Episode 239: Why MSPs must do a weekly LinkedIn Newsletter

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This is a transcription for episode 239 of Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast: ‘Why MSPs must do a weekly LinkedIn Newsletter’

Full show transcription

Hey there, my growth focused profit hungry, MSP owning friend. Here are today’s big things. Why LinkedIn newsletters are a secret marketing weapon that you need to embrace. The easy way to stop the stupid things that don’t matter so you can focus on the important things that do. And an MSP owner reveals how he’s cracked one of the hardest marketing problems to solve, making outbound phone calls that ultimately set up sales. Sounds good. Welcome to episode 2 3 9.

LinkedIn is the social platform for MSPs and it has one tool in particular that allows you to reach an extraordinary number of people with the least amount of work. Let me tell you what it is, how to set it up, and my pro tips after using it for more than two years. We are talking about LinkedIn newsletters. This is something which LinkedIn itself is very keen to push, and that means it gives it a huge amount of algorithmic attention. So here’s the big picture overview. You load an article into LinkedIn and when you publish it, not only is it put into the newsfeeds of your newsletter subscribers, but it’s also emailed out to them. Now think about this. This is an amazing way to reach people and to increase the number of touch points that you have with them. And let’s not forget that LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft, so the deliverability of their email, that’s going to be off the chart compared to the deliverability of your emails.

Now I’ve been sending out a LinkedIn newsletter every Thursday for the past two years and I’ve discovered it a great way to build an audience, engage with people, and ultimately drive new business. And actually I know a few MSPs who are doing exactly the same thing. They consider it an essential part of their prospecting and their marketing. So with LinkedIn newsletters, there are two parts to it and the first is getting it set up in the first place. Then the second is building it into a system so that you are sending out a LinkedIn newsletter on a regular basis. Now let’s set some expectations from this. You are not going to win a new client just by sending out a LinkedIn newsletter, but the goal is to build multiple audiences of people and then build up a relationship with them so that at the exact moment that they are sick to death of their incumbent MSP and they’re ready to switch to someone new, you and your MSP are very much top of mind for them.

Now this is actually incredibly hard to do in real life, and I believe that LinkedIn newsletters are a very powerful weapon to get it right. So the setup then it’s a lot easier today than it was two years ago. You can how to do it. And in fact, the hardest thing is figuring out where all the controls are in LinkedIn, there’s no nice easy section where this is the newsletter controls are, you have to kind of find them. There’s a publishing menu as part of the articles view, but I say Google that and Google will take you to it very easily. But LinkedIn newsletters, they’re based around the articles that you write on LinkedIn. So it’s not really a newsletter where you have lots of different pieces of content. It’s simply that you write an article and when you send that out, that becomes part of your LinkedIn newsletter.

So if you go into your feed right now, you’ll see up at the top where you start to post, you know where you just normally type to post. There’s also a couple of buttons there, so I think it’s like a green button that says media. We can add like an image. And then on the right there’s a red button which says start an article and that’s the one that you want to push. Now of course on this, I’m not going to be able to take you through it step by step here it is just a bit too complicated for that. And as I said, you can just Google it anyway.

But setting up your LinkedIn newsletter is relatively easy, so long as you’ve done a bit of prep work. The first thing is to make sure you have creator mode switched on in LinkedIn. Now for years creator mode has been an optional setting and has only been available to you is you have enough followers, I think it’s like, you need at least 150 connections and you need to be doing enough activity on the network – so like posting once or twice a week or something. Now at the moment they aren’t rolling it out for everyone it’s been in some kind of Beta for a while, but again you can just Google how to check whether or not you have creator mode, the chances are if you’re watching this a few months after your original broadcast or listening to it a few months after broadcast you’ve probably got it switched on by default as they’re just rolling it out for everyone. But if you don’t and you don’t have the ability to switch it on, then you just need to grow your followers a little bit, get more connections and do a bit more activity until it’s available to you. But as I say, it’s just going to be automatically switched on for everyone in the months and years ahead.

So once you’ve got creator mode next up you need to prepare a cool name for your LinkedIn newsletter, probably not just your MSP’s name but something cool like, I dunno, Tech Tip Tuesdays, that would do it. And you need to have an imagine ready, like a logo for your newsletter – that needs to be 300 pixels by 300 pixels. You upload that as part of the process of setting up.

