Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast

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 owned 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. Do marketing you can’t automate or scale 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 yo...

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...

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge Welcome to Episode 307 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week… MSPs: Stop using this 2008 marketing tactic: Some MSPs are trying to find new clients using outdated tactics from over 20 years ago. Let’s find out which tactics are working for building your email list and lead gen right now. Why ignoring Copilot damages MSPs’ retention: Whether you love it or hate it, AI tools are here to stay and we know that Microsoft is highly committed to baking Copilot into everything. Let me tell you why. Can MSPs win clients without embracing video?: The video revolution is happening, and it’s the MSPs who are embracing it who are winning new clients faster. My special guest reveals ways for you to use video easily and also something that he’s calling, the new social SEO. Paul’s Personal Peer Group: As an MSP owner, do you struggle to let go and delegate tasks to staff or outsource? Let me tell you why it’s such an important step to growing your business. MSPs: Stop using this 2008 marketing tactic You’re not doing MySpace marketing, are you? Some MSPs are trying to find new clients using outdated tactics from over 20 years ago. Building an email list is still one of the most effective things you can do, but are you asking for email addresses in the most modern way? Let’s find out which tactics are working for building your email list and lead gen right now, and which should have died out alongside MySpace. What I’m talking about here is lead magnets. Have you heard of those? Let’s discuss what they are, why you should care, and why your approach to them might be stuck in the past. First things first, what is a lead magnet? It’s something valuable that you give away for free in exchange for someone’s contact details. And usually that’s their email address, but sometimes it’s also their phone number or other information. The whole idea is to attract the right prospects and start a relationship with them before you try and sell them anything. Now, if you think about it, no one wakes up in the morning thinking, oh, I can’t wait to fill in another contact form today. You have to give people a reason to do it, and the lead magnet is that reason. So how would you use one in your MSP? It’s simple. You put it everywhere that you prospects might come across you. So on your website, your LinkedIn, both your profile and your posts, your email signature, anywhere really, and you promote it almost like it’s a service that you offer. In fact, the more valuable it feels, the more people will download or sign up for it. And then you can follow up with useful emails that guide them towards becoming a client, whoop. Now here’s the thing. For years the go-to lead magnet has been a PDF download, something like top 10 tips for cyber security or a small Business IT checklist. And don’t get me wrong, these can still work, but let’s be honest, PDFs are a bit old hat now, right? People are drowning in files they never open, and the guide that you put hours into creating is probably sitting in someone’s downloads folder and they’ve never opened it. So what’s better these days? Well, I believe these days, interactive content wins. And one of the best examples is an engagement quiz. The kind of thing that you can build with a platform like ScoreApp. If you’ve ne...

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge Welcome to Episode 306 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week… Your MSP should AVOID these AI tools: If you want to be more productive, do better marketing and ultimately grow your MSP, there are AI tools you’ll definitely want to avoid. Instead, here are five AI tools that you should be using right now. Why your MSP doesn’t stand out (and how to fix that): There are thousands of MSPs to choose from, so why would people choose you? Let me share a couple of good ideas with you and see if I can give you some inspiration. All successful MSPs have this in common: The easiest way to grow your MSP is to ask someone who’s already done it. My special guest has been growing MSPs for 20 years and has some ideas waiting for you to use. Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Find out what “relevance increases results” actually means and how can it help with your MSP’s marketing. Your MSP should AVOID these AI tools It’s one thing being overwhelmed by your business and not having enough time to find new clients for your MSP, but it’s another thing being overwhelmed with the choices of AI tools that are supposed to save you time and reduce overwhelm in the first place. Have you found the options and variations of AI tools so completely bamboozling? Well, if so, you’re not on your own. If you want to be more productive, do better marketing and ultimately grow your MSP, here are five AI tools that you should be using right now. And let’s be honest, there is a lot of noise about AI and a lot of it is hype. I follow a lot of AI newsletters very carefully to keep up to date with what’s happening, which of course is a never ending and somewhat overwhelming task in itself. Now while there is a lot of talk of people trying to do amazing things, often when you dive into the amazing things that all of these new tools should be able to do, they just don’t work that way. Well, they kind of work that way, but they’re never really good enough for you to rely on them. But saying that… There are some very real and very useful tools that MSPs are already using to save time, create better marketing, and just get more done. So let me give you a shortlist of what I think are the best AI tools you should know about right now: Let’s start with the most obvious one, ChatGPT or Copilot or Perplexity or whatever your preferred tool is. And yeah, I know it’s obvious but hear me out because the trick with getting the best output from your general AI tool is giving it good input. So let’s look at content creation for example. The worst thing you could do is just say, Hey, ChatGPT, write me a blog post about backups because it’s just going to generate boring AI slop that isn’t going to bring any benefit to your MSP. So a better way to use it is to shape content that you’re already getting from trusted content providers and get the AI tool to customise it to your specific audience. Let me give you an example. We create tons of content for our MSP Marketing Edge members and increasingly a number of them are using AI tools to tailor that content to their specific audience. So for example, some have created custom GPTs, which are then trained on their ICP, sorry to use two acronyms in a row there, but as you might already know, an ICP is an ideal client profile...

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge Welcome to Episode 305 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week… Is on-site support a competitive advantage?: Does your MSP still provide on-site support or are you thinking that maybe you should? Your decision could affect how successful your MSP is. How to find your MSP’s next 5 clients: Let me introduce you to the concept of the Dream 100 and how it could completely change your idea of marketing forever. Is this the only way MSPs should increase profits?: When profits are down should you reduce costs or focus your time on increasing sales? My special guest is an expert at operations and she’s got a unique spin on this exact problem that you are going to want to hear. Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Do you have a live chat or instant messaging option on your MSP’s website? There’s so many options it’s hard to know the right one to choose. But I have the answer for you. Is on-site support a competitive advantage? Some MSPs do do it, some MSPs make a point of saying, no way. We’re talking about providing on-site support. Obviously back in the day it went without saying, you just did it. But in our modern, remote first world, the need for in-person on-site support has completely changed. So are you still providing it or are you thinking that maybe you should or that you never ever will again, Your decision could affect how successful your MSP is. So let’s explore your options right now. Let’s be honest, a few years ago having engineers who could turn up at a client’s office and fix something kind of felt like a major selling point, but here we are in 2025 and most businesses now are hybrid or remote, that happened very quickly. Almost everything can be fixed remotely, so is on-site support still something worth shouting about in your marketing or is it yesterday’s news? Let’s look at both sides of this. The case for on-site support being a competitive advantage, first of all. It starts with the fact that some clients love knowing that someone will actually physically come out if needed. You think about clients with manufacturing equipment, specialist hardware, or those who just feel reassured by a human coming into the office. For them, we’ll be there in person if you need us, that’s a big comfort factor. And as we know, comfort sells. And not every MSP is offering this anymore, of course, so if most of your competitors have gone fully remote you’ll be standing out as we’re local, we’re personal, we’ll come on-site. That could be a differentiator in your marketing. It’s a trust builder. It says, we are not just faceless techs in the cloud, we are real people here for you. Now let’s look on the other side, the case against on-site support being a competitive advantage. Because on the flip side, as we know, most day-to-day issues don’t need it. Clients are used to remote support now, in fact they expect you to fix things fast online, over the internet. And for many, the idea of waiting for someone to drive over and come into an office kind of feels old fashioned, it’s not special anymore. And the...

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge Welcome to Episode 304 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week… 3 big pricing mistakes that kill MSPs’ sales: MSPs inadvertently make these blunders with the way they price up their offering and it often kills sales. Here’s what to do about it. This video MUST be on every MSP website: Videos on your website are really important. And a testimonial is the single most important type of video that could help a prospect decide to sign a contract with you. The truth about SMS marketing for MSPs: Every single business owner has a mobile phone and yet not many MSPs are using that to their advantage. My guest is an SMS marketing expert and is going to tell us whether SMS text messaging is a viable marketing tool for MSPs. Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Do you have trust badges on your website? Find out how to use them to get the most credibility for your MSP. 3 big pricing mistakes that kill MSPs’ sales Getting new clients for your MSP is hard enough, so you should do everything you can to avoid making mistakes, right? Often I see MSPs inadvertently making blunders with the way they price up their offering. It’s a complicated subject with many traps you can get caught in. So let’s look at three common price mistakes that MSPs make that are killing sales. Let’s talk about something that makes a lot of MSPs uncomfortable… pricing. It’s not the most exciting topic, but wow, it can make or break your sales. I’ve seen so many great MSPs – really solid, technical, brilliant businesses run by brilliant people – struggling to grow simply because they’re just making the wrong moves with their pricing. So let’s fix that. These are the three big pricing mistakes that can kill your sales, and of course, how to avoid them. Mistake number one: charging too little because you’re scared of losing the deal, and this is so common. Have you done it? You’re sat in a sales meeting, the prospect starts questioning your price and suddenly you’re talking yourself down. You say that you think you can find a way to shave some money off the price by reducing the package, or maybe you can find them a discount. But by doing this, you’re kind of leaving money on the table just because you want the client to say yes. Here’s the thing though, when you undercharge, you actually scare off the best clients. They kind of think, why is this MSP so cheap? What corners are they cutting? Plus, you’re setting yourself up to resent the work later on when the numbers just don’t add up. So here’s what you should do instead… price confidently, know your value. If you’re delivering 24/7 monitoring, a great help desk and really strong security, don’t price it like you’re just fixing printers on an ad hoc basis. That’s crazy. Mistake number two: making pricing complicated. I’ve seen some MSP proposals that are like three entire pages of line items. So here’s your base support, this bit’s extra, this is going to cost you this, we forgot to include this. It’s just so confusing. And the problem is that confused people don’t buy. So what you do instead is you bundle things, you create clear packages. You could call that bronze, silver, gold. You could call it something else, it doesn’t really matter what you name it. But the point is that when it’s all put together and prospects can look at it and go, Oh, right, yeah, I see. So we’ve got this or we’ve got this, which is a bit more, or we’ve got this, which is even more, do you know...

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge Welcome to Episode 303 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week… How to market your MSP to accountants: Accountants are a perfect fit for MSPs. Learn how to speak their language to win over their hearts and minds to give your MSP the competitive edge. 4 huge marketing problems that damage your MSP: These marketing problems do massive amounts of damage to MSPs, and yet they’re so easy to overcome when you understand them. Are these damaging your business? Here’s what to do. MSP insider’s lessons from 18 years of marketing: If you want to grow your MSP by attracting new clients, the chances are you’re making some fundamental marketing mistakes. My guest today shares his 18 years experience working at an MSP and reveals what really moved the needle. Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Do you sometimes find that your team makes the same mistakes over and over again? Well, this is actually your problem, not theirs, and here’s a process to eliminate the problem. How to market your MSP to accountants Dream client alert. For many MSPs that target verticals or niches, they find accountants (CPAs) to be a very attractive sector. Are you targeting accountants? If not, you really need to hear this, and if you already are, then this is going to make things so much easier. Let’s deep dive into why accountants switch MSPs, what they’d want from you and how to grab their attention. Accountants are a perfect fit for MSPs. They have a business that’s dependent upon technology. They’ve got compliance and regulations, and they’re often very stable businesses with lots of recurring revenue. So imagine this, you are sitting across the table from a busy accountant and they’ve literally got piles of tax returns and spreadsheets and calls with their clients all lined up. What’s the one thing that you know that they don’t want? More hassle. And understanding that is the first step in marketing your MSP to accountants. Get inside their head and their heart and really understand what drives them and what would drive them to pick your MSP instead of someone else. Accountants live in a world of rules, a world of deadlines, a world of compliance, and a world of absolute attention to detail. They value accuracy, speed, and security above almost anything else. So if you want them to even consider working with your MSP, your messaging has got to show that you understand their world. Talk about what matters to them, not technology. Instead show them how you help them keep their client data safe, how you help them to meet deadlines without system crashes, and how you help them eliminate the panic of last minute tech issues during tax season. I mean you can literally paint them a picture, you can say, imagine your team working flat out in January (or whenever your local tax season is) and instead of the WIFI dropping in and out or your software slowing down or freezing, everything just works because in the background we’re monitoring everything, we’re fixing problems before you’re even aware of them, so you can focus on your clients and tax returns and getting things done while we are focusing on your technology. Now that’s the kind of language that really gets into someone’s heart as well as their head. And then you start to think about how to influence them and get...

