL installed, such a simple thing, but they do fall over sometimes. It’s looking at how much people hate those intrusive popups and all those kinds of things.

Paul Green:
These are the kinds of things now. And I think we’re at a stage now where it is worth you spending a little bit of money on experts to look at this for you. I mean, we spend some money on our websites, not huge amounts of cash, but just monitoring these things on a regular basis and looking to see if we can make improvements. We have speed problems on our website. Our website is so big. There’s so many different elements in it, and there’s so many cool tools. And the downside of that is, it’s affected the speed of the site. And we have a project underway to address that well before Google actually makes this a proper ranking factor.

Paul Green:
And maybe you should do exactly the same. Because as much as you can do lots of cool stuff with LinkedIn and Facebook and other social media platforms, and you can do lots of cool stuff with direct mail and the so many marketing things you can do. At the heart of it, your website is your shop front. And all we’re doing here is we’re making sure that the shopfront remains fit for purpose. The further down search engine results you are, put simply the fewer people will see you. It really is that critical. And it should be one of your core digital marketing actions. And it’s probably not a competency of your MSP. Why would it be? So in which case, just hire people to do this for you. It doesn’t have to be very expensive. You just need to make sure you’ve got the right people to overlook this and be on top of it for you.

Paul Green:
So where would you go to look for that? Well, maybe you’d start with your local SEO firm, your local search engine optimisation firm. Maybe you’d look online to see who’s out there. I don’t know if there is an MSP specific SEO firm. If there is, please drop me a note and let me know. Hello@paulgreensmspmarketing.com because loads of people ask me that question.

Paul Green:
Maybe you could look in platforms like Upwork, PeoplePerHour, maybe even fiverr.com and try and find people who understand this, but just be very, very careful with this. Like anything, when you’re letting someone into something important, you want to make absolutely sure you know who that person is before you let them in. But whatever else Google announces in the months and years ahead, one thing is sure to continue, and that’s the whole of Google searchability is based around giving a better experience to the end user.

Paul Green:
So if you’re doing something on your website, which you find it just a bit obtrusive and it’s a bit annoying. If you find it annoying on your website, then other people will find it annoying as well. And there’s a chance that at some point, Google will not be impressed to see it on your website and it will have an impact on your business. This is an ongoing project that’s really worth you setting up now, so you can stay on top of it.

Voiceover:
Paul’s blatant plug.

Paul Green:
Now, if you fancy a more relaxing marketing reads than Googling Core Web Vitals, why don’t you get a copy of my book, it’s written especially for MSPs, it’s all about marketing and I’ve got a free physical paperback copy to send to you if you’re based in the UK or the U.S. All you got to do is go to paulgreensmspmarketing.com, and there on the home page, there’s a copy of the book it’s called Updating Servers doesn’t grow your business and we’ll send you that copy completely free. Just fill in the form.

Voiceover:
The big interview.

Alan Butler:
Hi, my name is Alan Butler. I am the EMEA Marketing Director for Datto. I have been in and around technology for the best part of two decades. Keeps me happy and interested still.

Paul Green:
Gives you something to do every day, right? And I should imagine being part of Datto, you’re a very busy person. Datto of course famous for being one of the big consolidators, driving a lot of innovation, acquiring lots of businesses. And one of the things that Datto has done in the last, I think it was about the last month or so, which caught my attention was of course you released your annual state of the MSP report and unbeknown to you guys, as you were researching this, of course the world went into lockdown and the coronavirus hit, and that significantly changed the report that you put out this year, didn’t it?

Alan Butler:
What was quite interesting about the report it’s in its fourth year, generally with this sort of sizeable type of research, you have a lead time, there’s a lot of details behind it to prepare before you release it. And that in itself is usually about a six month cycle. So we were in and around that sort of cycle when the world went into lockdown. So we had a unique and interesting moment in time where we were able to take the initial research and then add another layer of research when we went back to people and just ask them how they were coping during the new way the world was moving. From that perspective, we have this great insight from both before and during the current lockdown situation.

Paul Green:
So actually worked out really well for you. You have the ability to sit and look at the overall market and know many MSPs of many different sizes worldwide. How has COVID in general affected MSPs?

Alan Butler:
Some were impacted hard and some have seen extreme upward sort of movement in terms of their business because of the move from office based to remote working. I should say, and I’ll give you a bit of context is as well Paul where the report has covered about 1800 plus global manage service providers. And for the first time this year, we actually went to partners that were non-Datto as well. So we had a very good 50/50 split. So the feedback and the results and what we’ve seen in terms of a shift has not just been Datto partners, it really is a sort of a market perspective of how both the MSPs prior and during lockdown have coped.

