Episode 236: Is break/fix outdated… or a valid marketing tactic?

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This is a transcription for episode 236 of Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast: ‘Is break/fix outdated… or a valid marketing tactic?’

Full show transcription

Hey there my time poor, stressed out, growth hungry, MSP owning friend. Here are today’s big things. Is break/fix an outdated concept or can it be a valid marketing tool? Why It’s not about what you say you are going to do. It’s about what you get done. And a guy who sold so many new clients, he broke his MSPs operations. Welcome to episode 2 3 6.

00:47

Back in the day, break/fix was the business model and then the idea of managed services and monthly recurring revenue came along. Lots of MSPs still do break/fix and some swear it’s a great marketing tactic. So how much break/fix do you do in your business? Do you still have heritage customers who are used to just ringing you when something’s gone wrong and they won’t go on a contract because they’ve never had to before or have you completely eliminated break/fix and the only way to do business with you is to be a managed services client? My opinion on this has been really clear for years. So I saw break/fix as an outdated concept a bit 2005, and if you’re still doing it now, yeah, okay, it can give you a mini cash boost now and again, but it’s unpredictable work and it might even be dangerous not to proactively protect someone who believes there are clients of yours in these heightened cybersecurity days.

And then I went and asked 2,300 MSPs who are in my MSP marketing Facebook group, what they thought, and you will not believe some of their replies. Let’s have a look at this. So I asked them, would you sell something small just to get a client as in break/fix or is it monthly contract or nothing? Chris said something small is exactly how I win my clients. Matthew the other way said, I’ve given up doing small cheap jobs unless it’s part of a security audit for a monthly agreement. Jason says, I’ve been thinking about this lately as well. I think it’s a way for them to sample your services and if you tell them that you’ll do a project or you’ll do a break/fix, then they can see how they go from there. But ongoing support from us needs to be on one of our agreements.

Tony then says, it really depends on your size and how busy you are. When we were small, we would take small steps if we knew it could lead to bigger things, especially for a growing company. Nowadays we’re at that tipping point of being so busy and ready to hire another tech. We’re not taking anything but MRR monthly recurring revenue. Aaron says we only quote if they also want to quote for full services. So he will take on break/fix, but only if it leads onto something else. Steven says MRR or nothing. We’ve just turned down a project because of the nature and the prospect rejected the proportion that was MRR. And then we’ve got Mitch who final comment from Mitch who says, I refuse to do break/fix if that helps get on a flat rate contract or nothing too much risk and it’s not a good relationship. So tell me where do you sit on this? Has it made you think that break/fix could be a marketing channel or opportunity maybe to get them to sample your business and maybe you try and convert them from there? Or are you never ever going back to break/fix? No way.

Paul Green’s MSP marketing podcast still to come. One of the biggest fears MSPs have when they start doing marketing properly is that they’ll get too many clients and won’t be able to cope. Now, that rarely happens except it did happen to my big interview guest this week and you’ll hear his story in the next five minutes.

03:55

We all come up with big plans and things we want to achieve with our business, but you know that no one’s impressed by that, right? There’s only one thing that impresses your family, your peers and your staff. 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. There are many things that are not cool about being a business owner, number of hours worked, worrying cashflow rules and regulations staff, and of course the fact that all of this is on you, but there are of course many things that are cool about being a business owner, such as how being a business owner becomes an integral part of your identity, especially when you’ve done it for a few years and you’ve proved to yourself that you can do it.

You can start and maintain and grow a business. So I’ve been a business owner for 19 years now and it’s become central to the way I identify along, of course with being a dad and part of my local community. And I like that my non-business owning friends that they’ll look at me and think, how the hell did he do that? How has he grown a business like that and how has he done it for so long and not had to go and get a proper job? But here’s the thing, they’re only impressed by what you get done, not by what you intend to get done. It’s like when you join a gym on January the second and you tell everyone, right, I’m going to lose half my body weight. I’m going to get rid of this dad term. I’m going to have muscles like Arnie, and you will never ever see me eating a burger again.

