3 big MSP marketing priorities for 2025

[00:00:03] Speaker A: Ah, MSP clients like the finest truffles. They can be hard to find without the guidance of a truffle pig. [00:00:10] Speaker B: Speaking of which, hello and welcome to the last regular episode of 2024. Now later, I'll tell you about the specials we've got lined up for you in the next three weeks. But first, here's what's coming up today. Three big marketing priorities for you in 2025. Have you got a few days off during the holidays? Well, here are four big questions to answer about your MSP and meet the MSP who's using a very smart backdoor marketing tactic. Welcome to episode 266 powered by mspmarketingedge.com. [00:00:44] Speaker A: Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast did your. [00:00:48] Speaker B: MSP sales engine feel broken in 2024? Well, here's the fixed the best new revenue comes from lead gen that's driven by a marketing machine. But don't be scared. It's dead easy and it's built with just a few simple parts and it's going to make 2025 your best year yet. Right now let's go through why your current marketing isn't working, how to find more people to speak to, and how to make all your marketing easier. I do love this time of year because everyone has a collective pause and after you've had a few days off to enjoy some time with your family, you move on to to time to just kind of take stock of what's happened in the last 12 months and you figure out what it is that you want to improve next year. Now, most of the MSPs that I've spoken to this year just want to win more new clients and of course they want to keep their existing ones and make sure those clients are happy and of course make sure their staff are happy. [00:01:45] Speaker C: And service quality is important too. [00:01:47] Speaker B: These are all important things to MSPs. But ultimately, if you nail it down to what's the one thing that you would do to improve your business? If you could wave a magic WAND for most MSPs, it would be to win new clients. So let me suggest to you three marketing priorities to focus your business on next year. And these are not difficult concepts to understand. In fact, I've deliberately made this as easy as I can as I try to do with all the marketing that we talk about in our podcast and on the YouTube videos. So my first recommendation is to create a marketing system rather than a series. [00:02:24] Speaker C: Of one off activities. [00:02:26] Speaker B: Now the reason I suggest this is because the whole channel seems to Be geared around helping you to do one off activities. You get big vendors giving you marketing campaigns or social media that you can just roll out in one go. Now don't get me wrong, I think doing a one off campaign or being all over social media for a couple of months is better than no marketing at all. But the very best kind of marketing is consistent and persistent. And that comes from having a marketing system. A system means you have a series of tasks that are happening on a regular basis and ideally you personally, as the owner of the msp, is not doing them. You have someone doing them on your behalf, whether that's someone who works for you or a trusted outsourced person. If you've been listening to my podcast or watching my videos for a while, you'll know the marketing system that I recommend. I suggest you build audiences of people to listen to you, Starting with your LinkedIn and your email list. And then grow relationships with those people using educational and entertaining content posted on LinkedIn and email to them. And then you convert relationships using marketing campaigns and calling people on the phone. My entire MSP Marketing Edge service is based around this three step system. And the beauty of it is that you're doing marketing 365 days a year. Even when you're taking some time off, like in the weeks ahead, your marketing still happens every single day. And that's necessary because people only buy when they are ready to buy and you don't know when that is. So it's only by doing marketing every day that you can get in front of them at exactly the right moment. My next recommendation is to build up the numbers of people that you're talking to. Now, you may have heard people say that marketing is a numbers game. And yeah, that's kind of true in that the more people you market to, the more likely you are to find someone who's nearly ready, willing and able to speak to you about switching to your msp. It takes the same amount of time and costs the same amount of money to market to 100 people on LinkedIn as it does 1,000 people, or even 10,000 people. The more people you market to, the more successful your marketing will be, and ultimately the more new clients you will win. And then my final recommendation is to do a little bit every day. And this seems to be the one that MSP owners find the hardest. And yet it's one of the most critical things in marketing. This is the most important part of growing a business. You've probably already got too many things to do and not enough personal Time, right? And yet I highly recommend that you find 60 to 90 minutes every single weekday to work on your business rather than in it. This is what I've been doing for years and it's what's helped me to build up my last business, the one I sold in 2016. It's what's helped me to grow my current business, the MSP Marketing edge. Every single