LinkedIn is the number one place for MSPs to build relationships with potential clients, and here’s how. Also this week, how your MSP can excite ANY prospect, and the Disney lesson your MSP mustn’t ignore.

Welcome to Episode 326 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

MSPs: Never be ignored on LinkedIn, again

For MSPs, LinkedIn is the number one place to go farming, never hunting, but farming. Slow, steady, reliable relationship building with the exact people that you want to do business with. And that means adding new connections, ideally on a daily basis. Let me give you five super smart LinkedIn connection request messages that you can swipe and use today.

Farming on LinkedIn is about slow, steady, reliable relationship building with the exact people that you want to do business with. And the good news is that LinkedIn makes this incredibly easy, if you approach it the right way. Most MSPs massively underuse it. They log in every now and again, maybe post something, maybe like something, and then they wonder why nothing really changes. They get nothing out of LinkedIn. But the real power of LinkedIn is in building your network, your connections.

Think of every connection as a tiny little seed. The more relevant seeds you plant, the more opportunities grow later.

Your job is simply to show up every day and plant a few more seeds. So how do you do that? Very simply, you search for the people you most want to do business with -business owners, managers, decision makers, in your target verticals and your target geographical areas. If you serve financial firms, go and look for accountants/CPAs, financial planners. If you specialise in manufacturing, look for operations managers, plant managers, supply chain directors. If you are local only and you just want local businesses, search by your town or your region.

And then, here’s the system… you send 10 personalised connection requests every day. Not 50, not 100, just 10. Because consistency beats volume every time. Doing something small every day is always more powerful than doing something big every now and again. So make it part of your daily routine, same time each day, same process, no emotion attached, it’s just a system. In fact, you can get other people to do this for you, maybe a member of your staff or a virtual assistant.

Now let’s talk about the connection request messages, and again, here’s where a lot of MSPs go wrong. They send the same bland, boring copy and paste connection requests that screams, I’m going to pitch you something here. But we’re not pitching remember, we’re farming, we’re starting a relationship. And that’s why you want a set of smart, simple human sounding messages that you can just rotate your way through. Today I’m going to give you five of the best, and these are the same ones that I give to my MSP Marketing Edge members. So let’s go through them.

1. The common ground message. This one is beautifully simple: Hi , it looks like we both, . I want to add you to my professional network. Now, maybe the thing that you insert is that you both live or work in the same area or maybe you’re in the same industry group or maybe you’re both fans of a particular business author or a local sports team or something like that. Humans connect through shared identity, so point out the common ground with them. They’re much more likely to accept your connection requests.

1. The local business owner message. If you target a geographic area, this one is gold: Hi , it looks like we’re both local business owners in . Should we connect to see if there’s anything we can do to help each other? People feel good supporting businesses on their do...

Delighting your clients is really important to retention, so it should be systemised in every single MSP. Also this week, AI prompts for MSPs to win new clients, and this is how MSPs lose revenue.

Welcome to Episode 325 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

MSPs who don’t do this, risk losing clients

Insane retention for your MSP isn’t just about doing a great job for your clients, it’s also about making sure they feel really positive about you. Most MSPs have great retention by default. Sure, you’re looking after people properly, but you must also remember that for ordinary business owners and managers, switching MSPs is a distress activity.

In fact, the perception is that moving to another MSP is difficult and dangerous and that’s what keeps people with you. It’s called inertia loyalty. But relying on it is a really bad strategy. Instead, here’s how to systemise going the extra mile so that your clients don’t just respect what you do. They love it.

We’re really talking here about delighting your clients, but not in a haphazard way. One of the great things about owning your own business is having complete control over the experience of the customers, right? If you and I could clone ourselves, then we’d have the perfect businesses because everyone in our team would behave like us.

But the reality is that no business is like that. We need other humans and other humans behave in different ways. So unless we put in place systems and train our people on the systems and then coach them to follow those systems and thrive within them day in, day out, we get haphazard performance.

I think that customer service is absolutely one of those areas that could and should be systemised in every single MSP.

