These emails help prospects love MSPs

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Welcome to Episode 296 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• These emails help prospects love MSPs: It’s critical to have a series of good emails to send to prospects who are looking at your MSP for the first time. Early engagement is key for email deliverability and not being labelled as unsolicited spam.
• A simple way to reach senior decision makers on LinkedIn: Here’s a tried and tested LinkedIn hack to connect with the right people on LinkedIn. Remember, both decision makers and influencers are important contacts.
• Smart ideas to sell more to your MSP’s existing clients: Selling more to existing clients is the big opportunity and my guest tells you how to do it and how it can generate more delicious profit for your MSP.
• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Do you upload PDFs to your LinkedIn personal profile? You should, the algorithm loves it. Here’s how…

These emails help prospects love MSPs

It’s a huge struggle. A lot of MSPs looking to grow, struggle to do effective data capture from their website, and this is an important way to build up your database of prospects. But it’s not just about getting them to fill in the form in the first place, that’s just the start of the process, the real question to ask yourself is: What do I then send them?

Let me tell you some of the perfect emails to send to new prospects looking at your MSP for the first time.

So tell me, do you have some form of data capture on your website? You really should. The most basic data capture is asking people to sign up for your email newsletter, which actually very few people will. A better form is to offer them something known as a lead magnet, also known as an ethical bribe, which is where you give them something in return for their email address. And this might be a guide, like a cyber security guide. Although the 2025 version of data capture that’s working really well right now is to do an interactive quiz and you allow them to build a scorecard for something. Again, something like their cyber security score would be a great way of doing that. But the data capture itself is only the start of the process.

What’s critical is to have a series of good emails to send new prospects, because you can make an assumption that they may be looking for a new MSP in the future.

And you need to send them content that’s going to influence them to pick you and not another MSP. So let me give you some examples, starting with the very first email you send to them. And the goal with this first email is to get them engaged with your content and either get them to click something on the email or hit reply. Why? For email deliverability. Because that sends a very clear message to their email agent that they are interested in your content and they don’t just see you as unsolicited spam.

I do this with the first email in my sequence. I introduced myself and then I ask the MSP who’s reading that email to hit reply and tell me which marketing problem they’re suffering with right now. And we do get a pretty good reply rate to that. Of course, I make sure I answer every single person who replies. I do that personally, which in itself is good for engagement. It’s good for showing there’s a real human at the other end who’s listening. And of course it’s good for email deliverability. So I would definitely do that with your first email.

Here’s what you could do in some of the other emails that you send out to people when they first join your list. You could send them some social proof, testimonials, reviews, case studies. People love seeing other people like them and what they’re doing. That’s what makes social proof so powerful. Now, this could be as simple as sending them to a page on your website where your latest reviews are, or if you don’t have that page on your site, just send them off to your live Google Reviews page.

Another email you send out could be educational. It could tell them about the biggest cyber security mistakes that businesses make these days. In fact, wouldn’t it be amazing if you put together a two minute video which you presented yourself? It doesn’t have to be slick and Hollywood. It could just be you talking into your phone telling them the biggest problems that you and your team see that cause the most pain for the businesses you look after. The kind of prospect that would actually watch a video like that is someone who’s going to be likely switching MSPs in the future. So that’s a very powerful piece of marketing to do.

Some other emails you can do is to ask them what technology questions they have. Perhaps even ask them what technology they’re running right now, what are they running their computers on? And anyone that replies with Windows 10 or XP, yep, there’s going to be a follow-up phone call there. But whatever you do with this, make it super simple for them. Let them just hit reply and ask you any question and you’ll answer. And do expect to only get a tiny number of people emailing back, but those that do are your highest engaged prospects.

You can also tell them about your service. Never be afraid to mention what you do or at the very least send them to a page that explains it. And of course, at some point, don’t forget to invite them to join other audiences that you have, such as connecting to you on LinkedIn, YouTube, or other places where you post content.

Now I’ve got one final piece of advice for you on this, and that’s to obsessively join other people’s newsletters. And no, I don’t mean other MSPs. You can be more original than that. Look outside of the tech world for inspiration. If you come across someone’s website and you think it’s great, regardless of what industry they’re in, but assuming it’s B2B, then enter your email address and join their list. And it’s always a smart idea to do research on what other businesses whose marketing you admire are doing. I do this all the time. I’m subscribed to hundreds of newsletters and at least once a week I’ll get an email from something completely unrelated to what you and I do, but it gives me an idea to improve my own emails.

Improving your marketing is an activity that never ends, right? Hey, do you want to join my email list because I spend a lot of time making sure my marketing is as good as it can be. And if that inspires you with your marketing, that would be great. All you have to do is go to my website, mspmarketingedge.com, and my lead magnet I’m giving away is a free magazine. So go into the navigation, look for magazine, and that’s how you can join my email list.

A simple way to reach senior decision makers on LinkedIn

What about this? To find new clients for your MSP, you head to LinkedIn and you find someone who could make a good client down the line. You make a connection request and then you wait and wait and wait for them to accept, but they ignore you. So you send them an InMail and they ignore you again. Nothing nada.

Thankfully, there is a tried and tested technique to get connected to the senior decision makers that ignore you like this, and to get a conversation going. Let’s find out why it’s such an issue in the first place, what the fix is and how to help you fall in love with LinkedIn all over again. You’ll love this idea. It’s smart, but simple and easy to implement. And I’m not claiming it as my own idea either. It was suggested to me on a call by an MSP called Jason Johnson, so thank you so much, Jason. And it is as simple as this.

If you want to reach senior decision makers on LinkedIn, then first connect to people lower down in their organisation.

Think about it from the point of view of the CEO or the big decision maker that you’re trying to reach. Let’s imagine they’re running a big business, they’ve got hundreds of employees, which is lots of seats for you, great. And they get LinkedIn connection requests all the time from strangers that they don’t know because those strangers all want a piece of their business.

So they tend to ignore most of their connection requests. And then they get a connection request from you, and they can see that you are already connected to 10 other people who work for them in their business. So they’re much more likely to click that blue accept button without thinking about it. Smart, right?

This is a good time for me to remind you that in any buying decision made by bigger businesses, there are two sets of people involved. There are the decision makers and there are the influencers. So the CEO or whoever might give the actual yes or no, but before they do, they’ll ask their team what they think. And that team can include other senior staff, team leaders, rising superstars, and especially their executive assistant or their virtual assistant. Most MSPs focus all of their attention on the decision maker, and they forget that the influencer can kill your chances of a contract with a single sentence expressing doubt about your business.

So a good rule to live by is that you never know who in a business will encourage or block buying from you. So treat everyone as a potential ally who should be positively influenced. And LinkedIn is a great place to start that.

Smart ideas to sell more to your MSP’s existing clients

There are of course, two ways to grow your MSP. There’s getting new clients and there’s upselling more to your existing clients. And in fact, it’s that second task that will really make a massive difference to your business. But have you tried it before and found it really hard to upsell clients? If that is the case, my special guest today is going to be a massive help to you. Why is selling more to existing clients the bigger opportunity? How do you do it? And how does it generate more delicious profit for you?

Hi, my name is James Steel and I’m the host of the Harvest Podcast, all around generating more revenue from your existing clients. And I’m also Channel Chief at Salesbuildr, a quotation and proposal tool for MSPs.

But that’s just the thing that pays the salary, so don’t worry about that. It’s Harvest that’s the show that we want to talk about because you found a niche within a niche, James, and I give you big applause for that. Your show is about how MSPs can make more money from their existing clients, which is a great subject. And I think you had me on your show a couple of months ago, which was a fun experience, so thank you for that. Always nice to return the favour and I know you’ve got lots to say about selling more to existing clients. So in your experience, does the average MSP embrace this and really go for this and just go after that extra revenue? Or in your experience, is it the exact opposite that most MSPs think that marketing and sales is all about bringing on board new clients and they forget to sell more things to their existing clients?

Yeah, I think there are a couple of groups. You’ve got those who absolutely get this idea and embrace the concept. I think we’ll dive straight into a concept that you’ve talked about in the past as well. They embrace the idea of this matrix setup of, okay, let’s look at all of my customers down one side and all the services along the top, and let’s just work out where the gaps are. So you get the group that are sort of doing that in a kind of ad hoc fashion, whether it’s on a spreadsheet or whether it’s through some sort of manual scripting and stuff through the PSA. They’re trying to get that gold mine of information basically that’s living in your PSA. And then you’ve got the other group who I think are just, it looks like the better thing to do is to just go straight to generating new leads. And I think that can be a problematic approach if you go there first.

And why is that such an issue if you focus all of your time on new leads?

There’s an enormous opportunity there within your existing customer base.

And this isn’t just about saying, okay, there’s a gap. I mean that is part of it, but I think there’s a couple of areas. One you need to know, okay, within my existing customer base, is my house clean first? Have we got this right? Am I billing everyone correctly because that’s a huge area, and have I adjusted prices recently, for example? I mean, I can only imagine what it must be like trying to keep up with the Microsoft Product Suite, as great as it is, it’s always changing, it’s absolutely sprawling. So trying to keep up with that and make sure that you’re always passing on the right costs and preserving margins continuously while you’re trying to run your business, that’s a really difficult thing to be doing, I think.

Yeah, I bet it is. And also I think it was Jay Abraham, who’s a legendary marketer still with us today, I think it was him that first pinpointed that to grow a business, you can’t just focus on bringing new clients. You’ve got to a) get new clients, b) get those clients to buy more from you or buy from you more often. And c) get those clients to spend more every single time they buy. So that’s obviously what your podcast is about. And I know you’ve been interviewing a whole ton of people asking their best ideas of how do you sell more to your existing clients. Can you give us some of the best ideas that you’ve heard over the last couple of months?

Yeah, that’s a really good one. So of course, we’ve got the profit matrix, you need to have that in place first. But actually I think looking at just standardising your stack, so getting away from doing everything. I had a wonderful chat with a guy called Jeffrey Newton from MSP Insider podcast. He’s also one of the leads at a company called Sift, and he was talking about the massive gains that they’d made by just stripping down what they’re working with. Not having umpteen varieties of firewalls, there’s this kind of ripple effect when you are working with sprawling portfolios that it’s not just tricky to sell, to maintain, but the entire business feels the effect of having multiple products that aren’t needed. So the more streamline you can get, and I’ve seen this time and time again with the highest performing MSPs that we work with, the more streamlined you are, the stricter you are with your portfolio, the better.

Give us another one.

We hear it a lot, but I think the pricing side of things is absolutely key. I really like those companies that have the arrogance, and I understand it’s tricky to do this from the outset if you’re just starting out, but the arrogance to say, my price is my price, this is my stack, I’m sticking to it. It’s amazing how your customers end up respecting you for it. I have to give a shout out to Ian Groves at Star Tech, I know this is something that he does very well indeed over here in the UK. And not only do your customers respect you for it ultimately, but your team know as well that there’s value in what you’re providing and you’re not going to budge from that, and that carries through. You’re not ad hoc discounting, we’re worth what we’re worth. And I think the best MSPs are doing that consistently.

Yeah, absolutely. I would agree with you. I mean, even if you’re a startup, and this was day one of being an MSP, stick to your prices. Figure those prices out, stick to them. I truly believe that what happens in the first 30, 60, 90 days with the client dictates your future relationship. And if actually right at the very beginning of the sales stage, you fold, they say, I want a discount. And you go, okay, here’s 25% discount, every single project you put in front of them, every single MRR service, everything, they’re going to ask for a discount.

I did that in my first business, our biggest client was a massive engineering company. They were spending a couple of thousand pounds a month with us, and at the sales meeting, the chairman said, I don’t buy unless I’ll get a discount, and I gave him a whatever discount. And it transpired in the months later that when I was working with the people under him that half of the suppliers he asked would give a discount, half wouldn’t. Those who didn’t, he respected more and who got more business from him and more sales because he wanted someone to push back. And obviously I was like 12 at the time, so I didn’t really get that. But it is fascinating how we get this pricing thing completely wrong in our head.

If you were to walk into an MSP tomorrow and you were to look at what they’re doing, and you’ve talked about some good things already, but if we were to look at a hardcore sales thing, so let’s say you’ve got an MSP that is actually in the mindset of, yes, I do want to sell more, in fact it’s an MSP who knows that retention gets better the more that you sell to a client, it’s the complete opposite of how it should be you. The more services you sell to a client, admittedly, you have to justify them, and you’ve got to justify the bill every month sometimes, but the more you sell to someone, if you’re selling them what they want as well as what they need, then the happiness can and does tend to go up. What would you recommend for actually getting into that sales? So do you recommend doing strategic reviews or quarterly business reviews as they’re called? Or is there something else that you recommend?

Yeah, I mean, I think everyone’s got their own way of doing this. What I really like and what I see a lot  is really taking a moment just to understand are there sort of commonalities within your particular customer base. Developing that domain expertise so that you’ve got a position there that is so strong because you understand the real nuances. I mean, the particular regulation, perhaps it’s a financially regulated industry or whatever it might be, things that only somebody in that space would know. And I think coming at it from that position, if you can do that, and you can come in and say, right, okay, I understand your industry perfectly, and I also understand the technology stack that aligns with that. I think that then puts you in a much better position to be able to introduce new products. And in terms of the conversation, I think the overwhelming advice definitely, and I see this on the podcast consistently, is let your customers talk.

I’ve seen it all from, I just go in there with a blank pad and just put it in front of them and say, just talk. I’ve got others that just say, right, okay, here’s a whiteboard, put your top three business objectives, nothing to do with technology. Varying different approaches on that scale. But I think if you are first of all aligned, you’re in that industry, you’ve got the industry knowledge, you’ve got the right stack, and then you can actually listen and see where that can apply. I think that’s really, really key to really eking out the most from your base.

Yeah, I agree. Isn’t that lesson one of day one of sales school, which is the more you talk, the less you sell, and the more you listen, the more you sell. It really is. It is about asking the right questions and then shutting up and letting them talk themselves into it. And I think actually with what we’re talking about here is account management. So bringing on board new clients, there’s a little more to it than that is more of a nuance. But when you are with someone already or they’re with you, they trust you already. They want you to succeed, they want to stay with you. They don’t want the relationship to go sour, so it makes more sense that you’ve already got that trust. Therefore, let them talk themselves into buying more from you. James, good advice there. Thank you very much. Tell us about two things. Tell us about your podcast. I’ve become a listener myself. Tell us what you cover on the podcast, how we can listen to it, and then tell us about Salesbuildr as well.

Wonderful. Thank you so much. Yeah. Well, Harvest is all about unsurprisingly, generating more revenue from your existing customer base. And we’re trying to keep it on that topic. We’re trying to keep it tactical, actionable, very short. We’ve got sort of segments in there for dispelling industry myths and things. So hopefully the idea is that you can always take away three actionable points for your MSP, take the idea, put your spin on it and put it into your business tomorrow. And yes, as for Salesbuildr, we are a proposal and quotation tool, which works beautifully with Autotask ConnectWise and Halo PSA, connecting to your distributors and of course your PSAs to build a portfolio and then to let you build beautiful drag and drop proposals right from there. And there’s a whole load of automation in there too. And you’ve got the whitespace view on top of that, which is look, your profit matrix built live from your PSA. So if you’d like to know more about that, head over to salesbuildr.com.

Paul’s Personal Peer Group

Damien, who runs his MSP in Manchester in the UK, wants to do lots more on LinkedIn. His question is: Someone told me we should be uploading PDFs to LinkedIn. Is this true? And how exactly do I use them?

Yes, it is true. They’re called LinkedIn carousels, and all they really are is a PDF that you upload to LinkedIn as a document. But instead of cramming hundreds of words onto each page, you might only have 10, at most 20 words per page. Think of it more as like a slideshow, almost like a PowerPoint, where the less you put on the slide, the better. And that means that people can read the slide really quickly. They can use the arrow to move on to the next page or just swipe their finger and over six or seven, maybe up to 10 pages. It’s an ultra engaging and easy to digest piece of LinkedIn content, which promotes top level interesting technology facts.

How do you make an easy one? Well, I would just get a designer to create a PowerPoint template for you with your MSP’s branding, and then you can easily set up a new slideshow anytime you then just save that PowerPoint as a PDF and you upload it to LinkedIn as a document. Just remember to post from your personal profile, not your business profile, because LinkedIn prioritises personal content over business content, and of course people buy from people.

So how do you do it? You just click start a new post on LinkedIn and then either hit the three dots, or if you’re on a laptop, hit the plus symbol. Look for the little icon that is a document, and that’s it. You upload it. Lots of algorithmic attention to your PDF Carousel. Oh, pro tip, the file name of your PDF carousel will be displayed in your post. So make sure that the file name communicates what it’s about rather than being a file name. You know what I mean.

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, James Steel on LinkedIn, and visit the Salesbuildr website.
• Got a question about your MSP’s marketing? Submit one here for Paul’s Personal Peer Group.