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

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So maybe the message you want to send them is telling them all the downsides, all the bad things that could happen, like the fact they’ll have to deal directly with Microsoft if there’s an issue. They’ll have to pick which license is best for them as well. Of course they’ll have to set up their new users, they’ll have to manage their users, deal with all of that headache. And of course it complicates your basic support or it could have an impact on some of the other work that you’re doing for them.

The challenge for you if a client asks this and you want to fight it, is to make them realise how much extra work they’re going to have to do for saving $2 per user per month. So to recap, some MSPs would roll over and say, here you go, other MSPs would fight it to keep it. To me there’s a third option and that’s to use this as an early warning of some potential future change in your relationship with your client. Because let’s be honest, this is just not a sensible decision that would be made by a sensible decision maker. Is it? It’s taking on a lot of extra work to save a tiny amount of money. And that rings an alarm bell for me.

Is your client desperately trying to cut costs? Does your client really not understand what you do for that $2 per user per month? Is your client actually thinking of switching to another MSP or doing something completely different and this is kind of your first notification of a very long process where at the end of it they’re going to leave and go to someone else. My suggestion is that if this happens to you, you don’t use this as an opportunity to go in and say stay or go. Instead, you use it as an opportunity to start a discussion to have an in-depth conversation about their business, where it’s going, what the goals are, what their issues might be, what are they facing at this very moment.

Very rarely are you as the MSP, the cause of some problems in their business, but you can become the victim of other problems that their business has. We’d always want to have a business discussion with someone before they made a major decision about doing something different, wouldn’t we? And this might just be the early warning that you would always want to receive. It’s actually quite cool to get it even if it does cause you a little bit of distress and of course some work. And do you know what, it might even lead to an upsell opportunity. Sometimes people cutting costs is a sign that they’re actually looking to spend more but in a different direction. So there might be some other services that you can sell them or you might be able to come up with a more comprehensive deal that helps them achieve the things that they want to achieve.

Now I would love to know what you think about this and did you know I have a Facebook group that’s all about discussing marketing and business growth and it’s a vendor free zone, only MSPs, no vendors. To join, go onto Facebook, type in MSP marketing in the search bar and then go to groups and you just look for the MSP marketing group. You’ve just got to prove that you’re an MSP by answering a few simple questions and I look forward to discussing this with you in that Facebook group.

Should your MSP start a podcast?

Have you ever heard me on my podcast and thought, that seems easy, I should do that? 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, and if you do get started, let me tell you about these specific things you need to consider before you get started.

So Paul, should I do a podcast for my MSP? Well, my easy flippant answer to this is probably not, no. Because unless you have a real passion for podcasts and you’ve always itched to do your own, you’ll quickly find that a regular podcast is a total pain. However, the benefits are huge. I found that my podcast has been a key tool to reach people that I’d never have reached any other way.

It’s helped me set myself up as an authority figure. It’s helped me to open doors to influential people by interviewing them and it’s helped me to build a brand new audience. Would you and I be talking right now, either you listening on the podcast or watching me on YouTube, if I wasn’t doing this?

If you do fancy doing a podcast, these are the main 10 areas to consider.

The first is your target audience. Who are you going to do the podcast for? Now this is easy if you operate in a specific vertical, but much harder if you just operate geographically. You have to really ask yourself why would someone choose to listen to your podcast? What’s in it for them?

The second thing that kind of leads on from that is the podcast title. You need a unique title that will catch their attention. It also needs to be something that’s not already being done. And remember, ordinary people, the business owners and managers that you want to reach, they’re not as interested in technology as you are. So having a podcast about technology is probably not going to be interesting to the people you most want to reach, but they are interested in growing their business, increased productivity and just having a smoother, better run business.

Number three is regularity. So weekly gets people into the habit of listening. We’ve been doing it weekly since around about November 2019, but I’ll be honest with you it’s a treadmill, it really is. I work several weeks ahead, so I never miss an episode and that requires a lot of discipline. For example, right now I’m recording this on a Tuesday morning. It’s so sunny and beautiful outside I want to be out in my shorts working in the garden, but instead I’m in my studio and I’m recording the podcast because I need to do it now because my whole team is waiting for me to record that podcast so they can go and do the editing and the promotions and all the stuff they need to do. Discipline is a big thing with a podcast and if you’re going to do it weekly, you’ve got to work ahead and make sure it appears weekly.

