Episode 210: Use Star Wars marketing in your MSP

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

[00:00:09] Speaker B: My friend. And welcome back to the podcast. This is Episode 210 and here’s what we got coming up for you this week.

[00:00:16] Speaker C: Hi, I’m Michele Ibbs from I’m Your PA. And I will be joining Paul to tell you how we support many SPS to get more work done whilst working less in their business.

[00:00:31] Speaker B: And on top of that, interview with Michele later on in the show, we’re going to be talking about the psychology of three tier pricing, what happens in people’s minds and their hearts when you offer them three options.

[00:00:44] Speaker A: Paul Greens MSP Marketing Podcast let’s start.

[00:00:49] Speaker B: This week with a very exciting idea. What if you could make your MSP’s marketing as compelling as Star Wars? And I mean like proper seventy s eighty s star wars. Not the prequels, not the sequels, and certainly not the mandalorian, which has gone off the boil in the last couple of seasons. But what if you could make your marketing as compelling as classic, original, fantastic Star Wars? Well, maybe you can. You see, I’ve been reading this book. It’s a book called Building a Story Brand by Donald Miller. And I highly recommend that you get hold of it on Audible or you get hold of the paper copy. I read loads of books. In fact, you know the bit at the end of the podcast where one of our old guests kind of pops up and recommends a book? If I haven’t heard of the book often, I’ll go and buy that book and it sits on a bookshelf in my bedroom. There’s about 40 to 50 books in there that I will get round to reading at some point. I have a whole load more on Audible as well. But this one I bought a couple of years ago. And so many people have been recommending to me, buy story brand, buy it by read story brand. And eventually I did get round to reading it. And what’s clever about this book and I like hoovered this up in 48 hours. What’s clever about it is it takes marketing, which, let’s be honest, is a bit boring, and it makes marketing more interesting by turning it into a story. And human brains love stories. I mean, we respond really, really well to stories. Because if you think about it in caveman times, that was the only way we had to pass on information, wasn’t it? We couldn’t write things down. It took too long to sort of chip away at stone to do pictures. And so we passed information from generation to generation by telling stories. And all of the movies that we watch, well, the good movies and the good TV is based around great stories. And there’s one story in particular which is very, very popular in movies, and that’s called the monomyth, also known as the hero’s journey. And that was first put together by a man called well, I believe it was first captured of course it wasn’t put together, it’s been around for thousands of years. But it was first captured by a guy called Joseph Campbell, who wrote a book called something like The Hero with a Thousand Faces, which I’ve half read. It’s on a bookshelf somewhere. It’s quite hard work, that book. But the basic principle of the hero’s journey is it takes someone who’s got a problem, it introduces them to a guide who sets out the plan. They then go and use the plan to overcome the villain and they reach success. And if you think of Star Wars, that’s the plot of Star Wars. So Luke Skywalker is the hero, has the problem. Evil galactic empire meets a guide, which is Obi Wan Kenobi, and then it’s Yoda. In future films, Obi Wan Kenobi lays out a plan and then Luke goes down, follows that course of plan and it ultimately ends in success, which is the destruction of the Death Star. Woohoo. It’s exactly the same film. Well, all of the three classic Star Wars films are the same film. They are versions of the same film. The Matrix, you’ve got Neo is the hero. He’s got a problem which is convinced this world is not real, meets a guide, which is Morpheus. Morpheus shows him a plan and then they implement the plan to success. And again, Matrix Two and Three and probably even Matrix Four, of which only about seven people have seen that you get the idea they’re all the same film, all the same story. The hero’s journey. And what Donald Miller does in the story brand is he does exactly this and he wraps that story around your marketing so that your marketing becomes an interesting story to the people you’re trying to reach. So if you imagine, for example, the villain, the problem they have, and he does explain this in the book, I mean, it’s quite hard to summarize a 230 odd page book in a four minute podcast piece, but people typically have two or three problems that makes up their villain. So, like, their external problem might be, for example, getting their technology to work, but the internal problem. So the result of that external problem is that their staff complain a lot and they don’t seem to be able to do things fast enough. They will also have a philosophical problem. You can read the book to understand what that is, but that’s the villain. Think of that as the Darth Vader that’s wrapped up. And essentially, if your future client is the hero, the problem, the Darth Vader is technology. You can look at it like that. Now, along comes the guide that’s you. You are the guide in this journey, you’re not the hero. That’s a big part of the start of this book, is that you and your business are the supplier of the solution. You’re not the hero. The customer is the hero. You are the guide. You have to come along, you have to demonstrate authority, but you also have to demonstrate empathy for their problem. Well, that’s what you do, isn’t it? Right? That’s what you do in real life. But what do you do in your marketing? How is that reflected on your website? And then you as the guide, you give them a plan. And of course the plan is to, I don’t know, migrate them to the cloud. It’s to allow for remote working, it’s to stop them getting ransomware, all of that kind of stuff. But you fill in the gaps and you come up with a plan. And ideally your plan is based around some kind of audit or some kind of procedure where you’ve got a number of steps. Maybe it’s even got some kind of name to it as well. So it’s the 90 day technology transformation or something like that. And then you have a call to action. And the call to action is for them to go and do something. And again, if you think about Star Wars and the Matrix, there’s a call to action, isn’t there? In Star Wars, Obiwan Kenobi is murdered in front of Luke’s eyes and that’s the call to action. That’s what forces him down that path, trying to think what it is in the Matrix. Isn’t Morpheus kidnapped or something like that. And that’s what makes Neo forces him to go to action. Now, your call to action is for them to do something about their technology and not to have another year where technology is controlling them rather than their controlling technology. But you’ll get the idea from that. Now, look, I recommend a lot of books. This is one of the best. This has earned itself a place on my best marketing books. Bookshelf which is here in my office where I’m filming. Absolutely love it. I know I’m going to read this again and again in the future because it’s so, so simple. And it does lay out a very simple process for you to wrap all of your marketing and to tell the story of your MSP in a story format in a way that other people will find really interesting. And they’ll act on it.