And by customer service, I mean going the extra mile, the stuff that genuinely makes clients think, wow, these tech people are different. Because when you do that consistently and not just occasionally, you create loyalty, referrals, and a reputation that’s almost impossible for your competitors to touch. So let’s get into 10 simple but practical ways that you can go the extra mile and more importantly, how to turn each one into a repeatable system inside your business.

1. Proactive communication. I don’t just mean the usual emails that say your ticket has been updated, but actually I mean reaching out to someone before something becomes an issue. So like a quick monthly check-in call or a short video from a technician summarising what they’re working on for them. The magic here isn’t the contact, it’s the proactive nature of it. And yes, you can systemise this with a simple CRM task. Every client gets a check-in every 30 days, no exceptions. Now obviously if you’ve dealt with some tickets with them in those 30 days, you can skip that, but if you haven’t really dealt with your clients, you haven’t sorted anything big out for them in the last 30 days, then send them a proactive video just telling them some stuff you’re doing or just checking in to say, Hi, how are you? What’s happening right now within the business?

1. Personalised micro touches. Things like remembering their birthday. I mean, what if you got the birthday of every user at every client and you just sent them something? Just send them a card or just send them a video message from the team. I know that means a bit of work every week, but it’s a point that it really connects with them. What if you celebrated their business anniversary? What if you found out and congratulated them when they hired someone new? In fact, you are one of the first people to find out when they hire someone new, right? If they remember to tell you, although I realise most of your...

If you want more hot leads for your MSP, put a price estimator on your website. Marcus Sheridan is here to tell you why this works. Also this week, change your life (and MSP) with this daily habit, and why email is the #1 MSP marketing tool.

Welcome to Episode 324 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

Why is this so controversial for MSPs?

If you want more hot leads for your MSP, put a price estimator on your website. For some reason, this is one of the most controversial things in the channel, with many MSPs saying it’s impossible to give an idea of pricing before you’ve spoken to a prospect. And yet, prospects don’t want to talk to you in order to get a price. What to do? Well, I’ve got marketing expert and bestselling author, Marcus Sheridan, here right now to give you what I believe is the definitive word on this.

I like to think of myself as a bit of a marketing sponge. I read almost every single business and marketing book that I can get my hands on, actually, I listen to them more these days, but I’m also constantly reviewing different ideas and different ways of doing things to keep my mental model of the best way to market your MSP fully up to date. And there was something that I added to this model years back when I read a book called They Ask You Answer by Marcus Sheridan. Have you read this?

One of the big ideas in the book is the idea of transparent pricing. Marcus in that book talked extensively about radical price transparency, which means that you talk very openly about your price. You explain what drives the cost up and down, you discuss cheap versus expensive options, and you compare yourself to alternatives.

You’re just trying to help people who want to buy from you, who want to switch MSPs, you’re trying to help them to understand value.

And then Marcus released a book called Endless Customers last year, which was a reinvention of They Ask You Answer and kind of updated for the AI age. And he took the idea of radical price transparency and took it even further by suggesting that you put a price estimator onto your website. What’s a price estimator? It’s a tool for someone to get a rough idea of how much it costs to be a client of your MSP.

This to me was so obvious that I actually negotiated a partnership with Marcus Sheridan and his business partner, Steve Auchettl, and we launched MSP Price Guide at the backend of last year. It’s an AI-driven price estimator tool that you can put onto your website and we’ve done all the hard work for you. So we’ve built templates, we’ve added in all the standard managed services, all of that kind of stuff. So you can just start your 30 day free trial and get an estimator onto your website within 10, 20 minutes or so. You can see that at msppriceguide.com.

Anyway, I asked Marcus to pull together something to show you why all of this is so critical and so applicable to MSPs. Take it away, Marcus.

Hello MSP community, Marcus Sheridan here. Let’s have an honest conversation about whether or not you should be considering a pricing estimator for your website. First thing that we have to understand is that 75% of all buyers today say they would prefer to have what’s known as a seller-free sales experience. In other words, we don’t hate salespeople as buyers, we just don’t want to talk to them until we are good and ready. And that was a B2B study by Gartner, by the way. And I think you would agree with that. We don’t want to talk to sales until we’re confident, comfortable, and we feel like we’re not going to make a mistake. The answer to that is give the buyer more control through what is known as self-service.

Self-service are interactive tools mainly on your website that allow...