Episode 205: A smart LinkedIn MSP marketing trick

NB this transcription has been generated by an AI tool and provided as-is.

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Fresh every Tuesday for MSPs around the world. Around the world. This paul paul. Paul Greens MSP.

[00:00:08] Speaker B: Marketing podcast are rolling right into episode 205. Welcome to the show. Here’s what’s in store for you this week.

[00:00:16] Speaker C: Hi, I’m Jake Gregorich, and I’m going to talk about what the biggest challenge is in the MSP industry, which in my opinion, is new logo growth and how to address those challenges to help grow your MSP business.

[00:00:28] Speaker B: And Jake will be joining me later on in the show. That is a fascinating interview. We’re also going to be talking about something called Lead Magnets. I’ll explain exactly what they are and how you can combine them with LinkedIn messaging to generate new prospects.

[00:00:44] Speaker A: Paul Green’s, MSP Marketing Podcast now this.

[00:00:49] Speaker B: First bit of the podcast goes very nicely with something I was talking about last week. If you haven’t yet listened to Episode 204, do consider spinning back and having a quick listen to that. Because I was talking about how if you’re going to grow your business and throw yourself into working on the business more than you work in it, it’s much more powerful to do that in little chunks every day, 60 to 90 minutes every day, rather than just put a big single day aside because it’s too easy to lose that entire day. What we’re going to talk about today is a natural extension of that. And it is about the cadence of your marketing tasks, of your business growth tasks, and in fact, anything that’s important to you, it needs a regular cadence. We have a weekly marketing system. I’ve talked about it on the podcast before. It’s something we give to our MSP Marketing Edge members, and we recommend that they do this system every single week. So they publish a blog and a video on their website every week. Then they send an email, which drives traffic back to that blog. Then they publish a social media post, which drives traffic back to their blog again. And then they use the blog as a LinkedIn newsletter. By the way, we give them all of those materials and plenty of support to do that. But can you see the cadence of that? There’s a set of activities there, many or most of which can be automated, which just need to be done on a weekly basis. That’s why we call it the weekly marketing system. And actually, if you look at all of your marketing, I don’t believe at all in campaigns. I think campaigns, they’re one off campaigns. I mean, they have their place, they have their purpose, and they are things I recommend to MSPs. But if the only marketing you do is campaigns, that’s not the right marketing for you. For most MSPs that are doing very low levels of marketing, getting into a regular system, a regular cadence is so much more powerful. You want to be doing daily activities, weekly activities and monthly activities. And I’m going to suggest some of those activities to you in a second. Why do you want to get into that cadence? Because one of the things that makes marketing an MSP so difficult is the fact you’ve got to get your timing right. It takes so long for a lead, for a prospect to get to the point where they’re so fed up of either doing their technology themselves or their incumbent MSP that they are actually willing, ready, willing and able to have a conversation with someone new which might include you. In fact, we want it to include you. So they can put up with a bad MSP with a bad relationship for years and years and years and then suddenly they’ll just wake up one morning and they’ll think, you know what? I’ve had enough. I’m fed up of our technology being behind. I’m fed up that they never seem to pick up the phone. I’m fed up of the service levels dropping. People leave MSPs for all these reasons. It’s all emotional, perceptual reasons. But they wake up one morning and right, it’s time. I’m going to do it. This is the day we’re going to go and talk and think about switching to a new provider. And the challenge for you is being in front of them on that day. If you do some marketing on a Monday and Monday is not the day they’re ready, that’s fine. The marketing is done, you move on. You do some marketing on Tuesday and Tuesday is not quite the day they’re ready either. That’s fine, we move on. On Wednesday, you take a break from the marketing. The problem is that Wednesday morning was the morning they woke up and they were ready to take some action, but you didn’t do any marketing to them and they don’t remember you and they don’t remember your brand. And they don’t remember the company name because that kind of stuff does not stay top of mind for the average human being unless we’re talking the brands that have spent billions of pounds and dollars over the years making themselves brands that are top of mind. Like Coca Cola, like Ford, like Ferrari, like Apple, like Microsoft, etc. Etc. Your MSP is ever, ever going to be in that position and you don’t want it to. It’s far too difficult. So what you can do instead is get into a regular cadence. Now, these tasks I’m just about to talk about you personally, assuming you are the owner or the manager of the MSP, because that’s who this podcast is for. Although everyone is welcome to listen to it. Of course, assuming you are the owner or manager of the MSP, you personally should not be doing these tasks on a regular basis. There are other people who can do these tasks for you and that includes virtual assistants, that includes members of your own team. It includes well, there’s plenty of people out there who can implement stuff because the jobs I’m about to give you the cadence I’m about to suggest. None of it’s difficult. Frankly, it really isn’t difficult. And I know I say that as a marketing person, but I’ve been doing this for a number of years. I’ve worked with a lot of MSPs to do it. The hardest thing turns out to be making it happen on a regular basis. So let’s look at some daily, weekly and monthly tasks that you would set up as a system within your MSP. The daily ones are pretty simple. I’ve mentioned some of them already. Social media, for example. So if we take LinkedIn and we assume that LinkedIn is an incredibly powerful platform, it’s one of the main core audiences you should be building, then on a daily basis, you should be attempting to connect to more people. In fact, every day, attempt to connect with ten more people on LinkedIn. Only one or two of them will accept that connection. That’s all right. That’ll do. You’re building your database by two people a day. So attempt ten connections a day and post a piece of content onto LinkedIn every day. Those are just some basic daily tasks that you can do. There something else that you can do on a weekly basis is send out educational emails. So if you’ve got an email database once a week, you send them out an educational email. Remember how I mentioned earlier that a cool thing is to put a blog and a video on your website? And then the email, when people click for more details, it drives them back. Basically, they click on it and it opens your website. That’s a very, very smart, integrated way to do it. But that’s just one example of a weekly task that you can set yourself. And then there’s a monthly one, which is to send them printed newsletter. I love printed newsletters. Anything physical has, like, ten times the marketing power of digital stuff. Because digital is relatively so easy and it’s relatively so low cost, it just has so much power if you can get printed stuff into people’s hands. So there are just a few things, there are many more things that you could add in. But could you see the power of just setting up a system within your MSP that on a daily, weekly, monthly basis, you’re just powering this stuff out that has more power and makes it so much more likely that you’re going to be there in front of the right person at exactly the right time than if you just do a series of one off events.

