Episode 237: What it really means when a prospect says no

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This is a transcription for episode 237 of Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast: ‘What it really means when a prospect says no’

Full show transcription

Hey, my ambitious, growth hungry, MSP owning friend, here are today’s big things. What it really means when a prospect says no, why you need to grow with more urgency. And an MSP sales expert tells you how to do the perfect lunch and learns. Welcome to episode 2 3 7.

It’s so frustrating when you’ve been through the whole sales process with the prospects and you seem like a really good fit for each other and then they say no, but actually I don’t think no means no. It can really affect you emotionally when a hot prospect turns you down and decides to go with another MSP and not you. I’ve been in business for 19 years and I still kind of take it personally when someone decides not to buy from me. I think that’s what we do as business owners, isn’t it? It’s like we see the business as an extension of ourselves, and so when someone rejects the business, they’re rejecting us. A psychologist would have an absolute field day with this. Anyway, the way I see it, when a prospect says no to you, they’re not actually saying no. They’re saying not now as I don’t trust you yet.

Let me explain that fully. So the ordinary business owners and managers who are buying from you, but they don’t know a lot about technology except they do know that if it goes wrong, then their entire business is doomed through a very fast death, and that makes them really, really cautious when picking a new MSP. They could have spent years feeling unhappy with their incumbent MSP feeling that the service levels have been declining and things just aren’t as good as they used to be, and yet they trust them because of the relationship they’ve had in the past. So to get them to move over to you, you have to build a level of trust. You have to build a relationship with them, and this is best done with lots of touchpoints. They see your stuff on LinkedIn, they read your LinkedIn newsletter, they get emails from you, direct messages from you.

They read your printed newsletter, they watch your videos, they read your blog, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. This is why I recommend you start to build relationships with leads and prospects years, years before they might be ready to switch because if they’ve had like 20, 30, 40 touchpoints before they even start to think about buying from you, there will be a level of trust there. It’s not going to be a massive level of trust, but it’s going to be a higher level of trust than someone in an MSP they just found by Google, right? So by the way, this principle, it stands even if they give you a different reason not choosing you because ultimately all reasons are about trust or lack of trust. So if they say your prices are too high, they actually mean we don’t trust you, deliver that much value. If they say the package isn’t right for us, then actually they don’t trust you to give them what they think they need.

They see that you are too fixed and too limited if they say that you are too small or you are too big for them, it’s that they don’t trust that you are the right match to the size of their business. It’s all to do with the fact that they don’t know you well enough yet you can’t trust someone that you don’t know humans. We are wired to act that way. So you have to build relationships with your leads and prospects, educate them, entertain them, contact them, and always make sure you are there with the spark of a relationship started. So the exact day they are ready to switch to a new MSP. They feel as though they know you.

Paul Green’s MSP marketing podcast still to come.

Have you ever fancied doing a lunch and learn, but you are scared no one will sign up, or if they do, they won’t turn up or you’ll bore them to sleep over their sandwiches. My big interview this week is with a sales expert about how to run very successful lunch and learns, and that’s coming up in five minutes.

So the average person lives for 4,000 weeks, which is about 76 years. Go and Google. Now how many weeks have I been alive? And you’ll find a whole load of calculators to help you work it out. I did this before the recording and as of today, I’ve been alive 2,592 weeks, which means I have 1,408 weeks left, and I then used a percentage calculator to discover I only have 35% of my life left, which is pretty sobering and slightly depressing actually. And I do actually turn 50 in a few months, but of course I’m not going to want to work until I’m 76. I want to do something. I’m never going to properly retire and do nothing at all. But it will be different things, maybe consulting, because we all know that consulting sounds easy. In fact, if I’m still presenting this podcast in the year 2050 when I turn 76 and something has really gone very wrong somewhere, so let’s say I sell my business in 10 years time or 15 years time, so age 60 or 65.

