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This is a transcription for episode 248 of Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast: ‘3 smart ways to recruit technicians’.
Full show transcription
Hey, don’t let MSP stand for my secret passion. Prepare for another marketing masterclass and share your passion with your clients.
Hello there my friend. It’s a brand new day. It’s a brand new podcast, and this is what I’ve got for you this week. Three smart ways to hire new technicians. Why worrying is the most destructive thing you can do as a business owner and how to tackle it. And my guest explains the customer service and retention opportunity around email deliverability. Welcome to episode 2 4 8.
Powered by MSPmarketingedge.com. Paul Green’s MSP Marketing podcast.
The most important employees in your MSP are of course your technicians. The quality of them dictates the quality of the service that you can offer, but the biggest problem that MSPs have with their technicians is often where to find them in the first place. So I’ve got three smart ways for you to recruit the best technicians.
Recruiting technicians is a headache for most MSP owners and certainly in the first few years of your business, you find yourself always slightly behind on recruitment. You realize you need someone like today and then the thought of having to invest dozens of hours in recruiting and interviewing people is actually a nightmare scenario, especially if you’re already working 60 to 80 hours a week. And I don’t think there’s much of a way around that in your first few years of business. Maybe it’s like a rite of passage actually that all business owners have to go through anyway.
As your business grows and develops, I believe you have to take a more long-term approach to recruiting all staff and especially technicians. You should always be looking at the amount of work that you are doing and what your existing technicians can achieve with a view on what’s going to happen in the next six months or so. And if you can start to hire a good person months before you actually need them, that means you can onboard them properly, you can train them properly and make sure they fit into the existing culture of the business. And yes, by the way, I know that this is really hard and it’s hard to find the time to do this as your business grows, but I promise you it’s something that you have got to get your head around at some point. So let me give you three really smart ideas to hire technicians.
And the first of them is playing a long game on LinkedIn. Now this is going to take you about 10, 20 minutes a week, but it will build you up a pipeline of potential hires for when you have a vacancy. And it’s as simple as finding technicians on LinkedIn that you could work with in the future and then building up a relationship with them before you actually have a vacancy. And I really do believe that much of recruitment is actually a marketing problem rather than any other kind of problem. And this is a great example of that. So let’s say there’s a big company in town that employs lots of technicians and you’ve often greedily eyed that company and thought that could be a potential source of technicians for my business, which is a great way of thinking by the way. So the long-term opportunity is to connect to as many of those technicians as you can on LinkedIn.
So go onto LinkedIn, look at the company page and go through all of the staff that work for that company. And then when you find someone who is in a technical role but not a management role, obviously you make a connection request and in your connection request, you know how you can put a note here you just sort of want to build up a little bit of intrigue in the person you’re connecting with. So your message might say something like, Hey, hello, I run a local managed service provider and I’m always looking to connect to great technicians in the area. Something simple as that. So you’re not out and out saying that you are recruiting, you’re just building your network, right? And let’s assume you do that to a load of technicians and a percentage of them will accept your connection requests not going to be a very high percentage, but some will, some won’t.
That’s fine. Don’t be put off if they don’t. By the way, there is always a delay in LinkedIn. You and I might be using LinkedIn every day, but someone who is employed, they may just use LinkedIn for getting their next job. So it may be some time before they accept your connection request, but once you connect to them, this is great, right? Because the next challenge is then to start to build a relationship with them. And you can do this by sending them a message on LinkedIn, just introducing yourself, asking a little bit about them. You might ask them about their background, how long they’ve worked at the company, all of that kind of stuff. And it’s a bit like dating in that you don’t want to ask too many in-depth questions too soon and put someone off, but you have to show a little bit of interest.
It’s that dating dance, isn’t it, that you get at the beginning and it’s no different really. You’re looking for technicians who are showing a little bit of interest back because what we’re trying to do here is have a short chat on LinkedIn and then ultimately see if they want to meet up for a coffee, a get to know you coffee, not an actual date. Oh, and of course you’re doing this, remember before you have any job vacancies to fill, so let’s say you have met and had coffee with two or three technicians and you’ve gotten well with them and they’ve understood what you are trying to do with your business, your understanding what they’re looking for from a career point of view, and you just keep in touch with a text message every two or three months. The second you have a job vacancy, you can just send them a text and say, Hey, I’ve got a vacancy. Is this a good time to talk about you coming to work for us? Or is this not a good time?
