Episode 197: Help techs triage tickets properly

Fresh every Tuesday for MSPs around the world. This is Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast.

Greetings pop pickers and welcome to another exciting episode of the podcast. Here’s what we got for you this week.

Hi, I’m Merit Kahn. And the ABCs about me, I’m an author, a business owner, and a consultant and comedian, and we’re going to be talking about the open for business framework, three pieces of the puzzle that every business owner and MSP needs to know to be successful in business for the long term.

And as well as that fascinating interview with Merit, we’re also talking about triaging tickets. If your technicians don’t triage tickets properly, I’ve got something for you that could help you to retrain them.

Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast.

One of the recurring themes in this podcast is LinkedIn, as it should be, because LinkedIn is the number one place for you to be prospecting for your MSP right now. There is literally nothing but benefits of being in LinkedIn. To save you going back and finding my advice on this in previous episodes, you’ve got kind of four Cs of LinkedIn, four Cs you should be focusing your attention on. You’ve got obviously connections, that’s building up new connections. You’ve got content, that’s posting content seven days a week. You’ve got then contact, which is messaging people. And you’ve also got comments, which is commenting on other people’s posts because that’s a great way to get exposure to their networks.

If you could find, I don’t know, 60 minutes every day to work on LinkedIn or maybe not you personally, but someone working on LinkedIn on your behalf because I’m a big fan of not doing jobs yourself, just finding other people to do those jobs and that would make a massive difference to the pool of people that you’re talking to. You have a bigger audience, you generate more leads, more of those people would turn into prospects. Right now, and I don’t see this changing for a number of years, right now, LinkedIn is the place to be.

But of course there are some interesting questions that come up about LinkedIn and I had an email a couple of weeks ago from an MSP that I’ve dealt with loads in the past. We haven’t spoken for ages. His name is Paul, great name, and he sent me this email a few months ago. He said, “Hi, Paul. Hope all is well with you. Long time no speak, but I do check your weekly updates. I have a question which you may be able to help with. We have a business development person,” which in itself is awesome, by the way, “and the business pays him to build relationships and create leads mainly via LinkedIn.” Also awesome. Paul then continues, “Recently a client of ours had one of their sales guys leave to a competitor. They went on to then poach the client and divert the funnel he’s been nurturing to the new company with some success.”

So this is a client of the MSP, so it’s an ordinary business and one of their sales guys left, went to a competitor and has then been trying to poach the clients. You with me on this so far? So he had a contract saying he could not approach any clients, but there was nothing about potential clients. Plus technically he was not approaching them. He was simply posting on his personal LinkedIn. The argument was that the previous business paid for his time to nurture those contacts. And of course all of that time he’s now invested, is now benefiting a competitor.

“The debate I currently have is that with our new business development person, do we create a new LinkedIn account that is linked only to our business, our business email, et cetera. And when that person leaves, we can cancel that account or at least disable access. That means if existing clients or potentials are approached using a different profile, it’s a breach of that contract and more provable. I wanted to get your thoughts and maybe this will be a good talking point for one of your weekly podcasts.” Well, yes it is, Paul, because doing it right now. So I have a very clear opinion on this and we had that email conversation. I think you can guess where I’m going to go with this.

Have a separate LinkedIn profile for any salesperson you have working for you. So someone comes to work for you, if they’re going to use LinkedIn as a tool, they should either be using your LinkedIn, so I’m assuming you’re the business owner or the business manager. They should either have access to your LinkedIn, so all the next… Let’s say, they work for you for three years, then they go somewhere else. For the next three years they’re spending their time building up your connections, building up your audience, building up your relationships with these people to generate leads for you from your own LinkedIn. Yes, they’re not quite using your tone of voice, but it is a risk worth taking. So that’s one approach.

Or the other approach is exactly as the other Paul suggested, which is to set them up their own company LinkedIn account. So they would have two LinkedIns, they’d have their own personal private LinkedIn and then they’d have the LinkedIn that you have put together for them. That is the right approach to do this. Go and get them their own LinkedIn. The number of reasons why, the main benefit being, if they do spend three years building up an audience for you, they can’t take that across the road. It doesn’t belong to them.

