MSP Marketing Made Easy (EP 783)

[Uncle Marv]
Hello friends, Uncle Marv here and welcome to the IT Business Podcast. This is once again a very special episode as we continue our marketing and money series here in the month of March, where the goal here is to provide you with the tools and insights needed to enhance your brand presence and increase your recurring revenue monthly. And as we've mentioned before, we'll be featuring expert advice, practical strategies, real world examples of how you as an IT professional or MSP can use marketing to drive growth.

We'll cover topics such as content marketing, podcasting for business, yeah, I said that, and the latest AI driven marketing tools that can give you a marketing edge. And then of course, in addition to the marketing strategies, we'll also dive into financial growth. For those of you looking to scale, we've lined up guests who will discuss funding and investment strategies and then the rest of us will talk about pricing strategies, upselling techniques and creating value added services that your clients will find indispensable.

So with that, let me go ahead and bring up our guest for today. He has been tagged as, interestingly enough, the world's go-to MSP marketing expert. He is Paul Green.

[Speaker 1]
I wrote that.

[Uncle Marv]
You wrote that?

[Speaker 1]
I wrote that.

[Uncle Marv]
I was going to say, if somebody tagged you with that, that's great. But for those of you that know Paul Green has been on the show before, he is the founder of the MSP Marketing Edge. Let's see.

I think the bio stuff says that you've helped over 700 MSPs worldwide. That's probably closer to a thousand now, right?

[Speaker 1]
So 700 is the number we're actively working with. I think in nine years, it must be getting on for 2000, something like that, but yeah.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. And Paul's mission, folks, is to make marketing easy for MSPs, helping them to win clients, grow their business, and live awesome lives. Welcome back to the show, Paul.

[Speaker 1]
Thank you so much for having me on. And I think you're the first person to actually ask me about my self-described title of the world's go-to MSP marketing expert. There is another MSP marketing person.

I'm not going to bother giving you a name check, but when I changed my LinkedIn profile about a year ago to say that, he turned himself into the multiverse's go-to MSP marketing expert, which I thought was like, bravo. That was a great response to that.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. So listen, you've got to market yourself somehow, right?

[Speaker 1]
Right.

[Uncle Marv]
Okay. So, Paul, let's start with the fact that we were speaking earlier. So you were on this podcast a year ago.

We have seen each other on some other stuff, but tell me, how are things going in this last year?

[Speaker 1]
It's just been another awesome year. I love working the channel, love working with MSPs. It's interesting, you've combined two of my favorite things with this series, marketing and money.

I could talk about marketing all day long, and I love money because money gives me the fantastic lifestyle that I want to live. And you said that my mission is to make marketing easy for MSPs. There's a reason that I've done that.

In the last year or so, I've really clarified my mission and sort of simplified what I talk about because I believe that if as an MSP, if the missing ingredient is marketing and the ability to know exactly how to get new clients, then getting good at marketing is the missing link between going from being a 60-hour-a-week business owner to being a 20-hour-a-week business owner who spends more time with their kids, more time with their other half, has the car they want, has the house they want.

And this isn't just about stuff. This is about living the lifestyle you most want to live, and I do see a direct correlation between that. So that's what I've been doing the last year or so.

I think you and I were on a joint, we were trying to figure it out, we were on a joint thing where there were like 10 guests from around the channel, and I remember seeing you on that. That might be the one where they forgot to come to me at the end, I don't know if you remember that one. Do you remember that?

And the guy was running out of time, and he was speeding through the guests.

[Uncle Marv]
Yeah, and I think, yeah, that was one of those 10 to 12 people community outreach things.

[Speaker 1]
Yeah, yeah. Which is always a nightmare, never, ever. For any vendors figuring, doing webinars, this is the perfect format.

It's one person talking to one other person, maybe three at the most, you know. Right.

[Uncle Marv]
Yeah. All right. So you have been busy.

I noticed that when we were getting ready to talk that you have this, and we'll just get right into it, you have a new three-step lead generation system.

[Speaker 1]
Yes, it's actually an old three-step lead generation system, but what I've done, Marv, is I've figured out how to communicate it better. So what I was just saying about, if you can get your marketing right, you change your life. And I did this.

I've been in business. This is my 20th year in business. I know you've probably, you must be getting near your 30th now.

I'm close.

[Uncle Marv]
I'll say that.

[Speaker 1]
I've got more gray hair than you have. I'm close. But you know this.

As you go through cycles, don't you, in your business-owning career, and this is my ninth year in the channel. And about 18 months, two years ago, I sat down and I looked at, what do I do to help my MSP Marketing Edge members? What do I do when I do a webinar or a podcast like this two, three times a week, every week?

What's the messages I'm sending out? And I've talked about all sorts of marketing over the years. And then I sort of thought of all the MSPs I've spoken to, and I must have spoken to getting on for 2,000 MSPs over the years.

What are the most common questions? And it always boils down to the basics. Should I do LinkedIn?

What should I do with my website? The real job that people want to fix is, how do I generate more leads so I can win one new client a month, or one new client every month or every three months? Whatever you're able to take on board.

And so I've spent the last 18 months simplifying my message. The three-step marketing system, you'll love this, Marv, it's six words, right? Here's an entire marketing strategy in six words.

Let me give it to you. So step one, this is the first two words, build audiences. I'm going to come back to that in a second.

Step number two is grow relationships. Step number three is convert relationships. So build audiences, grow relationships, convert relationships.

And I'll go through all of those and explain them very quickly. But what I did was when I realized that... And that's the same three-step marketing system I've been talking about for years, but I've never been able to communicate it as efficiently as that.

So I sat down and I wrote a book. I've got my book here. It's called MSP Marketing Start Here.

This is on Amazon Worldwide. It's on Kindle. It's on paperback.

The Audible version is due to be approved in seven days. So that's going to be coming out pretty soon. Because Audible have some...

Yeah, they have some very high standards that you have to meet. But this is a 60-minute read. This is...

Actually, when I wrote it, I sat down and gave myself the challenge that you could read this in two sessions on the toilet. That was actually my brief to myself. It's designed to be sort of super simple to read.

And the three-step systems in this book and then everything we do that MSP Marketing Edge members, it's exactly the same. So the same content that's in the book, we use the same system in our portal and all the content and the help that we give to our members is implementing that three-step system. Do you want me to briefly explain what those three steps are?

[Uncle Marv]
Well, let me at least say this much. So I was getting ready to get back out there. So you asked me if I'm getting up there.

So this business, this is year 28 for this business. And I had not done marketing since my first year or two because I had a very good referral system and I kept my business in kind of a boutique style. So it was never about going out where I had to get 50 new endpoints every month or anything like that.

And that's worked well for me. So I've had some clients retire, had a couple of business get sold. So the number is shrinking for the first time in those 28 years.

So I get to get back out there. So I'm actually, and I probably am doing this out of the wrong order because my thing was just to go back out and grow my relationships. So I was going to get out and network and do all the stuff that I did back then.

But obviously, building an audience is what you have as the first step. So let's talk about building the audience before you can actually go out and, you know.

[Speaker 1]
Yeah. Well, the good news is, I think by getting out and networking, you're actually combining steps one and two at the same time. So we'll talk about that in a second.

First of all, let's just acknowledge the last time you did marketing for your IT business, it was a previous century. It was another century. It was another millennium.

That's how long. There are people listening to this podcast who weren't alive when you were doing, last doing marketing for your business. So I think there's actually a round of applause there for having a business and clearly being so good at what you do that your client retention has been so good that the clients literally had to sell their businesses or retire before they stopped paying you.

So the three steps, I turned 50 last year. I'm turning 51 this year. And when you start talking about, oh yeah, do you remember where you were when it became the year 2000?

And I was 26 when that happened. And it's kind of nuts when you start talking to people who weren't even born and now they're running businesses. You know, it's just like mind blowing.

But anyway, there we go. So the three steps, build audience. Let's take this first two steps, build audiences, grow relationships.

Now you have an advantage over an MSP owner of three or four years in that you've got that longevity, right? So you've already got massive audiences, Marv. So for you, you don't realize they're audiences, but you've already got them.

So you've got audiences of people you've known who are in business in, remind me, whereabouts are you based?

[Uncle Marv]
Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

[Speaker 1]
That's right, Fort Lauderdale. So there are just people you've known for years, right? You've probably got, there'll be community groups that you've been involved with.

Again, it'll be over decades. There'll be a sports team that you follow and you've got, they're just fans. They're just guys you know, guys you see once a year and you're like, hey, how are you?

How's business? How's it going? So you've already got all of these audiences.

And actually, you getting out there networking is shaking the tree, isn't it? It's you working on your relationships. For most MSPs, they don't have that.

Maybe it's because they haven't been in business for so long or because, you know, what was the marketing that worked in the 1990s? It was that. It was getting out there.

It was talking to people. You know, if you hadn't got the dollars to go and put adverts in the newspaper or put adverts on radio or TV, which most startup businesses don't, you just got out there and you met people and you built up a network. That was what we did back in the 90s.

And so you've still got those networks now, which is amazing. So an MSP that's been in business for five, 10 years may not have that because most of the MSPs that are owned by people younger than you and me, they are pure digital. All they've ever done is digital marketing.

So what I recommend to most MSPs is let's do that first step, which is to build audiences. And there are lots of audiences you can build. This is an audience for you, Marv.

So obviously this is an audience of IT professionals. This isn't an audience of business owners that are going to buy from you. But you could, and I know you're a fan of this because you mentioned it, any MSP could start their own podcast.

And it could be a podcast for business owners in their local area. It could be a podcast for a vertical or a niche that they're in. There are actually very, very few MSPs doing podcasts or doing videos about technology for ordinary businesses, about how technology can improve productivity, about how it can make the business grow faster, about the issues, the cybersecurity elements.

So that's an audience. YouTube is an audience. Social media is an audience.

I recommend to most MSPs you start with two audiences. And those two are LinkedIn and your email database. So LinkedIn, love it or hate it, every single possible business you could ever want is there on LinkedIn.

The vast majority of the world's decision makers and influencers are on LinkedIn. And the reason I love it so much as a simple way to get started is because you can just go in and in just 10, 20 minutes every day, you can just try and connect to business owners and managers that you want to do business with. It's as simple as that.

So if you're just a regular MSP in a regular town or a city, you go in and you're like, right, what kind of businesses do I want? I want CPAs. CPA is my town, right?

Up comes 20 of those. And then you just work your way through the people. And remember, you're looking to connect to decision makers and influencers.

What's the difference between the two? The decision maker says yes, but the influencer is the one that leads them to a yes or a no. So I'm the decision maker in my business, but I don't make any big decision without my colleague, Amy, who's my operations manager.

She will tell me what she thinks, whether we should buy from A or buy from B. So you've got to make sure you're covering both of those off. So you type CPA is your town into LinkedIn.

There's a load of them. You attempt to connect to 10 a day. When you've done all the CPAs, you move on to the lawyers.

You move on to the manufacturers, the veterinarians, the dentists, the doctors, whatever it is that you want. You can search within LinkedIn. You can search within Google.

Obviously, the Google searching is better. If you type in CPA is your town LinkedIn, that brings up better results than LinkedIn does. But you can do either of those.

Or you do the cheat method. I love the cheat method. You go and find someone else who's already connected to all the people you want to do business with.

So I live in the UK, as you can tell by my voice. I live right in the middle of the UK, about an hour from London, on the edge of a city called Milton Keynes, which is the only city in the UK that was built on the US grid system, by the way. So when they built this city in the 1960s, they said, what's the best thing about living in the US?

It's the roads, right? You have grid roads. So they built this city from scratch, and it has grid roads.

So we don't have traffic jams here. We're the only city in the UK not to have traffic jams, which is great. I know.

So thank you for your grid road system. And there's a guy here called Mark Orr. I don't know him, but he's the most connected guy in the whole city, right?

He knows every business owner. He's connected to 10,000 people on LinkedIn. If I wanted to reach business owners in my city, I would connect to him, and then I would look at his connections and farm his connections, if that makes sense.

By the way, you have loads of connections on LinkedIn that is a setting to stop people seeing those connections, if you wanted to stop people doing that. Obviously, for Mark, his value comes from the fact that he knows everyone, and he's connected to everyone. So LinkedIn is a massive audience.

The problem with... Sorry, let me just finish this a little bit, Marv. The problem with LinkedIn is it's what's known as a rented audience, right?

At any point, they can take it away from you, and they do. Matt Solomon from a channel program, great guy, got LinkedIn banned for 10 days at Thanksgiving last year. He didn't do anything wrong.

Some algorithm somewhere decided it didn't like his account, took his account down. Matt's got, I don't know, 10,000 followers, connections, something like that, huge numbers. And it took him 10 days, maybe more, to get his account back.

And his LinkedIn account is back up. But it just goes to show, at any point, for random reasons, LinkedIn can take that audience away from you. So we call that a rented audience.

A better audience is an audience that you own. And I always recommend that all the new connections you make within LinkedIn, go find their email address. A couple of different ways to do that we can talk about if you want.

Get their email address, put them into your CRM. So your CRM is not your PSA, but it's something like HubSpot, which is overkill, ActiveCampaign, MailerLite, MailChimp, Growably, which you can get in the tech tribe for free. All of these are really good CRMs. You take your connections, you find their email address, you put their details in your CRM. Even if your CRM bans you, that data is still yours, right? They don't own the data. It's your data that you just happen to be using within that platform.

So those are just two really simple audiences. You can build those at the same time. I'm just going to answer the elephant in the room question, which is, but Paul, I don't have permission to email these people that I'm adding into my CRM.

And my answer to that, which is not legal advice, but my answer is, it's better to seek forgiveness than it is to ask permission. Relax. The world's anti-spam laws are aimed at the people who send out like a million emails a day.

They're not aimed at a small business owner who's adding two people a day into their CRM. And particularly not if the first email you send to them says, hi, Dave, we've just connected on LinkedIn. I've added you to my newsletter list.

I'm going to send you one email a week with useful advice about using technology in your business. If you don't want to get it, just unsubscribe below. The vast majority of which most people won't.

So those are the two audiences I'd kind of get started with. If you don't have any marketing or much marketing, that's the great place to start.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. Well, I was going to ask you about LinkedIn in particular, because the big push inside of LinkedIn is not only to create content, which, you know, they're guiding people now on how to create content with saying, hey, answer this question or, you know, put together this newsletter. But what I wanted to ask you is, have you advised people on the sales navigator portion where you actually buy to get more access to people?

[Speaker 1]
Yes, unfortunately, you have to buy sales navigator to do what I'm talking about. So two years ago, you could go on LinkedIn and just do huge amounts of activity before you ran out of free connections, free activity. And then, you know, LinkedIn's part of Microsoft.

Microsoft's just, it's all about recurring revenue. Who can blame them, right? That's the game we're all trying to play.

And they've just shrunk and shrunk and shrunk the limits. So your limit now depends on how active you are, how big your network is, how much value you put back into LinkedIn. Most MSPs starting out, I say, go and connect to 10 people a day or attempt to connect to 10 people a day.

Two of them will accept. That's the worst case scenario. They start that on Monday.

On Tuesday, they run out of connections. So that's where you have to give LinkedIn some money. It's not a huge amount of money, but it's a pain because sales navigator is a great tool set, but most people don't use all of that tool set.

It opens up lots of things you can do, but very few of us use them. If you're going to take LinkedIn seriously, that's a good thing to do.

[Uncle Marv]
Okay. Wanted to get that out of the way. So that's good.

The other side to all of this equation, and it's not just LinkedIn, it's anybody that does stuff on Facebook or what's the new one that's out. There's a new popular one out, the Substack and all of these things. They're all communities that you can be a part of.

Like you said, you don't own them. You can't take them with you unless you get all that information and put it in your own system. The second part to that equation, it sounds like, is you still got to do some content marketing with all of that.

So I wanted to ask, content marketing a few years ago was the rage. Here's the template campaigns. People are starting to move away from those to more customized campaigns and stuff.

So I wanted to ask you, what role right now do you see content marketing playing in our marketing?

[Speaker 1]
That's brilliant. Genuinely, you and I haven't rehearsed this, but you've led very nicely into the second step, which is grow relationships. So because grow relationships is content marketing.

And you're absolutely right. When we talk about content marketing, we mean using content to put in front of people that you're connected to or that are in your email database to build a relationship with them. So there's a core problem in marketing MSPs.

Well, there's lots and lots of problems. But the core problem is that, first of all, people only buy when they're ready to buy. So there is nothing you can do to force someone to switch MSPs today.

Because it's a big job in their head. They don't understand the tech. In fact, already they're suffering from something called inertia loyalty, which is where it feels easier to stay with the MSP that they've been with for years, even if they don't like them, even if they're not happy.

It just feels easier to stay. And the people you're selling to who don't know what they don't know about technology, they're just veterinarians. They're just dentists, right?

They don't understand tech at all. They really have to be very, very motivated and at a point where they're really feeling the pain to switch from their incumbent MSP over to you. And at that point, they're not going to switch unless they know you, they like you, and they trust you.

So what we're trying to do between the point today where you connect to them on LinkedIn and start emailing them and the point in 2028 when they're ready to buy, between that point, we're going to put content in front of them on LinkedIn. I'll give you some examples of content in a second. We're going to send them some emails.

We might even pick up the phone, just have a chat with them. None of this is selling. We're not trying to do any selling.

What we're trying to do is show that you are the local tech authority, that the stuff you talk about is very relevant to them because you're talking about using technology to grow a business. All business owners have this in common. They want to grow their business.

Everyone wants a little bit more money, a little bit less hassle. We all want exactly that, a safer business. So you've got years in order to show that you are really on top of your game.

And it would be very easy to look at LinkedIn, very easy to look at just the web and say, there's enough content. I think we've got enough content out now. The reality is, content marketing is as valid today as it was a few years ago.

Now, you mentioned marketing campaigns. This, I think, is the big shift. All the vendors give marketing campaigns away, all of them.

And 95% of them are trash. They are just awful because these big vendors, we're not going to name any names, and I've seen campaigns, people send me samples and say, what do you think of this? I'm a partner of so-and-so.

I've had this. What do you think of this? And I look at it and I say, look, their in-house marketing team has knocked this out in a day for the sake of ticking a box of, oh, we have marketing campaigns in our portal.

And the problem with the marketing campaign is, A, often it's geared around selling what the vendor sells, right? But if the vendor is selling some kind of obscure cybersecurity solution, which is just part of your stack, why would you mention that to business owners? You wouldn't.

Business owners don't care about insert product here. They care about growing their business and not having their staff complain about slow computers. So often the marketing is skewed in the wrong way.

But the real problem, Marv, is that a one-off marketing campaign does not work, right? And I hate it when MSPs say to me, oh, I did some marketing. It didn't work.

I'll tell you why it doesn't work. If people only buy when they're ready to buy, and that's in 2028, say, because it can be that far ahead, you do a one-off marketing campaign today. It lasts for 30 days.

You might pick up two or three people to have conversations with you, but that's it. It's a ton of work, and then it stops. And what I recommend instead, and this is in my book, MSP Marketing Start Here.

This is how we run the MSP Marketing Edge. Don't run marketing campaigns. Run a marketing system.

So you set up a system where you're doing a series of things on a regular basis. So like we were saying about LinkedIn connections, every day, just go and do some LinkedIn connections. In fact, you don't even need to do it yourself.

Get a virtual assistant to do it for you. Every day, add connections into your CRM. Then we come on to content, the second step, which is to grow relationships.

Every day, post something on LinkedIn. Every day, and you can do lots of different types. You can do posts with images.

You can do infographics. You can do what are called PDF carousels, where you upload a PDF and there's a little arrow on it. So people click and see all the different pages of your PDF.

You can upload videos. You can do personal updates. You can do a LinkedIn newsletter.

LinkedIn newsletters are still huge, three years on from when they were launched. I thought by now that the algorithm would have stopped promoting them, but still the algorithm promotes them. So there's all these different kinds of content.

And then you can send them an email once a week. You could even send them a printed newsletter once a month. And you can use the same content across all of these platforms.

And you can take a LinkedIn newsletter and you could add that onto your website as a blog. You could turn it into an email. It can be a story in your printed newsletter.

So you don't need a huge amount of content to reuse it across all of these channels. The point is, at the point at which they're ready, willing, and able to think, genuinely think about switching MSPs, you have a relationship with them. It's a low-level relationship.

They don't know what beer you drink, but they will look at that. They'll say, oh yeah, Uncle Marv, I know him. I've been reading his stuff for years.

Or here, I've got his books on my desk. Or I've got his printed newsletter here. We've got three or four copies knocking around the business.

You win yourself a place at the sales table. Just by virtue of the fact that you've done the hard work over years. But it has to be a system.

Has to be a system. That's the most important thing.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. Let me ask about that system. Because I've heard recently that AI is now making its way into marketing.

And we've used it for automation, for MSPs. We've used it for chatbots on our websites. And now we're using it to be able to target specific markets and stuff.

Using AI to do the thing you talked about earlier. Where we're trying to find all those attorneys. All those medical offices in our areas and stuff.

Have you played with any of that at all?

[Speaker 1]
Oh my goodness, yes. As a business, we've embraced AI. We use chat GPT extensively.

Not for content creation. I still prefer my humans to do that. So none of our stuff is generated by AI.

It's not good enough. But we use it for research. We use it for opportunities.

I think the thing to use AI. We use chat GPT. Although we're this close to looking at perplexity.

The only one I wouldn't use is Grok. Because that's been trained on Twitter hate. And I'm not being flippant there.

And I say this as a Tesla driver. Who I'm looking for one of those stickers that says, I got this before I knew about Elon. So Grok, it's all about what data has it been trained on.

Chat GPT has been trained on everything. Grok has been trained on Twitter. And we all know that Twitter for a number of years has been in a very specific space.

So you have to ask yourself, what's the value of Grok? But the way to look at AI is it is not a replacement. It is an enhancement.

And that may change in the years ahead. Because I do think we're on day one of AI. And it's the so much cool things that you can do.

But I was talking to an MSP yesterday who is replacing his PSA with his own internal system that he's building day by day with Chat GPT. So they'll look at it. And they'll say, oh, wouldn't it be great if it could do, I don't know, if you could take an open ticket and remind us if it's been over three days.

Goes into Chat GPT says, hey, you've been writing me this program in whatever language. I want to add a new function where it does this. It outputs the code.

They test it. It's not perfect. But it's an internal system.

So it's not like they're selling it to anyone or anything. As long as it's secure and it's their own internal system and they know how to fix bugs, they've managed to replace their PSA. That's the level of capability.

And these aren't coders as well. These are non-coders who are using it to code. So yeah, I think it's a great tool for enhancing.

You can go in. They've just released something called Deep Research. And we're on the $20 a month account, which is the pro.

And I think you get five of those a month where you can go in and you can ask it a question. And not just give me the first answer you come up with. But go think about this.

Go investigate this. So you might, for example, let's say you wanted to reach lawyers. Lawyers in your city or your state.

So you could go in and you could say to it, I want you to do some deep research and give it all the information. We are a managed services firm, an MSP. This is our specialty.

This is what we focus in. Cybersecurity is a big thing for us. We want to reach lawyers.

We want lawyers that are a minimum of five lawyers and support staff within this geographical area. We don't want the ambulance chasing one-person vans. We want these.

We want corporate law. We want this. We want this.

We want to reach more of these people. I want you to go and do some deep research on how I would reach them. Where are they hanging out?

What organizations are they part of? What are they reading? What are their behaviors?

Go and do as much search. And that might go away and spend two or three hours doing that. The more you ask, the more the research is.

And of course, it's going to come back with some lies because we all know that AI hallucinates. But what a great tool. Because you could then take the 200 pages it gives you and then get ChatGPT to summarize that down.

Summarize that down to 10 actions I should take today. 10 actions I should take tomorrow. And again, it's not going to be perfect.

But five years ago, we'd have paid a human to do that, wouldn't we? We'd have said to someone, go and do some Googling. Go and ring some people.

Go and talk to someone.

[Uncle Marv]
It would have taken forever.

[Speaker 1]
It would have taken forever. And the quality would have been probably just as dubious as the ChatGPT quality. And that's the point.

It is an enhancer. It's the same with content. You know, you can take content.

In the MSP marketing edge, sorry to keep dropping in a plug, but we only work with one MSP per area. So we never have two MSPs in competition with each other using the same content. That's been the case for nine years.

Most of our competitors will sell to anybody, right? So any MSP can use their content. But you could, for example, take some content or maybe some content you get free from a vendor, put it into AI, personalize it.

Again, it's all in the prompts. What makes it special? What's your sphere on this?

You can train ChatGPT on your personality and say, I want you to reword this into my word or bring the readability down. Like you should be writing for grades. I think it's like grade five.

I use a tool called Hemingway, which analyses my writing and tells me what grade, you know, like school grade it's at. And I think grade five is like the highest I ever want to be. And that should be the same for all, you know, unless you're writing for PhD students, everything you write should have a grade five readability.

And you can take AI and feed in some information and say, rewrite this so it's understandable by a grade five student, by, what's that? 10 year olds, 11 year olds, something like that. Yeah, so that's the power of AI.

But you use it as an enhancer. It is not a replacement for humans and ideas. And I'll tell you the other thing that, and this is a bit of a bugbear of mine, is I know a couple of MSPs who are using it to generate tons of content, and that content doesn't make sense, right?

So you look on their website and there's a 10,000 word article on backups, say, right? And so yes, it makes sense, but nobody's going to read it, right? And you could argue, ah, but we're doing it for SEO.

We're doing it to get searches. But here's the thing, when we do it for SEO, we're still trying to get humans onto the website or at least get other AI systems to find it on your website and recommend it, but someone's going to go and look at it. No one's going to read a 10,000 word article on backups because it's boring.

And the AI content that's been output is boring. These days, in the age of AI, you've got to put your personality into everything. So if you have a, you know, in fact, your personality is your differentiation.

It's the only thing you've got to differentiate yourself from all the other MSPs, because I know everyone's got their different tech stack and their different cybersecurity tools and different SOPs, but really all MSPs do the same thing as all other MSPs. So it's the same as dentists. All dentists do the same thing, right?

They get you out of pain. They stop you having problems and they overcharge you for it. And then they drive around in Porsches and Mercedes.

That's what dentists do. What makes you pick one dentist over another? You trust them.

I like Dr. Drill here. So I'm going to stick with Dr. Drill rather than go to Dr. Doom over here. And it's no different within the MSP space.

So you've got to put your personality into your content, especially on LinkedIn.

[Uncle Marv]
Yeah, yeah. Doing AI stuff, you still want people to engage when they get there. If they get there and see an article that they're bored with and they go off your site, that's done you nothing.

So SEO doesn't always work there. I just wanted to go back and piggyback. You had mentioned you're thinking about perplexity.

I've been using perplexity for a couple of years now. I picked it when I was looking at pricing and some of the functionality. It seemed a little bit more flexible than ChatGPT, a little bit more up-to-date and relevant.

And you mentioned deep research. Deep research is in perplexity as well as ChatGPT 4.0, 4.5, Claude, Gemini. So it's got some stuff.

So if you're looking for a referral nod to perplexity, I'd say give it a shot.

[Speaker 1]
Right, that's tipping me over the edge. Yeah, I'll try that. Thank you.

[Uncle Marv]
All right here. So let's see. So we've basically tackled the first two.

I was going to ask a couple of questions, but I want to make sure we finish off with your third point there and tie it off in a nice bow, convert your audience.

[Speaker 1]
Yeah, it's a good thing you remembered that because I'd forgotten about that one. So yeah, it's the third step. And it's all of that work that we've done building audiences and then growing a relationship with them that still doesn't turn them into clients.

So the final step is convert relationship. And there are lots of different ways to do this. The way I recommend it is the slightly hard way, but you get the best results, is you pick up the phone and you call people, but not you.

You get someone to do it on your behalf and not a marketing agency. I'll tell you who in a second. So I under nod over this one for a long time because nobody likes making outbound calls.

Nobody. You don't like it, Marv. I don't like it.

Everyone listening to this or watching this doesn't like it. We don't like it. But here's the thing.

Remember I said that people only buy when they're ready to buy. You've got to get in front of them at the exact moment, but we don't know when that exact moment is. Not until we can have the AI analyzing every single little bit of someone because there is something called buyer intent where you can or intent data where you can see when someone's intending to buy.

That's very hard for managed services. It's really easy when it's type in wedding cutlery or something like that, right? Someone doing that is just the Google search is a buyer intent, but it's very hard to manage services.

Today, the best thing you can do is you find someone to just phone all of your LinkedIn connections, everyone who's on your CRM, everyone that you may have met at networking meetings. That call is not a sales call. It is a relationship building call.

There's sort of two or three outcomes that you want to get out of it. The number one outcome is if they are thinking of switching MSPs or hiring their first MSP in the next few months, you get them on a 15-minute video call with whoever does the selling, which is normally the owner of the business, right? The MSP owner.

That's like a tiny percentage of people. So for the rest of them, you find out who are they in a relationship with, who's their MSP, and when's the contract up, right? So if we're talking today and they say, yeah, I'm in a contract, it's up in October, then great, we're going to give them a call in August.

We're going to give them a call two months before that contract ends because we want to see how happy they are with their MSP two months before the contract end. And then the other thing we want to do is just move the relationship forward. The best person to do this is not you.

Please do not hire a marketing agency. There are a small number of very good marketing agencies out there, and we're not going to name any names, but there are a very great deal of very poor marketing agencies, and especially with telemarketing. They over-service you.

I've hired and fired about seven or eight agencies in my time over my 20-year business career. They over-service you in the first couple of months so you relax and you're like, oh, this is amazing. These guys are making great calls.

There's high-quality people doing it. They're getting results. And then the second you relax and you sign the long contract, the good people get moved on to the next new client and you get the B team.

And it's the B team that start making your regular calls. Results go down, activity goes down, but you're locked in a contract. That's not all agencies, but that's most agencies.

I think the answer is hire someone in-house. And you're looking for someone to work two to three hours a day, two to three days a week. In fact, a back-to-work mom is the person for this.

So you don't want someone who's previously done tele sales because they just have all those bad Wolf of Wall Street boiler room habits. We don't want that. We want someone who has had a professional career.

And by the way, when I say mom, I do mean a mom, not a parent, because I've also hired and fired 20-odd direct working-for-me phone people over the years, not in this business, in the previous business. All of the best performers were female. All of the worst performers were male.

It was absolutely as clear-cut as day. So a back-to-work mom, she's had a professional career. She's used to being on the phone.

She enjoys being on the phone. She's had a career break to have some kids. It's been like seven, eight, nine years.

She hasn't worked some time. She's bored now. The kids are of an age that they don't need her during the day.

They're stable at school. Money is, yeah, a bit of extra money would be nice, but that's not the prime driver. It's actually, can I do some work that's easy-ish, that's fun, that's adult work?

And can I throw myself into it? And making outbound phone calls, which aren't sales calls, they're relationship-building calls, is great fun. She can do it from home.

She can do it during school hours. In fact, they can be flexible. She could work today, but not tomorrow, completely up to her because it doesn't really matter.

She can use your VoIP system and she's not doing anything difficult. My best ever person for this was a lady called Miranda. I would beg Miranda, I would give her the entire contents of my fridge to my refrigerator to get her to work for me again because she used to sit in my office.

This is a previous business I owned, which I sold in 2016. She would sit with her feet up on the desk, just talking to people like this. And I'd come into the office and I'd say, is Miranda making a personal call?

Because she's laughing away and going, no, you didn't, you didn't, whatever. And I'd say, is she making a personal call? And they say, no, no, she's on the phone to that prospect.

And I'm like, that's the fourth time she's called in this month. And they'd be like, yep, we know. And she was the highest performer of booking.

Her job was exactly the same. It was to book like discovery calls, 15, it wasn't video calls back then, but it was like discovery calls. And she was relationship building.

She loved being on the phone. And she saw each call as a challenge that I'm going to get to know this person over two or three calls. And eventually, if there's any dissatisfaction with their current supplier, I'm going to get in chatting with Paul.

And that's the person you want. And where do you find that person? It is not on job boards.

It's not on Indeed. It is through social media. So you find, you look within the MSP, you say, right, who are the important females here?

Is it your other half? Is there an important female in the business? Get them to advertise, not even advertise, just put something on their Instagram.

Hey, my boss is looking for a back to work mom to work two to three hours a day, two to three days a week, flexible work, work from home. It's making outbound calls to prospects, no selling, you're just chatting to people about their business. And somewhere out there in her network, or working for the local school or something like that, you'll find someone.

And it's a really powerful thing to do. And remember, get you on 15 minute calls, then you do the hard work, right? Because you and I know, yeah, if you're on, if you're on, well, if you're on a 15 minute call, you can ask them questions about their tech, their business, you can decide, is this the right kind of business for me?

It's 10 seats, still want 10 seats. And then you can say like, hey, we should meet. Let's go for lunch.

Let's have a meeting, whatever it is. And the point is you're then in your element. All MSPs say to me, have been saying to me for 10 years is get me people on the phone.

I will convert them into sales. But how do I get them on the phone? That's the hardest thing.

So that three-step lead generation system, build audiences, grow relationships, convert relationships, boom, there we go.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. Well, normally, Paul, this is a point of the show where I ask people for resources and books you'd like to recommend. But you've told us pretty much all about yours, your book, MSP Marketing Start Here.

I'll have a link for it on the show notes. And then I also do want to make sure we plug in your podcast, Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast. And I did want to say this real quick.

I know we talked about everything else, but you had a couple of shows that I got some really good points out of. And if there's, first of all, if there's anybody who does more podcasts than me, I think it's you. But one of your shows, let's see, episode 27.6, one of the biggest things you can do is ask your customer for a testimonial.

[Speaker 1]
Yes, yes. Yeah, so testimonials, reviews, case studies, they're all part of what's known as social proof. It comes down to at a deep psychological level.

So we've had this behavior hard baked into us for 10,000 years. It's a safety thing. If other people like you are doing something, it seems safer.

So for you, if like I work with 700 MSPs, so if I show you, let's say I've got 70 reviews, if I show you those 70 reviews and you're like, you don't even need to know those MSPs, but you're like, oh, MSP owner, MSP owner, MSP owner. Oh, there's an MSP owner 200 miles away. It's getting even more relevant.

There's an MSP owner in my state. You can see how that makes it safe. So yeah, as an MSP, I mean, your clients love you.

I don't think MSPs realize the bond you have with your clients. Apart from the occasional screw up, which everyone screws up now and again, your clients really, really love you because you do look after them very, very well. So the only thing that's stopping you getting more reviews is asking.

Yeah, the more reviews you can get, the more testimonials, the better. And you put them on your marketing, you put them on your website, you put them everywhere because it makes you seem safer. It's like the more your clients talk about you, the safer, the less you need to talk.

Put it that way. Yeah. I'm sorry to interrupt you.

You're saying about me doing more podcasts than you. It's a system. You know, I was saying earlier about having a marketing system.

We've done a podcast every Tuesday for five and a half years. And it's a system. I do interviews.

In fact, I don't think you've been a guest on my podcast yet, which we need to fix. So we'll get that right. Why haven't we done that?

So we'll get that sorted in a second. I'll book you after this. I do guest interviews.

I record six, seven weeks ahead. I have a producer. He produces it.

We have a lady who loads it. It's a system, right? There's no stress.

So long as I do some interviews and I do some talking, the podcast happens. Because it's all systemized and it's all got SOPs. So actually, and this is the same for all marketing, it should all be a system broken down into a series of small tasks that you do regularly.

[Uncle Marv]
Nice, nice. I was going to piggyback off of the customer testimonial because I wanted to give users, I mean listeners, a thought. One of the things that turned out to be a great thing for me that turned a client into a referral machine was when they were getting ready to look for a new piece of software and they were asking me which software is out there that you use for other clients and stuff.

It was coming up to a time where I could invite them to go to a conference with me. It wasn't a tech conference and this was a law firm. So law firms have their own conferences and one of them is a ABA tech show, American Bar Association tech show where all of the legal software people are there.

And so I said, yeah, I'm going to go to this conference. Do you want to go? I brought him out and he was so amazed, so happy.

I mean, and probably for six months when he got back from the conference, all he could talk about was, Marv invited me to a conference. Does your computer guy do that? Yeah.

So you don't have to specifically ask for a written testimonial. You can get a verbal testimonial by doing just little things like that.

[Speaker 1]
Yeah, very true. Although if you did get, let's say, I just want to put an idea in your head and I appreciate this may have been some time ago. Let's say you got a video person to video this guy, this lawyer.

Do you want to work with more lawyers?

[Uncle Marv]
Do I?

[Speaker 1]
Yeah.

[Uncle Marv]
I'll say yes.

[Speaker 1]
Okay, okay. I never understand why anybody wants to work with lawyers. But anyway, so let's say you want more lawyers.

So you get this guy, he's a lawyer and you get a videographer just to interview him. And the reason you get a videographer is someone who does something for a living is always going to get a better result than you. And it's like a 20-minute thing.

You sit down, he asks him some questions. We're looking for a journey. The journey is, this was his problem before.

It was a real nightmare. Let's poke the pain. Oh, our tech was like this.

Our staff were complaining. We would lose case files. It was a nightmare.

And then we met Marv and Marv came in and he did this, he did this, he did this, whatever it is that you've done. And then he's looked after us for the last 20 years and he's done this. And no problem is too small, no whatsoever.

In fact, once he took me to a tech show, took me to a legal tech show and showed me where I shouldn't be spending my money. And he talks about all of this. So you've got a five-minute case study video that can go on your website.

And actually the next time you go and meet with a prospect or before you have that 15-minute video call, you say to them, before we talk, would you watch this five-minute case study? Because rather than me tell you about us, let my clients tell you about us. So that's what that five-minute thing is.

Then you can take a 60-second clip of it. That goes on your homepage. Then you can, and on social media as well, because you can now embed a video into LinkedIn.

When you go in, it's got experience and it's kind of got like your latest job. You can embed a video. So you could just put that on YouTube, embed that YouTube, and that now appears on your LinkedIn and it's there in your experience, which is beautiful.

Then you can take, because it's a video, we can now go down to print. So you could now turn that into infographics, literally take a line, he said. He might've said, Marv is the best investment that this company has ever made, right?

Something like that. You'd pull a line out. That could be just a quote on your website.

You could turn it into an infographic. You could do an infinite number of things. So just from that one 30-minute interview, you formalized how he feels about you and that then produces a whole ton of social media or marketing content, which is great.

[Uncle Marv]
Great. Just what I want, more marketing work. But that is a great point.

And I've seen others do it and it sounds like a great idea. So I'll look into that. So Paul Green, Paul Green's MSP Marketing Edge in the website, you just add a .com to that and that'll take you to his site. And it's great. You actually put on your website, be successful with the world's most powerful MSP lead generation. Six words, folks.

That's all it is. Six words. Paul, thank you for coming on and sharing these nuggets and congratulations on the book.

And we'll look forward to you coming back to the US. I knew you were here last year and we missed you, but enjoy yourselves. Have fun over there in England.

Is it cold right now?

[Speaker 1]
Oh, it's always cold in England. It's awful. That's a shame.

I want to move somewhere warm. Florida sounds a good idea.

[Uncle Marv]
We got room. So thank you much. Well, there you have it, folks.

Paul Green, MSP Marketing Edge. And that concludes this episode. That is a part of our Marketing & Money March series.

We'll be back with more and we'll chat with Paul somewhere down the road. That's going to do it, folks. And we'll see you soon.

Until next time, holla.