ERP115 - Expert Sales Advice and Tactics

And the truth of the matter is that even the best sales people overall are optimizing to lose more than they win. Of course. throughout the entire deal cycle. Now, good sales people may have good close rates from like proposal to close or whatever. But they're doing a lot of filtering out earlier on in the sales process. It takes a lot of nos to get to the yes. Welcome to Evolved Radio where we explore the evolution of business and technology. I'm your host Todd Kane. This episode is brought to you by Evolve Management training courses. A whole series of courses built specifically for your MSP training needs. There's a project management for MSP's course, an MSP service manager boot camp, MSP security fundamentals and an IT documentation done right course. Check out the full suite of courses at training.evolvedmgmt.com. Or look for a link in the show notes. Welcome to another episode of the Evolved Radio podcast. Today we're talking sales strategies and tactics with my guest Megan Killian, chief consultant with MKC Agency. We start off by discussing finding strength in adversity. Megan shares her story about an incredibly challenging period in her life and what she learned. This was kind of an unexpected rabbit hole we went down, but it's relevant since business development means getting a lot of nos, which can be so uncomfortable for people that they never start. Then Megan shares practical tactics on qualifying leads, understanding client needs and framing discussions to turn prospects into customers. This episode is packed with useful tactics that you can use immediately to grow your business. So let's go. Megan, welcome to the Evolved Radio podcast. Glad to be here. All right, so we'll kick in straight with a bit of your origin story if you would, your background and how you've come to the position that you're in now. Oh, yes, my villain origin story. So my background is B2B sales. Um, and I've been in that for about 15 years, done $550 million in B2B tech revenue. And five-ish years ago, wibbly wobbly timey wimey. I'm starting to lose the thread of when this all began, but I guess it must have been closer to six years ago. I was working at Ericsson as the director of business development on the UDN project. And I was in big rooms with some big personalities and closing really the biggest deals of my life. And then I got pregnant with twins. Which at the time was super exciting. They gave me great maternity leave. There was no complaints from that perspective. It wasn't like they pushed me out. But my twins came six weeks early. And so they were in the you for 10 days. And they came out of the you and my mom had been struggling with lung cancer that had metastasized to her brain. And two months after my twins were born, my mom was down here visiting. She and I got into a really big fight, probably the first real fight of like our lives. And she left and then she died. Wow. Less than two weeks after she left my home, she passed away. Um, I flew up there super last minute. Um, to kind of try to get in a visitation before the end, but she was really, really gone. I don't know if you've ever known anyone um who's passed from brain cancer, but it really erodes away at who you are, especially the treatment, the radiation, the chemotherapy. She just wasn't my mom anymore. She was more like a petulant child. And then when I was up there, she was completely not not present, not herself. I her last words to me were listen to your mother Megan because I was trying to force droplets of water into her mouth. Anyways, the company I was working for, they gave me an extra week of leave. I was supposed to be back on the West Coast in California that following Monday. Uh they gave me an extra week, but the Monday after that, I had to get back to the West Coast and when I came back, I was making mistakes. For the first time in my entire career, I was making mistakes. And they were small things, like misspelling on the website, sending an email from the wrong domain, calling somebody by the wrong name. It wasn't earth shattering. But I have a standard that I hold myself to professionally and I didn't feel like I was meeting it. So I met with my GM and he and I talked and he was like, how do you think you're doing? And I was like, garbage. And he was like, well, I wouldn't say garbage. But no, you're not you. Like you're not bringing your usual self to the table and we had this conversation. And then on the way home, I was in the airport and I was pumping breast milk for my twins in like an airport bathroom. And it was just that moment that I was like, what am I doing? I'm not here mentally, emotionally, I'm a mess. I have to prioritize myself, prioritize my family. So I took time off to consult. And I just took one or two clients because I was really trying to prioritize being at home with my kids and it grew and it grew and it grew and my clients were buying hours from each other to take up more of my time blocks. And so I was opening up time blocks. And that went on for about two, two and a half years before I launched the agency. And when I launched the agency, it was very much a response to my client saying like, all these ideas are great, Megan, but who's going to do it? And I was like, well, I'll I'll hire the people, I'll train them, I'll build the systems and we'll do it for you. And then two to three years ago, um we started bringing on more and more managed services clients. And I had worked for two MSPs directly in the past and I knew that they had a hard time with sales. And so we sort of accidentally niched. We were at the time doing a lot of SAS, a lot of big money contracts. But I didn't feel like we were delivering a ton of value or that it aligned with my vision and my passion for small business, for local economy, for giving opportunities to marginalized people. And so that's where like the the MKC of today was born then as we started to lean more towards managed services and we really rebuilt everything specifically for MSPs because one they needed the most help. But two, every dollar earned by an MSP goes back into a local economy. Whereas I was getting real sick of helping people buy their third private jet. Like that's that's not it. So I was done being a kingmaker and I wanted to be more of like a local lord maker instead. Excellent. But um, so interesting. Like I I hadn't really realized that you came into the MSP industry sort of sideways. Uh so that that's that's that's enlightening. Um, I think it's awesome. I mean, maybe if you if you don't mind, uh shift back slightly in that window of like like the experience of a lot of sort of tough times and and I hate this word but like a traumatic experience. of all of those things happening in quick succession, you know, your mom being sick, uh the twins, all of those things. Well like this must have been sort of relative time around COVID too, right? Yeah, so my the twins were born, they were born pre-COVID, thank goodness. So like Nick you, we could come and go as we pleased. So they were born January of 2018. My mom passed April of 2018. She was down here in March. And then my dad passed February of 2019. Oh my god. So that time that I took off, it was super important to me, to my family to be present for my dad. who was a juvenile diabetic and a brittle diabetic and had been deteriorating for a long time, but with my mom gone, like there wasn't anybody there. So we were and we live down in Florida and I'm from Massachusetts originally, so we were back and forth a lot. And then that following April, I had to put my horse down, which that horse and I were BFFs, right? So this horse when I was an infant, like a toddler in my little what are those things called? You're like little walkers. My dad would have the horse in the shed row like grooming her and I would be tickling her belly under her feet and she would stand with her her feet all spread out to make space for me and just stand super, super still because she loved me and I was a baby. And she had basically been my sister. I'm an only child. And so this was like the closest bond I had in my life. And I might get emotional talking about it because I got through it. I got through my my twins being premature. Um and I'd had multiple big scares with them going into labor really early. from flights up to see my mom when she was going through cancer treatment. I got through my mom dying. I got through my dad dying and I was holding it all together. You know, the pieces were a little cracked, but I was holding the vase together. And then I had to put my horse down. And my husband had to pick me up out of the hole in the ground they had dug for my horse. And I wouldn't let go of her lead. And he had to carry me and put me in the truck because I didn't want to leave her. And it still to this day feels like I buried just a piece of who I was. So yeah, those years like that it it was super traumatic. Yeah. And then COVID hit. Yeah. So literally