Episode 240: MSPs: How to reach hot prospects other MSPs can't

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This is a transcription for episode 240 of Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast: ‘How to reach hot prospects other MSPs can’t’

Full show transcription

You want to grow your MSP and make more profit. Great. You’ve got the right podcast. Here are today’s big things: A clever way to reach prospects that positions you as an expert and never someone trying to sell something. Wouldn’t it be cool to see the names of the people visiting your website. And the MSP that achieved a 500% increase in sales for one fifth of the expenses? Sounds good. Welcome to episode 2 4 0.

Are you struggling to reach your hot prospects? Stop trying as an MSP salesperson and use this technique instead. Let me tell you a story from days Gone by the year. It was 2005 and I just started my first business. I was doing prospecting on the phone for the first time and I quickly discovered something horrendous. No one wanted to take my call. Is this your experience from making outbound calls? It was a constant and depressing stream of No, no, no, no, no. It’s a nightmare. And what I found especially difficult was that just a few months before people have been delighted to get a call from me. So what changed? Well, it was simple. The context of why I was calling that is what had changed because before I’d worked at a radio station where I was a presenter and the boss, when I called people, it was really exciting and showbiz and they welcomed my call because I could help them.

When you say to many people, Hey, do you want to be on the radio? They go, yes, yes, yes. But if you say to the same people, Hey, I’m looking for new clients for my business, they reply, no, no, no. And this suggests actually a genius idea to reach dream prospects, and I know that at least three members of my MSP Marketing Edge program have implemented this after I suggested it to them. So here’s the idea. Instead of approaching someone as a salesperson, approach them asking if you can interview them. And that’s going to be a much easier conversation to have. Gatekeepers will be less suspicious. Decision makers will be a lot more willing, and the real beauty of this approach is you will get 30 minutes or more of quality time talking to a dream prospect about their favorite subject themselves and their business.

Boom, it’s perfect. But I know you have doubts and let me answer them. The first is probably, but Paul, what am I interviewing them for? Well, that’s actually an easy one to answer because unlike back in 2005 when you had to work in the media to be a serious content creator, these days, anyone can and does create content. I haven’t worked in the media for 19 years yet here I am creating content. And what made the media so powerful back in the day was that they controlled the distribution methods that ended with a web. Now, anyone can reach anyone else via a series of platforms, so you could interview them for your LinkedIn newsletter, you could do a LinkedIn live streaming interview. You could write about them for your blog. You could start a podcast about local business leaders or even start a YouTube channel about inspiring people in your town.

Now, your next worry might be, but Paul, I don’t have a big audience. This doesn’t matter either. How many people do you think listened to the first episode of my MSP Marketing Podcast when it was first broadcast back in 2019? I’ll tell you, it was about six people. One of them was me, another one was my mother. But that didn’t stop me from cracking on and arranging great interviews and just plowing on with it. And even today we get, I dunno, like a couple of thousand listens per episode. And no one ever asks me when I’m setting up an interview, not even PR people that don’t ask me how big the audience is because it’s an issue more in your head than it is in theirs. For many people, the showbiz of just being interviewed is exciting enough. Now your final worry might be, but Paul, what do I talk to them about?

And this is actually the easiest question to answer. You ask lots of open questions about them and their success, whatever that success is. So for example, to give you some specifics, tell us your story. How did you get to where you are today? What are you most proud of achieving along the way? If you could jump in a time machine, what would you go back and change? What’s been the best advice you’ve been given over the years? What’s your best advice for someone growing their business? And just listen carefully to the answers that they give you. In fact, once they’ve given you an answer, you can ask questions for clarification, just to explore interesting things that they say. I’ve given you enough questions there, enough open questions to do a good 15, 20 minute interview. Now remember, the big picture goal here is not to do a great interview that people will love consuming.

The goal here is for you to spend quality time with a hot prospect talking about something that they are passionate about, which is their business and themselves. And after the interview, you may find your subject saying, Hey, do you know what? That was really good fun. Thank you so much. I think we should talk about our technologies. We are having some real problems right now, and that is a solid invitation to engage with someone about their business. Pretty clever, right? And you could just rinse and repeat this approach with all of the hot prospects in your town. Tell me, are you going to try this in your MSP.

Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast, still to come. When you do marketing, how do you know which method is really bringing a return? Many MSPs wonder about this, and in my big interview, I’ll talk to someone who’s figured out the answer. That’s coming in the next five minutes. Have you ever been in Google Analytics and noticed a splurge of people visiting your website? And maybe you’ve thought, if only I knew who these people were and which pages they were looking at, they could be really hot leads. Well, I’ve got a really interesting idea for you to try out.

Hey, I’m Paul Green. And don’t forget, for all the content, tools and training to market and grow your MSP, check out MSPmarketingedge.com.

If you knew who was on your website, then you could target marketing at them. You could give them a call. You could see if they’re a potential prospect, right? And there are lots of services that say they’ll identify specifically who’s on your site.

But I’ve tried a few over the years and they’ve never been great. They can tell you someone from Microsoft has been on the site, but not who. And what about the hundreds of small businesses also known as viable leads for an MSP that visit your site? Traditionally, these website services have been really rubbish at identifying smaller businesses. About 10 years ago in a previous business, I got locked into a crazy expensive contract with a company called Lead Forensics. And frankly, I was underwhelmed. So I’ve kind of ignored this as a source of leads until the last few months. So a few months ago, I decided to jump back in, see what the services are like today and see if they’re relevant for MSPs. And I have to say I’m impressed. So I tried out three, and the one that I’ve stuck with and that I’ve actually started paying for is called Leadinfo.

Now, caveat on our website, we get a pretty good level of traffic because we do a lot of activity. So what I’m about to describe might not be that useful to your MSP if you get three visitors a week, although this will help you to diagnose that, that’s your problem because if you’re only getting three visitors, of course you’re not generating leads. You need to drive a steady stream of traffic onto your website. Now Leadinfo is pretty good identifying who’s on your site and you can do a 14 day free trial. It won’t show you a visitor unless it can identify them. So we did check between our Google Analytics and what Leadinfo is showing, and we had more traffic in analytics than was showing in Leadinfo, but it just shows you the people it can identify. And then it shows you every time they come back to your website, it shows you which pages they visited.

If there are multiple visitors from the same company, it’ll show you those multiple visitors as well. And you can upgrade to see videos of what they’ve actually done on your site. That’s quite useful is let’s say you’ve got someone revisiting a specific page. Let’s say it’s a page about backups, and you can see that they’re often looking at a very specific piece of info. That’s what we call intent data. We know because they’re looking at a specific piece of information that they are interested in that and they may be going on to buy that at some point in the near future. So you can then tag them for internal use. Now this tagging is something very useful. For example, we tag of all of our visitors, we tag existing clients, we tag former clients, we tag vendors, we tag irrelevant ones. I do get a lot of traffic from non MSPs who are just searching for marketing info and come across my site.

And then the tag that we want more than anything else is prospects. And so we’ve got, as of time of recording, there’s about 60, 70, 80 MSPs who’ve been on my website who’ve never bought from us, and that my marketing team and my sales team can now target. We can have some conversations with them, we can send them some marketing. And what’s really cool about Leadinfo is it doesn’t just tell you who’s visiting the site, it actually has their details. So you can see the name of the business, you can see the website address, you can see the names of the key players. Sometimes it’s got their financials in there. You can click through to look at their website, you can get an email address. Sometimes it’s just a generic email address, but it’s a start. You can go and connect them on LinkedIn. I mean literally it’s got the key players with their LinkedIn profiles next to ’em, and you can just click through and go and connect to them on LinkedIn and then you can trigger some automated actions from it.

So it integrates with lots of CRMs. So you could, for example, you could send an email to a prospect. So someone’s visited your site, you could trigger off an automation, so your CRM sends them an email. You wouldn’t say, Hey, I know you’ve been on my site because that’s creepy, but you might say, Hey, just wondering, were you looking for a new IT support company right now? And they would perhaps chalk it up to coincidence that they were looking at your site on like a Tuesday and you happen to send them an email on a Wednesday, right? I mean, that would be a good thing to do. You just got to be a little bit careful with something like that because even though people know these kind of services around, it is creepy when they get an email saying, you’ve been on my website or something like that.

