Episode 245: You sure that prospect's a great fit for your MSP?

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge

This is a transcription for episode 245 of Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast: ‘You sure that prospect’s a great fit for your MSP?’.

Full show transcription

A great writer once said that great technology is indistinguishable from magic. So welcome to the podcast for magic service providers.

And we’ve got plenty of magic for you this week. Here are today’s big things: Five ways to measure whether or not your hot prospect is a great fit. A new lead isn’t just for today, it has tons of value until one of three things happens. And my guest expert reveals why you must only chase fish that are big enough for dinner, which means letting the tiny fish escape. Sounds good. Welcome to episode 2 4 5.

So you generated a new lead that’s quickly turned into a prospect, but are they a super hot prospect that makes you salivate just at the thought of working with them? Let’s discuss five ways to measure whether or not your new prospect is a great fit for your MSP. Not all prospects are born equal. In fact, I’m very much a fan of not taking on board a client and even firing an existing client if they don’t fit well with you and your team and your business because frankly, life is too short to be dealing with idiots. And I’m very lucky that the vast, vast majority of our MSP marketing Edge members, they’re great people who are there to grow their business and they work with us on this, but once or twice a year, someone behaves in a way which is not acceptable, such as being rude to my staff or degrading the value of our community rather than adding to it.

And I have no hesitation from freeing that person from what we’re doing i.e. firing a client. And I hope that you do the same because it’s one of the best ways to bond with your staff and also to show your best clients who, let’s be honest, they’re the majority that you respect them and that you are here to serve them so long as they’re willing to work with you anyway. You can get yourself to a position of never really having to actually fire a client if you assess their suitability and fit for your MSP before you even engage with them. Here are five ways to measure whether or not your hot prospect is a great fit. Number one, they understand the value of what you do. Now we talk a lot on this podcast about how ordinary business owners and managers do not really understand technology and to a certain extent, they don’t care.

They want the outcomes and they just want everything to work. And the best clients understand that you are not just being paid to fix things or to maintain stuff that’s a caretaking job. The best clients see a value in what you do. They understand that they’re investing in their business, which leads to number two, they have a willingness to do what you’ve asked them to do. In fact, these two go hand in hand. Clients are less willing to follow your guidance and instructions and strategic advice if they don’t understand the value that you bring to their business. And I would without these two, they’d make terrible clients. Now, don’t get me wrong. We all in our business careers at some point take clients just for the cash because we have bills to pay and staff who get upset if we don’t kind of help them pay their own mortgage.

But to really grow your business, you have to be ultra focused on the very, very best clients and for what you do, that means people who want you and are willing to listen to you. There’s a third aspect to this, which is that they’re happy to pay a good price for the service you deliver. And again, this links in very nicely to the first two. If someone says you’re expensive, they don’t see the value. In fact, this is one of the most common sales objections, isn’t it? And it shows that you haven’t done a great job of demonstrating how you help them to grow their business. The best clients pay the bills without querying them because they understand the value and they understand that high quality does not come by paying peanuts. They also understand that costs go up every year and so your prices will go up too.

In fact, one way to ensure you get clients who understand this is to ask them how often they put up their own prices. The fourth way to measure whether or not they’re a good fit for you is how they’re going to use technology as a business. How reliant are they on technology? If you take away their ability to work on computers, can the business continue? I mean, very few businesses can these days, but some businesses are more impacted than others. You want a client where technology is at the very heart of what they do because if they understand that, then they’ll be willing to invest in you and hardware and software and projects in order to leverage technology and grow the business. Have you noticed how often I’ve said that about the best clients using you to grow the business? You do realize, don’t you, that the best MSPs position themselves as their to help people grow the business and not just give strategic technology advice or just do it work.

It’s 2024 and most businesses should be using technology as a growth lever. That’s the kind of client you want Anyway, the fifth and final one of these is one that’s going to make you chuckle. They pay their bills on time. At the end of the day, we we’re running a business here, right? And cash is king. If your client respects you and values what you do, they’ll pay you on time. If they don’t, then they’re devaluing your relationship. I don’t believe that’s acceptable, do you? So those are five ways to measure whether or not your hot prospect is a great fit. And I’m sure you’ve got more, haven’t you? Why not drop me an email and let you know? You can email me from the contact us page at mspmarketingedge.com and it’s the real me at the other end. I also reply to every single email that I get.