like we put my dad in the ground, we flew home and like I buried my horse pretty much the same time I buried my dad. So I I'd gone back up to deal with his service and also to deal with my horse. We came back down here and I remember really vividly because we had O pairs at the time flying in from overseas and our O pair came in from South Africa on the very last flight out of South Africa before they closed international travel and they couldn't anymore. And I want to say that that was in May, but again, I may be not 100% on the timeline. And then like, I think that was traumatic for all of us. We all we all experienced that traumatic experience together. But for me, in many ways, it almost felt like a gift because I did not have to go back to in-person work anywhere. None of my clients expected me to fly out to do on-sites. And I'm autistic and ADHD and I'm very high masking. So it's very easy for me to put the persona on for like a zoom meeting and get my work done and then I'm done and I can walk away from it and I can be more authentic to myself. I don't know that I would have made it through that year to two years following both my parents' deaths professionally if I had had to be on on sites, if I'd had to have been on like the channel MSP circuit going to all the events. Yeah. If I had to be in office, I think I would have had a mental breakdown. So while there were lots of things about COVID that I didn't enjoy and it was a terrible thing that happened to us all, it also was a gift to me personally to have that time to recover. And expectations were just lowered across the board. Sure. Where we were all kind of allowed to be in our pajamas. Yeah. And I was really depressed, but yeah, it's it's interesting. Like this is almost an like an entirely separate podcast. So maybe we'll have you back on on on sort of the resiliency of this, right? Because like that that is a lot for anybody. And I I totally recognize what you're saying about uh sort of the the strange silver linings of such a horrible event with COVID. I think a lot of people sort of experienced some brightness, like a a unique opportunity that that was sort of born out of that in a lot of ways, right? But maybe just like a quick uh sort of uh synopsis on sort of that that whole period. Like what are your thoughts? You must have sort of considered this. Like uh what are your thoughts on resilience around like dealing with a lot of sort of personal impacts and how that that sort of crosses over uh can teach you some some things about yourself or can teach you some things about business. But uh yeah, just overall, what are your thoughts on on sort of personal resilience? Well, I think that challenge is transformative one way or another. So when you're challenged, you have to make the choice of how you're going to respond to it. We do not get to choose the things that happen to us in this life. All that we choose is how we respond, how we persevere, if we persevere, and what comes next. And it's it's corny, but if you've seen Frozen 2 and now you have kids, there's that song that talks about doing the next right thing. Mhm. And for me, that's what you do. In business, in life, you just do the next right thing. Whatever that may be. And so as I was going through personal challenges, there were also quite a few business challenges happening during that very same time that I was also trying to navigate. And you know, MKC's core has always been ethics to prove that revenue does not have to be an unethical aspect of your business, that sales can be ethical, that marketing can be ethical. And so I've always just asked myself, what is the best choice I can make in this moment? What is the least wrong thing that I can do? And when it comes to personal resiliency, I myself went through a lot of really early trauma in my youth. And I hate those sayings that like my trauma made me stronger. No, my trauma broke me. But I rebuilt myself stronger. And because of that, I there's just a lot of tools in the toolbox. Yeah. You know, early childhood trauma means that I went to a lot of therapy. Like I have CBT skills and I use that in sales. Like part of our cold calling training that we do is CBT. And I think that those skills that there's so much cross usability, cross functionality of the skill sets we pick up in work and business. Like there's so many times that I've been through some type of coaching or training for business, like I went through strategic coach for example, that I then use at home in my life. Like that I'm using as a parent. I'm using these skills. And vice versa that there's a lot of things that I've done in therapy or parenting classes or whatever that I put into practice in business. And resiliency is one of those things that you have to disconnect from outcomes to a certain extent. You have to protect the core of who you are in all that you do. There's a lot of things that you can sacrifice and I'm one of those people who's very willing to put myself through a great deal of pain for the success that's on the other side. But you've got to protect that core of what is my breaking point and how do I avoid it or how do I come back stronger after the break? Almost everyone I know who's hyper successful in business has a traumatic origin story. Something lit the fire. Yeah. You know, we all have the passion that keeps us going and something has to have lit that fire and for me it was a lot of trauma. Yeah. I I think that's true. Like uh two things in there that I I want to underline. Uh I I think the idea of protecting yourself and that being the core responsibility, I think is really important because, you know, as sort of related to what we're what we're what we're originally supposed to talk about today. Uh the like MSPs and small business owners as a whole have a high degree of uh ability to sort of run hot, but a lot of people sort of drive themselves into the ground without really realizing it and it's often too late before they kind of reflect on like, hang on, maybe this is too much. So I think that idea of like how much is too much and making sure that there's still that core element that is protected and has to have like a really strong fence around it. So I think that's a a crucial, crucial idea around this. And also like, I agree, like the number of entrepreneurs and and business owners that I've talked to, like if you dig deep enough, there's often just an element of I'll show you and if someone says like, you can't do that, they're like, watch me, right? Like that's such a core component to so many business owners. That's my whole life. So I had my oldest son when I was 18. And at the time, like I was a straight A student. I went to one of the top 15 high schools in the country. I had an early accepted. I took my pregnancy test the day after I got my early acceptance letter to Emerson. And my whole family, my whole support system was like, you are throwing your life away, girl. You've tossed it. Now you will be nothing. You'll just be a mom and that's all you'll ever be. And I was like, that's not true. Middle fingers to the audience. And now I'm a best-selling author and And I think that comes for a lot of entrepreneurs start there and it's certainly why I chose sales as a pathway. Because there's so few things in life you can do with no college degree and make a lot of money. I think I'm like three credits away from my associates still. And I've done $550 million in B2B tech revenue. I'm an Amazon best-selling author of the MSP Sales Playbook. I've worked I think at some of kind of the best businesses you can work at and brought a lot of value to our clients. I don't have a college degree and I don't know whether or not I'll get one. Maybe if time allows at some point. Um but that's sales. Like sales skills are something that you can learn outside of a classroom. In fact, I would argue that is better learned. Absolutely. outside of a classroom. Because it's such a practical skill, right? Like it's about interacting with people and understanding sort of like what works rather than theory. And honestly, this is part of what bothers me about a lot of business books in general. I would say maybe sales books sort of fall into that same bucket of a lot of theory, right? And maybe this goes to sort of like one of the things that I think is problematic in the industry is people tend to overthink sales rather than just taking reps, right? And getting used to it. Would you agree that like just getting out there and interacting is probably the most strength that you can build around this? Yeah, so first and foremost, something is always going to be better than nothing. Yes. Especially in sales. So if you're sitting there and you're just waiting, like if you're an MSP owner and you're just kind of sitting at the office waiting, hoping that somebody's going to fill out a form online or call you up. That's the do nothing approach. Yeah. And I think most MSPs can say that doing nothing does not get them where they