The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge

Welcome to Episode 291 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• They want to buy 365 direct – fight it, or accept it?: If a client wants to buy 365 direct, it’s not necessarily a bad thing… it could actually become a massive sales opportunity for your MSP.
• Should your MSP start a podcast?: Lots of MSPs have asked me for advice on setting up a podcast, and yes, having a podcast can be an insanely powerful marketing tool. But should you do one? Let me help you answer that question.
• Ask these questions to pick an MSP marketing agency: Many MSPs hate marketing and they hate agencies even more. My guest is going to tell you the specific questions you should ask a marketing agency to separate the good guys from the bad.
• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Have you ever considered sending an impact box to prospects? Find out what you should include in yours.

They want to buy 365 direct – fight it, or accept it?

Are these clients for real? They want to switch to buying 365 directly to save a couple of bucks a month. This is a scenario most MSPs face at some point, but should you fight it, try and educate them or let them just do what they want? What if I told you this wasn’t necessarily a bad thing and could actually become a massive sales opportunity for your MSP.

As someone who doesn’t personally have to deal with 365 and all the licenses and NCE and all of that, it does look to me like Microsoft has made it as hard as possible for you. That whole NCE thing is a massive pain, right? And especially if you have a client where you’ve made an annual commitment and then of course they hit you a few months in that they want to buy directly, and that just creates a headache for everybody.

It’s not like 365 is a high margin item for you, but from the client’s point of view, 365 is right there at the core of their experience.

Outlook and Teams and Word and Excel, these are all applications that most businesses use multiple times every single workday. So they want them to work, they want them to be productivity tools, not pains in the backside tools, and I think that’s a basic and perfectly understandable requirement of any business owner or manager today. Don’t you agree? So if someone wants to move the licenses away from you, buy direct and save themselves a couple of dollars per user per month, what should you do?

I’ve asked a few MSPs this question over the last couple of weeks and some of them have said that you should just roll over and you should just take it. So invoice them for any out-of-pocket expenses caused by NCE. Make sure they know how that’s going to affect the direct support that you give them and then let them go off and buy it from elsewhere.

Others have said that you should fight really hard to keep everything under your jurisdiction. Isn’t that the point of a managed service provider that you are looking after all of their technology? And that starts with the very basic help desk functions and goes right up to their technology strategy. Now if you don’t have some level of control over everything in between those two items. help desk and strategy, then surely you’re making your life harder than it needs to be and that must have an impact on the service that you can deliver to them and the service that they’ll enjoy.

So maybe the message you want to send them is telling them all the downsides, all the bad things that could happen, like the fact they’ll have to de...

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge

Welcome to Episode 290 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• Can your MSP offer an easy first purchase?: One of the biggest MSP marketing hurdles is asking potential clients to go from nothing to a monthly recurring revenue contract. A better way is to give them an easy first purchase.
• Does your MSP do whatever it takes to keep clients happy?: Flexibility and initiative needs to be a culture within an MSP, not a policy. A culture of “do whatever makes technology easy for clients” would be a powerful retention weapon.
• Why is your MSP’s marketing and sales SOOOO slow?: My special guest is a personal branding expert and explains how it’s easy to build and can be incredibly profitable when you get it right.
• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Ever wondered why your MSP’s marketing and sales are SOOOO slow? Let me explain and advise what you can do about it.

Can your MSP offer an easy first purchase?

Here’s something you know already, it’s just too darn hard to get new managed service clients. One of the biggest hurdles is that you are asking them to go from nothing straight to a monthly recurring revenue contract at the click of a finger. Surely convincing them it’s safe to start spending their money with you is easy. You just put a strong case forward and then dazzle them with the service that they’re going to be getting, yeah? If only it was that easy. So if the client finds signing a contract with you a bit scary, how do we fix that? Is there a way to make them feel happy committing to you and spending money with you? Absolutely there is, and let me tell you what it is.

What we’re really talking about here is building trust.