[00:07:28] Speaker A: Here’s this week’s. Clever idea.

[00:07:31] Speaker B: I want to take two completely separate marketing concepts and put them together to create something new. And it’s a way for you to take a new connection on LinkedIn and turn them a little bit faster into a prospect. Let me tell you what the two things are, and I will explain what they are as well. The first is something called a lead magnet, and the second is LinkedIn messaging. You know all about that one. So let’s talk about lead magnets. What is a lead magnet? Well, you may have heard the term banded around. If you’ve ever read anything about marketing on the Internet, and particularly internet style marketing, you’ll have heard of lead magnets. I used to call them ethical bribes back in the day. It’s the same thing. It’s something that you give to someone in return for something. So traditionally, a lead magnet would be something, let’s say something you put onto your website and you said to people, hey, you can get this. You just got to fill in your email address and we’ll give it to you. And that still has a value within business. In fact, we have a great lead magnet, which we use on our website. If you go.

[00:08:34] Speaker C: Paul. Paul.

[00:08:35] Speaker B: Paul. Paul Greens, MSP Marketing Podcast. Paul Greens, MSP Marketing Podcast. There’s a bit in there. I think it’s on the homepage. You can look for a free magazine. So our lead magnet is a physical free magazine which will post to you. We’ll actually send you a physical copy if you’re in the UK or the US. Anyway. The rest of the world, it’s just a PDF, but that’s a lead magnet and we get, I don’t know, five to ten MSPs a week. So not massive numbers, but a constant trickle of people filling in their contact details and joining my email list through filling in that form. So that’s an example of what a lead magnet actually is. Now, I don’t recommend it to most MSPs just because it’s hard work. You think about the amount of time and effort and expense that we have to go through in our business. Just know we’ve had to write that magazine, design it, we have it printed, we have a fulfillment center in the UK and in the US. And obviously there’s a cost to that. I’m happy to pay that cost to start a relationship with you, because obviously, if you join my email list, then we can start talking about other things. And you never know, you may go on to spend some money with me at some point, or not, it makes no difference to me whatsoever. But the point is that for most MSPs, it’s kind of overkill until you start using lead magnets in a very targeted way. And this is where LinkedIn can come in. Now, the beauty of LinkedIn is you can message your connections and know 100% that your message will be delivered. So people don’t often log into LinkedIn. If you go into LinkedIn more than like once or twice a month, or once or twice a week, then you’re unusual. Many people log into LinkedIn now and again and pick up their messages. It’s not like email, is it? In fact, LinkedIn messaging is almost the opposite of email. With email, you guarantee that they’re reading it on a regular basis, but you can’t guarantee the deliverability. And LinkedIn the complete opposite. We have an opportunity with LinkedIn to use lead magnets to warm up, to accelerate the relationships with certain types of people. And actually, you can do it across a range of verticals. Let me give you an example. And we’ll use for this a CPA or an accountant. It’s what we call them here in the UK. Elsewhere. They’re called CPAs. Does that sound for Certified or Chartered Professional Accountant or something like that? Write to the usual address and let me know. I think it’s something like that. So let’s imagine that you want to do business with CPAs. You like the idea of CPAs. You like the idea that they’re regulated. That the fact that the computer, the technology is mission critical. And you like the fact that they’re b to b services and it’s a fairly standardized stack that you can use with them. So you want more of them. So you go onto LinkedIn and you look for as many CPAs, particularly managing partners or owners of businesses, as you can in your area and in the surrounding areas, and you connect to them on LinkedIn. Now, it might be that you have a general business, like many MSPs, so you will accept pretty much any business type that comes in. But actually, right now, CPAs is where your marketing focus is at. So let’s say you connect to well, you do some connection requests. We were just talking about it, weren’t we, in the last bit? You make ten connection requests a day to CPAs and two or three will connect to you. One pro tip, actually, if at the point you are going after a specific vertical, change the description