ERP074 - MSP Marketing Fundamentals

I cannot tell you how many potential clients those 80% of MSPs have lost by having a crap website. It should be the number one priority in terms of MSP marketing fundamentals. There are only really a few basic things to do and the number one is the website. Welcome to Evolved Radio, where we explore the evolution of business and technology. I'm your host Todd Kane. The Evolved Radio podcast is brought to you by Evolved Management Consulting. It's our mission to help MSPs increase profit and decrease stress. If you're in the MSP industry and manage people, you should really check out my service manager training course. It's like the missing manual for how to run high performance service delivery teams. Most managers in the IT space have never had any formal training. If you'd like to step up your game and become a successful manager, check out the Evolved Service Manager training course at training.evolvedmgmt.com. That's evolved with a D as in Delta. Or you can visit my homepage and scroll down to the training section. Today on the podcast, I'm joined by Paul Green, a MSP marketing expert. Paul and I talk about why IT companies really struggle with marketing despite knowing it's important. Paul details where to start from scratch on your marketing strategy and then how to focus down on qualified leads. We also chat about the tremendous opportunity to market to your existing client base. Finally, we talk about why many MSP websites are downright embarrassing and why you should ensure that your website represents you in the market. Paul is knowledgeable and super passionate about the MSP marketing space, so grab a notepad, get ready to soak up some of the learnings here. If you enjoy the show, please consider leaving a rating and review in your favorite podcast app. It really helps to spread awareness and bring more listeners to the show so we can share the message with more of the community. Now, on with the show. Welcome to the podcast, Paul. Hello, thanks so much for having me on Todd. It's genuinely an utter pleasure to be here. Awesome. So, this is going to be a great topic for everybody. The sales and marketing end of an IT business is often one that I think everyone can agree requires a bit of love and a bit of attention. And maybe that's probably the best place to start. Why do you think that MSPs struggle with sales and particularly marketing? I think there's a really clear and obvious answer for that. And that it's that most MSPs have got into the business because they are technicians or they're really into technology and that's what they want to do. In fact, if you go and read a book by Michael Gerber, which is called the E-myth Revisited, I'm sure you've read this yourself, Todd. Yes, absolutely. And you read that. Yeah, and it talks about the different levels of business owner. You've got technicians, you've got managers and you've got entrepreneurs. And actually most of our when they're talking about technicians, they don't mean IT technicians in that book. And yet most of the people who start MSPs or start any kind of IT support company are literally technicians. They just want to fix computers, play with computers, fiddle with settings. And that's their passion, that's the thing that drives them. And then of course they discover along the way that, oh, we've got to go and win some clients. And to win some clients, we've actually got to talk to people and we've got to do marketing and we've got to do sales and all of this other kind of stuff. So I think marketing is actually a distress activity, not for all MSPs, but for the vast majority. I think also the MSP model makes it very easy for you to be, I'm not going to use the word lazy, but to be complacent with your marketing. Because there are two massive advantages that you have over all other kinds of businesses. Advantage number one is that you have insane retention. I mean, genuinely insane. I work with more than 500 MSPs all over the world. And when I talk to people, very often they'll say, oh yeah, yeah, we started 15 years ago and we've still got client number one. And. And if you know, if they don't have client number two or number three, it's because they've gone bust or because they were sold or something like that. But most MSPs most of the time keep clients for years and years and years. That makes you complacent. The other thing that makes you complacent is the sheer amount of monthly recurring revenue. Again, most MSPs have covered their costs on day one. All the money comes in on day one, the bills get paid. There's some money left over for them. Sure, they'd like more monthly recurring revenue. Because who doesn't want more monthly recurring revenue? But the the hunger isn't necessarily there. So when you've got a distress activity, marketing that you don't really want to do and and you don't have a pressing need to go and do some of that marketing, it's very easy to kind of put it off for another month and another month and another month. And that actually creates an opportunity. Because you look at any market in any sort of civilized part of the world and you'll typically find one, maybe two MSPs that are okay at marketing. And most of the rest of them are really bad. To me, that's the opportunity. The opportunity is in in your area or in your niche, in your vertical that you get really good at marketing really quickly. So why do you find that people avoid marketing to begin with? Or or better yet, why do you find that people are attracted to the marketing and feel that they need to do it? Because as you described it, like they're okay as they are. Is it maybe the the peer pressure or just sort of like the other people are doing this and I feel like I should too? If there's not sort of a business need necessarily, they don't feel an attraction to this, why what is it that sort of draws people into the idea of maybe I should do more of this? Well, that's a really interesting question. Because is it peer pressure? No, I don't think it is. Peer pressure comes into play with things like which PSA should I use, which RMM should I use? I think the the reason that people do marketing is not because they need to do it, but because they want to do it. And this actually dovetails very nicely into why people buy from you anyway. People buy, and I'm by people, I mean ordinary business owners or managers. They buy for one of only three reasons. Either because they need something or because they want something or because they've got a fear. And they will buy from you to satiate that need or because they want that stuff or because they want to sleep better at night. And I think most MSPs get into marketing not because they need a little bit more money, but because they want more money. Because actually, this is this is the thing with business, isn't it? It's it's very much, you know, you bring on board some new clients or some new users, some new monthly recurring revenue. But then you've got this extra margin, but then you need to invest in that new tech or that new technology platform. Or that new toy that you were thinking of getting yourself, or you look at your car and your car is now five years old. And wouldn't it be nice to have a Tesla, but a Tesla means you've got to have another three, four, 500 bucks a month coming in. And so it's these wants I think that drive people towards the the marketing. It's still a distress activity. But