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge Welcome to Episode 302 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week… 3 mistakes MSPs commonly make with Google: This is one of the most overlooked tools in your marketing toolbox – your Google Business Profile. Make sure you’re getting it right to get the most out of it for your MSP. Why MSPs should send personalised videos: Discover how these videos really can help to secure new clients for your MSP. And how when you open your mind to it you can spot opportunities to send them every day. What does great marketing look like in a mature MSP?: If you want to be successful, find someone who’s achieved the results that you want and copy what they do to achieve the same. And my guest this week has 26 years of MSP marketing expertise to share with you. Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Ever wanted to know your MSP’s true search position in Google? Find out how in one simple step… 3 mistakes MSPs commonly make with Google There are three mistakes that MSPs commonly make with Google. And when I say three things, I really mean four things because the first is assuming that AI is now your new focus for getting search traffic. Well, it’s not. It’s currently sending only about 1% of traffic to your website. So the focus right now still has to be doing better on Google. But why and how do you do this? What are the three other things that MSPs are getting wrong? We’re talking about one of the most overlooked tools in your marketing toolbox – your Google Business Profile. Now, before you skip this or zone out, do stick with me. Google Business Profile isn’t just for coffee shops and hair salons. Your Google Business Profile shows up when someone googles your MSP’s name or even if they just Google MSPs . Your Google Business Profile is like your digital shopfront and it can make you look trustworthy… or not, if you get it wrong. So let’s look at three common mistakes that I see MSPs making and how you can fix them quickly and easily: The first mistake is to have a boring generic business description. If your profile says something along the lines of “We offer IT support and services to businesses”, oh, you’re not alone. Loads of MSPs do this, but it’s bland and it’s costing you clicks. So here’s the fix. Speak like a human and not a robot. Use the first sentence to make it clear who you help and what problems you solve. So try something like “We help businesses worry less about IT with fast friendly support, bulletproof security and advice with zero jargon.” I mean that alone, just using that sentence instantly sets you apart from other MSPs. Mistake number two, no photos or photos from the year 2005. Did you know that businesses with photos actually get more clicks and more calls from their Google Business Profile? You don’t need to go and hire a pro photographer, just pull out your phone, grab a team photo, maybe grab some photos of your office, your vans if you’ve got vans, you could do a behind the scenes look at your setup, it could be your help desk, someone answering a phone, it could be your security dashboard with obviously the sensitive stuff blurred out. People just want to see people, they want to see who they’re dealing with. And even one new photo added like today or this week can boost engagement. If you added a n...

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge Welcome to Episode 301 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week… Should your MSP get HubSpot? A review: The system you use to manage marketing with your prospects has to be a good match for your MSP, otherwise you could have a very costly waste of time on your hands. So, is Hubspot the right choice for you? Free Windows 10 end of life marketing materials: Windows 10 end of life is now less than two months away and this could be a massive once a decade marketing opportunity for you. How to run your MSP by the numbers – and which to track: If I asked you about the most important marketing and growth numbers in your MSP would you know what those numbers should be? My guest works with MSPs to help them understand just this. Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Do you know what a UTM is and how it can benefit your MSP? Let me explain… Should your MSP get HubSpot? A review Whatever you do, don’t pick a CRM for your MSP until you’ve heard this, and especially if you’re looking at HubSpot. The system you use to manage marketing with your prospects has to be a good match for your business, otherwise you could have a very costly waste of time on your hands. So which is the right CRM for MSPs? Have you been considering systems like MailChimp, MailerLite, Growably from the Tech Tribe or even HubSpot? Eight months ago I switched my business to HubSpot, so let’s review it eight months on and see if I’d recommend it for your MSP. On the 14th of April 2009 I committed to my first serious CRM. It was called Infusionsoft. I know the date because I’ve still got the welcome email. Now, back then I owned a different business, actually one I sold in 2016 just before entering the channel, but even back then I knew that finding and committing to good software that sat at the heart of my marketing was critical. At the time, Infusionsoft was the hot property. In fact, I’d say it was instrumental in our success building that business. It allowed me to build up a large audience of prospects. I had 12,000 of them in that last business and using Infusionsoft I could grow a relationship with those prospects using content marketing all sent out in that CRM. And I had a telesales team whose job was to call those prospects and book them in meetings with our salespeople, and that allowed us to convert the relationships from prospects into clients. I look back now at that 2009 to 2016 period and realise that was kind of a golden time for Infusionsoft, because since then it really has gone off the boil. First, there was a focus on not just being a CRM and a marketing platform, but becoming a payment platform as well. And then the original founders left and then the new people that took over, the new management team, they rebranded it as Keap, and they created a second CRM, which seemed to do the same things as the first CRM but in a different way. And then the original founder took control again and then they tried to bring those two products together as one, and I’m not quite sure how successful that was. And then they were trying to turn themselves into an automation business, but there was no clear roadmap of what that meant or how they were going to do it, and they also massively hiked up the prices. Now I’ve been using Infusionsoft (or Keap) in the MSP Marketing Edge since day one, since we opened back in 2017, and I’ve been feeling for a while up t...

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge Welcome to this SPECIAL edition of the show, Episode 300, of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week I’ve got an incredible and motivating story of resilience. 700 nights of “will the business survive?” Featured guest: Colin Knox is a serial entrepreneur and seasoned executive in the MSP and SaaS space. As the CEO & co-founder of Gradient MSP, he leads the charge in transforming how managed service providers operate and grow, with a focus on automation, billing reconciliation, and revenue enablement. With multiple successful exits, over $15 million in capital raised, and a track record of building companies from startup to nine-figure enterprise value, Colin brings deep expertise in scaling businesses, fostering culture, and navigating M&A. When he’s not building businesses, you’ll find him sharing insights on branding, leadership, and the future of the channel on LinkedIn. Hello and welcome to a very special episode of the podcast as we celebrate 300 episodes. Every single Tuesday since November 2019, we have put out a brand new episode of this show, and today I have an astonishing story that you will almost not believe. It’s a feature length interview with a well-known vendor in our space who nearly lost it all a few years ago. Imagine how you’d feel if your business lost all of its available cash in one day, and you had to fire most of your staff, and this situation was so bad that it didn’t resolve itself for two years. Could you keep going? Could you push forward and still try to build something amazing? Well, that’s what my special guest did. His story is so inspiring and I’m delighted to introduce you to him right now. Hi, I’m Colin Knox, CEO and co-founder of Gradient MSP. And it’s great to have you back on the podcast, Colin. I think you were here in 2021. I say I think, that seems like so long ago, the podcast is in its sixth year now, and we’ve decided to go for at least 10 years. We’ll have to book you now to come back in like 2028 or 2029. Sounds good. So thank you for joining us again. You have joined us today to talk about something really important, which kind of affects every MSP at different stages of their business growth, and that is dealing with when things go bad. It’s the issue of resilience and we’re talking more today about mindset and how you get through problems and how you get through stuff that just seems too big to tackle. And you’ve got an amazing story to tell, which happily you are the other side of that story now, which is a great time to tell us. So before we get into that story and we talk about what the problem was and the lessons you’ve learned, just give us a sort of a brief overview of who is Colin Knox? Yeah, Colin Knox. I often refer to myself as the accidental entrepreneur. I worked at an MSP, one or a few for a number of years, and came to a place where I started to get frustrated with things. I never really had thought of or wanted to be a business owner but finally just said, nevermind, I’ll step out and try it for myself. So I stumbled into entrepreneurship worked through all of the lessons learned some of the very hard way, some an easier way of what it takes to build a business, grow a business, exit a business, and maybe sometimes foolishly start a new bu...

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge Welcome to Episode 299 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week… Marketing an MSP is like boiling water: Marketing your MSP is difficult. It requires a long-term strategy, not a series of one-off activities. But it will pay off for you very well with clients that stay with you for years and years. MSPs: Get a better understanding of your prospects’ pain points: You can get a better understanding of your prospects by using the “Five Why’s” framework. It’s a problem solving method developed by the founder of Toyota and I believe that you can use it in your MSP sales. How MSPs build trust, authority and credibility in the AI age: In this new world of AI some marketing tactics don’t work anymore and some are way more important than they’ve ever been. My guests reveal how you can use PR to your advantage in this new landscape. Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Do you struggle with content creation? I have a brainstorm of really great ideas for you to try. Marketing an MSP is like boiling water You must get so frustrated at how long it takes to generate leads and new clients for your MSP. And you’re not on your own there, lots of other MSPs feel the same. But imagine if there was a quick and amazing fix for this frustratingly long drawn out problem. Well, there is, and even better news, while this painful long wait for new clients will be driving your competitors insane, you can train yourself to think differently. I think one of the things that MSPs find the hardest when they really start taking their marketing seriously is just how long it takes to win a new client. Because you read stuff on the internet, don’t you, about people who set up a funnel or they have a special offer or they do this new shiny tactic and there’s always a promise that you launch something at 9 in the morning and you have your first sale by 9:30, but that’s not really how it works for managed services. Managed services are a double-edged sword in that you both benefit from and you are punished by them. Let me explain what I mean by that. On one side of the sword, it takes a very long time to win a new client, but on the other side of the sword, they pay you money every month in monthly recurring revenue and they stay for years and years and years. And it’s that lifetime value, the revenue that the client contributes to your business over the decade they stay with you, that is what you’ve got to stay focused on with your marketing. So if you are measuring your marketing by doing a little piece of activity today, like sending an email or posting a blog post or putting something on LinkedIn and you expect that is going to generate a hot lead who turns into a client tomorrow, it just doesn’t work that way. You haven’t got the right marketing mindset and that’s always going to lead to you being frustrated with your marketing. The right marketing mindset is about having a great strategy and implementing that day to day, but sticking with it until you are sick to death of it. Because at the point that you are sick to death of it, that means it’s actually just starting to cut through to the people you’re talking to. So you keep doing it and keep doing it and keep doing it, and it really does work like that. The strategy that I always recommend to MSPs is super...

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge Welcome to Episode 298 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week… ICP: Jargon or a powerful MSP marketing tool?: Your MSP’s Ideal Customer Profile is a clear picture of the type of business that you want more of. When you’re clear on who you are targeting, everything else becomes easier. MSPs: How to never drop a ball (no matter how busy you are): If you want to run the best MSP you can and find new clients at the same time without the fear of ever dropping the ball, you need to get this system into your life. AI is changing EVERYTHING with your MSP’s website: Websites that were perfectly optimised for Google just a few years back are now not good enough for the age of AI. My guest explains what MSP’s should be considering now and in the future. Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Ever wonder whether you should be sending promotional emails as plain text or HTML? I have a very clear answer to this… ICP: Jargon or a powerful MSP marketing tool? Just like in the tech world, marketing is full of confusing sounding acronyms. There’s your LTV, your CTR and your PPC, but while you can safely ignore those, there’s one that you must not ignore. Perhaps you’ve heard of it already. When you get this acronym right, it influences all of your MSP’s marketing and you get better results. Let’s talk about this acronym that you must be aware of and how implementing it in your MSP will help you win brand new clients. So we’re going to talk about something called an ICP, which stands for Ideal Customer Profile. And don’t worry, this isn’t going to be some kind of big scary marketing concept. It’s actually really simple and it can make a massive difference to how effective your MSP’s marketing is. So what’s an ICP? Think of it like this. If you could clone your best customer – the one who always pays on time, never complains, values what you do, and is a dream to work with – who would that be? That’s what sits at the heart of your ideal customer profile. It’s a clear picture of the type of business that you want more of. And I’m not just talking about the vague stuff like saying small businesses or anybody with computers and a wallet. I mean details like what industry they’re in, how many staff they have, where they’re based, what kind of technology they use, who makes the buying decisions, and even what headaches are they dealing with right now that you can solve? Why do you bother with all of this? Because when you are clear on who you are targeting, everything else becomes easier. Your marketing becomes sharper, your messaging really hits home. You stop wasting your time chasing leads that when never a good fit in the first place because you understand exactly who you want to work with. It’s like fishing with a rod rather than chucking a net into the sea and hoping to get a very specific kind of fish. So how do you build your ICP? Well, I suggest that you start with your current clients. Have a good look at them, analyse them. It could just be while you take the dog for a walk, you don’t need to sit down and stare at a screen for another six hours, but just think it through. Who are your best clients? Who are the ones that you wish you had 10 more of? Write down what it is that makes them great. Look for the patterns. Is it that they’re all in profe...