And you never know do you? It’s about getting the right job in front of the right person at the right time. The relationship building that you’re doing before you have the vacancy is doing the hard work because the smart thing about this is all of that hard work is done. You’ve picked the person you’ve figured out, would I want them to work for me? That’s all done. Then when you have a job, it’s just about seeing is this the right time for that right person? And by the way, I have a really smart idea to reach more people working for that big company in your area. And I’ll tell you about that in a second. But first is my second idea for you, and this is a way that you can stand out in job adverts.
So let’s say you don’t have that pipeline that we’ve just been discussing building because it does take time to build that up, but right now you have a vacancy you need to fill today and you’re going to put a job advert out. And the problem with job adverts is that your adverts may seem exactly the same as all the other job adverts out there. And this is the same problem that MSPs have when they’re trying to win new clients through marketing. If you look the same as all the other MSPs, then you’re making it hard for clients to choose you. It’s the same with recruitment. If you look the same as all the other employers, you’re making it hard for new staff to choose you. So ask yourself, what can I do in my advert to stand out? I wrote an advert for the members of my MSP Marketing Edge, I did this years ago, and it has a headline, something along the lines of you don’t want this job or you don’t want to work for us.
And the whole advert is about de-qualifying people. It’s about why you wouldn’t want to come and work for a company rather than that you would. Now, as you can imagine, that’s the complete reverse of what most jobs are about, and that almost like reverse psychology approach is very, very powerful and makes it stand out. Please do go and try that.
Let’s go onto the third idea, and this is how you can reach more technicians working for that big company in your town who may want to come and work for you. Let’s say the LinkedIn long game hasn’t quite worked out for you, and again, you’ve got a vacancy to fill today. So here’s a great idea. It’s a little bit ballsy, but I do think it would work very well. Go and hire yourself one of those mobile billboard trucks. You must have them in your area, right?
You put a giant poster on a billboard, which is on the back of a truck and it drives around in the area you want it to. In this example, you want it to drive around outside the building of the big company that you are targeting or even park up outside it. And the advert says something along the lines of, if you are not happy working at big company name, we are hiring technicians right now. And then you have a simple URL for them to go and have a look at all of the details. And I’d advise you not to use your standard website URL. Perhaps you’d have a funny URL like come and work for us.com or something like that. I’m sure you can find something. It only takes one technician to spot this during their lunch break or while looking out of the window and word will soon spread amongst all the other technicians because you can imagine them going, look at that over there, that advert, it’s talking to us, right?
It’s clever, isn’t it? Now that advert alone isn’t going to make them want to work for you, but what you’re trying to do is reach the one technician who’s working there, who today is unhappy, who is ready to look at a different challenge, and they’re going to go to that URL on their phone and maybe they’ll get in touch with you. By the way, if you do do this, do expect an angry phone call from someone in management at the company. But remember, you’re doing nothing wrong. All you are doing is advertising a vacancy the same as you would do on a job board. You just happen to be doing it on a big truck, which is parked outside their building, not really doing anything wrong. I think it’s pretty smart, but I can understand if the management could get angry, can’t you?
Paul Green’s MSP marketing podcast still to come…
We all know that email deliverability has changed a load this year, and actually that creates a huge customer service and retention opportunity for you. So I’ve got a special guest to tell you all about that in the next five minutes.
If you ever find yourself lying awake in the early hours of the morning worrying about any aspect of your business, whether it’s clients cashflow or an important staff member who might leave, you need to hear what I have to say about how worrying kills business owners. Hey, I’m Paul Green, and don’t forget, for help finding new clients for your MSP, we’ve created an easy to follow marketing system. Get that and all the content to go in it at mspmarketingedge.com. For the first few years of my business owning journey back in sort of 2005, 2006, I was a terrible worrier. I had a healthcare marketing agency back then and I’d lie awake at three in the morning worrying whether this client or that client was going to leave every complaint even about the smallest things I took very personally.
And I would obsessively check my email around the clock waiting for a complainant to respond to my apology. And then the birth of my daughter in 2010 actually made this worse just for a few months probably thanks to sleep deprivation and just massive change in my life. Because of tiredness I did actually reach a kind of a mental crisis point later on that year, and I did something smart. I actively made a decision to improve the way that I was thinking about my business, and I overcame much of my worries within a few months. I’m going to tell you five things that I did because there might be some things in there that would help you if you are in that situation. So the first one was action. I switched to an action orientation if something bothered me, I took swift and decisive action on it immediately.