[00:06:59] Speaker A: Here’s this week’s clever idea.

[00:07:02] Speaker B: Tell me, have you heard before about three tier pricing, also known as Good, Better, best? It’s a way of packaging together and bundling what you do as an MSP so that it’s so much easier for people to make a decision and to feel in control of what it is that they’re buying from you. Now, let me start with a quick caveat, which is I’ve spoken to lots of MSPs about this and the vast majority of them have decided not to go down this route. And that’s absolutely fine. But what I wanted to do in this week’s podcast is talk about the psychology. How it affects the way that people make decisions when you use three tier, when you make a good, better, best offering. So let’s first of all, just look at what that offering could and would be. And then we’ll go into the psychology of why it’s so important. Now, I don’t want to get too hung up in what goes in those three packages. The basic idea is you have a package which is good, and then you have a package which is better than the good option, and then you have a best package which is better than the previous two. So it’s almost like you’ve got a bunch of stuff and then you got a bunch more stuff, and then in the top layer you’ve got an even more bunch of stuff and the price goes up accordingly. And again, I’m not going to recommend a package to you, but it might be for example, you have basic support and you have 365 and you have some basic cybersecurity and that might be your good package. And then your better one might include enhanced 365, it might include enhanced security. You might bundle something else in there. And then your best one, again, might just have the very best. It might have all the cybersecurity.

