How to grade the quality of your MSP's leads

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This is a transcription for episode 249 of Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast: ‘How to grade the quality of your MSP’s leads’.

Full show transcription

It is time. Ground control to MSPs. Your marketing mission is a go prepare for lift-off.

Hello and what is happening in your life right now? I have a ton of inspiration and motivation for you today. Here’s what we’re going to be talking about, how to grade the quality of your leads. If I suggested that you spend 80% of your time marketing your MSP, would you think I was nuts? And my guest reveals how to use pay-per-click advertising at the heart of your overall marketing strategy.

Welcome to episode 2 4 9.

So you might be spending a great deal of your marketing time just trying to generate leads, but remember that not all leads are equal. A one man band business with zero budget should not be treated the same as a 30 user business that hates its incumbent MSP and is desperate to switch. Now let’s talk about three important criteria you can use to grade every single lead that comes into your MSP. Now, I’m sure that this has happened to you at some point in the past. You’ve had a notification of a new lead into your business and they want to engage with you, which is great because that makes them a prospect. It’s exciting, isn’t it, when that happens. And then just before you pick up the phone to call them, you just have a quick look at their website or you look over the details that they’ve submitted to you and your heart kind of sinks because you realize that unless their website is years out of date, this is a micro business and therefore they’re very unlikely to pay the several hundred dollars or pounds a month that you like your clients to pay.

And we all have standards for the kinds of people that we want to work with. Sometimes that is a dollar value, sometimes it’s a type of business. Very often it’s down to the mindset of the people that we’ll be dealing with. We all have these standards, whether we stand by them every single day or not. I know some days when you are desperate for cash, you will just take on any client that turns up. But long-term, you want to get people that are the right fit so you are a good fit for them and they’re a great fit for you. And I’m going to give you three suggested criteria that could be a very good way for you to judge the quality of every single lead that comes into your MSP. And the first of those is opportunity and or urgency. So if someone is still in the middle of a lengthy contract with their incumbent MSP and they’re relatively happy, that makes them kind of like a low quality lead today versus them being at the end of a contract or really unhappy.

Or of course if they have a massive tech problem that’s holding them back now and there’s no one that can fix it for them, these are all great leads and they’re much higher quality because the more urgency and opportunity there is, the more motivated they are to talk to you, get it really clear in their mind and their heart whether or not they want to hire you and actually take action. The way to assess this, of course, is by asking them opportunity and urgency questions. So open questions such as, are you being looked after by an IT support company right now? When does your contract end? What are the biggest tech headaches or problems in your business right now? Is there something active right now that you need to deal with urgently? What do your staff say about your technology? What do your staff complain about?

Now, never be scared to ask these questions when you first start talking to a lead because you don’t always have to jump straight into tell me about your business. What do you do? What are your growth goals? Those are important questions, but you don’t have to do them first. You can immediately establish whether or not they are a quality lead. Don’t be afraid to ask them, how many staff do you have? How many devices? That kind of thing. Do you have a budget? Do you have a budget for IT? Support? How much would you want to spend a month? If they say $12 a month and they’ve got two devices, it’s potentially not a great quality lead for you. Now the second criteria that you can assess them on is fit. So ask yourself a question. Are they your ideal client or not? Like I said earlier, this is the little bit that you compromise on depending on how desperate you are for cash in the business.

Although every time I’ve done that in my 19 year business career, and I’ve done it many times, I always ended up regretting it. Most MSPs, they never formally sit down and ask themselves, what is a perfect client to us? And this doesn’t have to be a difficult process. You can just kind of figure out what types of businesses you love working with, what you want your minimum spend to preferably be every month. And more importantly than anything, what do you really not want to do and what kind of people do you really hate dealing with? If you hate lawyers, don’t deal with lawyers, right? If you hate dealing with bespoke software, don’t take on manufacturers. If you have no desire to be supporting an EPOS system or an electronic point of sale system like tills at eight 30 at night, don’t support a restaurant. That kind of makes sense, doesn’t it really?