And everyone thinks, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then three weeks later when you’re pig out on your seventh Snickers bar of the evening, they’re not that surprised at all. And it’s exactly the same in business because you say, right, gang, this year we’re going to grow our turnover by 50%. We’re going to double net profit, we’re going to add six new clients. And people don’t believe you. And by people I mean your peers, your staff, and your family. They only believe you when actually do it, when you get it done. People are impressed by what you actually do, not by what you say that you’re going to do. And this is a really important point because the only way to grow your MSP is to do things, to take action on things. You can hear a great marketing strategy or an idea in this podcast or one of the millions of other places to get inspiration, but unless you act on it, it has no value at all.

Go back and listen to some of the MSP owning guests that I’ve had on in the last few years, and their story is typically one of average slow growth until one day they change, they throw resources into sales and marketing, and they start to take the business much more seriously and they do things, they take action every day on things that will grow the business. They do this consistently year after year after year after year after year, action, action, action, action, action. And then they get to tell their peers and their family that the business is now turning over $20 million instead of half a million dollars. Now imagine what that would do for your identity as a business owner. Be amazing, right? Action is the only silver bullet.

Paul Green’s MSP marketing podcast still to come. Have you ever wondered if you should do Facebook ads to attract new clients? Another MSP is wondering exactly the same thing, and I’ll answer that question in the next five minutes.

07:25

One of the biggest fears that MSPs have when they start doing marketing properly is that they’ll get too many clients and won’t be able to cope. Now, that rarely happens, except it did happen to my big interview guest this week. Let’s talk about what he did to be so successful and then the changes he made to ensure the business could cope and not let customer service drop. Today’s big interview is with a guy who sold so much, he broke his MSPs operations.

Hi everybody, I’m Jeff Newton and I’m the VP of sales and marketing at Red Eye Tech in the Midwest in the USA. And I’ve also got the hottest new community for MSP owners that are looking to grow.

Okay, and we are going to talk about the community towards the end of this interview. Thank you so much for coming onto the podcast, Jeff. It’s really funny when I talk to MSPs about improving their marketing and improving their sales, very often people say to me, Paul, the number one fear I have is that I’m going to switch on the marketing, switch on the sales and we are going to be inundated and we won’t be able to move for leads and for prospects and for new clients. And I always say to them, that never ever happens. And then I met you and your opening gambit to me was I’m the guy that broke operations. I got so good at marketing and sales that operations had to tell me, stop. We can’t cope with the number of clients coming on board. So what I’d like to talk about today is how you did that, and then I’m guessing you’ve come back a bit otherwise you have a lot of enemies in operations right now. We’re going to tell your story today of what you’ve done to improve the marketing and sales in your MSP so much that actually you were asked to slow it down a little bit. Let’s go back right to the beginning. So how many MSPs have you worked for? Because you’ve been doing this some time, haven’t you?

I have, yeah. So after, for the last 18 years, I have worked for five different MSPs, but seven times total. So that’s not sales guy’s math, that’s just the way that the MSP environment works. So that doesn’t mean that I worked for the same MSP twice over the last 18 years and the first decade was really spent on the operation side of the business. I was about every title you could have on the tech side of the house up to and including being an operations manager running a team of 25 when I had no business running myself. And so that was sort of my initial dive into leading and managing and growing business and people on the MSP side of things. And then the latter half for the second decade or so of my experience has been really on the sales side specifically whether that was in a sales executive role or director of sales role, the VCIO consulting engineer style roles or building sales teams like now VP of sales and marketing, running both sides of those houses. So pretty well-rounded with regards to having been in the trenches on both sides, and that makes it really interesting.

And what was it that made you switch from the warm and cuddly fluffy side of operations over to the dark and evil side of sales and marketing?