Paul Green’s MSP marketing podcast. Still to come…

Have you thought about hiring an operations person in order to free up you the owner of the business to focus on the big picture? Well, it’s something you might actually be scared of doing, but my guest today says it’s something you have to do if you want to get big growth going in your MSP. My interview with him is coming up in the next five minutes.

You’d be surprised how many MSPs miss out on new clients because they never follow up with leads. Let’s talk about a follow-up system that you can use. Hey, I’m Paul Green from the MSP Marketing Edge, the leading white label content marketing system that’s trusted by over 700 MSPs around the world. Check if your area is available now at mspmarketingedge.com.

Now, I know that lead generation is the hardest thing for many MSPs, but you make it harder on yourself by treating your leads as if they were single use plastic.

Let’s say you generate a new lead today and then you get them on the phone and you realize to your utter delight that they’re not just a lead, they’re a hot prospect and side notes to define my terms. This is the journey that business owners and managers go through. So they start as a suspect knowing they want a new MSP, but not knowing anything about who’s out there. And then once you know about them and they’re in one of your audiences such as connected to you on LinkedIn or in your email database or something, that’s when they become a lead. But only once they’re ready to talk about potentially buying from you, do they become a prospect. And then once you’ve qualified them as the kind of business you’d like as a client, they become an opportunity. And obviously from there they go on to become a client.

Happy days, right? Better still by the way, when they’ve stayed a few years and they love your service so much, they would never leave. That’s what we call a bonded client. Anyway, back to what we were talking about. So you talk to this prospect and at the start of the call you are really excited. They’ve got like 30 users. Technology is core to their business and you have experience in their sector as well. But the more you talk, the more your enthusiasm drops because they’ve got a current MSP, they’re not happy with them, but they’re not desperately unhappy either. They’re just seeing who’s out there. They say that they’ll probably sign one final annual contract with their current MSP. So you end the call by promising that you are going to call them back in a year’s time. Now, you’d be surprised and actually terrified how many MSPs would never make that call.

Some forget because they don’t have a sales system to remind them, a few know to make the call but never get round to it or they think I won’t chase them. They’ll call me if they’re interested. And all of these things, they just make my brain explode with utter disbelief. Every MSP that acts in this way has serious follow up failure and then they’re treating valuable expensive leads as if they were disposable and time limited, but they’re not. Leads don’t last forever, but they do last a thousand times longer than you’d think. In my last business, which was a healthcare marketing agency, one of the final clients I onboarded in 2016 just before I exited actually it was a lead. We’d been following up for nearly a decade, I’m not kidding, 10 years. And I wasn’t paying them special attention. They were just one of 12,000 leads who were constantly getting follow-ups from my team.

It’s just that it took many, many winters before the timing was right for them. Here’s my attitude towards following up leads, and it’s a great attitude to embed into your MSP. You follow up the leads until they buy die or say bye-bye. And I’m not joking. I’m really not because you can’t hope that your leads will remember you at the exact moment that they’re ready to switch MSPs you are not and never will be top of their mind. They can’t remember your MSP’s name or your name even thinking about it. And that’s why you have to do the hard work and follow them up repeatedly. And this is not pestering them. If they don’t want to hear from you, they’ll unsubscribe or they’ll block your number or something and only a tiny number of people will do this. So here are some practical ways to put in place a permanent follow-up system for every lead that you generate.

You should connect with them on LinkedIn and make sure you post content every day and reply to comments. You should go into their LinkedIn feed now and then to comment on their posts. If of course you have something valuable to add when you come across some of the content that might be of interest to them, perhaps content you’ve seen elsewhere, direct message it to them or for greater impact, this is cool, print it off and mail it to them with a short covering note that will have massive impact. You should add them to your email database and send them an educational and entertaining email once a week. Also, you should add them to your snail mail database and send them a physical printed newsletter once a month and then run a marketing campaign once or twice a year on a theme such as email security, mail them a postcard, send related emails and make a follow-up phone call.