So that means I’ve only got between 520 and 780 weeks left to grow my business. Can you see where I’m going here? That’s kind of a scary set of numbers and obviously your numbers are going to be a lot different to mine. So if you’re in your thirties, you’ll have many, many more weeks left than I have. And don’t get cocky because your late forties creeps up on you a lot faster than you think. But whether you’ve got loads of time or just a tiny amount of time, you and I, we need to do this with greater urgency, right? Because here’s a question for you. What would you do or what do you do to hold yourself back? Are you a control freak? Do you worry too much about details that don’t really matter? Maybe you’re just not thinking big enough or do you not have the right resources?

Here’s an interesting idea. If you only had a year in which to grow your business just one year left and whatever is the recurring revenue at the end of that year that would dictate how much you would earn for the rest of your life, you would work the hardest year of your life ever. Yeah, you would grow that business more aggressively and faster and you would push all of the roadblocks out of the way because there’d be this impending and immovable deadline. You have an insane year, right? And of course, we don’t act like this because we’ve got like 1,408 weeks left, and not just a year, not just 52 weeks left. So that takes the urgency away. No matter how reasonable or stretching your goals are for the future, I think this is something that deserves a long walk to reflect on. Pop it in your brain, go out for a two, three hour walk, take the dog, borrow someone else’s dog, and then off the back of that, when you come back and you are thinking differently or thinking, how could I speed this up? What could I do to make the things I want to achieve in a year? How could I achieve those in six months? Then you need to do some rapid action taking and all of us, you, me and every other MSP on the planet should be growing our business with more urgency.

Paul Green’s MSP marketing podcast still to come.

Do you worry about your techs leaving your business going to work for someone else because they don’t feel valued? I’ve got three ways for you to make them feel more valued without having to give them a pay rise. And I’ll tell you in the next five minutes,

What’s stopping you from doing a lunch and learn? Maybe you’re concerned that no one will turn up or worse, just one person will show up or maybe you’re nervous about presenting or you’re not sure how to talk about cyber security in a way that doesn’t send people to sleep or you’re not clear on the best way to deliver value to your audience, yet still make it an event that actually delivers sales to you, which is the ultimate goal. My big interview guest today has all the answers about how to put on a highly successful lunch and learn.

Hi, I’m Brian Gillette, founder and CEO of Feel-Good MSP, the sales development community for the managed service industry.

And it’s so good to have you back on the show. Brian, I can’t remember if this is your third, maybe fourth appearance over the last few years, but it’s always good to get you here because you always bring so many value bombs, dropping those bombs, delivering value left, right, and centre. And today we’re going to talk about lunch and learns and why every MSP should be doing them, how to do them, how to maximise them, how to get people into those events, and how of course to turn the people who’ve been to those events, into clients at the back of it. Now, before we talk those lunch and learns, let’s just explore who is Brian Gillette for someone who hasn’t listened to the podcast before, hasn’t come across you before, tell us your story.

Yeah, sure. So you’ve been in sales for 15 years or so. I was a VP of sales for an MSP in Southern California where I live. We grew that business really fast, uncomfortably fast. You might even say we got to 2 million in three years. And during that time I realised that this is an incredibly difficult product to sell, but B, it’s a very incredibly difficult product to understand. So once you can help people bridge that gap, nobody wants to talk about it, but they all need it. We’re white collar mechanics. We fix the thing that they desperately rely on that they don’t understand. So as soon as you can sort of bridge the gap with empathy in the sales process, then you’re going to succeed. So did that for a few years and then now we’re coming up on, we’re two and a half years in with Feel-Good MSP, which is our sales development membership for the managed services all over the world.