Yeah, that’s a fantastic question because I used to live in that side and I had the same perceptions about the salespeople as operations always did, but largely that was because I didn’t understand it, right? There was this perception of sales that I had because I was barely touching it really, right? I was just on the side, I was just a technical person. What ended up happening is as I rose through the ranks or got more experience is probably a better way of putting that on the operations side of the business, is that I found myself going on every single sales call with all of the sales reps across all of our regions from when I was sort of in that consulting engineer position, and then naturally my workload was spread to where that’s really all I was doing. I was the sales engineer, if you will, going on all of these calls, realizing that the calls went a little bit, something like this salesperson would introduce us in the company and say, and this is Jeff.

And then I was off doing a monologue for about the next hour until we were in the car driving back from the appointment and talking about it. And then a couple weeks later, we would close those deals and I thought, I think I’m really on the wrong side of the commission equation here. So I did that for about two years before one of our sales reps left and I said, Hey, I’m going to take the leap and fill that slot. So moved over into that role and got humbled really quickly, and that was where my respect for the sales and marketing side of the business came from is because I understood that darkness that existed between the two, but I didn’t understand what it was rooted in until I became the sales rep, and then my eyes were opened to everything else that goes into sales and that goes into marketing to get to that meeting that I was getting invited to all the time as the technical person and really kind of had to relearn an entirely new skill, but incredibly quickly because that was my new role. That’s what I was responsible for.

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So you presumably have tried so many different marketing things and sales things over the years before we talk about what has worked really well for you and he’s working well for you right now. Tell us some of the things that haven’t worked so well, and I’m going to add a caveat to this, that if you say something like, Hey, pay-per-click work for us, or SEO search engine optimization didn’t work for us. I’m going to throw in that caveat that all of these marketing things that you hear people say, oh, that didn’t work. Just because it doesn’t work for one MSP doesn’t mean it won’t work for another MSP. And you do find that different MSPs have to find a different mix of the different kind of things. But I’m curious of what you went through before you discovered your solution that works really well for you right now.

Yeah, I’m so glad you brought that up because that would’ve been the precursor to my answer is that I think one of the biggest pitfalls that I’ve experienced or seen in the MSPs that I’ve either worked in or worked with is that they’re very binary and they’re linear thinking of like, well, I tried that before and it didn’t work, so it’s written off entirely and forever, and that just isn’t the way that it actually works. I think of more of the Thomas Edison saying about having built the light bulb, he found a hundred different ways how not to build a light bulb or the other example I use is the WD 40 spray lubricant stuff. They found 39 ways that wasn’t going to work before they came across the 40th. I mean, that’s really the mindset that I had to adopt is that the only failure was stopping quitting, literally not trying anything new rather than continuing to push through and just whittle it down, get more specific, figure it out, and then eventually you find the things that catch.

And it wasn’t so much that the category didn’t work, it was just that the tactic or the approach didn’t work. One of the things that I think helped as I was stumbling through, okay, how do we get to the goal and the goal being net new recurring revenue? It was really chiseling away at, was it my audience? Was it my message? Was it the way in which it was conveyed? Right? Was it the targeting? Was it the angle? And so I really kind of broke the world down into more hook story offer, and then I at least had three things to focus on. What am I trying to say and how are we trying to get them to understand it? But it wasn’t until I really dove into the marketing for the first time that I even understood there was this whole other animal that’s different than sales that was different than operations.

And the marketing part for me was the saying that sticks in my head. I don’t know if it was this person who said it, but it’s who I heard it from. It’s Dean Jackson and Joe Polish, and they said that you have to enter the conversation that’s already happening in your prospect’s mind. And it was just like, I remember when I heard that and it changed the way that I saw the world entirely. And then I could then sit and say, okay, I’ve talked to a hundred different accounting firms as an example when I was on the support desk, or I’ve done 30 different installs for a lawyer’s office when I was an implementation engineer. So my experience gave me a lot of that water cooler conversation, if you will, inside those different types of niches or industries. And that really helped me say, okay, if I want to enter the conversation of this particular law firm’s mind, then I need to use the language that matters to them.