So it fits really the easy one. The final criteria is engagement. How engaged are they? How much are they talking to you and engaging in what you do? The more engaged a prospect is, the more likely they are to choose you. If you find yourself constantly doing all the chasing and kind of doing all the work. And it seems a little bit like a one-way process that makes someone a much lower grade lead. Now, we talk a lot about partnership in the channel and a true partnership with clients of yours. It has to be a two-way thing. And I truly believe that the way they behave during the sales process is an indication of what kind of client they will be when you are working together. And I really think you mustn’t be afraid to walk away from a lead or prospect that you just have a bad gut feeling about even if actually their business would be great to have.

Paul Green’s MSP marketing podcast, still to come…

Tell me, have you ever tried pay per click Google adverts to drive traffic to your website and generate leads? Maybe you’ve struggled with it. Many MSPs feel that pay per-click is just a massive cash suck and it doesn’t produce results. Well, my guest today will tell you how to place pay per-Click at the heart of your overall marketing strategy, and that’s coming up in the next five minutes.

When you first start working on improving your MSP’s marketing, there is a sudden realization that you kind of need to throw resources at it. Yep, you need some cash, definitely. But the really important resource to kickstart any marketing effort is time. And that needs to be your time as the owner of the business. I believe the more time you can spend on your MSP’s marketing the better. In fact, if I suggested you spend 80% of your time marketing your MSP, would you think I was nuts?

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 right now@mspmarketingedge.com. So most MSPs have a very common origin story, and it often begins when the owner quits an unsatisfying job to start their own business. Now, this is normally about gaining control over the quality of the work that you’re doing, what you do with your time, and of course over your own personal income. In fact, was that why you started your business? Maybe in the first few years, you just got too busy to do it all yourself. So you started to take on staff and you watched in horror as the quality of the work dropped a little. And B, you realize that buying 40 hours of someone else’s time doesn’t really free up 40 hours of your time, but you kept pushing the business forward, trying to run it at the highest possible quality while growing it at the same time.

And of course, you are always tired from working too much and the odd sleepless night mostly from worrying over cashflow, right? Well, this is the rollercoaster nature of being a business owner in your first few years and always there lurking in the background is that massive problem of how to get new clients. In fact, this is the biggest headache for most MSPs in the early years. You overcame that problem just through the sheer force of the energy, time and passion that you put into the business. And that activity and momentum probably opened doors, probably uncovered low hanging fruit just through word of mouth, through referrals, through sheer energy. But as the business starts to mature and you return to a more balanced lifestyle, the leads just seem to dry up. And maybe today you’re in a position where you haven’t got a clue where the next client will come from.

Is that where you are today? Well, if you are at this stage, the answer is to start taking marketing way more seriously, starting with the amount of time that you put into it. I believe that you have to transform yourself again once you successfully transformed from being an employee to being your own boss, and then you successfully transform from being the MSP’s primary technician to being the owner. Well, now you need to transform from being the owner of an MSP into being the marketer of an MSP. And this might mean working towards spending the bulk of your working time on the marketing of your business, generating new leads, turning them into prospects, qualifying them into opportunities, setting up sales conversations and closing deals. Now, I know I understand that this isn’t why you got into your business back then. You just wanted to help people.

You just wanted to have fun with computers. But that was then, this is now. And things have changed because now you want to grow your business. You want to take more money home, you want to pay your staff more. You want to invest in better tools, you want to protect your clients better and you probably want to spend more time with your family. And all of these things need more clients who are buying more monthly recurring revenue services. And the only way to get more clients is to spend more time on marketing. Understand this, the MSP owners who spend a greater proportion of their time marketing their business will always end up with a dominant share of their marketplace because that constant focus on marketing turns you into a massive and unstoppable client magnet. Do you agree?