Number four is format. So lots of podcasts are just an interview with a guest and that is a kind of an easy way to do a podcast. The downside is if your guest is a bit boring or the listener doesn’t like the guest or their subject, they’ll just skip the whole podcast and that damages the principle of trying to get them to listen to you every single week. So the other way to do it is to have several segments to the show. That’s what we do in our podcast. If you listen, you’ll hear me, I do a talky bit and then I’ll do a tease or something and then I’ll do another talky bit and another tease, and then we have the guest on and then we sort of finish with a listener question and that’s a pretty good format that’s worked well for us for a number of years.

Number five to think about is specific content. So what exactly are you going to talk about? It’s worth having a content calendar to plan this and mine stretches months into the future. So as I’m recording this, we are here on the 29th of April. You know that this is obviously going out in June and we have a plan right up to September, October right now. The quickest way to lose motivation for your podcast is to be scratching around for content ideas. You’ve got to think ahead and make that systematic knowing what you’re going to be recording months in advance.

Which brings us onto number six, recording. You need a quality USB microphone. I use a Shure MV7. It’s quite difficult to say, although don’t get too caught up on the technology. For years, I used a really old Samsung Meteor microphone, it must’ve been like 10, 15 years old, and that was fine enough until we upgraded, did the whole studio out and decided to upgrade the equipment, and that was years into the podcast. Just as you can have the very best golf clubs and be a terrible golfer, you can have the very best microphone and produce awful content if you’ve got nothing to say. Make sure you do record somewhere quiet, you’ll get great audio quality recording in a small cupboard. And I do mean that, a friend of mine does voiceovers for national radio and he does it in his under stairs cupboard with a blanket just to kind of deaden the sound. Now today I do mine in a large open space at home. If you’re watching this on YouTube, you’ll see my studio space and it doesn’t sound too bad because we’ve put acoustic tiles on the ceiling and on some of the walls as well. But if I had to start again and I didn’t have this space, I’d just go in a small cupboard and I’d just use my microphone and just reduce the space because you reduce the amount of boom that you can have if there’s not so much space.

Number seven then is production or jingles, you know when the guy that says on the podcast of Here’s Paul Green’s marketing podcast, something like that, you just get someone on Fiverr or Upwork to make this for you. There’s so many people out there that will do voiceovers. You can source your own or you can just get someone who’s got a good voice you love to do it for you, and then get someone else on Fiverr or Upwork to produce that, to turn that into a little jingle that you can play out. Just don’t let anyone who does this for you try to charge you any kind of ongoing licensing fee because that is nonsense. Pay once and own the work.

Number eight is editing. As with videos, really it’s the editing that makes or breaks a podcast. We have two people that work on our production. We have James, who’s our producer, and Simon who’s also our producer and our editor. And Simon sits and edits this just down to a level of perfection. He takes out all of my ums and uhs, he’ll get rid of my mistakes, he tightens it all up. He does a fantastic job. And when we first started, it was just me and James and we just did a quick edit and got it out there. Now we spend a lot of time, we repurposed a lot of our podcast into YouTube, into other platforms. We cut it into shorts, we cut it into clips for LinkedIn. But all of that is stuff you do down the line. And we use Premiere Pro now because it’s a fantastic tool where you’ve got a flow and you are repurposing content. But again, if I was starting again tomorrow, even if it was just me editing my podcast, I would start with something called Audacity that’s an open source audio editor. It’s a really great piece of software. However, as quickly as I could, I would outsource the editing if I was starting again. So he takes my editor Simon, around about two to three hours a week. He takes my recordings, my ramblings, and he turns them into a well polished product. But please do not underestimate how important the editing is. The talking bits that I do, which takes me around about an hour a week, plus my interview. That’s nothing compared to the time that Simon puts in making it perfect. So if you listen to the podcast or watch the videos and you think this is good, this is professional content, it’s Simon that’s doing all the heavy lifting on this. Thanks Simon.