Also, you should pick up the phone every six months just to chew the fat with them for a few minutes. Ask open questions and be really interested in their favorite subjects themselves and their business. And don’t be afraid to ask, is this the right time for us to meet? If they say call in September, then make sure you do and text them if they don’t answer. Something else you can do is you should put on lunch or learns and other events and invite them. And webinars are okay. Real life events though are dynamite and seek them out at networking events and make sure to say hello, remind them who you are as they won’t remember and give them another business card, even if it’s the 200th card that you’ve given them and the final idea, send them a Christmas card in March because that’s a way to make you stand out doing something that no one else is doing at that time. Sending a Christmas card at Christmas just makes you part of the noise. So tell me, what are the best things that you’ve ever done to follow up leads?

Paul Green’s MSP marketing podcast. Still to come…

Are you thinking of outsourcing your help desk overseas but you’re concerned what you should tell your clients? Well that’s a question I’ve received from an MSP who listens to this podcast and I’m going to give my answer in the next five minutes.

If you own your MSP and you are just crazy busy all the time trying to grow the business while keeping the clients happy, retaining your best staff and remembering to go home now and again, you’ll know that it’s a constant juggling act. And once you get past your first four or five staff, you might have the resources to hire an operations person now they would take up the day-to-day, attention to details, freeing you to look at the bigger picture of growing your business. Is this something you’d consider doing? Maybe you are worried about giving so much responsibility to someone you haven’t met yet. My expert guest today will tell you how an operations director frees the leader of the business to see the big picture and take more holidays, or vacations. Looking at marketing, he reveals why you must build relationships with prospects before trying to sell them anything and looking at sales while you must only chase fish that are big enough for dinner and let the tiny fish escape. Today’s big interview is all about the mindset needed to grow your MSP.

Hi, I’m Damien Harrison, I’m the director of operations at Bondgate IT.

And thank you so much for joining us Damien, it’s great to have you on the show. And we are going to talk today about why you need to spend more time nurturing relationships and building up some trust with people before you ask them to buy from you. It’s a classic mistake that many MSPs make with their marketing and with their sales. We’re going to explore why MSPs do that and some better ways of doing it. Let’s first of all learn about you. So tell us a little bit about your career and how you’ve come to do what you do now.

My career’s been incredibly varied. So I’ve worked in several different verticals, really several different industries from education to healthcare. I started off probably around about 2002 working for a claims company as kind of an IT engineer, but gave me a badges IT manager because there was only me and slowly progressed from then to education and then I moved up to northeast of England and a couple of rocky jobs here and there, try to find my feet and ended up working for the NHS for several years from there. Started working for a national charity as IT manager and the head of IT eventually. And I came across Gary Brown, the MD of Bondgate IT. And I thought that was probably a really good step for my career and here I am almost five years down the line.

Fantastic. And for those outside the UK that don’t know, the NHS is our national health service because here in the UK anyone gets free healthcare at any stage, which is great in principle. It has a few issues as you can imagine after about 70 years doing that. But you’ve had lots and lots of different jobs there and now you are, I think you said you were head of operations for the MSP that you work for.

Director of Operations.

Okay, director of operations. So that’s not a job title I hear very often. So what’s a practical example of what you do on a day-to-day basis? So for example, compared to someone that’s like a help desk director or help desk manager, how does your job differ?

I get involved every aspect of a business. I’m kind of the MDs I’d say right hand man. So anything that needs doing around of business kind of ends up with me eventually. So it means I get to see all aspects of I’ll call customer journey. So from the sales through to the support through to projects all the way through to billing. And then I get to see kind of stuff from the board level as well. So I get to see what impact we’re having for the business, but also what impact we’re having on the customers.

And it’s really interesting because before I started my first business in 2005, I worked for a couple of big companies, a lot of big companies, thousands of employees. They had boards and they always had operations directors as well. And these were media companies. But it was interesting how the operations people were the ones that actually ran the business, whereas the CEO was the one that obviously set the direction and set the strategy but didn’t actually run the business day to day. Is that the kind of thing that you are involved in? And if that’s the case, what’s the benefit to the MSP of you working in that way?

Yeah, it is kind of what I am involved in. It gives another hand to help the MD kind of run the business. He’s not always able to be involved in every aspect of the business and the reality is he should be able to focus on where his strengths are. Gary’s strengths, I don’t think you’ll might be saying are dealing with customers. He’s very strategic. He works at kind of a board level when dealing with some of the larger customers we work with, which means he doesn’t always have the time to look at the nitty gritty of a business. So how the support team’s handling stuff that’s been passed in by the sales team and how the project team are handling stuff that’s been passed from the support team and vice versa. It allows an extra couple of eyes on the business and it allows us to challenge fairly and be a bit more present in the business on a day-to-day basis.