Paul Green’s MSP marketing podcast, still to come…

How happy are you with the headline on your website? Do you think that perhaps you could do a lot better with it? Well, many MSPs feel this way, and in fact, one of them has asked if I can suggest a better headline for him, I’m very happy to help. And I’ll give you my suggestion, which you can use as well. I’ll give it to you in the next five minutes.

I think most MSPs have a kind of love hate relationship with pay-per-click – the adverts that sit at the top of Google search results. They love the idea of just being able to pay for traffic, just being able to pay to get a message in front of people who’ve got a problem that needs to be solved. Right now, however many MSPs who’ve tried this have discovered that they spend a ton of cash for very little return. Well, my special guest today believes that pay-per-click can sit at the heart of your marketing strategy and he has some very smart ideas to share with you. Let’s look at how pay-per-click is changing in the era of AI and whether or not you can use it inside your MSP to drive leads and win new clients.

Hello, I’m Corey Zieman, owner of Guaranteed PPC and senior strategist at Guaranteed PPC.

And thank you so much for joining me on the show. Corey, we are going to talk about PPC pay per click or basically advertising online. And it’s one of the hardest things for any MSP to get, right, because we all know an MSP who sunk several thousand dollars into Google Ads or some other kind of online advertising and got nothing from it. And Corey, I know that you’re very familiar with paid advertising MSPs, and we’ll come on to your suggestion in a second. I think you’ve got a very clever strategy that you can share with us today. Let’s first of all have a look at your background. So what got you into pay-per-click in the first place and how long have you been doing it?

Oh, basically I started marketing stuff right out of college back in 2003, and just another partner that I met up with in college and just learned the hard way learning how to sell stuff online and then just got to be good enough at it that I started to get clients a few years later and I’ve been doing it for close to 20 years now.

Wow, that’s a very long time. And what is essentially a business that only really existed? Was it the late nineties that Google came up with the concept or either came up with the concept or adopted?

Yeah, it was 2002, 2003 when Google came out with the Google AdWords program.

Wow, so you’ve literally been there the entire lifestyle, the life term of the industry, which is pretty cool. So what have you seen, I mean I guess tons has changed over those 20 years or so, but what are the big changes that you’ve seen that have affected B2B marketers like MSPs over the last two, three years?

Everybody says it’s gotten more complicated. There’s so many more levers and switches inside the account and then therefore a lot more to screw up if you will. Prices have went up on a click, but with that said, it also though puts a moat around your business if you understand kind of the gotchas that everybody so-called everybody else will fall for essentially, and you don’t do those things and you have an edge on everybody else. I mean, that’s the better way to look at it and what I try to tell people when they’re trying to enter it.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. So MSPs traditionally have really struggled with pay per click. There are some that do really well out of it. There are some that kind of set it up. I know they don’t monitor it very well and they’re spending X thousand dollars or pounds a month on their ads and they’re not necessarily seeing anything for it. I’ve got a few MSPs that I’ve worked directly with not on pay, it’s not a specialty of mine, but where they’ve worked their way through either some kind of training on it or they’ve just sat and figured out how to optimize it. And I’ve got one in particular I’m thinking of who will spend, I think a couple of thousand dollars a month and will happily work through the nonsense inquiries, the one man bands coming in saying, oh, we’ve got a broken iPad, can you help with that? Which is, that’s not a business inquiry, that’s just noise. But they know if they work through enough of those, eventually they’ll get a 30 user client coming in that’s got a problem that needs to be solved today. What’s your experience of doing paid ads with MSPs? Is it a very similar thing or have you seen different patterns and different problems?

Yeah, the main thing that you got to know when you’re doing a pay-per-click for managed service provider businesses is that the keywords that are actually going to work to get where the meat is and not where the tire kickers are, if you will, the information seekers or people that aren’t really serious, the keyword always needs to have the word agency services, companies, firms along with that keyword where 80% of the business is. And the problem though is if you go into Google, if you don’t know any better, you go in there and you put your keywords in there, it shows up for a lot more than that. It’ll be 90% of stuff other than that. But that is where the serious people are, if you will. And if you can get your ads narrowed down to just those type of searches, it will basically generally work.

