Episode 238: HUH? Growing your MSP should be... boring???

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This is a transcription for episode 238 of Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast: ‘HUH? Growing your MSP should be… boring???’

Full show transcription

So you’re hungry to grow and I’ve got plenty of nourishing food for you. Here are today’s big things. Why you know are on the right track growing your MSP if you are a bit bored, what’s your email marketing spam rate? And my guest explains how to look at your marketing like a prospect does. Welcome to episode 2 3 8.

This may be the craziest thing you’ve ever heard about growing an MSP, but you’ll know you are on the right lines if your business bores you. A little question, where are you on your business journey right now? Are you in that kind of crazy start-up phase or maybe you have your first staff or maybe you’re actually a few technicians in and you’re dedicating yourself to growing the business. You may even be working towards the wonderful stage where the business runs itself without you needing to be there. In the 19 years that I’ve run my own businesses, I’ve been through all of these stages actually a few times as I’ve had a few different business ventures. The last time I started a business of substance was the business I’m running now, which is the MSP Marketing edge. And that originally started back in 2016. And I’m going to be honest with you, I really don’t miss those very early days where you’re kind of making it up as you go along and the business is kind of stressful in a way.

Why stressful? Because when you’re inventing something new, you have to create everything. You have to figure out how you want things to be done, what you want the customers to feel and to experience. How are you going to do the marketing? You have to build all the systems from scratch, and that’s why start-up businesses and early growth businesses chew up huge amounts of hours from the founders. You and me. What’s really scary is that lots of business owners get stuck there. When I speak to someone who’s been in business, they’re an MSP and they’ve been in business for 20 years and they’re sort of trapped in that early kale stage, it does make me wonder what a severe impact that must have on their personal life and how it must affect their family. And that’s not something that I would want to do really for more than, I dunno, a year or two, that’s for sure.

Here’s something very strange that you may never hear any other business growth experts say. One of the measures that you are going in the right direction with your business is if you are slightly bored with it, why would you be bored with it? Because you’ve got the business to a stage where it’s so highly systemized and it’s so well run that there are no crises for you to fix, no fires for you to put out. Every day the clients submit their technical issues, the technicians sort out those issues, the projects are all planned in and implemented, all the proactive checks are done. This is actually a fantastic MSP. And can you see why a well run MSP like that would be slightly boring, especially if you spent years fighting fires and now you have no fires to fight. That’s kind of boring in a way, but being bored with your business is in no way a bad thing.

As I say, when you spend so many years in start-up mode and you get used to fighting fires, it does feel weird to us when there are no fires left to fight. But let me tell you something that I’ve discovered two or three times now, once you get past the firefighting stage and you get to a point where your business is well organized and it’s well run, it can be utterly liberating, not just in terms of the fact that you can take more vacations and spend more time with your family. I mean, that’s obviously a massive bonus. But actually when you are working, you can dedicate really high levels of quality time to growing the business. I spend around 50% of my working time working on my business, and the other 50% is improving my business for my members. And that’s the ideal situation for me because I’ve got a fantastic team around me who do all the little things that need to be done to keep the business running well, but we rarely have any crises, and that’s by design because we’ve designed the business around eliminating a crisis before it happens.

And there’s not A week goes by where I can’t spend considerable sums of time working on either growing my business or making it better for my members, which is great. All of that’s by design. So here’s the question for you. How far off that stage are you are still dealing with fires every single day? Let me tell you now, you don’t have to just accept this and believe that it’s something that every MSP has to tolerate. That is not the case at all. There are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of examples of incredibly well-run MSPs where the owner does not have to firefight every day because they have systemized away all of the problems. And sure every business has the odd fire. Now and again, that’s just normal. But listen to some of the fantastic guests that we have on our MSP marketing podcast, and it goes back over four and a half years now, some amazing guests talking about businesses that they’ve built up over a number of years.