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge Welcome to Episode 297 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week… Every MSP should listen to this book: If you implement the simple ideas inside this book, it will dramatically improve your marketing – you’ll get more attention and ultimately a lot more business for your MSP. Would your MSP tackle a one off project to unlock MRR?: There is a way to warm up reluctant prospects and build a solid relationship with them, before asking them to sign a monthly recurring revenue contract with your MSP. Here’s how. This MSP looks back on his biggest marketing mistakes: If you could go back to when you started your MSP, what advice would you give yourself to avoid your biggest marketing mistakes? This is the question I asked my guest, see how his answer compares to yours. Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Are Google’s Core Web Vitals still a thing in 2025? Find out how this affects your MSP and what you should be doing about it. Every MSP should listen to this book I know I know, you want to grow your MSP, but actually you barely have enough time to stay on top of the big shows on Netflix, let alone learn how to improve your MSP’s marketing. But could you make the time if all you had to do was read or listen to just one single book? Let’s dig into a new book that if you implement the simple ideas inside, it will dramatically improve your marketing. You’ll get more attention and ultimately a lot more business for your MSP. What was your lockdown experience like? Well, some people had a terrible experience, of course, but others discovered new things about themselves. So for example, I discovered a bit of a renewed love of running which led me to doing a couple of half marathons over the years after. And actually I lost about two stone in weight, which sadly has come back now and doesn’t seem to want to go again. But also back then I fell in love with reading one more time and I got through tons of books that summer. And one book that I read for the first time ever, which I had been meaning to read for years, was a book called They Ask You Answer, written by a guy called Marcus Sheridan. And this was instantly an insane book for me and it resonated with me in every possible way. So I went away and I implemented as much of it as I could in my own business, and I kept telling the MSPs that I was working with that they should do exactly the same. And actually, I decided I had to get Marcus onto my podcast, which finally happened in January 2023. If you want to listen to that episode, Google MSP Marketing Edge and Marcus Sheridan, and you’ll find the podcast episode. It’s episode 164. Marcus was very generous with that interview and it helped to position, They Ask You Answer in ways that made it super relevant to MSPs. I tell you all of this as background as it helps to explain why I got so excited earlier this year when I heard that Marcus was releasing a new book. It’s been billed as They Ask You Answer 3.0. Version two was a bit of a refresher to the original book which came out in about 2019, whereas this new book is more than just an update, this is a reinvention for the modern age. You see, They Ask You Answer first came out in 2016, that was nine years ago, and the world has changed dramatically since then, hasn’t it? No more so than with the AI tools that we have today. And so They Ask You Answer has changed into something...

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge Welcome to Episode 296 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week… These emails help prospects love MSPs: It’s critical to have a series of good emails to send to prospects who are looking at your MSP for the first time. Early engagement is key for email deliverability and not being labelled as unsolicited spam. A simple way to reach senior decision makers on LinkedIn: Here’s a tried and tested LinkedIn hack to connect with the right people on LinkedIn. Remember, both decision makers and influencers are important contacts. Smart ideas to sell more to your MSP’s existing clients: Selling more to existing clients is the big opportunity and my guest tells you how to do it and how it can generate more delicious profit for your MSP. Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Do you upload PDFs to your LinkedIn personal profile? You should, the algorithm loves it. Here’s how… These emails help prospects love MSPs It’s a huge struggle. A lot of MSPs looking to grow, struggle to do effective data capture from their website, and this is an important way to build up your database of prospects. But it’s not just about getting them to fill in the form in the first place, that’s just the start of the process, the real question to ask yourself is: What do I then send them? Let me tell you some of the perfect emails to send to new prospects looking at your MSP for the first time. So tell me, do you have some form of data capture on your website? You really should. The most basic data capture is asking people to sign up for your email newsletter, which actually very few people will. A better form is to offer them something known as a lead magnet, also known as an ethical bribe, which is where you give them something in return for their email address. And this might be a guide, like a cyber security guide. Although the 2025 version of data capture that’s working really well right now is to do an interactive quiz and you allow them to build a scorecard for something. Again, something like their cyber security score would be a great way of doing that. But the data capture itself is only the start of the process. What’s critical is to have a series of good emails to send new prospects, because you can make an assumption that they may be looking for a new MSP in the future. And you need to send them content that’s going to influence them to pick you and not another MSP. So let me give you some examples, starting with the very first email you send to them. And the goal with this first email is to get them engaged with your content and either get them to click something on the email or hit reply. Why? For email deliverability. Because that sends a very clear message to their email agent that they are interested in your content and they don’t just see you as unsolicited spam. I do this with the first email in my sequence. I introduced myself and then I ask the MSP who’s reading that email to hit reply and tell me which marketing problem they’re suffering with right now. And we do get a pretty good reply rate to that. Of course, I make sure I answer every single person who replies. I do that personally, which in itself is good for engagement. It’s good for showing there’s a real human at the other end who’s listening. And of cour...

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge Welcome to Episode 295 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week… Ghosted? Send your MSP’s proposals in 3 ways: There are a number of things we can do to minimise proposal ghosting with prospects. Only sending it digitally risks your proposal being lost in digital noise. A free cyber security webinar outline any MSP can use: Webinars are a great way to enhance your reputation and your perceived authority as the local tech expert. Let me give you a free cyber security webinar outline that any MSP can use. Why every MSP must niche in some way: My guest and I to talk about niching and about the power of super laser focus on a very specific set of people. Find out exactly what to do and how it works. Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Confused about which social media platforms to use to market your MSP? Let me tell you my top 5 in priority order. Ghosted? Send your MSP’s proposals in 3 ways This must have happened to your MSP… proposal ghosting. You send a proposal to a hot prospect and crickets. All the conversations, all of the relationship building that you did leading up to this proposal seem to have counted for nothing. So how do we fix this? Why don’t they reply? Why can’t you get hold of them? Are there three simple things that you can do that will improve your hit rate? Absolutely, there are, and let’s get into them right now. A few years back when I was single, dark days, I was being ghosted all the time. OK, that was on Tinder and Hinge and Bumble and other platforms, but I know that you get ghosted by your prospects now they seem so hot, so ready to join you, and then you send the proposal through and they never get back to you. So you never quite understand what’s happened. Is the problem that the price isn’t right, that you didn’t display an understanding of their business? Have they changed their mind? Have they gone off to another MSP? Have they signed another contract with their incumbent MSP? Are they actually dead? I mean actually really, are they dead? And you can phone them as much as you want, but there’s no one there to answer the phone. We all have these exact thoughts when we get ghosted by prospects. The problem is not your prospects… the problem is actually you. You’ve allowed them to take some level of control of the sales process. You’ve allowed them to ghost you. I believe there’s a number of things that we can do to minimise ghosting, not in dating, but certainly with prospects. Now, let me tell you about two of those things. The first is that I think you should send all of your proposals out in three separate ways, and then the second thing I’m going to tell you about is that you should always have the next appointment in your calendar. That’s coming up in a second. Let’s first of all go into some of the details. So, how do you send your proposals now? If you’re like most MSPs, you probably just do it digitally. Maybe you use a specific piece of software or you have a proposal tool built into one of the platforms that you’re using and these kind of tools they are cool, especially as they can track who’s opening your proposals, how many times they view it, all of that kind of stuff. Or maybe you just pull a PDF together or even just an email and you just send it off to them by email. Most MSPs...

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge Welcome to this SPECIAL edition of the show, Episode 294, of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. I’m interviewing an ordinary business owner and he’s going to talk about why he’s unhappy with his current MSP and is thinking of switching. SPECIAL: Why this business owner will switch MSPs For MSPs looking to find new clients, this is the holy grail. It’s taken nearly 18 months to arrange this, but boy is it going to be worth it. It’s a conversation with an ordinary business owner, the type of person who might be your dream client. It’s the number one wish I hear – I’m the owner of an awesome MSP, but it’s so hard to get new clients if only I could get in their head to find out what I could do to attract them, especially if they’re currently with another MSP who they’re thinking of leaving. Well, here we go. Now I’ve agreed to keep his identity anonymous so he can be extremely open with answers to questions like, why he’s unhappy with his current MSP, what’s changed in the last few years, what he likes and dislikes about them, and why he’s thinking of switching. Oh, and most importantly, what could you offer him that would win him and keep him in your business? Welcome to this very special episode of the podcast, and I have a treat for you today. This is an idea I’ve been trying to implement for years and years because I think it’s really going to help you get an insight into what happens in the head and the heart of an ordinary business owner when they may be thinking of switching MSPs. We’re going to interview today someone who’s been a friend of mine for over 25 years, but his identity is going to be kept a complete secret. In fact, I’ve given him a false name. I’ll introduce you to him in a second. He’s with an MSP right now that was acquired sometime in the past, and as I’ve been talking to him over the last few months, I’ve realised his satisfaction levels with his incumbent MSP have been going down and down and down. They’ve done nothing wrong, it’s all just tiny little things that have chipped away and he’s now getting to that point where he might be ready to switch MSPs. Let’s see if today we can figure out how he thinks, how he feels about his MSP and what are the things that he would go looking for from another MSP. If you can understand how ordinary people think and act, the chances of you getting them to come to your MSP goes up dramatically. So let me introduce you to my friend, we’re going to call him Jason. His real name is Sean, but we’re not going to use that, we’re going to call him Jason. That’s not his real name that was just a joke. Jason, thank you so much for jumping onto the call. Obviously we don’t want to identify you because we don’t want any awkward conversations between you and your incumbent MSP. So without revealing what you do as a business or where you’re based, just give us an idea of your company. So how many staff have you got? Are you like a professional services company or a consumer driven company? Give us a bit of an overview. We are I guess a professional services company. We’re a marketing business at heart, obviously based here in the UK, and we have got staff who are employed in the UK and in the Philippines. We’ve also got contractors in the UK and the Philippines as well. Okay, so you’re spread around the globe, even if that’s just two locations, which is a pretty common setup these days I think for many businesses. Obviously this is your business, you started this, you’ve grown this over a number o...

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge Welcome to Episode 293 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week… What if you only had 90 days to win new clients?: Imagine you absolutely had to generate new business, FAST. Let’s explore where you should focus your time, effort and resources. 3 HUGE questions to ask about your MSP’s clients: It’s very common to hope that the awesome retention of your key clients just continues, but unless you really give them what they need and want you run the risk of losing them. This MSP’s best ideas from his 8 year podcast: My guest is a long-standing MSP owner and eight year podcaster. He’s here to share the very best things he’s learned during that time. Paul’s Personal Peer Group: You still hand out business cards, right? You definitely should, and here’s my recommendation of what should be on them. What if you only had 90 days to win new clients? Are you ready to take the MSP experiment? How would you do if you had to win a load of new clients within the next 90 days? Yes, just 90 days to find and sign up new managed service clients. The reason isn’t important, it’s a thought experiment, but does the sound of having to do that make your blood run cold? If so, let’s dig into why it’s such an important test and the real world benefits to your MSP. This is kind of based on a question I was asked on a podcast I appeared on a few months back. I can’t quite remember which one it was right now, but the host asked me if I had to start an MSP from scratch, what would I do? And I think he was waiting for me to suggest which RMM I would use and which PSA and what my tech stack would look like. But the answer I actually gave was that I would figure out all of that stuff only after I’d won some clients. I’d focus all of my time, effort and energy into creating a pipeline and then shaking that tree until some new business fell out of it. Yeah, I know I’ve mixed up my analogies there, but you see the point I’m making, right? I’ve never actually owned or run an MSP, but I’ve been a business owner for 20 years and there’s no point getting your operations ready and perfect if there are no clients to put through those operations. So let’s make that a real life question for you. Not what would you do if you started again with your MSP, but if you absolutely had to generate new business in the next 90 days, what would you do? Don’t get too hung up on the why’s about this. Just imagine you’ve lost a big client or your personal circumstances dictate that you just need more cash. The reason is not relevant. What’s more important is to talk about what you would actually do. A quick aside, if that was a real situation for you and you desperately needed more cash in the next month or so, that cash is going to come from your existing clients. There’s always more revenue and certainly high levels of profit to be made selling something to your existing clients than winning new clients. But for the purpose of this piece here, what would you do to win new clients in just 90 days? Well, let me break this down into a series of suggestions. The first of those would be actually the way that you think and the way that you act. One of the reasons that many MSPs really struggle with marketing and winning new clients is because they simply don’t...

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge Welcome to Episode 292 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week… Does your service desk manager really need to be a tech?: A service desk manager’s job is to make sure your MSP’s clients are delighted while freeing you up to grow the business. It’s possible that the best person for this job isn’t a technician. How your MSP can break into a new vertical: It’s easier to do marketing, find new clients, and make more money for your MSP, if you choose a vertical. Here’s how to get started. The framework MSPs can use to be more efficient: Visionary leaders are notorious for moving at such speed that they leave a trail of chaos behind them. My guest helps such visionaries put an end to operational chaos and create operational excellence in their business. Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Have you considered how your MSP would respond to a supply chain attack and what marketing actions you would take? If not, it would be a very wise idea. Does your service desk manager really need to be a tech? You may just have to tear up that job ad, and let me tell you why. We all know a service desk manager is a critical role. It’s their job to make sure the clients are delighted while freeing you up to grow the business. But whoever said that a service desk manager has to be a tech. What if there’s a different kind of person who’s much more suited to this kind of role? I really do talk to a lot of MSPs. In fact, it’s one of the most wonderful things about the work I do. I get to talk to lots of different people about lots of different things. And because of my work in my MSP Marketing Edge where we are working with 700 MSPs, I talk to people in all sorts of different circumstances. So we have startups, two businesses that have been going for 30 years. We’ve got one person bands, two businesses with 200 employees. We’ve got all of these and everything in between. But there’s one thing that I notice again and again and again, and that’s that the most successful MSPs, and let’s define successful as, the owner can do what they want to do with their life. They’ve got enough cash and they’ve got enough time, that’s success is to have that. The MSPs who are most successful are those where the owner is surrounded by a very good team who take on the burden of the work for them. Because it’s just too difficult to do everything yourself for more than a couple of years. What’s acceptable for our first few years in business gets tiring and boring as time goes on. And I’m sorry if that’s disappointing news for you because you never wanted to have staff, but it is the difference between just working for yourself and having a business that can survive and thrive without you. And of course, one of the most key hires in there is a service desk manager or change that job title to whatever is appropriate for you. But basically someone whose entire role is to keep the clients happy and make sure that the work happens as it’s supposed to. Now, different MSPs have different ways of doing this, but they all come down to the same things. You’ve got some technical resource and you’ve got customers who want things to be done, and the service desk manager sits in the middle of that making the magic happen. If you own the business and you are currently doing that as well as t...