And there are some other tools on Leadinfo, there’s a lead generation data capture box. We tried that out, didn’t get a lot from it, but that could just be our audience. You might get something more out of that. Like I said earlier, you can see videos of what people have been doing. And yes, some of these require you to pay for an upgrade off the basic minimum, which we’re paying I think around about $149 a month just for the minimum anyway, whether you use this tool or whether you use an alternative, if you are getting some half decent traffic to your site, it will help you potentially make the most out of every prospect. And I think that’s what you have to do in your MSP, right? You’ve got to make the most of it because a lead to you, a hot prospect could be worth to you. I dunno what, 40, 50, 60,000 in lifetime revenue, maybe more because they pay you all that monthly recurring revenue and they stay for years and years. So it’s worth you spending 150 bucks a month just to make sure you’re getting the most out of every lead. If you do try this, will you let me know how you get on.

Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast still to come… You’ve heard of Search Engine Optimization, SEO? Sure. Right? And maybe you put your head in your hands when you Google your MSP, and there you are on page four, but should you actually spend money and invest cash, time, resources into SEO, I’m going to answer that question for you in the next five minutes. When you do marketing for your MSP, how do you know which method is really bringing a return? And if you have salespeople, how do you know if they’re really performing? My guest today can answer both of these questions.

Today’s big interview is about the MSP that achieved a 500% increase in sales for just one fifth of the expenses.

Hi, I am Kyle Mealy. I’m a small business CRO. And one of the greatest things about this podcast is I get pitched a lot. I mean, I get sort of five or six emails, sometimes it feels like a day, and I’m on various platforms where people can reach out and pitch me and I say no to about 98% of people who reach out. And Kyle, you immediately cut through the spam because you pitched me with something I thought, I’ve got to get it on this podcast. Can you repeat for us exactly your pitch line to me?

Sure. I said, Paul, I think your audience would love to know more about the revenue formula that I used to increase the efficiency of sales and marketing by 500% at an MSP. They had one fifth of the expenses in marketing and sales and their best revenue year ever.

And my reply of course was you had me at 500%. So let’s talk about that. Well, actually, let’s find out a little bit about you. So give us a brief idea of your background and how you come to be working now with MSPs helping them grow their revenue.

Yeah, I fell in love with small business a long time ago. It started in being the number two of a real small business. We got from 500 to a million in about three years, really using system in process. And that’s when I really fell in love with marketing and sales because how we grew. And then I actually went to a marketing agency and took over their marketing and sales. They were stuck at 3 million. We got ’em up to seven fairly quickly. And I once again was exposed to lots of small businesses, including MSPs, and I realized that most of these B2B businesses, especially MSPs were over technical and not really able to afford a full-time marketing leader and a full-time sales leader. And I realized that if you can make it less technical to your buyers, you can bring together marketing and sales leadership under one banner, chief revenue officer. You can do some really incredible things from an efficiency and a growth perspective. And that’s what launched Next Level, small business Chief Revenue Officer.

Yeah, I love that. And what a great job title as well, Chief Revenue Officer. In fact, as you’re saying that, I’m thinking I might steal that as my job title. It’s utterly you being a hundred percent focused on what you’re trying to do, which is of course driving new monthly recurring revenue into the business. Exactly. I’m going to ask you not to name the MSP because if you don’t name them, then obviously we can talk openly about what they’ve done and what some of their secret sources. But let’s hear the story. You’ve been working with this MSP and you’ve achieved this insane 500% revenue growth. Talk us through what you did, and we do want some specifics, Kyle.