weekday, I try to find a minimum of 60 to 90 minutes to get things done. And when I'm in that 60 to 90 minute window, I'm not doing email or Facebook or anything that robs my time. I'm just working on the business. Now, you might find this easy to do at seven in the morning every day before your staff arrive at the office, or maybe seven at night when they've left. Or you find an hour during lunch to lock your office door and put a sign on the door that says do not enter unless the building is on fire. And I suggest that you do this at the same time every day. Don't think that you can compile it into one day a week, such as all of Fridays, as A, you won't get as much done in a day compared to five 90 minute sessions, I promise you that. And B, there'll always be some crisis that steals your time from that day. And you know, there is a direct link between your ability to find 60 to 90 minutes every single weekday to work on the business and you getting closer to the future that you really want. Literally everything I've achieved in the last 1920 years has come in 60 to 90 minute chunks. And it's been a real compound effect of lots and lots of small things adding up over thousands of thousands of days. It's the only silver bullet to grow your business, spending that time every single day making sure that you're implementing the right strategies and the right tactics. [00:06:41] Speaker A: Paul Green's MSP Marketing podcast Still to come. [00:06:46] Speaker B: Sometimes I stumble across an MSP doing some very, very smart marketing, a little bit under the radar, and I managed to persuade them to come onto this podcast to tell you about it. My special guest today is doing exactly this with something I'm calling backdoor marketing. Essentially, he's building a relationship with people away from his msp, and by the time he's ready to talk to them about technology, they already like and trust him. This is very smart and I'm delighted to welcome him to the show in the next few minutes. Who's with me? When you're an MSP owner wanting to grow the business, vacations might as well be canceled. There's just no such thing as time off. But not in the way that you might think. No, this is nothing to do with being too busy with client issues to have time off. What I mean is, when you do take time off, you just can't help it. This always happens. You find yourself thinking about the business, right? So, over the Christmas break, after you get your child's new drone stuck in a tree and make them cry, here are three big questions to ask yourself for when you inevitably start mulling over how to grow your MSP business even further in 2025. Let's start with big question number one. What's your personal vision for the future? Now, this is not a question about the business. This is about real life, family and stuff that matters a hell of a lot more than the business, frankly. Close your eyes right now, unless you're driving and dream about how you'd like your life to be in the next two to three years. What kind of house would you like to own? What kind of car would you like to drive? What kind of vacations holidays would you like to take and where would you like to take those vacations? [00:08:32] Speaker C: Who would you like to take those vacations with? [00:08:34] Speaker B: How much time would you have to yourself every single week to do the things that you truly love doing? Because I know that you love working in your business, but I also know. [00:08:45] Speaker C: That you probably wish you could do. [00:08:46] Speaker B: More golf or hang gliding or spend more time with your kids or knitting. [00:08:51] Speaker C: Whatever it is that you like doing. [00:08:53] Speaker B: Our brains are incredibly powerful computers. And the more that we can sit and dream about the future and picture where we want to be, the more likely it is that our brains will act on that and move us in that direction. Okay, big question number two. What are the smart goals for the business? Smart, of course, is an acronym. [00:09:13] Speaker C: You've heard this before. [00:09:14] Speaker B: It stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time bound. And a bad goal for your business is, I just want to grow revenue. Because you never quite know when you've actually got there. You never know really what you're working towards. But a great and smart goal would be, I want to grow my net profit from 200,000 to 400,000 by 31 December, 2025. Because that's a very specific and measurable goal. And of course, you'll know exactly when you've achieved that. And it is definitely achievable, by the way, to double your net profits in a year. We as people always overestimate what we can achieve in a small amount of time and underestimate what we can achieve in a long period of time. So its relevancy depends on how much this fits into your personal vision for the future. If you have a vision of spending much more time at home doing things you enjoy with your family, but your smart goal requires you to spend twice as long in the office, well, that's not a relevant goal to your personal vision, is it? Then time bound, that's the next thing. And it needs to have a deadline. And the deadline shouldn't really be more than 12 to 15 months away, which is why at this time of the year, it's great to set a calendar deadline of the end of next year. Now, you may have smart goals that are just for you and