want to be. It probably got them to a a place where they're maybe stable. If if you run a really good MSP, you will get referrals up until a certain point, but then inevitably, there's going to be some churn, even if you're great, company's going to acquired, they go out of business, whatever, there's going to be natural organic loss of business that is not no fault of your own. And at some point the referrals just start just replacing the churn. Yep. And then MSP's flat line. And at the end of the day, doing something's going to be better than doing nothing. And that's actually the quote at the very top of I have a a little playbook for MSP owners for how to get started on LinkedIn. And it just says post something anything. It doesn't matter if it sucks. Now you have data on what sucks. And it's the same thing with cold calling, with cold email, with going to networking events, finding out what doesn't work is just as valuable as finding out what does work. And when I'm coaching sales people and especially like front of pipeline SDRs is get to know as fast as possible. Yes. Getting to know is an incredibly powerful sales skill. And that's what that do do something so you can find out if it doesn't work. And if it doesn't work, great. Now we know that either that message sucked or it was to the wrong person. Let's figure out what was wrong and do something else the next time. Doing the reps, building the skilling. Most MSPs aren't even getting enough at bats to be good at discovery as a standalone in the process. So they're maybe having one sales call a month. And that's not enough to build muscle around sales once you already have them in the door. So someone wants to buy from you and you're really just enabling them to buy the product from you and still MSPs are fumbling because they're not getting enough practice. And imagine how much you could hone your messaging if you would just get on the phone and call somebody. Send a couple of emails, connect with people on LinkedIn and chat, go to networking events and practice your pitch. How much more ready that would make you for when that prospect that comes in that is ready to buy. that your message is then honed and also your social skills are, you know, practiced a little. Yeah. So, my brain's going in a million different directions here. This is awesome. So, one thing like that really sort of frustrates me that I tend to see in the industry is we are tend to be technical founders, right? Uh there are some sales led founders. Uh I would say it's maybe like 20% of the industry. I'd say the majority is technical led. And you know, inevitably, I think there's this uh there is an introverted nature, but almost a social resistance, I think is an amplified factor on top of that. And I would say that this is actually a crucial factor of the people that are able to escape, get that escape velocity past 1 million. Like there's sort of up to 1 million, you can build a pretty good business. 1 to 5 million is what we describe as Death Valley. And then if you can get past five, you're going to be great and probably sort of approach 10 over time and then start to really take off. I really said after 10 it's gravy. Absolutely. Yeah, like it's repeatable. You know this is going to work. And that's why the PE firms are are very interested in 10 million plus because obviously you probably know what you're doing. But what I find is the sub 1 millions, they almost inevitably fall into this category of they're relying very heavily on referrals for growth and it's organic for a period and then it turns out exactly as you described that they've sort of maxed out their referral capability and then like they're not sure what to do. And I've I've spoken to a number of owners about this of like encouraging them to just get out and start moving around, interacting with people. And you can sort of see this resistance on their face. They're like, can I just put up some ad words or, you know, like they just don't want to interact with people, right? But uh so first I'd love to sort of your take on like how important is it being is that personal and that interpersonal relationship in in starting to build that sales funnel versus some of the more technical activities that people tend to want to lean towards. So, there's more than one way to skin a cat. Yeah. I'm an introvert. It's not always immediately noticeable because I'm very high masking. But after act social activity, I have to go lay down for a long time to recharge, read a book, play some video games. And I've done a lot in sales. One of my friends Kyle has um written a whole bunch of sales material around sales for introverts. And I don't think the introversion extroversion thing actually matters in terms of how good you'll be at sales. Agreed. But you probably need different systems than your counterpart who's different. And I tell people all the time, there's going to be two major factors in whether or not an individual channel is successful for you for revenue acquisition. One, are your ideal prospects there? So, if they're not there, the channel's not going to work. Like, you can't cold call people who don't pick up the phone. You can't cold email people who don't check their email. You can't connect on LinkedIn with people who aren't using LinkedIn. You can't reach people on Facebook who don't use Facebook, so on and so forth. The second aspect being how comfortable are you with that channel? When founders are really bashing their head into the wall is when there's not anywhere they're comfortable. But then we need to unpack that. Yeah. Right? Cuz like I've known some people who are painfully introverted, right? Like I'm autistic, so painfully introverted, painful social anxiety. In fact, I can't go to a grocery store. I I literally cannot go to the grocery store and go grocery shopping. That's the level of like social anxiety. This causes me back. Right? But I go to conferences and you are a person that exists in the world as an MSP owner, no matter how technical you are, no matter how introverted you are, there are things that you do. What are those things, right? Am I super, super comfortable emailing a client back to talk to them about something? Great, maybe we should start with email campaigns. Like cold email. Maybe we should start honing your messaging via email first. LinkedIn is a great one because it is the omnimedia experience. Like you can do really well on LinkedIn with video. But you can also do equally as well on LinkedIn just with copywriting or with graphics. I've had clients who have been like, just whiteboard it for me. Show me on the whiteboard what it is that you're talking about. I'm going to dumb that down a little bit and create an infographic and now you're going to post it on social and explain what you just explained to me, but like I'm five. And so a lot of it is just it's finding where you can be comfortable, right? So like I had a client that closed a $5 million deal this past year from sponsoring a golf tournament. And when we first started talking about it, he was like, I don't know that I would be comfortable at the golf course. And I was like, okay, well the tournament's six months away. We don't have to get the prospectus back for two months. So go play some golf and tell me, could you be comfortable at the club? Because you've never tried. So and let like there's no pressure. You're just going to you and your wife are just going to go to the club. golf a couple of times, take some lessons, just see if you're comfortable. Do you like being there? Turns out, the man loves the golf club. Yeah. He loves it. He loves going in and getting a drink. He loves golfing. His wife likes to go with him. They like bird watching, which by the way can go very well with golf. And it turns out he could be super comfortable there and he sold the biggest deal of the entire existence of his business at a tournament, got a verbal, got the contract out to him afterwards and they signed like, but he didn't think that that was something he'd be comfortable with when we first started talking about it. Sometimes you need a system to get started. I know like a lot of technical MSP owners are like, just give me the process. And I'm like, I can give you a process, but you still have to figure out what to say. Right. Like the process as a standalone is great, but we have to insert targeting and messaging and strategy behind it in order for it to work. But I think there's a lot of things that you can do to just help with comfortability. Role play, Rob Gillette over at MSP Dojo is big on just just practice. Yeah. That's a huge piece of it. Like practicing through role play so that you're more comfortable when it does happen. Even just going to events that are lower pressure to start with. So like if you decide that networking is a big opportunity for your business, go to some low pressure networking events. Go to your local chamber first. Go to like a young entrepreneurs group if you can fit the