Paul Green:
And the impact over the last few months on MSPs, has that been because of the loss of project work, because obviously where you’ve got monthly recurring revenue streams, typically they’ve continued, obviously some people have seen reductions where numbers of users have been furloughed, or they’ve had to put services on hold, but has it been the loss of project revenue that’s been the big impact or has it been something else?

Alan Butler:
We’ve seen initially that first sort of four to six weeks, depending on which country you’re in and when lockdown happened for you, those MSPs and those sort of remote working framework, I guess, just had an influx of business that just sort of help us get our people from an office to home base, help them be secure, help them set up in a way that they can access information.

Alan Butler:
So there was that initial sort of huge spike, then from there, the different industry sectors went into various scenarios. So if you were to be in hospitality, you would have seen most likely a downward trend, but if you were in that remote working collaboration tools, file sharing, those types of things, suddenly everyone needed them, wanted them to operate their businesses. So we saw that distinct split between the partner data and feedback.

Paul Green:
So if we look forward six months, 12 months, 18 months to the end of next year. And I appreciate there’s going to be a certain element of both of us gazing into the crystal ball here, but based on the research that you’ve done so far, and presumably because you are starting to think about next year’s report as well, what do you think is going to happen to MSPs in the next, let’s say the first six months. So as we go towards the end of 2020 and the start of next year, I think now’s a great time because as people are returning to their offices, and I think we’ll see this more in September and October, there’s going to be a pretty much another rush of, Hey, I want anyone to work anywhere on any device, but what do you think is going to happen in the short term, just after that, Alan?

Alan Butler:
I think there’s a couple of trends. I mean, we asked obviously a whole bunch of stuff around technologies. You might use the term, what keeps an MSP up at night? I don’t think this was a surprise to anyone is cyber security. There’s very many forms in which that might manifest itself, whether it’s protecting yourself as an MSP in the business that you have, but equally protecting your end users. So that’s something that we saw in the research really as a fundamental piece that MSPs were looking to do, not just now, but into the sort of next 12 to 18 months. And I think the move to remote working is increased that hype and conversation with those end users. Suddenly there’s this motion of, okay, I need everyone to be secure. I need them to be up and running.

Alan Butler:
So that talk track is very much there right now. And I think will increase in the next 12 to 18 months. And I think one of the really big pieces that came out of this was MSPs that are not traditionally in security, but they have end users asking them to support them, are now considering how do I do this myself, or do I partner with an MSSP? That is quite an interesting trend that we’re seeing where there’s this connection of managed security service providers who are tying their services with a existing MSP to produce that sort of security layer that they can offer their end users. So that’s something that’s bubbled up certainly for now and into the next 12 to 18 months.

Paul Green:
So, yes, we’ve heard this so many times on this podcast about the future being security and how MSPs are going to have to transition to become MSSPs over a number of years in the future years ahead. But interesting to hear they’re partnering up with an MSSP now, is the right way, or is certainly one of the ways to provide those security services.

Paul Green:
Let’s finish Alan by looking at monthly recurring revenue. It’s one of my favourite subjects. So I’ve worked in a number of different verticals and I’ve never known a vertical, an industry, a sector quite like our world now. It’s amazing just because of the sheer amounts of monthly recurring revenue and it’s accepted as normal by both the end clients and the MSPs, the IT support companies themselves, the monthly recurring revenue is normal. And there are many, many other sectors out there. You mentioned hospitality earlier, imagine how less of an impact it would have been on hospitality, if they had monthly recurring revenue, they have plenty of repeat custom, but they don’t have monthly recurring revenue.

Paul Green:
So going forward from here, do you see that more MSPs need to increase their amounts of monthly recurring revenue? And actually, is there a … I like to ask two questions in one. Is there, what you would call a good, healthy percentage of your turnover that should be monthly recurring?

Alan Butler:
I think this is a fascinating area and it really does encapsulate, I think what I would like to call moments of acceleration. We’ve seen them during sort of downtimes, you might refer to sort of 2008, 2009 financial crisis. It’s that moment where things look bleak, but actually some of the best innovation comes from that moment and the channel, the IT channel in general, from where it was born, how it sort of manifested itself into maybe shifting boxes initially to now software, now to platforms and now to services and all of those good things wrapped around.

Alan Butler:
If you are a partner that has been in the channel for 20, 30, 40 years, you may have made those moves, those steps during the evolution of this to where you now have a managed service part of your business that’s a recurring revenue. For those partners that may have started in the sort of last decade, may have jumped straight into that spot and just been all about providing a service with a monthly recurring revenue and a subscription.

