The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge

Welcome to Episode 279 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• MSPs: Set up your phone person for success: Phoning leads and prospects to find out if they’re almost ready to switch from their incumbent MSP is the golden nugget opportunity. Here’s how to get the most from your phone person.
• How the Compound Effect helps MSPs do better marketing: If you want to have great marketing that delivers one new client a month, then you need to make some sacrifices and have LOTS of discipline.
• Why MSPs must build a personal brand on LinkedIn: My special guest explains how to build a personal brand on LinkedIn. He can help you to get over your fears and show you why your leads and prospects will see you and your MSP differently.
• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Do you capture success stories from clients that your MSP has really helped? Find out the best format for doing so in this episode.

MSPs: Set up your phone person for success

This is the hardest role to recruit for in your MSP, but when you get it right, it can lead to an explosion in sales. Now you thought it was hard finding a decent level three technician or a service desk manager. Well, no, this role is even harder. And even though thousands of people can do it, you wouldn’t want to hire the vast majority of them.

Let me tell you what this role is, why it’s so important in your MSP and how to find the perfect person for you, someone who’s going to help you win new clients and grow your profit.

Now, this might be controversial to some, but I believe that every MSP should have an in-house person making outbound phone calls. Phoning leads and prospects and trying to find the golden nugget opportunity. That’s when an ordinary business owner or manager is kind of almost ready to switch from their incumbent MSP, and it’s the best time to start talking to someone.

Having a phone person, well, they can find them purely through doing the hard work and that’s doing something that you personally would never want to do, which is of course, picking up the phone repeatedly day after day after day, just calling these people. And these aren’t sales calls, by the way, this is not some kind of Wolf of Wall Street boiler room.

These are relationship building calls, to find out who is nearly ready, willing, and able to have a conversation about switching MSPs,

And then book in a 15 minute video discovery call with whoever does the selling in your business, which of course might be you or you might have a salesperson. And then you or the salesperson does the heavy lifting of booking the actual face-to-face sales appointment and of course closing the client. I know that you can do that. If I can get you in front of the right people, you can do that, right? Well, this is one of the best ways to get those 15 minute zooms. As I said, it’s an in-house person role rather than using a telemarketing agency. And there are some telemarketing agencies out there, some great ones out there, but there are also many rotten ones. And I always like to take a long-term view with any kind of marketing infrastructure that you’re putting in place. So honestly, I do believe you’ll be better off hiring someone to work within your MSP doing this. They may actually be based at home, but they’re just doing it for you. They’re not doing it for anyone else.

A back to work mom is great for this. You are looking for someone who has had a career break but who was previously in a professional role and yet they have no desire to retur...

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge

Welcome to Episode 278 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• Optimize your MSP’s marketing for voice & AI search?: AI and voice search is on the rise – let’s find out if you can use it to get more traffic to your website.
• The perfect MSP sales promotion, that’s 1,000% GUARANTEED to work: What has worked really well for you in the past but for some reason you just stopped doing it? Perhaps it’s time to re-start it but with a better system in place.
• A simple MSP marketing framework you can swipe: MSPs are often at risk of making marketing way too complicated. My guest shares a simple marketing framework that you can adapt to suit your business.
• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Do you perceive marketing as too creative or something outside of your comfort zone? It’s actually more logical than you might think.

Optimize your MSP’s marketing for voice & AI search?

Are you doing your MSP’s SEO wrong? Make sure you hear this first. Because if your MSP could really do with finding new clients and you need them to find your website, everything could be changing with search engine optimisation. Why? Because AI and voice search is on the rise. So let’s find out if you can use it to get more traffic to your website and whether you need to change your MSP’s marketing plan.

Tell me, how often do you search for answers using just your voice and how often do you use an AI tool to search? Whichever specific tools you prefer to use, I think we can all agree that sometimes it’s just easier to ask Alexa or Siri to search for something or get ChatGPT to do a whole ton of research for us. But have you yet considered how that might affect driving traffic to your MSP’s website?