persona, right? Go go to like just an after hours mixer or something. And don't try to sell the first time that you go. Just go get comfortable. Let other people come to you and talk to you because there's going to be other sales people there and they're going to pitch you. That's a great opportunity to filter it. Maybe think about all the different ways you were approached and which ones felt good and which ones felt bad. You want to make people feel the way that you felt good, right? So how did how did the people that approached you when you were networking that made you feel good? What did they do? Oh, they asked you questions. They listened. They talked to you like you were a person. They didn't pitch you right away. Right. You can do that, right? Yeah. I think MSP owners get in their head thinking that sales is this like, I have to be super outgoing. I have to have this elevator pitch ready to go 24/7. And I'm like, dude, I don't I've never used an elevator pitch to sell anything in my life. Yeah. It's talked about constantly. I've never used one. I ask questions. I try to understand the problem. Like, can you if you can do a root cause analysis, you can be in sales, my friend. Yeah. Because that's what it is. That's awesome. So I mean, you're you're giving everybody hope here that there are are sort of different ways to approach this and you don't necessarily need to be sort of this extroverted, like charismatic used car salesman that we often have in our head when we talk about sales. And I it's just I agree, it's just generally not true. And I think the biggest factor in this is just act normal. Sorry. Just act normal. Act normal, exactly. The biggest factor in this is uh is exactly what you said. I see this in many aspects that uh I see this in QBRs and budgeting and all kinds of things around technical people is they tend to sort of make mountains out of mole hills, especially when it comes to sales and they have they sort of build up this catastrophic idea in their head of this is how badly it could go, right? Like they determine a client's budget and they say, oh, they'll never pay for this, so they never pitch it. Like you don't know, go tell them and maybe they might buy it. Same thing, right? Like uh you know, oh, if I went to this event and you know, there's nobody there, it'd be a waste of time. It's like, do you know that? Go. Like, go try it out. And then tell me if if if it actually was a waste of time. Then try something else. Um sort of to this. Yeah, don't reject yourself. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. I when I think a lot of that is the fear of rejection. Yes. It hurts less if I tell myself I can't do this, I won't be any good at it. Well, you can side step it. They're not interested. Yeah. If I preload myself with like they're not interested, then I'm less likely to get hurt. Whereas if I call somebody and they tell me to go fuck off, that actually that really hurts. Or if I spend all the time in the deal cycle and we get to the end and they don't the budget doesn't get approved. That really hurts. And the truth of the matter is that even the best sales people overall are optimizing to lose more than they win. Of course. throughout the entire deal cycle. Now, good sales people may have good close rates from like proposal to close or whatever. But they're doing a lot of filtering out earlier on in the sales process. It takes a lot of nos to get to the yes. And there is there's a resilience that you have to have in sales of being able to take that to the face and just be like, okay. Guess you're not interested then. But there's a psychological aspect of it that is just it's disconnecting from the outcome. Yeah. I can only control what I can control in the sales process. I cannot control if a business is going to be acquired. I cannot control if another priority is going to become a bigger priority than the one that is attached to my deal. I can't control if somebody's going to be fired or hired, any of it. I can't control what's going on inside that business. What I can control though is whether I know about it. I can make people comfortable enough to be honest with me and tell me what's going on in their business so that I know ahead of time if this deal is likely to close or not. I think especially new sales people, technical owners that are getting into sales, we're so afraid to just make the ask. And that is covered the most when people talk about asking for the clothes, like ask for the deal. Yes, do that. But ask for trust. Ask for information. Ask for access. All those little asks before you ask for the clothes. And like I tell people all the time, if you're losing deals, you're losing them in discovery. Like I don't care what the data says, what like they it may be closing after you sent a proposal so you think you're closing it, you're losing it in negotiation, but you're not. You lost that deal in discovery. And so that is where I see the natural curiosity of a technical person is actually so well fit for a good discovery process. The only caveat is that you have to learn how to discover around business, not tech. There is a technical needs analysis that needs to happen for an MSP. Like obviously I need to know if there's servers. I need to know what kind of cloud service they're using. I need to know how many users there are and where their email tenant is. Like I get that that technical needs analysis does need to happen for an MSP. But the business discovery is where you're winning or losing your deal. It is about how you are mapping your solution back to the business priorities. Their goals, their pain points, and their overall just business objectives. And I think that technical people are actually very prone to curiosity. They just have to learn how to be curious about the business rather than just being curious about the tech. Yep. Especially when you're facing someone who's not technical. Right. Yeah, exactly. That's another big thing that drives me crazy is like like they go into pitch to some provider and they speak all kinds of technical. They want to educate them about the IT and security landscape and I often tell people is like, hey, they don't know about any of the things that you're talking about. And B, they probably don't care. That's why you're in the room. So don't try and educate them about your business. You want to understand how your business can help their business. That's the part you want to focus on. It also may sound like a lie to the prospect. Right. Yeah. There is a level of education that has to happen, but I think where MSP owners tend to miss the boat is you should not be educating them about your products and services. They don't care. You should be educating them about the how you're going to solve their problems. Outcomes again, right? The education around why that problem you're having is actually a cyber security problem. Why that problem you're having is actually a config issue with your IT. That is the education that you need to do in sales. And also understanding that if you as a salesperson are the first one to tell them that something is important, you're going to lose trust. So you have to be cognizant of where in in their awareness journey the prospect is. If they come to you and they're like, I need cyber security because there's a new compliance thing coming down the pipeline that I have to meet and it has to be ready by this date and take my money and get me ready. That's fantastic. That is a different prospect. Pretty rare. Yes. Amazing. Amazing prospect, but they don't usually look like that. Totally different prospect than one that was like cold called on your behalf and a meeting was set around when was the last time that you evaluated IT vendors. Yeah, exactly. That person is not likely not aware. And so asking questions early on in your qualifying or discovery process that frame the awareness of the prospect that you can set things up appropriately is going to be so huge to delivering value. If I came into an MSP that didn't know that they had a lead gen problem and was just like, you guys have to have a better website. Your website sucks, you need a better one. That's not going to be received well. That's just how business works. Like don't call the baby ugly. Yeah. You know, especially when we're talking to owners, which is usually where MSPs are pitching. Most MSPs are pitching small businesses, they want to talk to the owner, they're pitching an owner. Do not tell the owner that their baby's ugly. That is their whole life. They put in so much work to get the business to this point. They personally identify with it too, right? You need to help them understand how this could be better, not that everything like the sky is not falling. If you preach it like the sky is falling, especially around cyber security because there's a lot of fud, fear, uncertainty and doubt pushed around cyber security, when you're like, panic, panic, panic, you're going to lose millions of dollars