Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast

• Why being the cheapest MSP is a bad strategy

  The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge Welcome to Episode 312 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week… Why being the cheapest MSP is a bad strategy: If your marketing strategy is to be the cheapest MSP around, what you’re actually doing is setting yourself up to attract the worst clients, who create the most noise and generate the least amount of profit. The #1 all time secret of epic MSP marketing: The marketing winners aren’t smarter and don’t necessarily work harder than everyone else. They just get more of the right stuff implemented really fast. DANGER: Most MSPs have confused messaging: My special guest is an expert at making messaging simple. Your eyes are about to be opened as to how confused messaging is killing your MSP marketing efforts dead. The Marketing Minute: Don’t miss this simple email signature marketing idea that can make a big impact. Why being the cheapest MSP is a bad strategy If your marketing strategy is to be the cheapest MSP around, then you’re setting yourself up for a world of pain. Lots of MSPs do this because when you’re not very good at marketing, which most MSPs aren’t, it just seems like the easiest thing to do… offer a good service, deliver it at a good price. But what you’re actually doing is setting yourself up to attract the worst clients, who create the most noise and generate the least amount of profit. If you don’t today, have the confidence to put up your prices, to be the most expensive MSP in your marketplace, let me tell you why you owe it to your existing clients, your future clients, yourself and your family to do this. On the surface, being the cheapest MSP feels like a good idea because everyone likes a bargain, but being the cheapest is not a winning strategy. It attracts completely the wrong kind of clients. The ones who are constantly haggling, they’re always looking for shortcuts and they just don’t value what you do for them. In fact, they’ll leave the moment that someone else comes along who’s a pound or a dollar cheaper than you. And that is not really a foundation that you can build a profitable stable MSP on. So instead, you kind of want to be at the other end of the scale, the most expensive MSP in town. Now, I know that you might maybe have tensed up when I said that and you might be thinking, Me, the most expensive, no way. I don’t want to be that. I don’t want to do that. But listen, just hear me out on this. The MSPs who charge the most are often the ones who are seen as the safest choice. It kind of seems crazy, doesn’t it? But actually, higher prices signal higher value. They signal better service, they signal more stability, more reliability, and guess what? The best clients, the ones who are really serious about their businesses and protecting their businesses and growing them with a proper partner, they want that reassurance. They don’t just want to spend money on a service and spend as little as they can. They want the best quality because they want a genuine partnership from someone that offers a very high quality of service. So how do you do this? Well, there are two main approaches that you can take overt and covert. So overt is where you’re very upfront about being premium. In fact, you build your whole brand around expertise, trust, and high standards. You’re never apologising for your price, in fact, you’re proud of it. But then the opposite is covert because this is a little bit more subtle. And in this with being covert, you don’t shout about being the m...

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• Is your MSP wasting time on marketing?

  The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge Welcome to Episode 311 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week… Is your MSP wasting time on marketing?: Here’s a tactic that all pro marketers use, yet very few MSPs are even aware of. It’s going to save you time and it could even help you find a brand new client. 7 MASSIVE mistakes that stop MSPs generating leads: Most MSPs make a series of huge mistakes that hobble their lead generation. Here’s how to change that. This old MSP lead gen tactic never fails: Let’s look at an older way of finding clients for your MSP. My guest is going to explain why this still works and how you can beat the other MSPs who don’t even know that this is still a thing. The Marketing Minute: Don’t miss these two questions that will add power to your sale pitch. Is your MSP wasting time on marketing? If you want nothing more than a new client for your MSP right now, just be careful that you’re not wasting your time in the way that you go about it. Because some MSP’s marketing is a complete waste of time, often because a vital element has been missed out. Wouldn’t you love to hear about a massive time saver that all pro marketers use, yet very few MSPs are even aware of? You are going to love this because it’s going to save you time and it could even help you find a brand new client. So what I’m talking about here is repurposing content, and this of course means taking something you’ve already created, let’s say a blog post, and then you turn it into other bits of content so you get more mileage out of it. You’ve already done the hard work once, so why not squeeze every bit of value out of this? And here’s the thing, it’s something that some people frown upon, but trust me as a full-time marketer of 20 years now, it’s an essential thing to do. The only person who is consuming all of your content across all of your platforms, is you. Different people consume content in different ways. Some like reading blogs, other scroll LinkedIn, some just glance at Google when they’re looking for a new MSP. So by repurposing content, you can meet people where they already are without having to reinvent the wheel every single time. Let me give you a few practical examples of how this works. Let’s say you write a blog article about a new ransomware threat. First, you publish it on your website as a blog article, which is great because now Google can find it, it might have some SEO benefits, search engine optimisation etc. But next, you can take that exact same blog article and you can then adapt it into a LinkedIn newsletter. And that way the people who are subscribed to your LinkedIn newsletters get a notification in the feed, they also get an email copy of it as well, and it’s great for authority. You’re seen as the helpful, local, knowledgeable IT expert. Then you can take that LinkedIn newsletter and you can cut it down into a shorter version and post it on your Google business profile. Now that’s really powerful because when prospects do Google your MSP, they’ll see fresh, helpful content right there on their profile. It’s also really good for your Google Juice. In fact, I suspect that Google sees more of your Google business profile content than humans do, but ultimately, anything that helps you perform better in search results is good, right? And you could also record a short video on this same subject where you just talk through the same advice that you were giving in your blog, in your LinkedIn newsletter, and of course, in y...