in your LinkedIn to match that vertical. So let’s say just this week you were targeting CPAs, you would change in the description in your LinkedIn to say, I’m a technology expert working with accountants in the so and so area, in your area. And the next week, when you’re going after lawyers, you change it to lawyers. I know that’s a little bit sneaky and it’s not the most transparent thing to do, but something that you could do. You’ll get more connection requests or you get more people accepting your connection request when you do that, because they’ll look at it and perceive that you are more relevant to them. Something that seems more relevant to us is something that’s more attractive to us. And that’s one thing that you can do. As I say, it’s not utterly ethical and transparent, but it’s something you can do. So let’s say you’re connecting to more CPAs this week, and then you can drop them a message and in the message, you can get them to engage with you by offering them something in return for engagement. So this is half the battle on LinkedIn, is getting people to engage with you. So if we can message them and get them to do something, that’s a good thing. I mean, in terms of when you email people, if you can email people and get them to engage, that’s great for deliverability. And just getting them to respond to your emails on LinkedIn, there’s no algorithmic well, there’s little algorithmic benefit actually thinking about it. There’s bound to be some algorithmic benefit of them engaging with you. But primarily we want them to engage with you because it could lead onto a sales opportunity. So imagine you’ve connected to a CPA and then you email them, sorry, no you don’t. You message them on LinkedIn and you say to them, hey, thank you very much for connecting. I have a guide here which I’ve put together for accountants in geographical area, it’s called. And then you pick some kind of attractive title and it might be something people are more motivated by the fear of loss than they are the opportunity to gain. So it might be something like the five ways that technology slows down accountants and costs them valuable fees. Something like that. So you might say to them, look, we’ve put this guide together. Would you like me to send you a copy? Question mark, and that’s it. And so you don’t send it to them. There’s no link for them to download it as a PDF. You don’t add it as an attachment or anything like that. You literally just say to them, hey, thanks for connecting, I’ve written this guide. Would you like me to send you a copy? And what we’re trying to do is to get your new connections, those very focused connections, to hit reply at some point. It might be now, it might be tomorrow, it might be next week, it might be three months down the line. It depends how quickly they a, how quickly they review their LinkedIn messages, but B, also how often they log into LinkedIn. So what we are trying to get them to do is to hit reply and go, yes please, or could you post me a copy or can you email it to me? Or yes, I’d love a PDF or whatever. And the beauty of that is they are engaging with you. Now, this doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t mean they’re going to go and buy with you, but there is some engagement, it’s a very low level engagement, but it’s there. And actually what you could do is you could send them that PDF and quite rightfully then two days later, you could phone them up, try to get through their gatekeeper and just say, hey, it’s Paul here. I spoke to you a couple of days ago on LinkedIn. Do you remember I was offering you that guide on the Seven ways you could just wanted to double check that you got it in LinkedIn. And essentially what we are doing by sending them that lead magnet through LinkedIn or offering it to them and then sending it to them. We are creating an opportunity to phone them and the phone is where the magic really happens. Now, if you send them the message and they don’t respond to it, you’ve still got an opportunity to phone them, right, because they haven’t responded to the message. So you could just phone them. In fact, you’ve got a reason to get past the gatekeeper as well. Oh, hi. Can I speak to Dave? He’s not in right now or no, hang on, that wouldn’t help. Sorry, he’s busy right now. Can I help? Yeah, actually, my name’s Paul and I’ve been chatting to him on LinkedIn. Simple as that. It doesn’t matter that Dave hasn’t actually seen the conversation yet. We’re giving ourselves reason to phone people here. So let’s recap what we’re doing here. So we’re reconnecting to, or we’re connecting to people on LinkedIn within a specific vertical. That’s important. Has to be a vertical. Then we’re offering them a lead magnet that seems to be about their business.