a day when you have downtime because you're attacked by a cyber criminal. And that small business owner is like, well, you know, I go to my peer group once a week and I go to chamber events every other week and I have a lot of other business friends that are similar sized businesses to mine and none of us have been the victims of anything. I think you're full of shit. You didn't gain trust, you lost it. Yeah. You have to instead be able to ask a good question and then position true risk. Do an actual risk assessment and show them what that could mean for their business and be really specific with it. So my messaging to say a doctor's office is going to be different than my messaging to a manufacturer around cyber security, not just because they have completely different compliance demands, but also because it means something different for their business. If I'm talking to a manufacturer who say is in the middle of the distribution cycle and so they're more so they're not really a supplier and they're not in logistics, they're more like warehousing and they have a lot of contracts where they're selling to larger retailers that are selling their products. What if I talk to them about how a cyber security incident could cost them their contracts? Because now you're going to be seen as a risk to a Walmart, to an Amazon, to a Target, and they're not going to want to sell your products anymore because they're going to be worried that their PCI compliance will be affected by your lack of compliance because you had this incident. It's not just about the day or two that you had downtime or that you were the ransom that you paid or whatever. It's this additional problem that you might have. And anytime that you can niche your messaging like that, like if you're talking to law firms and you want to talk about billable hours and how having a better IT support could set them up with automation to remove manual tasking from their administrative services and that therefore their paralegals could be doing a lot more billable hours and a lot less admin work. That's going to resonate. But if I just say like, hey, local law firm, do you need IT? Yeah. I hate that pitch. Like it's not nobody needs IT. I mean they do. But nobody is sitting, not nobody, less than 1% of your overall total addressable market is sitting there hoping the phone will ring with a solution to their IT problems. Most of them are not even aware that the problems they're having are technical. Right. The problems that they're having are about shrinking profit margins, uh constant churn of internal employees, onboarding taking forever and HR and IT hating each other because onboarding takes forever. And they're being no real process for offboarding and angry employees can destroy their business. There's so many things we could focus in on around this, but the overall point is just that the more niche you get with that messaging, the more you speak to what's actually going on in their business, the more successful you're going to be in sales because there's only a very small percentage of the market that's like actually in an awareness stage and aware that they need cyber security, that they need IT support. Everyone else needs you to do the extra work to help them get there. And with the managed services space getting more and more crowded every single day where you have those one-man shops that can offer it so much cheaper than you can. And you've got the big national MSPs that have a huge sales team and huge marketing budget and have more processes and systems and tools than you do and you're getting squashed in the middle and you want to stand out. The way to stand out is not to say, hey, we do IT support and cyber security. We're a compliance focused MSP. Right. That's not how you're going to jump out at people and make them want to talk to you. So I want to maybe pull up like like 100 feet and and focus on something that I think basically you've already answered. So but I want to kind of envelop it in a different sort of framing. Because one of the things you talked about earlier is sort of working with someone to figure out how they're actually going to market originally. And I I see this a lot where very tactical owners like just want to kind of get to the get started and just start like bringing in some leads. And then they'll bump into someone who's going to help them with their marketing or their sales process. And the first thing that they want to do is sit down with and and design their ideal candidate profile, right? Their ideal target. And a lot of people sort of look at this as like, is this really necessary? Like this feels kind of overhead, administrative, like, like can't we just get started, right? And I I feel like you kind of laid that out. Anything that you would add in that framing, I guess? Yeah, so I will say that 90% of the time it is pulling teeth with my clients to get them to describe to me the problems that they solve framed for their ICP. And so it is, it's a part of the business that not all MSP owners because we do have that like maybe 20% of MSP owners that do come from more of like a business background, sales background and they get it. But a large portion of MSP owners, like they're highly technical, they think of it sort of like I just want to do it, let me just get into it. And I will say something's better than nothing. Again, yes, do something. However, if you don't have a target, and you don't have messaging that's built for that target, the chances of you being successful are very low and reliant on the skills that you're telling me you don't have, right? So like an MSP owner will come to me and be like, well, I'm not that personable. I'm not that like charismatic fun person that everybody wants to be around. And I'm like, okay, that's fine. But then people aren't going to be lining up to talk to you. You have to do something a little bit different. You so figure out what the target is. Otherwise, what you're doing is like you're just throwing axes with no idea where the target is and just hoping and praying that it's going to hit one. But meanwhile, you're chopping down the forest around you. And what I mean by that is without doing that ICP, without building out that ideal client profile, most managed services when I ask them about their ideal customer, this is where they start. Companies with at least 10 computers within 50 miles of my office. And I'm like, please don't say that ever again. Not don't tell people you're my client if you're going to say that. And what that is is like, if that's what you're doing, you're just spraying and praying and hitting every company that has at least 10 computers within 50 miles of your office, I promise you you're pissing off at least 80% of them. They're not interested, they feel harassed, you have become the used car salesman that you hate so much. When we narrow it down, then we know who we're trying to talk to. So instead of at least 10 computers within 50 miles, we're saying, we do really well with prospects that have, you know, 25 to 50 machines. That's really where we can bring the most value before they have an internal IT guy, but not so small that they can't afford us. Budget's going to be a problem under that usually. And we really hone in with like professional services, law firms, accounting, other B2B companies, they seem to appreciate our services the most. Our staff is the most trained on their fundamental systems. Like QuickBooks, we really like clients that are on Microsoft. We don't like to do the Google and Microsoft migration and we don't support Google. Like when you really get deeper into it, then I can build you a buyer persona. And the buyer persona is 10 times the value of ICP because the ICP is just where we're throwing the axe. Right. Right? The ICP says, throw the axe at this target and don't cut down the whole forest around you. But the buyer persona says, what does this person care about? Right. And that's when we can develop messaging, positioning, strategy that's going to resonate and have prospects wanting to talk to you and you can speak their language. Because the truth of the matter is, when I throw around words like ICP and I don't explain what it is, managed service providers, they get frustrated, right? Like, it makes them feel a little dumb. They don't like feeling dumb. They're smart people. That's all the business owners. No business owner wants to feel stupid. So when you're throwing around acronyms that are like BCDR and SOC 2, you're making them feel stupid. People don't like to feel stupid. By connecting the dots, they then don't like you because you're making them feel stupid. And to quote, I think it's Jeb Blount that says, people may not buy from people they like. As in they're not going to hurt their business because they like you. But people don't buy from people they don't like. Mhm. Yeah. 10 out of 10 times they'll give that money to to the person that they liked better. And most most of the most of the time when you're selling managed services, you usually are in a multi you're being compared, whether you're trying to unseat someone who's already there or they're doing a vendor roundup and they're trying to see what's out there. Any which way you look at it, you're you're probably being put up against someone else. So be likable. Yeah. Uh all right, so one other thing that you mentioned here, um that I I want to get get you to sort of expand on because this is I think really important a lot of I I find a lot of people don't know this. Uh but I think it's really foundational to sort of understanding the sales process. So can you walk through kind of the awareness stages in a sales process? Yeah, so there's like actual real awareness stages that people use, but for me, it's no awareness whatsoever, right? They're flying blind. There's problem awareness. So they know that something's wrong, but they don't yet know how to solve it. Yep. And those are probably most of your cold prospects. Yep. So if you're doing cold outbound, probably most of them are in this stage of like, I've got problems. Like they're not walking around thinking there's absolutely nothing wrong in my business. They they're aware of some problems, but they don't know what the solution is. Then you've got solution aware buyers who they know they have a problem, they know how they would like to solve it. So maybe they want to outsource their IT, maybe they want somebody to come in and consult about cyber security, whatever. They have an idea of how they want to solve it. They're usually in a research mode. Right. Those are the prospects that are coming in inbound on your website asking you questions if you've got a website where they can do that. And then you've got the the truly like aware ready to buy prospects who are not just aware they have a problem, are not just aware of the solution that they're looking for. But they are aware of you and the fact that you solve this problem and that you've done it well for other people. And those are your like referrals, the people that like actually pick up the phone and call you and are like, hey, uh I know that you do IT services locally and I'm looking for a solution. That's how I describe the stages as a you can look up like a funnel that'll give you the real buyer intent stages. that comes from more of like a marketing perspective, but those are the stages that exist for an MSP in my opinion. Right. Okay, fantastic. Yeah, as I say, I think understanding those stages and how you apply differently and and understanding where a prospect sits is important and not not everyone kind of knows that. The other aspect I I would love to expand on is getting to know. This is another aspect that I think is really undervalued. And I find a lot of organizations will engage in some type of marketing where they're really shy about losing the sale almost to a detriment, right? And I'll I'll sort of kick you off and I think a bit of a rant here as well. One of the important aspects of this is like I encourage people to talk about price up front because if you're not aligned on budget, then why are you wasting time talking to each other? And I find so many people will work with a with a prospect for weeks, like subconsciously avoiding like, I think they're going to say no, but if I say this, I reveal too much, then, you know, maybe I can I can get them to buy in. And then ultimately you get to price like, oh god, no, uh $2,500. We were hoping this would be like $500. So now you've wasted all this time and all that time could have gone to look at least looking for if not engaging with other customers that were better aligned as prospects. So A that point and then B, which I think is related is I know you have some opinions on posting your prices publicly on your website. So you can go off on two of those. Yeah. So I am team public pricing. I am. I'm team just put your pricing out there and let people decide if they want to buy from you. If you can, online sign ups, great. Yeah. Now, I know a lot of MSPs are like, but I'm not the cheapest solution. I don't want to put my pricing on my website. And to some extent, I can understand at the very least wanting it to not be an easy to navigate to page of your website. especially when things are priced the same regardless. So one of my biggest pet peeves is like your prospect really isn't that stupid. I know that maybe they're not technically savvy, but they're a business owner and so they have to have some level of intellect to be running a business. When you say that we have to have all this conversation for me to figure out the price, but your price is the same every single time, you are setting off five alarm fire warning bells in your prospect's mind of this person's a liar. I'm being misled. They're picking up on it, okay? So be transparent, be honest in your process. The other thing that I get a lot is people like, I don't want to tell them the pricing until I have the chance to build value. Agreed. I hear this all the time. And I'm like, how much value do you really feel like you're building in this very technical needs analysis type process that you have? That you think someone's going to change their mind if there's a huge difference in the budget that they set aside for this and what you're going to ask for. If you know that you're a premium service, and you know that someone's a budget shopper, why are you wasting your time? Agreed. Because there's the difference between budget objections that are that seems expensive for what it is, as in you haven't built enough value with me yet. versus I don't have that money in my bank account and I cannot give it to you because I do not have it. You really need to filter out the second one. You need to filter out the people who do not have the money from your services early in your process. And here's how I recommend doing that. tactically for those MSPs that are like, okay, but how? Give me the tactics. The first thing you want to do is qualify how big of a problem you're in the room with. Scale of one to 10, how happy are you with the current solution? Okay, let's say they're a seven. Great, you're a seven. That means it's not terrible, but it's not great. There's lots of room for improvement. I feel like my MSP delivers like a 9.5 really, really consistently and the only reason I say it's not a 10 is because we always see room for improvement on what we can deliver to our clients. How much are you paying for your current solution? $2,500 bucks a month. Great. You are getting a seven of service for $2,500 a month. That's pretty typical around here in our local, like in Philadelphia, whatever, where wherever we are. That's usually what I hear in Philly. When clients are getting a seven, they usually tell me they're paying somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000. I'm going to be really honest with you, Mr. Prospect, we come in between $4 and $500 a month. Is it worth us having that next meeting? If I tell you that I can solve the pain points you told me that I got out of you, that I can solve that your email is always you're always getting locked out of email, that it takes you six days to onboard a new employee. that the response time from your current MSP is iffy and sometimes they get back to you in five minutes and sometimes it takes a couple of days and you don't understand what the heck's going on. If I could solve all that for you, Mr. Prospect, and I could give you a 9.5 every single day in your business where technology was no longer something you worried about, would it be worth us meeting again for another hour to really hash this out or is $4,500 a month a do not be friends anymore price tag for you? There's a couple of different ways to frame that, but here are the important tactics. One, uncovering the pain points, two, finding out how satisfied they are with the current solution, and three, positioning your pricing as a range that gate keeps the value of a next meeting. You are not saying, I don't value you if you don't have $4,500 a month to give to me. You're not disqualifying them forever. You're not saying never don't ever call me again. This is what we cost. You're letting them know that that's what it costs to do business with you. You can improve what they've got. But if they don't see the value in jumping from a seven to a 9.5, then they're not going to see the value in spending an extra $2,000 a month. There's extra you can add in there depending on where you are in your process. Like this has to be really short if it's on a cold call. Yep. We got to be snappy. I got to ask quick questions and get to the next step. But if we're in more of like a qualifying meeting or a discovery meeting, then I can take a little bit more time and unravel what's really going on there. So frequently I add something along the lines of, could you see it having value in your business if you were at a nine and a half or a 10? Would that be value over the seven? Or is