at least it's something that you can look at and you say, okay. I I need to do this. The problem then comes when when the MSPs then looking at the marketing and realizing that it's not as simple as just do these two things. It's actually an enormous thing with with hundreds and hundreds of different working parts. Yeah, and so that leads well into sort of my next question in this. And that what should people focus on? This is an issue that I see people really struggle with and and sort of get caught in the typical analysis paralysis. Which I think is really natural for the logical people that are in these these types of IT industries and running these types of businesses. They really want the data, they want to understand things before they move forward, they want some level of confidence. And because they're not confident in marketing, they sort of look around and they're like, well, should I do some AdWords? Should I run some events, the plethora of options is a bit intimidating. This is a complex topic and there's not necessarily a single answer here. But what would you say to the person that just says, where should I start? You know, like I've not spent a ton of time on marketing, but I'd like to get started. Where is sort of the highest value return and and sort of the the the least scary place to start in the marketing field? Well, looking at something like, should I spend money on Google or should I should I do this is completely the wrong place to start. Because that's actually a tactical conversation. You know, Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, building email databases, all of that, these are all tactical things. What we've really got to do is we've actually got to bring it back right up to not even just goals for the business. We've got to go a little bit further back and look at what's the vision for the life. Let me explain what I mean by that. There are five things that I typically work with with my clients before we get anywhere near doing tactical stuff. First of all, what's the vision for your life? Secondly, what are the goals for your business and how does that feed the vision for your life? Thirdly, what's your marketing strategy? I'm going to cover all of these off in a second. Then we get into tactical conversations of which tactics do you need to implement the strategy. And then the final thing we get into is what are the small things that you and your team and your outsourced suppliers should be doing on a daily basis. Which ultimately, I've made a link there between the vision for your life and the things that you do every day. And that's a really important thing for MSPs. So let's start right up at the top. And I know this isn't quite the answer you you were looking for, but this is such an important thing. You've got to sit down with your partner. And I don't mean your business partner, because no one wants to spend more time with their business partner. I mean your life partner, the person you love or the person you spend the most time with, which may not be the same person. You've got to sit down with that person and you've got to say, what do we want from our lives? And you know, that changes. When I was 30, I was all about the the Aston Martin. I wanted the James Bond car. I was all about the big house and the gravel driveway. And I've got some of that now. I don't have the Aston Martin, but I've got the house and I've got the gravel driveway. And now I'm 47 and I'm starting to think about boring stuff like pensions and investments and all of that kind of stuff. So these things do change over time. But you've got to ask yourself, what's the vision for your life? Me, I want to travel, I want to give back to the community, I want to have a place abroad when all this pandemic stuff's over and all of these kind of things. You need to figure that out for you. And then once you've got a vision for your life, you then need to say, what does the business need to do to fulfill that vision? Because I'll tell you something, Todd, very few MSPs I speak to want to rule the world. Very few of them want millions and millions and millions of revenue. They'd like that. But they don't want to have to do the work to get those millions of revenue and the hundreds and hundreds and thousands of of of dollars of of profits every year. That just doesn't fulfill their life needs. Most of them just want a little bit of extra cash, a bit of a bigger house, more holidays, and more than anything, they want more time. They want more time with their other halves, with their kids, with doing the things that they love doing. Which computers can be fun, but you know what, taking the dog for a walk or or you know, going hang gliding or wind surfing for a lot of people, that's a lot more fun. So you see how we're looking at what what are the goals for the business? If for example, one of your goals is to only work 20 hours a week, which is an excellent goal. Then you've got to look at whatever you do for your marketing and say, whatever that marketing strategy is, it cannot tie me into the business even more. If I am the number one technical person in the business, then we can't go out and start selling to manufacturers with bespoke setups and weird machines that are still running XP that haven't been rebooted for seven years. We don't want stuff like that. Because that's not great business, that's bespoke hard business to do. We want nice, standardized business. Let's get more lawyers, let's get more CPAs, let's get more regulated industries, let's get more health care where we can roll out the same solution, a standardized solution from client to client to client to client to client. And where they're regulated, that means they're going to spend good money on cyber security, they're going to take our suggestions properly, they'll do the quarterly business reviews or strategic reviews or whatever you call them, and they will be more compliant clients. You're speaking my operational language here, Paul. Well, well, and you know what, you need to figure all of this out first before you say what's my strategy. And and what tactics am I am I going to go and get them? Because actually, to me, this is my third business that I'm running right now. And this is standardized down to to the T. I'd just had two weeks vacation with my with my daughter. I'm a I'm a sole parent. There's just me and her. And you know, I I might have done a little bit of email in the middle of it. By choice. But you know what, otherwise, the business continued to thrive when I wasn't there. That is a proper business. It's a business that you never fall out of love with. Because you can have a proper break from it and you can come back all energized and refreshed. So once you've figured out your vision and once you've figured out the goals and you've figured out who you want as clients, then you come into your marketing strategy. Now I'm going to share with you, Todd, and you may have heard this before. Because I I I say this on a lot of webinars. There's a three-step marketing strategy that I recommend to all MSPs. And it is so simple and yet it is so powerful as well. I've used this strategy multiple times. I use it in my current business. I used it in a marketing agency, which I built up and sold back in 2016. This is such a simple but powerful strategy. Step number one is you build multiple audiences. I'll come back to what exactly that means. Step number two