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 s...

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. Build a personal brand to build your MSP: 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 f...

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 la...

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge Welcome to Episode 288 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week… 3 wins for MSPs on LinkedIn right now: LinkedIn is the hottest place for MSPs to go prospecting, the only snag is the algorithm changes. Here are three algorithmic wins for MSPs on LinkedIn right now. Does your MSP’s marketing have personality?: It’s hard to differentiate your MSP from your competitors, but one of the ways that you can do this is by making sure there’s real personality in all of your marketing. MSPs: How to sell unwanted client contracts: Could the process of finding new clients or getting rid of unwanted ones be as simple as ordering on Amazon or selling old clothes on Vinted? My guest has developed a hassle-free way to buy and sell managed service contracts. Paul’s Personal Peer Group: A common question I get asked is how often should we post on LinkedIn. The answer may surprise you… 3 wins for MSPs on LinkedIn right now Have no doubt, LinkedIn is the hottest place for MSPs to go prospecting right now. It’s been that way for a few years and I can’t see that changing. Why? Because every possible prospect you could ever do business with is already there on LinkedIn. And you have access to the tools to connect with them, get your content in front of them, and ultimately build a relationship before they’re ready to switch MSPs. The only snag with LinkedIn is that the algorithm changes and what worked a few years ago isn’t quite as powerful today. Let me tell you three wins for MSPs on LinkedIn right now. My team and I produce a lot of content intended for use on LinkedIn, and that’s for our MSP Marketing Edge members. Now of course, it can be used across lots of different social networks, but as I just said, LinkedIn is it. It’s the easiest and most accessible platform to access decision makers, the ordinary business owners and managers that you want to reach. And a couple of times a year, we do a bit of a deep dive on what’s going on in the algorithm at the moment. Because as you know on LinkedIn, the performance of your content is very much dependent on what the algorithm is trying to reward at that time. And you can see this change over the years if you use the platform regularly, In fact, any platform. I’ve noticed in the last few months that engagement in my Facebook groups has completely fallen off a cliff. And that’s nothing I’ve done and it’s nothing to do with the members of those groups, it’s just something that someone, somewhere, some vice president at Facebook has tweaked the algorithm and if I wait a few weeks, that engagement will come back. This has happened five or six times over the last 10 years or so. But anyway, back to LinkedIn and these are some of the wins that we’ve noticed from our research which are making a difference right now. I’ve got three of them for you. Win number one is to upload a PDF carousel. PDFs are performing very well on LinkedIn. They actually look beautiful when you see them in your feed on LinkedIn and they’re kind of easy to use as well, you just upload a document. The trick is to have carousels with many pages, aim for around about 12 pages, but each page only has a tiny amount of information on it. I mean, I’m talking literally like one sentence, half a sentence on each page. The idea is that peop...

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge Welcome to Episode 287 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week… Great marketing for Windows 10 end of life: There’s a hot new opportunity – Windows 10. This soon to be obsolete operating system is good for your MSP with this end of life marketing opportunity. Ask this cybersecurity question to speed past phone gatekeepers: Most MSPs really struggle to reach the person they want to speak to. This trick will help you get past the gatekeeper and start a much more productive conversation. Can you drive new revenue with DMARC?: DMARC isn’t just critical for ensuring messages reach people’s inboxes, my guest believes that DMARC can actually generate new leads and new revenue for your MSP. Paul’s Personal Peer Group: This week’s question is about getting more attention and engagement by adding personalised videos to emails. Find out which software options are available for this. Great marketing for Windows 10 end of life So you’re an MSP trying to find new clients and also increase revenue from your existing clients. Well tell me, have you heard about the hot new opportunity – Windows 10? Yeah, you heard that, right? But how could talking about an old, soon to be obsolete operating system be good for your MSP? Is this a credible way to win new clients or upsell your existing clients? Let’s find out about the Windows 10 end of life marketing opportunity. Five months. That’s what we’ve got until Windows 10 reaches its end of life and it’s been with us a decade you know, it first launched in 2015. Will you be sad to see it go or are you already a big fan of Windows 11? Anyway, that’s kind of irrelevant to this conversation, and I know that loads of MSPs still miss XP. I’m kind of joking there, although do you? But what we’re talking about here is using Windows 10 as a marketing opportunity, not only to win new clients but also to upsell your existing clients. You see anytime there’s a big enforced change in the marketplace, like a major operating system reaching its end of life, that creates an opportunity for you. And one of the key things in marketing is always putting yourself in the shoes of the person that you are trying to reach and influence. For an ordinary business owner or manager, Windows 10 reaching its end of life is going to be a bit of a shock to them in October. Not for you and me, they announced the 2025 end of life date four years ago can you believe. But what’s big in our world and surrounds us every day does not surround ordinary business owners and managers. And you and I both know that there will be many, many people running their businesses on Windows 10 with no idea that this is coming. And maybe their MSP or their break/fix outfit has told them, but they weren’t listening or they’ve ignored it and ignored it and ignored it, and then suddenly it’s October 2025 and it’s crept up on them. So what’s the best way to tackle this for prospects and for existing clients? Well, let’s look at those separately. And the easiest way to start is with the prospects. Now, I’m guessing you as an MSP have a preferred route forward at this point, in terms of what to do after Windows 10. So many MSPs will want their clients to upgrade to Windows 11. I do know a few MSPs that are still trying to hang on to Windows 10, and let’s...

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge Welcome to Episode 286 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week… How to get your MSP recommended by ChatGPT: Ordinary people don’t just use Google for search anymore, many searches are being done using generative AI platforms. Are you ready to find out about GEO and how to leverage it for your MSP? 3 marketing priorities for your MSP in May: Want to do something to speed up your MSP’s growth as we near the middle of the year? Here’s some marketing ideas for May. 99% of MSPs do no proactive client retention: MSPs generally hold on to clients long-term, but not necessarily by design. My guest tells us why we should build an “intentional” retention programme to help improve customer experience and drive growth. Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Would your MSP survive without you for 3 months? Find out how you can prepare your business in the event of your absence. How to get your MSP recommended by ChatGPT I’ll admit this could be a contradiction. You need to market your MSP so you can find new clients, and no doubt you want to hear about specific tactics that are going to work for you. Now, normally my advice is to ignore shiny new things because most of the time they’re just unproven ideas and a complete waste of time. But this really is different. Have you heard about the tactic that could be huge for early adopters? Are you ready to find out about GEO, the evolution of SEO? Find out about the huge potential for MSPs, what the main advantage is and why you can’t afford to ignore this day one alert. More and more MSPs are starting to wake up to the fact that ordinary people don’t just use Google for search anymore. There are no hard stats about how many searches are being done using ChatGPT and other generative AI platforms. There are certainly lots of predictions that traditional search traffic will be down by 25% by the end of next year, but even without hard figures, there are times where a generative AI search does produce more useful results than a traditional Google search. Google is still great for looking up something quick, but generative AI is great for doing research into something complicated that you don’t really understand. And if we look at managed services from the point of view of ordinary decision makers, well that’s something complicated that they don’t really understand. Do we think it’s possible that business owners and managers are already using generative AI to research which MSPs they should switch to in their marketplace? If they’re not doing that already, then they’re certainly going to do it in the very near future. And this is where you have an opportunity to get into something right at the beginning. You see, just as the rise of search engines saw the birth of SEO, search engine optimisation, so the rise of generative AI has seen the birth of GEO, generative engine optimisation. It’s designed to help your website appear in the research results output by generative AI. Now, I’ve been reading a ton about this in the last few weeks, and there are three simple things that you can do to your website today, which will help...

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge Welcome to Episode 285 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week… To grow your MSP, scrap these pointless tasks: One of the curses of the MSP owner is the never-ending list of things that you need to do. Use the 80/20 rule to identify the things that make the biggest difference to the growth of your business. Don’t be scared to present that cyber security webinar: Speaking at a seminar or a webinar can be an incredibly powerful way to attract prospects, warm them up and persuade them that your business is the one they can trust. Why so many MSPs fail at LinkedIn ads: LinkedIn is an insane lead generation and prospecting tool for MSPs, but which things should you do? I’ve hunted down one of only 90 certified LinkedIn experts in the world to find out. Paul’s Personal Peer Group: There is a word that you must never, ever use when you’re talking to prospects or clients. It’s a word that must be banished because using it can damage your chances of a sale or your retention. Can you guess what it is? To grow your MSP, scrap these pointless tasks Growing an MSP can sometimes feel like a game of poker, can’t it? If each and everything you could do to grow your business was a different card in your pack, choosing which cards to play can be overwhelming. And doesn’t it seem like the hand you’re dealt, everything that’s on your to-do list, just keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger. So how do you decide which cards to play with and which to leave? How do you make sure you can quickly identify the things your MSP can do to become a real winner? The biggest problem with being an MSP is having a massive to-do list. Just shout back to me now as you are listening to this or watching it on YouTube. How many things do you have to do today or tomorrow? I’m guessing it’s like 20, 30, 40 things. Because that’s one of the curses of the MSP owner is there is a never ending list of things that you need to do just to look after your clients, never mind actually growing your business. And the net effect of that is that you can get to the end of another day and another, and another and another, and you’ve done the work that your business needs to do, but you haven’t grown the business at all. This is a common problem for MSPs and frankly, it’s a massive problem. The goal is to make a little progress every single day, and it feels frustrating when you don’t, doesn’t it? This is why I think sometimes you need to take an 80/20 approach to your list of things that you could do, and I’m sure you’ve heard of 80/20 before. It’s also known as the Pareto principle named after Vilfredo Pareto. He was an Italian economist in the 19th century, and he was busy harvesting peas in his garden when he made an interesting observation. He noticed that some pea pods had a lot more peas in them than others did. So he counted the number of peas in each pea pod. He clearly didn’t have a lot to do that day, but he found that 80% of the peas came from only 20% of the pea pods. And what was really interesting was he then later noticed the same pattern in how wealth was distributed in Italy in his home country. He found that 20% of the people in Italy owned 80% of the land, and these 20% were very wealthy. The remaining 80% of the population owned only 20% of the land. Now, don’t...

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge Welcome to this EASTER SPECIAL – Episode 284 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. How one big decision changed this MSP owner’s life Featured guest: Steve Dempsey has been a Managed IT Services owner for over 25 years and only serves small businesses in several different markets in the UJS. In addition he owns a small SEO agency for MSP’s only to help them generate local organic leads for their business. Hello and welcome to this special for Easter. I’m joined today by MSP owner Steve Dempsey, who’s going to tell us his business owning journey. And trust me, you have never heard a story like this before. There are many highlights, one of the best being how he went from losing thousands in his business every month to making thousands, with one key decision. Steve is a unique and generous character, and you are going to love everything he has to talk about. Hey there, I’m Steve Dempsey. I’ve been in the IT business for 25 years and my main IT company is NeoTech Networks. And it’s so cool to finally get you here onto the podcast, Steve. We’ve got our special episode for Easter 2025, and I feel like you and I have both been in lots of the same places at the same time, but we’ve never had a quality conversation. You’re obviously highly active in The Tech Tribe, as am I. We nearly met at Scale Con, which was the big marketing conference in Vegas in October last year. I actually talked to you from the stage and we did some cool stuff where you were in the audience and I was on the stage, but we never found each other afterwards, so it’s absolutely crazy. But I’m delighted to have you here on the show. And the reason I want to have you here, well there’s two things that I want to talk about. The first of them is you are one of the most unique MSPs that I have ever come across and you have a very unique lifestyle and I want to explore today what your life is like and what you’ve had to go through to get to that life. And just as a bit of a tease for the many MSPs that will be listening to this on the podcast or indeed watching this on YouTube, Steve has an enviable lifestyle and it’s nothing to do with having lots of houses, a yacht, cars, anything like that. But Steve is living his best life and also has a great business. So that’s what we’re going to explore first of all. And then secondly, you have one of the most unique approaches to SEO, search engine optimisation, that I’ve ever come across. So I want to explore that because I know you had a huge amount of success for it, and indeed you are helping a small number of other MSPs to implement that in their business. But let’s start with the lifestyle stuff. So first of all, Steve, let’s hear your story. So you said in your intro you’ve been in the tech world for 25 years, which sounds like such a long time, doesn’t it? I’m 50. How old are you right now? I’ll be almost 52. Okay, so we’re more or less the same age then. Talking about 25 years, it sounds a lot and when you realise, hmm, that’s half of my life actually, that’s quite sobering in some respects. Tell us about your tech career then. So how did you get into tech in the first place? How did you start your first business? What’s your journey into this MSP space? To sum it up quickly, full disclosure, I actually never went to coll...