And so in the marketing, we would say things like, well, specifically what is the practice management suite that you use? Traditionally, we might’ve said, what’s your line of business application? Well, what the prospect here is when you use those two different pieces of language is you either know me, you intimately know me, or you’re just asking me a question you want the answer to. And in little tweaks like that about language, and it’s more inherent than you think when you think about having supported them is like, well, how do you manage your matters? Again, speaking of law firms, because they call their cases and all the deals that they deal with matters. And so to even just use the language that they have is a massive hack, if you will, or a secret to really cracking the code of entering that conversation that’s already in their mind. And then that makes it really congruent because they want to engage back in a dialogue with you at that point because it’s more about how you’re making them feel and what you’re making them think about versus what you’re trying to get across.

Yeah, yeah, I agree with you 1000%, and it’s interesting. It is tiny tweaks of language. So as you say something like saying, how do you deal with your matters rather than how do you deal with cases? It actually indicates that you are an insider. And of course you don’t actually need to be an insider to learn that, but it’s one of the reasons that makes vertical marketing so very, very powerful that you can really get to know the language they use, the way they use it, the shortcuts they use. Be like if I was on here saying, right, tell me about your remote monitoring, and I don’t even know what RMM stands for, right? I know it as an RMM, I know what it does, but I know PSA is, what’s that public service announcement? It’s not there, is it? I dunno what it is.

That’s the point. I don’t need to know. I just need to say PSA and I know exactly what your PSA does. It’s the acronym everyone uses, and if you didn’t use it, you’re not an insider. You mentioned as well the phrase enter the conversation that’s already going on in their head, which I think was originally from Dan Kennedy, who he’s like the marketing guru of small businesses and certainly Joe Polish, and I forget the other guy you mentioned, but Joe Polish was a Dan Kennedy student. Interestingly though, there was a TV show on years ago called Mad Men, which was set in an advertising agency in the 1960s. And I distinctly remember Don Draper, the main character saying, enter the conversation already having in there, they’re already having in their head. And if you don’t like the conversation, change that conversation. And I remember sitting, I love that show anyway, and I remember sitting bolt it right thinking that’s a marketing thing.

He’s just straight into marketing territory. But there we go, Jeff, let’s talk about what you are doing now or what you have done that got you in trouble with your operations colleagues. So we told that story right at the beginning that you are that very, very, very rare person that genuinely got too many prospects, too many clients coming into the business, and you were told to slow down there. And I promise it is a rare thing. You are one of only about two or three people I’ve ever spoken to who’ve done it. So tell us what you were doing and how you got to that position and how you’ve adjusted it to what you’re doing now.

So I can actually thank probably the how to the roots that I got out of the operations side of the business because I’ve never been the smartest guy in the room. Technically speaking, I didn’t go to school for the tech side of the world, but I always really leaned into the social side, the soft skills side, the people, parts of the business. So I knew who the smartest people were, I knew what I didn’t know, and I knew how to ask for help, and I leaned into those skills more than anything else. And so all of that to say that I got really, really good at reverse engineering to find what success was and work myself back from that. And so I would say it was a maybe three step process, right? Because the core of the process is to truly have a sales process, period, end of story.

I would even go as far as to say it may not even matter exactly what that process is, so long as you have one and you do the same things the same way every time because you’re not going to be able to adjust fixed change, tweak any area of that process, whether it be the funnel or the process, if you aren’t consistently figuring out how are you doing it each time and what does that look like as you’re either winning, losing, or finding success along the way. And so step one is to have a sales process. Now, if you don’t have one documented or if you don’t have a real one or you really don’t even like that word, it isn’t as intimidating as it needs to be, right? Think about the times that you’ve won. Think about the last deal that you closed and just start with the milestones that you took that prospect through until they became a customer.