then smart goals that are for your staff. I would never set a smart goal for net profit and communicate that to my team because very few employees are motivated to make the boss even richer. So you might have a smart goal that's revenue based or related to other items that you can tell your team about, perhaps even motivate them to help you achieve. But your real smart goal would definitely be around profit. Revenue goals aren't really goals at all because of course revenue or turnover is vanity. It's profit that's sanity. [00:11:02] Speaker C: And you've heard this before, it's cash that's reality. [00:11:04] Speaker B: You want to be growing your net profitability this year. You can't spend revenue on holidays. You can spend profit on holidays. And then finally, big question number three. What are the right marketing strategies and tactics to hit the goals? If you've got a very clear personal vision for the future and you've translated that into some smart goals for your business, picking the right marketing strategies and tactics are so much easier. And typically there are of course three strategies to grow any business. Number one is to get more new clients. Number two is to get those clients to buy from you more often. And number three is to get your clients to choose to spend more every single time they buy from you. Once you're clear on those three strategies, the tactics to make them happen become very, very simple. [00:11:56] Speaker A: Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast still to. [00:11:59] Speaker B: Come, we're continuing to talk about ways to improve your MSP in 2025. In a few minutes time when I'll be answering a question from another MSP about why it's seems to take them so long to complete marketing projects. Keep listening to hear the answer. [00:12:16] Speaker C: You're safe. [00:12:17] Speaker B: No one's calling the cops. This is the one time that you can be a thief and not get arrested for it. When you're an MSP business owner wanting to find new clients and make more money, new ideas that actually work for other MSPs are like gold dust. But with permission, please go ahead and steal the smart ideas you're about to hear from my guest this week. In this interview, you'll learn three things. What is special tactic is how it makes finding clients easier and how you can do a version of this in your msp. [00:12:51] Speaker D: Hi, my name is Omar Amaro and I'm the owner of an MSP based in beautiful Trinidad and Tobago. [00:12:58] Speaker C: And congratulations because after five years of the podcast, you are the first ever person, the first ever guest from Trinidad and Tobago to appear on the podcast. So congratulations and thank you so much. You and I have actually been talking for what feels like a year, I think, and it's taken quite a time to get our calendars together. And I'm so excited to get you on the show, primarily because you are using a marketing tactic that I don't think we've ever spoken about before. And I'm going to give it the name of backdoor marketing. I don't think you ever set out to do it when you, when you did it, and obviously you want to describe what you've done and the results you've had from it, but I'm calling it backdoor marketing because you started marketing to businesses without them even realizing they were being marketed to. And we're going to explain the whole thing here and lay out what you're doing. Let's first of all hear a little bit of your story. So how did you get into tech. [00:13:46] Speaker B: And how did you end up owning an msp? [00:13:49] Speaker D: Yeah, so my career started here in Trinidad and Tobago and I think throughout the years I've worked in different areas of it. So I started out working for a vendor, an application support, a payroll application vendor, and then I started working for the bank where I did some programming. And sometime around 2005, I actually moved to the UK. I know we were talking and I lived in London at the time, working for one of the largest IT firms there, but that was as a database analyst. And I had always had the idea of doing it and doing things my own way and having my own thing. I never really crystallized what that would look like. And when I left the uk, I moved to New York City and I was doing an MBA and a professor in the program at the time had introduced me to someone in New York who owned MSP and That was my first experience of understanding what an MSP is or what an MSP does. And for me, the name of the company was Greenhouse it And they were very generous in sharing the time and knowledge and explaining all those things. And it just ticked so many of the boxes for me because I just saw the beauty of managed services and how you can really structure things that help so many people. And it was just a different way of doing it traditionally to what I was accustomed to. So after I finished my mba, I moved back to Trinidad and Tobago and started my company, Rose IT Services Ltd. And we've been here providing MSP services ever since. [00:15:27] Speaker B: Amazing. [00:15:28] Speaker C: You've lived everywhere. It's like you've lived in all the cool cities, which is really cool. London, New York, Trinidad and Tobago. It doesn't get any better than those three. Right? And I bet the weather where you are is a lot better today than the weather is here, where it's kind of dark and misery and horrible outside. Yeah, it