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge Welcome to Episode 283 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week… Can MSPs grow the business… by being idle?: Sometimes the fastest way to grow your MSP is to do less work, because it’s very difficult to do when your mind is constantly moving from task to task to task. That’s why you need to be idle. When did you last Google your MSP?: Do you know everything that’s being said about your MSP online? It’s time to discover your digital footprint. How to survive 30 years owning an MSP without a breakdown: My special guest has a unique insight into how MSP owners set themselves up to not just survive, but thrive over three decades of business ownership. Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Have you considered selling your MSP at some point in the future but don’t know where to start? I have some great book recommendations to help. Can MSPs grow the business… by being idle? Just a warning, this is not the MSP growth advice you were expecting. As a busy MSP it’s all about getting things done and maximising your time, right? Well, sometimes yes, but are you ready to hear about a shocking way to grow that is the exact opposite. Because sometimes the fastest way to grow your MSP is to do as little work as possible. I’ll be honest with you, I’m a bit of a productivity junkie. Since way before I started my first business 20 years ago I’ve been reading books and listening to advice about how to get things done and constantly tweaking my productivity stack, if you’d like to call it that. I mean, the software that I use, of course. And you go back to the turn of the century when I was, obviously I’m very old now, but I was running a radio station back then and I was completely trapped in having too much work to do without enough time to do it. And that was actually what drove me to look at what are other people doing and how do they manage their time better. What used to be called time management back then, we now call it productivity, but it’s all the same thing really. We all have exactly at the same 24 hours in every day, and yet many people get a lot more done in their 24 hours than you and I might in ours. Why is that? Why does the work week pass so quickly week after week after week? The people who get the most things done are actually doing the smallest number of tasks, but they work on the tasks that make the biggest difference. Makes sense, doesn’t it? And the reason they know which tasks to work on is because they make sure they spend plenty of time being idle. You see, I said this was growth advice that you weren’t expecting… to get more done, you should do less? That doesn’t make sense, except it does. The core problem with tackling productivity with a view of I must get lots more done, is that you get trapped in being busy. And this is especially risky for an MSP because the very nature of your work is to be reactive and to be caught up with lots of details. And yes, I know they really do matter, and because of that you can easily fill your day with getting hundreds of small things done. But are they the things that move the needle? Are they the things that help you win more new clients, get those clients to buy from you more often, and get those clients to spend more every single time they buy? The chances are that they’re not. All o...

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge Welcome to Episode 282 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week… Being a better technician doesn’t grow the business: Being successful has less to do with being skilled and more to do with the way you think. You personally don’t need all the technical skills in order to grow a fantastic MSP, you hire people who can do those things for you. Should MSPs use AI robodiallers to make prospecting calls?: Is this a valid, smart marketing tactic or could it do harm to your MSP? The results I’ve experienced and the potential opportunities out there for your MSP may just surprise you. How to escape the chaos of being an MSP owner: My guest is an expert at saving business owners from the chaos of their business by adopting the right relationship with time. Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Do you ever get stuck on what to write in your LinkedIn connection requests? I’ve got three examples for you to swipe and try. Being a better technician doesn’t grow the business If growing your MSP was like flying a plane, would you focus on building the biggest engine or just learning how to fly higher? Most MSPs assume the answer is raw power, more technical skills, better tools, deeper expertise. But strangely, some of the most profitable MSPs aren’t even run by technicians. So what’s really keeping some MSPs grounded while others climb higher and higher? If it’s not just technical know-how, then what is it? Stick around because once you see this, you’ll never look at your business the same way again. I’ve made it a deep habit to follow, read, listen, and learn from as many people as I can across my business career. In fact, I kind of wish this was a habit that I had as a teenager or in my early twenties, but there we go. And it does mean that over the last 25 years or so, I have read an insane amount of business and marketing books and blogs and courses, all sorts of other stuff. I’ve just been absorbing knowledge like a sponge. And of course, a huge amount of that knowledge has come into my head and left my head. Although I guess all the good ideas that you have, they get mashed together and they influence the way that you think and therefore the way that you act. Anyway, there was a specific phrase that I heard, and it was quite at the beginning of my learning career about 25 years ago, but it stuck with me, and it’s been very present in my mind for a very long time. If you are under the age of 30, please don’t laugh at me. As I tell you the delivery method on which I heard this piece of advice, it was actually on a cassette tape. I used to get a cassette sent to me, I think it was every week or every two weeks, by a guy called Peter Thompson, and he was huge in the field of personal development here in the UK, sort of back at the turn of the century. He’s actually still around today, I’m guessing he must be in his eighties, something like that, late seventies, early eighties. But back then I absorbed and loved every single thing that he put out. One day listening to one of his cassette tapes in the car, he said this sentence, and this is the thing that stayed with me all these years, this is what Peter Thompson said. He said, it’s your attitude and not your aptitude that determines your altitude. Is that insane or what? Because t...

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge Welcome to Episode 281 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week… MSPs: Why April Fool is NOT a marketing opportunity: MSPs should avoid April Fools’ Day like the plague. Same with Thanksgiving, Christmas, and any big national or international event. Marketing on these days is just adding to the noise. Why would a business pick YOUR MSP, rather than a competitor?: Ordinary decision makers pick an MSP based on how they feel about them. Make their life easy by giving them a clear, emotional reason why they should pick you. MSPs: How to uncover opportunities you didn’t know existed: My special guest has a unique way of looking at marketing and how you can use human relationships as a powerful marketing weapon. Paul’s Personal Peer Group: This week’s question is about website traffic and how to track where it’s coming from – does your MSP do this? Find out my 3 easy implementation ideas. MSPs: Why April Fool is NOT a marketing opportunity Happy April Fools’ Day. Have you ever wondered if you’re missing out by not doing marketing for your MSP themed around today? I mean, loads of big companies do April Fools’ jokes, that makes it an opportunity right? In my opinion, no. I believe your MSP should avoid April Fools’ Day like the plague, the same with Thanksgiving, Christmas, and any big national or international event. And let me tell you why. This podcast episode and YouTube video has been released on the 1st of April, 2025, and when I was younger, I always used to really look forward to April Fools’ Day. As a child, it was to play jokes on my family who never found the jokes funny, but then as a young adult, I really used to enjoy the big April Fools’ jokes that companies would try and pull and they would do full page adverts in newspapers. If you were around in the nineties and naughties, you might remember this.Things like Taco Bell in the US, they announced that they bought the Liberty Bell and they were renaming it, the Taco Liberty Bell, it’s Genius. Or Burger King, they actually launched a left handed burger, so clever. The big tech companies have done this very well in recent years. Samsung said it was going to launch the Galaxy Blade Edge, a phone that’s so thin and sharp that you can also use it as a kitchen knife. And then Tinder, the dating app, they launched a fake height verification tool on April Fools’ Day, although as a former Tinder user, a nutter spotting tool would actually be much more useful. You might look at all of these gags put together by marketing departments of these big companies and ask yourself, I wonder what we should do to promote our MSP on April Fools’ Day? And there is an easy answer to this. Nothing. And it’s the same answer I would give you if you asked Paul, what should I do to promote my MSP around Thanksgiving… Valentine’s Day… Christmas… the Super Bowl? In fact, any big event that millions of people celebrate at the same time. The reality is when you do something at the same time that everyone else is doing that thing, then you’re just adding to the noise. It’s very hard to cut through when everyone is doing the same thing at the same time. And that’s why I never recommend that MSPs jump onto awareness weeks around cyber security, stuff like that, because you have exac...

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge Welcome to Episode 280 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week… MSPs: You can (almost) never post too much content: Let’s dig into the suggested rules about the frequency of posting content for MSPs and how to do it in a way that you feel comfortable with. The best MSP marketing tactic I learned at an event: It was listening to talks from two marketing legends that inspired this new MSP marketing tactic, and I believe it’s one that you should start using. Why your MSP must be all over your Google Business Profile: You want more traffic to your MSP’s website and you’ve maybe even looked at how to improve your SEO, but did you know there’s a solid basic that you must get right first? Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Have you ever wondered what is being written about your business online? Find out how you can track this in one simple, free step. MSPs: You can (almost) never post too much content If LinkedIn is like an MSP goldmine, is there a risk you could over mine it? It’s a valid concern. So many MSPs are worried about this. When you’re looking for new clients and you know that you’ve got access to a gleaming rich source of them, whether that’s on LinkedIn or even in your email list, is there a risk you could annoy them by trying to mine them too often, by flooding them with content and messages? Let’s dig into the suggested rules about the frequency of posting content, how to do it in a way that you feel comfortable with, and the big opportunity for MSPs that are mining for new clients in 2025. I’m sure that as a technology expert, you hear the same questions all the time from your clients. In fact, could you list the top three things that people are most likely to ask you? Well, this is my experience as well, and almost every single day of the week I’m talking to a new MSP from somewhere. It could just be a chat on LinkedIn or maybe I’m doing a webinar and answering a question or whatever. And over the years, I’ve noticed that the questions I get asked are often very similar. People ask like, is LinkedIn still valid? They ask about their websites. They ask about whether or not they should be hiring marketing agencies and salespeople. One of the most common questions that I get is about content. How should content be posted and at what point does your content become overwhelming? Actually, the way that question is normally asked to me is by someone saying that they don’t want to send out more than one email a month or post no more than once a week on LinkedIn, because they’re scared that people will get sick of their content and sick of seeing stuff from them. Well, let me tell you the answer that I always give them. I believe as an MSP, you can almost never post too much content. It just couldn’t happen. Because marketing is not your superpower and to a certain extent it’s a bit of a distress activity for you, right? So you’re never going to do as much marketing as, for example, I might do. You’re simply not going to tackle it with the level of aggression that’s ultimately going to frustrate the people that that content is aimed at.

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.

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 shi...

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

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge Welcome to Episode 276 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week… Happy client? Ask for a testimonial NOW: There is a perfect moment to ask your clients for a testimonial or review. This social proof is really important, and when you systemise collecting it, it’s going to make your life so much easier. Why MSPs should add new LinkedIn connections every day: LinkedIn is the single most important place for MSPs to go marketing right now and I’m going to tell you the best way to leverage it. How this MSP marketer grew the business: There’s no better way for you to find the right ideas to market your business than listening to other people who are doing it right now. My guest talks us through what he’s done and what you can take away and implement quickly. Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Do you know what a vanity URL is and have you ever wondered if you need one? An MSP has asked the question which I answer in this episode. Happy client? Ask for a testimonial NOW What if I told you there was a perfect moment to ask your MSP’s clients for a testimonial or review. But you must act on it super quickly, as that moment will very fast vanish. If you struggle to collect social proof from your clients, this is going to make your life so much easier and even allow you to systemise getting testimonials and reviews from your happiest clients. So we all know that social proof is really, really important. Social proof is when people see other people like them acting in a certain way, and it gives them kind of a feeling of safety to know that other people have already tread the path that they are thinking of treading. And what I mean by that is collecting testimonials, reviews, and case studies from your existing clients, and then using that “social proof”, as it’s called, to persuade other people to pick your MSP. You’ll be perceived as a safer choice by business owners and managers if they see that other business owners and managers have already picked you and are happy to endorse you. Now, you’ve probably heard this before, but maybe there’s been something that’s been holding you back from collecting lots of social proof. Maybe it’s just been you simply haven’t had enough time, too many things to do, right? Or maybe you felt a little awkward asking your clients to give you a review or a testimonial. I mean, they’re already paying you money every month, surely you can’t ask them for something else, can you? Well, as a side note, yes you can. In fact, your best clients are often the most delighted to give you a testimonial or review because they want to see you succeed so that they can continue to enjoy your service. Whatever the reason you don’t have enough social proof yet, let me tell you the perfect moment to go asking for it. You’re looking for the point at which your client is at their happiest, and we can actually predict when this will be. There are two, maybe three times that they’re most likely to be at their happiest, and the first will be about 90 days after they very first joined you. So that first month is always a little bit manic, isn’t it? As you are onboarding them and you are migrating any services away from their previous MSP. And then the second and third months are where you work your magic and where the really good stuff happens. So they see lit...