Then we go onto number nine, which is hosting. So we use something called Castos, which automatically publishes the podcast to all of the major platforms, it’s why we’re on every single major podcast platform. And as a bonus, we can control and publish the podcast through our WordPress website, which is really easy. But that was a choice we made six years ago. And there are lots of hosts around, there are other hosts that are perhaps a bit more up to date. There are some, and I can’t remember its name off the top of my head, but there’s one which can dynamically insert adverts. So it can take all of your old podcast episodes and insert new adverts into your old podcast episodes. So it really is worth you checking out all of the major players and you definitely want to get your podcast transcribed as that becomes valuable content for your website. We don’t use Castos’s own automated transcription, we prefer Rev.com’s human checked transcription, so they do it on AI and then a human checks it. And the reason we do that is because we take that transcript and we use that to build our entire podcast page. So if you go onto mspmarketingedge.com and you have a look at the podcast and you’ll see for about the last 15, 20 weeks or so, which is when we last changed it, we have insanely good pages where the whole transcript is on the page. We pull out key quotes, we have links to things, we have other resources that appear in the page. And that takes Laura who’s on my podcast team, it takes her a couple of hours a week to do, but it’s worth it because we do see some good traffic coming into that.

And then finally number 10, it’s the final item and it’s promotion. Now, this is the biggest question to answer. How will you promote your podcast to the audience that you want to reach? So here’s what we do or a little bit of what we do for ours. I’ve already mentioned a few things, we do like repurposing the content onto different platforms, but I send out a big email to my database every Tuesday. I post it in my Facebook group, that’s my MSP marketing Facebook group that’s only for MSPs. We post it on LinkedIn, actually goes across the week in two or three different ways. And for special episodes, we do sometimes run paid ads as well. One other thing that we do is we ask the guests to promote it to their audiences. So we’ll only do that if they’re guests from within the channel, because that’s a sensible thing to do. But we do also invite on strategic guests. So people that I know are very well connected and will bring a lot of listeners onto the podcast. In fact, the pro tip on that one is go and find all the other podcasts that are big that you want to be on and invite the host of those onto your podcast. So they come onto your podcast, you do an interview with them, and inevitably during that interview, they will say to you, would you like to come on and be a guest on my podcast? So you actually promote your podcast by appearing on other people’s podcasts, and as long as you’re all reaching the same audience, that’s a really great idea.

Ask these questions to pick an MSP marketing agency

Many MSPs hate marketing and they hate agencies even more. But why? Is it because they’ve had their fingers burned, they’ve spent a ton of cash on an agency and felt they never got value for money? Or is it because agencies persist in making marketing seem mysterious when it’s really not? My special guest today is going to tell you exactly why MSPs hate marketing. And if you are hiring a marketing agency, he’s going to tell you the specific questions you should ask to separate the good guys from the bad guys.

Hello, my name is JP De Silva and I am the founder and owner of Create Want.

A marketing agency. And thank you so much for joining me on this podcast, JP, because we are going to talk today, two marketers having a discussion about why people hate marketers, which sounds like a bizarre conversation for us to have, but there is a solid reason for us talking about that. Because we believe that actually it unfortunately makes MSPs hold themselves back because of their dislike of marketing and marketers in general. So we’re going to explore that today and try and make it more comfortable for you as an MSP if you are thinking of hiring a marketing agency or bringing a marketing person on board. We want to sort of help you by knowing what are the right questions to ask, what are the things you should consider and why you shouldn’t hate marketing people. That’s our goal for this anyway.

So tell us a little bit about you. I know those people watching this on YouTube will see that you look like you’re about 18, but you’re telling me that you’ve been in marketing for 25 years already. Tell us about your background.

Yeah, I’m past 40. So yeah, I have been in the industry probably for about 25 years, and it all started when my dad was a computer programmer before internet was a thing. And I was always with computers and marketing related stuff, and I started helping people trying to get their name out. And I found out that a lot of business owners didn’t understand the principles of marketing and how it works and what to expect, and it created a false expectation. So over the years, I started to lean more towards how can I get this person to understand how these work so they can make a more responsible decision when it comes to, oh, I’m going to invest money here or I’m going to do this. And it became a very fun thing just because I’ve heard probably about every question, every complaint people have in the industry, which has helped me to develop things that is going to help them overcome that.

That makes sense. And certainly back in the day, and even today still to a certain extent, people who don’t know much about marketing or technology assume that if you can do computer stuff, you’re good at marketing. We see this with the MSPs. MSPs are sometimes asked by their clients, can you build us a website? To which of course we know that managing someone’s technology and building a website are two completely different skills, but the end users, the end business owners don’t do that. I remember 20, when was this back in 2005, so yeah, 20 years ago, my last proper job before I started my first business, I worked for a newspaper publishing company here in the UK. So 2005, fairly early days on the internet, but I worked in the internet division. And at one point just before I left because things were going stupid, they decided that they should give the responsibility for the internet publishing division to the IT department. And their thinking was, these are our news websites, so the computer people should run them. And of course, it was just a case of no, they’re websites, it’s just the conduit to get the news out to people. I made this argument in a meeting, that would be giving the printing press over to the IT people. They wouldn’t know what to do with it and they wouldn’t know what to do with the websites.