You might throw in things like email signatures, a whole bunch of optional stuff. And again, don’t take this pricing as this is an example, not suggested pricing, but your good might go for, let’s say $45 per user per month. You’re better for 55 or 65 and you’re best for 75, 85. So the idea is that they look at the packages and they can say, right, we’ve got something that’s good at $45, something that’s better at $55, and something that’s absolutely the best at $65. This is the question they then ask themselves, which of these is right for me? Now, that’s not a cognitive decision. They don’t actually ask themselves that in the head. But they are essentially asking this which of these is right for me? Which is the right package for me? And that is the beauty of good, better best. Because what we’re doing is we are offering people a choice or the perception of a choice. The reality is, 80% of people offered a three tier package will go for the middle tier. Assuming you’ve got the pricing right and the positioning right and the package itself right, 80% a majority, let’s say, will go for the middle package. And that’s really exciting because what you do is you take the middle package, the thing you most want to sell, and you put that in the middle, and then you strip some stuff out of it to create that sort of early tier, that good part of it, and you add some stuff in to make the best one. But you know that the vast majority of people are going to look at that and they will say, well, I see we’ve got here the cheapest option. But I don’t like to buy the cheapest because my business deserves better. And then we’ve got here the most expensive option. But I don’t want to buy the most expensive because times are tight. We’ve got to keep an eye on costs. I’ll go for the safe option. I’ll go for the middle option. That is the sweet spot that we want them to hit. We want them to look at the middle option and to think it looks like great value for money because they’ve got something worse and something better to compare it against. And that is the pure psychological beauty of Good, Better Best. It allows them to make a comparison and emotionally to justify why that is the right level for them to buy into. So now you understand the psychology, which by the way, is incredibly, incredibly powerful. We are actively looking right now at whether our MSP marketing edge will move to a Good, Better, best pricing model from early 2024. At the moment, we just have one single price. But we understand the psychology of that is so powerful, we’re looking at should we bring in some kind of choice? Maybe it’s just worth. You looking at what your stack option is. If you go to a client prospect and you present to them and you say, look, this is the price, this is the package we recommend, it’s our better package. However, if things are tough right now, you can have a look at our good package, which is a little bit less. Or actually, if you want to push the boat out and really invest in your technology, you can have a look at our best package. So imagine the power if every single prospect was given three prices. Now, you might think that a lot of them will just automatically go to the cheaper pricing and you’ll lose out. That’s not the case at all. The people who only buy on price, well, of course they will buy the lower price package, but actually they were going to do that anyway. They were never going to buy from you at your normal price because someone else would be cheaper. So actually, this Good, Better, best approach gives you the ability to not just win normal clients, but to win the cheapskate clients as well if you want them, but also to win the top end clients. Because there are people that will spend anything on cybersecurity, on their telecoms, on their support, because actually they know it’s so business critical. So next time you come to sell to a client, why not just experiment, have a play with it. You could make it up on the spot. Pull together three packages, a good one, a better one, and a best one and see which one they plump for.

Things like story brand and positioning, your marketing, and certainly things like pricing and the psychology of how people buy. All of that is the kind of stuff we discuss in my Facebook group. It’s completely free it’s for all MSPs and actually no vendors. It’s a vendor free zone. And if you aren’t a member already, come and join me. And around about 2000 other MSPs, all you have to do is grab your phone, go onto Facebook, type in MSP Marketing at the top, and then just make sure you go to groups, because it’s not a page, it is a group. Go to groups. We ask you a couple of questions to check you really are an MSP, and if you are, we will let you in. And I look forward to speaking to you in the MSP Marketing Facebook group.

[00:13:12] Speaker A: The big interview.

[00:13:14] Speaker C: Hi, my name is Michele Ibbs. I’m the owner of I’m Your PA, which is a virtual assistant company set up in 2007, which supports over 260 different businesses around the world.

[00:13:29] Speaker B: And I know that you support a ton of MSPs as well because a couple of them have mentioned you to me, and it is a delight to get you onto the show. Thank you so much for joining me, Michele. We’re going to talk about two things today. The first thing we’re going to talk about is outsourcing work to a virtual assistant. And we’re actually going to look at it partly from your point of view of what it’s like to take on work from an MSP and then look at how MSPs can get stuff off their desk. And then we will finish up later on talking about networking. Not the cables, but the one where you go out and you have breakfast with people, because I have heard on the grapevine that you are very, very good at networking, and in your area of the country, you are known as the queen of networking. So we will come back onto that. Let’s just, first of all, hear a little bit more about you. So you set up the business in 2007, which seems pretty early for a virtual assistant company. Tell us briefly about your journey and how you got there and what kind of business you sell you have now.

[00:14:24] Speaker C: So for many years I’ve worked in sales, medical sales, steel industry, all sorts of sales. And then working with my ex husband, we ended up falling out, getting divorced, and I found myself out of work. And at the time, I had all the phones diverted to my mobile in the event that nobody answered the phone at work, which obviously I needed to stop. Spoke to the telecoms guy and he said, so what are you going to do? And I said, I have no idea. He said, have you ever thought of being a virtual assistant? I said no. What do they do? And then I downloaded everything I could find, which in those days, Paul, wasn’t a lot because, as you say, 2007 was early on for virtual assistants, especially in the UK. Took it all out to Antigua, lay on a beach, read up about it, and set up. I’m your PA. The rest is history.