This is why the vertical is so important. And you can do many different verticals in your area. So you could do CPAs this week, lawyers next week, manufacturers the week after. It doesn’t really matter as long as the guide the lead magnet, the thing you’re offering seems relevant to them. If it doesn’t seem relevant, you won’t get much of a response to this, but an accountant will look at this and think, oh, I would quite like to read that. It will trigger them to take more action. So we’re offering them the lead magnet, then we’re sending it out to them and then we’re using that as an opportunity to follow them up by phone. This is very, very exciting and actually relatively easy to do. And listen, if you would like some support putting this together, I can’t help you on a one on one basis, but I’m happy if you get stuck with this to just have a chat with you on email. Please do drop me an email and let me know how you get on with it. My email address is hello@paulgreensmsmarketing.com, Paul’s.

[00:17:03] Speaker A: Paul’s. Blatant Plug.

[00:17:04] Speaker B: Blatant Plug. If you wanted more direct support from me, then please have a look at my core service. It’s called the MSP Marketing Edge. For just $129 a month, or 99 pounds a month, if you’re in the UK, then we give you everything that you need to market your MSP. All the tools, all the content, and a ton of help from me as well. I am there every single day helping our 700 members around the world. It is an absolute delight to do so and I know loads of them listen to this podcast as well. So thank you. If you are a member, if you’re not yet a member, here’s the thing. We only work with one MSP per area, which is important, so there’s no kind of clash. And we’ve got a self service tool for you to find out if your area is available. So just MSP Marketing Edge, doesn’t matter which country you’re in, you can self service and double check to see if your area is still available. MSP marketing.

[00:18:04] Speaker C: Edge. I’m Jake Gregorich. I work with Evergreen Services Group and Lyra Technology Partners as a vice president of Growth.

[00:18:11] Speaker B: Oh, what a great job title. Vice President of Growth. Although, talk about pressure because everyone wants to grow their business and your company has literally got someone in that role and that’s you doing that. So thank you very much for joining us, Jake. I know you are going to blow some minds today as we talk about the hardest challenge for every MSP around the world, and that is bringing on brand new clients. Before we start talking about that, let’s set some really important context because you are a real expert at doing this, because you’ve been doing it for a number of years. Tell us about your career and how you’ve got to where you are now.

[00:18:45] Speaker C: Yeah, I think what’s most important, Paul, is that we coordinated before this and made sure that we were wearing matching shirts. But in terms of my background, I’ve been kind of in the MSP industry for six or seven years now, and I’ve kind of always had this competitive edge and thing that has driven me towards sales. I was actually a door to door salesman when I was in high school, and I was selling doors door to door, literally, which is an interesting combination.

After I went to college, I soon after joined a managed service provider out of Chicago, a company called Impact Networking, and they had kind of a world class sales training program. And since then, it’s kind of been thinking about the MSP industry. In that one, I’d say the quality of revenue and the deep customer relationships are just so attractive that it’s an industry I’ll never leave.

And two, just how hard it is to get qualified first appointments and close new customers. It seems uniquely challenging in this business, and I think we’ll probably get into that a little bit later. Since that company, I’ve worked inside of two MSPs. I’ve been inside a company that was acquired. I’ve been on the acquiring side doing ten plus acquisitions, now consulted to eight MSPs as an independent consultant on the sales and marketing side. And today with Liver Technology Group and Evergreen Services, I lead sales and marketing for 20 best in class MSPs. So we kind of have a family of best in class It services companies and we run them in a decentralized manner. So I should use quotes when I say lead sales and marketing, as none of those companies report to me, but I’m kind of a shared service and helping them unlock growth in their business.

[00:20:36] Speaker B: Got it. But actually what you’re doing is harder when it’s decentralized because you have to not just tell people what to do. You have to inspire the leaders of these 20 businesses that you’re working with to take action and then do the right kind of action in the right way. That must be quite a tough gig.

[00:20:51] Speaker C: Yeah, you could see it as a challenge. I kind of see it as forcing us to do business the right way, in that we have to really believe in any initiative that we’re pushing so much so that we’re able to sell our companies. They have to opt in to any program, any growth initiative that is happening at a central level. And once they opt in, we have their buy in. And so that’s kind of the right place you want to start. When you launch an initiative, it’s everyone buys into the mission.

[00:21:17] Speaker B: Yeah, no, that makes perfect sense. So let’s talk about why it’s so hard. And this is a recurring theme across this podcast. And it’s great to have a guest such as yourself repeat exactly things that hundreds of other guests have said that I’ve said myself, which is that new sales, brand new sales for MSPs is not easy. It’s one of the hardest things that you can do. What’s your definition of why this is so hard?

[00:21:40] Speaker C: Yeah, Paul, I think it comes down to really three things. It’s noisy, I’m in the US. In the US, there’s 40,000 managed service providers. If you only count MSPs with over five employees, there’s about 10,000 of them. So still a lot. And they’re all creating sales and marketing campaigns. They’re all creating content. AI is lowering the barrier to do this type of content and push it out to mass numbers of people. And so you just have a lot of noise. And that leads to kind of the second thing, which is a lot of noise with a general lack of differentiation in these companies.

It’s not all that sexy, what we do, right? It’s the plumbing of it.

If we’re doing a good job, if we install the thing correctly, we do some maintenance on it. You don’t really want to call us that’s when things are going wrong, is when you’re calling us a lot and you have a lot of issues. And so in plumbing and in managed it, we want to do a really good job up front, and then we want to do proactive maintenance. And so the client doesn’t have to think about their technology not working in their business.

That message to business owners, they understand that they need this thing, and so they don’t really want to take a meeting with several MSPs to understand what they’re doing because they kind of hear the same story, fastest response time, best people, all those kinds of things that were proactive, one fee, one monthly fee. So you have this fixed fee that you don’t have to think about it anymore. And the pitch has become kind of the same for everyone. And so that lack of differentiation really makes it difficult to get your foot in the door to even have that first conversation. And then I think the third thing is really a fundamental misunderstanding about how buyers buy. We treat everyone like they’re in the market to buy today, but in actuality, there’s 3% of our prospects are in market ready to buy. And so we have to think about treating these buckets differently and how we’re engaging with them from a sales and marketing perspective to be able to get in front of them and to sell to them properly.

I’m happy to kind of get into how I think about addressing these different areas or have an open discussion in more detail about those three areas that I think are the biggest challenge.

[00:24:09] Speaker B: Yeah, well, let’s do that. Let’s get into some detail about those because I think what I like what you’re doing here is you’re systematically breaking down what the challenges are and then we can move on to how you guys are addressing those. So yeah, jump into some more detail for us.

[00:24:23] Speaker C: I think the lack of differentiation is pretty clear, the noise is pretty clear.

Maybe where I can get into a little bit more detail is this misunderstanding of how buyers buy. I think there’s two things to address in this department. There’s one, how do we get insight into the trigger events that pull someone from the 97% of people that aren’t ready to buy today into the 3%? That’s a very insightful and useful thing to do because now we can sell to them today if we’re able to get in front of them. And then to really understand how a buyer buys, they do it in three ways. Primarily, let’s take a random prospect, a prospect that’s not in market today and some trigger event happens that could be a breach downtime, internal It turnover, change of control, failed project. They’re getting billed from their It provider and they don’t really know why. We can track those events. Maybe use some buyer intent, track some keywords, look at job boards for when they post a job, they’ve had someone that’s turned over, track LinkedIn for that kind of thing. But how they’re buying when that trigger event happens, you already need to be in there with the customer. And that’s because they’re buying from people they already know, they’re buying from people they’re referred to, or they’re buying from brands that they trust. And I think everyone inherently knows that our businesses are driven by referrals and by their own personal network. So those first two things are not all that complicated in understanding what they mean in getting more of those things. That there is some nuance certainly. But in terms of the third category of how buyers buy from brands that they trust, it’s usually someone that makes them problem aware or someone that makes them solution aware. And so this would be kind of the SaaS playbook, right? Like you have some software tool. And it solves some specific problem.

We could use AP automation, for example.

People in a business might not know that they’re three way checks with their highlighters and they have two full time resources administrators doing these three way checks to process invoices and you can show a little video making them aware of this problem and making them aware of the solution. In managed it. Because of this general lack of differentiation, things get a little bit trickier. And so how I think about this is I like to call it consulting as the tip of the spear. And so what MSPs do is we become trusted technology advisors to small to medium sized businesses. And really when I think about what are the major things hot topics of the day that we can generate one of those two buckets which is making them problem or solution aware is cybersecurity.

People are aware that there are threats but they might not be aware of the specific threats in their business. There’s personally identifiable information out there. There are dark web scans. You can use assessment or vulnerability scan tools to make people aware of what’s going on in their business. Cybersecurity questionnaires, making sure people are in compliance. These are all ways to make people aware of either a problem that they have this is the cybersecurity risk or a solution and how you’re going to help them kind of close those cyber gaps.