So best practise for your logo is either, do some work in advance. Go onto Fiverr or Upwork and get someone to design it for you, so if you did call it Tech Tip Tuesdays you could have a logo that says Tech Tip Tuesdays. Or if you just want to do it quickly and easily, go onto Canva, do a 300 pixels by 300 pixels image and just pop your MSP’s logo into that Canva image.

Now in terms of actually setting up the newsletter for the first time, it takes about 10 minutes, and the way it works is you load your first article. And during the loading of that first article, that’s where you set out all the parameters of your LinkedIn newsletter. When you publish that article, all of your existing connections are asked if they want to subscribe to your newsletter. It’s really important to understand that once you’ve switched on creator mode you have 3 different audiences on LinkedIn. So, when you just have a standard LinkedIn account, you just have connections. Once you’ve switched on LinkedIn creator mode, and as I say this is going to be for everyone, you have your connections, you have your followers, and you have your LinkedIn newsletter subscribers. So your connections are people that you’re directly connected to, your followers are people who are following your content because you’re a creator now and the you’ve got the subscribers to your newsletters. And of course some people are going to be across all of these 3 audiences but it is a bit of a shift for you in the way that you think about your LinkedIn connections. And of course, connections are still the most important thing but you do have a maximum, I think off the top of my head, you’ve got a maximum of 10,000 connections on LinkedIn. It might be more than that, it might be 30,000 actually, I’m sure you can find that out on Google, but that’s thy they introduced followers. So really it was for people like Richard Branson and people who have hundreds of thousands of people who read their content but they’re not necessarily their connections. So they can now, people like Richard Branson and Bill Gates can have millions of followers but they’re still limited to the same amount of connections as everyone else, which is 10,000 or 30,000 or whatever it is.

But the need for you to sort of get set-up is really important so you are kind of prepared when you send your first newsletter and also the first article you send out, your first newsletter, needs to be spot on, it needs to be a really good subject because remember it’s going to contact all of your connections and ask them to decide whether or not they want to subscribe to your new newsletter. And they will subscribe or not subscribe based on the content of that first newsletter.

Often the first thing you do in marketing is really important because people will judge you by that. But don’t worry to much about it, it’s not just about what happens the first time. Obviously. it’s just as important what happens regularly from there. But it is good if you can do the prep work, it’s good to get that prep work done.

And there are a couple of things that you then need to build. Once you’ve done that set-up the then need to build it into a regular marketing system. First is actually doing a newsletter every single week. I make this really easy for the members of my MSP Marketing Edge by giving them a LinkedIn newsletter that my team has written and they can use. And because we only work with one MSP per area, there’s never any risk of clash.

Now if you’re a prolific generator of content, you won’t have an issue with this but if you’re not, and most MSPs aren’t prolific creators of content then you will need to find a way to remember to get this done, to have a system to create this content every week. And remember as well that ordinary business owners and managers, the people that you want to reach, they’re not really interested in hard core technology, so make it about the business of technology or increasing productivity or just making more profit because everyone loves that.

Side note by the way, if you are creating new content every week for your LinkedIn newsletter and it’s fresh and original content then be sure to add that to your website as fresh blog content there may be some SEO, search engine optimisation benefits of doing that, either way the humans visiting you website will see that you’re active and you’re adding original content.

So you build a system where you’re creating a newsletter every week and sending it out every week. And the other thing to systemise is actually adding new subscribers. LinkedIn will invite new connections to subscribe to your newsletter, but you can do the same manually yourself. So put the link on your other social profiles, put it on your website. You can even do a vanity link on a business card for example, so you send them to yourwebsite.com/newsletter and that’s just like a redirection link which redirects them to your newsletter link.

Your LinkedIn newsletter is one of those things that will build up over time. So please do make a personal commitment to doing it for at least a year. I’ve done mine for over a year now, in fact I’ve just checked, and I’ve done mine, as of today, for 121 Thursdays in a row, isn’t that cool? So, it’s become a habit right, it’s very much ingrained in my weekly schedule. I have a recurring note to think about it on Tuesday and by the time I get to Thursday, which is when it goes out, there’s an idea in my head, it’s formed into a blog article, I write something original every week, I put it on my website, and I ssend it out every single Thursday. If I go on holiday or a vacation, I write it and my team will send it out for me.

Now algorithmically, doing that every Thursday for 121 Thursdays has got to be an advantage on LinkedIn right? And now, after 2 years I’ve got 3,500 subscribers, so it’s a powerful way for me to reach another audience, coz remember, it’s appearing in their newsfeed and LinkedIn is emailing it out to them. It’s amazing what great touch points.

Do you think this the something you can get started with?

Paul Green’s, MSP Marketing podcast. Still to come…

One of the most powerful marketing hires you can make is someone to do outbound sales calls on your behalf, but they’re also the hardest people to hire, manage, and keep motivated every day. There’s an MSP I’ve interviewed who has cracked this and he’s going to share his secrets in the next five minutes.

MSPs are held hostage by urgent tasks more often than any kind of business owner that I’ve ever worked with. Obviously due to the nature of your work. But how do you manage the urgent so you’ve always got time to get the important done? I have the answer. Hey, I’m Paul Green. And don’t forget for 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.

In 1954, US president Dwight D. Eisenhower laid out what he called the dilemma of modern man. I have two kinds of problems, he said, the urgent and the important, the urgent are not important and the important are never urgent. Isn’t that great? Isn’t that absolutely spot on? And MSPs more than any other kind of business owner are trapped between the urgent and the important. The urgent is of course clients with their issues and problems that are stopping them from just getting on with their work. And the main reason they give you money is to eliminate these problems. So of course they’re urgent, but then there’s the important, and that’s the stuff that you as the business owner need to do to grow the business. It’s the working on the business not in it. Urgent and important things are always in conflict. And after your first few years in business, you start to realize that this never ends, right? So how do you manage this conflict without going mad or working a hundred hours a week and dying at your desk, which is not fun.

So President Eisenhower, he’s credited with creating something called the Eisenhower Matrix. Go and Google that so you can visually see that if you’ve not seen it before. And it’s a way to figure out what to do with tasks. It’s a very simple four square grid. You’ve got two axes. So the one at the top says simply urgent and not urgent. And the one down the left hand side, it says important and not important. And the idea is that for each task that’s sat waiting for you to do, you assess whether or not it’s urgent and whether or not it’s important. And by doing that, you automatically assign each task into one of four boxes, which tells you what to do with the task. So if it’s important and urgent, then you do the task, right? If it’s important but it is not urgent, then you schedule the task.

If it’s not important, but it is urgent, then you delegate the task. And of course this sits very well with hiring technicians to do all the technical work so that you don’t have to because technical work, I know it’s important because that’s what the business does, but it doesn’t mean that you as the business owner or the manager of the MSP has to personally do it. And then finally, if a task is not important and not urgent, you delete it. And yes, you really do delete it. You can’t get everything done all the time. That’s a fallacy. But what you can do is focus on the things that are most important. And sometimes you need to ignore tasks and never get them done. And if you have a problem with deleting a task, then do what I do. Just add it to a never ending list of things that you know are never going to get round to.

I call mine the black hole. There are thousands of tasks in my black hole going back, I dunno, 10, 15 years or something like that. So in my mind, I never delete a task. It goes in the black hole and it’s still there. It’s just I acknowledge and accept I’m never actually going to get round to doing that. MSPs are held hostage by urgent tasks much more often than any other kind of business that I’ve ever worked with. How do you manage the urgent so that you always have time to get the important things done?

Paul Green’s MSP Marketing podcast still to come.

Have you ever wondered whether or not you’d win more clients with good, better, best pricing? Well, another MSP has, and I’m going to answer that question in the next five minutes. Hiring someone to make outbound calls to prospects is one of the smartest things that you can do because they can build relationships on the phone and identify which people are nearly ready to switch MSP, but they’re some of the hardest people to hire, manage, and motivate. We’re going to look at why outsourcing calls is probably not the answer. Who to hire instead and how to get them booking appointments on the phone?

Hi, I’m John Wright from Core Managed and we are headquartered in Indianapolis, Indiana.

And thank you for joining me on the podcast. John, it’s great to get another MSP on. And you have a specific thing that you are going to talk about today, which is hiring a sales development representative. We’re going to use the acronym, we’re going to use SDR throughout this, but basically someone who picks up the phone, makes outbound phone calls and tries to get leads for you. And I know that you’ve been particularly successful with this and yet many other MSPs struggle, which is why we’re going to explore today, what you’ve done, how you’ve done it, and how other MSPs can model the work that you’ve done getting these people in. Let’s first of all tell a little bit about your story. So how long have you been running your Ms P? How did you get started?

So we started the company 13 years ago and we’ve been growing organically since then from two to 30 people with no acquisitions or anything like that. How I got started, it’s kind of a long story, but basically I decided even though I’m not a trained technician, I decided that this is what I would love to do. And so I decided to do what I love and that’s why we had two people on day one and not just one, a lot of our peers because I hired a tech on the first day and the rest is history.

So what was it that drove you to hire that tech before you’d even got an income coming in for yourself?

It’s because I didn’t know how to do it work. That’s the best reason I can still close eight out of 10 tickets that come into the health desk. Good critical thinking and just general common sense. But early on I wanted to focus on the business.

Yeah. So you were coming into this knowing that you just didn’t want it to be just you and a couple of other people for 15 years. You wanted to actually go at it and grow it into something. So what was the point at which you realized that you needed to, well actually before we get to that question, talk us through what you were doing to grow the business organically before you hired salespeople, what were the marketing methods that worked best for you in the first few years?

Well, a lot of people with us so small, and with me being so involved in the business, I didn’t have to do much. We just did really good work. We got referrals, we exhausted our warm relationships like our neighbors, friends, family, church members, people we used to work with. And it just came very, very easy. Also during the break fix era, we were taking any work that came along and so that also made it seem easy, although it didn’t build the kind of company we were trying to build. So yeah, it was just referral based and it wasn’t until we kind of hit a wall that we started looking into more different methods, especially methods that we thought might scale.

Yeah, no, that makes perfect sense. And the wall that you hit, did that coincide with a transition over to managed services or were those two things completely separate?

I would say it’s possible that that was there. It was as we built out some systems that I wasn’t as involved, so we weren’t getting referrals from people because they didn’t know me and no one else was asking for referrals. And not to mention that we probably had just penetrated the best warm referrals in our circle of influence. So yeah, I think that it did partially coincide with going fully managed because when we went fully managed, we started saying no to a ton of work and so that made leads that much more valuable.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. So a lot of MSPs get to this position and they struggled, don’t quite know what to do, it’s all the fun referrals, as you say, have dried up and what seemed easy and seemed like it would never end of business just turning up at the door that actually ends. And many of them dunno what to do. Some of them start to go out networking and I mean going to events, others of them start doing pay per click or search engine optimization or just flounder around. And it’s a really common thing and many people listening to this or watching this right now will have been or will indeed still be in that situation. So as your lead started to dry up, did you go straight to the root of hiring someone to do the sales course for you or what did you do next?

If I recall, we probably thought that pay-per-click was the answer. So we dove pretty hard into pay-per-click and tried to figure that out and failed. And that’s when we went the other way.

So talk us through, I think you were telling me just before our interview that the very first thing you did was you actually hired an outside vendor to do these sales calls for you?

Yeah, so we hired, now that I think about it, we hired two. So the first vendor we hired was fully outsourced. So the caller worked for them. They fractionalized that caller to about three or four different MSPs or maybe even three or four different businesses. So we had what was essentially a third of a caller, met him in person, he drove to Indianapolis, we had lunch, we put him on our website, he changed his LinkedIn profile to say he worked here. So it was trying to put forth a real professional image. He worked really hard. We made a couple of sales, but ultimately I decided that the quality wasn’t there. So we parted ways with that vendor, parted ways, friends took a little break and found another vendor who has a little different business model where they hire your person for you. So they recruit and train and manage a person that is your employee in your building if you want them to be.

So they found us, our first SDR in Indianapolis, she works in our office and a W2 employee, W2 being maybe a uniquely United States firm but not a contractor. And they managed her for a year, weekly meetings, regular huddles, performance reviews and everything. And I think they did a fantastic job. And that was what got me inspired to figure this out. So I wanted to be able to do this 10 times and I said, well, if I’m ever going to have 10 SDRs, then I’m going to eventually part ways with this vendor and master this sales management piece in house. And so we did, we ended that engagement and we went to hire our second SDR on our own.