If you go back and listen to some of those interviews and you’ll hear the successful ones talking about how their time is stolen from them bite fires every day or it was, but no longer, it is because they’ve systemized away all of the crises. And that’s the challenge for you. If you are not bored with your business right now because there are still too many problems each day cropping up, keeping you kind of interested, then you have to fix those problems. You put in place systems to stop the fires from starting in the first place. And that might be delivery problems, it might be customer service problems, it might be billing issues. Whenever a problem comes up, you keep a list of it somewhere, it’s going to be a very long list and every day, see if you can take just a small amount of action to eliminate a problem.

Can you automate it? Can you put in place a better system or buying a better solution? Do you really need to be handling that problem in the first place? Is it a problem because it’s something that isn’t the core competency of your MSP a tiny amount of action every single day. Eliminating the fires in your business will mean that one day you’ll wake up and there are no fires, and then the next day there’ll be no fires. And the next day and the next day and the day after that and the day after that. And that’s the point when you can start to feel the luxury of getting a little bit bored with your business. Now when this happens, this will be a day to celebrate and you’ll realize that you are well on track to creating a thriving business that’s going to feed the lifestyle you most want to live and give you the time to go and enjoy that lifestyle.

Paul Green’s MSP marketing podcast still to come. Have you heard experts tell you that you need to put pricing on your MSP’s websites, but you just don’t believe them? The big interview this week is with a marketing expert who explains why this is so important and why you really mustn’t skip it. That’s coming up in the next five minutes.

Email marketing has changed considerably in the last couple of years, and every MSP needs to be aware of the new rules and the new best practice to use what is still one of your best marketing tactics. Hey, I’m Paul Green. And don’t forget, for help finding new clients for your MSP, we’ve created an easy to follow marketing system. Get that and all the content to go in it at mspmarketingedge.com. There have been a lot of new rules affecting B2B emailing over the last few months. You probably know this already, that Google and Yahoo now expect you to have your DKIM and your DMARC set up that’s been in place.

Well, we’ve known that’s been coming for a long time, haven’t we? And it’s not a problem for someone technical like you compared to a lot of other businesses, but now it looks like Google is going to crack down on emailers with high spam complaint rates. I was reading a news article on this just a few days ago saying that Gmail has defined a threshold for spam complaints of just 0.3%. That seems really, really low, doesn’t it? And it’s really easy to read updates like that and for it to put you off sending out emails to your mailing list. Well, let me explain why You must must send emails to your list and also I’m going to share with you my email, my own personal email spam rate so that you can measure it against your own. So why is an email list so important for an MSP to build and to use?

Because email is one of the few platforms that you completely own the data on LinkedIn. It’s a great platform. Sure, right? But you don’t own the data on LinkedIn and you never know there could come a day where, which of course owns LinkedIn. Microsoft for some reason bans you from the platform just because you’ve done something they didn’t like. What an absolute nightmare that would be for any MSP. And that would be the same with Facebook and YouTube and most of the other platforms. So here’s the thing with email. Even if you fall out with your CRM like MailChimp or active campaign and they decide to close your account for whatever reason, the email data that’s in that still belongs to you. It’s still your data. They have to give it back to you. And as much as we all receive too many emails and everyone seems to be whinging and complaining about spam, email marketing is still massive.

Do not believe anyone that tells you that email marketing is old fashioned or dead if that email is still the central place for most messaging in most businesses. So even if they do use teams or Slack or whatever, everyone still has an email address and everyone uses it. In fact, if you think about it, think bigger than that, isn’t email still a critical part of every login? You can’t log into something without an email address can you? You need that. And so you can still reach so many people via email. I still believe you need to be focusing a huge amount of effort on building up your email list and then not being afraid to actually send emails to that list. Best practice for email is to send one email per week and you can send more than this. Two or three emails per week is okay, but for most MSPs, just sending one email a week is the right thing to do.

And what kind of emails do you send? Well, I prefer edutainment emails where you educate and entertain people about interesting technology and business subjects such as productivity, security and making more money from a business, increasing profits, hardcore technology, not really of interest to ordinary business owners or managers. So we need to give them things that they do care about, helping to get their staff get more done and making higher profits because who doesn’t like that? So what about spam them? Well, let me share my stats with you. I use a CRM called Keap, KEAP, used to be called Infusionsoft, a much better name. I dunno why they rebranded it. I’ve been using this for years and years. I mean it must be getting on for 15, 16, 17 years, something like that. So I’m very comfortable with it. I use it all the time, has a ton of automation in there, which is great.