Yeah, of course. I was brought in as a Fractional Chief Revenue Officer. They knew they had a marketing problem and they had a sales org, but no metrics, no really understanding of qualified leads. I mean, it was this kind of infantile program when I came on. And one of the things I focus, and this is the backbone, backbone of what I do, is a measurement called ROASS. It’s a bit cheeky, two Ss instead of the traditional one, but it’s a measurement of all sales and marketing together as an efficiency ratio against revenue generated. And so it’s a very simple number, and they didn’t know how to measure this. And this is kind of what I get to do in my role reporting up to leadership teams is score attribution of marketing and sales efforts. Because marketing wants credit, sales wants credit. It’s like, we don’t care.

I just care about driving new revenue. And so I looked at their marketing efforts, their sales put it all together, and they were at a 1.17, which is really bad for MSPs to grow. You want that ratio to be between six and eight. And the first thing I did is I looked at all their expenses, and I noticed that for four salespeople, they had only brought in four new deals in six months. That was like eye-opening. And then I started to look at commission structure and I realized that we could get the same amount of efficiency very, very quickly with reducing almost completely the inefficient use of sales time and energy and spend some of that money over driving marketing. That was kind of the setup was really an efficient sales team.

Okay, so let me just pause you there, and I just want to make sure everyone understands exactly what you’re talking about in terms of acronyms and measurement scores and stuff. So just dive in for us, explain what ROAS traditionally means, explain what it means to you, and then just talk us through that score and how and why an MSP would normally have a six or a seven.

Sure. So ROAS, R O A S is return on ad spend in the marketing world, and that’s a measure of, okay, if I spend a thousand dollars on Google ads, I’m getting $4,000 in product sales. What my model does, and its the revenue portion, is instead of just thinking about advertising dollars, purely small scale is its return on all sales and marketing spend. So ROASS, when you put every expense sales commission, compensation, your leadership, so technically my fee to my clients is in that bucket. I have to generate a return on those dollars. Every marketing program, every marketing tool, CRM costs all get put into the ROASS bucket. And then very simply, you put your revenue over top. And so if you have a million in revenue and a million dollars in sales and marketing expense, your ratio is one which is not healthy. You will find that you’re bleeding cash, you’re not profitable at all. If you can get that number to a six to eight, you’re going to be likely more healthy. It kind aligns with financial best practices. So that’s kind of the breakdown of ROAS and ROASS.

Okay, and that makes perfect sense. Thank you for explaining that so well. So you start working with this MSP, they’ve clearly got this problem, I mean for sale or you say it was for salespeople and they got four new clients. Yeah, eight salespeople did you say?

Yeah, it was four salespeople and only four new clients in six months. And they were that, I think up to the day they had spent almost, was it 600,000 in compensation already for that year. Wow. They were getting commissioned on just about anything and everything. It was built entirely in their favor without anybody with a financial lens looking at it for profitability.

So I imagine the conversation you had with the owners or the management team of that MSP, when you actually broke it down for them, how much they were investing across everything, and as you say, how little return on investment they were getting, what was the reaction that you got?

It’s why I started my business is I wanted the ability to be authentic. If I’m sitting in there as their VP of sales and marketing or Chief Revenue Officer, I am kind of having to protect the team and present a ROAS or picture. But by being an outsider, I just get to say it like it is. And so the truth was when we look at it by a number sense, we’re really inefficient. And so the question is, can we increase our efficiency quickly with the team that we have, or have we tapped out their level of skill and knowledge and at what time do we start to let go and start to move forward? And so that was the tough conversation we had to have. The last thing I like to do when I come into businesses is start letting team members go, that’s not the first choice, but I have to protect the business. And if there’s no business there, there’s no jobs anyway. So by presenting the numbers to the team, I get to have that conversation of if this is what good means, we have to make changes on this now. And good is not, they started at 1.17 was their efficiency score. It was bad.

Yeah, it’s pretty bad. So Kyle, the axman cometh. Tell us what you did, what happened?

Well, it starts with education. What I have found is most MSPs and most small businesses don’t really think about revenue. And the way I think about it, and think about it from a math, they just are trying to drive deals in. And in that hunger and desire to grow, you kind of forget about scoring what good is. And so I’m like, okay, good is a better return on all sales and marketing spend. So that means we need more new customers and we need them now. And it sounds like so simple, but they were not thinking of that because they were getting so well paid on existing clients that I don’t think there was an incentive to drive new business. I don’t think there was anybody saying, this is the expectation. So I set that expectation. I told him what the score was, and it wasn’t an axman situation.