The irony for that company that they did such a good job that you then ended, you ended your engagement with them and went off to do it yourself. But I think you were right. It’s the only way you can possibly scale up. You look at if you want to get five or 10 of these people working for you, you can’t do that through an agency. You’ve got to have that skillset inhouse. So what was your experience having, I have to say, John, you, you’ve had a uniquely pleasant experience with two vendors. So I know the first one didn’t quite work out quality wise, but you still got some sales from it and it did work out the second time and we could have a thousand other MSPs on this show who have also used these kind of agencies and they’ve not had a good experience. Perhaps things have started well and then the quality really dropped off. Or actually they feel like they’ve spent in some cases tens of thousands of dollars and never quite got anything in return. So bravo to you for actually getting that return. Talk us through what it was like actually going out and hiring your own SDR.

So the second SDR we hired, we kind of happened upon a woman in the Philippines. We weren’t seeking to offshore this role, but it looked perfect. It was a referral and from somebody we knew she had worked for a large distributor making lots of phone calls. I think the hardest part of recruiting this person is finding somebody who’s willing to bang the phones for seventy, eighty, ninety calls a day. So that’s the first hurdle to clear. And so we hired her, we used a website to help make that easy from a legal standpoint, and we hired her full-time, 40 hours a week, and we did our best to manage her, but I think we did a real poor job and we definitely learned some lessons there. But ultimately what we learned was she wasn’t at all doing her job and we didn’t know. And that sucked because it took us several months to understand that we weren’t tracking things properly, the right KPIs and listening to recordings and the like. So for better for worse, again, now we’re one for two. So I’m not really complaining because number one has done so fantastically. Of course I’m a little disappointed because we haven’t proven that we can do it. And so we went to look for number three and number three is six months in and it’s going really well. Fantastic. We may have learned the lessons that we need to learn.

So I’ve got two follow up questions to that. One is about the qualities you look for in the person, and then I’m going to ask you what those KPIs are, so how you manage and track their performance. So when you were going looking for number three, what kind of person works well for this? Because as you say, this is a tough gig to pick up the phone and make 80, 90 outbound calls a day. That’s not pleasant work for some people. I wouldn’t want to do it. And I’m guessing that John, you wouldn’t want to do it either. So what kind of qualities do you look for in the people that you are hiring?

Well, I’m going to say something that’s probably not the same as what a lot of my peers would say. I see a lot of my peers looking for that. Somebody reentering the workforce after devoting their time to their family or somebody who they just see a little something in them. I think that’s a real long shot. I think you need to look for somebody who’s already done it and you need to be willing to pay them. Those are two things, two mistakes that I think our peers are making is cheaping out on the salary, looking for somebody who will do it on commission only. And my advice to my peers would be to be willing to take a big risk in paying somebody what they’re worth, who’s already demonstrated their worth. That’s what we did. So I think that answers your question, how do I know that they’re willing and capable because they’ve done it. Now of course the hard part is why are they looking? But that’s with any role you hire. If they’re so great, then why are they moving on from their current employer?

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. So how are you tracking them now? And actually tell us, are these people, are these two people remote or are they both sat in your office?

They are both local. And the reason I wanted to hire local when you could hire anywhere in the world is I want the possibility that they might develop into an outside salesperson. The type of person who gives presentations in person, shakes hand. That’s our sales cycle, our sales process. So we hired local, they probably are 50 50 between their desk and their home office and at their desk they have a private office with a door they can shut because they’re working amongst it people. And so you got to have that privacy.

Yeah, absolutely. And it can get noisy sometimes, can’t it? And actually they’ve got to be very focused on what’s going on the phone rather than what’s going on in the office. So what KPIs are you tracking with your two people right now?

So first there’s the number of phone calls. So I’ll tell you how we do this. We do this with HubSpot. We do this by making all of our phone calls through HubSpot, which was a technical challenge that again, a lot of our peers are going to want to solve a variety of different ways. We solved it the expensive way perhaps, but we get great reporting through HubSpot. We get transcriptions and recordings and metrics right there in the CRM. And so we know number of calls, that’s the first one. And then we know average duration. And so I think the duration needs to be an average of 45 to 60 seconds to kind of signal that the SDR is having quality conversations. So a real low average duration means they’re probably not getting past the gatekeeper. So the higher the better, generally on average call duration.