So you must have seen then over the years, things completely change in terms of the rise of digital marketing and all the offline stuff, even though some of it is still valid, it’s just not popular these days and most people don’t do it. What are the big changes have you seen over the last 25 years?

The main thing I feel is it is so much easier to put content out. It is so much easier to put junk out that makes it harder for something like Google or any search engine to try to sift through all of the stuff available to be able to come out with a proper answer. And I tell a lot of people that anything from Facebook, Instagram, paid ads, SEO, I look at it like a highway. There is a highway and there are billboards. And those billboards are your SEO strategies, your Google ads. And the truth is that we’re running out of highway. There is so many people posting, doing this and that it requires a clever creative outside the box intent to come up with, okay, this is how I’m going to target my perfect audience, because it is not like before where you just needed to put your name in the yellow pages and make the best offer and wait for the phone to ring. Now there is a lot more territory to cover, which doesn’t make it necessarily harder, you just have to put a little bit more, oh, okay, I’m going to try this with intent, and it usually works.

Yeah, I agree with you, there’s a lot more junk out there. And of course, the last two years with the rise of AI, we’ve seen a lot more what people are calling AI slop, which is just nonsense that’s out there and I think there’s no long-term future in that AI slop, but where we stand today in 2025, that is surprisingly dominant on a lot of platforms.

Let’s talk about MSPs. So JP you know MSPs, I know you work with a number of MSPs, although you’re not an MSP marketing specialist, you work with lots of businesses and MSPs are amongst your client roster. So you know that they’re primarily technicians first, that they’re driven by helping people, solving problems, great customer service, all of those things MSPs love. And the vast majority hate marketing. And I know that that’s not just managed service providers. You see that from all sorts of business owners. So why do people who are not marketers hate marketing?

The fastest way to answer that is because they don’t understand it. That is the fastest answer. Now, the next layer to that is the fact that they have been screwed over in the past by somebody. Now granted, I believe there is people out there who are not necessarily the most honest, but really everybody’s trying to do their best. And the problem is that if the business owner doesn’t understand what’s going to happen when they implement certain strategies or what to expect or don’t understand the foundation of it, they’re going to listen to what that professional marketing agency/freelancer is saying, and they might be implementing something that is not going to work for them. And it’s not because the marketing agency is intentionally doing that. It’s not because the business owner is intentionally doing that. They just don’t understand how it works. So I give this example, sometimes I say, listen, because I know how to run ads or because I’m an expert on video production, that doesn’t mean it’s the right thing for you.

And I think that’s where the disconnection usually happens. Hey, I need more clients. And they say, oh, well you need to run ads because that’s what the agency knows how to do. Now it might work but it may not be the strategy for them.

I truly believe that the main reason people end up hating marketing is because they don’t understand it.

They say, Hey, I want to do X, Y, and Z, and I need this many leads. And the agency is like, oh, okay, well let’s do blah and then they don’t get the result and then the client is like, oh no, I want to replace my agency. We’ve been gifted to having clients for over 15 years, and it is often we get people like, yeah, we’re not happy with our agency. And believe it or not I always, and this might be sound odd, but I always vouch for the agency and not for the client, simply because I know there is something they did not understand in the process. And if they were to have that information, it would be a lot smoother.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. So you are actually trying to help educate them about the things that perhaps their previous agency didn’t educate them. It’s interesting what you say about the agency falling back on their own capabilities. It’s like if you go to a guy who’s holding a big hammer and you say to him, I’ve got a problem. I need a hole in the wall. He’s going to say, I know how to get a hole in the wall, I’m going to hammer it. If you go up to a different guy who’s got a drill, right, and you say, I need a hole in the wall, then he’s going to drill it. And both of those people believe that their way is the best way. And I think that’s a really good way of for you of describing how marketing agencies come at it. If they’re good at making outbound calls, they see that as the answer. If they’re good at SEO (search engine optimization) they see that as the answer, which is really interesting.