And we’ll talk about that towards the end of the interview. By the way, if you are just listening to this on one of our audio platforms, go and check out the video recording of this on YouTube because Brian says he’s been in MSP sales for 15 years, but you’ll look at him and either he is got some kind of Instagram filter going off or he’s got a painting in the attic. That’s where the aging is happening, certainly not happening on Brian’s face. And I say this as a guy who turns 50 in the next few months, right? I’m looking at you, Brian. I’m feeling every month of my 50 years now. I really am. So let’s, let’s talk about London. And by the way, don’t get too cocky because in a few decades time you’ll feel as tired as I do right now. I know everyone in their forties is agreeing with me right now. So let’s talk about lunch and learns. So what is it about a lunch and learn that A seems to be so difficult for MSPs to do, but B is worth doing? What makes them so powerful? Right, that’s a really important dichotomy is that both of those, first of all, it’s so incredibly hard to pull off a good lunch and learn. We’ve observed, but is it still worth doing? So the main reason that I’m excited about lunch and learns right now is that what we’re seeing is as the managed service industry has matured in its sales outbound, its sales maturity overall, in the last, let’s say five years, we’re seeing an increased amount of outbound. And with that, we’re also seeing an increase in saturation in outbound. So what maybe in 2017 we could say, Hey, I’m from this IT company. Listen, we would love to do a free assessment for you. We come check out the network, give you some information, you’ll get a handout, and if it’s valuable then or it’ll be valuable and you can either take it further with us or not.

But now, an IT assessment is just not a sexy enough offering for somebody on a cold outreach. It’s just nots, just not. And that’s what we’re seeing. Cold calls we’re increasing. The number of calls per opportunity has gone up two or three X in the last five years I’ve observed. So what we need to do is lower the barrier to engage us so it’s easier and more attractive for somebody to say yes when we send them a cold email, LinkedIn, direct mail, whatever. But we also need the engagement to be meaningful. We still want to be able to somehow build a relationship so the directions we can go are, can we have simpler lead magnets? Like guys like you, Paul, are so great at making the IT buyers guide and all those the things that are easy for customers, for prospects to get and download and consume.

It’s along those same lines. Rather than just saying, hi, nice to meet you, can I demo you my services? We want to say, Hey, I’m an IT company in the area. We’ve been supporting the dental industry in Phoenix for over 10 years, and here’s what we’ve observed along the way is that because of our experience in working in so many dental offices, there’s five or six little productivity hacks that we’ve picked up along the way that we’d love to share with your team. I can bring by some lunch the whole office, and all I ask is that you, Mr. Doctor and Mrs. Doctor are present for the lunch, and I promise you, I won’t pitch you, but I’d love to come by, meet you, meet the office, and I’ll bring lunch for everybody. Then get them to commit to that in the same way a pharmaceutical rep might do something along those lines in the us.

That’s how pharma reps will sell to doctors. So doctors already have a framework for that. So of course it’s very hard to say no to a free lunch even though there is no such thing as a true free lunch. But then they have this decision to make, do I want to get free lunch for my whole office or do I want to turn it away rather than do I need an IT company right now? You see what I mean? That’s kind of the idea behind can we lower the entry and make it more fun and more meaningful to engage with us as a prospect?

Yeah, absolutely. And one of the most powerful concepts in marketing is exactly as you say, Brian is getting them onto that first rung of the ladder. So if you think of someone buying from you as climbing a ladder, and this doesn’t really happen in an MSP, but in other businesses you’ll buy one thing for a few dollars and then you’ll buy something that’s more dollars and you’ll buy something and you are climbing up the ladder towards the big ticket item at the top. And this is what we’re trying to do here with the lunch and learns is to get them on that ladder. What we’re really trying to do is build trust. We’re trying to build a relationship and build trust and the power of having someone in the room with you and educating them in a fun way about something that matters to them, like their technology is a very powerful thing. So do you recommend then that MSP should only be doing this in people’s offices, or do you recommend they should also try and do public events that lots of different business owners can come to,

Right? Yeah, I think there’s two different, both of those approaches are great, and I think depending on your vendor relationships, venue relationships, your own personality and temperament, what kind of event do you want to run? I think you should really try both at least once. There’s a couple of schools of thought for starters, there’s a lot of vendors in the channel who will happily come to a room where you’ve collected a bunch of potential endpoints and they will present for you. You can call everybody in your stack and they’ve all got marketing dollars that they have to spend. The backup company we used would do this and they’d bring their backup device and they would set it on fire and then show you how it was this very theatrical over the top thing. But they would do that right Now, those vendors are going to want a room full of a certain amount of opportunity.