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge Welcome to Episode 275 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week… Why the tough life of an MSP owner is worth it: Running a business can feel like it’s sucking all your time and energy, but the big picture is that you can work towards the lifestyle you most want to live. How a messy office damages your MSP’s sales: Is your office a pristine, tidy space with zero mess or an untidy space packed with clutter? Find out why your environment impacts your effectiveness. EXCLUSIVE: How to reduce tickets while delighting clients: My guest explains why digital organisation is vital for business health and how you can help clients consolidate, archive and purge their data for a more effecient work flow. Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Do you ever wonder how happy your staff are? I have the questions to help you find out the answer. Why the tough life of an MSP owner is worth it What is it with people like you and me running on fumes? If you’re running an MSP, I know what it’s like right now. That boost you had from time off over Christmas, all that recharging festive fuel, that was months ago. It’s all long gone. And yet we keep pushing, don’t we mile after mile after mile, hoping we can keep the business going, hoping we can keep it growing. But is this actually the best way to run an MSP? Stick around to be reminded why we do this, how to keep your energy levels up and the unexpected benefit to your life and lifestyle in the long-term. So this is my 20th year as a business owner and my goodness that has gone so quickly. I kid you not, I was 30 when I started my first business and I was young and cool and now I’m this old man, I’m age 50, I’ve got the creaky back, I’ve got a dodgy knee. And if you’re in your twenties or thirties right now, do not get cocky kid. This is going to happen to you as well. Although by the time that you reach the age the I am now, I’ll be in a nursing home, anyway. One of the constants of being a business owner is that it is hard work. I have a great business now with a great team at the MSP Marketing Edge and we do great work for MSPs all over the world with our service. But I still have weeks where I’m working more hours than someone with a job would. If I worked for someone else in a job, I would never do those 50, 60 week hours, rarely anyway. And if I look back over the last 20 years, there have been many of those periods of time where you throw yourself into projects or problems or whatever it is. I’m sure you do exactly the same. The truth is only business owners can understand this… Running a business that you own is more than just something you do. It’s more than just a job. It’s very much a way of life. It has a unique way of sucking every single last ounce of energy and every last second of time out of you. And do you know, as I hear myself saying that, I realise that I’m not really painting it in a very good light for someone who’s actually thinking of starting their own MSP. So sorry if that’s you. But I think actually before anyone starts their own business, really they need to understand the downsides as well as the upsides. It is an all consuming thing and especially so with an MSP because running an MSP is surely running one of the most difficult kinds of businesses in the world. There are so many details you need to be across,...

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge Welcome to Episode 274 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week… Are audits still a good sales tool for MSPs?: Sell something small to start building a relationship before selling the thing you really want, which is of course, a managed services contract. Every MSP needs this strategic referral deal: There could be an opportunity for you to set up a win-win relationship with a local web agency near you, and it could get you more clients. Why your marketing must be about the prospect, not you: Your potential clients don’t care about you… they care about how you can help their business, so your marketing must be about them. Paul’s Personal Peer Group: How can you stop clients from contacting you directly? I have 9 suggestions for you to try. Are audits still a good sales tool for MSPs? If a client tells you they’ve got a Trojan, your heart sinks. But what if there was a kind of Trojan that actually made you happy because it meant that you were going to make some more money and win some new clients. And don’t worry, I’m not suggesting you infect people’s computers, but let’s talk about why this sales Trojan is a good one, how it can boost your sales and ultimately have a powerful positive impact on your MSP. We all know what a Trojan horse is, and we all know the Greek myth that gave it that name. But of course, we also know its place within cyber security, perhaps a term that was maybe used more in the past than it is today. But I believe you can use a sales Trojan horse. So what is this? It’s where you sell something small to someone to start building a relationship with them ahead of the thing you really want to sell them, which is of course, a managed services contract. As an example, you would sell them a low level service first, with the knowledge that you’re going to overdeliver, do a great job, totally delight them. And that’s going to help you to sell them a proper monthly recurring revenue managed services contracts down the line, which is always the goal of everything we’re trying to do here. MRR first. There is only MRR, everything else is just establishing the setup of more MRR. The beauty of a sales Trojan horse is that it’s a lot easier to sell someone something small than it is to ask them for a 12, 24 or 36 month contract. They might not understand technology at the level you do but they do understand that if and when something goes wrong, their business is completely screwed. So by selling them something small first, it gives you the opportunity to build up a level of trust with them to build a relationship. And this actually has a term within marketing. It’s called front end backend marketing. Maybe you’ve seen one of these people online selling something, perhaps doing something like a giveaway where they ask you to pay a little bit for postage and packing. So the thing they’re giving away, the book or whatever is free, you just pay the postage and packing. Or maybe you get a huge value item for $20, something like that. And what this person is really trying to get you to do is to buy something and feel satisfied with it, and then you’ll go on and you’ll buy something more expensive from them in the background or what’s known as the backend. They probably don’t make any money from selling you the book or the $20 item or whatever it is, but they will...

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge Welcome to Episode 273 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week… “Why does my MSP’s marketing NEVER work?”: Discover how to pinpoint what’s holding your marketing back, how to turn it into a system that works, and why this approach could unlock new growth for your business. Which is better for MSPs: Syndicated blogs or original content?: Up-to-date blog content on your website shows your MSP is active and it’s also great for demonstrating expertise and authority in technology. Aim to post a blog article at least once a week. Why technicians procrastinate… and what to do about it: Have you ever wondered why we sometimes choose to do something easy rather than something that’s urgent? My guest shares some great insights on combatting procrastination. Paul’s Personal Peer Group: This week’s question is about billboard advertising – is this a good idea for MSPs? “Why does my MSP’s marketing NEVER work?” Have you got a cold, sinking feeling because no matter what marketing you seem to attempt, none of it seems to be working? You’re not alone. Many MSPs get the chills about this. When nothing seems to be working, it’s hard to know where to begin fixing it. But here is the good news. Right now, you are going to discover how to pinpoint what’s holding your marketing back, how to turn it into a system that works, and why this approach could unlock new growth for your business. One of the most common complaints I hear from MSPs is that their marketing just isn’t working. It doesn’t help that what you’re trying to sell has one of the most complex and longest sales cycles around. Managed services is very difficult to market and sell compared to many other things. For example, if you were running a business that sells widgets, it would be a lot easier for you to get traffic to your site, to get leads, to get inquiries and of course sales and get those widgets out the door. But you don’t. You sell managed services. And by the way, the flip side of this is that you keep your clients longer and they spend a lot more money with you. You have the kind of stats that widget manufacturers would be very, very jealous of. But why does an MSP’s marketing typically not work? And if you feel like you are doing lots of marketing, but you’re seeing little return, where do you start fixing it? You have to break all of your marketing down into its component parts and examine each one. And ask yourself two very big questions… The first of those is whether or not you are using the right marketing strategy? Let’s look at strategy. Sometimes I’ll be talking to an MSP who says they’re doing loads of marketing, but what they’re actually doing is creating a lot of disjointed noise. Just because you’re posting regularly on LinkedIn, that has no power unless it’s guided by a marketing strategy. Now my favourite strategy, which I talk about all the time, is very, very simple to communicate. It is just six words, but it’s the most powerful marketing strategy that any MSP can use. In fact, any B2B business, because I use this for my own marketing as well. The strategy is – build audiences, grow relationships, convert relationships. It’s a three step strategy, which you can also use as a three-step marketing system. In fact, we built our entire MSP Marketing Edge service around this. So you build up audiences of people to...

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge Welcome to Episode 272 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week… An MSP marketing tactic guaranteed to grab attention: Doing this means you can reach more people and persuade them to talk to you with much less work. Want a new client? You can afford to spend this much: Don’t be distracted by the short-term costs of getting a new client. Instead, focus on the long-term revenue and profit they will bring you. Compliance isn’t a headache. For MSPs it should be a profit centre: It’s very powerful to send a message to a business owner talking about a specific problem they have because of a regulation, and exactly how they can fix it. Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Could gamification be what you need to motivate your team? An MSP marketing tactic guaranteed to grab attention Imagine doing some marketing for your MSP that’s so relevant to the person who sees it, they immediately stop what they’re doing just to listen to you. And yes, it is possible for your marketing to be this powerful. It means you can reach more people and persuade them to talk to you with much less work. Let me tell you the surprising secret to this kind of marketing and you won’t believe what I’m going to ask you to Google. Now, I should start by admitting that this isn’t really a marketing tactic that you can use for a general audience. It only works when you use it for a vertical. Your MSP doesn’t have to only work in this vertical. You can have lots of different clients doing lots of different things in lots of different sectors, but this specific marketing idea only works for a vertical audience, and you can’t just reuse it across different verticals. You have to do some research for each vertical that you are using this tactic to target people in. But the payoff is immense because targeting to a vertical is already a beautiful thing to do. It’s so much easier to send a message that’s highly relevant to an audience within a vertical. So for example, if you’re targeting lawyers and you use the phrase legal practice, the part of their brain that filters information, which is called the reticular activating system, it decides that what you are saying is relevant to them. So they ignore stuff that’s aimed at general business owners and managers, and they listen to stuff that seems to be targeted at lawyers. And that works across all verticals. Now, this new marketing idea that I have for you right now is even more specific. Okay, enough teasing. Let me tell you what it is. So you pick a vertical that you want to win more business in, and then you do some Googling. And what you’re looking for on Google is specific regulations regarding cyber security or data retention, or in fact, anything that you touch. Specific regulations that affect that vertical. So for example, let’s say you work with healthcare, there’s going to be tons of regulations or laws specifically aimed at healthcare businesses. Lawyers will have them, CPAs/accountants will definitely have them. Manufacturers will probably have them as well. So go and find that regulation. In an ideal world, you would then talk to so...

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge Welcome to Episode 271 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week… How to influence what John Smith buys: Your prospects don’t really understand technology and that can create fear. The smartest MSPs build trust and ease those fears by positioning themselves as the go-to tech authority in their marketplace. Find out how… 3 more bootstrap marketing ideas for MSPs: Let’s explore how to strike gold by turning your existing assets into lead generators, using simple tactics to attract new clients and unlock hidden revenue opportunities… without spending a penny. How motion graphics make complex sales easier: Simple visual tools, like animated videos, can attract prospects by helping to explain complex concepts and products. Could this be what your MSP needs to turn your website into a lead generation machine? Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Are you struggling with writer’s block? Elliot from an MSP in Manchester (UK) is too. I have 3 suggestions to help. How to influence what John Smith buys Have you ever seen someone wrestle with a Rubik’s cube? Well, that’s how most business owners feel about technology. They’re fascinated by what it can do, but frustrated by its complexity. So here’s an exciting thought. If their mind is boggled, that creates a massive opportunity for your MSP to unboggle it. Let’s explore how the smartest MSPs build trust to ease those fears and position themselves as the go-to tech authority in their marketplace. And yes, you can do this too. Somewhere in one of the hundreds of business and marketing books that I’ve read over the years is one of my favourite phrases, and here it is – To influence what John Smith buys, you must look through John Smith’s eyes. And in this instance, John Smith is the ordinary business owner or manager that you want to reach and influence to buy from you and not one of your competitors. You have to really understand what it’s like to be John Smith, in order to persuade him that your MSP is the one he should choose. Let’s do that right now. Let’s imagine John lives in your town and he’s the owner of a small CPA, a small accounting firm. Let’s ignore that old joke that all accountants are dull, although actually we do know this to be the truth, don’t we? But anyway, don’t worry about that. What is day-to-day life like for John running his business? Well, of course technology is mission critical for an accountancy practice, and yet we can probably guess that John hasn’t invested well over the years. So he and his team, maybe they’re using older technology still – they’re definitely still on Windows 10, might even be a Windows 8 machine clunking away somewhere… maybe an XP machine, that might be pushing it too far. Their internet is okay at best, and cyber security is very much something that they just pay lip service to. John’s mindset is that he pays Microsoft, maybe an MSP, perhaps a break/fix company somewhere. He pays the money every now and again or every month, so surely all of the security and everything should be all sorted out, right? That’s his kind of accountant’s attitude towards it. And this attitude towards technology probably means that John suffers from lots of downtime or at the very least, interruptions to his productivity. And I bet his staff complain a lot too. The subtext of this approach to...