is you build a relationship with those audiences. And step number three is you commercialize those audiences. That is your marketing strategy. So step number one, build multiple audiences. What does that mean? Well, I mean, you get bunches of people to listen to you. Now, the audiences that most MSPs should build, there are only really two of them. The first one is your email database. And the second one is your LinkedIn. And there are lots of other audiences you could build. A podcast would be a great thing to do, particularly if you have a niche or a vertical. You could build an audience on YouTube, you can build an audience on other social media platforms. You can build an audience in forums. But for most MSPs most of the time, build up your email database and build up your LinkedIn. And Todd, I'm happy to take some follow-up questions later on on specifically how you do those. So build up your build up multiple audiences. The first step. The second step in your strategy is to build a relationship with them. That's all about content marketing. Because the ordinary business owners and managers that you want to reach, they don't know what they don't know. They don't really understand technology. They think they do, but they don't. You ask them to explain the cloud to you in a short sentence. They can't do it. They don't know what it is. They don't know what ransomware is. They'll say something to you about colonial pipeline, but they don't really understand what ransomware actually means. And they certainly don't believe that their business is actually being targeted all the time. So we've got to educate them. In fact, we've got to educate them and entertain them at the same time. And we call this edutainment. And that's done primarily through sending out content. The stuff you do daily, stuff you do weekly and stuff you do monthly. Daily, you post social media content every single day. Because it's disposable, most people won't see it, so you need to have a regular flow of it going out. Weekly, you send out an email newsletter, not selling anything, but you're just edutaining them, educating them about things that are important in our world that are relevant to them. And then monthly, if you can afford this, if you can go through the hassle, because most MSPs don't, which makes it a very powerful thing. Monthly, you send them something printed, ideally a printed newsletter. Newsletters are amazing. Not PDFs, physical print newsletters in your hand. Because they hang around, they sit on desks, people read them on toilets, they pass them to other people, hopefully not after they've read them on the toilet. Yeah, put in qualification. You know, so but they they have such stickability. And the whole thing that we've got to remember is people only buy when they're ready to buy. You could meet a business owner today who seems to click with you, who's not that happy with their incumbent MSP, but it might yet still be two or three years till they're ready to buy. And what we've got to do is build a relationship up with them over a period of time and that can sometimes be years. Very much right time, right place, right? Oh, massively and and most MSPs give up on their marketing far too often. I agree. This middle step, you know, if you're building multiple audiences and then you're building a relationship with them. This building a relationship never stops. In fact, it stops the day you die or the day you sell the business. And I'm I'm actually not being flippant or not joking. It's an ongoing, never ending thing. It never ends. Because every day, every single day, someone near you or in your vertical is waking up. And they think, you know what? I've just had it, I've had it with my IT guys. I cannot be doing with them anymore, it's time to switch. And the tiny window of opportunity is just open. Now, you know, remember what I was saying earlier about insane retention. People stay with their MSP for five to 10 years. So for every prospect you're talking to, or excuse me, every lead you're talking to, there's like a three to five day window every five to 10 years where they're actually genuinely open to moving to someone else. We can't be haphazard with our marketing and just do a bit now and again or stop and start it or sometimes known as boom and bust marketing. You've got to build a marketing system that consistently and persistently markets to people. Every single day and the chances of you having quality conversations with people just goes up. You you funny, you get luckier, you seem to generate more leads and more prospect meetings and just have more people to talk to. The more marketing that you do and the more consistently you do it. And that leads on to my my final things, if you remember the three-step strategy. It's. Build multiple audiences, build a relationship with them. The third thing is to commercialize those audiences. The simplest thing to do with this, Todd, and it's so simple, it's painful. Is you get someone to pick up the phone on your behalf. And call your audiences. Now, this is not cold calling. Cold calling is where you acquire some data and you call people and they swear at you and everyone slams the phone down. This is not that warm, but it's slightly warm calling because these are people who are connected to you on LinkedIn. Or they're receiving your emails. If you send out an email every week and this guy, this business owner down the road has opened your last five emails and has clicked the link on a couple of them to go and read whatever it was you sent to them. He is active and he is alive and someone in your business should phone him. And the phone call is not a sales call. We're not trying to sell anything over the phone. In fact, the person who does this call for you doesn't even need to know anything about technology. The purpose of that call is to try to book a 15 minute video call with you. Or whoever does the selling within the business. And it's beautiful. It's just beautiful. You get someone else, whether that's a virtual assistant or a back to work mom, to work two to three hours a day, two to three days a week, calling your audiences until they come across that person who's either in that window where they're going to switch or they are approaching that window where they're going to switch. And you know, if you've got someone doing this, let's say 10, 15 hours a week for you. You might only get one or two video calls booked a week. They'd have to make a lot of phone calls, you might still only get two or three video calls booked. But some of those people will go on to be excellent prospects for you. In fact, you'll know based on how long the video call actually goes on. If it's a five minute video call, they're not a great prospect. Whereas actually, if that 15 minute call turns into a 40 minute call, woohoo, this is a really hot prospect. And of course, your goal off the back of that video call is to book a proper sales meeting. Go out and see them and bring on board another five to 10 year client. So first steps would be a definition of what you're actually trying to build and what you're looking for, what you want from your life. Moving to that, I guess, trying to marry up that tactical with with sort of the larger strategy of build multiple audiences. Build a relationship and then move to some type of qualification or lead and and development of commercialization, as you say. So to help people with that tactical component, next week they can sit down with themselves or the significant other and define what they actually want from their life. And therefore what they're building. Which I agree is a really, really important first step. Is LinkedIn maybe the best place to start to build that audience? 