Trust is a massive currency within marketing and sales. The more trust you have, the more likely people are to sign a contract and throw themselves into your care.

But the opposite of that is also the case. If you don’t have enough trust built with your leads and with your prospects, then asking them to go from no buying relationship with you straight into a managed services contract is a big ask. I know it can be done and it is done every single day, but surely we should be trying to make our lives easier. If you look at this from the point of view of the person buying, and by the way that’s always a great way to look at any of your marketing and your sales, always, always, always look at it from the other person’s point of view. So when they start looking for a new MSP or maybe even their first MSP, we call them suspects. They have their arms folded, they are suspicious of everyone they find and they are not overly impressed with anyone at all. And even if they’ve been given a warm referral from a friend or they find an MSP online that has tons of social proof, so it looks like a safe choice, they are still suspicious asking someone to trust you with their technology. And as we said, it’s a big ask.

Now, they might not know what they don’t know about technology, but they do know that if you get it wrong their business is dead in the water. And this is one of the reasons why it takes so much time to build a relationship and warm up an arms folded suspect, turn them into a lead turn that lead into a prospect, that prospect into an opportunity. It takes time, it takes effort, and it’s exhausting because the risk is so big from their point of view. So let’s see if we can de-risk that for them.

One of the ways that you could do that is with a risk reversal guarantee. I’ve seen only a smal...

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge

Welcome to Episode 289 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• Accountable to no-one: A blessing or curse?: There is a huge benefit of being accountable to someone, and being accountable to your team is a great way to make sure you get things done. It forces you to plan ahead, be more disciplined, and be a better team player.
• The free MSP marketing tactic that nearly got me arrested: This is a lesson in lateral thinking. You don’t need lots of money to market your MSP, you just need a desire to get new clients, some ideas, and a little time to implement.
• How this MSP built a GREAT marketing system: My guest shares the warts and all story of how she grew her MSP, and how it really took off when she put in place a proper marketing system.
• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Should MSPs use WhatsApp for marketing? My answer to this question might surprise you.

Accountable to no-one: A blessing or curse?

The joys of being an MSP owner… complete control. Yeah you want to be always onboarding new clients and improving your tech stack and providing the best customer service. But if one week you don’t want to do those things, no one can stop you from not doing those things, because you’re the owner of the business. You’re the boss, right?

Well, if right now you’re not accountable to anyone, there is a huge benefit of being accountable to someone. But who is this person you should answer to? Stick around, you’re not going to believe who I’m going to suggest.

There are many reasons why someone starts their own business and I say that as someone who’s been in business for 20 years himself. People who don’t start their own business think that we do it so that we can earn more money and not have a boss. But I think those of us who’ve been doing it for more than a couple of years, which means we are going to keep doing it for a couple of decades, we know that we started our own business primarily to have control.

And by that I mean control over what work we do, who we do it for and how it’s done. Most of us, I believe, start our own business because we have a deep desire to do something amazing and we want to control freak it all along the way. Sometimes when we work for someone else, we’ve had bad bosses. I know that I have, I’m looking at you, Terry, but also we’ve had good bosses. I’ve had some of those as well, fact loads of those. But escaping the boss is not always the reason why we start our own business.

As I say, making more money and building an asset, something that you own, that’s the side benefit I believe of running your own business. I truly believe control is the primary driving factor for doing it and keep doing it. But nevermind all of these upsides of starting your own business and not having a boss, let’s look at the downsides as well. And I don’t really mean the fact that you for many years, worked longer hours than you ever have for probably a lower salary, that does eventually go, but it’s mostly a pain in the first few years, I don’t mean that stuff. I do mean the downsides of not having a boss. Because, and this might be hard to swallow, but there really are downsides to not having a boss.

The biggest downside to not having a boss is that you are accountable to no one.

Think back to when you last had a job. Someone, somewhere was in charge of you, right? You were accountable to someone in some way and forgetting all the negative impacts of that, there were positive impacts...