What if you only had 90 days to win new clients? (MSP emergency plan)

Imagine you had just 90 days to win new clients.

Maybe you’ve lost a whale. Or maybe you just need cash. The reason doesn’t matter, it’s a thought experiment (so, relax).

Does the idea of this make your blood run cold? Good, because that’s what makes it such a brilliant test. It shows you what you’d do if you took your marketing seriously.

Important side note: if you really needed emergency cash within a month, it would come from selling more to your existing clients. This plan is for winning new ones.

An MSP podcast host once asked me what I’d do if I had to start an MSP from scratch. Of course, he was waiting for me to name an RMM, a PSA and my tech stack.

No way, José. Instead, I said I’d figure all that out AFTER I’d won some clients.

First I’d build a pipeline, then I’d shake that tree until some business fell out (yes, I mixed my analogies. Moving on).

Here’s the emergency plan

1) Take marketing seriously

Spend a minimum of 90 minutes every day on your marketing. Do the maths: 90 minutes x 90 days = 135 hours.

If it were a real emergency, I reckon I could free up 4 to 5 hours a day within 48 hours.

Chaos? Yes, and I’d be calling in favours to ferry my child around. But the pain is short term, and it eases fast once new clients start arriving.

While you’re at it, tidy up your website and your LinkedIn profile, because prospects check both before they talk to you. Make them reflect who you are and how it feels to work with you. Cold, techy sites full of stock photos get the same results as every other MSP.

2) Dig out what you already have

You’ve probably got a drawer of business cards from events over the last 10 years. Old enquiries buried in Outlook. Notes from calls you never followed up.

Some of those people are dead ends. But some of those one man bands now have 25 staff and an MSP they’re fed up with. And you won’t know until you reach out.

Email them, phone them, add them on LinkedIn. Work them hard. You have nothing to lose.

3) Farm LinkedIn, then go and meet humans

Every day on LinkedIn, do the 4 Cs: connect, contact, content, comment.

1. Connect with new people and
2. Contact them (message them) once they accept
3. Post one piece of content every 24 hours
4. Comment on other people’s posts, which is what gets people sending you connection requests. Two way traffic, right?

But LinkedIn is farming, not hunting, and you can’t easily speed it up. So find a networking event for every weekday if you can, and at least three or four days a week if you can’t. Nearby towns count, and so do events for a favoured vertical.

I detest networking myself. In a real emergency, I’d do it anyway.

Digital marketing is free but slow. Networking costs you time and effort, but relationships form much faster. Meet the same person two or three times over a few weeks and they might refer you, or start a conversation that leads somewhere.

4) Pick up the phone

Spend 60 to 90 minutes every day making outbound calls. Phone everyone on those old business cards, and everyone you meet networking, whether you think they’ve got business for you or not.

Talk about them and their business. Your MSP is the last thing you mention, because these calls are a relationship building exercise. People are much more interested in talking to you when you're talking about their favourite subject... which is themselves.

Most MSPs have massive follow up failure, so the easy wins sit there for years just because the phone wasn't picked up. It’s a numbers game, and the phone speeds it up massively.

OK, reality check time... None of this sounds like fun, does it?

I get that. And yet if you do it day in, day out, even on the days you can’t be bothered, something happens.

You build Big Mo. Big Momentum. Once you get the wheel spinning, don’t let it slow down.

Keep speeding it up. By doing more of the right stuff.

Which of these 4 tasks would you struggle with most? Let me know. I read and reply to every email😃