And then it’s number of discovery appointments. And a lot of times you’ll do a follow-up email and invite the prospect to book with you. That’s a discovery call. But a lot of times the discovery call happens on your first call or your first conversation. Where I’ve lucked into Paul who has a need now is hot and he’s willing to talk to me. I can spend eight to 12 minutes with him making sure he’s qualified. And that’s so we’re tracking the number of discovery calls or first time appointments, which leads to an onsite technical assessment. And then that’s the end of this SDRs responsibility for metrics and whether or not the deal closes if they get us an in-person meeting.

That makes sense. So just to check the people that they’re calling, are they just making cold calls to data that you’ve purchased or are they making slightly warm calls to people that in some way

They’re almost all exclusively cold? We pay another vendor for very expensive data to try and make them more efficient. So yeah, they’re almost all cold. Warmly would be one that maybe hit us up on the website, but the way people shop these days, if they came to our website and they book an appointment, then you’re bypassing the SDR, right? There’s no need for a cold call at that point. That person is almost bought. And so that’s why we kind of let them focus on the relationships that we have that are super cold.

Yeah, that makes sense. And presumably they are, if they speak to someone today and they have a two three minute engagement, but for whatever reason it’s just not the right time for that person, which I’m guessing is the vast majority of people you speak to, do you then pop them back into HubSpot and sort of schedule them for a follow-up call six or 12 months down the line?

Yeah, absolutely. And even I myself, who I’m responsible for closing the deals in Indianapolis, and I use HubSpot as if I would want a salesperson to use it. And every single day I have somewhere between five and 15 follow up tasks that are just constantly rolling. So I’ll just send that person an email and schedule a follow up for 90 days or six months or 12 months, depending on how warm or cold.

Yeah, I love it. What I love about this is, and using HubSpot is the thing that’s made this easy for you is you’ve turned this into a system. So this isn’t just some haphazard, oh, we must remember to make some calls today. This has become a system where you’ve got two people in the two different marketplaces that you work in and they have a responsibility to make X number of dials. You are tracking it, you’re measuring it. You mentioned earlier about listening back to calls, so I presume there’s some kind of performance coaching going on with them, or at least just monitoring now and again, dipping in and seeing what they’re saying. So I absolutely love this. And the secret to this is definitely I think that you’ve systemized this because anytime you have any kind of marketing or sales system, it’s something that happens on a regular basis.

Let’s finish off John, with the two most common questions that I get, and I get a lot of questions about how to set these kind of SDRs up. The questions I’m going to finish on are how you keep this person motivated. And then the final question is how many dials you have to make in order to win a new client? And I’m just looking for an approximation for that. Let’s do with the motivation one first. As we’ve said a couple of times, this is not a fun job for many people. I know some people love it, but many people don’t. So how do you keep your two SDRs motivated?

Well, we have twice daily meetings first thing in the morning and then in the afternoon. And of course, meetings aren’t good if you don’t have the personality for motivating and encouraging people. So you need to be able to spend that time filling their cup, if you will, answering their questions, building their confidence, showing them the marketing materials that you’ve developed that will help equip them, just all of the things that kind of get them excited and keep them excited, celebrating their wins and things like that. So whether they’re virtual, and actually our people have a desk in an office where none of our leadership team is. So this is almost always done via video conference. So it’s regular calls and encouragement. And then of course it’s with money. I mean, we hire people that are very money motivated. And so again, that goes back to my earlier comment about hiring somebody who is wanting to do sales, not somebody who you saw doing marketing and you thought maybe they might be good at sales. So we start with somebody who wants to sell and is very money motivated, so we paid them fairly and we pay them all. And this is another thing that I see a lot of people trying to do differently, and it’s fine. We pay them all of their commission upfront. There is no residual or trailing commission. We want them to get a really big check when we close a deal and then we want them hungry again.

And they only earn commission when you actually win a client. They don’t earn commission just for booking appointments, which of course motivates them to book high quality appointments that are potentially going to turn into business.

Great question. It’s a base salary plus a closed deal, so nothing in between is commissionable, which means they won’t be setting garbage appointments.

Yeah, that makes sense. Final question then, John, and it is one of the hardest things, as I said earlier for MSPs, is you’re going to hire someone and they’re going to pick up the phone on Monday morning and they could spend all week dialing and speaking to people and not generate appointments and appointments for you. I’m not going to ask your stats for every stage of the process. I think actually that’s something that will be unique to each MSP and it’ll be unique to geographically where you are and the kind of people you’re calling and all of that. But approximately, do you know how many phone calls or how many days worth of phoning it takes from one of your SDRs for you to get a new client?