So they’re going to want, Hey, let’s throw an event. We’ll pay for the sponsorship. They might even have a promotional playbook for how to get people in the room. They might have flyers and emails and stuff. If you’ve got a venue, I think it’s a great idea to try to get a bunch of prospects in one room. Candidly, I’m thinking of myself as if I’m the buyer in that position. I don’t think there’s any world where I’m going to go out of my way and go to a steakhouse for an event held by an IT company, and I know that the holy reason I’m there is that me and all my contemporaries in the same industry are all going to get presented to. I personally don’t think I would attend that. And so for that reason, even though that in theory sounds like the better value because you’ve got more opportunities in one presentation, I think that there’s a certain calibre of buyer that’s never going to approach those events.

See what I mean? So you should run them, you should try them, and you should do everything you can to not have to pay for it, because there are vendors, I’m telling you, just call all your vendors that are beating you over the head every day with telling you how they know how to sell managed services, and you should sell more of their agents. Say, okay, if you really want me to be the hands and feet of your whole sales organisation, how about you help? Bring me some sponsorship, bring me some stuff to give away, bring me some flyers, get some help. That said, vendors don’t know how to sell managed services. They don’t know if they knew, then they would probably be selling for managed services, but they don’t know how. That’s why a lot of vendors were MSPs that just couldn’t figure out how to sell managed services.

So they developed tool and then now they sell it to other managed services. So I also love the idea of finding a vendor that’s relevant to your ideal vertical. There’s nothing stopping us from, I’ll use an example of Dentrix is a huge market share holder of a dental software. A lot of dentists use it, and Dentrix cloud is, well, at the time of this recording, famously difficult. And so a lot of people still have to run Dentrix on-prem for, so an MSP might even have to run an on-prem in their own virtualised environment. So it could be a really strategic partnership for you to have a great relationship with Dentrix if you only sell to dentists. So why don’t you just try call? Maybe I shouldn’t be calling a vendor by name. Call your vendor, that’s the primary line of business vendor for all of your customers and say, what if I could get you all of these customers using your product more, get them all on the on-prem or the cloud version?

What if I could go and find more of these? I’m going to be a big lead generator for you. Find a regional account executive and say, how can you help me explain the value of your product or what are your biggest frustrations with low user engagement? And then get them to come and say, Hey, I’m X, Y, Z IT company helping dentists in Phoenix. Listen, I’ve got a rep coming in from Dentrix. Are you a Dentrix shop? You are. Okay, listen, well, any value in having your team come and get 25 minutes of free training over a steak and shrimp dinner? Now you are the conduit of this really valuable relationship and you’re weaving yourself into the software vendor role, which is a critical part of being a good MSP, but you don’t have to hit them. You don’t have to come in hot with a sales pitch. You could truly add value, but it’s tangential value to you being involved in their life rather than just the value of your stack.

Yeah, yeah, I completely get that. And I agree with your advice. I think it’s great advice with one slight tweak. I personally wouldn’t let the vendors anywhere near your prospects, and that’s because as you say, the vast majority of vendors, they don’t dunno how to sell managed services. And also they are overly obsessed with their own product as they should be because they’re the vendors. Now, I experienced this myself actually about 10 years ago when I used to work with optometrists or opticians and I put on a big event and I got it sponsored by one of their suppliers. It was probably something like contact lenses. So I’m there and I’m doing my lunch and learn thing. It was actually a whole day event and I had my audience in a really good place, and of course I’m hoping to sell them my marketing products.

I worked with those guys back then, and then I had my contact lens sponsor come in and he did an hour talking about all the technical details of the thickness of the silicon of N 0.25 millimetre thickness contact lens at this diameter. And literally the entire room just fell asleep and the whole vibe went, the whole energy went, and it was such a mistake. And what I should have done, and this is what I’d recommend to MSPs, is I take the guy’s money, I take the vendor’s money and I say, I don’t want you to attend because you sell this, right? This is tiny little part of what we sell overall. But what we’re going to do is we’re going to take your money. We are going to get X number of business owners and managers into a room, and we’re going to bring some of them on board and in our stack by default will be your solution.