And is that where most MSPs are? In fact most business owners go wrong, is that they see pay per click as a, it’s a complicated one-off setup, and then they’re kind of loath to go in and fiddle with it. I guess you guys make your money just going in and optimizing campaigns every single day of the week.

Yeah, they think it’s a one time setup. Google makes it look like that when you go in there, it makes it, they want your money of course, and they make it simple in 15 minutes to set up your ads, and rarely is that going to be good enough. You have to go in there and make sure Google isn’t just wasting your money because they’ve loved to have your ads show up again for other stuff that you don’t want to show up for. And then where there isn’t actually any customers there for you and then it’s just death by a thousand cuts. If you show up for enough people that don’t need your service and are just clicking, well, you’re not profitable anymore.

Yeah, that’s an interesting point. So obviously that the managed services sell is a very long sell. Someone will stay with an MSP for, I dunno, 3, 5, 7 years, and then they reach that level of dissatisfaction. They go and look in that very, very small window. Their mind is open and they’ll go and look at two or three other providers with the intention of switching from a pay-per-click point of view. Well, let’s say from a marketing campaign point of view, I know that your mind thinks a lot bigger than pay-per-click. What would you do using paid ads to reach those people at the point that they’re ready? So let me complicate that further by splitting that out into a couple of different questions for you. So what kind of ads would you run for an MSP and then what would your overall marketing strategy be?

Yeah, so the main three things that the customer or client is always going to want to know from you right up front or to decide who they’re going to go with in that small window at time as you describe is can you do what I came to Google for? Can you cover my area and can I trust you? That’s what the consumer always is going to want. Can you communicate those three things quicker than your competition there on Google? Because if you can, you’re going to end up with a lion’s share of the business that’s coming through. Google actually wants to promote that person who does that better than the other people that are there on top of Google advertising for the same keywords that you have because that provides Google’s users a better experience, makes ’em want to click on ads in the future.

So I would figure out with my ad, how can I communicate that better than my competition versus the other ads that are there and when they click and go to my website, how do I do that better? And a lot of the cases, it’s going to be not just one ad for everything and one page to take ’em to for everything. It’s to identify that different users have different needs. So I’m going to communicate with people on an individual basis and an individual need so that my ad, when you’re looking at four ads and you’re trying to decide which one to click on, this ad right here clearly understands what I need and they didn’t bait and switch me and take me to the homepage of this guy’s website, and it’s clear that they really weren’t listening to me, and now I’ve got to really struggle to see if what they said on the ad is even true. It’s accurate. That’s the magic formula right there, per se.

So essentially, if I was to summarize that, if you can make it easier for the person who’s searching, then the chances of you actually getting that inquiry just goes up dramatically.

Yeah, exactly.

Okay. If I’d known it was that simple, well, why aren’t I in pay-per-click? Well, that’s right. You have to be there doing settings and stuff all day. That’s not the kind of thing at all. So in terms of the overall marketing strategy, how do you recommend MSPs use pay-per-click? As you talked there about how to target the right kind of people, but how else would you use and what other types of marketing strategies would you use around?

Yeah, so Google search is a great base, but it’s going to be limited. There’s only, as you say, there’s a small window of time when somebody is willing to switch and they’re going to come to Google and make those searches. You could still get those and that still can be profitable. However, you have a lot more available to you. People will have individual questions that they ask and anymore, where do they go if they have a question, they go to YouTube, be the person that answers that question when they have that one-off question on YouTube, they can find you easily specifically by creating niche content that answers questions. YouTube is a how to answer question platform still at the end of the day, that’s what it’s for. And a lot of people forget that it is a search engine first and foremost, or people are looking for specific answers.