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• MSPs: This simple upsell generates new MRR AND boosts retention

  The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge Welcome to Episode 310 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week… MSPs: This simple upsell generates new MRR AND boosts retention: This is something that almost every single client wants but rarely gets from their MSP… a 24/7 at-home support package. And it’s such a simple upsell. MSPs who do this win new clients faster: If you want to sell your services you have to move people from being someone you talk to mostly on LinkedIn, YouTube, and email, to being someone you talk to on the phone. MSPs: Use marketing AI like Iron Man, not Terminator: Many MSPs actually do damage to the marketing messages they’re putting out because the AI doesn’t really understand what their end goal is. My guest today is an AI marketing expert and he’s going to tell you how to get it right. The Marketing Minute: Don’t miss this quick and easy LinkedIn messaging tip. MSPs: This simple upsell generates new MRR AND boosts retention Could this be the most valuable upsell any MSP could deploy? It’s something that almost every single client wants but rarely gets from their MSP. And it not only generates new monthly recurring revenue for you but also has a huge and positive effect on retention. Let me tell you what this upsell is and an easy way you can roll it out in the next seven days. The upsell I’m talking about is an at-home support package. Now think about how most of your clients work these days. They might have an office, they might be completely remote, and of course you are already looking after their office tech, their business tech. But the reality is, as we know, people just work from anywhere these days and they also work at any times – in the evenings, on weekends, sometimes even when they’re on a vacation, on holiday. And here’s the problem, when they’re working from home out of hours and something goes wrong with their IT, they don’t have anyone to turn to, not unless they wait till Monday morning or something when you and your team are back and we all know that that must be deeply frustrating for them. We also know that you don’t want to do support in the evenings and the weekends for work-life balance. So this is a source of friction for both parties. You should be doing everything to remove friction between you and your client. This is where your at-home support package comes in… and it’s such a simple upsell. You could do a setup project perhaps by bundling a couple of things together. You could maybe have a laptop doc, a wireless keyboard, maybe do a WIFI survey for their home and install some boosters, something like that, maybe even a check in on their home security. But the real winner and the monthly recurring revenue is a 24/7 help desk. And the secret sauce to this is that you don’t have to provide that 24/7 help desk yourself. You can outsource it. There are plenty of white label providers out there who will handle those calls in the evening and at weekends for you, often under your brand. So your clients still feel like they’re talking to your MSP. You might choose to be very clear with your clients that it is an outsourced help desk, but they have access to all of your systems and you train them and you’re constantly working with them and updating them. Because no human expects another human to provide genuine 24 hour service from their local office. I think you’re almost being a bit disingenuous with your clients if you’re not honest with them about how you do this. But if you didn’t want to use a wh...

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• Do marketing you can't automate or scale