seven good enough for you today? Right. Because the truth of the matter is is that us as IT professionals living in this sphere, we think IT's high value. And I'm not saying that it's not. But it only has value if you can make impact inside the business. If you're talking to a small business that's like, yeah, they're like a seven. Like sometimes it sucks, but nothing really changes in our business because our MSP sucks. Like it just means it takes me a little bit longer to get the ticket closed, but that wasn't important anyways. I'm not experiencing true downtime in my business. Like I can still operate versus a business that's like, hey, my point of sale is down. I'm making no money. Or I'm I can't file any billable hours because we're all cloud-based and my cloud's down. And now I'm making no money. Those clients, a lower standard of delivery is going to have a bigger impact. It's going to be something you can charge a premium for. But you can't charge a premium to clients that don't care. How many of of the overall managed services prospects are really out there Googling like best in class MSP? The absolute best tech support ever. I would dollars to donuts, they're Googling budget more often than they're Googling the best. Right. Now, maybe you truly are like you're the best MSP, you're premium, you have all the best guys. You've got like that big brain genius at your org that can solve every single problem. You are experts in automation, you are experts in AI. You have the entire stack of your clients, you have someone in house who is an expert in that stack. QuickBooks, Microsoft, you've got the big brain for every single piece of the stack and you can do it and you really are the best in class premium. Great. Filter out those budget shoppers at the very beginning of your process. Yep. Because you're not going to lower your price, right? If it's truly a negotiation and you're one of those MSPs that like kind of has tiers and you have like a basic support tier that's like, yeah, this one's only 50 bucks a month, but it doesn't include anything. But we can scale you up and then we've got the big brain that you can have access to if you're if you're on this tier that's 300 bucks a month. Then you don't have to qualify out those budget shoppers right at the beginning. But it is better for you to qualify out a budget shopper and go out and find a prospect to replace them than to continue to try to fit a square peg in a round hole if you know that you're not lowering your price. Right. If you're an MSP that's maybe just getting started and you're like, I'm willing to negotiate on price because I just need some I need revenue in the door and I don't care if it's shitty. That's different. But most of the managed service providers I talk to are like, my price is my price and I'm not going down a penny. If that's the case, get that out in the open early. I like to use ranges because it still allows you to negotiate to position for things that could change later on. Like I wasn't aware of that server that we were going to have to support or, you know, and but I love early on just being like, hey, companies like yours, law firms between 50 and 60 employees, usually end up spending about $6,000 a month with us. Is that going to be reasonable for you or should I just take this meeting off the calendar now and save us both the headache? Yeah. If you're not transparent about budget, which arguably as business owners, is not our P&L what we live and die by? We all do it, right? Me as an agency owner, managed service owners, you live and die by your P&L, right? How disrespectful is it to someone to not be transparent about a cost of doing business they're going to have moving forward that is going to be foundational. Like they can't just turn it off. Once you're with a managed service provider, it's not like I can just not pay my bill and let it let it turn off. It's not a tiny little tool that doesn't matter. Like this is something that my business relies on. I have to be able to commit to being able to pay this bill moving forward from now until three years from now when my contract is up. And then turn around and ask them to trust you about your recommendations on cyber security, your recommendations on what they should be doing for their infrastructure, for their IT, whether or not they should be using 2FA, all this shit that you are later going to have to negotiate with them that you know damn well your prospect's not going to want to do because we all have these same recurrent conversations where they're like, but 2FA is a pain. You want them to trust you when it comes to that, but at the beginning, you misled them. Right. You let them believe they could afford you and they couldn't. Mhm. Just get out of the way, build trust through transparency, build trust through honesty. And if it doesn't work, you can send me a really angry LinkedIn message. But yeah, if you're scaring away your prospects with with price, then they weren't the right prospect for you, right? Like Exactly. Yeah, that's totally my feeling on this. I I 100% is I want to scare them away if on price initially because it's a as you say, it's a filtering mechanism. One other one, like I'd love to get your input on, we kind of talked about like uh if you're cold calling or you're prospecting that typically the MSP will run into the the counter of we're happy with what we what we have. And queuing them through like what are you happy with, what could be better? Like those are the types of questions rather than just sort of, oh, okay, I guess I'll call you some other time. Like there are questions asked. I think that that is a really important aspect of this. That scale of one to 10 question. Yeah. is functional. pretty much all the time. Yeah. Okay, you're happy with them. Where would you rate them on a scale of 1 to 10 though? Yeah. Yeah. I love that because it's great to just sort of 10 out of 10. Yeah. Oh, that's amazing. It's so rare that I hear from a prospect that they're really getting a 10 out of 10 around here. Tell me, what do you love about them? Let them go. Usually when you ask people what they love, they'll get to what they hate. Or they really do love their MSP. They do. They love them. Like and they're just telling you great stuff. And then I usually will say something like, that's amazing. You know, I so rarely run into that. Do you mind telling me the name of who you're using? I would love to network with them because it's so rare in our local area that I come across another MSP owner who's really doing this well and I would love to be in network with them and I can help support them and they can help support me. Would you mind telling me who they are? Because then you're going to get that market research and genuinely do go connect with that MSP owner. Yeah. Because that's someone else in your market who's killing it, whose clients are happy and we know that's rare. Yeah. But most of the time, you're going to get like a nine and an eight, a seven, which means there's something to improve upon. Or when you ask them to tell you what they love, they're going to get to like, but sometimes Yeah. Or when they're telling you what they love, you're going to be like, this sounds like the bare minimum. Like you're telling me you love that they answer the phone when you call. What kind of MSP were you using before? Right. And also remembering that our biggest thing internally with our SDRs who are outside, like they're I think most MSPs call them ISRs, inside sales representatives, but your outbound callers. What I tell them all the time, the goal is not to sell anything. The goal is not to set the meeting. The goal is to find out as much information as you can. to find out if it's worth setting a meeting. If we could sell them something. If we could solve their problems. Let's go find out if there's a if there's a problem to solve. Like we are the Scooby gang, okay? And we are trying to find out if there's monsters in this neighborhood. That's what you're trying to do. And I think for those technical founders, if you frame it like that for yourself, if you say my job is not to just go sell shit. My job is to network, to do root cause analysis, to understand what problems there are in my local community that I could solve with my business. That will make sales so much less frictionous in your own brain for you because that's really what you're trying to do. You just want to call and find out, hey man, what are you doing? Like and let's stay in touch. Okay, even if it is a 10 out of 10, even if they do love their MSP. Maybe their MSP specializes in their industry and they don't touch accounting firms, but you do accounting and that law firm you just called has a dozen accountant friends that they could refer to you. I end my calls that are like, I'm super happy, I'm super happy, I'm super happy with like, hey man, would you mind if I just sent you a connection request? I'd love to continue to follow you, stay in touch, follow