Episode 241: Should your MSP have a presence on Reddit or X?

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This is a transcription for episode 241 of Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast: ‘Should your MSP have a presence on Reddit or X?’

Full show transcription

This is the podcast ambitious MSPs listen to every week to immerse themselves in growing their business. Here are today’s big things. Should your MSP have a presence on Reddit or X, why you can’t fly with average staff and my guest will tell you how to make more money selling security in the most authentic way. Welcome to episode 2 4 1.

Should your MSP have a presence on TikTok, Instagram, Threads, Twitter X, all of those other platforms? Well, I have a definitive answer for each one, and most of them I’m going to tell you, it’s a big fat no. So to all of those social media platforms, should you be on them? Well, the short answer to this is nope. But the longer answer is it’s a very common question for me that I get from MSPs. People say, Hey Paul, should I be on insert platform here? And often I’ll get a flurry of people asking this when a new platform launches. Do you remember from a couple of years ago, do you remember Clubhouse, which was like the audio only one. And then there was BeReal as well, which came out a few years back. My daughter still uses BeReal, me haven’t touched it for two years, but this last year or so, it has of course been questions about Twitter.

Once Elon Musk bought it and then destroyed 17 years of brand equity by renaming it to X. And also then of course there was Threads, which was the Twitter replacement launched by Meta that’s linked to Instagram and then was it Mastodons? That’s the other one as well, which is the decentralized version of Twitter. My answer to most of these platforms is very, very simple. The answer is this, it’s don’t worry too much about them. Stay focused on LinkedIn as your MSP’s main social media platform and why? Because that’s where you are most likely to meet the business owner and the manager. These are the decision makers that you most want to reach. Now, don’t get me wrong, some of the other mainstream social media platforms, they do have a value, especially Facebook. Facebook is like the universal platform, and that makes it useful for reaching decision makers in their downtime.

And you can also use Facebook really well for remarketing adverts. Now, remarketing is where you show an advert to people who’ve already visited your website, but assuming that you don’t have a huge marketing resource, the more you stretch yourself across multiple platforms, sometimes the less impact that you’ll make. And you want to be a laser and not a flashlight, not a torch. So here are the top social media platforms, excluding those intended primarily for messaging. So I’m excluding WhatsApp, messenger, telegram, and here’s my view on the marketing usefulness of each one. Let’s start with LinkedIn. So as I said, this should be your MSP’s main social media platform. Use your personal profile and not a business page and set up a system to attempt 10 or more connection requests a day. And then every day add one new piece of comments. You should also comment on other people’s posts every day and on a weekly basis, do a LinkedIn newsletter.

There you are really maxing out LinkedIn. Next up is Facebook. If you are going to embrace a second platform, do make it Facebook and again, use a personal profile rather than a business page, which are more or less dead these days on Facebook anyway. Now on Facebook, your content needs to be more personal than business or tech related. Next up is Instagram from Meta. The same company that owns Facebook, and you’d use Instagram to reach consumer focused businesses that use it for their own marketing, such as retail and hospitality. So we’re talking like restaurants, hotels, shops, that kind of thing. Why? Because the decision makers of those types of businesses are likely to be the ones using Instagram for their own marketing. So they’re much more likely to see your stuff on Instagram. Next up, we’ve got X or Twitter. You use this only if you are passionate about it or if you’re targeting a vertical that famously uses Twitter X very heavily.

Next up is TikTok. I would ignore this one. The audience you want to reach mostly doesn’t use it. And also as I’m recording this episode in early May, 2024, there is of course a lot of talk about TikTok being banned in the us. So it’d be interesting to see what’s happened at the point that this episode is actually broadcast in late June. Threads is the next one. So Instagram, I mentioned Instagram earlier and Threads is just a version of Instagram. Again, I would use Threads if you want to reach the kind of businesses that use Threads, but are retail businesses, are hospitality businesses using Threads? Do a bit of research on that in your area before you throw yourself into it. Next up is Reddit. Reddit is the wild west. Have you ever been onto the Reddit MSP page? It’s fascinating how I think because people can just hide behind a handle and they’re completely anonymous.

There are some very aggressive people on Reddit. So you use Reddit only if you are very passionate about it or if you’re targeting a vertical that uses Reddit heavily. Discord is another one, a bit of a messaging platform, but it is a social platform as well. I believe you can ignore this. Mostly the audience you want to reach mostly doesn’t use Discord. The same with Pinterest. You can ignore this as well because again, the audience you want to reach mostly doesn’t use it. Exactly the same with Tumblr. Do you remember Tumblr? Not many people do. Since you are who got hold of it, you can ignore it. And any other platform that I haven’t mentioned there, the chances are high that you can ignore it unless the specific audience that you want to use uses that platform. Have I missed any? Drop me an email and let me know.

Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast still to come. Of course, you want to sell more security, but you also want to do it in the most authentic way. My guest on today’s show will tell you exactly how to do this that’s coming up in the next five minutes.

One of the biggest headaches for MSPs is getting the right staff. We can’t fly without them, and actually if we get the wrong staff, it will place a huge ceiling on the altitude that you can achieve. Let’s talk about finding and keeping the right people. 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 @mspmarketingedge.com.

Now, I don’t think I’ve ever met a business owner who would prefer to clone themselves rather than have to rely on staff. I’m kind of not joking actually, because when you first take on staff, when you’re in your, I dunno, your first few years in business, you realize that hiring someone for 40 hours a week doesn’t actually create 40 extra hours in the business.

You’re kind of lucky to add an extra 30 hours and at the same time, your own personal workload goes up as you have to support this new member of staff. How is this the case? Because cloning technology doesn’t exist yet. We do have to rely on staff. And the only way to grow a great business that thrives regardless of whether you personally are there or not, is to hire great staff. But I keep seeing again and again and again, MSPs hiring average staff. In fact, they hire BTE or worse C team players, but they still expect a team performance from them, which is nuts, right? But loads of people do it. And I know exactly why this happens when it’s just you and maybe two or three staff in the business, you are always playing a game of catch up. So you’ve got work that needs to be done and not quite enough resources to do it.

And the easy answer for this is for you to do more hours, right? I’m sure this is something you either remember or a situation that you’re in right now. And the problem is that this puts more and more pressure on your personal time. And at the same time, you are becoming increasingly dissatisfied with your business because maybe you see the standards slipping around you or maybe your personal income goes down. There’s nothing worse than seeing the business seem to be doing a worse job and you getting paid less for that while working more. I mean, this is literally a nightmare, right? And everyone goes through this stage, and when you are in the middle of that, at the point there where suddenly you have the cash to afford a new member of the team for whatever reason, the pressure is on you at that point to get the right person as quickly as you can.

And there lies the crux of the problem. Too many MSPs hire really quickly and fire way too slowly, which is the complete opposite of what it should be, but you could understand why it’s done that way. I’ve done it, you’ve probably done it. If you haven’t, then you will at some point. If you have a problem today and you need someone to fix that problem, ASAP, you hire the first half decent person that comes along, we’ve all done it and for the first few months, that’s great, right? Because the problem with hiring that person quickly for that short-term problem, the problem with that really crops up in the long-term. Someone who fixes a short-term problem for you today probably will limit the altitude that you can reach in the future. And I’m afraid that you’re not going to like the answer I’m going to suggest to this because the answer is actually to slow down the hiring and stop hiring people for fixing short-term problems, only hiring people to achieve the long-term goals that you are trying to achieve.

And even if there’s like two of you in the business right now, you still slow it all down and you stop hiring for short-term problems only for long-term goals. So practically, how do you actually do this? Well, my suggestion is when you have a short-term problem, you use short-term resources to fix that problem. So that might mean hiring in freelancers or consultants or just taking on people on short-term contracts, contractors essentially. I know that there is a real issue getting hold of good people, especially good technicians, but there are lots of good IT people out there. There are some who are working full-time but would like a little bit of extra work in the evenings and the weekends and maybe some of the work that you’ve got, some of the problems, the short-term problems that need to be done, maybe they can be dealt with by someone in their spare time.

What if someone was to do your proactive checks at six in the morning before they go off to work at eight in the morning? Maybe that’s a very doable thing. Looking outside of technical work, the admin or marketing work is especially easy to find contractors or part-time people, freelancers to help you. There are literally hundreds of thousands of people out there who would love a little bit of extra work, and you could say you could take on a freelancer, a part-time or a short-term person just to help you with that. The goal with gaining some immediate short-term help that you’re not long-term committed to is to take the immediate pressure off you so you can get this short-term problem fixed, the short-term work done, fix all of those problems. But then when you’re hiring full-time staff, you can be completely focused on the long-term goals of the business.