100%. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 100%. So LinkedIn is phenomenal. And everyone's a bit blasé about LinkedIn. Because because don't get me wrong, your email database is actually more powerful. Your email database, no one can ever take away from you. LinkedIn, Microsoft could take away from you and they do. But no one could take your email. However, email marketing is just getting harder. Deliverability is is awful. Look at all the spam filtering that happens. Email marketing can be great, but LinkedIn is beautiful. You can be connected to anybody, anywhere. And you can message them with 100% guarantee that your message will get into their inbox. You can't guarantee that they'll read it. But you can message them and you can put content in front of them. And it's where people it's the dominant B2B social media network. So 100% yes. If from a tactical point of view, if you've got nothing to get started with, you focus on LinkedIn. And LinkedIn has changed over the last few months. If we think about the history of LinkedIn, you know, when it first started, I don't know, what was it, 15 years ago? It was the it was the online version of your offline network. And do you remember you used to get friend requests from people and you you were encouraged to reject them? Not friend requests, connection requests. You were encouraged to reject them if you didn't actually know them in real life. And then Microsoft bought it and and that all kind of went out the window. And it and it became LinkedIn version two. Which is what it's been for a number of years. Which is a free for all. You know, for for some time now, we've been encouraged to build massive networks online. You can have up to 30,000 connections on LinkedIn. Your brain cannot cope with more than about 1,000 connections. A real connection to people. And yet on LinkedIn, you can have 30,000 connections. But that free for all is is ending. Microsoft is changing LinkedIn and they've moving away quite rapidly from the from the quantity model to the quality model. I don't think this is a bad thing in any way. I agree. It means that there there is a cap on on the number of people that you could connect with. And I forget what the exact number is because I I tactically I I don't touch LinkedIn. But it it's, you know, it's made us sort of have to move away from some of the automated tools. Not a bad thing. We're now getting humans to do what the automated tools are doing and humans are doing a better job of it. And it is absolutely it it makes you think exactly who do I want to be connected with? Can I give you a pro tip on connections on LinkedIn? Absolutely, that's why we're here. Okay, the easiest way to make connections in LinkedIn, rather than searching for like CPAs in your city or anything like that. Ask yourself this question, who already has all the connections that I want? So for example, I live in the UK, I live right in the middle, just outside a city called Milton Keynes. I'm in a little village. And if I wanted to do business with the business owners of Milton Keynes, I would connect on LinkedIn to a guy called Mark Orr. I don't know Mark that well, but I know that he is one of the most connected people in this in this city. He has about 20,000 LinkedIn connections, he seems to go to all the networking events. He seems to just know everyone who's in business in Milton Keynes. If I wanted to build my Milton Keynes connections, I would connect to Mark. And then I would try and connect to his connections. Does that make sense, Todd? Yeah, the super connectors leveraging them, right? Exactly, so he he's already done 20 years of hard work. I can now go and leverage that. Now, if you if you have, if you are a super connector, there is a setting in LinkedIn where you can actually switch off the ability for people to see your connections. To stop someone doing this to you. And I don't know if you've done that, Todd. But but I have. I've got about 6,000 connections now. And I don't particularly and they're all MSPs. And I don't particularly want someone coming in and and stealing my connections. But that's my my number one tip for just making LinkedIn really, really easy for yourself. Yeah, that's a good one. Next piece that I I wanted to hit on. Is moving from acquisition to sort of quality of acquisition. So we'll sort of assume now that either someone has gotten past this phase, they're starting to build a bit of a marketing engine. Or they're a slightly older or mature MSP. And they're doing some level of marketing, but they're still struggling with quality connections. And a lot of maybe they have an AdWords campaign and they get a lot of people saying, hey, you know, can you come over and fix my PC or, you know, can you install this piece of software that we got? And and it's not the type of connections that they're really looking for. Is there any sort of strategy or tactical advice that you can give on increasing the quality of the connection so that they can find people that are going to be a better qualification, a better lead for them as an as a mature MSP? Sure, there's there's two things you can do in fact. And before I mention those, I think with AdWords, there's very little you can do about that. Other than really honing in on keywords and negative keywords. I have a client who he put himself through a Google Ads course on Udemy. The the online courses platform. And he's spent the best part of two years perfecting his ads. He's based in the UK. And in fact, I caught up with him this week and and he was saying, I forget the exact numbers now. But he he might only generate one or two decent leads every other month out of Google Ads. And he's spending, you know, a few thousand pounds a month on it. But for him, it's worth having the the the guys ringing up saying, can you fix me iPad? Which which he doesn't want to do. He doesn't want that at all. He's pure pure managed services. But to him, it's worth that and it's worth the rubbish because every now and again a lead comes through, which turns into a thousand per month of monthly recurring revenue. Which as you and I know, is going to stay for for 10 years. So so he's taking the bigger, bigger picture with with Google with Google Ads. But there's very, very hard Google Ads. For most MSPs, the two things you can do to pre-qualify. Number one is is having someone on the phone pre-qualify for you. That's the easiest way because it it takes away your frustrations. In fact, that same person that's commercializing the audiences that's picking up the phone and calling people. They just need to have a couple of basic questions to ask. And you you don't need to be as crass as to say, you know, how how many staff have you got or what's your turnover? Because those kind of questions are pretty obviously pre-qualified. But you you can do things like depends on someone's personality of whether they can get away with this. But say things like, God, you you guys seem as though you've been really growing fast the last few years. You must have loads of people there now. And and a lot of business owners will just jump in and