So you give me some of your MDF, your marketing development funds, don’t come to my event. Give me some freebies if you want, which I will pass on to them if they’re high enough quality. But what you’ll get as a return for this is I will win new clients and your stack. You are in my stack and you’re in my stack for every new client. And I think that especially when it comes to actually traveling and will you send someone please a thousand miles on a plane or whatsoever? For a lot of vendors, that’s going to be a much better thing. And just a note on that, MDF marketing development funds, all vendors have all the vast majority of vendors have money sat there to give to you. If you can show it’s going to help them sell more products and certainly the bigger the vendor, the more money’s available.

There’s millions of dollars worth of MDF around. You just have to put forward a business case for it. Right? One last thing from me and then I’m going to ask the next question for you, Brian, which is you talked about the difficulty of getting people to come to a steakhouse or something or come to an event, and I think you’re absolutely right. The smart play for that, I believe is you find other people’s events that you can go to. So I think your original idea of going to someone’s office, that’s brilliant. I love that. A second to that, if you can’t fill your own event or you’re not confident about it, then hey, BNI, for example, BNI does meetings in every city across the world, almost in every week. They’re doing a meeting and there’s always a slot for an expert, that would be a great thing to do.

You go and be an expert at BNI or you find another meeting, or as you say, Brian, if you’re in a vertical, where are these verticals? Meeting verticals meet all the time. They have associations, they have trade shows, they have all sorts of things. So yeah, if you can’t generate your own audience, then you find someone else’s audience that’s relevant and you go and you educate them, you do the learn bit. Right? Let’s talk about follow up. So we’ve talked a little bit about how to get an audience. Well, let’s talk about actually two things. Number one is what kind of content should be at the lunch and learn? And number two is how do you then pivot that event where you’ve been in front of people and you’ve impressed ’em with your content? How do you then pivot that into some kind of sales conversation without being overt about it?

Right. That’s a really, really good question. The key to having a good converting, a well converting presentation is actually not, doesn’t start in the follow-up. I think it starts in the construction of the presentation itself. So any good presentation should create a problem, agitate the problem, and then establish a gap, right? What Donna Miller would call a story gap where, okay, here’s the issue that you are facing or that we find people in your position face, and this is all the consequences of that issue. This is how it can turn out. This is what happens when you resolve the issue input results mechanism, which ideally, if you’re well structured, if you have a good marketing strategy, you’ve got your own unique proven method or results mechanism or whatever you want to call it. So if you were to just straight up pitch you, that’s how you would structure it, but you don’t necessarily have to do it that overtly.

I think it’s about coming up with creating an emotional connection with the material itself. And that comes from being really well researched before the presentation. Because if you come in and just say, Hey, here’s a bunch of best practices for cybersecurity. There is no emotional connection, it’s good insight, but what you’ve done is connected to their intellect, but people don’t, as you’ve probably said a hundred times, Paul, people don’t buy with their intellect. They first have to emotionally decide they need it, and then they’ll use all the intellectual stuff to justify the decision that they’ve already made in their heart. So the content is key. This is the part that people oftentimes phone in because it’s so much work to put the material to put the event together, they forget to have an amazing presentation. I would recommend doing it this way, have a core talk on a specific topic, whatever topic you feel the most confident with, and then get yourself a 10 minute, 20 minute, 30 minute, and maybe a 40 minute version of that talk.

So I do this, it’s like modular presentation building. I’m sure, Paul, you’ve done this. You have certain things you’ve talked about so many times, you know, could spit it out, and you could probably go to an event and somebody says, Paul, can you give me five minutes on websites or can you give me 30 minutes on websites? You could probably do it since you’ve done it so many times in your head, go, okay, I’ll talk this and I’ll expand this area. But that’s the part you need to focus a lot on. You can refine a lot of the verbiage at the networking events. Go to the hokey little chamber, the round tables where everybody stands up and does a 92nd pitch, practice it, practice it in front of a mirror, et cetera. But I would say use a good balance of things that only an MSP could tell you.