[00:15:15] Speaker B: Fantastic. And you were telling me just before our interview that many virtual assistants, it’s just them or one or two people, but you’ve actually built this into a business and you’ve got a team of people sat in an office.

[00:15:27] Speaker C: That’s right. So we employ all our staff to be office based. We have one member of staff who was a senior, who does work remotely, but is set up with the same level of security as I’m sure that all your listeners will appreciate, security is absolutely top priority when you’re dealing with other people’s data. So, yes, we set everything up. Cyber, essential, standard, and they are office based to ensure that we can support them as well. So we have a team of 15 that are all office based in Wolverhampton.

[00:16:01] Speaker B: Which is Wolverhampton being roughly in the middle of the UK. And it’s quite unusual for virtual assistants to do this. When I recommend to MSPs that they get a VA, then quite often it’s a one woman band, typically working from home. So refreshing to speak to the expert. You are now the expert on virtual assistant services. So what is it you think that stops MSPs from outsourcing more? Because, you know they’re busy. You’re working with plenty of MSPs. I know they’re busy. And often they get trapped on low value tasks. Perhaps you can give us an example of the kind of tasks that MSPs delegate to you, but also tell us why it’s so difficult. What’s the mind block that stops them handing a low level task over to someone else?

[00:16:47] Speaker C: I think they assume that we won’t know what we’re talking about.

That is a big one to overcome. One of our very first MSPs that joined us said, yeah, but you won’t understand my business. And it’s like, I don’t need to be an It expert to understand your business, because that’s your job. What I need to do is to be able to deal with the clients that have a problem to give you the information.

So some, they will just say, can you take new inquiries and book them in for an appointment for me to have a follow up call with them, and we’ll deal with their diaries, and we can do that. Others, we have MSPs that actually even get us to book straight into autotask and then follow the things through on autotask. So we’ll be checking all their emails. If they’ve had an email inquiry or an email issue that’s come through, we’ll add that to autotask. We’ve even got where we have teams of MSPs.

And so you’ve got an MSP who’s actually got a team of people working with them. We will chase up to say, this ticket is not being claimed. Who’s doing it?

It’s been sat there an hour. Who’s doing it?

Which has reduced the number of unclaimed tickets and the number of times where they go outside their service level agreements. It’s almost taken that to zero. But we understand Autotask, so we don’t need to be able to fix computers. We need to understand the tools that we’re working with. And that’s what we do.

[00:18:24] Speaker B: I love it. Absolutely love it. So essentially for those MSPs, you act in the dispatcher role. The dispatcher role, of course, being that person that picks up that ticket and makes sure that someone somewhere is on top of that. Do you call yourselves the ticket police?

You should do.

[00:18:39] Speaker C: I think we should, yes. No, we haven’t yet, but I may actually put that forward as something that we could do.

It does mean that we do stay on top of it. But the thing is, if they were to employ somebody, if you think about it, when they employ somebody, and a lot of VAS will work on a package, so they have to buy X number of hours. A lot of them won’t do call handling because that ties them to a desk. But that is predominantly core business, is the call handling. So we become the personable person at the end of the phone, so there’s no voicemails, but they only pay us for the seconds that we’re on the phone or the minutes that we’re actually working on. Admin tasks, emails, auto tasks, whatever. So we might check their emails every hour, 1 minute. Okay, that’s 50 p.

They can’t get a member of staff for that money, so they use us if it’s suddenly very busy, it might be that we’ve had four minutes on there. So it’s now two pounds, but they can’t get somebody to sit there from 08:00 A.m. To 06:00 P.m., monday to Friday, nine to one on a Saturday, and only pay them for the minutes or seconds that they’ve got them working. So that’s why it works out for them. Works out cost effective.