In fact, we run all of the MSP Marketing Edge in the background through the automation on Keap. And just before this recording, I just pulled up a report for the last 30 days. I have a naught 0.18% bounce rate, which is okay, there’s good thumbs up for that, but I have a N 0.4% complaint rate, complaint rate, and if you remember, the Gmail limit was N 0.3. Now let’s put that my N 0.4% in context. That’s six people who’ve unsubscribed and marked it as spam. And we do get unsubscriptions and we do get people marking it a spam, which I have to say is particularly frustrating for me. I operate a fully opt-in list. Every single MSP who is on my list who’s said that they’re getting spam email, they have chosen to opt into my list. I never add anyone onto the list without my permission, but this is what people do.

I know it’s not personal, by the way. I also see the names of anyone who marks my emails as spam. So if you don’t want to get my emails anymore, please just unsubscribe, don’t mark them as spam. That would be very helpful. And obviously I do the same whenever I leave anyone’s list as well. Anyway, I clearly have some work to do to get my N 0.4% down to the Gmail limit of N 0.3. I think that’s like one person not marking it a spam when they unsubscribe. And again, to add some context to this, I am sending out lots of emails all the time. I’ve been doing what I would be considered to be professional email marketing, as I say for like 15, 16 years. So I’m not afraid to send out two or three emails every single week. I do a lot of segmentation, so you might get one or two emails a week from me, but I’m doing more because for example, if you’re a member of the MSP Marketing Edge, you’ll get different emails than if you are not.

For example, if you are someone that we’ve spoken to, literally spoken to on the phone, you’ll get different emails than if you’re someone that we’ve never ever spoken to. And I’m not afraid of sending emails out, and I’m not afraid of having a few unsubscriptions because every time I send an email, I get new members to the MSP Marketing Edge, I make more money just in the same way that every time you send out an email, you grow your relationship with business leaders, with managers and owners, prospects who could go on to become clients one day. It’s very rare for an MSP to send an email and get a new client, but you are playing a different marketing game. To me, I’m trying to win new members to my MSP Marketing Edge service, which is a very low commitment. We’ve got no contract, cancel any time.

It’s a completely different proposition to what you are selling. I don’t keep people for five years. You do, you kick them for five to 10 years. So I win new members almost every day. You win a new client once a month or once every two months. So we are using the same tool but for different things. You are using it to warm up leads and prospects so that you can be in front of them on the exact day. You get the right message in front of the right person at the right time the day that they are ready, willing and able to switch from their incumbent MSP to someone new. And I know that sending out emails is a lot of hassle, but please, please don’t let this put you off emailing your leads and prospects for MSPs. Email marketing is still a highly viable and valuable marketing method, and it really will be for years and years to come.

Paul Green’s MSP Marketing podcast still to come.

Have you ever wondered if Instagram is a viable platform to promote your business? Well, another MSP has asked me that exact question and I’m going to answer it in the next five minutes.

One of the greatest marketing skills that you can develop is the ability to look at your marketing from the point of view of prospects rather than your own point of view. My guest today is very good at this and is going to tell us how prospects behave when they’re thinking of picking a new MSP, why reviews are so important and why you must put pricing on your website.

Hi, I’m Megan Killian and I help MSPs scale from the $2.5 million a year range up until 10 million a year.

Thank you so much for joining me on the podcast. And I should start by saying a fellow Doctor Who fan as well. If you’re watching this on YouTube right now, you’ll see just over Megan’s left shoulder, one of the old Doctor Who’s well say old Doctor Who is just regenerated into the 15th Doctor, Megan and I are going to have, we could do an extension to the podcast where we talk for 30 or 40 hours about Doctor Who, which no MSP on the planet will be interested in. Maybe we should do that. Maybe one or two, probably not as many as are interested in what you’ve got to say about marketing, which is of course why you are here. So tell us a little bit about you. So what kind of work do you do with MSPs and what’s your background?