Which means when you’re hiring someone, you can look ahead a few years, you can ask yourself, what kind of business are we going to be in a few years time? What would we like to be? What kind of clients would we like to serve? What kind of operations would we like to have? What do I as the owner want to do with my time in the future? And if I’m doing all of that stuff, what gaps does that leave for someone else to fill in? Now, this is strategic hiring, and once you’re past your first two to three staff, it’s the only way you can grow your business. You figure out where you want to go, and you hire people for the problems that you think you’re going to have in the future and not the problems that you are facing. Now, as I said earlier, I know this isn’t what you want to hear, and I know right now your arms might be folded and you might be thinking, this is really, really difficult, Paul. But here’s the thing, I promise you this is the only way to grow your business with the right staff, the A team players. Do you want to be surrounding yourself with 18 players who are empowered to go off and do 18 work in the future and free you from all the problems of your business? Yes, of course you do. And the bonus of this is it requires in the long term less of your personal time, the businesses run better, it keeps its clients happier, and ultimately it makes a ton more profit.

Paul Green’s MSP marketing podcast still to come.

Do you have a contact us form on your website and have you ever wondered why no one ever fills it in? Well, there’s a really good answer to this and I’ll tell you what that is in the next five minutes. Plus what you should have on your contact us page, that’s even better than a contact form.

It’s the biggest fear MSPs have when selling security that you come across as a salesperson rather than as a genuine expert who’s trying to help your clients to help themselves. You and I know how necessary high levels of cybersecurity are, but ordinary business owners and managers don’t. My guest today is going to talk about how to sell more cybersecurity without using fud, fear, uncertainty, and doubt. He’s going to talk about the simple method to make security relevant to people who don’t understand or care about it and why you should never ever let an end customer opt out of your cybersecurity stack. Today’s big interview is with an expert. He’ll tell you how to make more money selling security in the most authentic way.

My name is Michael Crane and I’m the senior Vice President of Managed Security Services at SonicWall.

Thank you for joining us on this podcast, Michael. And the subject we really want to drill into and get inside your head is how MSPs can sell more cybersecurity, but in a very authentic way. And in fact, I think those two things go hand in hand. If you can sell more cybersecurity services and make more money at the same time as protecting your customers, that’s got to be a very, very good thing. So tell us about you. What’s your background and how did you end up at SonicWall?

So I was the owner and founder of a company called Solutions. Granted, started that company about 22 years ago, shortly after nine years of military service, and went through a change or be changed moment. Went from being a VAR to being an MSP. Waking up one morning realizing I was a terrible MSP in my bedside manner, just wasn’t what it probably needed to be when people were feeling that crisis of I can’t print, decided that I wanted to be more of a cybersecurity focused. And then really realized that MSP struggled with delivering cybersecurity services, and about nine years ago decided, Hey, I’m going to build my own channel. I’m going to be focused on helping protect those that are protecting others. And now we fast forward to November of last year and my company was acquired by SonicWall.

Amazing. Well, congratulations and well done on that acquisition. I imagine that must have been, I mean, it’s a hell of a thing, isn’t it, to sell a business in the first place, but to go through that entire journey of transforming and then selling like that is fantastic. I mean, cybersecurity to me as, and obviously I’m a vendor in the MSP space, but a vendor in marketing where although things change often they don’t change as fast as they do for cybersecurity. What kind of, if you look at your journey over those nine years, what were the biggest changes that you noticed along the way in terms of you helping MSPs to protect other people?

I think a lot of it, it was just around educating MSPs what was the right thing to do for the right reason. Again, this is an idea of not just selling something for the sake of selling something, but selling it because it had purpose in design and capability to make a change in somebody’s lives. I’ve got this journey of this nine years of military service and knowing what true life and death can look like, and we’re not saving lives, but we are saving livelihoods, and we have to remember that this is a really critical, important part of that journey, and giving MSPs hope that they can be something greater than Jim just sell, and giving them this almost organic growth, if you will, of having these subject matter experts that could be standing behind them to when something goes bump in the middle of the night, that somebody’s there to see it and respond to it and take quick, decisive action to save it.

Save it. Yeah, absolutely. When you are talking to MSPs about how they educate their customers, and let’s be honest, we all know that the average business owner and manager is very, very unaware of cybersecurity. They have no idea how terrifying it is. So when you are talking to MSPs about how they educate, how do you do that? Avoiding the FUD approach, fud of course, being fear, uncertainty and doubt?

Well, I think first and foremost, it’s all about using analogies that make sense in people’s lives, and you talk about the proactive and preventative services that they now have in their cars. We don’t have anti-lock brakes in our cars because there was fear. It was about making it better, making it more sustainable, the automatic braking systems. We have better home security in our homes today than we had 50 years ago. So using some of those ideas of how we live our everyday lives and taking that and turning it into a story that helps them sell cybersecurity, and even just taking the fear away, but giving them the reality of cybersecurity crimes now outpace physical crimes, and we’re talking about centuries of physical crime that’s going on, and cybersecurity has only been happening for a couple of decades. So bringing that realization around is that somebody can get to you from anywhere and we don’t turn these things off anymore.