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge Welcome to Episode 270 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week… If your clients are happy, this KPI will be high: Net Revenue Retention (NRR) is a quality score where you measure how well you have done at retaining revenue over the last 12 months and assessing whether it has grown. 3 bootstrap marketing ideas for MSPs: Marketing doesn’t have to cost a load of cash. If you have a member of staff with a spare few hours each week, you can invest their time into these low cost or no cost marketing tasks for your MSP. Your MSP’s growth priorities for 2025: My special guest, a turnaround expert, tells us how to plan the year ahead with clarity, focus, and fresh momentum. You’ll discover how to organise your priorities, craft a winning growth strategy, and create a story for 2025 that’s really worth celebrating. Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Ryan, from an MSP in San Diego, wants to know why it’s so important to fix his website as a matter of priority. If your clients are happy, this KPI will be high Your MSP’s bank balance might look great and you might be impressed with your other KPIs. But there’s a hidden one that I bet you $5 you never look at. Yet it could flip things completely. Most MSPs have never heard of this key performance indicator, and yet it’s the ultimate quality check for any recurring revenue business. In just a few minutes, you’ll find out what this secret KPI is, how to calculate it in under 10 minutes and exactly what score proves that you are running a truly outstanding MSP. One of the things I love about working in the channel is that every day is a school day and you never ever feel like you have finally learned everything. This, in 2025, is my ninth year working with MSPs and honestly, I feel like I learn so much every single day. And as someone who has a passion, and a need in fact, for constant learning, I do find this exciting and not at all tiring. In fact, just a few months back I was chatting to an MSP and we were talking about how much progress their business has made over the last couple of years. It’s been actually astonishing. And then he said to me how delighted he was with the performance of his NRR, and that’s N, as in N for November, not MRR, which is M for mother. And of course we know what MRR is. It’s monthly recurring revenue. What is NRR? It stands for Net Revenue Retention – essentially, which clients that we had last year are still here this year. It’s a quality score. It’s something that is used a lot by SaaS businesses (subscription as a service businesses) and all subscription businesses typically use it, just not normally MSPs. But if you are looking for more ways to measure how good a job you’re doing, this could be it. So let me tell you how you’d measure this and what good performance looks like. This will be a great time of year to measure it because you could kind of look back to the end of 2023 or the beginning of 2024 and look at the clients you had then and ask how many of those clients do we still have today? What was the value of their monthly recurring revenue a year...

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge Welcome to this SPECIAL edition of the show, Episode 269, of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week I’ve got the last of my special episodes for you, where you’ll discover how my guest grew his MSP to 450 clients, 35 staff and $7m revenue. How to own an MSP doing $7m a year Featured guest: Steve McNamara is the visionary founder and CEO of DTC, Inc., an MSP that has been a cornerstone of IT support for over 25 years. Established in 1999, DTC began as a small operation focused on serving the dental community, quickly evolving into one of the largest dental IT support companies in the Mid-Atlantic region. Under Steve’s leadership, the company has expanded its reach beyond Maryland to include clients in Virginia, Delaware, and Pennsylvania, now boasting over 450 clients and a dedicated team of more than 35 employees. Steve built DTC from the ground up with his first hire, Scott Leister, who now serves as the DevSecOps engineer. Steve has remained committed to the core mission of making IT work for clients through innovative solutions and meaningful connections. His philosophy of “doing the next right thing” has guided the company through various challenges, ensuring that client needs are always prioritised. DTC has a strong emphasis on values and culture. Steve believes in hiring individuals who align with the company’s core values rather than merely filling roles. This commitment to culture is reflected in initiatives such as hiring a Chief Flourishing Officer and conducting quarterly skill-building sessions and all-hands meetings, where every team member has a voice. This focus on values not only attracts talent but also fosters a loyal and engaged workforce. How would you like to own an MSP doing $7 million a year where you personally do none of the tech work? There’s nothing more motivating than hearing how other MSP owners have built up their business. And in this week’s special episode, you are going to discover how this guy grew to 450 clients, 35 staff, and $7 million revenue. What I think you’ll love is his unique approach to his people and how he’s kept the quality of the tech work really high without having to do any of it himself. Hi, I’m Steve McNamara. I’m the CEO and founder of DTC Inc. We are an MSP here in the Maryland DC, Northern Virginia region of the United States. We’ve been incorporated for a little over 25 years now and serving primarily into the healthcare and dental space, but now moving into the CMMC space as well. And that’s the very short, skinny version of who we are. I love it. Thank you so much for joining us on the podcast, Steve. I think my favourite episodes of this podcast over the last five years or so have been when we’ve had real MSPs on who have shared their stories of how they did it. So you’ve been going, I think you said more than a quarter of the century, what was it that made you start your first business or start this business in the first place? Well, we had a 2 year old son and my wife told me to get a bleeping job. Were you working in it before? Part-time, I actually, I had a health food store in rural county in Maryland and it was failing, but I was more interested in the natural food industry and alternative healthcare than I was tech. I did te...

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge Welcome to this SPECIAL edition of the show, Episode 268, of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week I’ve got another special episode for you. If your MSP isn’t growing, and you’re too busy running it to focus on growing it, this could be the answer for 2025. Should MSPs hire a chief growth officer? Featured guest: Jake Gregorich oversees revenue generation for Lyra Technology Group. He joined the team in January 2023 to help grow sales talent, increase collaboration among Lyra companies, and drive top-line revenue growth. Prior to Lyra, Jake worked with MSPs including Impact Networking, Ntiva, and Equilibrium IT. He also served as an independent consultant to private equity backed MSPs and private equity companies looking to enter the MSP market on sales & marketing, diligence, acquisitions, and integration. Outside of work, he enjoys time and good laughs with his wife Joanna, baby girl Sofia, toddler Charlie, golden retriever Bella, and large extended family. When he is not spending time with family and friends, Jake can be found outdoors hiking, biking, swimming, and playing team sports. This is an MSP Marketing podcast special. Could this be any more perfect. A fresh idea, for a fresh new year. So, you want to make more money from your MSP and you’re looking for new ways to do it. Well, as we bring on a brand new year, it doesn’t get much fresher than this. Welcome to a special episode dedicated to someone who’s found the solution to the problem of – how do you focus on growth if you are too busy with the day-to-day running of your MSP? Here’s a fresh perspective that’s definitely worth your time. Hi, I’m Jake Gregorich, SVP of Growth at Lyra Technology Group. And Jake, thank you so much for joining me for this special. It is of course your second appearance on the podcast. You were on, I think it was episode 205 back in late 2023, and ahead of having you back on the podcast again today I’ve just listened back to that, it was such a great interview and you were so very generous with the things that you shared. In our special today, we’re going to talk about what you guys are doing with this amazing MSP that you are building. And we’re also going to talk about the concepts of something called Chief Growth Officers. And not only in terms of how you’re doing that, because I think it’s really interesting how you are inspiring a large and growing number of people to grow their MSPs, but also we can look at it in terms of how the average MSP owner can take some of the concepts that you guys are proving are working right now and actually apply that within their own MSP. So let’s start right at the beginning. Let’s assume that everyone who’s listening to this or watching this on YouTube has not heard you on the podcast before. Tell us exactly who you work for, what you guys are doing, what your mission is, and what you’ve achieved over the last few years. Yeah, certainly Paul, great to be back, thanks for having me. Lyra Technology Group is a family of MSPs. We have now 77 companies across the US, Canada, the UK, Australia and New Zealand. Our business, compared to most highly acquisitive MSPs, is a bit different.

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge Welcome to this SPECIAL edition of the show, Episode 267, of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week I’m taking you for a walk near my home. And we’re going to talk about a subject that’s very important to us as business owners… How MSPs achieve a happy balance Running an MSP is like constantly spinning plates and there’s a good chance that you’ve dropped the odd one from time to time. It’s a dizzying challenge trying to keep them all spinning and in perfect balance. If you are trying to juggle your home life with everything your MSP throws at you and it often feels impossible, today’s special episode is just for you. Come for a Christmas Eve walk with me as we find the answer to this question – How do you achieve the perfect happy balance? Well, I hope you’ve had an insanely good year this year and you are really ready for Christmas tomorrow. Certainly if you’re listening to this when the podcast is released, what we’re doing today is kind of a bit of a new tradition, which we only started last year, but already it feels like the right thing to do every year is that you come for a walk with me. So last year, and you can go back and listen to last year’s special episode, we went for a walk round a lake near my home where I live. I live just outside Milton Keynes in the UK. It’s kind of in the middle of the UK. And today we’re just going for a walk near my house. Actually, I live near some fields. I live in a little village. It’s very nice around here. So it’s a beautiful, beautiful, sunny crisp December morning and I’m just taking you out for a walk to talk about the happy balance. So what is the happy balance? Well, I’m a business owner just like you, and I’ve been doing this, actually next year it will be my 20th year. It was February, 2005 when I started my very first business, not the one I have now, I sold that in 2016. But back then I started and I had all the hopes and fears and all the difficult times that everyone has when they start their first business. And it took me probably about seven years to achieve this thing called the happy balance. And the happy balance is a mixture of, or a combination of five things that you need to have in your life in order to achieve happiness. Because if your experience of starting your MSP was anything like my experience of starting my first business, you throw yourself into it with such gusto that it becomes almost an unsustainable beast. And you kind of look up a year, two, three years in, and you realise that you are spending so much of your time working that you have got all the other parts of your life out of balance. Things like, well, all the things we’re going to talk about today, but especially your family, your partner, your kids (if you’ve got them), your social life, your friends, all of these things, they take a backseat to the business and I think that’s okay for a year, maybe two years. But if it goes on any longer than that, the risk is that you are just out of balance. We cannot live our lives out of balance for a very, very long time. I do know business owners, MSP owners, in fact, who have been out of balance for years, decades in some cases. And yeah, some of them are sitting on very successful businesses, successful as in there’s lots of revenue coming in and there’s lots of profit going into their bank accounts. But I have business owning friends who are in that position and they go home to their luxury apartment in the evening where there is no partner and there’s no kids because the price of them building the business and...

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge Welcome to Episode 266 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week… 3 big MSP marketing priorities for 2025: The silver bullet to getting new clients and growing your MSP lies in consistent and persistent marketing. Make it easy by prioritising these three things. And 3 big questions to ask yourself: Before the new year begins, take some time to answer these questions and focus yourself on your future goals, in life and in business. This MSP is using a clever backdoor marketing tactic: My guest this week tells us what his special marketing tactic is, how it makes finding clients easier, and how you can do a version of this in your MSP. Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Graham, an MSP owner in Omaha, reflects on how little he feels his MSP has achieved in terms of lead generation this year. He wants to know why his marking projects take so long to implement. 3 big MSP marketing priorities for 2025 Did your MSP sales engine feel broken in 2024? Well, here’s the fix. The best new revenue comes from lead gen that’s driven by a marketing machine, but don’t be scared. It’s dead easy and it’s built with just a few simple parts and it’s going to make 2025 your best year yet. Right now let’s go through why your current marketing isn’t working, how to find more people to speak to and how to make all your marketing easier. I do love this time of year because everyone has a collective pause and after you’ve had a few days off to enjoy some time with your family, you move on to time to just kind of take stock of what’s happened in the last 12 months. And you figure out what it is that you want to improve next year. Most of the MSPs that I’ve spoken to this year just want to win more new clients, and keep their existing ones and make sure those clients are happy. And of course, make sure their staff are happy and service quality is important too. These are all important things to MSPs, but ultimately, if you nail it down to what’s the one thing that you would do to improve your business, if you could wave a magic wand, for most MSPs it would be to win new clients. So let me suggest to you three marketing priorities to focus your business on next year. These are not difficult concepts to understand. In fact, I’ve deliberately made this as easy as I can, as I try to do with all the marketing that we talk about in our podcast and on the YouTube videos. My first recommendation is to create a marketing system rather than a series of one-off activities. Now, the reason I suggest this is because the whole channel seems to be geared around helping you to do one-off activities. You get big vendors giving you marketing campaigns or social media that you can just roll out in one go. Now, don’t get me wrong, I think doing a one-off campaign or being all over social media for a couple of months is better than no marketing at all. But the very best kind of marketing is consistent and persistent, and that comes from having a marketing system. A system means you have a series of tasks that are happening on a regular basis. Ideally, you personally as the owner of the MSP, is not doing them. You have someone doing them on your behalf, whether that’s someone who works for you or a trusted outsource person. If you’ve been listening to my podcast or watching my videos for a while, you’ll know the marketing system that...

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge Welcome to Episode 265 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week… Successful MSP owners exercise: Our bodies are amazing, but they’re even better when we use them on a regular basis. Even just a 20 minute walk every single day keeps your body sharp – and also your mind. How one client question can turn into 7 pieces of content for your MSP: To do great marketing for your MSP, you need great content. There’s tons of it around and there’s a simple way to extract it from everyday conversations with clients and prospects. This guy phoned 1,000 decision makers… and learned these hard lessons: Making more outbound calls is essential to win new business for your MSP. If you HATE picking up the phone, this interview is going to blow your mind. Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Steven, from as MSP in London, UK, is looking forward to getting organised in 2025 – his question is: Which project management software do you recommend? Successful MSP owners exercise MSP Running Shoes on. Have you ever felt that owning an MSP business is like running a marathon in more ways than one? And if you prioritise looking after your clients and their technology ahead of looking after your own body and health, then you have a very low chance of completing the marathon that is being a business owner for the next 20 years. Let’s find out why successful business owners exercise, how they do it when they have zero time, and the benefits of doing it to you, your clients and your staff. A few months back, I had my dad come and stay with us for a couple of nights. Now he lives about 150 miles away and we don’t really see him more than a couple of times a year. So it was lovely having him stay. My daughter and I, we took him to London for a full day being tourists in our own capital city, and we went to see a theatre show and we went to some museums and it was great fun. But we walked about 20,000 steps, which is about 10 miles, and we do a lot of walking because London is a walking city. It’s so much easier to walk around and just catch the tube. You wouldn’t drive around London. No one does that. My dad is in his early seventies, so he’s not really that old and he’s kind of fit and kind of healthy as he has been throughout his life. But he has let his fitness slip in recent years and he was really struggling. So at the end of that day, he just looked ill. He was sitting down, his back was hurting, his knee was hurting, his hip was hurting, and he won’t go and see the doctor about his dicky hip. And I got him to admit that he doesn’t really do any regular exercise. He’ll have a walk now and again. Now all the medical advice from all the doctors everywhere is that someone of his age, in fact, someone of every age should be going out for at least a 20 minute walk every day. And I told him that even last year when I couldn’t exercise much because I’d injured my knee and I needed surgery on it. I couldn’t go running or anything like that, but I still exercised every single day. I’d go for a 20, 30 minute walk or go on the treadmill for a mile, or I actually bought an exercise bike, which I’ve since sold. But you get the idea. I was telling him how the most successful business owners and MSP owners I...