Sure. So I’ve been in B2B Tech sales and marketing for the last 15 years, and in that time I’ve done $550 million in B2B Tech revenue. About 80 to 90% of that was at least influenced by LinkedIn. And I have worked directly for all four of the big telcos here in the US as well as multiple MSPs, a lot of CDNs, so content delivery networks and a few SaaS companies. About five years ago I launched a consultancy and two years after the consultancy was launched, a lot of my clients, especially my MSP clients were coming back and saying, this is such an incredible strategy, Megan, who’s going to do it? And so then about three years ago, I relaunched my consultancy as an agency, the Megan Killian Consulting Agency, and we help MSPs with three major things. We help with revenue consultation at the front, make a plan, figure out what you need, figure out what you have today and what you need to change to get where you want to go. And then we help them with some outsource sales through fractional SDRs or some managed and coached sales plans. The third piece of what we do is just some content marketing. Most of MSPs that come to us, they’re kind of starting on ground zero. We’ve seen some websites that were straight up PDFs put online. So we help them make their online presence, just make them look a little bit more like a business of the 21st century.

And you kind of think it shouldn’t really be that way in 2024, and yet you and I deal with enough MSPs to know that actually sometimes marketing is very much a distress activity, something that they get round to after they’ve done all the fun tech stuff. Let’s talk about marketing from the prospect’s point of view, because I think any good marketing, and I’m sure you agree with me on this, any good marketing starts from saying, right, who are we going to sell to? How are they going to find us and why would they want to engage with us in the first place? What’s your thoughts on how prospects go through that journey and find MSPs in the first place?

Yeah, so I talked to a lot of MSPs that feel like if I could just get in front of more people, I could sell more because I have just this great personality for selling. And the reality is that 96% of B2B prospects do their own research before they’re willing to speak with a human sales rep. And what’s more, 71% of those prospects prefer to do solo research instead of talking to any person. So even if you have customers that would be willing to be a reference for you, the average buyer does not want to talk to them. So where are they going for information? Instead? They’re checking out your website, they’re checking out your LinkedIn. They’re also extremely likely to look at reviews. The easiest reviews to find are usually Google reviews, but they’re also probably checking your LinkedIn recommendations, potentially Facebook reviews, and highly likely to look at Clutch or Cloud Tango, which are just the top aggregators of reviews in the us.

So if those things aren’t really tight, the prospect may not be willing to ever talk to you. So what are they looking for, right? They’re looking for your pricing. And I know MSPs hate putting pricing on their website, but even a range is very, very helpful to someone in understanding if they even could work with you. They want to know what do you actually do for them? And you have to remember that they think in a different language than you do. They’re not actually interested in what the cyber tech stack looks like. They don’t care if you use Black Point or CrowdStrike. If you’re partnered with Kaseya or ConnectWise, they don’t even know what those things mean. They really care about is this going to be full stack, including everything? Can I put in as many tickets as I want? Are you doing proactive maintenance?

Is backup and disaster recovery included? Are you making sure that patch management cybersecurity is happening? They want someone that they can trust. Beyond that, 73% of business decision makers today are millennials, and they tend to make decisions based on shared values. So when you think about it as an MSP, what part of your product or service do your clients engage with the most? It’s your tech support and that’s actually your people. And I think a lot of MSPs make the mistake of thinking that what a prospect wants to see is all of this technical information about what they do, and they want to talk about Microsoft Intune and they want to talk about endpoint management and the average small business decision maker, which 98% of businesses in the US are small, less than a hundred employees, 89% less than 20, 78 0.5, less than 10. So we’re talking small businesses.

They don’t know what that technology even is. They want someone that they can trust, who they share values with, who’s just going to handle technology and take it off of their plate. So the best way to really show that is by having case studies. Examples of projects that you’ve done, pictures and videos of actual real people make it easy for someone to trust you before they engage with you. Historically, most of the MSP clients that I talk to, they have relied on referrals to scale their business to the point that they’re at. They’ve gotten to one, two, $3 million a year on referrals. And the good news about that is to get those referrals, you have to have been doing a good job. Great, you’ve done a good job. When a referral comes into you as an MSP owner, that deal should be really easy to close. If you can’t close referrals, you’re going to have a hard time closing anything else. When it becomes time to create an outbound strategy and you want to attract more clients than just your referrals, you have to ask yourself, how do I build trust with people who don’t know me? How do I make all that research that someone’s going to do before they’re willing to talk to a person, indicate that we are a trustworthy partner?