[00:20:08] Speaker B: So just for our US listeners, the British money that Michele was talking about there range from sixty five cents at that bottom level up to what she said, two pounds. That’s around about $2, $62.70, something like that. So just to give you some context, you can see it’s really cheap. Here’s the thing though, Michele, I think was before our interview we talked about building up levels of trust and how when an MSP hands over tasks to someone, there is that fear, that worry that it won’t be done properly or you don’t understand my business, something like that. Being a ticket police officer in Autotask, I would say is a fairly deep level task. As in there’s got to be a level of trust before they’ll let you loose into Autotask or any other PSA. So what are some of the typical tasks that MSP owners delegate first? Is it things like accounts, basic admin, sort of just checking that everything’s how it should be?

[00:21:05] Speaker C: Yeah, checking, following up on invoices. Because if they’re not on direct debit, which is the easiest way of dealing with it, but sometimes direct debits bounce. So if they’re not on direct debit, they will get us to follow up on the invoices, chase the invoices, so they may actually get us to log into their Xero or QuickBooks or whichever accounts package they use. A lot of them will start with just the calls. Can you take a message?

Because they know when they’ve got their head deep in focus on what they’re doing, they’re solving a problem. Right now, the last thing they want is somebody phoning up saying, oh, my screen’s upside down, how do I fix it?

And I’ve just lost exactly where I was.

So it gives them that time, and quite often there’s the turn it on and turn it off again.

Turn it off and turn it on again, rather. But it gives them that barrier to stop those constant interruptions, because an interruption, I’m sure you’re aware, every single interruption in business will probably cost that person 15 minutes of time before they’re back into the zone of where they were. Well, you get four phone calls an hour. You’ve just lost your hour. So how do you focus? You can make much more money if you can focus, then drop out for half an hour, follow up on those calls and then focus back in again.

[00:22:41] Speaker B: Yeah, completely agree. And as someone who works at home with a 13 year old in the house, that whole interruptions and losing where you are is a perpetual problem. More so, I think, for MSPs Who, the very nature of the job is to be reactive. So I think that buffer that barrier is such a great idea. Right, final question on outsourcing, then we’re going to talk briefly about networking. It’s the question I’ve always wanted to ask a VA, and I have lots of VAS in my business, and I don’t want to ask them this because they won’t give me the correct answer. What’s the worst task that can be delegated out to you? So the task that when it comes in, you or your team, you’ve got your head in your hands and you’re thinking, oh, we hate doing this job.

[00:23:20] Speaker C: I think the only job that we hate, and it’s not a job that gets delegated to us, it’s when we have and it doesn’t happen very often, we have a client that doesn’t do what they say they’re going to do and we then get the repeated calls because they’ve not done what they said.

We’re not just a punch bag for people not doing their jobs. We like to work with people to make sure that we can support them. We’re not there because they don’t want to do what they’re supposed to be doing or what they’ve promised to do. So those tend to be a little bit sort of, please don’t make us your punch bag.

But I can’t say that there’s anything that I mean, I’ve had things from booking helicopters, booking twin engine helicopters. Did you know you cannot fly a helicopter unless it’s got two engines within the M 25?

[00:24:26] Speaker B: I didn’t know that.

[00:24:28] Speaker C: No, I learned that.

[00:24:29] Speaker B: Yeah. The M 25 is a massive motorway which goes around London. So I guess that’s a safety thing, isn’t it? That if one fails, the other one picks up. Well, it’s amazing what you learn in the course of a day.

[00:24:40] Speaker C: Years ago, I had to book the Queen’s reserve helicopter for a client to get them down to Wimbledon, which is the big tennis tournament.

Yeah, I had to book her reserve helicopter and I’m thinking, I hope she doesn’t need it.

[00:24:58] Speaker B: I’m sure she had access to more. No, I bet there’s not. I bet there’s not. Okay, Michele, let’s very briefly look at networking. So you do a lot of networking. I know it’s how you generate a lot of your business, and you’ve seen a lot of MSPs turn up to networking sessions and just not be very good. What are some of the things that MSPs typically do at networking that just holds them back and stops them from properly connecting with people?

[00:25:22] Speaker C: Jargon MSPs are the world’s worst. Sorry, guys, you’re the world’s worst for Jargon. There is nobody in that room is going to know what a DKIM, an Akim and SPF record is. You can tell us all you like, but we’re still not going to be any the wiser. But if you turn around and say, if your emails aren’t getting through, these are the things that need sorting, come and speak to me and I’ll make sure that your emails get through properly, that makes sense to us. So Jargon is really something where we have to sort of bring them into line.

And the other side is telling stories, getting them to tell stories.

With networking, you always need to speak in the language of the people that you want to reach, because they’re not selling to other MSPs, they’re here to speak to other business owners who require an MSP. So they’re going to have to speak in the language of those business owners and with the best will in the world. Most business owners don’t know all that.

[00:26:32] Speaker B: Jargon oh, completely. I’ve worked with MSPs since 2016, and I know that DKIM and SPF are something to do with email deliverability. Couldn’t tell you what SPF stands for. Maybe framework something. Spam pork Framework, something like that. I don’t know. I could take what you said about networking and say that when you’re networking, you need to use the language of the people you’re talking to. I would argue that’s all of marketing and networking, of course, just being a pretty powerful form of that. Let’s just finish, Michele, you gave me just before we spoke, you gave me an example of an MSP that, you know, who goes to networking events that you go to, and in fact, he was the one who. Introduced us, so thank you. Shall I name him? Yeah. Shall I name him? Shall I not name him? All right. Thank you, Tristan, for introducing us. We do appreciate that. And he did a fantastic 22nd pitch. You know when you go to a networking meeting and you have a short space of time with which to talk, can you just do for us Tristan’s 22nd pitch? Because I think this is genius and MSPs around the world can use this.

[00:27:30] Speaker C: Yeah. So the problem is, he came back to me and said, I cannot do anything about it in 20 seconds. And I said, yeah, of course you can. So we gave him this one to do. He put a bowl prior to the meeting on every table and he stood up and said, good evening, I’m Tristan from Name of Company. Please take all your credit cards out of your wallets and purses and pop them in the bowls on the centre of the table for distribution later. Not happy to do that. Well, a non encrypted laptop will do that for you. I’m Tristan from name of company.

And we encrypt laptops.

[00:28:09] Speaker B: Bravo. Absolutely brilliant. And that is the perfect example of how to take something techie and turn it into something that’s relevant to other people. And I love the idea of give me your credit cards. What an attention grabber that is. Michele, you’ve been very kind with your time. Thank you very much. Just briefly, tell us again what you can do to help MSPs and what’s the best way to get in touch with you.

[00:28:28] Speaker C: With MSPs? We can do the call handling, we can do the tasks, whatever best way of getting in touch is through our website, imyourpa co UK. That’s imyourpa co UK. And if anybody wants any support on networking, then you can find me at the Networking Queen. And we do support with short videos and everything to help them get more business, because that’s all we’re interested in. Everybody needs to get more business. Paul.

[00:29:03] Speaker A: Paul Green’s, MSP marketing Podcast. This week’s recommended book.

[00:29:09] Speaker D: Hello, I’m Jacob Prime. I’m the CEO and co founder of Ploy. The book I recommend to you is Grinding It Out by Ray Crock. He’s the man who bought us the double cheeseburger, but along that, he bought a fantastic attitude. Later in life, he really did grind it out in terms of selling milkshakes door to door. And it’s a great story about how McDonald’s was founded, all the challenges along the way, and I think it’s going to be really relevant, know, on those hard days, really digging deep and getting on with it.

[00:29:38] Speaker E: Coming up next week hi, I’m Robert Gillette with the MSP Dojo. I’ve talked to hundreds of MSPs in the last year. All of them want one thing more, better leads. But unfortunately, what a lot of them need is to eat their vegetables and just get better at sales. I’m going to be talking about how to practice your sales craft, so you’re never practicing on a prospect.

[00:29:58] Speaker B: You’re going to love that interview with Robert next week, and we’re also going to be talking about how to train up your very lowest level staff. What do you do when you’re taking someone from absolute scratch? And how do you turn them into a superstar in just 52 weeks? I’ve got a clever technique to tell you about next week. Join me next Tuesday and have a very profitable week in your MSP.

[00:30:21] Speaker A: Made in the UK. For MSPs. Around the World.

[00:30:25] Speaker C: Paul Green’s.

[00:30:26] Speaker A: Ms ms MSP. Marketing podcast.