  The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge Welcome to Episode 309 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week… Do marketing you can’t automate or scale: In the early days of trying out new marketing, you can’t always jump straight to automation. Manual testing helps to figure out what marketing actually works for your MSP. MSPs: Imagine losing 17,000 connections on LinkedIn overnight: You don’t own your connections, your content or your interactions on LinkedIn… they belong to LinkedIn, you just get to borrow them. MSPs should have a combination of borrowed and owed audiences. The simple video every MSP needs to increase sales: Explainer videos are a key marketing tool and my special guest will explain how to create one and how to make sure it’s something your hottest prospects are desperate to watch. The Marketing Minute: Don’t miss this quick and easy YouTube marketing tip. In a world where you can automate almost anything so it can be done at any scale, here’s the strangest advice you are going to hear from me. I believe sometimes you should deliberately do marketing that will never scale up and that you can’t automate, even if that means that you personally have to sit and do a whole chunk of work. Why would I recommend this? Surely one of my jobs is to make your marketing easier. Well, yes, that’s true once you’ve figured out what marketing works, but doing marketing experiments yourself is an important part of figuring out the specific tactics that’ll work for your MSP. As business owners, you and I love things that are scalable and repeatable, right? We like processes, automation, efficiency, and yes, that’s where you want to end up with your marketing. But in the early days of trying out a new marketing channel, you can’t always jump straight to automation. And here’s why. Not all marketing works for all businesses. What works brilliantly for the MSP down the road from you might flop for you. The only way to find out what marketing actually works for your business is to test it manually in a way that doesn’t scale. For example, let’s say you want to try LinkedIn outreach, and sure, there are tools out there that’ll blast out hundreds of automated messages every week. But if you don’t yet know what message resonates with your ideal prospects, then blasting out hundreds of messages just means you’ll annoy more people faster. Instead, you’re better off writing a handful of personal connection requests every day. Try different approaches, test out different messages and see what kind of response you get. Once you know what works, then you can look at scaling or systemising it. Here’s another example, follow up emails. You might want to eventually build an automated nurture sequence inside your CRM, but before you do that, it’s worth sending a batch of personal follow-ups to prospects one by one to see which subject lines get opened, which wording gets replies. That kind of stuff. Once you know can then plug those learnings into automation and let software do the heavy lifting. And here’s my key point. Marketing is not a one size fits all game. Every market, every town, every vertical is slightly different. So in the early days of trying something new, you’ve got to be willing to roll up your sleeves and do the kind of marketing that just isn’t scalable. Let me give you three more practical examples: Number one – handwritten letters to prospects. Everybody has too much email, but nobody gets lots of nice stuff in the post...

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• The 3 big reasons your best technicians might leave you

  The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge Welcome to Episode 308 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week… The 3 big reasons your best technicians might leave you: Surely one of the greatest fears of any MSP is that of losing one of your key technicians. Let’s explore the three big reasons why they might leave and what you can do to address those. How to turn tech newbies into your MSP’s biggest fans: If you confuse your prospects and clients with technology, it’s likely they will disengage and divert their attention elsewhere. Everything needs to be explained in the easiest possible way. Control freak? Your MSP may struggle to grow: Business owners are control freaks and often get so caught up in the details that they struggle to grow. My special guest shares how he could help you to improve your business by letting go. Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Have you ever considered starting a podcast for your MSP? Here’s a few things you should consider before you dive in… The 3 big reasons your best technicians might leave you There are many fears that MSP owners have. One of them is of course being breached, another one is running out of cash. But surely one of the greatest fears is that of losing one of your key technicians. And I’m so sorry to even bring this up, but it’s something that we do need to talk about because there are always very specific reasons why any employee leaves any business. I want to explore the three big reasons that technicians might leave you so you can address those in your MSP before something terrible happens. You’ve probably heard that people don’t quit businesses, they quit managers or owners… whoever’s managing them. Well, this is absolutely true, and in fact, studies have consistently shown that 75% of voluntary exits are due to the boss and not due to the role itself. Another survey that I found on Google show that 57% of employees left their job because of frustrations with their manager or leadership. So here are the top three specific reasons that a technician might leave your business: The first is poor management – a lack of support, micromanagement, or even bad communication. Managers who don’t coach, who don’t listen or who don’t trust their people well they drive them away. The second reason is no meaningful growth or opportunities. High performers crave challenge and progression, and without it they get bored or worse, they leave. And the third reason is feelings of being undervalued or unrecognised. If your techs aren’t getting feedback, recognition or meaningful rewards, they’ll just look for a place that gives them those things. But now for the good parts and how to flip the script and keep your top tech talent engaged, motivated, and loyal: Number one – coach them, train them, invest in them. Make development a habit, not just lip service. Training, whether you do this yourself or whether you pay for them to have training, it boosts retention massively and tailored development plans show that you’re serious about their future. Plus, if you invest in leadership, you won’t end up with accidental managers who drive people away. And of course that’s good because as you can develop managers who work for you, it’s going to be easier for you to hand over the reins for the business at some point when you want to take life a little bit easier. And we do get there, I promise you we do. Number two – give them room to grow and give them meaningful work to d...

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