probably is. I think that's the one thing we can guarantee. So you've got your msp, I know you're quite successful at what you do, but you started a second business. So briefly, tell us a little bit about what that business does. And this, by the way, is a critical part of the story. [00:15:59] Speaker D: Right, so one of these sectors we provide services for is for credit unions here in Trinidad and Tobago in the region. And that's what we had a MSP client who we were the IT. We are still the IT provider. And sometime around 2013, oil credit unions. And this is not just in Trinidad, but this is across the world, they have to do something called an annual general meeting once a year, which is a public event where they invite all their members or clients to attend. And part of that annual general meeting is there's an election that happens so years ago that used to be like physical ballots by hand. And it was a process that took hours to finish. And sometime around 2013 our client asked us, they had an electronic ballot counting system and they asked if they could help us run the ballot counting system. So that was like a high speed scanner on a desk and we would have pre printed ballots and people would shade and we basically reduced that process from like four hours to like probably like 30 minutes. Right. So what happened is that a lot of other credit unions saw us doing it and reached out to us to do that. So apart from the MSP business, this was like a service we provided, a niche service which we built out to pre printing all the ballots and Managing that election process. And we had, you know, we would give them the returning office, so everything packaged for an election. And then in 2020, we had gotten pretty popular in the space doing that. And in 2020, Covid happened. Right. And these events can be over 1,000 people at a physical venue, and it has to happen. And a lot of our clients reach out to us to try to figure out how do we have this event that we need to have and how do we move that online. So these events, the challenge of these is these are not like irregular webinars or Zoom or anything like that. These are highly, highly interactive. These are hundreds of people who need to be heard, who need to vote, who need to, you know, vote on motions, who need to do an election for board and committees. And we just fell in a really good space because we were by design, technical people. But we also understood that credit union space, and we developed a template of how to run those virtual meetings online. That grew into hybrid meetings, and it became a subsidiary side business where we have our MSP business now, but we also have a business that does large virtual and hybrid events. [00:18:42] Speaker C: Got it. So you were telling me just before the interview, you can have up to a thousand people taking part in essentially a massive video call. [00:18:49] Speaker D: Well, we know we actually have capacity for 100,000 people on a zoom. [00:18:53] Speaker C: Oh, wow. [00:18:55] Speaker D: The largest we've registered is we probably just under 4,000 people on our live zoom. But yeah, and this is. So we have. It's very, very involved and you have a lot of technical elements in the background. Everyone has to be to participate and feel like they accommodate it. So, yeah, it's very demanding. [00:19:17] Speaker C: Yeah. So that's a very unique business, I have to say. That's a very cool side business. And wonderful to hear how actually Covid for you was the making of that business. It allowed you to pivot and change and invent something new, which is really cool. Now, obviously, what we're talking about here today is backdoor marketing, which is where we're selling to people and we're influencing them to choose you as an MSP without them realizing. And the reason I wanted you to explain that second business is because, of course, that second business is where the backdoor marketing happens. [00:19:47] Speaker B: So tell us your experience of what. What has happened as you started setting. [00:19:51] Speaker C: Up more clients and onboarding more clients onto your video platform? How has that actually generated work for your msp? [00:19:59] Speaker D: Well, right, so because on those events are very, very involved. There's registration, there's like a month of work that happens before the actual day of the event and within that month, there's a lot of technical pieces that have to happen. I mean, we have to work with the client on what goes on their website. We have to do content, email marketing, blast. We have to do. We may have to look at what happens on the Internet on site. So there are a lot of technology pieces. And through that, we either work alongside the client's IT department or maybe they don't have an IT department and we have to step in. So that gave us one, a really good understanding of where these clients who were working with us on the virtual services were on the IT spectrum. And we also. That gave our clients understanding of how we worked because some of our resources from the MSP side do help out on the virtual side. So because of that, you know, it was a good conversation if we executed really well on virtual, to say, hey, by the way, do you know we also offer these MSP services that may be of value to you? And that has worked really well because it's not like we're coming in cool, right? It's someone we're familiar