The second really hot topic of the day that you can use to generate some of these first appointments in doing it in a way that is in line with how buyers buy is AI. And so everyone’s thinking and talking about AI everywhere. And so can you package and productize AI or AI enablement, bring it to your small to medium sized businesses and show them how to leverage the different tools and then they view you as a trusted Technology advisor. And once you kind of achieve that status as trusted Technology Advisor, the managed It work just comes along with it. They’re like hey, I want this vCIO or I want this company in my business because I view them as strategic. We don’t even need to talk about help desk. That’s your business now. Those are I think two of the ways to get over that hump of problem and solution aware in our business. Maybe Paul, we could shift gears here into solving some of the big issues around differentiation, around becoming someone they know, becoming a referral in a more systematic way rather than just kind of going out and building relationships.

[00:29:08] Speaker B: You’re the perfect guest. I don’t even have to ask the questions. So yeah, let’s do that. I’m just going to go and have a cup of tea while you finish the interview off.

[00:29:16] Speaker C: Yeah. I apologize. I’ve been thinking about this too much for too long. So it’s a pleasure to get to talk to you and your audience here. If we think about addressing these three issues around kind of noise, lack of differentiation, and the misunderstanding of how buyers buy.

I like to think about how do we kind of specialize our business to be differentiated and cut through the noise and address some of the challenges of generating qualified first appointment activity. And I don’t like, particularly in sales and marketing, a fair fight. So I would highly recommend starting with your current accounts, understanding what originated those deals. Where do you already have traction today? If you go through and you look at your current clients, what industries they’re in, what problems they have, what verticals they have, what relationships you have to those businesses, you’re going to start identifying some trends around, like, hey. Maybe it was just a handful of people that made all these referrals and they happen to be in some industry. And we’re doing something unique to that industry and we got to uncover what it is.

I would say kind of the next step is after you identify a trend and you kind of formulate a market segment around that trend, you should look for market segments where you have ambassadors, you have some specialization already. You have current happy clients, and then people talk about the ideal customer profile or the ICP. And I think it goes a step further than the ICP in the age of noise, which is, I think, what we’re in, and I call it kind of the ideal audience profile. And that, yes, includes your ICP, but it also includes strategic partners, current clients, ambassadors, clubs, associations, peer groups, podcasts like the one we’re on, right? Like, we’re getting to talk about trends in a business, and then we get to go to our current clients or to our prospective clients, and they see us as a source of authority because we were on their industry podcast, for example. And I think about targeting all of those areas and building relationships in each of them because they’re going to lend their credibility to you, their authority to you. They’re going to make more referrals to you, and those referrals will be more powerful because you’re specialized in the market segment that you choose to address.

[00:31:40] Speaker B: Yeah, that makes perfect sense. If you don’t mind, I’m going to take us off in a slightly different direction, and I want to talk about practical. And I think with all of the interviews I do on this podcast, I always try and bring it down to a practical level of what can you do? So let’s imagine I run an MSP. You’ve just acquired me. So your business has acquired me. You’ve just flown over to the UK to get me started on the difficult process of winning more new clients. What are some of the first things? Not the things that we’ve necessarily talked about, like working out the profile of the kind of client you want to reach, but what are some of the first practical steps that you would recommend that I put into place?

[00:32:19] Speaker C: Yeah, I really do think it starts with the current account research and I would identify those trends and I would find where we are special and then at that point kind of layer in the more traditional sales and marketing tools. So once you have a tight ICP, can we leverage LinkedIn Bots, for example, to go after all of those categories that you see in your kind of audience profile of strategic partners, current clients and ambassadors? The automation as it’s layered on and amplified can be really useful. I recommend doing Voice of the Customer interviews, so again, starting with the happy customers and in those Voice of the Customer interviews, finding out what makes your relationship special and then asking for referrals in a strategic way.

To bring this down to the practical level, when I talk about asking for referrals in a strategic way, maybe I’m identifying those referrals that I want introductions to prior to the meeting I have with my client where I’m going to make the ask. And so can I use buyer intent data to find someone that is in market today that’s connected to my client and then ask specifically for an introduction to that person? The challenge with asking for referrals is that people don’t know what their network is like, if they need It services at the moment or not. So you can ask and they’ll be like, I don’t think about selling managed It services, so I don’t really know. So if you do that first legwork for them and then you ask for the referral to a specific person at a specific business with a specific problem, your chances of actually getting that referral are going to go up dramatically.