And write it down and put it on paper, like real paper, not digital paper, and just start filling in the details of what did I take this person through? Standardize that, make sure you and all the people in your organization, which is what we had done, were doing everything the same way. Then it didn’t matter if it was just me running a team of me, or if it was me running a team of seven sales reps, I needed everyone doing the same thing every way. I couldn’t manage the chaos that was created in A CRM as an example when everyone was doing it their own way until we had a sales process that was dialed and consistent, which we eventually got to, then it really became tweaking and adjusting. So I’m a big believer in continuous improvement. We’re never really going to have this thing dialed in.

We’ll always make changes. And so feedback going into and out of every sales call mattered, and that was where we were making our adjustments, but we were also monitoring and documenting what those adjustments were. Because again, if we were changing something and it broke a couple steps down the line in our process, then we needed to go back and figure out what was the change that we made that had that implication both positive or negative. And that’s, I mean, as ironic or as simple as basic as that might seem, it actually took until I talked to many, many MSPs through peer groups that I realized that they don’t even have a process. They oftentimes mistake selling the selling side of the business for what I call just order taking. So if your sales process looks a little bit something like this, it’s an inbound referral or a warm lead or something to that effect because that’s how most MSPs grow, then your sales process and questions probably sound a little bit more like, well, how many endpoints do you have?

How many people do you have? How many locations do you have? What tools are you using? Or what applications are you using? And then in the back of your mind, you’re really just building a quote, and then you turn around and get off the phone, you send it to him, you maybe follow up with him once or twice before you’re off to one of these other thousand things that’s demanding your attention, and that’s mistaken as a sales process. And so we just lump all that into, Hey, this is order taking. That’s not selling. And selling is a completely different set of skills that most professions don’t train on as well. And so that’s where the methodology and the approach of ACL’s process really comes into play. Now, once that’s there, then you’re dialing it in, you’re getting perfection. That’s the output side. Anyone can get that part right?

That’s not really the secret to how we broke operations. It was really, once I had that dialed in, two different organizations we would produce. We had a 64% win rate average and a 68% win rate average at the two different locations using the sales process consistently. So once I had that dialed in, I really only had one major problem to grow or to scale, and that was top of funnel. So how do we fix the top of funnel process, which really just means more leads to run through that system because then it got much more predictable. I know a lot of people say that sales is just a numbers game, and while that is true, it can be so much more than that if you actually apply the art along with the science of the numbers at each stage of the game. So the number one factor that really engineered the engine that broke operations was really good, top of funnel with really good engagement with a focus on conversion to drive them all the way through the funnel.

Maybe a clear example of that in our industry, and since we’re all in it, right? We’re all MSPs, there’s two sales cycles that you have to be aware of. There is the here and now buyer, which is the smaller minority, but it’s really the pool that most MSPs think about is the only pool of sales. So the people that buy now, and by now I mean within 90 days, and that’s just the smallest amount because there’s this whole other category of buyers that are the not now buyers that buy somewhere between 90 days and two years after your initial engagement with them. And if you lose sight of them, that’s where so much fortune is made. And so much fortune exists is in the discipline and the relentless follow-up on those that you may have gone all the way through the process with, and maybe they didn’t decide to move forward with you today.

But the reason is it’s really an event driven sales cycle, right? There’s one of maybe five reasons why people make a change when it comes to a managed service provider. Internal person leaves, whether that be an internal tech person or an internal key decision maker, we oftentimes see it as maybe like a CFO or a finance person changes. And then that’s one of the first things they want to do is bring in their people to make an impact and make a splash. So we see that as a trigger, some sort of incident security incident or like a catastrophic infrastructure failure or something. But unless some event happens to get people off the X, the perceived pain of changing is so much greater than dealing with mediocre service that they just sort of accept it until one of those events happens. So if you don’t drive your sales process, and even there, right, whether you have tools or automation or it’s all manual, if you’re not staying in front of the people that you’ve already been in front of for at least two years after you are in front of ’em, you’re leaving so much opportunity on the table.