And the beauty of having an action orientated mindset is anytime something’s in your head that you could possibly worry about later, you deal with it, it’s done. You move on, which is brilliant. The second thing I did was to say bye-bye to the idiots. I started firing clients that I was worrying about. In fact, I still have a rule today. If I wake more than two mornings in a row thinking negative thoughts about a client or a supplier or even a member of my team, then they must be fired that day. Or obviously in the case of my team, I must start a disciplinary process. Life is too short to put up with idiots as clients, suppliers, or members of your team. The third thing I did is that I embraced the gorgeousness of recurring revenue and I discovered monthly recurring revenue back then in 2010, and I completely flipped my business on its head.
And as you know, because you’ve got recurring revenue or I hope you do anyway, the peace of mind from a predictable cashflow is utterly astonishing. Even if you’re not quite covering your overheads every month, you’re in a much better position than someone who needs to sell stuff every month just to make ends meet within their business. The fourth change was I got really, really good at my marketing superpowers. I was always kind of good at marketing, but I really buckled down. I focused on marketing, I tried things, I read books, I went on courses, and then I systemized all of my marketing exactly the same way I have done in my current business and the same way I advise MSPs to do because systematic marketing is predictable, which again gives you peace of mind. And then the fifth change that I made was to introduce balance and rest and I stopped working in any way at weekends.
Instead, I started enjoying the simple things again, going for long walks, going to the cinema. I took proper holidays, I took proper breaks with no work interruptions. It was really good, it was healthy. And that again, is a habit that I’ve carried through to this business. I can’t see me ever not being a business owner, even if I live for another 40 years, maybe another 30 years at least. But because I’ve got that balance right? And if you don’t, you need to introduce it. Lemme just finish on why I wanted to talk about this. It’s great that more and more people are talking about how tough mental health is for business owners and MSPs in particular. There’s been a lot of talk about this within the channel, and I’m supporting someone through this worry right now, and it has reminded me just how destructive it can be. If you worry about your MSP, you are not alone. It’s normal, and it can be overcome and thinking about the business is healthy, but you need to understand that worrying about it is not, I’ve given you five things there that you can take action on to remove the worry and sleep better at night.
Paul Green’s MSP marketing podcast still to come…
Have you ever wondered whether taking on an apprentice will be a smart thing to do for your MSP? Well, that’s a question that’s been asked of me and I have a very definitive and positive answer. I’ll tell you what that is in the next five minutes.
So much has changed with email deliverability this year, and you might see that as an opportunity to sell a one-off service to prospects or clients. But what if I told you it’s also an opportunity to improve retention and customer service to your existing clients? That’s what my special guest is here to talk about today. Today’s big interview is about the business opportunity around email deliverability.
Hi, I’m Ben Fielding and I’m an email delivery expert. And thanks so much for joining me on the show, Ben. Now we’re not going to talk about email deliverability from a technical point of view, although I know you’ve got a few technical things to say. We’re actually going to look today at how email deliverability is an opportunity to delight your clients and increase the levels of customer service that you’ve got for them, as well as being obviously a tool to protect them from huge amounts of spam. Before we get into that, do you want to tell us a little bit about your background? So who are you, where have you come from and what do you do?
Sure. I started off life as a graphic designer many years ago. Wasn’t particularly great at it, but fell into it. I’m not going to say how many years ago. I skipped forward 15, 20 years of a corporate career set up an MSP 10 years ago. I got out that business September last year, and I’ve been focusing on delivering fractional CTO services and email deliverability services as well and work with some MSPs.
And what is it about email deliverability that interests you?
I’ve always been a messaging geek from Nove GroupWise, if anyone remembers that, through to Lotus Notes. I’ve done a bit of zimbra through there as well, old exchange days. And then as Microsoft Exchange has grown up to 3 6 5 and Google Workspace has come out, I’ve always been into messaging, but it’s just the security side of it and the deliverability side of it. It’s just something that clicked with me. And so things, I’ve always had people come to me and say, I’ve tried everything, Ben, can you look at this and just have this sixth sense of looking at it? I think it’s that. And then proving it is
That’s really cool. I remember Lotus Notes, actually. I used to work for a big radio group and the email that they used late nineties early noughties was Lotus Notes, and I can’t remember exactly how it worked, but it certainly seemed a lot harder than it is today with Gmail and Outlook and stuff like that. Is that even still around anymore? Lotus Notes?
I’m sure someone’s running it somewhere.
Yeah, it’s probably unsupported. Hasn’t been updated since 2002 probably, but it’ll be fine. That’s not a security risk at all. So let’s talk about, there’s been a lot of changes this year, hasn’t there? So Yahoo and Google brought in a series of changes earlier this year. I think it was around about April time, and I know most MSPs are going to be on top of that, but just to make sure that everyone is completely aware what’s happened, can you give us a 62nd summary of some of the security changes that have happened this year?