So let’s bring this back to being an MSP owner. So if you are an MSP owner you know you need to do marketing to win new clients, you know you need new clients to increase your profit, you know you need to increase your profit to have a better life, right? That’s an established thing, but you’re stuck on what is the best marketing solution for me? Put yourself in that person’s shoes. And what do you think are some of the right questions to ask or sort of avenues to explore before you pick? Well, I guess there’s two things. There’s what kind of marketing do you do? So do you go down the DIY route, (do it yourself), or do you go down the done for you, or do you find something in between? And then how do you actually pick that right person?

That’s a very interesting question, and there is a few ways we can answer it, but I feel like the one thing people should keep in mind, regardless of the option is, it has to be simple. I’ve worked with some of the biggest brands and some of the smallest businesses, and the simpler the better. Do not make it complicated. It is not complicated. If it has a billion steps and all this different stuff, it is probably not, right? Not to get carried away, but if any business owner were to look at how they started their business, it was them being passionate about what they were doing, giving that information to another person who was also in need of that, that’s the simplicity of it. All we’re trying to do is to recreate that same process, but to thousands of people. That’s it. At any given time, any coffee shop, any MSP, any lawyer started by, okay, it’s just me, I’m a small business, I need to start to drum up some money. How do I do this? And they we’re just doing that.

So if a business owner is in the position of how do I approach this need, number one, have a strategy. Whoever you’re going to work with needs to put together a strategy, something simple that says, Hey, this is your perfect audience, your perfect type of client. This is what they need and this is what we can say to them so they understand we can offer that. What is going to be the medium we are going to use to deliver that message. And they should be able to walk you through sort of like, this is what’s going to happen and it’s going to lead to this and it’s going to lead to this, and this is what you’re going to have at the end. So not sure if I fully answer your question, but that is what I would recommend to an MSP owner or a business owner who’s like, how do I pick my next marketing agency because I’m frustrated with the current one? Well make sure that they have a plan and that they are able to explain to you what’s being done and why.

Yeah, I think that’s great advice. And of course as an MSP owner, you’re dealing with very technical and very difficult, complicated things in your work. And so it’s easy to assume that your marketing should also be difficult and technical and multi-step. And I completely agree, the simpler you can make it, the easier you can make it, well, the more likely it is to happen for a start. Simpler, easier marketing that happens is always better than complex smart marketing that doesn’t happen because there’s just too many steps in it. So that’s really good advice.

Final question for you, JP, is if you could have every MSP owner that you speak to know one thing, apart from the stuff that you’ve just said, what would that one thing be? Or if there’s no one thing, what would be the one question you would want them to ask of you?

So one is they need to track everything. They need a system or something that allows them to see the progress of what’s being done. So if they’re writing content for SEO, they need to see is the traffic increasing? If they’re doing social media, do we get more exposure through social media? Are we doing email campaigns? Are people just track, look at it just like a diet and people track their weight and their measurements and stuff. Just measure things out to make sure that what you are doing it is working or is not working so you can make adjustments. Please, please have a strategy. A strategy is your GPS. It is going to take you from point A to point B. Can you make it without a strategy? Yes. But if you have a strategy is going to be the easiest way to figure out if you’re doing the right thing or if it’s going to work out.

And it takes time and money. A lot of people have the misconception that is going to be, I’m not saying it has to be expensive, but I feel people need to understand it is going to take work. It is going to cost certain amount of money. I know people always try to get, how can I get the cheapest option or whatever, which is fine, they should, but they need to understand that they’re going to get the result they’re paying for to some extent. So they need to be conscious of that and think with that a little bit.

Yeah, I agree. And selling a managed services contract, perhaps one of the longest, most complex sales B2B sales that there is, apart from the multimillion pound sales that are being made to enterprise companies and governments, those are probably longer and more complex. But in terms of small business transactions, absolutely it takes time, time, time. The flip side of that, of course is you keep the client for 10 years, which is unheard of in other B2B sales. JP, thank you for your time today. Briefly tell us what does your business do, how do you help MSPs and how can we get in touch with you?