with, someone who knows us, someone we've executed for. And we found that there are a lot of people who would be happy to work with us on a more permanent basis as an MSP provider. [00:21:27] Speaker C: Got it. So essentially, if I was to summarize that, because what I want is for everyone listening this or watching this on YouTube to not think, okay, it's about having a unique business, it's something extra. And we'll talk about what any MSP could do in a second. But essentially, you're building a relationship with people who have bought something else from you. And as you're building that relationship, it allows you to influence them and talk to them about the technical problems that you're finding in their business, which is obviously a natural in for you to talk about the solutions. Have I got that right? Is that correct? [00:21:58] Speaker D: Yeah. And I don't even think it's that intentional because actually, what a weird thing started happening in that MSP client started. They knew us as technology providers. That's what most people know us as, bread and butter. But then our virtual clients know us as virtual meeting providers. And none of these people know we do the other thing. So it was naturally like, after we execute the event, I would just call and say, hey, I'd just like to pop by, just share with you some of the other things we do. And it's usually very, very informal. We usually just having a chat. And I would just Say, hey, did you know we provide IT services, we provide cybersecurity services, we can do penetration testing, vulnerability assessment, all these things. And usually it's like, I had no idea you guys did this, because this is actually a current requirement for us. And then that's where that conversation would start. So it's really, really natural. I mean, really, we just know that we have a solution that can solve problems for them. And for them, it's like, they know how we work. So it's just a natural fit. [00:23:11] Speaker C: Exactly. So the actual sales conversation, as you say, is natural, but you're leveraging the existing relationship, and I think that's the key part of this. So here's a question for you, Omar. If you ran another MSP or you were advising another MSP and they don't have a side business, because obviously what. You know, I can imagine you're a very busy person with two big businesses to run, as much as I'm sure you've got a fantastic team. But if you were advising another MSP who didn't have a side business and didn't want a side business, how can. [00:23:40] Speaker B: You take that principle of working with. [00:23:42] Speaker C: Someone on something else before you sell them managed services? What would you recommend they do? [00:23:47] Speaker D: Well, I think what I would say is that for us in this region, the concept of an MSP is not very well understood. And I don't know if it's like that commonly across the world, I wouldn't be able to see. But usually people just see us as an IT company, so they would come to us for different things. And sometimes we do things on a project basis. So they may say, we want to do an Office365 implementation, and we may work with the client on that, but then sometimes you do something like that for a client and you execute it and the client has worked with you on a project basis, and it becomes an easy conversation, if you can execute that really well, to say, hey, we did this for you and we can actually support you on a more permanent basis. Did you know we do these other things and this is how we work, and this is what works for other clients who have done an Office365 implementation. And then that is where the conversation can become really natural, because I think it's. I mean, obviously what underpins it is you have to execute on that thing you're doing so that the client has had a good experience working with you, and then that opens the conversation for a more fixed, permanent relationship. [00:25:01] Speaker C: Yeah, that makes perfect sense. So a lot of MSPs I think. Well, to answer your question about around the world, do people understand what MSPs are? I think yes, it's probably, you know, there is a greater understanding of it, but still you look at the average decision maker, so the average business owner or manager and they don't know what the term MSP is. They don't know what a managed service provider is. I think a lot of people still do think of their IT company as just an IT company. [00:25:26] Speaker D: Yeah, that's the IT company. You do, you do the it, you do the websites, you do the social, you do everything that involves a computer. [00:25:35] Speaker C: Exactly, exactly. [00:25:36] Speaker D: Right. [00:25:36] Speaker C: And actually that, that can be, that in itself can be a double edged sword because it's good because you, you just mentioned websites like. I've never understood why most MSPs don't sell websites because ordinary business owners see you as the technical people. And even though websites is a marketing thing, if they're thinking, oh well, I. [00:25:53] Speaker B: Trust you with my it, I trust. [00:25:54] Speaker C: You with this, you can do my website. And I've always thought that most MSP should be, should have an ms, should have a website building partner that builds those websites for them to sell. But anyway, that's, that's a whole nother conversation. But yeah, so I think a lot of MSPs will treat project