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Welcome to Episode 304 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…
Getting new clients for your MSP is hard enough, so you should do everything you can to avoid making mistakes, right? Often I see MSPs inadvertently making blunders with the way they price up their offering. It’s a complicated subject with many traps you can get caught in. So let’s look at three common price mistakes that MSPs make that are killing sales.
Let’s talk about something that makes a lot of MSPs uncomfortable… pricing. It’s not the most exciting topic, but wow, it can make or break your sales. I’ve seen so many great MSPs – really solid, technical, brilliant businesses run by brilliant people – struggling to grow simply because they’re just making the wrong moves with their pricing. So let’s fix that.
These are the three big pricing mistakes that can kill your sales, and of course, how to avoid them.
Mistake number one: charging too little because you’re scared of losing the deal, and this is so common. Have you done it? You’re sat in a sales meeting, the prospect starts questioning your price and suddenly you’re talking yourself down. You say that you think you can find a way to shave some money off the price by reducing the package, or maybe you can find them a discount. But by doing this, you’re kind of leaving money on the table just because you want the client to say yes. Here’s the thing though, when you undercharge, you actually scare off the best clients. They kind of think, why is this MSP so cheap? What corners are they cutting? Plus, you’re setting yourself up to resent the work later on when the numbers just don’t add up. So here’s what you should do instead… price confidently, know your value. If you’re delivering 24/7 monitoring, a great help desk and really strong security, don’t price it like you’re just fixing printers on an ad hoc basis. That’s crazy.
Mistake number two: making pricing complicated. I’ve seen some MSP proposals that are like three entire pages of line items. So here’s your base support, this bit’s extra, this is going to cost you this, we forgot to include this. It’s just so confusing. And the problem is that confused people don’t buy. So what you do instead is you bundle things, you create clear packages. You could call that bronze, silver, gold. You could call it something else, it doesn’t really matter what you name it. But the point is that when it’s all put together and prospects can look at it and go, Oh, right, yeah, I see. So we’ve got this or we’ve got this, which is a bit more, or we’ve got this, which is even more, do you know what, we’re going to go for the middle package for us. They’ve got to feel confident. They’ve got to be able to make decisions faster without overthinking it, but going on that gut feel. And packaging everything together, bundling it up and taking out a lot of the detail that they’re not really interested in anyway, that’s the right way to do this.
Mistake number three: hiding your price completely. Some MSPs think they’re being really clever by refusing to talk numbers until the very last moment. Perhaps you’re in a sales meeting, you’ve presented your proposal, and the only thing to discuss now is the price. But the reality is, that just creates friction. Buyers today like to know roughly what they’re in for before they even commit to a meeting. If they can’t get any sense of cost at all, they might never engage with you at all. So here’s what you do instead. You don’t have to plaster exact numbers on your homepage, but you do need to give people a rough estimate. You need to say something like, Our typical clients invest between X and Y per person per month. Or better still embed a price calculator on your website. Just a heads up, I’m going to be talking about price calculators a lot more in the weeks ahead. I’ve got a little announcement for you on that soon. Either way, you’re setting expectations early, and by doing that, you’re attracting people who are a good fit. And by the way, giving pricing at the point that people are doing research into which MSP they might even want to talk to, that is absolutely a competitive advantage right now.
So let me give you a quick summary of those three things to do. Number one, stop undercharging out of fear. Number two, keep your pricing simple and clear. And number three, don’t hide your price at all, be upfront enough to build trust. Get those three things right and you will close more sales with better clients without ever having to fight on price.
If your competitors have videos on their website and you don’t, there’s every chance that they’ll win sales and you won’t. Yes, videos really are that important. However, are all videos equal? Well, no, not really. The single most important type of video that could help a prospect decide to sign a contract with you, is a video testimonial. But if the idea of trying to create a video with your happiest most satisfied client fills you with dread, this is how you make it a walk in the park.
Collecting lots of social proof is one of the most important things that you can do to persuade someone to pick your MSP. Social proof in the form of reviews, testimonials and case studies influences people at a very deep psychological level. In fact, it talks to us at caveman level, right at the core of what drives our behaviour. Let me explain that.
A hundred thousand years ago, we were not at the top of the food chain. There were big scary monsters with huge jaws and jagged teeth that could and did eat us. And so the cavemen and women who survived to breed and essentially lead on to us today, they were the ones who were better than the others at not being eaten. So we know this today as survival of the fittest and how it drives evolution, but one of the most powerful tools to avoid being eaten is to watch what everyone else is doing and do the same.
It’s a kind of a herd mentality that you still see today in animals at the bottom of the food chain. If one sheep runs all the other sheep in the flock do the same. Now, importantly, they don’t think about this. They just feel very strongly compelled to act and copy. It just feels safer that way. So that’s what cavemen did back then, and 4,000 generations later, it’s what decision makers still do today.
Most of the time people prefer to do what most other people are doing, and that in a single sentence explains why social proof is so powerful.
When we see other people and we perceive that they’re like us and they clearly trust a business, it feels safer for us to do exactly the same. And just a side note, by the way, if you, you’re one of the tiny, tiny minority who proudly claims, oh, social proof has zero influence on me, then look out for the Saber-Tooth Tigers because they are watching you closely and they are licking their lips. Now, the most powerful form of social proof is a video testimonial. You get a happy client on camera telling your prospects why they trust your MSP, and you want that, right?
I’ll be honest, there’s a fair amount of work to get it, and of course you can throw money at the problem to outsource it. There’s a couple of services, one I found is remote videotestimonials.com. That’s not a recommendation by the way, that’s just a suggestion. Or you could use a platform that prompts your clients like storyprompt.com, which I think is risky for an MSP as it’s so easy for your clients to ignore a platform like that, and let’s be honest, you only have dozens of clients to ask, not thousands. Or you can follow my step-by-step instructions and do it yourself. So I’ve pulled together 10 steps. In fact, I did this a few weeks ago while personally interviewing 16 of my MSP Marketing Edge members about their experience with us. And it was such fun. In fact, we’ve compiled a series of video testimonials that are now on our website. You can actually see those at mspmarketingedge.com/reviews. But here is how to get your own testimonial video made.
Step one, be very clear what you want to achieve. So the perfect video testimonial is about 30 to 60 seconds long. It tells a story about how someone went from A to B with your help, and it makes the viewer feel happy that they could achieve the same result working with you. Now, never forget that someone hires your MSP because they want a specific outcome. They want ease of growth, extra profit, increase productivity, less staff moaning, all of that kind of stuff. That’s the transformation story that you want to tell. The format for your testimonial video should be, first of all to set the context. So say something like, this is a problem that many business owners face. Then you need to demonstrate relevance, One in four small business owners will have this IT problem. Then lay out the problem, tell them what it is. Then poke the pain, you take whatever it is that’s annoying that business owner or annoyed them in the past and you literally poke it and show what a pain it was to them. And then you present the answer and the answer is always something that only an IT professional like you can do. Then of course, you show a happy outcome. So we’ve shown in that whole testimonial video a transformation story.
Step two, decide who to ask. For this, you just ask your happy clients. Just be a hundred percent sure they are happy with the service before you ask, because nothing aggravates an unhappy client more than a mistimed testimonial request. Assume around one in five will say yes, and in the next step, we’ll make it easy for them to say no without feeling awkward. By the way, if your personal idea of hell is appearing in someone’s video, don’t assume that everyone feels that way. Some people like me love being in videos and are excited to be asked. Being filmed can be showbiz to some.
Step three, phone them or send them an email. Now you know your clients best. Some respond best to a chat on the phone. Others prefer information in a written form that they can digest before acting. So here’s an actual email that you can swipe and use. The subject line should be, Can I ask a favour, please? And then in the body you say, Hi name. Can I ask you a favour please? We’re always looking for more clients like you. (That’s a critical line) I’m going to launch a new marketing campaign soon, and at the heart of it, I’d like my favourite existing clients to tell my future clients why they should join us. How would you feel about telling us how well we’ve looked after you? Interested? Here’s my live calendar.
Step four, choose a video platform. And please don’t do these interviews on Teams or Zoom because those platforms prioritise the live call at the expense of the recording. You want a platform that works the other way around, it prioritises the recording at the expense of the live call. Personally, I use SquadCast for these kinds of interviews and I actually use that for my podcast interviews as well. An alternative is Riverside. Both of these record the video in quality on each person’s computer and automatically upload it to the cloud. Now, I highly recommend you record the video twice. And what I mean by that is, while using the platform, you might remote in to run a screen recorder on your client’s computer, with their permission of course. And that way, if the cloud recording fails, you can retrieve the backup. And trust me, your client’s patients will not extend to doing the same interview twice.
Step five, use this format to make your client feel great. So you know the purpose of the interview is to get the video testimonial, but it’s also a great chance to strengthen your bond with your client. So follow this format, banter, interview banter. And the banter either side of the interview is actually really important. Your client will probably come onto the call with something that they want to talk about, so you give them that time so they can see that you are prioritising their needs and wants. And remember that the interview itself is kind of unusual and maybe even exciting for them. If they ask lots of questions about it, share with them how you’ve done it. In fact, feel free to steal my advice here and pass it off as your own, I’m quite happy with that.