Sure. The name of my company is Create Want. And that’s what we do, we create want for people’s products and services. We believe that marketing has gone the wrong way by pushing people into buy now or you will lose an arm or get it this and all that. And we figure out that everything you’ve bought, you bought it because you want it. So I was like, well, why are we trying to push things into people? Why we don’t just create want, why we don’t just make it so people want it. And there is many different ways, videos, SEO, emails, etc. So we try to figure out, okay, what is going to work for this particular person? And a lot of our clients are actually agencies, marketing agencies, marketing directors, business owners, and we find a lot of joy doing that because it’s not just meh marketing it’s, Hey, how can we actually create want for your services?

And what’s the best way for us to get in touch with you?

JP@createwant.com, that’s the easiest way. That’s my direct email and I love answering questions. I could spend my entire day just helping people answer question. It is the thing that I’m most passionate about. I don’t charge anything for it. I just want to help people accomplish their goals.

Paul’s Personal Peer Group

Gideon runs an MSP in Texas and he really wants to make an impact with his prospects by sending them physical stuff in the mail. So his question is: What should I put in an impact box?

An impact box, also known sometimes as a “shock and awe box”, is a box of stuff that you send to a prospect in order to make an impact. And the idea is to really punch through and show them that you mean business. Now you don’t have to spend a fortune on your box. The contents could include something as simple as a handwritten short intro note. And yes, it should be handwritten so it stands out and has value. And you just need to say something like, Hi Dave, I know that picking a new IT support company is a big decision. We’d love to partner with you. Here’s a copy of my IT services buyer’s guide and some case studies plus some snacks to enjoy while you are reading them. If you’ve got any questions about joining us, please give me a call on this number.

You’d also put in there your proposal or maybe your confirmation of a meeting or a follow-up meeting depending where in the sales process you send them this impact box. I mentioned earlier that thing called an IT services buyer’s guide. Well, this is a guide that tells them how to switch from one MSP to another. We actually give one of these to our MSP Marketing Edge members and we update it every year. It’s a very, very powerful tool because the only people who would read something like that are those people who are almost ready to switch from one MSP to another. So it’s a great way for you to stamp your authority as the person who wrote the book on how to pick a new MSP. Can you see the power of that? That definitely goes in your impact box.

You’d also add in a selection of case studies, and I know that that would be a second piece of printed material. You’ve got your IT services buyer’s guide, and then your case studies. But each of these things play a different part. In fact, one idea to move away from just being printed stuff is to actually put video case studies onto a USB. But then you’ve got the thing of your prospects plugging a USB from a stranger into their laptop. And we all know that they would do that, but you don’t necessarily want to encourage them to do that.

Next thing that goes in your impact box is some edible stuff. So chocolates, biscuits, sweets, candy, whatever. I mean, what you can do is if you could find out the favourite chocolate bar of the person you’re sending it to, that would be so powerful. Imagine if their favourite chocolate bar was a Snickers and you put five Snickers bars in that impact box. I mean, that just shows a level of care and attention to detail that’s so high.

And it’s actually quite easy to find out. You just ring up their business, speak to the receptionist and say, Hey, I’m sending a box of stuff to this person. Just out of interest, what’s their favourite candy bar? What’s their favourite chocolate bar? And then you just go out and you get a few of those. If you didn’t want to do candy chocolates or sweets, you could just do perhaps a few cans of Coke or Pepsi or tea bags or sachets of coffee, something like that.

And then finally, you should do a piece of merch – merchandise. I’m down with the kids. I can say merch. It could be a mouse mat. Do people still use mouse mats? I see MSPs using them but I’m not convinced that normal people do, but it could be a mouse mat, a pen or a mug or something like that. It doesn’t really matter just find some merch that you like and get some made for your impact box.

Then make sure the box looks really nice inside and outside. So inside you can use sheets of gently crumpled tissue paper to achieve that. And then the outside, you could get your box printed in your MSP’s brand colours. Well, the simpler thing is just to buy some boxes off Amazon or wherever and then get some stickers printed with your logo and perhaps saying what it is. The perfect way is to get it printed to your brand, but sometimes the perfect way just slows everything down. Whereas you could get an impact box put together in the next two days if you just did it, and then you refined it down the line.

Mentioned links

• This podcast is in conjunction with the MSP Marketing Edge, the world’s leading white label content marketing and growth training subscription.
• Join me in MSP Marketing Facebook group.
• Connect with me on LinkedIn.
• Connect with my guest, Jean Paul De Silva on LinkedIn, and visit the Create Want website.
• Got a question about your MSP’s marketing? Submit one here for Paul’s Personal Peer Group.