It was a what are we going to do to drive in new business? What I can also do, industry standards are what they are. If you bring in some new leads, you have a pretty good chance of closing 20 to 30% of those. And in MSP world, we know if they have a hundred employees, we have a pretty good guess of how many users and how many licenses and how many we can ferret out what we’re going to get in from a monthly recurring revenue. So I’m like, let’s just get some leads in. What can we do from an activity perspective? And that was really the two commands is we’ve got to improve ROAS and we’ve got to improve our volume of activity. If we don’t do those things, then things have to change. So that was the command, and we let things run for a month, and that’s when it was time to make some hard decisions. We hadn’t turned the corner, we hadn’t seen activity change. I saw balls getting dropped and I had my lens out and I was looking at the details where they hadn’t been looked at before.

And lead generation is, I know for people listening to this podcast or watching it on YouTube, that’s the number one reason that they’re coming here. So just tell us, give us a bullet point overview of what you did to increase the volume of leads going into that MSP.

Yeah, so a couple of things. It was a very technical driven concept, very technical, trying to be sales, and they were targeting small businesses. Well, a small business owner, and I get to lump myself into this category and kind of think like that. I don’t really care what the technology is. I am sorry, I don’t, don’t really care. I care how much does it cost? How much of a headache is it going to be and am I going to be safe? And so we started to talk about things in those terms, which was eye-opening, and it was really hard for that sales team. They’d only ever been technical sales relying on engineering, which was another cost centre and relying on service side expertise to solve the problems that they didn’t know how to solve. And so we needed to actually change the way we went to market, which was thinking about our customer, which was the business owner who was actually signing the check and speaking in their language. Some of the tactics on the marketing side was email, outbound, LinkedIn outreach, LinkedIn organic social, webinars, a lot of different tools, but it was really about the way we were thinking about messaging and then the way we were thinking about scoring the results that kind of drove the efficiency.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. So Kyle, I’m going to ask if we can sort of jump towards the end and the success that you had with that MSP. So you pushed the, I think the point we got to in the story was where you’d started to make some changes to drive the activity up. What were the other big things that you did and how quickly did you get to that big result of 500% increase?

Yeah, what’s fun about measuring ROASS, the way I do it is I do it over a time. So it’s not just today because in MSP world or at monthly recurring revenue, if you get a big client, you look great for a hot minute. And so I care about trends and so do most business owners, they care about seeing things moving up into the right over time. I guess it’d be this way in reverse. And so I started to measure it over a time delay of about 90 days. That was our sales cycle. So it was a recurring, it was an average of ROASS, I was over 90 days, and so it went from 1.17 and near my end of my time with that, they were close to 6.8 or 7.2, kind of depending on the week. It fluctuate a little bit. And so that’s where you get that 500% increase.

Some of the things we did is we took two sales team members off the table right away. It didn’t take long for us after we made the transition to realize that they weren’t doing the follow-ups they needed to do. There was a reason why they weren’t efficient, and the numbers gave us that story without having to invest a ton of resources in management and accountability, which sometimes slows people down because you, and I don’t mean this because I don’t care about people. It’s just really hard to sit there and handhold someone when you’re trying to run a business. So this gives us a way to do it that’s fair and subjective without objective, without being subjective. So we did that, lowered the sales commission and changed the commission structure so that the business won first. That was a huge element that just cut a lot of extra commission.

That wasn’t a new business. It was what our goal was, right? We didn’t just want to keep what we had, which of course we do, but we needed the new to grow. We launched the new marketing program based around a new product offering, updated the website, updated the one sheeters, and that’s when we got to really fun stuff that I like to do with LinkedIn tactics and organic visibility, LinkedIn outreach from the sales and the CEO with webinars and other kind of traffic driving tools, and then pulling them into a website that I had re-skinned for lead generation. So we actually started to get contact us forms that they hadn’t ever had. It was just really fun to actually see them turn the engine. So yeah, we got to about a 700% efficiency by the end.