Alan Butler:
I think regardless of where you are on your journey and how long you’ve been in business, the one thing that is very, very evident through this current situation we find ourselves in is that monthly recurring revenue been able to provide a service that is on point supportive for an end user to continue to run, regardless of their situation of an office or non-office, all of that good stuff is hugely valuable. So the world of anything as a service, I can get, I can consume, I can use if and when I need to, is right there front and centre right now.

Alan Butler:
For partners, MSP partners, it’s absolutely something I think has increased, and that, understand it, grab it, understand the services you want to offer. How do you increase it? How do you become more valuable to those end users so they have more and more trust in the services that you can provide now and into the future? I think it’s a great area.

Paul Green:
Alan, thank you for being my guest this week. So how can we learn more about this Datto state of the MSP report?

Alan Butler:
The best way to do it is to visit datto.com. Download the report. It’s free of charge. It is packed with all the information. Some of it we’ve touched on today. You can see what your peers have answered in terms of feedback. The tables are broken down by areas. If you want to see what the next hot trends are in services and technology, it’s all in there. I advise everyone to go and download that and do a bit of reading.

Voiceover:
Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. Ask Paul anything.

Jason:
Hi Paul, this is Jason from Neveco. How do I position myself as an expert in the marketplace? Thanks.

Paul Green:
Great question, Jason. Thank you. And there were three very simple answers to that experts write, experts speak and experts are sought out by other influential people, because it’s all about positioning, isn’t it? If the people who are looking for new MSP in your area perceive you to be the expert at IT support, at data security, at keeping them safe, then it almost guarantees you a place at the table and that’s all you need, isn’t it? You just need the place at the table.

Paul Green:
Most MSPs I speak to say, yeah, if we can get someone on the phone or on a Zoom for 15 minutes then, nine times out of 10, they will become a client eventually. We’ve just got to get the place at the table. Being seen as the experts is the ultimate position to have. It’s so powerful because just the fact that you are the expert, means that many people want to work with you and they are expecting to pay top dollar to do so. Now, not everyone wants to work with experts. Some people are just looking to get a job done quickly, quietly and cheaply, but you don’t really want those kinds of clients anyway. Those aren’t the kind of people who commit to levels of monthly recurring revenue and stay with you for 20 years as great clients. You want the kind of clients that acknowledge your expertise and they’re willing to pay top dollar for it.

Paul Green:
So let’s examine all three of those. Experts write, experts speak and experts are sought out by other experts. So the first one then is the experts write. And this is great news for your content marketing strategy, because you should be writing regular content all the time. When I started working in the media in 1996, one of the cool things about working in newspapers and then radio was that they controlled the distribution of information.

Paul Green:
If you wanted to reach hundreds of thousands of people in your area, you had to either be on the radio or you had to pay to be on the radio. And I think that was the thing that really appealed to me the most, this makes me sound like an egomaniac, doesn’t it? I could sit in a tiny padded cell type studio in an obscure city like Peterborough in the East of England and with the press of one button, I could talk to hundreds of thousands of people. That was really cool. Now you flash forward to 2020 and these days, no one really controls the distribution. I mean, look at this podcast, it’s been relatively easy for me to get this podcast out to MSPs all over the world. I haven’t needed a broadcast license to do it. There’s no limits on the distribution of this information. And that’s the difference these days.

Paul Green:
You can write stuff, put it on your website, put it on LinkedIn, put it out there as a book, it all gets out there because the distribution these days is easy. And that’s why we’ve seen such a massive explosion in the amount of content being written. Now, just because everyone seems to be writing everything, doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t carry on writing yourself. It’s still a very, very powerful thing to do. Earlier on in the show, you heard me offering you a free copy of my book, Updating servers doesn’t grow your business. And I offer that free book. Well, for a couple of reasons, but one of them is because it’s a great positioning tool. It shows you that I understand about marketing an MSP. It also acts as a great way for us to start a relationship. You get a free book, you join my database and yeah, you can unsubscribe at any point if you want to.

Paul Green:
But the vast majority of people don’t do that. It’s a great introduction to me as an expert, and it’s also a great way for you and me to meet. In fact this is why I recommend to all of my clients that I work with, that they either write a book or they take the book that I provide to them as part of their MSP marketing edge membership. We currently have a book called Email Hijack that we provide to people and that they just put their name on the cover and use it as if they’d written that book. It’s a very quick and powerful way to become an expert in your local area.

Paul Green:
So what about the second one then, speaking. Well, there aren’t many speaking engagements happening right now. I know events are starting to trickle back, but certainly not the big events that we’ve all been used to over previous years. But when those do return, get yourself up on the stage. These are the kinds of things that you have to work up and work towards. You start off by doing little events, you get known as a good speaker, and eventually you get up there to big events. And they’re all useful positioning tools.