In fact, how much easier to just cut their access to that LinkedIn? No one wants to be worrying about contracts and, “You did this and you did that and I’m going to sue you,” because it’s very hard to sue an ex-member of staff who goes to work for someone else anyway. You just don’t want the hassle of that. You really don’t. But what you do want, which is much easier, is very simply set them up their own LinkedIn. It might be a bit of extra hassle, it might be a faff, but it really is worth it just to protect your business in the long run.

Here’s this week’s clever idea.

So you must have experienced this at some point in your life. You’ve injured yourself or maybe even worse, one of your kids has been injured or isn’t well in some way. It’s horrible, but we’ve all been there and you end up in hospital, you end up in what I guess in the US you call the emergency room. Here we call it A&E for accident and emergency and you end up waiting. In fact, you end up waiting sort of three or four hours just to see a proper doctor to be assessed, let alone the treatment happening. It’s an awful thing, isn’t it? Because in your world right now you’re ill or your child is ill or whoever’s ill, and as far as you’re concerned, that’s the most important thing and the hospital should be dropping everything and every single human being in that hospital should be there right now to deal with that.

Of course what we don’t see is the fact that they’re probably dealing with someone who, I don’t know, had a heart attack or been in a car crash or something like that. Hospitals, doctors, the whole medical world is very good at this process called triage. And I’ve got here sort of a basic triage that medical personnel will do and you’ve got, I’m sure there are many different systems they use, but this basic one that I found here on Google, so it must be correct, this has a five level triage where you’ve got level five, non-urgent injury or non-urgent illness, needs treatment when time permits. So level five is the least urgent going up to level four, which is semi-urgent but not life-threatening. Level three is urgent but not life-threatening. I guess that’s like a child that’s broken an arm.

Certainly when my daughter jumped off a swing when she was up at the top, clever thing to do, and fractured her wrist, that was a few years ago, the triage nurse was very honest and said, “Look, this is urgent, but it’s not life-threatening. It’s urgent because she’s in pain, it’s urgent because we need to set the wrist, but it’s not life-threatening. She won’t die if we don’t deal with this. She didn’t say those words, but that was essentially what she meant. Then you go to level two, emergency, could soon become life-threatening, as in they’re going to destabilize quickly. And then you’ve got level one, which is immediate and life-threatening. And I think as difficult as it is when we’re in that situation, we understand that there are people in a worse situation than us.

Unfortunately, the same principle is applied to tech support. When someone’s printer doesn’t work and they’re not printing anything of importance, it’s just a thing they need to print and the printer won’t work, to that person, that’s the most important thing in the world. And they want you and every single other person who works at your MSP to drop everything and to get on that right now because it’s the most urgent thing. It’s no different. And I’m sure that you do some form of triage. Certainly if you are a busy business you will have to do some form of triage, but maybe you get kind of annoyed and frustrated with your technicians when they don’t triage very well.

Now again, obviously I’m not a technician. I’ve never run an MSP, this of course being an advantage, not a disadvantage, because I’m not caught up in these kind of things in my mind. But I did another Google search. I’ve been operating the Google machine today and I found there’s number of different ways that you can triage tickets, but here’s one which is based on the severity and impact matrix and it’s not as simple as that five level one that we were just looking at. But, for example, if you look at the severity, is the entire company affected, are large groups of users affected, or is it small groups or just the individual that’s affected? That’s the severity. And then of course you’ve got the impact. You’ve got from sort of more of an irritation than a stoppage to business is degraded, but there’s a work around, major business processes are stopped. And you can have different levels for the different triage there.

I think the important thing though, and by the way, I’d love to know your triage system just because I’m interested in these kind of things. So do drop me an email, hello@paulgreensmspmarketing.com. But I think whatever triage system you use in your business, do you have moments, times where you look at a ticket and you think, “Yeah, that’s not being triaged properly. My technicians didn’t do a great job at triaging this.” Maybe your issue is that they placed something too high up in the priority list. My printer’s not working, we’re just trying to print off the weekly report. Kind of a low impact item, isn’t it? Well, if the technicians jump on that or if they have the shiny new ticket problem of new ticket, jump on it, new ticket, jump on it, new ticket, jump on it. Oh, we’ve got 32 open tickets from today for our four clients. I can see that that would be a major issue.

One of the things that some MSPs I speak to do to help their technicians triage better is to do a weekly ticket review. Sometimes this is a sort of lunch and pizza thing. Sometimes this is an end of the day thing, but you do whatever works best for you. But you have a little huddle, you and your technicians, and you pull some tickets at random. So the temptation is for you to target tickets. You know that that ticket that came in on Wednesday afternoon from your whale client wasn’t looked after well, and I guess you may choose to do that, but it’s fairer, I think, just to pull some at random.

Let’s say you’ve done 100 tickets this week. Do a random number generator, have it up on a screen, put in one to 100 or whatever the ticket numbers are. Boom, it comes up with number 58, great. You grab that ticket and you look at it and as a team… You agree the rules before. You say, “Look, if this was you that triaged this, no one’s going to get fired. No one’s getting in trouble. This is not a finger pointing blame exercise. This is all of us getting better and all of us learning triage.” And you pull a ticket out and you ask the questions, you run it through the triage system.

I mean, you can take this approach to anything. If you systemize anything in your MSP, to make those systems work well, you’ve got to take people through the systems on a regular basis and certainly ticket triaging, if you want… You may set a series of rules, and to you it’s very obvious that they’re done that way. But to your technicians, it may not be so obvious and each of your technicians may have a very different interpretation of what you think those very clear rules are. The only way that you can sort of look at that and see what their interpretations are is either by doing one-on-one coaching with them or some kind of fun end of the week ticket triage review. If you do try this, do let me know because I’d love to know if it has the impact on your business that it’s had on many others. My email address, again, is hello@paulgreensmspmarketing.com.

Paul’s blatant plug.

Stop. Don’t go on YouTube, don’t watch those cute cat videos. Don’t watch those very interesting videos where someone takes a song that’s been a remix of 20 other songs and shows you where the clips have come from. It’s actually my favorite kind of video that is. Don’t waste your time on YouTube with all of this nonsense. Spend your time, invest your time on YouTube, learning how to grow your MSP. We have a YouTube channel and it is stuffed full of useful videos that are all for you. They’re to help you get more new clients and sell more to your existing clients. Go to youtube.com/mspmarketing.

The big interview.

Hi, I’m Merit Kahn and I work with people who sell something complex, creative or custom, and they need to be really succinct and powerful with their language.

Sells something complex. What was it? Complicated, complex and custom. Who do I know that sells stuff like that? Oh, hang on. All MSPs. Yes, exactly.

Yes, exactly.

That’s what makes you the perfect guest for us. So thank you very much for joining us on this week’s podcast, Merit. So tell us before we talk about how to sell complex and complicated things in a way that ordinary people can understand, which is managed services, tell us a little bit about you. What’s your background and what gets you to this point in your life?

My background was business development. Radio advertising sales was how I started my career. And then I began my own sales management training, coaching consulting practice. And what I somehow gravitated to was people that were in very technical businesses. So I’ve ended up working with a lot of engineers and technology professionals and MSPs, so people who are really skilled in an area, in a particular discipline and then they have to talk to other people who may or may not have that level of knowledge and really transfer to them why they would want to use their services, why they need them even more than they thought.

Somehow I just became known in those circles because my brand of training and coaching is not pushy or aggressive. In fact, my company is called SELLect Sales Development and we spell it S-E-L-L-E-C-T, not because we don’t know how to spell the word select, Paul, but because we really want people to stop selling and we really want you to get selected. We want people to recognize your expertise because of the good questions that you ask that help them think deeper about their situation so that they recognize that you’re an expert, that they really need you on their team and they don’t want to go to anyone else.

Yes, yes. And that’s exactly the kind of sale that you want because obviously most MSPs enjoy insane retention, but we need to encourage that from the start. And being a hard pushy salesperson is not the way to do that. There’s a lot of talk of partnerships within the channel, and the only way to have a true partnership is to do that right from the beginning. And I love that idea of being selected rather than being the salesperson. Interestingly, you say you used to work in radio sales. I used to work in radio programming.

There you go.

I was the UK equivalent of the person who said, “No, Merit, you can’t do that.” Which I know radio salespeople absolutely hate, so I apologize for that. It’s funny how there are completely different sides of radio depending on which side that you are sitting.

Anyway, so what is it about, I mean, look, we talk about complicated and complex sales. The vast majority of MSPs who end up with their own business and go out selling never wanted to do that in the first place. They wanted their own business, sure, and they wanted to look after clients and protect them from themselves, but they never intended to become salespeople and they’ve inadvertently become salespeople in one of the most difficult potential sales arenas. What is it about complex and complex… Complex and complicated, I can’t even say it, there’s too many Cs in there. What is it about difficult things to deliver that makes them so hard to sell?

Well, first of all, you nailed it. I mean, the thing is, when you’re good at what you do, you suddenly look around and go, why am I doing it for this other guy? I should just open up my own business. I’m the best at doing this. And so you open up your own business and what you don’t realize is it’s no longer good enough to be good at what you do. That’s the ticket to entry. Now you have to be great at marketing and sales because otherwise the guy down the hall is going to get the business that you might be better at delivering, but he’s better at sales and marketing.

And then it doesn’t matter that you’re the best in the field, you’re not going to be successful. So that’s the rub. That’s where a lot of times people who are really good at what they do sometimes end up going out of business and it’s not because they’re not highly skilled, it’s because they haven’t had the luxury of putting the time and effort into getting good at sales and marketing because they’ve been getting good at what they do. So that’s the first piece.

The second piece is what is it about complex and custom and creative? Well, because there’s a very big difference between a sale that you make where it’s, “Click here, buy now,” and it’s more of a transaction. You don’t need a coach or a consultant or a trainer to help you sell something that’s click here, buy now. That should be very easy. But if you’re selling something complex, creative or custom, it requires a consultation. It requires that you know how to turn your expertise into the right questions that help people understand that you are an expert, that they do need to work with you. That’s the distinction. That’s a science, but it’s also a bit of an art. And it’s not that difficult.

There are definitely steps and there’s a process. I teach a framework so that people can understand when to use their expertise, when to drop that in, because if you push it too soon in the process, it’s overwhelming for people. And that’s probably the biggest danger that I see with MSPs and other types of technically skilled people is they think they want to dazzle someone with their brilliance and all the stuff that they know, but that’s the part that would make somebody else overwhelmed and that can actually prolong the sales process, which is exactly what you don’t want to do.

Yes, exactly. I 100% agree with you that selling is not about showing how clever you are, your accreditations, your qualifications, your capabilities, it’s completely an emotional thing. And the more you talk about technical stuff, the quicker you lose your audience. You were saying earlier about how technical people often struggle to, or they go out of business because they struggle to sell. I think what has saved the vast majority of MSPs who are going through that process in the early days learning how to sell is monthly recurring revenue. And it’s one of the things that has changed this industry for good. It’s created genuine partnerships, it’s allowed the cash flow to be there for businesses while they’re trying to figure out how do we do this, how do we deliver, how do we sell? And it’s absolutely been a lifesaver.

Now you mentioned your framework, which is the Open for Business Framework. Take us through what that framework is and how it puts in place, something to allow MSPs to sort of relax into their consultative selling.

So the Open for Business Framework is really something that developed over the last 20 plus years that I’ve been working with professionals who sell custom, creative and complex things because there’s a very big difference between being open for business in the sense of you’re available to conduct a transaction. You have open business hours, you’re available for the conversation, that’s one thing. But when you’re truly open for business in a sense of it being more of a mindset, it’s the way you move in the world, it’s the way that everything about how you interact with people and present your business really is inviting, it allows people to freely select to work with you. That’s a very different thing than just being available to do a transaction.

So that’s kind of the overarching theme of why I call it the Open for Business Framework. And there’s three parts to it. There’s mindset, what you think, there’s the mechanics, what you say, and then there’s being in motion, that’s what you do. So if you think of mindset, a lot of times when I’m doing a keynote for a large conference or something like that, I’ll ask the group, “What do you think is the most important, mindset, mechanics or motion?” And usually there’ll be somebody in the room that says, “All three of them. They’re all three important.” Most people agree that mindset is the number one thing. That’s generally what I see is people really appreciate that.

I was listening to a previous episode where you were talking about the secret from that book from 20 years ago or the movie, and you and I share a common philosophy. I don’t think the law of attraction means you’re thinking about chocolate cake and then chocolate cake shows up at your doorstep. I think it means, you want to manifest a piece of chocolate cake. And then you think to yourself, well, how can I do that? Well, I might have to drive to the grocery store and buy the chocolate cake mix and then go and make the cake. There’s stuff to do.

So my philosophy is that when you look at mindset, there’s really three different parts of that. There’s your internal mind, what you say to yourself, there’s your behavioral mind, that’s what your actions say to other people. And then there’s your emotional mind and that’s how well you understand your own emotions and the impact you have on other people. And so that gives you three different ways to start to work on shifting your mindset. And it doesn’t have to be a big giant shift, but it may be one thing that you uncover like, “Oh, I think…” I’m just making up numbers here, and we’ll use the American Dollar if you’ll forgive me and let me do that because I can’t do the conversion in my head.

But let’s say you grew up thinking $100,000 was a lot of money, and maybe it was to you when you were just out of university, but then you have a family and now you want a luxury vacation or a house in Portugal or something. And now you need to adjust your thinking about what that is, otherwise you’re going to line up your life, your lifestyle and your business around a belief that you came up with in your earlier years that doesn’t match the lifestyle that you have mapped out on your vision board. So that’s a little bit about mindset. Does that make sense?

That one makes perfect sense. Yes, it really does. And that also explains why no matter how much you earn, you always need more. I’m sure billionaires with amazing personal income and cashflow still have exactly the same thing of, “If only I had another 200 million a month, I could get the 600-foot yacht instead of the 500-foot yacht.”

That’s so funny.

You never run out of things to upgrade to.

I have a mentor and he once told me, he’s like, “There’s always a bigger boat. Someone’s always got a bigger boat. You’re always going to want the bigger boat.”

Space rockets. That’s the new thing, isn’t it? I was just thinking of Jeff Bezos who has the biggest personal boat or yacht, and I’m thinking, how do you up that? That’s right, you build an entire space complex and you fire rockets into space.

Obviously.

There’s always something else to do.

So that’s mindset. The second part of the framework is mechanics. And if you think of mechanics is the nuts and bolts of what you say, it’s really your skills. So for MSPs, it’s going to be your technical skills, all the things that you know to do the work. But when you think about it from an owner perspective, it’s also your communication skills and your sales skills. And one of the things that I’m always talking about, because generally I’m speaking to a large audience that’s very mixed in terms of the types of roles that they play within an organization, and so questions are really something universal that we could all get better at.

The main message there is don’t act as if you have all the answers to every single problem, like you’ve got the solution for everything. Ask as if you really want to understand what is the right solution. So don’t act as if, ask as if. And there’s different things like that when I teach the mechanics of communications or selling or whatever it is to help people really use what they’ve learned in ways that help other people gravitate toward them. So that’s the mechanics part.

And then motion is pretty simple. It’s really about just setting a goal and then tracking and measuring the actual behaviors that you’re doing to reach the goal. But it’s also about having a plan to get back up when Murphy’s law kicks in and things don’t go as planned and you’re not going to get every deal. You’re going to face rejection. You have to have a strategy to get back in the game before all of that happens, otherwise it takes you too long to get back in and you start to internalize it. And then that shifts your mindset. And then it doesn’t matter how well your mechanics are or what you’re saying, because now you’ve sabotaged yourself.

And that’s why all three of those pieces are integral together because you can’t just throw a lot of stuff against the wall. You’re going to be exhausted. You can’t just try to manifest the business, you’ve got to be in action. You can’t just know what to say and not be out there talking to people or you can’t know what to say and have a sabotaging mindset. You’ve got to work on all three of those, and that’s why the framework works together to really help someone build the right business.

Yes, that makes perfect sense. I’m going to be one of those annoying podcast interviewers that says, “Hey, thanks very much for that framework, which is the result of your lifetime’s work. Now, can you give us one thing that…” Merit, can you give us something that if you could get every MSP to do this, you know it would improve their sales apart from implementing your framework of course, but one thing from your experience that non-professional salespeople don’t do enough or don’t do well enough?

I would say the one piece of advice I got when I was early in my career was learn everything you can about other people. And the idea there was if I could understand your buying motives, then I could speak to that. And I think that was good advice, but it really only got me to a certain point. And what I learned probably later in my career than I would’ve liked was that the advice was just a little bit off. And the better thing is to learn everything that you can about yourself because of course you’re going to be in every communication that you have with everybody else. So it is helpful and useful to understand other people’s behavioral styles. But if you do that without first understanding as much as you can about how you are wired, then you’re doing yourself a disservice.

So I would say the most impactful thing that I’ve found over the course of my career is to really understand your emotional mind. Because buying is absolutely an emotional process and if you’re trying to impact the buying cycle from strictly an intellectual perspective, which most MSPs are wired to do, you’re missing out on a really big reason that people are going to finally pull the trigger. Because from MSPs I’ve worked with, those are long-term contracts. You’ve got two opportunities. You either catch someone right when their contract is about to end before they renew, and you’ve got to get them to be open to making a shift to working with you, or you’ve got to catch them at a time when they’re open to making a change, even though they’re in the contract, they might have to wait until it is complete, but you’ve got to start to build that relationship and find out what’s not perfect yet in that relationship so that you can then present yourself as an opportunity to be selected as somebody who can solve a problem that’s not currently being solved.

So you’ve got only a couple of opportunities, and that’s why if you understand how you’re wired, do you have impulse control or are you going to blurt out the answers too soon? Are you optimistic or do you see the glass is always half empty? There are certain things we can assess in your own emotional mind that once we know what that pattern looks like, then you can learn to strengthen that from the inside out. And every single one of your communications is going to be more effective because you have a better understanding of yourself.

Yes. That makes perfect sense. Merit, tell us a little bit more about your business. So what do you actually do to help MSPs and what’s the best way for us to get in touch with you?

The best way to think of me is I’m like the JumpStart Girl. So you’re sitting there, you’ve got a decent business, everything’s fine, you’re making money, but you want to amp it up. And so you want a fresh set of prospects, you want a fresh way of communicating with them. You want to make sure you’re asking the right questions. That’s a good time to think of me. Other scenarios would be, let’s say, you’re newer to the business, or you’re newer to the sales and business development aspect of it. That’s a great time to use me.

So I have a JumpStart program that I developed, and it’s really 10 things that every highly technical, skilled professional needs to know and be able to do and have in place to really jumpstart sales in the next 90 days. And it’s a finite program, but it’s also, it’s one on one or it’s a small group. So it’s not an online course, do it yourself. You get me, you get experienced eyes to make sure that the way that you’re introducing who you are and what you do really makes a difference, will really make an impact. And you’ll learn all the things that you need to learn about how you’re wired and all of that. It’s a pretty complete process. And at the end of it, you have 100 prospects that you know that you’re going to go after and you have a good campaign to do so.

The best way to get ahold of me is really my website. That’s the hub of all things. And it’s my name, meritkahn.com. There’s a Let’s Talk button. So don’t be afraid, click the Let’s Talk button. Book some time on my calendar. Let’s have a conversation. That’s the best way to do it.

Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. This week’s recommended book.

Hi, I’m Steve Buzogany from The Appreciation Advocate. The book I recommend is Work by Referral by Brian Buffini. The reason I recommend this book is because it talks about working by referral versus word of mouth advertising, which is a passive way of generating referrals, whereas working by referral is a more active, intentional, purposeful way of actually building relationships and getting more income because of it.

Coming up next week.

Hello, I’m Jacob Prime. I’m the CEO and Co-founder of Ploy, and your client staff will be signing up to SaaS applications that they’re not aware of, and I can help you find those risks and make money on the way.

Hit subscribe right now on whichever platform you love listening to podcasts or even watching them on YouTube. And that way you’ll never miss an episode because on top of that interview next week, we are also looking at an amazing idea to really bring every proposal and, in fact, every communication with a prospect or a client dramatically and colorfully to life. Join me next Tuesday and have a very profitable week in your MSP.

Made in the UK for MSPs around the world. Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast.