Ghosted? Send your MSP’s proposals in 3 ways

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge

Welcome to Episode 295 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• Ghosted? Send your MSP’s proposals in 3 ways: There are a number of things we can do to minimise proposal ghosting with prospects. Only sending it digitally risks your proposal being lost in digital noise.
• A free cyber security webinar outline any MSP can use:  Webinars are a great way to enhance your reputation and your perceived authority as the local tech expert. Let me give you a free cyber security webinar outline that any MSP can use.
• Why every MSP must niche in some way: My guest and I to talk about niching and about the power of super laser focus on a very specific set of people. Find out exactly what to do and how it works.
• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Confused about which social media platforms to use to market your MSP? Let me tell you my top 5 in priority order.

Ghosted? Send your MSP’s proposals in 3 ways

This must have happened to your MSP… proposal ghosting. You send a proposal to a hot prospect and crickets. All the conversations, all of the relationship building that you did leading up to this proposal seem to have counted for nothing. So how do we fix this? Why don’t they reply? Why can’t you get hold of them? Are there three simple things that you can do that will improve your hit rate? Absolutely, there are, and let’s get into them right now.

A few years back when I was single, dark days, I was being ghosted all the time. OK, that was on Tinder and Hinge and Bumble and other platforms, but I know that you get ghosted by your prospects now they seem so hot, so ready to join you, and then you send the proposal through and they never get back to you. So you never quite understand what’s happened.

Is the problem that the price isn’t right, that you didn’t display an understanding of their business? Have they changed their mind? Have they gone off to another MSP? Have they signed another contract with their incumbent MSP? Are they actually dead? I mean actually really, are they dead? And you can phone them as much as you want, but there’s no one there to answer the phone. We all have these exact thoughts when we get ghosted by prospects.

The problem is not your prospects… the problem is actually you. You’ve allowed them to take some level of control of the sales process.

You’ve allowed them to ghost you. I believe there’s a number of things that we can do to minimise ghosting, not in dating, but certainly with prospects. Now, let me tell you about two of those things. The first is that I think you should send all of your proposals out in three separate ways, and then the second thing I’m going to tell you about is that you should always have the next appointment in your calendar. That’s coming up in a second. Let’s first of all go into some of the details.

So, how do you send your proposals now? If you’re like most MSPs, you probably just do it digitally. Maybe you use a specific piece of software or you have a proposal tool built into one of the platforms that you’re using and these kind of tools they are cool, especially as they can track who’s opening your proposals, how many times they view it, all of that kind of stuff. Or maybe you just pull a PDF together or even just an email and you just send it off to them by email. Most MSPs do proposals digitally because it’s quick and it’s easy, but anytime something is quick and easy for you to send out, it’s then quick and easy for people to consume it and ignore it.

We all have far too much digital information and that makes it really easy for us to receive something on email, read it, maybe save it to a folder somewhere, or add a label in our email, and then just kind of forget about it. The other issue with sending out proposals digitally is that it’s very hard for you to stand out from the other MSPs. So most times when you’re talking to a prospect, they’re also talking to other MSPs. And even if you know you’ve got the best package, the best price, the best position, you want to be 1000% sure that you always stand out against your competitors.

Let’s do that by sending them the proposal in two other ways. So yes, we send it to them digitally, but we also send them a video. And this should be a video that you record just for them, like a one-to-one video. So get yourself onto a service like Vidyard, Bonjoro or BombBomb where you can record a personalised video to someone really easily through your laptop or your phone. And what I suggest you do in that personalised video is you bring up a screen share of that proposal and then take them through the main sections of it. You’re looking for a 60 second, maybe two minute video max. But think about it from the prospect’s point of view. If you send them a proposal with a video that explains that proposal, they’re much more likely to watch that video  to read the proposal and they’re much more likely to be engaged with it.

The better you can communicate anything, the more likely it is that someone will take action on it, and that’s why I recommend you send your proposal out a third way. And you might think that this one is nuts. I suggest you print off the proposal and you send it to them in the mail. Yes, I’m talking about the proposal that’s already sat on their laptop, and in fact, they may have received it as a PDF and as a video explaining the PDF, and then on top of that, you’re going to send it to them in the mail as well.

Yes, yes, yes. I want you to do this because physical stuff stands out in our digital world. And you want that proposal to sit on their desk for a week, you want it to get passed around between offices, passed around in meetings, you want them to scribble notes on it. And I know they could print off the PDF, but most of them won’t do this. Send it to them physically and maybe even include some chocolate bars, some candy bars, perhaps even a printed case study with some social proof if you want to send them a mug with your MSP’s name printed on it. The point is that by the time you come to put in a proposal to someone you’ve already invested hours and hours of your time and probably a fair chunk of cash as well, just in generating that prospect and getting them into a meeting. Marketing is hard enough as it is, so you want to make sure at the point that someone’s actually asked you to submit a proposal to them, you stack the odds dramatically in your favour.

To summarise, you’re sending out the proposal digitally with a personalised explainer video and you’re sending them a physical copy in the post in the mail, and there’s one final thing that I suggest you do, and this one is actually probably your ultimate weapon against being ghosted. At the previous meeting where you agree you’re going to send them that proposal, make sure you walk away from that meeting with a follow-up meeting date already in the calendar. Because if you walk away from that meeting and there’s no next meeting scheduled, which is what most MSPs do, you are deliberately making your life too hard because that pushes the action taking back onto the prospect.

They then become in control, and I know that you are giving them some space to read your proposal and talk it through with whoever they need to talk it through with and get back to you with questions or a yes or a no or whatever. But they can have that space and you can still have the next meeting booked after they’ve had that space. The follow-up meeting needs to be scheduled in their calendar. In fact, it must be this way. It’s the only way you can keep control of the sales process. So at that meeting where you’ve gone out, you’ve collected the information, you’re going to go away and write the proposal and send it to them. You ask them how long will they need to read it, absorb it, discuss it? Who do they need to speak to? Which meetings do they need to have? What are the other proposals they’re waiting for so that they can compare your proposal to the other peoples? They’re going to do that. So you might as well talk about it. Let’s say they need two weeks to do all of this. So you say to them right there in that room, okay, everyone grab your phones now, grab your calendars. Let’s schedule the follow-up meeting between you and me. And at that meeting you can ask me any outstanding questions and then give me the good news that we’ll be working together. And if you say that line with a bit of a cheeky smile, that can make quite a difference as well.

Now, these are some really, really easy changes to make. If you could find 30-60 minutes today to implement those changes, even if that only won you one new extra client over the next 12 months, surely that’s going to be the most productive hour of today, right? 

A free cyber security webinar outline any MSP can use

Would you love to do a cyber security webinar to promote your MSP but you have big concerns? Maybe you’re worried there are too many other MSPs doing webinars or what exactly would you say? I mean, you know your cyber security stuff, right? But maybe you’re not convinced that you could communicate this well to an audience. Well, good news. I’m here to help, and let me tell you why prospects are actually very keen to attend any webinar that you put on. And let me give you a free cyber security webinar outline that any MSP can use.

Yes, the world does need more webinars. It might seem to you like every vendor in the channel is doing a webinar every single day, but that’s just the view from inside the channel, from inside your MSP. To ordinary business owners and managers, the people that you want to reach, they might feel the same about the vendors in their world, but they do still have room for one more webinar on a completely different subject, and that subject is cyber security. And it should be your MSP that delivers it to them.

Webinars are a reliable way to reach the right people, get them engaged in what you have to say, and persuade them to talk to you at the point they’re ready to take action.

As the person presenting the webinar, it enhances your reputation and your perceived authority as the local tech expert. When I speak to members of my MSP Marketing Edge about webinars and what they’re thinking of running, their two biggest fears are: what technology to use and what to say. Well, the first one is easy. The technology is super easy, and I’m not going to suggest a specific platform here as we all have different software preferences, but 15 minutes just firing up the Google machine will give you a very, very good idea of all of the platforms that you can choose from. Although please don’t overthink it. The simplest way to get started with a webinar is just to use Zoom. On a free plan you can have up to a hundred people for a 40 minute call. And trust me, that is more than enough to just get started to try your first few webinars.

So the harder of those two questions then is, what to say. And I can’t write your webinar for you as it wouldn’t be authentic for you to use my words. But what I can do is give you an outline. It’s the structure of the webinar, and you can fill in the gaps to produce a cyber security webinar that’s ready to roll out right now. Swipe and adapt this cyber security webinar outline. Now, I’ll first of all give you the too long didn’t read version, and then I’ll add a little bit more meat to the bones. So we’re going to look at a hook, a three-line agenda, who you are, we’re going to present the content in three different sections, we’re going to present a social proof story, do a conclusion, next steps, Q&A, and then very finally the follow-up. That’s the TLDR, the too long didn’t read version.

Let’s go into some more details starting with the hook. Your opening sentence must hook them in and make them think, whoa I’m glad I attended this, and also encourage them to stay till the end. So here’s an example: “20 minutes from now, you’ll be armed with three simple things you can do to protect your business from a cyber attack. These three things work for any business, anywhere, and you need them. Since I started this webinar 12 seconds ago, there’s been a cyber attack on another business in this town. Every 39 seconds somewhere a business is infected with ransomware, which is another kind of malware or they fall for a phishing attack. So let me tell you what all of these things are and how to protect your business from them.” And a cool thing actually will be to have a cyber attack counter or something on the screen and perhaps every 39 seconds or whatever it would go up by one. I’m not quite sure how you do that, but that would certainly help you to get your point across.

Next thing then is the three line agenda. Once you’ve hooked someone in, and well done for that because that opening line is everything, it really is. Once you’ve hooked them in, you’ve convinced their heart to stay on the webinar, now you need to give their brain some evidence that it’s worth them investing the next 20 minutes of their life with you. And that’s what the three line agenda is. So for example: “Here’s what we’re going to talk about. First I’ll explain the three main dangers facing your business today, those things I just mentioned. Let’s get inside the mind of the criminal. Let’s explain what they’re trying to get out of you and why. And let me tell you some common ways they’ll try to trick you and your team. And then I’ll tell you about your defences and how they’re a mixture of protection from software and things that humans must do. Finally, I’ll summarise what we’ve been talking about and give you some quick wins to increase your protection today. I promise everything I’m going to talk about will make sense no matter what level your tech ability. And right at the end we’ll do a Q&A where I’ll answer any question that you have.” Feel free to take that, rewrite that into your own words, and feel free to use that.

Now, let’s talk about the who you are section. This is about establishing your credibility. Give them a few lines on your background, how many businesses you work with, and also your passions. Some work ones like protecting business owners from cyber criminals and showing them how technology makes everything easier, but also don’t forget to show them how relatable you are. Maybe you’re a parent, maybe you are into the local sports team, maybe you volunteer in the community, those things are important as well.

The next part is your content split into three sections, and this is the bulk of your webinar content. You organise it into three sections to give it some structure and make it feel understandable and highly valuable. And trust me, it’s way too easy to bore a webinar audience by talking too much. So let’s say you’re talking about ransomware, other malware and phishing. Well, those are your three sections. That’s how they could be structured. Simple as that. You could spend two to three minutes talking about each one. “Let me tell you why cyber criminals are interested in your business. These are their most wanted outcomes, stealing money, stealing data, creating disruption. They have three primary ways of doing this. Ransomware, other malware, phishing. Let me show you examples of each one and let’s see if you’d have spotted the telltale signs. I’ll also show you how it’s getting harder to detect attacks because of AI and how the best defences are a blend of software and humans paying attention. And here’s a mix that we recommend and how we train people in a way that’s fun and not boring.”

Next part then is your social proof story. So if you’ve got one, please do present a story of a real client of yours that you saved from a cyber attack. Of course, you’ve got to anonymise them unless you have permission from your clients to use their story to educate other people. Now, if you don’t have your own story, then just ask your MSP peers for a story you can borrow or go onto Tech Tribe and find someone else’s horror story, something like that. Just don’t use one of these big business stories as the ordinary business owners and managers that you want to reach, they find it very hard to relate to big businesses, like those massive corporations. They cannot relate to them being attacked. And don’t think that you need to have huge, huge dollar or pounds numbers to get the people to pay attention to you. If a business their size has been attacked and was let’s say down for a couple of days, that is actually a thousand times scarier to them than a giant corporation losing $10 million.

Next section is the conclusion here. You’ve got to summarise what you’ve been talking about and then give them what you promised earlier, some quick wins to protect their business today. Now, these could be as simple as guidelines on checking emails more carefully before they click on links or download attachments. I’d be very cautious of giving them security software suggestions though is really you want them going through a full appraisal with you before you recommend solutions.

And then you come on to the next part of the webinar, which is your next steps, and this is the call to action, the thing you want them to do off the back of attending this webinar. Now, ideally you’d have something available they could commit to at low cost or no cost. And I believe actually that low cost works better for this than something that’s free, as getting someone to pay something is an indication of true commitment. So for example, you could do like a $99 mini security audit, and this is your prospect buying a small amount of your time to look at what they’re doing well and what they’re doing not so well just make sure that a feedback consultation is built into that audit. So for their $99, they’re actually buying an in-depth sales appointment with you. Yes, please. That’s exactly the kind of thing we want, but as I said, be very wary of giving that away for free. The tire kickers, the time wasters will always take up that free offer, but it will be a nightmare delivering it and they won’t join your business anyway as a client. If you can get someone to pay one to maybe even 300 pounds, $300, they are going to be a much higher quality prospect.

And then the final section of your cyber security webinar is a Q&A. And you leave this till the end because a number of people will drift away during a Q&A. Some will hang around because they want to discuss the security audit or just ask you a question and that’s okay. Just make sure you answer every single question, even if it’s just you and one person left at the end. The more value you give in a webinar, the better. But then we mustn’t forget the follow-up. You should always phone everyone who attended your webinar but didn’t buy the security audit and ask them for some feedback on the webinar. You want to get them talking about security and how they feel about it. You may get one or two extra sales from that. Some people always need a bit of time to just think about things, even if it’s just spending a hundred dollars. So it’s also worth emailing a recording of the webinar to those people who didn’t show up. To be honest, you’ll only get roundabout a third of people who registered actually turning up for the live webinar. But don’t ignore the two thirds who registered but didn’t attend. With some work there are possibly a couple of extra sales hiding in there for you. And if not, you just need to be patient because they probably will have a conversation with you at some point in the future. And that’s why you need to be repeating webinars regularly, ideally as often as once a month.

Why every MSP must niche in some way

Tell me how big is your MSP’s marketing megaphone and is there any way that you can make it bigger? When trying to talk to potential managed service clients you may have heard that finding a niche or a vertical is way more effective, but why and how exactly does it work? I have an expert joining me right now to explain why you might be better off with a teeny weeny bullhorn rather than a big noisy whopper.

Hi, my name is Adam Walter. I am from Humanize IT. We are a SaaS company for MSPs where we help digest all that information from your PSA, put it through our engine and output projects that are meaningful to your clients so you can focus on the conversation and the relationship with your client, rather than putting together these six hour PowerPoints and all these quotes. We take care of the proposals for you, we take care of the marketing for you, we take care of the project roadmaps for you. All you have to do is talk to your client and you’ve got an excellent QBR or an account management session.

Adam Walter, back on the podcast after a couple of years and straight in with a 30 second elevator pitch. I mean, literally no other guest gets away with that. Everyone else gets a three second intro and somehow you get an elevator pitch. Dude, thank you so much. I think I just said, dude, for the first ever time on the podcast there as well, welcome back to the show. I don’t know how long it’s been, but it’s been too long. It’s awesome to have you back. And we will talk a little bit more about Humanize IT maybe towards the end of this interview. I think you’ve had your free plug already, but we want to talk about niching and we want to talk about the power of super laser focus on a very specific set of people. And I know you’ve got lots of experience of that. But before we get into that, let’s just set some context. Let’s set some credibility. So assume that whoever’s listening to you right now are watching this on YouTube, doesn’t know who you are, shock horror, how can that be? Maybe there is someone out there. So just tell us who are you, Adam Walter?

Yeah, I have been in the industry for a long time. I got my bachelor in Science and Computer Science in 2002. I had a minor in art and then I’ve got a partial MBA because I didn’t want to finish out learning supply chain management. So I’m all over the world, I’m very widely experienced. I was a Nexus core ad man, I was a CISSP, I was a critical infrastructure security director. I run large teams, small teams, I have a lot of experience. A lot of people know me from conferences. If you talk about something, I have a story. There’s a story there. And so I formed a company called Humanize IT in 2017. Well, technically I formed Virtual C to be a CIO for hire for small businesses and to take my expertise and help small businesses get that same advantage that large companies got. I didn’t know VCIO was a thing, I just wanted to be a fractional CIO. Did really well there, formulated Humanize IT in 2022 actually, and started helping MSPs have those better conversations with their clients. They could help drive revenue for their clients and themselves at the same time.

Yeah, no, I love that. And we will talk more about Humanize IT just towards the end of the interview. I’m actually interested in what you’ve done over the last couple of years. You have shifted and changed and I read your marketing, your emails that come out every week and sometimes twice a week. And it’s all good stuff. And I’m just interested and curious what you’re doing and why and what’s driven you to change. But we’ll come onto that in a second. Let’s talk about niching first of all. So when we talk about niching, what exactly do you mean by that? What’s an easy definition that everyone can understand?

Yeah, niching is specifically focusing on an industry for delivery. So if you look at your local town, your marketplace, you see some of your clients as an MSP are manufacturing. Some are construction, some are accounting firms, some are dentists. Not so much in the UK though, right? You have doctors, you have lawyers, you have people in all different areas. Well right now, MSPs tend to and service providers across the board. But whether it’s a lawn care company or a computer firm, you’re spreading yourself across every single industry. Niching is picking one or two of those and saying, I am just going to service attorneys. I am just going to service medical service providers, or schools, or manufacturing firms. And when you do that, you say, I’m not going to do dentists. I am not going to do lawyers. I’ll let somebody else have that. So you define who you care about and who your target audience is. You draw a picture of them. A lot of marketing companies will even have you draw a picture. What is the name of this person? What kind of car do they drive and what do they care about? But you only care about dentists.

Yeah, or lawyers or whatsoever. I think we actually nailed that there. Yeah. So let’s take one from outside of tech. So you mentioned lawn care there, and you also said something very important, which is you decide what you don’t want. So I have, as you said, I’m based here in the UK, we get the odd summer day once or twice a year. So I do have a lawn in my garden and I do have a company that comes and they do things to the lawn, I don’t know what they do. They aerate and they put things in and they add worms or who knows what they do, who cares. But the point is the lawn looks nice. And that company is a specialist domestic lawn company. That’s what they do. They only do domestic lawns and mine’s just a normal, average sized lawn. And I know that there are also lawn care companies that specialise in, for example, lawn care for hotels or lawn care where there’s a large amount of lawn, which is a completely different proposition to my lawn.

Now my daughter’s 14, we go on the lawn like once a year, whereas a lawn belonging to a hotel, it’s going to have people on it all the time have, there might be specialist lawn care firms for sports teams or whatsoever. And each of those is probably very similar, 80% of the work is very similar, but there’ll be a 20% that you wouldn’t do. What you do on a sports pitch you wouldn’t do on a domestic lawn. And it’s that 20% is the specialist thing that I think people are looking for. So when you say, right, I’m going to focus, my MSP is going to look after lawyers, but we can niche within the niche. We want lawyers where there’s at least 10 support staff, where there’s at least three active partners, where they have an office, we don’t want a fully remote company, for example.

And the more you get into that niche and be very, very clear on who it is that you want to reach, I think that becomes more powerful because then you can make the message and the marketing you’re doing talk exactly to that person. So if I pick up a leaflet that says lawn care, which is the general lawn care versus lawn care for averages size lawns, in average sized villages, with the kind of weather that we have today, which of those two things is more relevant to me? It’s the one that talks directly to me about my lawn, about this, about the that.

So from your experience, and obviously you talk to thousands of MSPs, same as I do, so from your experience, do you find that most MSPs dip their toe into a niche and they’ll say something like, oh yes, we do lawyers, we’ve got a page on our website about that, but that’s all it is, there’s no real niching. Or do you find that some of them actually do go the whole hog and go the whole way?

We see a little bit of both. So we see people who are accidental niching, when you’re going to do it because you have people you naturally gravitate towards. And when you started your MSP, you probably started with a friend who needed IT support, and that just grew your company. So for me, in 2017, I started off doing CIO work for private schools in the Lutheran school districts. And the reason was they had no CIO, they had no IT department because they were not a unified school, and they’re not like public schools or Catholic schools where there’s this big system. They were just trying to figure things out themselves. So me acting as a fractional CIO and there’s 160 of these schools in Nebraska, worked out really well for me and for them. And so I defined that early on, this is what I am doing. And I kept doing that and I started developing skills that were unique to them, such as helping them with E-Rate, helping them with their particular politics that they deal with within their senate, within their districts and how that works. And so I knew how to help them with grants. I knew how their cadence worked throughout the year with their donors, and I helped them develop out stories to get those donor dollars and to compete with the school districts in their area.

And so with MSPs, when I see them do this, the really neat thing that I’ve heard, especially all throughout 2024, was I kept hearing about MSPs who just leaned into the niche they already had. They didn’t know they had it. It’s like, oh my gosh, we’re already dealing with attorneys. Let’s just lean into that and really support LexisNexis or their software suite and what they’re trying to do. And they started charging like $500 a seat, $600 a seat, US dollars. So they lost a third of their customers because they couldn’t afford them anymore, but that was okay. So they just cut their workload down by a third and increased profits from $150 an endpoint to $500 an endpoint. So they’ve tripled their revenue and they have less work, and they’re very happy with it because now when they walk into this town, they are the premier attorney MSP. They know how to give you an advantage. They know the technologies that are going to come out for attorneys that are going to benefit them. And so the attorneys are willing to pay more for that unique boutique feel.

Yeah, I agree. And that’s when you know you’ve got niching rights, isn’t it? When you become the premium, the top end choice, and actually you want the lawyers, well, we all want lawyers to be in pain, but you want the customers to feel the pain of, oh, I really need those guys, want those guys. They’re the best ones. They understand our business, they understand this. They’re already working with 30 businesses like us, but they’re really expensive, but it’s worth it. And that’s great. I love hearing about businesses that do less work to make more money. To me, that’s a really smart kind of business. I guess one of the fears I hear when I talk to MSPs is that their fear is that in committing to a niche and especially a niche within a niche like lawyers of 20 people or 10 to 20 staff or manufacturers that only do this or whatever one of their fears is, but if I go all in on that and I focus all my marketing on that, I’m not going to attract other kind of clients. What would you say to that kind of fear?

If you want to grow you’re going to have to take some risks, and a fear of not wanting to lose your clients is something that can hold you back.

And sometimes the fear is just, well, they were my first customer. Okay, cool. They’re a pet project, they’re a loss for you, but you love them and you’re going to keep them on. That’s fine. But when you sit down and you look at the risks involved, if I increase my cost per seat for attorneys or let’s say dentists or schools so that they can have a unique experience, it doesn’t mean you have to get rid of all of your old ones. You can create a secondary breakdown of cost for them, but it’s not recommended. Eventually you have to outgrow your shoes. You eventually have to get forward if you’re happy where you are, stay where you are.

But if you want to grow, there’s going to be some pain involved. You’re going to have to get rid of some unhealthy customers, and you have to identify what unhealthy means. And it might mean that they are not in your vertical, they’re not in your target audience. They as in they’re not paying enough or they don’t fit into the solution stack you have because you, you’re focused on this area over here, but until you define what you are, you can’t define and say no to the things you aren’t. And so that’s, you keep bringing on unhealthy clients, so desperate for money. You haven’t defined what a healthy client looks like.

Yeah, I think that’s a really good way of putting it. We’ve all been there, haven’t we, we’ve all been in business where we just take money because there’s money there, there’s work there, even though we know we’re going to regret it down the line, and this is not going to end well. I’ve not done this in this business, but my previous business which I sold in 2016, I absolutely survived for four years just taking anything that would come in, and obviously it all went bad at the end.

Okay. I think one of the other benefits about niching, Adam, of course, is that you become the biggest fish in a relatively small pond. And when you are just fishing for clients in your geographical area, in your town, your county, your state, whatever it is, you remain a small fish because in fact, there’s you and there’s the 40 other fish, which are the 40 other MSPs. Whereas when you are the most expensive managed service provider providing strategic cyber security, growth advice and consultancy for lawyers of a minimum of 20 staff just within this town, you suddenly become the biggest fish, if not the only fish within the pond. And that means you get all of the business. And when you take that to a whole extreme and you start dominating, you’re talking at all the conferences, you’re being written about in the magazines, or you are writing your own tech columns in their blogs, or you’re part of their communities or whatsoever, that’s when you really start to dominate a sector, which is so exciting.

Let’s finish with one final question on niching, then we’ll come on to Humanize IT, which is give me some examples of good sectors to be in and bad sectors to be in, just from your experience.

From what I hear, so I’m talking to MSPs all the time with our business, good industries to be in… education, especially private schools. I can tell you 100% this is an underserved community because their MRR is terrible, but you know what? They’re really good at, donors. So it is easier to ask a private school for $150,000 than it is to ask them for $3,000 a month. And that’s an example of why niching works, because you understand the finance of this sector. You know that if you lay out this is how it’s going to benefit the kids, this is how they’re going to get a competitive advantage in the area of science, technology, any of the STEM stuff, because we’re going to build labs for this and they’re going to be powered by this kind of technology, or we’re going to help the teachers become more effective and teach across campuses in an easy way. Then you’re telling a story and you’re building a stack, and donors are willing to give them money for that. They love that, and you’ve got to get to know them.

Other areas that are really good, the niche… medical. Are you helping people with HMS? Do you have dedicated HMS staff in house that can come and say, Hey, I can help you with Epic. I have three certified techs here. No one’s going to compete with you. And so now you have somebody who’s going to come and help them with their medical office when they can’t get somebody on the phone. Somebody who’s going to teach the staff how to run this and do lunch and learns on better serviceability or how to do this and that, you now become the 800 pound gorilla or the big fish in a small pond because none of the other service providers can do that.

I have one MSP who does wineries. They were on our podcast earlier this year, and he just does wineries. He’s like, I’m not a real MSP. I’m like, why not? He’s like, well, I don’t have all these things. I’m like, you don’t need all those things. Do your wineries need all those? Well, not really, but I want to be a, and he’s beating himself up because he has his expectation of what an MSP is rather than realising you have a captive audience who loves you because you uniquely have a set of services that they need to offer their clients. Lean into that, and he did, and it’s working out really well for him.

I love that. I want to do wineries. That would combine my favourite hobby, which is wine with my favorite work activity, which is marketing. I might start Paul Green’s winery marketing business. Yeah, I need to think that one through. I’m going to throw in a sector that I don’t think is a great one for MSPs, and that’s manufacturers. And I know there are lots of MSPs that love manufacturers. What I don’t like about manufacturers is the bespoke amount of work per client. And again, some MSPs, they pride themselves on that. But one of the other beauties of niching is that you’ve dropped in various software packages that various niches use, like you mentioned LexisNexis earlier, which is a legal thing. You learn LexisNexis for one client, you already know it for the second client, the third, the fourth, the fifth, it’s no different, it’s the same software. Whereas if you’ve got manufacturer A who’s running an A B, C machine that’s run by one XP computer that hasn’t gone down since 2006, and it’s like, A) why would you want to have that responsibility? And B) you’ve got to learn all about that machine. Then the next client has a completely different machine made in a different country where the instruction manuals in German and it’s like, yeah, we’ve got to support all of those. But anyway, that’s just my personal thoughts on that one.

Let’s move on to Humanize IT. So you have transformed in the last few years. What was the problem? What was wrong? Where were you then and where are you now and what sort of drove that transformation?

Yeah, I originally started off Virtual C, a fractional CIO firm. I have a lot of management experience. I’m not self-taught, I’ve been mentored, I have the education and I have the experience as an engineer. I was in the data centres, I was the tier three go-to buck stops here admin for billion dollar companies. And I got into management and I realised that I missed working for small businesses. So I formed my own company and then brought on a couple people, and we started teaching MSPs how to do actual CIO work. Because the idea of what a CIO was broken in the MSP world. Everybody was basically, what we would call in the corporate world, a manager of desktop engineering is what people were calling CIOs in the MSP world. And so I started saying, we need to start talking about profits. We need to talk about how you’re going to design out strategy for your clients from a business standpoint and how a technology’s going to affect that.

And I did really well there for a long time. I was using a software called Managed Services Platform to do gap analysis. And during the pandemic, I had enough money that I ended up buying managed services platform and turning it into a tool that would help CIOs dissect what was going on within their MSP and align it with what was going on with their clients. So you say, Hey, look, I see you’re trying to grow your sales by 20% next year. You don’t have a SharePoint portal that will help you manage contracts and get them out to your clients faster. And so you’re helping promote projects that will enhance your clients over time. And there was no real tool out there that was fitting this.

They were calling them QBRs, they were calling them strategy sessions or whatever, but they kept focusing on tickets and assets because that’s what the channel wanted them to focus on, reselling licenses and assets. So we came in and designed a product using our gap analysis software that focused on delivering better services to your clients that they actually need to run their companies effectively from a strategic standpoint. So you work with Adam Walter’s MSPs, you’ll say, our MSPs are going to help your business become more profitable. We’re not going to save you money. We’ll do that too because it’s operations, but we’re going to help you find areas where we can enhance your revenue, enhance your profits, and reduce risk. And we happen to use technology to do that. That is the message that needs to be out there, and that’s the message we’re trying to get to people.

I love it. So do you know that counts as your pitch? You’ve just had your pitch for Humanize IT there. You’re allowed 30 more seconds just to speak directly to the MSPs that are listening to this or watching this on YouTube. Just tell us what you can do for them and what’s the best way to get in touch with you, Adam?

Sure. Come to humanizeit.biz, get a demo or just sign up for a free trial. You will be up and running in about an hour and you’ll digest things out of your PSA or as of last month, Ninja RMM. We will digest directly from them, give you a list of projects that need to be worked on with this client. And all you have to do is walk in and do a QBR or a strategy session, but focus on what the client needs to do and then align the projects, the 300 projects you have there, and prioritise the ones that they care about and are help move their needle forward. And you will have a sticky client that will be loyal forever.

Paul’s Personal Peer Group

Scott has an 11-year-old managed service business in Canada, and he’s wanting to increase his visibility. His question is: What social media platforms should I use?

Social media of course is a great way to reach leads, but you must make sure that you are using the platforms used by ordinary business owners and managers. So here are five I suggest in priority order:

Number one, LinkedIn. It’s the number one social media platform for MSPs. Make sure you use your personal profile and not a business page to post social media content as often as you can. Ideally at least once every 24 hours, the algorithm likes that. And you’ll grow relationships with your network.

Number two is Google business profile. Bit of a surprise entry at number two, but actually an active Google business profile is a very easy way to boost your SEO or search engine optimisation. If you post a single Google business update every week, you’ll help to keep your profile active and current.

Number three is Instagram. Use this to reach business owners who actually use Instagram for their own marketing and therefore they’ll be on it regularly. If they’re on it regularly, it’s a great place to reach them, isn’t it? That would include retail and hospitality.

Number four, Facebook. Whether you love it or hate it, or maybe both, Facebook is the universal social media network. So do set up a company page for your MSP, which is also good for search results as well.

And then number five, I’m not sure about this one, it’s Twitter, or X. I’m not sure about it because it used to be so useful back in the day to reach a very niche audience, like we were just talking about with Adam there, but it has changed so much since Elon bought it. And we all know the problems of X. So I think you only use X if you are personally a fan or if your audience is highly active on it.

And of course there are a couple of alternatives of X, the one that seems to be getting a little bit of traction but nowhere that close is Bluesky, which is also worth you having a look at. But Paul, what about *insert the latest social media here* – Well, you can ignore the shiny new social media apps. What’s about to come out tomorrow, what’s coming out next week. Because until the majority of your prospects are using it or talking about it, you’ll get a much better return on investment sticking with the big platforms that most people are already using.

Mentioned links

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