your posts. Yeah. Not just drop the ball and be like, oh, they don't want to buy anything from me today, so that means their value to me is zero. Yeah. Like they're people, they're human beings. Treat them that way and they'll treat you that way. That's cool. Yeah. So the other one that I I see really common that people really get stumped by that I would love your input on is where they get ghosted. They may like send a proposal and then like they continue to email them, they phone them, they never get called back. They're like, they wanted a proposal from us and then I've never heard anything else. Is there anything to do in that circumstance? Well, one, if you didn't already do it in discovery, you're fucked. So, let me start preface my my advice with that, which is that when they ghost you, if you didn't do discovery well, game over. Because every piece of advice I have about pull through is based on good discovery. But everybody should put into their Google search the nine word email. because that is a great follow-up mechanism. And it's basically just are you still blank? Or is blank still a priority? Right? The nine word email is your nine within nine words, asking the prospect if they are still interested in the thing they engaged with you in the first place. So, something like Todd, are you still trying to fill slots for your podcast? Right? Whatever that is. Uh, Jamie, is that Microsoft to Google migration still causing a headache? That's the nine word email. Then you can you can also be more specific if you got more data. So following up and saying, hey, when we spoke on this date, you were trying to insert like solution by date, right? So did you capture the timeline so you can be running against the clock on something? Because more often than not, the MSP loses to this do nothingness that is happening because there was no sense of urgency. Like your prospect thinks they can come back and engage with you whenever. Yeah. So make sure you're capturing that timeline and discovery. When did they want to have a solution in place? Okay, if we're fighting against, they want to have a solution in place by March. You need to build urgency with the prospect. So, like for example, MKC, we only do on boardings every two weeks. We do them on Thursdays, every other week. Why? Because we're a boutique agency and we believe every client that we onboard deserves that one-to-one love that they need. We have the time to give it to them. So when I'm talking to a prospect and they're like, I really need something in place by January, so maybe we can touch base in December. I'm like, hold the phone. I'm currently booked out until January 16th for on boardings. Which means that if you sign something today, the earliest I could possibly have someone on the ground for you is February 1st because we need time between the between the onboarding to do the kickoff. That knowledge of one knowing your own backlog of on boardings and how long it takes things, like know how long it takes, build a mutual action plan throughout the process. So before you're sending a proposal, you should have that mutual action plan in place so the prospect is aware of all the things they're going to need to do. We're going to need access to your tenant here so we can do this here. Unless you're one of those magical MSPs that can just push a button and do it all, but usually there's a process. So then when you're doing that follow-up with the prospect and you're like, hey, you said that you wanted to have a solution in place by March. that your current contract with your your managed service provider was turning over on March 13th. In our experience, after you serve them their notice, they're a lot less accommodating to what you need and getting things out of their system. Most MSPs have this many days based on my experience, you know, it you have to give them 90-day notice. So I would really recommend that we have a contract signed and in the works by December so that in January, you can be the go between collecting everything from your current MSP and getting it over to us so that we can have you live in March without having to fight your MSP to get things over because they're not going to release it to you or they may not release it to you once they know that you're canceling. Right. Could we meet next week? to get the ball rolling on the approvals that you you told me that you needed approvals from your leadership team. You know, I haven't spoke to Jack yet. Do you want to bring him into that meeting? Pulling from what you already know is the magic of getting a prospect re-engaged. If you have to send follow-up emails that don't that are just like, hey, hey, you going to buy some IT? You said you had IT, you need IT and you said you needed IT. Why haven't you bought the IT? I sent you a proposal. Why haven't you signed it? That's not going to work well. However, just final bit of advice on this, if you didn't do a good job in discovery, and you still need to follow up with a ghost, at least send a meme. Like if you really can't, if you really don't have any because like there's other things you can do like sending articles that are relevant to the topics that you discussed. Like hey, saw this and thought of you. You know, you were telling me onboarding's a pain. We wrote this recent blog about onboarding, sending that over, like more nurturing type behaviors. If you can't nurture because you didn't collect the data, if you can't use a really good pull through template because you didn't collect the data, send them a meme. You know, one of those ones that's like, you know, like peeking behind a door. And be like, hey, you still have that proposal I sent you? Like if you can do nothing else, at least be funny. That's cool. I like that as a suggestion. And that I think uh that didn't occurred to me, but uh I I totally see it now that connecting it to urgency in the discovery process, I think is really crucial because there's all those elements that need to be in place and understanding why people say no is a really important aspect of sales and tying that to urgency, I think is really, really insightful. That's awesome. And you're also setting proper expectations with the prospect that it's not a magic wand. And that for us early on, uh because I do most of our sales, early on I got a lot of feedback from our service delivery team that was like, Megan, you have to set better expectations about how long this shit takes. You know? Um and so infusing that in your sales process that this is not something that we just like flip a switch and we have all the details that we need from your current provider. especially if if you're coming into clean up a mess, like you know that the current MSP is doing a bad job. We really need to get that shit from them. If you think they're doing a bad job now, just wait until they find out that you're not renewing. Right. Yeah, I mean, that's it is the natural symptom of being busy as an as an agency. Like when clients come to me and they're like, I've heard this objection like last week or the week before where one we had to move um a meeting with a prospect because of Hurricane Milton that hit us. And he was like, well, it just seems like you don't really have time to bring on new clients. And I responded and I was like, one, we moved this meeting due due to a hurricane, which I have no control over the weather. Good luck if you do. I actually sent the meme, the the Jackie and Kelso one where Kelso's like, damn it, Jackie, I can't control the weather. And then I said, you know, I would be very cautious of engaging with agencies that tell you they can onboard you tomorrow because that means they have no demand. If they have a steady flow of leads signing on and onboarding, then they're going to need time to onboard you. Also, if they if they say that they can just fire on board you in the middle of the week, like that they don't need to prepare for it, they're not doing the foundational work. Right. Because when are they doing the ICP? When are they doing? Are they expecting you to have that already? Anyways, he re-engaged, he's back on my calendar. Um and it's a natural symptom of being a professional organization that knows how long it takes to onboard a client, that gives a high level. It's it's and it's almost coming back to kind of the price thing, right? Like if you're telling clients that you're a premium, best in class solution, but then also being like, oh yeah, you if you sign today, I can have you live tomorrow. Where's the best in class happening? When does that happen? Right. So yeah, that's my that's my two cents on that. Awesome. This has been uh packed with uh valuable insights. I appreciate you. We're going to have so many good clips. Yeah. I appreciate you being on. This is uh this is really valuable. So uh thanks for your insights. Thanks for your time. Absolutely, anytime. It's been fun. And I've got other meetings I got to get to. Right. Part of the MSP Radio Network.