You can actually provide good answers to people. You’ll be surprised in your space how few people are giving specific advice to specific questions that people have in your space on YouTube accurately without a lot of fluff or what’s there is being taught by somebody who’s not a real expert. And then what you can do just by satisfying that user’s question at that time, now you’ve got familiarity with that prospect and you have a foot in the door with that person essentially. And then with other follow-up, you can actually get that client. Maybe they’re just not fully ready to switch, but they’re not quite satisfied either. Or one day the current provider isn’t doing what they need ’em to do, and then you’re first in line for that business at that point in time.

And what’s the technicalities of how you’d actually do that, Corey?

Yeah, so you go ahead and you set up your YouTube channel to answer the questions for the user just as if you’re trying to build up a channel like anybody else does that. Once you’ve done that though, the magic is in setting up what they call retargeting or remarketing through a Google advertising account that you set up for your business. You can actually have video ads then show up for somebody who watches your channel, even if they just watch just one video of yours. And then you can have other videos now show up for them while they’re watching other videos, while on YouTube for months essentially. And then you can just continue communicating with that user over time, providing them more education, also providing them saying what you do, what the benefits of working with you are. So it’s all done through something called retargeting, and that’s all done through setting up a simple YouTube ad campaign in your Google advertising account that you can set up for your business.

Okay, so that makes perfect sense. So you are using, if you like, your traditional pay per click to drive traffic into your business, into your website, and potentially also onto YouTube, and then using remarketing to get people, which I guess also answers that question of getting all the problem of getting the right message in front of the right person at the right time. Let’s change direction a little bit and I want to ask you about changes that are happening within the search market. Now I need to give a caveat that we are recording this interview right at the end of June, 2024. And the reason that I mentioned that is because so much change is happening so quickly with search engines, with everything in regards to ai, and as we’re recording this now, Google has just sort of done a whole bunch of AI generated answers in certain markets and it backed away from that very quickly. Obviously the answers were nonsense in many of the cases. Alongside that we’ve seen Bing grow in popularity. It’s still nowhere near Google, I don’t think. But what kind of changes have you seen over the last six months and what do you think is going to happen with AI and with search engine preferences in the next six months?

Yeah, Google, it’s been the case over years that they’ve been slowly displacing the organic search results on Google with a response that they give the user that’s based upon AI or scraping websites. And they’re doing that more and more all the time now with ai, they’re actually having AI generate the search result for their users. However, at the same time though, they’ve also been promoting YouTube videos very strongly in the search results as well. So going back to what I was saying just a moment ago, if you are the one producing video content, you’re not being replaced, at least at this time. I don’t know, maybe in the future, at some point in time, Google will have AI video to answer your question when you come to Google with the question. So if you go with video, you’re actually getting more placement than you were.

Whereas if you have an article on a blog or something like that, you’re actually getting less placement than you were. So for that reason, I would recommend doing video. And for that matter though, in an MSP business, they’re buying you, they’re not buying, they have to trust you and video is the best way to gain trust with the user. You’re not going to seem like a commodity once you have that video that you’ve educated them and that they’ve seen from you and they trust and respect you now. So really, if you got an MSP business, that’s where I’m going to go for sure.

Yeah, I love that. That’s a really smart way of looking at it. Okay, final question for you Corey, and then we’ll talk about how people can get in touch with you. If you could wave a magic wand and make everyone you work with understand one thing about pay-per-click, perhaps demolishing a common myth, what would that be?

Yeah, generally speaking, there’s no overnight success with it. Ultimately, PPC, it’s a process. You invest money into the process, you learn what works, what doesn’t work, then you scale what works, and then you try new things. And ultimately what people do is they see the competitor that they have spending all that money, they’re always at the top of Google with their ads, and then ultimately they say, how can they afford to do it and I can’t. And then they get discouraged. The reality is that person that you see that’s constantly at the top of Google running their ads, chances are they’ve been doing that for many years already to get to that point. And they started at the small level spending that thousand dollars a month and they took that thousand and they worked it and they turned it into 2000, and that’s how they eventually got there. So very rarely does somebody come to Google with a little bit of budget and then overnight boom, it just works. That’s not the default expectation you should have.

Yeah, absolutely. I completely agree with you there, Corey. Thank you. That’s been such an insightful interview. I think the remarketing is the big takeaway from that, that essentially pay-per-click has to be part of an overall marketing strategy. Tell us a little bit more about what you do for MSPs and what’s the best way to get in touch with you.

We have a advertising firm where we manage just specifically online ads for clients. And with that, what we do is if we take a look at your business and we identify what kind of goals that you need to have in terms of leads that needs to be generated from a starting advertising budget, we go through with you, try to figure out what would make you successful, profitable with how much you’re earning and closing rates on leads and stuff. And then we come up with a plan, and then we also offer a so-called guarantee with that plan to where we can get you a certain amount of results on your campaigns upfront to get you to break even or similar. And we’ll not take our fee until we’ve gotten you a little bit closer to that mark at the very beginning. And so we really do it all from start to finish, from start to finish. We built the ads, the landing pages, the critical tracking that you need, that entire sales process and that funnel that you need to really do well when running ads to make the whole process work. We manage it for you and you’re basically just paying a fee to get the results at the end of the day.

Corey, just tell us your website address and the best way to get in touch.

Yeah, the website is guaranteedppc.com.

Paul Green’s MSP marketing podcast, Paul’s Personal Peer Group.

So every week we jump in and answer a question from an MSP somewhere around the world producer James, what have we got this week?

Well, this week, Paul, we are traveling to Melbourne, Australia, and Greg’s MSP is based there. His MSP’s website is in dire need of a refresh, and his keyboard is taking the brunt of his problem. He keeps typing stuff, deleting it, typing stuff, deleting it. He’s getting very frustrated. And his question is, what is a great headline for my website?

Oh, this is a great question because the headline on the homepage of your website is so important. In fact, the headline and the main image, they kind of work together to grab people’s attention and hook them into your website. In fact, you only have really a couple of seconds to do this before they hit the back button and leave the site, which is known as a bounce. But if you get someone engaged in your site quickly than you have a much better chance of them reading about you potentially being interested in you. And obviously we want them to inquire with you. So let me give you a headline that works really well for MSPs. Well, this works really well for MSPs who already have clients. So this isn’t something that you could use if you’re a startup or you kind of in your first year or so.

But a more mature MSP that’s been going a few years will be fine. Here is the headline. Get ready to write this down and copy this 558 town name. People already trust us with their businesses technology. You should do the same. Lemme say that again. 558 town name people already trust us with their business’ technology. You should do the same. So that number at the start, that’s the number of users that you support. It needs to be a real number. And the idea behind this headline is to use it as a bit of social proof. If so many people already trust you, then you must be really good. Right now, you and I know that those 558 people are spread across like 20 or 30 clients or whatever it is, but it sounds an impressive figure. And remember these people, they do trust you because you are supporting them on a daily basis.

You are the place they go and they have a problem. So don’t worry about using that number. Don’t overthink it. Alright, it’s a great headline. It’s a great use of that number and obviously you just update that two or three times a year. Now there are many, many great headlines that you could use. To me that’s a really easy one and a super quick whim. 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 of course, for help finding new clients for your MSP, we’ve created an easy to follow marketing system. You can get that and all the content to go in it at mspmarketingedge.com.

Coming up next week. Thank you so much for listening this week. Next week. I’m so excited because we are going to hit our 250th episode, and so I’ve got a special for you. I’m going to be interviewing a business growth expert who helps people move from being a business owner to truly being an entrepreneur. And it’s all about the way you think and the actions you take. He’s a real inspiration and I can’t wait to bring you that fascinating interview next week.

For MSPs around the world. The MSP marketing podcast with Paul Green. Now go put rocket fuel in your marketing.

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Full show transcription

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