Yeah, no, that’s very true. So let me give you a scenario. Let’s say you had a crazy moment and you decided tomorrow to quit SonicWall and you started up your own MSP because you decided you wanted to do it all over again. What would your approach be to educate, I mean, I’m talking specifics here. So how exactly would you talk to customers? You’ve given us the analogy route, which I agree with, I think it’s a great thing to do, but how would you have those conversations? How would you help them realize that they need to invest more and more of their hard earned dollars into the cybersecurity solutions that you offer?

Mean first I’d look to it just like insurance. You’re not buying insurance for the, if you’re buying the insurance for when, and that’s what cybersecurity is. When you invest in this, you’re investing in the protection of your data, this hard earned, almost untangible piece of information that you’ve created, that if somebody takes it from you, it could be devastating to your business. And I’m selling you insurance. We’re going to do everything that we can with your help. You have to participate in this. You go to your doctor and you tell your doctor, my knee hurts. And the doctor says, great. I can see why your knee’s hurting, but here’s what I need you to do. I need you to participate in this journey with me. I need you to lose a few pounds. I need you to stop drinking as much bourbon and maybe eat a little bit less red meat and go out for a walk 10 minutes of every day, and then I’m going to do surgery on you, and it’s all going to be great.

It’s all going to be good. I’m going to tell that story. That’s what I want them to do. I want them to be a part of this ownership. I want them to feel their sense of urgency. I don’t want them to feel the pain, but I want them to feel that the pain is avoidable if we do the right things. Now, nothing is a hundred percent, nothing is bulletproof, nothing is perfect. But if we do all of the right things and the bear is chasing a hundred of us and we’re just a few steps ahead of the 98 that aren’t doing the right things, well, maybe we could continue to live and fight another day.

Yeah, I love that. And so essentially, you’re looking at it from a partnership point of view, and because the word partner is probably the most abused word in the channel, all vendors call their MSP clients partners, and they’re not partners. To be a partner with someone is, as you say, the two of you are working together towards a specific outcome. And I think using a doctor analogy is a great way of doing that. So you’ve got your own MSP, then you’ve got the insurance, the preventative approach. When you’ve got clients who say to you, oh, thanks very much for educating me about all of this cybersecurity stuff, but I don’t think we need it. Thanks. How would you deal with them? Or actually, would you never get into a situation where they’re allowed to opt out of sensible cybersecurity solutions?

So I think in my first journey of my business, I would’ve done everything possibly imaginable to keep the lights on, and I would’ve allowed them to opt out. But the threat landscape 22 years ago isn’t what it is today. It’s gotten faster, it’s gotten harder, it’s gotten dirtier. It’s gotten much easier for all of these things to take place. So I would not give them the option to opt out anymore. For me, the thing that I’ve appreciated that I’ve gotten a little bit older, and I’ve come around the sun a few more times. When I find somebody who is incredibly passionate about what they’re doing and they inspire me for change, I want to follow them. I want to be a part of that journey. And I think that’s what me as an MSP, if I’m doing this all over again, I have to inspire people.

I have to make sure that they’re not hearing me selling them for the sake of selling them, but they know that I am all in with this. And for me to be successful with them, they’ve got to be a part of my team. And there’s also just too much litigation that’s happening out there, and now you’re starting to see customers that are suing MSPs because they didn’t effectively educate them enough. Well, I’m going to educate you to the point of hopefully that you can come along the journey. We can meet in the middle or I’m going to tell you, I’m sorry. You’re not going to be a client for me.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Final question for you, Michael, which is to look into the future. So obviously you’ve spent nine years building up your own cybersecurity company, you’re now part of SonicWall, so you must spend a lot of time seeing the predictions and seeing the trends and how things are going. If you were to look forward, I guess even just five years would be a very, very far off time in terms of cybersecurity, how do you think that the threats are going to evolve, and how do you think that the solutions that the protection is going to evolve?