We don’t talk a lot about SEO, search engine optimization, on this podcast or in these YouTube videos. I’m not an expert at SEO, there are much better people than me at this and I prefer to get on guests to talk about subjects where I don’t have a specific expertise. But I think we can take a holistic overview of the change in something as big as search. Now if you are as old as me, he says looking at his gray hair, you’ll remember when search was really clunky and difficult…yep, I’m talking about you AltaVista, back in the last millennium, and I’m feeling every single one of my 50 years right now. But honestly, if you weren’t alive back in the mid to late nineties, you have no idea how bad search was.

Yahoo was kind of doing its own thing by doing it manually. It was compiling manual links and editor driven lists of stuff. And then you had kind of basic search engines like AltaVista. There was a popular one here in the UK that was called Ask Jeeves, like a butler type character, and I think that was ask.com across the world. Now of course, we didn’t know that the search experience was bad until something way, way better came along, and that thing was Google.

Google really did change everything back in the day. Its method of crawling the web and ranking web pages according to backlinks, which is how many other sites actually connect to them. And also its ability to figure out what the page was about, that was revolutionary at the time. And you can argue that Google has been so utterly dominant in search in the last 25 years and even though that dominance is now under threat from a number of different ways, the next big shift after Google came along was of course the shift to mobile search. But what’s that, about 10 – 15 years since we all needed to make sure that our websites were optimised for mobile search and mobile acce...

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge

Welcome to Episode 277 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• No idea where to start with your MSP’s marketing? Start Here: Discover the most important marketing things that will bring new leads into your MSP in my brand new, easy to read book.
• People only buy managed services for one of two reasons: Most purchases are made to either fix a problem (needs), or to make the buyer feel good (wants). You should offer an almost endless supply of additional services to meet these two criteria.
• The MSP mindset that grows your business: Building a successful MSP isn’t just about what you do, it’s also very much about the way you think. If you and your technicians adopt this way of thinking, then you’ll achieve immense things.
• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Freeing up your time is a challenge but absolutely essential to the growth of your MSP. Here’s the simplest way to achieve it.

No idea where to start with your MSP’s marketing? Start Here

Does this sound familiar? Are you completely overwhelmed with what marketing you should be doing in the short amount of time you have to do it? Well, many MSPs are in this exact situation. There’s so much information and advice out there, the problem is actually cutting through all the noise and figuring out exactly what you should do and in what order.

I spent years figuring this out and refining it. And finally, you can discover the most important marketing things that will bring new leads into your MSP. They’re all in my brand new, easy to read book. Stick around for some of the best highlights.

One of the coolest things about recording a podcast or doing YouTube videos or even writing a blog every week is that it allows you to go back and see where your mind was years and years before. I’ve been working with MSPs since 2016, and the core marketing advice that I’m giving to you today is no different to the advice that I was giving nine years ago. Sure, some of the tactics have changed, but the good solid basic marketing strategy is exactly the same. Because a good strategy doesn’t change for decades, it’s just the tactics that change.

What I’ve really noticed over the last four or five years is that I’ve got considerably better at explaining what you should do in an easier and easier way. And I’ve spoken to thousands of MSPs over the years and I realised that the majority of them, they don’t want highly advanced marketing tactics and clever strategies that are actually quite difficult to implement.

The vast majority of MSPs I speak to just want marketing to be easy. They want clear, simple recommendations of what to do and how to do it.

And that’s driven me to refine my three-step lead generation system and the tasks that I believe you most need to do are contained within that. Now, I don’t think this is a mission that’s ever really completed, but in the last year or so, I believe I have made a big jump forward. And one thing that’s helped me with that is writing a book on this subject. It’s actually just gone on sale on Amazon worldwide. You can get it on your Kindle, including in the free Kindle library thing. You can also get a paperback copy. Now I’ve written a few over the years, but I genuinely believe that this one is the most powerful book I’ve ever written, because it’s the easiest to understand.

It’s called MSP marketing: Start Here. And I actually physically wrote the first version on an eight hour flight from the UK to Las Vegas when I was speaking at Scale Con in Octob...