go, yeah, yeah, yeah. We've got like 25 people in the office now. Because they're they're proud of it because often we we wrongly think the number of people we've got. Makes us a better business. I don't I don't know about you, Todd. But the longer I'm in business. Bigger is not necessarily better. Exactly, the fewer staff I have, the happier I I feel about my business. But there we go. So so you you can pre-qualify on the on on the phone in that way. The other thing you can do, which which can be a bit hit and miss, but you can use educational materials to pre-qualify. My favorite tool for this is a buyer's guide. In fact, if you read this, there's a great book to read about this called they ask you answer. By Marcus Sheridan, in fact, that's the best book you'll ever read on content marketing. Every MSP should read this because this is your long-term marketing strategy. They ask you answer. And one of the things that Marcus Sheridan recommends is that you put together a buyer's guide. Because you've got to remember what we said earlier, the the business owners and managers that you want to reach. They don't know what they don't know. So let's teach them. I give my clients a buyer's guide which they can custom and tailor for their marketplace. And it's a really long one, it's like a 40, 50 page buyer's guide. Because we go into everything. We go into cyber security. We go into hardware. We go into software. We go into systems. But it's not written from a tech point of view, it's written from a business owner's point of view. So we're looking at all of these things in the context of productivity, in the context of staff not winging. We're looking at, you know, making sure the technology promotes growth, not inhibits growth and all of those kind of things. What you'll find is someone who sits and reads a buyer's guide in a in a way like that. And and actually consumes it. Is pre-qualifying themselves. You one man band, two user businesses, which I know there is a market for those things, but many MSPs don't want them. If you don't want them, they're not going to read a 40 page buyer's guide that talks about technology strategy. Because as you said, Todd, all they're interested in is, hey, my keyboard's a bit sticky, can you guys come and help? And so you you kind of people pre pre-qualify themselves. The actually it occurs to me that there are two other things you can do. Another thing you can do is use social proof. So social proof is where you show them your existing clients in the form of reviews, testimonials and case studies. Let's say you just want big businesses with minimum of 50 users. Then you make sure your case studies are big businesses with 50 users. Because your your smaller businesses will look at those and think, oh, that's a that's a big business. These these IT guys are aren't the kind of people we're looking for. They're dealing with the bigger businesses. So actually your social proof can be very powerful in deflecting people away in a way. Because typically people are influenced by people like them. It's why being in a vertical or a niche is so powerful. If you want lots of CPAs, show CPAs on your website. And and then the lawyers won't ring you. Because they'll realize you're not for them. And the other thing that you can do if you want to pre-qualify people is is do it with your pricing. If I believe you should put pricing on a website. That wasn't a belief I had until I read they ask you answer. By Marcus Sheridan. And it's very hard, isn't it? Because what what's the cost of IT? Well, it depends. Well, actually, that that's your answer. That's how you put pricing on. And some of my MSPs I work with have pricing calculators on their website. Which is another smart thing to do. But by putting your pricing on and showing someone how much it costs, whether it's on a per user or per device basis. You can be more expensive to put people off. And actually, you're again, if you want the bigger businesses where it's perhaps a little bit more corporate, you've got professional managers. They are more willing to pay more for a higher quality solution. Whereas your smaller micro businesses are typically going not always, but typically going to want to pay a little bit less for for a less comprehensive solution. Because cash is often a more finite resource for the smaller businesses than it is for the bigger businesses. That's definitely one that I like and and used a lot in the MSP that I was running. Is trying to intentionally scare people off with the pricing. If you just say, well, you know, contract started about $1,500 a month. Like, how does that sound? They're like, oh, that's too much. It's like, okay, well, we saved both of each other a lot of time. Instead of. Yeah, exactly. Like I I I don't want to tell them the price because I might scare them off and, you know, I maybe I have an opportunity with this. And then you do this song and dance for the next three weeks. You've wasted 15 hours of your time trying to coax this business into in the door. And then find out that they were price sensitive to begin with and this was never really an issue, right? So, I like that one. It's a pain. Yeah. So another area that I think is very underserved. Because a lot of people focus on net new marketing. And they want to attract new businesses and they want to grow. And I I find entrepreneurs are are especially bad at bad for this. Where all growth must be new. And they don't necessarily recognize the gold mine that they're currently sitting on. And one of the things that I talk a lot about is increasing share of wallet. You already have a captured audience of clients. That will be a hell of a lot easier to sell to. If you're trying to attract new business, the typical kind of conversion time for a new MSA is at least two to three months, sometimes longer. And as I say, like marketing efforts take time and it's a time and place type thing. So I'd love your thoughts on how you can best market effectively to your current client base for either cross sells or additional services. What are what are your thoughts on on selling to the existing clients that you have? Yeah, it's it's absolutely critical. And Todd, I'm sure you've heard of a marketer called Jay Abraham. Who is the the granddaddy of of direct response marketing. Because all all the marketing I do is direct response. It's not fluffy brand marketing where you place adverts and and keep your fingers crossed and hope. It's it's direct marketing where you do something and and you either get a response or you don't. Jay Abraham is is literally the granddaddy of it. He's he's been around for years. I've spent tens and tens of thousands of dollars buying a lot of Jay Abraham's stuff. And one of the very early lessons I learned very early on from listening to one of his most basic courses. It's such a powerful lesson. And if you've not heard this before, get this tattooed in reverse on your head. So you see it in the mirror every morning. There are only three ways to grow your business. Get more new clients. Get your existing clients to buy from you more often. Get your existing clients to spend more when they buy. That's going to be a big tattoo actually, isn't it? May not fit on your forehead. I know. Perhaps go over your arm instead. Jay Abraham makes makes the point that you can't just focus on number one. You've got to focus on all three at the same time. So while you're getting new clients, you've