Sure. So the three things everyone’s been talking about have been SPF, deac, I and DAC. Again, not going to bore everyone with the technical details. They should know no, if not, Google it now. They’ve been around for a long, long, long time. What’s changed this year has been Microsoft very quietly Google very publicly saying, we’ve had enough, these standards have been around for years. We need to start seeing you adhere to these standards. So that’s what’s changed is their posture as opposed to the technology.
Got it. So essentially a lot of end users, a lot of end clients will have been affected by this without being aware, especially if as you say, Microsoft did that quietly in the background. So you as an email delivered to the expert. And remember, we are looking at this from a point of view of how MSPs can improve and increase their relationship with their clients. What’s your advice to MSPs on how to a few months on from those changes, how best to use them to work with clients and to make email easier for them rather than harder?
So I’ll start off with what MSPs have done really well. What MSPs have done well is to tune into the fact that this is happening, to be speaking to their clients about it and start making changes. So I’ve seen quite a few MSPs been rolling out DA monitoring tools, or at the very least they’ve gone in and set some basic DA settings that have done something right? They’re on that journey. So that’s been going quite well. The problem I see is that MSPs have generally see this as see DAC, especially as a security feature. And that’s been the selling point to a lot of clients. We need to make your email secure, we need to enable DAC, and this is what we’re going to do. Now, this is on the MSPs, assuming they know all the platforms that their clients email from, and if you are managing it, then you know about it, great. But what if you’re not managing it? Some add-on email marketing tool that the marketing team set up three years ago by going in and enforcing Dmar C MSPs are actually causing their clients problems. They’re not reviewing the results of those dmar reports in detail with their clients. They’re just looking at it and going, 3, 6 5 is delivering, I know about that. Your CRMs delivering. I know about that. Everything else is being blocked, is doing its job.
And of course the downside of that is that while you can sit there and look at the things that you’re aware of and say, yep, we’re doing a good job, we’re protecting our clients. The clients meantime are getting frustrated, this is falling over and that’s falling over things that you didn’t know about. So what do you think is a better way of approaching that?
It’s analyzing the data from a good DAC reporting tool. So it’s not just about turning on D marking, setting it to quarantine or reject. And it’s definitely not about setting the email addresses just to be an alias address in their client’s 3 6 5, which I see quite a lot. It’s actually setting up a dmar monitoring service. There’s loads out there and analyzing that data coming through going, okay, well what can we see passing? What can we see failing? Do we know about this? There’s quite high volume there. That must be something you are doing deliberately. It could be the website, it could be a time sheet system, it could be an accounting package, it could be email outreach, it could be 3 6 5. It could be the website itself or some third party app that’s been deployed it, it is going through and making conscious decisions about that.
But you’ve got to have your technical head looking at this and then the client’s view of the world and go, yeah, actually I do recall something about a SendGrid service. I wonder what that is. But it changes the relationship from being a techie, a tech provided tech support relationship to being a, Hey, let’s make sure your business is running as well as it could be, and let’s make sure we’re getting this right. Because the downsides of not doing that and then starting to block a lot of these valid emails is you could start to impact the reputation of your customer’s domain.
And not only that, of course, as we were saying, the customer is unhappy because they’re getting bouncebacks of emails or that service that used to work just fine suddenly hasn’t started working. We know that when someone is unhappy with their MSP, that’s when they start to look at the contract end coming and it just enters their head of, maybe we should look somewhere else. Maybe we’ve outgrown that MSP or maybe they’re not quite right for us. Whereas obviously the flip side and what you are suggesting is where you actually work with them and essentially have that partnership. I mean, isn’t that what all MSPs promise and say that they want? I know every vendor in the channel says, oh, you are going to be our partner. The reality is very few vendors actually act that way and very few MSPs act that way as well. But this is a true partnership where you’re actually getting, and I guess is this difficult, this kind of level of service jumping in and taking the time to look at reports and what happening is that difficult? But it’s the kind of difficulty that’s worth it.
So if you imagine MSPs, many MSPs, resale VoIP services, phone systems, phone numbers right now, if that service for whatever reason doesn’t work, if that mainline number goes down and inbound calls aren’t coming in or outbound calls are showing the wrong phone number or not being able to connect through pretty damn sure the customers, when you’re jumping up and down straight away going, my phone system’s not working and it’s really obvious it’s black and white, I can’t make or receive a call. Yes, I see a problem, let’s fix it. The thing is, phone numbers are becoming less and less relevant in business today. And that email domain that’s probably hopefully had a great reputation for many, many years, that is the lifeblood of their business. Their website is they’re putting a lot of effort into SEO content marketing, I’m sure, trying to generate traffic online. That domain is litted everywhere and all various email campaigns and email outreach and day-to-day interactions going on, you take down a company’s email address or take down their domain or affect their reputation, that’s worse than taking their phone number offline. Nowadays, most businesses could survive without a phone number for a day or two even. They can’t survive without email. No one can.
No, absolutely they can’t. And I think email is as important to businesses today as it was 10, 20 years ago. Even with a rise of tools like Teams and Slack and every other collaborative project management, instant communication tool. Let’s be honest, email still sits at the heart of it. No one asks you to enter your Slack ID or something on teams when you set up a new account. It’s always email and some kind of security from there. Final question for you, Ben, is, and this is to prevent my team having to answer the same question 20 times, which is you mentioned about a dmar monitoring service. Whenever we have someone on the podcast who talks about something but doesn’t suggest a specific service, we always get emails afterwards. So you are the expert at email deliverability. Which of the many, many dmar services would you recommend or do you think it at least worth looking at?
Well, the first one I’m going to suggest is obviously mine. So Quinset power mail, which you can find Quinset credit uk slash power mail. I love this platform. I’ve tuned it to perfection work really close with the dev team to make sure it provides everything you need beyond DAC. It also does all the other geeky stuff that some of the guys out there will know, like bii and M-T-A-S-T-S and TLS reporting. DEMARION is another really, really good one. I mean, the company was set up by one of the guys that designed the A standard, so it’s got to be pretty good power. Dmars pretty good as well. And there’s a handful of cheaper ones which kind of do the job. There’s a good generalist, one called Glock Apps is pretty good. A lot of people use value mail. It’s quite expensive quite quickly. But yeah, it’s a handful out there.
That’s fantastic. And I thoroughly talked myself into giving you a massive free plug there, didn’t I? So well done, Paul. Well done Paul. Very good. Let’s finish off then, Ben, just by telling us, well, obviously we know that you’ve got that service. Just tell us what else you do to help MSPs and what’s the best way to get in touch with you?
I help MSPs in a number of ways. Primarily it’s education, so it teaching people about S-B-F-D-I, DM A C, all the other acronyms that people have probably never touched before, helping them with some tips and tricks on how to resolve issues, how to find issues, interpreting DAC reports, and also looking things back at things like DNS history, trying to figure out what’s gone wrong, teaching ’em to be a Sherlock Holmes as a resolving DNS and email deliverability problems essentially. Best way to get hold of me, go to my website, Quinset.co.uk or you can find me on LinkedIn/Ben Fielding.
Paul Green’s, MSP marketing podcast, Paul’s personal peer group.
You must have questions about marketing and growing your MSP, right? Well, we aim to answer a new question every week in this part of the show producer. James, what have we got today?
Well, today it’s a case of Paul Brian. Brian has a huge dilemma, Paul, and he needs your help. His MSP in Montreal is still quite new, and he’s looking to expand, but he doesn’t know the answer to this problem. His wife doesn’t know the answer, his friends don’t know. So he’s turning to you with this question. Should I take on an apprentice?
1000%? Yes. And let me explain what an apprentice is just in case that’s not a term that you use in your part of the world. So here in the uk, we can hire apprentices at lower wages legally, so long as they learn on the job. And it’s not one of these dodgy schemes that gives you cheap labor. It is actually a really good scheme here, and it’s a great way for lots of young people to get into jobs that have a more hands-on nature. Now, I know loads of MSPs who’ve hired technicians as apprentices, and the main advantage is that you get to shape someone into the kind of technician you want them to be. And there’s really no opportunity to do that with someone who’s already worked for someone else, right? So this is a very powerful thing to do. You can also look at an apprenticeship as a very long and extended job interview because you get, what is it, a year or two years during which you can decide, do I really want to keep this person long term? There’s no obligation to keep an apprentice on after their initial apprenticeship is up unless you want to. Of course, now, I’m guessing in your part of the world, there may be some kind of scheme like this, and I do think it’s a thoroughly, thoroughly good idea. Go for it. If you’ve got a question about anything in your MSP that you’d like help with, just go to the contact page at mspmarketingedge.com. Oh, and while you’re there for all of the content, tools and training to market and grow your MSP, do check out mspmarketingedge.com
Coming up, next week. Thank you so much for listening this week, next week, how to grade the quality of the leads that you are generating.
For MSPs around the world. The MSP Marketing Podcast with Paul Green. He’s your secret passion. You might want to keep that one a secret.