And also you are allowing him to take more holidays, which I’m sure is great for Gary.

I’m pretty sure he appreciates that as well.

Who wouldn’t? Who wouldn’t? So obviously as an IT person, you are now involved in every aspect of the business as the typical MSP owner would be. Yours is obviously a much bigger business, you’re overseeing a lot more activity. And one of the interesting things that you said to me just earlier, what you said earlier was that you oversee from where you go talking to new customers or prospects right through to how you actually deliver to them. What are some of the most interesting things that you’ve learned over the last few years as you’ve gone from being, if you like, just an IT person looking at actually, hey, how do we deliver and how do we satisfy and meet the expectations of these customers?

Probably the most eye-opening thing for me over the last five years working at Bondgate is the many levels of that journey for the customer. It’s easy when you sat on the receiving end of an MSP, so you’re there as a customer and you might not be happy with the support you’re receiving or you might be looking at the price going, I’m not paying that. But there’s so many different cogs and wheels that are spinning to deliver that customer experience. And there’s so many different handoffs that need to happen at the right time at the right place. It’s very much like a factory, isn’t it? It’s as a piece of work comes onto a table, it moves across the factory and it moves across a conveyor belt and if one piece of that conveyor belt’s not working at the right pace, at the right speed, the customer journey is really impacted. So you’ve got to focus equally on every little aspect of that journey for that customer. And you don’t always see that when you’re sat within just the technical support area or within just within the sales or the projects areas.

So I can imagine it must be a massive benefit for you just having this oversight of all the cogs in the machine. Now let’s talk about sales and in particular building relationships with prospects before you actually ask ’em to spend money with you. So why do you think most MSPs are particularly bad at this? Damien?

It’s probably time and understanding of how you go about building them relationships. Like I say, I’ve sat on the opposite side of the table where people have been trying to sell to me and you’ve got your quotas to me and you’re not going to be able to invest that time and energy into chasing every little fish down the stream by trying to chase every fish. You’re watering down kind of the quality of what you are building. People have got to know you. I’m a big believer that if people don’t know you, then the chance of them buying from you, it’s not going to happen or is very, very limited as to how it’s going to happen. If people don’t know you, they’re very much not likely they’re going to trust you. And if they don’t trust you, the chance of them buying from you again really diminish quite quickly.

So you’ve got to spend that time getting to know people and letting people know you. I think a lot of the time when I see marketing from MSPs, it’s very much focused on look at these shiny products that we can sell rather than look at us as a business, look at our personalities, look at our individuals and our humans, look at how we deal with each other in the office, but also how we deal with our customers. I think that makes a huge amount of difference. The more time an organization, an individual spends on the human aspect, I think the more successful you tend to be at not only business but at life as well.

Yes, I completely agree with you and I’ve got two specific follow-up questions to that. The first of them is about the size of the fish. So you were saying you don’t go after minnows, which may be a uniquely British word for very small fish, but that kind of makes sense that you just go after the size of fish that the business most wants. Is it very hard for you as an organization to say no to a customer because they haven’t got enough users or they’re not willing to commit to a minimum spend each month?

It’s always incredibly hard, isn’t it? You’ve got your growth targets as a business and when someone comes knocking, it’s very easy to get really excited that someone wants to spend money with us. But it can be a distraction, it can be a real distraction if that business isn’t the right business, if they’re not wanting to be a partner with you. It’s all right on a transactional basis, people spending money day in, day out. But the MSP industry, for me, it is not that it’s not transactional business, it’s got to work in a partnership where the MSP and the client are both helping each other reach their calls and reach their targets. It’s very easy to get distracted with chasing something that’s not right.

Yes, I can understand that. And the second follow up question is about how you build those relationships. So without giving away any secret source from your business, give us some examples of how you and your team build relationships with prospects before you ask them to get into a monthly recurring revenue contract with you.