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge Welcome to Episode 264 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week… Why MSPs procrastinate (and how to cure it): Don’t confuse busyness with business. Keeping yourself busy doing things that you really shouldn’t be doing, at the expense of the things that matter, is a form of procrastination. What technicians write in tickets can damage your brand: Your brand is YOU, and your team, and the way you communicate. And critically… how that makes people feel. Why successful MSPs use PowerPoint to tell stories: Eliminate ‘death by PowerPoint’ using storytelling to simplify complex information and help your presentations come to life. Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Want to fire a problematic client but don’t know how? I have the answer… Why MSPs procrastinate (and how to cure it) One of the dangers of doing a podcast every week and appearing in lots of YouTube videos is that at some point your friends and family stumble across your content. And every now and then I get a message from a friend saying, Hey, I just watched your latest video on YouTube, I’ve no idea what you were talking about Paul, but it seemed okay. Now, the reason that this is a risk is because I do try and put a lot of my life into my content, because as a working parent and a business owner myself, that helps you and me to relate to each other. So the story I want to tell you today is about a friend who I hope never stumbles across this recording because I know he will recognise himself immediately and no one likes to be talked about in a negative way. Now, this friend of mine runs his own business. Don’t worry, he’s not an MSP. In fact, what he does is almost irrelevant, but times sadly are not very good for him right now. He’s lost a lot of clients over the last few years and his business is not in great shape. We do occasionally talk about marketing. Of course, I give him as much advice as I can, but he rarely takes action on it. I think the problem is that he hasn’t yet emotionally dealt with the fact that a business that he’s been building up for decades has flattened out. In fact, it’s in decline now. He needs to do things differently to rescue it and turn it around. If you were in a situation like this where you’re actually struggling to meet payroll in some months, you’d think that your full attention would be on the rescue and the recovery, right? I mean, that would certainly be the case for me, but not for my friend because the other day when we were chatting and I asked what he was doing that day, he said he was going on a training course. Not a training course on anything that would be useful to him in terms of turning his business around or improving the service. It was a very low level training course around some minor changes to regulations regarding the service that he sells. So really, he could have just sent one of his staff or just skipped it altogether. It really wasn’t an important training course, but it was an entire day of his time. I was utterly gobsmacked when he told me about this because just a few days before, he was telling me that he didn’t have any time to implement all of the new marketing ideas that we discussed to help him win new clients. And then I had an epiphany. Him going on a training course was a form of procrastination. My friend had confused busyness with business. To him going on a training course, was doing some work, but the reality is it wasn’t productive work. It was ju...

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge Welcome to Episode 263 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week… How to create the perfect MSP about us page: An about us page must be about the people and the core values of your business. But it’s not really about us, it’s about the prospect. It’s a selling page. It takes 50+ touchpoints to get a new client for your MSP: Don’t run marketing campaigns – set up a marketing system. Long-term a system will outperform any campaign you could run, I promise you. A Google ads strategy for MSPs: If you want to try Google ads, don’t try to be all things to all people. You need to be very specific to stand out in a competitive market. Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Christine from an MSP in Portland wants to know why I’m so insistent that MSPs hire a phone person to contact prospects. How to create the perfect MSP about us page The two most important pages on your website are the homepage and the about us page. Why? Because those are the pages that most people are going to look at, the ones they’re most going to be influenced by because they’re most likely to land on your website on the homepage. And then of course they want to know what you’re about. They want to know who the people are behind the business, so they’ll head over to the about us page. Let’s have a look at some of the elements that you should have on your MSPs about us page to make sure it delivers the most value to your business. Now, where a homepage is almost like a summary of the whole business, the about us page is about the people and the core values of the business. So of course you still have an attention grabbing headline, although a different one to the one that you have on the homepage. And of course you’d still have your social proof, data capture maybe, and certainly a call to action, plus of course videos and photographs of real people. It’s just that you present those in different ways than you would do on your homepage. The most important thing on your about us page is your story. But it needs to be presented in a way that’s relevant to the reader. And actually it’s not really about you – you can talk a little bit about you and how you are really into tech, and as a child and you are obsessed with computers, and as a teenager and you’ve been doing it now for 800 years and then 20 years ago you had an entrepreneurial seizure and you decided you’ve got to do your own things, your own way, etc, etc. I mean, all of that is good. In fact, actually you can take that backstory, you can embellish it, you can enhance it, but you have to tell it in a way that makes it interesting to the reader. Because you being obsessed with computers, that’s not really of interest to them until they realise or you tell them that it means that you are across every technology detail in your business, and you only hire people who are incredibly attention focused, very good technology people, and they’re very good at following systems and documenting success, and all of that kind of thing. So, you take your story and you keep flipping it round and looking at it from a different angle so that actually your story is about the reader. Even an about us page is not really an about us page, it’s about the prospect. It’s a selling page. That’s what it really is. So of course something else you’d do on there is you’d put some case studies on there. Now, if you’ve g...

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge Welcome to Episode 262 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week… A mini masterclass on LinkedIn: Improve these three things on your LinkedIn profile to get people’s attention and encourage them to engage with you. The 3 tests to apply to new initiatives: The fear test, the regret test, and the comfort zone test – will these push you into taking the next big leap for your MSP? Should you start a podcast for your MSP?: Podcasts are a great way to grow relationships with an audience, but is it the right thing for your MSP? Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Stuart, from an MSP in Atlanta, has asked how much he should be paying for a content writer. Find out more on this and whether AI is a good tool to use too. A mini masterclass on LinkedIn It’s very easy to become complacent about social media and believe that it’s just a waste of time to a busy business owner like you who’s trying to build their MSP. But the reality is that social media is still incredibly important. Not all the networks, of course. I really don’t think most MSPs will get much from TikTok for some time, at least not until the generation that’s growing up with TikTok are the decision makers. For B2B marketing in 2024 and next year as well the social media network to go for is of course… LinkedIn – this is still the very best platform for MSPs looking for new clients, and I do highly recommend that you put in time on it every single day. Let’s spend a few minutes now on a mini masterclass on LinkedIn, and I’ve got three things for you to look at. The first is to improve three things in your profile. So here’s an interesting question. Based on your current profile, if you were an ordinary business owner or manager, would you want to be a client of your MSP? If not, here are three areas to spend more time on: The headline – focus on the benefit to your prospects rather than what you do. “I do IT for town businesses”, becomes “Helping town businesses grow with technology”. Then look at your headshot and don’t be cheap – pay a professional who does headshots every day and can make you look beautiful. Your about us bit – write it for your prospects, not other IT professionals. You want them to read it and think, ah, this is exactly the kind of person I want looking after my business. Next up then, is to build your personal brand. And your personal brand is what others think about you. It’s not something you control, but it is something that you can heavily influence. And it’s based on a number of factors: the number of connections you have, the recommendations that you have, what you post about, and how often you post, the value of your contributions, the speed of your responses, and whether you do something like a LinkedIn newsletter or a LinkedIn live. Because people who are perceived as experts, they do these things. Now, like much of marketing, getting better results is about doing a series of small actions on a regular basis, for years. I spend no more than about 15 to 20 minutes a day on LinkedIn. I have a virtual assistant who does functional stuff like accepting connection requests. I just do new content and commenting.

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge Welcome to Episode 261 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week… Stop clients calling you personally for first line support: You can’t grow your business while you’re delivering first line support. Find out how you can free yourself from these burdens whilst retaining great relationships with your clients. Why victory loves preparation: Planning small actions regularly will make the biggest difference to your business. How introverts can communicate more confidently – and feel better about it: Learn how to tap into your passion using this confidence formula, whatever your “vertness”. Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Greg from South Carolina wants to know what the Parthenon Principle of marketing is and how to apply it to his MSP. Stop clients calling you personally for first line support When you are the person who started the MSP, one of the hardest transitions for you is to get away from delivering first line support to that very first set of clients that you won in your first few years. But it’s something that you absolutely have to do or otherwise you get trapped in doing technical work forever. Now, don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with technical work, but you can’t grow your business while you’re doing password resets and setting up new users, right? This problem happens to most MSP owners and the reason it’s so hard is because you used to look after these clients yourself, you personally. So they feel that they have some kind of special bond with you. And even when you’ve employed first line technicians whose very job it is to sit there and help your clients, they will still email you directly or call your mobile directly rather than speak to the help desk. Now, this steals your time when you should be working on the business, but also reduces your ability to sell more to them during a strategic review. You can’t be the technology strategist and first line support at the same time. Clients’ minds will only let you sit in one of those boxes. There are a number of different ways to tackle this problem without annoying your clients, and you’ll probably put a couple of the things I’m about to talk about together into a blended solution. In fact, here are nine things that I recommend. The first is to set clear expectations. Now, this is really easy with new clients, but hard with longer standing clients. So just remember you have to educate them, constantly. What’s top of mind for you is item 1,058 in their mind’s list of priorities. Number two, make it easy. Put stickers with the help desk number on every single device. Put them on their hands so they can’t help but see them. Number three, have a standard operating procedure to roll out each time a client contacts you directly. Make a plan in advance so you don’t have the emotional trauma of wondering, how am I going to deal with this? Number four, play dumb. Tell them you don’t know how to fix that as you focus on strategy these days, but you’ll ask someone on the help desk to call them immediately. Number five, change your voicemail to say that you’re not working tod...

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge Welcome to a very SPECIAL edition of the show, Episode 260, celebrating 5 years of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This episode’s been released five years to the day since we launched the podcast on the 5th of November, 2019. It’s a birthday! Amazing. Well back then, producer James and I figured it would run for a few months when we launched the first episode. “Hello, this is Paul Green and welcome to the first ever MSP marketing podcast. Now, my aim every single week is to give you some motivation, some ideas, some clever stuff that you can take that other MSPs are doing around the world and you can bring it into your business and really make a difference to your business quite quickly and quite dramatically.” Five years on, I’ve talked to some of the guests who’ve appeared over the years and asked them a big question – What’s the best idea you have to help MSPs make more money? We’ve split their answers into four different sections, starting of course with Marketing and Sales. Hi guys, it’s Jamie Warner here, CEO of eNerds and Invarosoft. And here’s my tip for how your MSP can make more money. Well, the good news is I’ve got two tips and as an MSP owner, this is coming from experience. I’m actually in the saddle selling at the moment. So my first tip is that you must learn how to increase your percentage success rate of converting new customers. Your only goal is to essentially convince that new client opportunity that your MSP is going to be a step up from where they went before. That is why clients look to change. They don’t look to change for technical reasons. They only look to change for a step up in the service experience. So that’s your job, to figure out what are the things that you can say in your IT services presentation that will demonstrate that your service methodology is a step up from where they’ve gone before. Now, obviously in the Invarosoft world, we use our customer experience technology to demonstrate to that customer how visually they’re going to get a step up in their service experience. And interestingly, we also use our QBR or our roadmap, TBR, whatever you want to call it. We use the methodology and the software that we use to do that and we demonstrate that to the customer as well, so they can see how our methodology and how our roadmapping and our gap analysis and our reporting is going to be a step up, and we show them examples of that when we are presenting our services. So that’s tip number one and that’s going to help you sign up more clients and grow your MSP. The other thing that doesn’t get spoken about, so tip number two, is that you absolutely have to treat your clients as a pipeline of opportunity from a QBR perspective. So every client essentially has a huge amount of things that you need to help them improve. It might be new switches, routers, firewalls, a project to go to the cloud with Office 365, whatever it happens to be. Put all your clients in a list, down the left hand side of an Excel spreadsheet, look at how much you think you could possibly sell them. Workstations and desktops tends to be a big part of that. And then look at the enormous pipeline you’ve got. Now, these are things that clients actually need. These are not things that they don’t need, and so the best MSPs that grow faster, there’s this concept of sales compression. It’s understanding you have a pipeline as it relates to the QBR side of things, going out and actually having a conversat...