I’m going to go with 400 calls, two discovery appointments, 0.25 to 0.5 deals.

Okay,

So let’s go 1600 to 3,200 calls per deal. I think that extrapolates too.

Yeah, I’m not a figures guy, but that sounds about right to me. So I think you can see from that, and he’s someone who’s been doing this for some time and is doing it successfully with two people. It is not a short game. It is not an easy and quick win. But as we were saying earlier, you’ve set up a great system here and you’ve got a system now, which is going to, for every 1600 calls, is going to pump out some kind of new client. And obviously there’s lots of detail along the way there and lots of work, but actually that’s a great marketing system.

Those numbers are only going to work for you if you’re charging enough and the lifetime value of your customer is very high. So if you’re doing projects and hourly work, it would be almost impossible to justify that spend. So it only works if you can make sure you have a large lifetime value.

Yeah, absolutely. So you’ve got to have a look at that, not just that average lifetime value, I guess, of a new client, but in terms of the monthly revenue. So when do I get the cash back? If I’ve had to pay for 1600 calls to be paid, I want to see several thousand dollars coming in or a couple of thousand dollars a month coming in right from the start. And I guess each of these new clients, there’s a number of months where actually you’re not making any money from them, but the bigger picture, of course, as you say, is they’re going to stay for five years or whatsoever. So do we get payback by month, three by month, month four, et cetera? Yes, we do. And then we’ll keep getting the payback for a number of years. John, you’ve been very generous sharing this process on the podcast, so thank you so much for that. Just tell us what’s the best way for other MSPs who want to have a chat with you, what’s the best way for them to get in touch?

Yeah, just connect with me on LinkedIn. I think that would be great.

Now I’ve got this to help Simon, our producer just makes his life easier. I’m assuming you don’t have one of those. So if you could, when you’re ready, if you could say 1, 2, 3, and clap your hands on camera, that would be great.

1, 2, 3.

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

This is a fun part of the podcast. We take your marketing questions and we answer them. Producer James, what have we got this week? Thanks, Paul. Well, it’s Chloe’s turn

This week Chloe is in charge of new business at an MSP in Sydney, Australia, and has been onto the contactPage@mspmarketingedge.com to ask in our sales should we use the good, better, best pricing model.

So for some reason, this is one of the most controversial sales questions that can be asked. I’ve seen it debated over and over in various forums and by many MSPs that I’ve spoken to directly and people seem to be quite militant about it. Let me briefly explain what good, better, best is. It’s simply where you offer your clients a choice. They can get a good package, which will be, let’s say $30 per user per month, a better package, which will be $40 and a best package at $50. And of course, you add more into the packages as they get more expensive. You see this in SaaS, software as a service pricing all the time. So from a psychology point of view, it’s really powerful because you are presenting people with the perception of making a choice. And I know that you want to include cybersecurity and everything in every package, and to a certain extent, that’s the right thing to do to protect people from themselves.

But I believe you should be doing everything in your power to win a client, even if that client wants to play a little bit less. And then you educate them and you upsell them from there. So good, better, best pricing allows them to compare the different packages that you have on offer and then they can make what they believe to be the right decision for them. And actually, when you get three things right, the price, the position, and the package, you find that the majority of people go for the middle option. They see it as the safe choice. That’s because no one wants to go for the cheapest option and they look at the more expensive one and think, we don’t need to spend that money. Well go for the middle one, the better one, the better package, because that’s the safe choice. And what this does, and this is what makes it so powerful, is it makes them more likely to pick you than one of your competitors. So why is good, better, best, so controversial? I have no idea. I just know that many MSPs are really anti good, better, best. Do you know, I’d love to know what your view is on this. Just go to the contact usPage@mspmarketingedge.com. That’s where you can also submit a marketing question. 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@mspmarketingedge.com

Coming up, coming up next

Week. Thank you so much for listening this week. Next week we’ll look at how to gather hot prospects with a very clever technique that stops you sounding like a salesperson and instead makes you sound like a trusted contact that everyone wants to talk to. Now, if you can pull this off, it will make a massive difference to your marketing efforts.

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