Paul Green:
When I first started working with MSPs in 2016, I would go to anything, anywhere that someone would have any number of MSPs and I could possibly stand in front of them and talk to them for even as little as 10 minutes. I would do that because I knew that was expert positioning. In fact, some of my clients today that I’ve known for four and a half years now, are people that I first met at events, who believe what it was I was talking about, and it was the right message at the right time for them. And this is the power of speaking.

Paul Green:
Now, of course, while you can’t do public speaking, what you can do right now is videos. You can do loads and loads of videos. And I would argue that videos, as much as podcasts, are the modern 2020 can’t go out to events kind of speaking, because anyone can do videos, but not many people do. The number of MSPs that I know who are doing their own videos is absolutely tiny. And if those that are doing them, most of them they do three or four videos, and then they stop because they’re difficult or because they don’t like the way that they look on screen or the way that they sound.

Paul Green:
There’s only a very, very tiny number of MSPs I’m aware of, or that I know, who’ve carried on doing videos week in, week out, putting them on their YouTube, putting them on their website and it generates business. Because when you do those kinds of videos and you do them well, and they’re well edited, it positions you as an authority. Even talking about something as basic and simple as password security or using a password manager or why you should encrypt your laptop. All of these are very basic things that all tech people know. And yet it’s when you put that into a video or turn it into some kind of a talk or you put on a seminar or even putting on a webinar, it suddenly takes that information and it flips it around to bolster and boost your position as the local expert.

Paul Green:
The final one then is being sought out by other experts. And what I mean primarily here is the media. If you can get your local media to interview you or to feature you in some way in the newspaper or in the radio or the magazine or the website, then again that’s a position of authority. Because there is a perception that the media only picks the best experts for commenting on things. Well, I worked in the media long enough to know that’s not actually the case. Even 20 years ago, we were just picking out the people who were most convenient. And those were the days when all we had was a radio station and a crappy little website to maintain. These days, all the media outlets have half the staff and three to four times the amount of content that they have to generate. So they absolutely cut corners where they can, and they go to the easiest person.

Paul Green:
You should be sending out a press release on a monthly basis to your local media, telling them what’s happening in our world. What are the latest breaches? What’s the latest security thing. What are hackers doing right now? What’s happening out there, because they do not know what’s happening out there. They are not tracking it in the way that you are. And very few journalists and radio people are truly experts in anything. They’re just very, very good generalists. If they’re experts at something, it’s just getting the best out of the people that they’re interviewing. If you get featured in the media, it doesn’t have the impact and the reach that it used to have, but it’s still got the credibility. And that credibility is wonderful, when you can put on your website as seen in so and so newspaper or as featured on so and so radio station.

Paul Green:
The other positioning tactic where you’re sought out by other experts is where you can align yourself with other experts in your field. So that might not be other MSPs in your area, but it might be, for example, if you’ve got a specific networking group. There might be a networking group that’s been really powerful in your area for some time and you manage to join that group and become part of it.

Paul Green:
And the beauty of that is, all of the credibility of the other members rubs off on you. It’s why people have joined things like Freemasons, like rotary club, like round table and all these other kinds of business groups across the world for years and years and years, because not only is it about giving back and doing good, it’s also really good for business because of the positioning you have being part of those kinds of groups. So being seen as an expert is not really about being an expert at all, it’s about making sure that you’ve got your positioning right, and then just following through with it systematically and consistently.

Voiceover:
How to contribute to the show.

Paul Green:
So I’d love to know what you think of the show and get your marketing questions. You can email me a voice file, or just an email. hello@paulgreensmspmarketing.com. Or if you go onto the podcast show pages, then you can leave me a message, right from the browser. You don’t have to download anything or email anything. You just go onto the podcast page at paulgreensmspmarketing.com and tap on the orange button to leave a voice message.

Voiceover:
Coming up next week.

Phil Donoghue:
We simply couldn’t find anybody who could provide the types of service and the levels of service that we needed to be able to deliver to our customers in the cloud space. It very quickly became apparent that what we were building would be beneficial to other MSPs.

Paul Green:
That’s Phil Donoghue. He owns an MSP here in the UK. And a few years ago, decided to start his own cloud distribution service because he just wasn’t happy with all the other services on offer. You’ll hear his story in next week’s show. We’re also going to be taking a deep look at time next week, not Dr. Who type time, but your time and where are you spending it. I’ve got the most amazing time tracking tool to suggest to you. It merges a physical element with software, and it’s absolutely beautiful. And then I’m going to tell you about a new hire I’ve recently made and how much of my time it’s freed up. Finally, we’re going to finish next week, answering a listener question about how you know whether or not your marketing is working. Looking forward to speaking to you on next week’s show.

Voiceover:
Made in the UK for MSPs around the world. Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast.