Episode 225: MSPs: Send a Xmas card to prospects… in March?

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.

[00:00:06] Speaker B: Paul.

[00:00:06] Speaker A: Paul Greens MSP Marketing podcast. And welcome to this first podcast of March 2024. Here’s what’s coming up this week.

[00:00:16] Speaker B: Hi there, it’s David Duffett. And if you want to get more deals over the line or you simply want your communications to land even better, especially with, with non technical people, then join me on Paul’s podcast.

[00:00:29] Speaker A: And on top of that interview with David, I’ve also got an insane idea for you. What if you sent Christmas cards to your prospects now Paul Green’s MSP marketing podcast.

So in this first bit of the show, I wanted to. Sorry, hang on a second. I’ve just got a notification on my.

Yeah, okay. Actually, sorry, another one’s just come in. Hang on 2 seconds. Don’t go anywhere.

Okay? Right. Sorry. What was I saying? Oh, yes. So this first bit. Oh, hang on. Sorry, another notification. Hang on a second. Yeah, you get the idea, right? Frustrating, isn’t it? Notifications constantly grabbing your attention. Maybe your other half has said something to you or children. Children are the ultimate weapon against notifications because certainly when they’re younger, they will say to you, come on, daddy, put your phone down. Play with me as they get older. Of course, they don’t do that. Why? Because they’ve got their own notifications coming up on their own phones, and so we lose them to that. I truly believe that notifications are the bane of our life. They are the number one killer of productivity. And actually, I kind of fib to you just then because I don’t have many notifications on my phone at all. I sometimes allow WhatsApp notifications if I’m in the middle of a conversation with someone, and I want to see that. Otherwise, I will go into WhatsApp when I am ready to go into WhatsApp. And there are very few other apps that are allowed to send notifications to my phone. I’ll tell you how many apps can send notifications to me on my computer.

Zero. I don’t allow any notifications at all because when I’m sitting down to do some work, I want to do that work right. I don’t want my mind being distracted. Life is distracting enough as it is, especially if we work from home. You’ve got the postman, you’ve got the washing machine. Children come home from school, all of that kind of stuff. So you got enough distractions. You don’t need teams going ping, ping, ping or whatever noise teams make. I don’t personally use teams. I can’t stand it. But you don’t need those notifications. I’ve sat with MSPs and we’ve had one on one consulting conversations that they have paid a four figure sum for. And we’ve sat there with them online with their computer and their PSA and teams and slack and whatever else they’re using is just constantly ping, ping, ping, ping, ping. And they’re sitting there. They’ve paid me thousands for my advice, and I’ve got my full attention on them. And they’re constantly looking away at their screen so that they can see a notification from one of their first line texts about a new user or whatever it is. Something that just isn’t important compared to looking at their marketing strategy, the future of their business. Kind of crazy, isn’t it? People say that one of your greatest assets is time, and I kind of agree with that. But I think these days, especially in 2024, a greater asset than time is your attention. And our attention is so difficult to keep our attention on something. Our phones are the worst things we can possibly have. In fact, wouldn’t you agree that your phone is the best thing that you own and the worst thing that you own? It’s great for full communication and knowing where you are and being able to do. I mean, you can do everything on your phone, but it’s the apps and the lack of attention that you pay to your real life that is just horrendous. Let me give you a challenge. What if you turned off more of your notifications? What if you killed them completely on your laptop, knowing that if it really was that important, a member of your team will pick up the phone and they will call you? That’s a notification. That’s okay, isn’t it? The phone interrupting you? We’ve had that for what, 60, 70 years in business? That’s all right. And it’s certainly a lot less disruptive than all those pings coming up on your laptop. So what if you switched off all those notifications? What if you killed all of them on your computer? So the only notification you had was your phone or maybe your family texting you or whatsapping you or something like that? What if you decided to go and look at your PSA three or four times a day? So rather than it interrupting your work and destroying your attention span, you’re choosing to do a piece of work, working on your business, or doing a client project, or whatever you’re doing, and then you have 20 minutes to look at your PSA and get up to speed, and then you go and do a piece of work. And then you check your PSA and then you check your messages. If it’s really that urgent, someone will phone you for all the rest of it. It’s a distraction. Switch it off. Attention is your most precious commodity.

Here’s this week’s clever idea.

Let me drop an idea on you that you might consider to be utterly insane. Because this podcast has been published on the 5 March 2024. And the idea that I have is that you should send Christmas cards and Christmas gifts to your prospects, like now. Not wait till November, December. But do it now. Why would I suggest something as crazy as that? There’s a very good reason for it. Whatever you see, or whenever you see a whole bunch of people doing something at the same time, you should do the complete opposite. And that goes against what we feel is right. I know when you’re not very good at marketing, and perhaps you’re just starting out, your inclination is to look at what everyone else is doing with their marketing and just copy that. Right. It’s why things like cybersecurity week exist. And you can look at things like Valentine’s Day and Thanksgiving and Christmas and say, ah, other MSPs do these marketing activities around those dates. So I should. I want to do what everyone else is doing. However, if you really want to stand out and have huge made up word coming up, standout ability, then you can’t do stuff at the same time that everyone is doing something. Take cybersecurity week, or in fact, any kind of tech promotion. If everyone, I’ll put that in speech marks. If a lot of people are doing a chunk of activity around a week like cybersecurity week, there’s no point you bothering because you just become part of the noise. You want to do your own cybersecurity week, like six months later, do it sometime that they’re not. If a lot of MSPs do a piece of activity around Thanksgiving, let’s say Black Friday sales, I’m not a big fan of Black Friday sales for MSPs. I think it’s completely the wrong positioning. But let’s say you see MSPs do Black Friday deals and you think, oh, I should do a no, no, no. Just because everyone is jumping on it doesn’t mean that you should do it for. Amazon is a great example of this. Amazon does. I mean, I’m sure they do Black Friday, but they have created their own event, which is Prime Day, which is what, about a month and a half before Black Friday, something like that. And actually, Prime Day has become prime week, hasn’t it? Or prime two or three days. So Amazon there is proving that rather than just do what everyone else is doing and they still take part in Black Friday, they’ve created their own thing. Back to why I think you should send a Christmas card to your prospects now. Think about a prospect. Think about a hot lead, someone that you really want to talk to this year because you think they may choose you and leave their incumbent MSP. Imagine if you sent them a Christmas card this week or next week, and the Christmas card said, dear Dave, whoever, I wanted to become the first person to wish you a happy Christmas 2024. Tell me, have I succeeded? Question mark from Paul or whoever. And imagine if you just sent that card, or maybe you’d put your email address on the bottom or way for them to feed back. So let’s just recap from the point of view of the prospect. They’re sat at their desk, incomes, the posts. No one gets much posts these days. There’s a few things and there’s a card in it. And we all know when we get a card and you think, oh, what’s this? And particularly if you’ve handwritten the envelope, by the way. So if you print it out, it will have less impact than a handwritten, a card that turns up with handwritten and a real stamp on it, not some kind of franked mail. So they look at this and they go, what’s this?

[00:08:20] Speaker B: Then?

[00:08:20] Speaker A: It’s not my birthday. And they open it up and inside it says, dear Dave, I wanted to be the very first person to wish you happy Christmas 2024. Make sure you put the year in. Otherwise they’ll just think it’s a Christmas card that’s been delayed in the post for a couple of months. So I wanted to be the first to wish you happy Christmas 2024. Tell me, have I succeeded? Question mark? And then you put your email address or your LinkedIn or whatsoever. Now a proportion of people, not many, but a proportion of people, will email you back to say, ha, thank you very much for the card. Yes, you were the first one. Congratulations. Thank you. That is opening a line of engagement. You can then reply with, brilliant.

I was really hoping to catch your attention or something. I’m never very good at making these things up on the I can write this stuff better than I can speak it, but you get the idea, right? You can reply to their email and you can ultimately lead it into, how’s everything going with your technology? Hey, the last time we spoke, you were talking about switching contracts in July. Is that still something that you’re looking at or. You told me how unhappy you were with your incumbent. Are you still thinking of leaving them in the summer? What’s the best date for you and me to have a chat? Can you see how that would get some engagement going? So that’s easy for the ones who reply. What about the ones who don’t reply? You send off the card and nothing. That was the kind of the tumbleweed sound effect. You get the idea. Yeah, it’s from old spaghetti westerns. Anyway, you get nothing. Well, I still think you can pick up the phone and just give those people a call and that might be you or it might be someone phoning on their behalf. But literally just pick up the call, pick up the call, pick up the phone, give them a call and just say, hey. Hi, Dave, my name’s Paul from so and so. It tell me this is a bit weird and a bit random, but I sent you a Christmas card because I wanted to be the first person to send you a Christmas card in 2024. Did I succeed? What a great engagement. In fact, what a great way to even get past the gatekeeper. Hi, can I speak to Dave, please? Yes, he’s calling.

[00:10:15] Speaker B: Thanks.

[00:10:16] Speaker A: My name’s Paul. It’s about the Christmas card I sent him. Sorry, what? What? Oh, I sent him a Christmas card and I’m just calling about that. The gatekeeper hasn’t heard that before, have they? They’ve heard loads of can I speak to Dave? It’s about his it. They hear that every day, but they’ve never heard in March someone saying it’s about the Christmas card. So go on, give it a try. I’d love to know how this works. In fact, if you do try this and it does get you through to a prospect and you start an engagement, because that’s what this is all about, is having a conversation and getting them engaged. Will you drop me an email and let me know? My email address is hello, MSP Marketing edge.

Never mind emailing me. Another great resource to get direct input from me into your marketing is my free Facebook group. We’ve got around about, I think it’s about 3000 members in there. They’re all MSPs because it is a vendor free zone and you can join completely free. And I’m there every single day talking about growing your MSP. So grab your phone right now, fire up the Facebook app, type in MSP marketing at the top, and then just make sure you go to groups you don’t want to. Like my page pages are so 2021 we’re going for the 2024 group. So MSP marketing, go for groups and then you just have to apply to join. A couple of basic questions to check you are really an MSP and not a vendor trying to sneak in. And I look forward to speaking to you in the MSP marketing Facebook group.

[00:11:48] Speaker B: Hello there. My name is David Duffett and I help geeks to speak, nerds to be heard, and techies to talk. In other words, I help technical people get more sales over the line through making powerful presentations.

[00:12:02] Speaker A: And that’s a very polished introduction, that is, David, I absolutely love that. Give us those three things again that you said at the beginning. Was it geeks to speak?

[00:12:09] Speaker B: Yeah, I help geeks to speak, nerds to be heard, and techies to talk. In fact, in America, I even help propeller heads propel ahead with their public speaking opportunities.

[00:12:20] Speaker A: I love that. Bravo. You’ve clearly spent many years perfecting that, which is absolutely brilliant. You are very welcome on this podcast. You’re exactly the kind of guests that we love here because you are going to help our audience, MSPs to talk to ordinary people, particularly to talk to ordinary people about technical things that those ordinary people don’t particularly care about. So let’s start right at the beginning. And I’m not a technical person, so I think anyone who’s been listening to this podcast for a while will know. I’m a marketing guy who works with MSPs and I love MSPs, but I don’t really talk tech.

Are you a technical person yourself, David?

[00:12:58] Speaker B: I am a chartered engineer. I have a bachelor of engineering honors degree, and I’ve also been chartered since I think 2004. And my background is technical telecoms.

[00:13:10] Speaker A: Okay, so we’ll take that as a yes, you are a technical person. So when you’ve got technical people such as yourself, such as MSPs, and they’re talking to ordinary people like me, even if they’re ordinary people who are the decision makers of the business we’re trying to hook in and sell to. Why is there that mismatch if you’re not working very hard to change the way they communicate things?

Let me put it this way. Why can’t ordinary people understand technical conversations?

[00:13:37] Speaker B: Well, the thing is, of course, there’s so many details inside technical conversations. And it’s not just the technicalities, it’s the names of the technicalities as well, all the three letter acronyms and stuff like that. And in the technical world, it is our technical skills and abilities that are the know inside an MSP. You might hear Jim really knows his stuff. Or Mary, she’s particularly switched on about that particular technology. But the difficulty is when, of course, you’re outside and you’re talking to normal people, then that needs to be kind of decoded for them. And there’s a great saying by an american speaker called Zig Ziglar, and it’s, people don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care about them. And of course, the way you show that you care about people is actually by revealing the appropriate part of your technical knowledge in an understandable way so that they really get.

[00:14:35] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, I love that quote from Zig Ziglar. That’s an absolutely beautiful quote. So give us some examples of things that MSPs do that just destroy that communication, that make it difficult for that person that they’re talking to to understand what the hell’s going on.

[00:14:50] Speaker B: Yeah, of course, one of the things that, in the tech world, we all love the tech. Everybody loves the tech. And the temptation is to talk about the tech. And one of the terrible things that can happen is that the technical person who’s going to do the explaining doesn’t get properly briefed by the salesperson. And then what they do is they kind of stick in their comfort zone, which is all that technical stuff. But what they can do to mitigate that and to make it better is to just get to know that customer a little bit more and understand where they are. And then when it comes to explaining things using appropriate analogies, that the customer is going to understand will help them get the detail of the tech without necessarily getting into the technical detail.

[00:15:34] Speaker A: So can you give us an example of an appropriate analogy?

[00:15:38] Speaker B: Yeah, at a very top level. Let’s imagine, and this is going to be one about electronics. Imagine if we wanted to talk to somebody about electronics and Ohm’s law, the relationship between volts, amps and ohms, that could be a daunting thing for the average person. And yet, if we said, imagine the hose pipe in your garden that you use to water your plants, and the concept of treading on the hose pipe to restrict the flow of the water, then most people are going to understand that, and we can use that as an analogy to explain the flow of current in a circuit.

[00:16:14] Speaker A: No, I love that. I absolutely love that. So what we’re talking about here, exactly as you said, zig Ziglar said in his famous quote, is we’re talking about positioning things because we know that people aren’t interested in the technology per se. We’re talking about taking really important concepts that they need to understand, like cybersecurity, like data, distribution of data through the cloud, and all these other concepts, and we’re talking about trying to find ways of communicating them in ways that they understand. Can you give some other examples? And it could be from within the MSP world or from outside of other analogies or other ways that you can make your life easier to communicate those things?

[00:16:53] Speaker B: Yeah, very much so. I mean, I spend a lot of my time teaching technical people to speak to non technical people. And one of the things that I do is I pop up a picture of a YouTube screen with that little circle for buffering, you know, the one I mean, where things aren’t going well. And I asked the audience, what does that mean? And of course, everybody knows it’s a bad connection. And I go, aha. Exactly. And that’s what happens when technical people not talk to nontechnical people. There’s generally a bad connection. They don’t spend time making the bandwidth between themselves and the audience. And of course, the bandwidth is rapport. It’s establishing the communications channel with an audience so that not only can they receive what you’re saying, but they can also, or you can also receive what they’re saying, which might be in a nonverbal way, it might be their facial expressions or their body language. And so to talk about the bandwidth of your connection with an audience rather than talking about the rapport and the ways you do that, is a way to kind of land that with a technical audience.

[00:17:57] Speaker A: Yeah, that makes sense. So how do you train text to gain these skills, to know how to read someone’s body language and to be able to adapt what they’re saying and how they’re communicating to the person they’re communicating with.

[00:18:10] Speaker B: Yeah, that’s a challenge that I’ve risen to. And so just like programmers, like a syntax, or people designing electronic circuits, like the rules of electronics, or people like to work within certain frameworks. I’ve created seven power presenting protocols for nerds, which deliver kind of presentation skills in a way that’s easy for technical people to digest and to understand and therefore to implement. And they all begin with p. So they’re easy to remember, seven power presenting protocols. And the first one is purpose. So it’s talking about the purpose. And this is another place where people fall down is that they get so tuned into the small presentation they’re going to make that they forget. And of course, if they’ve done discovery properly, they wouldn’t forget this because they’d understand the broader context in which their solution is going to work. And so that first peer purpose is all about looking at the macro level objectives that the customer is trying to achieve, not just the narrow field of the presentation.

[00:19:08] Speaker A: Go on, give us another one. You can’t just go on.

[00:19:10] Speaker B: Then the next one is plan. What tends to happen is very often in technical circles, in MSP circles, people have never been taught to present properly to groups and so they’ve just picked it up from somebody else they’ve seen. And that might be, to coin a phrase, suboptimal. And so the plan protocol is all about using an understanding of the way people’s attention spans work to fit all of your great information in the most appropriate parts where it’s most likely to get remembered, and then also to use understanding of recall in order to, throughout the presentation, pepper it with other things that are going to get people’s attention, not just the prime time areas.

[00:19:53] Speaker A: Third one. Just a third one. You’re not doing all seven.

[00:19:55] Speaker B: Go on.

[00:19:55] Speaker A: Then we’ll take the third one.

[00:19:57] Speaker B: Yeah, the third one, Paul, is preferences. Now we all have preferences of one sort or another, and I often start my presentations with what looks like a trivial game of getting people to pick a colored shape, but it just goes to show that we all have different preferences. And in giving presentations, well, let me use a little simple explainer here.

Let me ask you, Paul, if you’ve got a brand new trendy coffee machine for home, are you the kind of person that’s going to rip it all out of the packaging, plug it in and get going with it? Or are you the kind of person that would carefully take out the manual and then sit in your comfortable chair and spend time reading the manual before you ever plugged it in?

[00:20:38] Speaker A: Definitely the first one.

I’d then go after the manual when I figured out I couldn’t operate the coffee machine.

[00:20:44] Speaker B: Exactly.

And actually that third one is what we call reflector. That’s when you reflect on the fact that you haven’t been able to get it to do everything you want it to do, and then you’re prepared to take a little bit of input from the manual. Imagine if you’re an action orientated person like you, and you’re going to talk to a customer about what your MSP does and you think, oh, well, I love getting stuck into stuff. So actually I’ll put the mouse in the hand of the customer and let them drive a demo. But imagine if the person that you’re presenting to or the people that you’re presenting to are the manual reading type, that would prefer to take a bit of input. And so the preferences protocol is all about understanding your audience, taking a little walk in their shoes, and doing things the way that they would like it, rather than way that you would like it.

[00:21:30] Speaker A: Yeah, that makes perfect sense. How do you read people in that sense, though? Because I remember doing a podcast interview. It was possibly our second ever episode back in 2019 with a friend of mine called Andy Edwards, who talks about different, how different colors can different sort of symbolize different types of people. So, for example, he talks about, and this may be a concept you’re familiar with, but he talks about red people being like myself, quick action takers. They’re more likely to jump in and then go back afterwards and look for the documentation if they get stuck back, versus, let’s say, blue people, who, as you say, are more likely to be reflective and more likely to sit and look at something and say, right, what do I think is the best way to approach this? I’m going to do this slowly. I’m going to do it by the book. And there was yellow and green as well. And I’m sure if you go back to, for our listeners, if you go back to episode two, you could find that exact analogy that Andy used in his training. Do you have something similar, David, that you use in terms of helping MSPs to actually read the type of person that they’re talking to?

[00:22:33] Speaker B: Well, one of the biggies is in the purpose protocol, when we’re establishing the reason why we’re doing things is to talk to the audience ahead of time. There’s no presentation police that says you’re not allowed to talk to your audience before you meet them. And in order to make sure that what you’re going to do for them and what they need kind of overlap properly, it’s always good to talk to them. And actually, you could just use a good old fashioned question and ask, how do your people like to learn best? Now, if you want to be more subtle than that, of course you can ask other questions to say the last time that you successfully purchased something that really did you a lot of good, how did that go? And you can let people explain to you a little bit, or like you say, you can use profiling if you really wanted to get into details to find out whether they’re red people or blue people or yellow people. But I tend to stick with just questions and suggestions to see how they land. And the purpose protocol actually gives rise to a little bit of an iterative cycle where you’ll send people an email with just two or three lines of what you’re going to do and how you plan to do it, and let them comment on it so that by the time you actually come to meet them to do the demo or to give the pitch or however or positioning it, you not only are going to hit what they want to hit, but you’re going to hit it in the way that they’d like you to hit it too.

[00:23:52] Speaker A: I love that. So you’re actually essentially pre qualifying, almost asking the client, or, excuse me, the prospect, what’s the best way for us to sell to you without using those exact words, but what’s the best way for us to communicate with you?

[00:24:05] Speaker B: Exactly. And just coming back to that original quote about people don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. That’s one of the ways you’re showing how you care, by asking them how they want this instead of doing what I call a drive by presentation where there’s no real consultation ahead of it, you come in, you hit it, and then you rattle off and there’s not proper follow up afterwards. And of course, sometimes that can be because there’s more than one person involved on the vendor side, on the MSP side, maybe there’s a sales and a pre salesperson.

[00:24:36] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. It strikes me as you’re speaking there, David, that this isn’t just useful from a sales point of view, but actually from a service desk point of view, this is incredibly useful because if we could teach all technicians to be able to ascertain. Right, what kind of person is this? How do they prefer having information, then that’s going to help them with the information that they give them about the problems that they’re fixing or the proactive work that they’re doing. That could be a very useful thing as well. I imagine you can use this kind of framework in absolutely any scenario where you’ve got technical people talking to non technical people.

[00:25:08] Speaker B: Yeah, it’s funny you should say that, Paul, because I hit it from a presentational angle, because in a previous role I had, I used to travel the world speaking at conferences and I saw that there were a lot of very well meaning and nice technical people that didn’t always do the best job at making presentations. So that’s the angle I had. But I was speaking recently to a very large company, specifically to the HR director for 8700 engineers, and she said to me, you’ve come along with seven power presenting protocols, but actually there are seven principles of communication that you can apply to any interaction. So as an example for a team meeting, that would be a way you could use these. And as you said, any interaction between technical and non technical people will be enhanced. If the technical person just took a little step back and thought about the way the communications would go and would flow instead of just jumping in.

[00:26:05] Speaker A: Yeah, I love it. But of course, this requires training, and that’s a nice little loop, David, to how you actually make money, which is an important thing to talk about. So you train technical people how to do exactly this, don’t you?

[00:26:18] Speaker B: Yes, indeed. And I tend to hit it again as presentations, maybe because that’s my background to what I like talking about. But actually, if you were to say to the average bunch of technical people, HR have arranged for you to do two days of communication skills training, they might run in the opposite direction.

But if you said, we’ve got a chartered engineer coming in who’s got these seven power presenting protocols, that’s going to help you get more customers over the line when you talk to them, then that’s a different idea. But actually inherently you’ll get the communication skills as part of it, because what people learn in presenting rubs off into many other areas of their lives.

[00:26:59] Speaker A: Oh, I completely agree with that, yes. David, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast. What’s the best way just to learn a little bit more about what you do and actually get in touch with you?

[00:27:08] Speaker B: Ok, well, there’s a couple of ways. Geekspeakhq.com is the website. I’ll say that again, geekspeakhq.com and also my LinkedIn profile. I’m blessed to have a reasonably unusual name, David Duffett, which is D-U-F for Freddie, e t for telephone. And if you search on LinkedIn, I’m pretty sure I’ll come up as the top one for you.

[00:27:32] Speaker A: Paul Green’s MSP marketing podcast, this week’s recommended book.

[00:27:38] Speaker C: Hi, I’m Robert Gillette with the MSP dojo, and one of the books that I would recommend is an oldie but a goodie. It’s called spin selling. I love it for a couple different reasons. One is because it teaches us a way to ask open ended questions that help direct a prospect to the line of thinking we want. So we’re asking instead of telling. It teaches you to shut up and just let them talk so you can actually learn something. And then it really exemplifies the power and necessity of practice, because if you’re not practicing on someone that knows all your tricks, then you’re just practicing on your prospect and they’re never going to give you the feedback you need to get better. They’ll just know what’s weird and they won’t buy from you.

[00:28:20] Speaker A: Coming up next week. Hi, I’m Joe Burns and I built an MSP back in 2005 and scaled that to over a million pounds.

[00:28:29] Speaker B: If you want to find out how I’ve then scaled an MSP in three years to the same size, join us on Paul Green’s podcast.

[00:28:37] Speaker A: On top of that fantastic interview with Joe next week, we’ll be talking about the best customer retention tool that you can possibly use. There’s no software involved, there’s nothing difficult involved. It’s so, so simple. But it’s incredibly rewarding, both for retention and for selling more to clients. 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.