So your subject matter expertise, but I want you to really, really carefully counterbalance it with relevant user specific short-term gain information. There’s something I’ve said a billion times, I don’t know why people don’t do this. Windows is full of keyboard hacks that make it easier to use a Windows computer, but nobody knows any of them. Why don’t you do five minutes on, Hey, did you know you can make multiple versions of your desktop with three buttons on your keyboard? Did you know we could actually write a script? And in fact, as a takeaway, I’ve got a script you can run and you can fill in a few variables and you can basically start up your day and open all your windows as you have like to have them configured. And that’ll be our free gift to you just in the users. You want the users to like you, and then they want to associate, when I want help, this guy will help me.

That’s the whole thing we’re trying to do with managed services. And cybersecurity of course is the undercurrent that is really relevant, but we can’t make people care about cybersecurity if they don’t. We just can’t do it in a 20 minute lunch. The only version of that is fear-based education, which doesn’t build connection. As we all know, fear-based education does not work. All it will really make you do is look like a villain in my opinion. And then you’re now in the adversarial complex and you have to conquer them in order to win the deal versus coming in as an incredibly helpful person That says, by the way, there’s a lot of deeper cybersecurity stuff that we don’t, I’m not going to get into today, but here are five things I’d like you to do and the reasons why. Number one, consider multifactor authentication. Hear me out.

And then use the seatbelt analogy that Paul, I mentioned to you once on LinkedIn, Hey, multifactor is kind of like putting on a seatbelt. It’s really frustrating when you start your car, but once you’ve done it six times, you’ll actually just automatically do it as a part of your start-up ritual. It’s the same way when you log into your computer. Once you’ve done that, you’ll never notice it again and your blank times less likely to get hacked, whatever, stuff like that. Number two, implement the three second rule before you click on any link in an email. Count to three and then read it again. Oh, maybe this isn’t what I thought it was. So a couple basic things like that. You are doing user awareness, but you’re doing it in a talkable way. It’s short, it’s more fun. They’ll remember a listicle version rather than a long form presentation.

So I’m trying my best to answer your question. I feel like I might, I’m trying not to go off the rails, but the way that we construct the education is going to determine whether or not follow up is even fruitful. See what I mean? Because if it’s encyclopaedic for 30 minutes, they don’t ever want to talk to you again. But if you make it engaging short form and valuable, we can always schedule another talk to get into more depth of cybersecurity, but start with the shiny objects of having a good IT setup. See what I mean? Just start with the lowest hanging fruit, quality of life, basic user support. Hey, if they all have to use sage and they don’t know how to work it, give them some sage shortcuts, whatever. You see what I mean? Those sorts of things that can help them. Then with your follow up, the way we follow up, we determine at the end of the lunch, so we go to the decision maker and say, Hey, I hope this was helpful.

Any off the record feedback for me? Get them to say something. And then if they, depending on how they engage, we’re going to essentially ask them what type of follow-up we should do by asking them what would be most helpful? So listen, I’ve got a ton of continuation material. Would it be helpful if I were to send some additional stuff over to you, or would you rather we just have another talk in a few months? Something like that, and let them sort of in the feel good close. We’re all about giving people constant opportunities to opt out, and that sort of paradoxically ends up making them feel much more engaged because they never have to lie and they never have to say face because they have constant permission to tell you to buzz off. So I would ask them, Hey, what would be most helpful? At this point, they might say, I don’t know, thanks for this. And say, well, here’s our default would be, I’ve got some continuation stuff I can send over. It’s very brief and I’d love to, why don’t I do this? Lemme send you an email in a week. Can you and I schedule 10 minutes and just talk about this lunch and maybe you can give me some feedback and then letting it positioning that way there. They’re a lot more likely to want to have that follow-up call.

And that makes perfect sense because when you feel you’re being backed into a corner and you’re being trapped, the fight or flight, right, you either want to run away or you want to fight it. Whereas what you are talking about is an approach of at any point, anyone can walk away and there doesn’t have to be any kind of aggression. So actually more people will have that conversation, which is just brilliant. Brian, you again have dropped another value bomb and I thank you so much for that. We’re going to get you back on the podcast in 2025. It will definitely be your fourth or fifth appearance, something like that for now. Tell us about this sales community that you’ve put together. What is it? How do we find out more about it and how do we get in touch with you?