got to essentially sell more to your existing clients. This is the secret to true growth. It's so much easier to sell more to your existing clients. There's more profit in it because you haven't got the marketing costs. You haven't got the onboarding costs. You haven't got the acquisition costs. You sell them a new security package tomorrow, you've got some good margin on that. They say yes, you put it in place. That's it. It's it's the end. The margin drops down to the bottom line from that point on. So there are three things that I recommend for MSPs, the first thing I recommend that you do is that you have something called a profit matrix. Now it has lots of different names. I like to call it the profit matrix. What it is is where you suck out the information about who is buying what. You suck it out of your PSA and you put it into a very simple grid. That grid will have two axes. You'll have, let's say clients going down the side and then you'll have services monthly recurring revenue services across the top. And that grid, you literally put in a a mark or a cross or whatever where someone is buying something. So client number one might buy services A, C and E. Client number two might buy services A and B. Etc, etc. Now, what makes the profit matrix more powerful than leaving that information buried in the PSA? Is we can look at it with an instant glance and see not only who's buying what. But who isn't buying what. In fact, I recommend to all my clients that they don't do this on a screen or in a spreadsheet. That they literally get a massive whiteboard and put it on their office wall. Or if they if they've got a home office, you know, have have two. And and they literally make it a physical thing. Because physical things are so much better than digital things. I know the digital world is awesome. But if you want something to really stand out, this is this is the grid you should be looking at every day. You want to get it out of your computer and put it on the wall. You want to put it in front of your help desk technicians. Your first line technicians, you want them as they're talking to the clients, their eyes to glance up at the board. And for them to think, yeah, if only they were buying so and so service, they wouldn't have this problem. Because you and I know the technicians won't act on that. But if we can then train the technicians to at least drop you an email and say, hey, just had so and so clients on the phone. They've got this problem, if they bought service C, that would just remove that problem. Could you give them a ring? Hallelujah, we've just got the technicians to tell us when they come across sales opportunities. So the profit matrix is a really critical one. And you can then gamify it as well. You can look at something like, I mean, security's been a massive thing over the last few months. I mean, it's been huge for a couple of years, but haven't all MSPs just doubled, tripled down on talking about and reviewing their security over the last couple of months. And you could look at, you know, your your security package on your profit matrix. And it's going to tell you there on a whiteboard on your office, which of your clients are most at risk. It's going to tell you who's most likely to be breached. It's going to tell you who are the danger points. Those are the people that you get on the phone to immediately, you upgrade them to a better security package. Or or in fact, well, do you know what I'm telling my clients right now is upgrade everyone. If you're not comfortable with their security, you force an upgrade on them and they have to opt out. We've even given them a disclaimer, it's not a legal document, it's a discussion document where they can go through with their clients. And go through, there's about 15 different lines of of of cyber security. And discuss it with them. And the idea is that they scare their clients so much that even their tight clients who don't want to spend another dollar on anything will realize by the end of it. Jeez, you know, we've we've got to invest in this. Because actually this stuff is is really quite important. So the profit matrix is is just your best friend for all of this kind of stuff. It also really pays for itself, pays for all the effort and time that goes into it. If you marry it with a quarterly business review. I don't call them quarterly business reviews because I think quarterly is overkill for most clients. So I call them strategic reviews. I know they're called technology reviews in the tech drive. And lots of different platforms have different names. Let's call them strategic reviews. Strategic review is where you sit down with your client. Because a zoom is okay and if you have to because of COVID, fine. But nothing beats a physical meeting or taking them out to lunch. Once a year, you sit down with them and you talk about their favorite subject. Themselves. Their business. The future. Growth. Plans. Ideas. Where are you going? A strategic review is never a backwards looking thing. Forget SLAs. I mean, you'd be a crazy to held yourself accountable to SLAs anyway. Unless clients absolutely demand them. They're just like SLAs are a shotgun. That you're a loaded shotgun that you give to clients pointed at your own head. But it's not about looking backwards at SLAs, it's not about that problem with a ticket four weeks ago. It's all about the future. And it's about talking to them about their aspirations, their hopes, their fears. If you're really smart, you'd use one of the many technology platforms out there. Like managed services platform or VCI toolbox. I think there's another one, I think it's audit for IT. I mean, there's dozens of these. Dozens of these. Yeah, so many around. You'd use some software like that to produce a technology road map. And you know, producing a technology road map where you and your client on a semi-regular basis. Whether that's, you know, annually or every six months or quarterly. Are agreeing what technology they're going to invest in the next two to three years. How amazing is that? You're there's no other sector in the world where you can routinely get most of your clients to agree. What they're going to spend with you in the years ahead so that they can budget for it. And they're essentially committing themselves to it because that technology road map feeds their own growth. It is utterly, utterly, utterly beautiful. And this is how we guarantee, in fact, this is how we create true partnership. There's lots of talk amongst lots of vendors about MSPs partnering with their clients. True partnership is where you're inside, you're their strategic advisor. That's why I prefer to call it a strategic review. And the technology road map is an important part of that. So the two things we've had so far, we've had the profit matrix. And then we've had the strategic reviews with the technology road map. The third thing I recommend, Todd, is that you're always adding new services. So if the goal is more monthly recurring revenue and that is the goal. That's what you want. Then you've got to add on new things. Now you may not want to add new services. Which is fine. But you can always add a different flavor of something. You might have a perfectly good backup solution right now. You're happy with it. It works very well, it takes all of their stuff. It backs it up off site into centers. You're happy with that and that's it. But here's the thing. Just