work as just something they do in order to onboard a new monthly recurring revenue client. And, and actually what you're saying here is go and do the project work to build a relationship and then a more deeper engagement, a monthly commitment, you know, monthly recurring revenue engagement will come off the back of that, which I think is absolutely spot on. So Omar, thank you so much. That's such a great, such a great idea. It's awesome to hear that you've got two very good companies going there and. [00:26:37] Speaker B: There'S a little piece of me that. [00:26:38] Speaker C: Hears that you can put 100,000 people onto a call and I'm thinking, right, there's 40,000 MSPs in the world. [00:26:44] Speaker B: If I could get two or three. [00:26:46] Speaker C: People from each of those MSPs on a call simultaneously. I want to test the limits of your system. You say you've done 4,000. Do you reckon you're ever going to. [00:26:56] Speaker B: Get past 4 or 5,000 on a simultaneous call? [00:27:00] Speaker D: Well, yeah, I mean, so we work closely with Zoom actually. And so that's how they have expanded the capacity. It used to be 3,000, it went up to 6,000. And I think where we want to go with that is related to curate these large events. And I often ask People, Is there something you want to tell the world? Right. If there's a message you want to get out to the world and you have this open online event, we do hybrid events as well, where everything is happening at a venue, but it's also open to online. And our job is really to get as many people and engage as many people to come onto your event and. And have a more professional experience than anything that is out there. It's a zoom product that they sell, so obviously there is a market for it. And this is actually a lot more fun than MSP stuff because, like, we have ideas to do, like, large. You know, we could do a music concert online. We could do, like, really creative and crazy things. And sometimes people come with us to us with ideas and we just have to figure out how to make it happen. I love that. So, yeah, that's the fun side of it. [00:28:14] Speaker C: Yeah, I bet. I can see why that's a lot more interesting than setting up new users and resetting passwords. Omar, thank you very much for your time. Just tell us, for those MSPs that have been listening to this or watching you on YouTube, what's the best way for them to just find out a. [00:28:27] Speaker B: Little bit more and perhaps even connect. [00:28:28] Speaker C: With you on LinkedIn? [00:28:30] Speaker D: Yeah, so I am on LinkedIn. I usually post everything we do there. Just find me Omar Romero. My website is www.rose-it.com rose it.com and we are on social media. Our company is on LinkedIn. We are on Instagram, we on Facebook @RoseITSL. [00:28:50] Speaker A: Paul Green's MSP Marketing podcast. Paul's personal peer group. [00:28:56] Speaker B: Well, that's us nearly done for our final regular episode of 2024. And we've just got time to answer one of your questions. Producer James, what's our final question of this year? [00:29:07] Speaker E: Well, Paul, we have a question from Graham in Omaha. And the end of this year has made Graham reflect on how little he feels his MSP has achieved in terms of lead generation over the last 12 months. His question is, why do my marketing projects take so long to implement? [00:29:27] Speaker B: Okay, well, there are a couple of potential reasons for this. The first is that maybe you're overthinking marketing. So just stop overthinking it, because marketing is already difficult enough. You just need to get a piece of advice from someone you trust and then implement that advice. And I realize that that cuts off several different ways of potentially doing something, but surely the goal here is just to get it done right. The other option is that or the other possibility is that you're disorganized. So you need to treat a marketing project like a technical project and use your project management software to break it down into easily digest chunks. The other possibility is that you're trying to do it all yourself. And you know my opinion on this, that you should only do what only you can do. So next year find yourself a virtual assistant who can help you or members of your team who have some capacity and are interested in helping to grow the business. And they could be your secret weapons in 2025. Now if you've got a question that you want to submit, just go to mspmarketingedge.com head over to contact us and you can send me your question there. [00:30:35] Speaker A: Coming up, Coming up next week. [00:30:37] Speaker B: Thank you so much for listening this week. Next week we are starting the first of three special episodes for Christmas. I'm going to continue a new podcast tradition that we only started last year where I took you for a walk around a lake near my home and I told you about something big and life changing. Next week I'm going to do the same. I'm going to take you for another walk and we'll be looking at how you can achieve something called the Happy Balance. This is where you get your life to a stage where every aspect of it is in perfect balance. It's an amazing place to be. So join me next week as I tell you exactly what the Happy Balance is and how you can achieve it in 2025 for MSPs around the world. [00:31:21] Speaker A: Around the World the MSP Marketing Podcast with Paul Green.