Yeah, for sure. I mean, it really came out of my hatred for fear-based selling. I think if you have to sell using fear, your product sucks, right? But if we don’t really have any other alternative, it seems to be the only path to create urgency for people who don’t seem to care about these big cybersecurity risks that they’re facing every day. So my question became, what if we could just use empathy to create urgency rather than using fear, uncertainty and doubt? And that’s why my company is called the Feel-Good MSP, because I don’t think it feels good to sell using fear both as a buyer or neither as a buyer, nor as a seller. So we’ve built this sales development program that is where MSPs can join at any level of operational maturity, whether you’re still a founder in the sales role or you’ve got three salespeople on your team.

The idea is we put together, we sort of align everyone’s sales philosophy using the Feel-Good Close, which is the empathy and honesty driven sales method that I’ve created in my sales career. Then we put together what we call the FUD free playbook. So how do you actually sell and actually create urgency and get a 30 to 90 day close without having to terrify or vaguely threaten your prospects with everything terrible that could happen to them, which nobody really likes to do, but we do because we don’t have an alternative. And then we put together the Failproof prospecting engine that sits on top of it. Now that we have a sales machine, we know how to convert deals at a really high rate, then we go out and create an engine to go and find four to eight qualified opportunities per month to get 10 to 12 super qualified, highly targeted customers per year.

Yeah, that sounds good. So what’s the best way to get in touch with you?

Feelgoodmsp.com. You can read all about our program. There’s free training and there’s links to all of our upcoming events.

Paul Green’s, MSP Marketing podcast, Paul’s personal peer group,

My new favourite bit of the show where we answer your questions. I’ll tell you how to submit one in a second. First to the lovely producer James, what have we got this week?

Thank you, Paul. Now, I think this is going to be a tough one. It comes from Ryan who owns a fairly new and fairly small MSP in Chicago, and he’s concerned about his team. His question is, we haven’t got lots of spare cash and can’t give them a pay rise. So how do we make our techs feel more valued?

Right? Well, that is a tough one because obviously cash is the easy answer. We work not for the fun of work, but so we can feed our kids and take them to Walt Disney World. So if you can’t give your techs more cash, then there are loads of other ways that you can show how much you value them. Now, here are three. The first is to be aware of their workload and share the burden with them. And I don’t necessarily mean you jumping in to do tickets, but if they’re stacked out, make them all a coffee, right? Buy them pizzas for lunch, send them home two hours early on Friday and say, I’ve got it. I’ll cover the help desk. You’ve just been great this week. I know it’s been a busy week and you all deserve an early finish, really simple thing to do, but shows that you care.

Second, you can invest in them. Now, this can be cash on tech skills training, but if you haven’t got that cash at all, it can also be one-to-one feedback and coaching from you because they look up to you and will appreciate your time and attention. And the third is to give them bespoke rewards. If they love sports, get them tickets to their team. If they love partying, buy them a case of beer. I once worked with a guy who never gave cash bonuses to his employees, but always bespoke gifts. One member of his team had loads of kids, so if he gave him like a thousand dollars bonus, that would be spent on a new washing machine, right? So instead, he sent him to a Formula One race, and it cost the business less than that a thousand dollars bonus. And the employee was delighted as he couldn’t justify spending any family money on going to the race.

But if his boss just gave him tickets, he could go home to his other half and say, well, I’ve got these tickets. I might as well go to the race. It’s a very clever way of doing it. If you’ve got a question about any aspect of marketing or growing your MSP, just go to the contactPage@mspmarketingedge.com. And also, while you’re there, if you’d love to attract new, better clients into your MSP, you just have to get our content marketing system. It’s trusted by more than 700 fellow MSPs around the world, and you can check if your area is still available right now at mspmarketingedge.com.

Coming up, coming up next week.

Thank you so much for listening this week. Next week, we’re going to pick up on what we were talking about earlier, growing with urgency, and I’m going to tell you why growing your MSP must be boring.

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