Well, my hope is that we as a community start to come together because right now, I believe part of the reason we’re losing the fight is because we’re not doing the basics that are necessary. We still see so many people that are not enabling MFA. We see so many people that are not enabling conditional access with 80% of the compromises that are happening in those cloud-based Microsoft 365 Google Workspace, not their fault. This is the configuration problem. This is not a platform problem. I don’t know what we’re going to be doing five years from now because we’ve had 10 years to talk about MFA and what about 34, 35, 30 6% of users in the Microsoft ecosystem are using MFA today? That’s a sad number. 10 years later, I think we are getting much closer to a passwordless society, and I think that’s going to be a huge beneficial change to all of us because, and the amount of passwords that I have to remember now, and thank goodness for a password manager, because if I didn’t have it, I’d be a hot mess and I’d be duplicating passwords and be my own worst enemy. Five years from now, I don’t know that anybody has that answer. AI won’t be called AI anymore. It’ll just be a standard way of doing business, and people are stopped using it as a marketing term, and it’ll become more normal in our everyday life.

Michael, thank you. Let’s just finish by hearing a little bit about SonicWall and tell us what’s the best way for any MSP listening or watching this. What’s the best way for them to get in touch with you?

Well, I think most MSPs know Sonic Well’s, this 33-year-old firewall manufacturer, and they have been around and dedicated to the channel for those existence of 33 years. But this isn’t your dad’s sonic well anymore. We are changing and we’re changing quickly with the acquisition of solutions. Granted, the company that I owned and founded, we now have a 24 7 security operations center that we’re providing threat hunters and all of the protective and preventative services that MSPs could need on a consumption basis this month to month. No annual commit, no minimum basis. We’re expanding across the globe. We’re building out our second security operations center in Europe to be able to meet those partners and help them and their clients where they are. So as you think about us and you think about the journey that you’re on, don’t think about us for the firewalls that we make, although we still make them and they’re fantastic and they’re great and they’re still good to use.

Think about us for all of the other cybersecurity services and offerings that we can bring to the table, that we can help you and your clients sleep peacefully at night. And if you want to, you can reach out to us at our webpage @www.sonicwell.com if you want to look for me on LinkedIn and drop me a note. Always like chatting with new MSPs, just hearing their struggles and their journeys, maybe providing a few words of wisdom, whether it’s around owning a business, fighting the HR fight, figuring out what the light at the end of the tunnel is, and hopefully it’s not a train and being a part of any successful journey that I can maybe touch the lives and just assist in one little way.

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

There’s no marketing question that I can’t answer for you, and I’ll tell you how to submit yours in a second. Producer, James, what have we got this week?

Thanks, Paul. Well, this week, Graham, who owns an MSP in Canada, thinks he has an impossible question for you. He’s really stuck on this. He’s been asking all of his peers and gets conflicting advice. His question is, should I use a contact form on my website or give an email address instead?

That is a great question and not one that many people ask. There are problems with both contact forms and email addresses on a website. The biggest issue with a contact form is that people fill it in and they wonder whether or not you’ve received it. Yes, even in 2024, they think that, in fact, how many times have you filled in a contact form on someone’s website and they’ve never got back to you? It’s kind of the same when you send an email. So it’s psychologically better to send an email. You feel more in control, but there’s still that question of, will this person get the email? Will they get back to me? You see, at the point that someone fills in a form or sends an email, they are ready or nearly ready to take action on their problem. So in terms of what you sell, their problem is, of course, they’re either fed up of their incumbent MSP or they have a technical problem that they want to solve.

Yeah, I know if it’s super, super urgent, they’ll pick up the phone and call you. But again, it is 2024 and people prefer not picking up the phone, right? They want a live chat with you or video call you. So here’s what I think you should do. You should offer every possible way of contacting you on your website. If you can do live chat and have it live at reasonable hours, say, I dunno, eight in the morning till 10 at night, then do that. But don’t stress yourself too much if that’s a stretch. But you certainly have on your website a contact form. You have an email address. Of course you have your phone number and put it on your contact us page, and also at the top right hand corner of the website. But then the number one best contact method you can use is to put your live calendar on the site.

So if someone’s on your website, let’s say at two in the morning, they can’t sleep at that point, they can book an appointment with you for the next day or the day after or whenever, when they know that they are free. And of course they know that you are free because they’ve got your live calendar. Live calendar is just beautiful. But generally, the more contact methods, the better so that people can pick the one that’s right for them at that very specific moment. If you’ve got a question about anything in your MSP that you’d like some help with, just go to the contact page @mspmarketingedge.com. While you are there, if you’d love to attract new, better clients into your MSP, you 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. Why doing tactical marketing instead of strategic marketing can be an insanely dangerous thing to do

For MSPs around the world. The MSP Marketing podcast with Paul Green.

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Full show transcription

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