[00:34:00] Speaker B: Yeah, massively. I completely agree with that. And in terms of online presence, obviously all of the MSPs you work with, I’m guessing they all have websites, they all have your standard digital footprint, your social media accounts. What do you recommend that they do in terms of content? Because you made a very good point earlier on in the interview about noise and there’s a lot of noise out there. So do you recommend that they don’t actively do stuff and they focus more on that strategy or do you have a sort of an overall well, we need to have a presence, a strategy that you recommend?

[00:34:32] Speaker C: Yeah, I like to create a content schedule and it kind of keeps coming back to where it starts, which is with that ideal audience profile. And so we’re creating content that is specific to that profile and that’s usually like an industry specific vertical that we would go after as a market segment. And then when you create the content schedule, you’re assigning your subject matter experts within your business to either help the marketing team write the articles or actually creating a schedule to have them write the entire articles themselves.

The content becomes valuable because you get the subject matter expert to write it, and it’s about a specific person that you’re going to try to target, and then it’s, do I read an article about generically speaking, like time management, or do I read an article about time management for financial services businesses? And the more specific you kind of get, the more chance that your ideal customer is going to actually pick it up and read it and find value in it.

[00:35:39] Speaker B: Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Thank you so much for your time, and you’ve been very generous sharing with us some of the marketing strategy and advice that you disseminate to the people you’re working with. I imagine you’re always looking for MSPs to join the group. So tell me a little bit more about what makes a good MSP for you and how can we get in touch with you?

[00:35:59] Speaker C: I think our business model is kind of the antithesis to what the rest of private equity in the MSP industry does. We partner with companies, they continue to own their P L statements. We bring some of the things that big companies can do centrally to the table, like cost reductions and strategic partnerships to generate leads, but we leave them with autonomy at the local level. And so people that are good fits for us are the people that really care about their business and what happens after they exit it, because we’re going to keep their brand intact. We’re going to keep their people intact. And so if you deeply care about your kind of customer, after you leave your business, after you leave the MSP world and go off on your yacht or wherever you’re going to go, we’re going to kind of create a permanent home for your company.

[00:36:46] Speaker B: That does sound like a great model. It really does. And just tell us how we can get in touch with you.

[00:36:50] Speaker C: You can reach me on LinkedIn at jake Gregorich and shoot me a DM.

[00:36:55] Speaker A: Paul Green’s, MSP. Marketing Podcast this week’s recommended book.

[00:37:01] Speaker C: Hi, I’m Doug Kreitzberg. I’m a cyber insurance expert, and the book that I recommend is Measure What Matters by John Dor, where you learn the techniques and the tools that organizations such as Google, intel and others have used to dramatically transform and exponentially grow their business.

[00:37:24] Speaker A: Coming up next week.

[00:37:26] Speaker C: Hey, I’m Scott McCrady with SolCyber. Can’t wait to be on Paul’s podcast to talk about how we raised $20 million to bring a new security service to the market.

[00:37:35] Speaker B: And on top of my interview with Scott next week, we’re going to be talking about networking. No, not the one with cables. I mean the one where you go to a hotel room and you meet strangers and you try and get some sales. In fact, I’ve got a very inspirational story to share with you about an MSP who has been so focused on networking that they’ve already generated 7000 pounds of monthly recurring revenue. That’s around about $9,000 of monthly recurring revenue. All of it just from networking. Let’s explore how to work a room and how not to get stuck talking to the most boring person. Join me next Tuesday and have a very profitable week in your MSP.

[00:38:16] Speaker A: Made in the UK for MSPs around the world. Paul Green’s, ms. Ms. MSP. Marketing podcast.