The easiest way we’ve found is by attending networking events. So if it’s people like you reaching locally, attending the same network events that they go to, and it’s about being that consistent approach, it’s you can’t attend one networking event and suddenly send out your sales brochure to everyone that was there. You’ve got to attend time and time again. I think you’ve got to touch base with people at least nine times before you even start to think about trying to sell them. And yeah, it might work. Sometimes you might meet someone once and they might buy from you straight away, but the chance of that for me are slim. It’s about taking your time, taking that energy. I think a friend of mine used a phrase once, at least buy me a drink first. And you’re not going to go on a date and ask someone to marry you on the first date. You take that time on your relationships, you take that time to get to know people, and the same’s got to happen in businesses. You’ve got to take that time and that energy you’ve got to give. So I’m a big believer in Canada caller frame of thinking. You’ve got to give to people. And the more that you give, I believe, the more that you gain.

Yes, I completely agree. And in fact, the whole philosophy of BNI, which is a big networking group is based on givers gain. And exactly what you just said there. I have to pick up what you said about not marrying someone on the first date, though you’ve clearly never been to Las Vegas, Damien, I think everyone in their lifetime should at least go to Vegas once and marry a stranger. It’s almost a rite of passage, I think. But no, you’re absolutely right. I think it’s interesting the more cool digital tools that we get, and there are always new tools coming out every day, almost the harder it is for us to reach people. And if you go back, I dunno, 40 years, 30, 40 years to where you had to physically go and meet people in meetings and sit in offices with them and have coffees and have beers with them and shake their hands and actually have a face-to-face conversation.

And that was how people used to get to know each other. And now we’ve got digital tools that allow us to try to do that with 20,000 people at the same time. And the reality is we are just not impacting on those people. So it takes, I dunno, 10, 20, 30 digital touch points. This is, I’m making this up as I go along, but 10, 20, 30 digital touchpoints has the same impact as one or two or three physical touchpoints. I think we massively owe underestimate just how powerful it is to physically see people eye to eye, to physically shake their hand and to have a conversation with them. Damien, thank you so much for joining us and sharing the insights of what you do in your business. For those MSPs who are listening right now and are thinking, this is a cool guy, I’d like to talk further to him, what’s the best way to get in touch with you? Tell us how we can find you on LinkedIn.

Probably the best way to connect with me is via LinkedIn. It’s via Damien Harrison, and I’ve got a little MBA at the end of my name, so I stand out a little bit.

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

Growing your MSP is a never ending task. And just as you figure out the answer to one set of problems, you realize you have a new bunch of questions you need to answer. We are here to help with this segment of the show where we answer your marketing and business growth questions. Now I’ll tell you how to submit yours in a second. Producer James, what have we got this week?

Well, Paul, this week actually we have a combined marketing and business growth question. Alex’s MSP is in Georgia and he has a change coming up within his MSP that is concerned might affect his external marketing, but more importantly the relationship with his current clients and the growth potential with them. So his question is how do I tell my clients we’re outsourcing the help desk overseas?

Oh, that’s a great question and there are a number of different strategies that you can use. Here are three. First of all, don’t tell them, right, if you’re just outsourcing just the tickets and the live chat, but you’re keeping the phone calls in your office, then you might choose not to tell them. Now this could be a problem when the technician really needs to phone them, but otherwise the chances are your clients are never going to figure it out. Suggestion number two is to only outsource new clients. So if they know right from the point that they sign a contract that a lot of the work is being done offshore, then that’s not going to be an issue of course. And number three is to use analogies to explain why you’re doing it. And a really good one is to compare it to car mechanics.

So you don’t expect the master technician who does the most complicated repairs to also fit a spark plug, right? Because anyone can be trained to fit a spark plug. And that’s why you are outsourcing your most basic tasks like setting up new users and password changes, you’re outsourcing that to someone so that you and your master technicians can spend more time A on preventative work, B on cybersecurity, and C on fixing complicated problems. Now, if you’ve got a question about anything in your MSP that you’d like some help with, just go to the contact page at mspmarketingedge.com. And while you are there, have a look at my leading white label content marketing system that’s trusted by over 700 MSPs around the world. Check if your area is available now at mspmarketingedge.com

Coming up, coming up next week…

Thanks so much for listening this week. Next week we are looking at your role as a business leader and why your actions are 10 times more important than the things you say. In fact, I’ve got a scary story about a business owner who told his staff to cut costs and spend less and they couldn’t believe it when he told them that he bought a brand new boat for his family,

For MSPs around the world, around the world. The MSP Marketing podcast with Paul Green. Now you know where David Blaine got his sense of humor.

Episode 245: You sure that prospect’s a great fit for your MSP?

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge

Full show transcription

Want new clients and an awesome life for you and your family?