When we were up and running, we ran two metrics. We had the 90 day pipeline and then that larger pipeline of the 18 month pipeline. And it was really great to watch. Basically on that 18 month cycle is what we watched on that second one was when and where did we get those leads that just the phone rang and they want to close within two or three days? Why? Because that event happened and you’d already pre-sold them. They just weren’t in a position to make that change when you talked to them.

Fascinating. That’s a really comprehensive answer, and thank you so much for that, Jeff. Let’s finally look at this new community that you have launched, and it’s a community dedicated to this sales to making more sales happen. Tell us what this community is about just briefly and tell us where we can go to find out more details and of course to join.

Absolutely. So it’s really just a dialogue, exactly like this one, right? I want get down to the, as we would say, brass tax, the real details about sales enablement, because it doesn’t matter if you get a thousand leads in a month, even if you don’t know how to manage the psychology of the buyer’s buying process to navigate them cleanly to a conversion, then it doesn’t matter if you have one lead or a thousand leads, if you can’t convert it, it doesn’t matter, right? You don’t have customers. And so there is a process, a really simple way to manage through that. And so I’m building out a community there, both with the free side and then a group coaching engagement too as well. It’s called MSP Sales Secrets. You can find it at mspsalessecrets.com. It is a mobile app for both platforms, and that was the details of where all that magic is happening, but it’s truly focused on sales enablement and taking that prospect that is in the stage of problem unaware and solution unaware, all the way to raving fan client, and how do you navigate the psychological milestones to get people there. So you can find that community at the website, MSP sales secrets.com.

27:34

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

This is a new bit of the show where each week we’ll answer your marketing questions. Producer James, welcome back. It’s been years since we heard your lovely voice, so what’s our first question?

Oh, thank you, Paul. Pleasure as always. Now, this question comes from Scott who runs an MSP in Florida, and this is an interesting one. He’s keen along with content marketing to also try some paid advertising on social media, but he’s concerned about the return on investment and his lack of experience. So his question is, should I as an MSP run Facebook ads? And if so, do you have any tips?

Okay, that is a great question. Like many adverts, Facebook really can be hit or miss depending on the size of the geographical area that you’re in and whether or not you’re targeting a vertical. Because the hardest thing with Facebook ads is getting the criteria right and getting big enough numbers. If you are targeting a group that’s too small, it’s really hard to make the ads appear and to actually make them effective. It’s actually easier to target really broad basis of consumers like dog owners or parents than it is to target business owners because that can be quite a small group, and that makes your ads less effective. My suggestion is just like anything, risk a hundred dollars, right? Try it. Make sure your advert is eye-catching and send them to a special landing page on your website. Make sure the message in the advert matches the landing, the message on the landing page, and one pro tip.

If straightforward advertising doesn’t work for you on Facebook, then test remarketing on Facebook. And this is where you show adverts to people who have visited your website, but they haven’t inquired yet, which of course is going to be the majority of your website visitors. And that’s a much easier target market to identify because you put a bit of code from Facebook in your website, which tells Facebook who has visited. And if they’ve already been on your site once, then you at least know that they could one day be ready to buy managed services. By the way, if you have a question about anything in your MSP that you’d like some help with, just go to the contact page at mspmarketingedge.com. And also, while you are there, if you’d love to attract new, better clients into your MSP, you just have to get our three step marketing system. It’s trusted by more than 700 fellow MSPs around the world, and you can check if your area is still available right now at mspmarketingedge.com

Coming up next week.

Thanks so much for listening this week. Next week, we’re going to look at what it really means when a prospect says no, because trust me, they’re not really saying no.

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

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Full show transcription

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