I love it. That’s such a great story, and we’re clearly going to have to get you back on the show in the future because you just dangled some carrots there about LinkedIn outreach and getting inbound inquiries. You can’t do that at the end of the interview, Kyle. So we will get you back on in the future and we’ll talk about the specific things, but let’s just finish by talking about what you do now with other MSPs. So obviously that was a massive job for you. It was clearly a big result. How can you help the average MSP?

I’m a huge fan of data, and so the first things I do when I talk to potential MSPs or when I’m working with an MSPs, I really want to understand, do you know how many leads you’re generating? I can’t tell you how many who don’t. Do you know how much you’re spending in all of your sales and marketing? So I joke that I’m the only marketing and sales person you’ll talk to that actually enjoys working with the CFO because I am cheap. I am painfully cheap when it comes to marketing and sales. And what I found about CFOs is they’re not just the no seat. They actually, if you show ’em data and you show ’em numbers and then you’re cheap, they love you and they will say yes easier. So that’s kind of what I end up doing is sitting at the leadership team reporting on or building ways to report on the numbers that matter, how many leads, what’s our return on sales and marketing spend, what’s our new level of visibility and how efficiently are we operating that engine? So that’s kind of what I love to do, and I build up teams and then I get out of the way. I get bored once it’s working, I get bored.

Yeah, the perfect consultant, you come in, you fix it, you make it great, and then you move out and move on to the next job. Kyle, thank you so much for coming onto the show. What’s the best way for someone to get in touch with you?

You can visit the website. It’s readyforthenextlevel.com. So if you’re ready, and then you can also reach out to me on LinkedIn. I’d love that. I have a book that’s coming out in a little while. It’s not quite through the publishing process. And then I’m also have a tool that will be available soon called the Revenue Cascade. It is a way to basically measure all the things I talked about that sets you up to measure ROASS.

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

Anytime you have a question about marketing or growing your MSP, I am here to help. You can submit a question to me for this part of the podcast. I’ll tell you how in a second. Producer, James, what’s today’s question?

Well, Paul, today it’s Mark from Dallas. Thanks for your message. Mark, his MSP is coming up to five years old, and he considers it still to be a young, new, fresh baby. He’s working really hard to grow it, and he’s concerned that he doesn’t waste any of his precious time on things that just don’t work. So his question is, in terms of my website, is it worth me doing search engine optimization SEO?

Okay, really great question. So the result you want from SEO is your MSP showing up higher in the search results, and certainly on page one, the idea is to put you and what you do to help people in front of the people who have a problem right now and are searching for the solution to that problem. So that’s good basic marketing right there. The issue with SEO is that it’s very big and it’s a very, very technical subject. So to answer this question, yes, you should be doing some SEO, but I don’t believe it’s an early priority. I think you’ll get faster leads from working my three-step marketing system in the sort of the first few years of your business. And that three-step system is to build multiple audiences like LinkedIn and your email database, then build a relationship with them using content marketing, and then convert the relationship using outbound phone calls to find people who are ready to switch MSPs.

So I believe you should think of SEO as something you do as your business matures. And the next question then is how do you do that? And there are lots of things that you can do yourself. You can improve your Google business profile. You can use tools like SEM Rush or other tools to see what your website’s SEO problems are. You can create original content and stuff like that. Now, the issue really is that most MSPs just don’t get round to doing these things. So maybe the answer there is to find someone you trust who can do these things for you. Just be aware that tackling all of your SEO issues, it is going to take time. It is going to take some money, it’s a bit of a resource suck. There’s no other way of getting around that. Now listen, if you’ve got a question about anything in your MSP that you’d like help with, just go to the contactPage@mspmarketingedge.com. And while you are there, if you’d love to attract new, better, higher quality 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.

Thanks for your ears this week. Now next week, how to make more money selling cybersecurity in the most authentic way.

Episode 240: MSPs: How to reach hot prospects other MSPs can’t

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Full show transcription

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