because you've got that backup solution and you're happy with it, doesn't mean that some of your clients wouldn't buy something else. We are not the ones who must decide what the clients buy. All we can do is advise them and let them decide what they want to buy. So you might introduce an enhanced version of your backup, which has a NAS box on site for urgent quick backups. And you back it up to another data center in another country for whatever reason you'd do that. But the point being is it's a better solution. It's a slightly better solution. You may not be comfortable, you may think that's overkill to sell it, but some of your clients will buy that. I have a financial advisor who works with me. And he buys everything. Absolutely everything. Because he knows I'm in this world, he knows I'm not a tech, but I'm in this world and he'll say to me, oh, I've just I've just bought a this package or I've just bought a that package. And literally anything his MSP rings up with, because he's regulated and he will literally lose his entire business if he has a cyber security breach. He buys everything just to stay safe. And that's what one of the things that helps him to to sleep better at night. I love the idea of the profit matrix. It's exactly the same thing that I described to people when I tell them to start thinking about internal sales and cross selling to their existing client base. So we're absolutely on the same page there. The other piece that you you touched on that I think is really critical to hit on is is the budgeting component. And this is a really, really important part of the strategic review. That I don't think gets enough air time or people don't really sort of think about why it's important. Because it marries up exactly with what you said of people qualifying the the purchase for the client. Before they even discuss it with them. And you see this all the time in internal discussions. Where an account manager comes back to the owner of the company and says, ah, these guys are cheap. They won't buy this. Right. And if you actually sort of dig into that, what you find is you approach them with a $30,000 project. And the person said, we can't afford that. That doesn't mean no. I don't see the value and I won't purchase this. It means I don't have $30,000 to give you right now. And that's the really important part about the road mapping. And the budgeting of this is to say, over the next six to 18 months, these things are important. Let's lay them out in some strategic fashion, rank them by priority and start budgeting for it. Because the amazing part is is this is why I love budgeting as as a component of that technology review. Is that most people that are running a business are not proactively thinking about their spending on IT. Because you ask them what's your IT budget, they glance over at their CFO or their controller and say, what did we spend last year? That's the extent of their budgeting. Right? So to be able to help them with this and to actually facilitate some proactive spending. And some budgeting for this benefits both of you. Because now they actually have a budget, they feel a lot more controlled about what they're actually spending and what they plan to spend. Plus it actually ends up feeding your project cycle. So I think that that's a an underserved and really, really important component of this as well. Yeah, I agree completely. So the next one I wanted to hit on that I think is right up your alley as well. In the tech drive, you do this little service where you review people's websites. Which I think is is awesome. Because I feel that there's definitely a tale of two websites in the world. I suppose with everything, but this is particularly prevalent in in the IT space. Most MSP websites are pretty good, like they're they're kind of formulaic. But they're they're decent. They're good enough. And then I feel like there's this other subset of MSP websites that are really, really horrifying. Like they look like they were written in 1996 and never updated since. You know, I've even seen like animated gifts and stuff, like the little bouncy icons and flashy strobe lights and stuff. It's incredible the differential of quality in what people have for for their websites. And quite frankly, it's the first thing that people are going to look at when they're considering you as a service provider. So not that it needs to be amazing and like the top tier website, that's ideal, that would be great. But it definitely needs to be professional and to be able to communicate the sort of the quality and the personality of the business that you're providing. So what do you see, like what do you think are are sort of the the main hang ups and what's sort of the minimum standard that that you look for when you're kind of surveying a website to determine whether or not it's going to fit in what that MSP needs? There are two basics that you've got to get right. And it's humans and engagement. And if you get those two things right, all all of the other things that you get wrong. Don't really matter. And what I mean by that is. You take that you you said it was a subset of MSPs that have awful websites. Let's say that subset is 80% of all MSPs. So it's higher than I think. I guess. I know. It's I know it's an awful thing to say. But I I I must have looked at a thousand MSP websites over the last five years or so. And it's when you come across one that's really that's that's okay, that's that's all right. That's got pictures of real people and a video of real people and there's some level of engagement. It's got live chat. And you can you can book a a call on the live calendar. It's it's it's like it's nourishing to the soul. And then you come across a a really good website that's someone's clearly spent an enormous amount of time. And it is typically time, not money. On the website. And I literally get excited and I bookmark it and I I you know, I run around my house. Because it just doesn't happen very often. Most MSPs have awful, awful websites. They're technical, they're too focused on services and technology. There's no humans on there. There's no warmth. There's no emotion. They as you say, they're designed in in in 1996. They're they're out of date, they're boring, they're just awful. And it's like I mean the website is the shop window, it really is. And the I I always talk about the the tale of of two shops, you talk about the tale of two websites, the tale of two shops. So you let's say you need to buy, doesn't matter what it is. Well, let's take let's take coffee shops. You want to drink. You walk down your high street, you go to the mall, whatever you whatever you do. And there's there's two coffee shops next to each other. One of them is is a locally owned one. And there's a sign in the window that says coffee 50 cents. And you look at it and the sign's really dirty. I mean, really dirty. And in fact, it's it's faded a bit and one of the letters is kind of peeling off. And the window clearly hasn't been cleaned for some time. And you and you look at the lights and half the bulbs aren't on. And and those that are on are are just a bit ancient and a bit dim. And you kind of peer through and there's a board looking person. So, you know, behind the counter and and and you look at that. And then next door there's a Starbucks. And. If it's not Starbucks. There's a there's a chain, there's a there's a big impressive looking one. And