This is really interesting. You are looking at what the MSP does from the point of view of the prospect, which is exactly what you want someone that’s doing your marketing to do. And it’s interesting, I laughed when you talked about putting pricing on the website. I feel like this week alone, I’ve had 15 different debates about that on places like Tech Tribe, talking to some of the members, my members of the MSP Marketing Edge and how important it is to put that pricing on the website. Even just to pick that small thing. We had Marcus Sheridan on this podcast, I think it was December, 2022 or January, 2023, Marcus of course being the author of They Ask You Answer, which is pretty much the definitive book about content marketing and how to engage people who don’t understand what it is that they’re trying to buy from you. And he did a wonderful seven minute answer about why you must have at the very least, indicative pricing or a pricing calculator on your website. And even in the face of that answer, many MSPs are still fighting that. So it’s fascinating to hear you talk about that as well, Megan.

I have the benefit of running an SDR team for MSPs. So when we talk about they ask you answer, those are frontline people getting objections, which are just questions from prospects about MSPs. And 80% of the time, once we’ve started a conversation, we’re getting somebody interested in potentially talking to us, setting a meeting, they’re going to ask, what’s it going to cost me? How expensive is it? And we know that depending on the MSP, some of them do a lot of custom work, they’re customizing their packages to an individual. It’s okay to not be able to say, oh, I can give you a quote right now. It’s going to be this specific dollar amount. But what’s really important, I’ve seen a good MSP website that says, our goal is to customize your technology solution to you. So we can’t tell you exactly what it’s going to cost until we’ve spoken with you, but most of our clients are paying between this and this per user or between this and this for insert something.

And it just gives people a lot more confidence and trust in you because whether MSPs are part of the problem or not, one of the reasons that buyers are so anxious about companies that don’t put pricing on their website is because it indicates a really bad buyer experience. They’ve had historical bad experiences with it. When prices, pricing isn’t on the website, I have to hit, oh, I want to talk to a person, fill out a contact form, they’ll get back to me at their leisure. And only then after I’ve been put through this demo that I never asked for, will pricing be revealed to me? And at that point, I find out, oh, I could never afford this anyways. So for MSPs that are struggling with this, and they’re asking themselves, should I put pricing on my site or not? The fact of the matter is, if you don’t want to be a part of the race to the bottom indicate that there is value in what you do and there is a price for that value.

So we’re talking here about being utterly focused with all of your marketing on giving the prospects exactly what they want and removing the friction, making it easy for them. So you talked about lots of things there. You talked about social proof, case studies, reviews, you talked about things like the pricing. Tell us some of the other things that you do at the beginning. So when you start working with the new MSP and because you’ve got the luxury of doing their marketing for them, what are some of the other foundations that you get in place?

So in the very beginning, we wanted find two things, who you are and who you sell to. And it’s a shock how many MSPs really haven’t defined that or they’ve defined it in a way that is outdated in my opinion. So they’ll be like, oh, I just want to do business with companies that have at least 10 computers and are within 50 miles of my office. Well, what can I tell you? I identify as a business that has 10 computers and is within 50 miles of your office. No, I don’t because that’s not how businesses self-identify. So instead, we have to go a little bit deeper into building an ideal client profile and saying maybe we do really well with medical companies that have 10 to 50 employees and between one and three offices, a geographic range is fine, but add more to it where we do really well with medical offices that value patient care and they say patient care is their top priority.

Why is that relevant? Because technology, helping support them, being able to focus on patient care or medical companies that do telehealth because we know that they need more tech support to be able to provide that telehealth to their clients or their patients. In this case, because language matters, or we might talk about manufacturing companies and it’s okay to have more than one, but each one should have a unique value proposition to go to it where we’re sort of mapping what makes your MSP unique to what that buyer’s unique needs are. So we’re building out buyer profiles inside that ICP, and we’re also going to build a unique value proposition. One that’s just sort of general for everybody, and then one for each industry that you want to work in. When we’re doing that, I put a lot of pressure on MSPs to define their why, really build out purpose, which we are an EOS org.

We work with a lot of other EOS orgs, so we tend to use that language, but your vision, your mission, your core values, figure out what really drives you and your culture as a company and put that on paper because it really does make a difference in a world where, as I said, I think it’s 71% of business decision makers that are millennials. Most millennials can reset our own email passwords. So we don’t have that need for, please hold my hand through everyday basic technology tasks. What we have is a need for someone that we can truly trust to run the technology of our business in an ethical way that aligns with our values so that we can focus on what’s more important to us. It’s more about the productivity drain of doing tech ourselves than us not being able to do it. So that’s a lot of that foundational work that we need to do before we can even start to do a marketing plan or build out sales. If you don’t have that, then it’s all just going to be throwing SP at the wall and seeing what sticks in case that wasn’t obvious.

I completely agree. And of course, most MSPs don’t do this, which is why the small number of MSPs in a marketplace that get good at marketing, that get their foundations right, that know who they’re trying to talk to, why they’re trying to talk to them, what the message should be and how to build trust and a relationship with them, they do tend to see an almost, what’s the word I’m looking for? A larger share, a larger jump in business than they would expect to see if they were just carrying on without all that foundational stuff put together. Final thought from you then, Megan. If you could wave a magic wand and make all MSPs improve one part of their marketing, what would that be?

I mean, I think it would have to be their website, not because I think it is the most important thing, but because it really is the face of your business in 2024. There used to be a time when we did business on Main Street and it was your front window that told everyone who you were, but that’s not true anymore. Your website really tells people who you are. And it’s also like, I forget the exact stat, but it’s well over 85% that your prospect’s going to look at your website before they meet with you. It may only be five minutes before the meeting, but they’re going to take a peek and if it looks awful, it’s going to turn them off. And then my other thing to say about that is if your website looks exactly like a competitor’s website within a 50 mile radius of your office, you’re completely denying the concept of a differentiator. Because if you’re different than them, which is what you’re going to tell them, right? You’re going to tell the prospect, I’m not like my competitors. I’m better in x, y, Z way. How can they possibly believe you when you have a templated website that looks exactly like your competitors that are in the same market as you, and you’re potentially going up against them in the proposal stage?

Yeah, I completely agree. So Megan, we know what you do to help MSPs Tell us what’s the best way to get in touch with you?

The best way to get in touch with me is to find me on LinkedIn. If you put Megan Killian in, I’ll probably be the first result. It’s also LinkedIn slash in slash Megan Killian. I’m always monitoring my messages there, and that’s definitely the best way to get in touch.

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

You must have so many questions about how to grow your MSP and in this part of the show, we answer them. Producer James, what have we got this week?

Thanks, Paul. Well, this week, I think an MSP who is at risk of marketing overload. Gordon owns and runs an MSP here in the UK and says, I feel I should have a presence on nearly every platform out there, specifically in terms of social media. Should I use Instagram in my marketing?

It’s a great question. And the golden rule with Instagram is you only use it if the businesses that you are targeting use it in their marketing because Instagram is a great platform, but it’s not typically used by business decision makers and influencers. And this, of course, they are retail or hospitality businesses who are trying to reach consumers via Instagram. So if for example, you were an MSP targeting restaurant owners because that’s your niche, your niche, and you realize that a lot of restaurant owners spend a great deal of time on Instagram marketing their business, then it would make sense for you to spend time on Instagram trying to reach those owners. Does that make sense? So if you are targeting traditional B2B sectors like lawyers and CPAs, I wouldn’t bother with Instagram at all.

But if you’re targeting retail and hospitality businesses that are after consumers, Instagram might be worth your time. Now, if you’ve got a question about anything to do with growing or marketing your MSP, I can help with that. Just go to the contact page at mspmarketingedge.com. And while you are 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. You can check if your area is still available right now at mspmarketingedge.com

Coming up next week.

Thank you so much for listening this week, next week, why you must do a weekly LinkedIn newsletter for your MSP.

Episode 238: HUH? Growing your MSP should be… boring???

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Full show transcription

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