and and the window's clean and the sign's clean and it's new and it's fresh. And the sign of the coffee says in the window says coffee $3 or $4. And no most people, most of the time, not everyone, but most people would go into the Starbucks and would pay a hell of a lot more for what is essentially the same drink as they could have got in in in in the death cafe next door. But the reason that they do that is. The reason they do that is because we judge the book by the cover. We really do. You ask publishers. I'll give you an example. My one of my favorite series of books is the Jack Reacher books. I'm sure you've you've come across them. Lee Child, he's a great author. He chucks out a Jack Reacher every year. They have different covers in the UK than they do in the US. The story is the same. He's a British guy writing for an for a US audience. And the books themselves are exactly the same, but the covers are different. Because they publishers have just learned over the years that what kind of covers American men like to buy. Versus what kind of covers British men like to buy. And it has nothing to do with the actual product itself, it's all in the packaging. We absolutely judge the book by the cover. We judge the shop by the shop front. We judge the business by the website. I cannot tell you how many potential clients those 80% of MSPs have lost by having a crap website. It should be the number one priority. In terms of MSP marketing fundamentals. There are only really a few basic things to do and the number one is the website. A human engaging website that's full of warmth, that's full of stories, that's full of people. I get my clients to put things like photos of themselves with their family. You know, if you're a family person or a family guy and you're based in a town and it's a town of, I don't know, 50, 60,000 people. And and lots of people know you and you're involved in Rotary and you go to BNI. And and you know, you you you're always at the the the ball game. And all of that stuff. Put that on the website. You might not put that on the homepage, but you put it on the about us page, the two most traffic pages of a website. The homepage and the about us page. Show me a picture of your family and your kids. Show me a picture of you with the with the the local landmark. Notice I haven't said there, show me a picture of you typing away, you know, setting up Windows 365 for someone. Because that's completely irrelevant. People don't buy technology. They buy business outcomes. And because they don't know what they don't know about technology, they're not making a cognitive decision about which MSP to choose. They're making an emotional decision. Or put it another way. They are picking you or rejecting you. Based on whether or not they like you. And the only way they're able to make that decision is what you put out in the packaging. So people with really bad websites, not only do they tend not to get much traffic. But they they literally people are being put off because the the shop front is is just awful. It should be the number one thing you get fixed immediately. I love that. And what occurred to me when you were saying that, describing those those two different coffee shops. Is so much of this is about the experience. Right? To land on someone's business website and surf through it. I think is an experience. But I don't think we naturally think of it that way. It absolutely resonates with me that that people will pay more for a quality experience. Both in the service delivery, but also I think that that's just as relevant in the prospecting and the business development side. Which I guess didn't naturally occur to me. But completely makes sense in in retrospect. Yeah, I mean, no one really goes to. Or very few people go to Starbucks because they're hungry and thirsty. You go to Starbucks for something else. I mean, this was their strategy for years. It's the third place, you've got your home, you've got your work. And you've got Starbucks as the as the third place. And it's it's expensive and it's nonsense. But we we love it because it's where we meet our friends or it's where we go to do a bit of work or it's where we just go to chill out or to treat ourselves. I'm going to go and treat myself to a $7 coffee. Which has got so much sugar in it, I'm going to become diabetic overnight. And actually, it's kind of the same for managed services. No one buys technology. They buy peace of mind. They want someone that they trust that they feel they could go for a beer with to have their back. You know. And you know that most MSPs are really good at what they do. I know that, but the customers don't. This is one of the things that stops people from switching MSPs. It's one of the reasons why you have such good retention. It's called inertia loyalty. When someone is with an MSP, even if they dislike them and the relationship has broken down, it still feels safer and easier to stay with the MSP that you don't like. Than it is to switch over to a brand new MSP that you don't know at all. It's why I recommend to my clients and all MSPs when you're doing sales proposals. You always put a picture of your face on every document. You know, your proposal, your buyer's guide, any educational book that you give them, any impact box that you send them, anything. Why? Because when someone's thinking of switching MSP, they'll have two or three or four firms coming in to pitch to put a proposal in. And actually, if you're a warm person and you've connected with them, they're going to connect more with your face than with your random company name. Because your random company name sounds all the exact the same. As all the other random MSP names that that have been invented. But your face is the unique thing that they will connect with and they'll remember how you made them feel. Not what it was that you said. 100%. And it's such an important thing. People buy from people. I was just going to say that. That's it. It's it's a tried and true. But it's it's 100% true. Like people buy from people and that that I think the human element of marketing is largely what we've been talking about here. Is is the development of an experience and that personal association. So that people can buy from you as a person. That's been awesome, Paul. I I really appreciate your your time and your thoughts on this. I think this is probably just scratching the surface of a lot of these topics. So potentially could have you back on in the future to to dig a little deeper. In the meantime, I think for people that want to know more about the services that you provide. You have a an excellent podcast and just an absolute treasure trove of materials available on your website. So if you could tell people where they can find that information, that would be great. Sure, thank you. And we as you say, we've in fact, I'll send you a free copy of my book. Which is called updating servers doesn't grow your business. An actual free paperback copy. And you can see all the other stuff and get that sent to you at Paulgreensmspmarketing.com. So we've got that's our education site, there's tons of content on there. We've got videos, resources. It's all free. And as I say, we'll send you a free copy of the book. Paulgreeensmspmarketing.com. Excellent. And we'll link to all that stuff in the show notes as well. Paul, this has been awesome. Really appreciate your time. Thank you. Thanks for having me on, Todd.