Step six, ask these questions. The key to any good interview is to ask open questions and not closed ones. Closed questions have a finite number of answers, and they produce boring yes, no answers. Did you have breakfast this morning? It’s yes or no, right? Open questions have an infinite number of answers, and they produce exciting answers. What was the best thing about your breakfast this morning? Here are some actual questions that can get you started, and don’t be a slave to them, just use them as guidance to help you get the story out of your clients, but make sure to listen to their answers and ask relevant follow-up questions. Some of these, by the way, use the technique of asking multiple questions in one go, and that might seem weird, but it actually sets boundaries of what you want your client to talk about. You are guiding them to give relevant answers, and you’re also asking questions in a way that encourages them to give self-contained answers. Self-contained answers are answers that make sense without needing to hear the question that was asked, and those make editing the video really easy. My final piece of guidance on questioning is to use silence as a tool. When your client has finished their answer, just stay silent for a few seconds. Some people fill the silence by continuing to talk, often their second answer is better than their first answer so don’t you be the person to fill the silence, let them fill the silence. Here are the example questions I suggest:
Give us the 30 second story about your business. What do you do? How long have you been going? What kind of clients do you work with? (Remember how I said you’ve got multiple questions in one question there it sets a context of what you want them to talk about). Next question…
How important is technology to your business? If your technology didn’t work properly, what chaos would that cause? Before you started working with us, what kind of problems did you have with your technology? And how did those problems affect you? And another question…
And now those problems have been removed by us, what kind of difference has that made to you and your staff? This is a good one…
What was your biggest fear when considering using us? Did it come true? And if not, what happened instead? And here’s another one…
What’s your favourite part of your experience with our service? Tell us why. Then really my favorite, and the final question to suggest to you…
If your best friend owned a business and was looking for a new technology partner and you would recommend us, what would you say?
Step seven, is to find an editor. Once you’ve got good footage, you’ve done the hard work, now it’s onto the editing where the magic happens, and you’ll be tempted to edit this yourself to save yourself a little money. So please rethink that as a) it’s another job you’ll not get round to doing for weeks, and b) someone who edits for a living is going to do a much better job than you. Good editing is not about the technical aspects of cutting and splicing, it’s about the art of telling a story. There are thousands of editors out there, you’re looking for one who understands and has edited testimonials before. So look on Upwork or Fiverr and make sure to hire someone with testimonials in their show reel. You can make their life and your life easy by sending them an example of what you’d like your finished video to look like. An hour spent Googling and watching other businesses testimonial videos will save you hours in the long run. And remember, you could just send them a copy of my testimonial video at mspmarketingedge.com/reviews. And by the way, a smart way to find a great editor is to give the same editing gig to three different people. And this way you can compare all of the videos to see which one you prefer.
Step eight, what videos to output and where to put them. In an ideal world, you’d have at least three individual client testimonials, which you can then turn into four videos. So the first video you do is a mashup of all three videos, like a 60-90 second summary of how a number of clients feel about your MSP. But again, don’t forget to tell a story. Your editor will know how to do that by pulling out clips that take the viewer on a journey. And this video goes on your homepage as high up as you can. The higher up something is on a page, the more likely someone is to see it. This video will influence prospects more than anything else on that page. And then those three individual case studies, they go lower down the page. You’d also take those videos and put them on other important pages, especially your About Us page, your pricing page, and your contact page. And if you have other written testimonials, reviews, and case studies, consider gathering them all together into a new page called What Clients Say. Now no one’s going to sit and read all of your social proof, but gathering like 30, 40 things together in one place sends a very powerful message to prospects.
Step nine, maxing your testimonial videos. Once you have those videos, you can make them work hard for you for years to come. Here are some ideas… Share them on LinkedIn – you can pull out new clips from the raw footage to create new content to share, and you could easily use each clip every two to three months because content on LinkedIn is kind of disposable. You could send your testimonials page to prospects before a meeting. In fact, in his original book, They Ask You Answer, author Marcus Sheridan suggests that you don’t take any sales meeting unless the prospect has watched your social proof video first. By the way, Marcus’s latest book, Endless Customers, is an excellent read for MSPs. You could start a YouTube channel, pin the testimonial video to the top to be a channel trailer. My MSP Marketing Edge members get five videos a month from us that they can add to their YouTube channel alongside their testimonial videos. You could repurpose your testimonials into written case studies, and these can be given to prospects as part of a proposal. And then these written case studies can go across all the marketing assets that you have. Plus, of course, you can use a screenshot of the client from the video as an image to accompany it.
And then finally step 10, shelf life. If you’ve got this far, and you’ve done all of this, high five, because you now have a powerful marketing asset that most other MSPs will never get round to creating, and that gives you a distinctive advantage over your competitors. So make sure you keep the original footage in a very safe place. 18 months from now, you could get a different editor to create new versions for you, or you could use clips from older testimonials in new mashup videos. And in theory, you can use these testimonials for years and years and years, but I would assume a shelf life of around about three years, that would be a good time to go back to some new clients and repeat this process again. In fact, if you have the resources, you could even send in a local videographer, actually physically send them in, holding a camera and a microphone to film your client in person. And that would be a huge step up in quality.
Featured guest: Chris Brisson is the founder and CEO of Salesmsg (read as “sales message”), a leading AI-powered SMS platform designed to help businesses engage, qualify, and convert leads at scale through two-way text messaging. A serial entrepreneur and seasoned SaaS operator, Chris has bootstrapped Salesmsg into an 8-figure ARR business while maintaining strong profitability and a high-performing team culture.
Chris is at the forefront of AI-driven customer engagement, leading the charge to “Textize Your Business”—a methodology that empowers companies to turn messaging into their most effective conversion channel.
What does every single business owner that your MSP would love to work with have in common? It’s something they take everywhere with them, and they look at over a hundred times a day. Yeah, I’m talking about their trustee mobile phone. Pretty much everyone out there would love to get their sales and marketing messages onto those phones. Hasn’t that become the holy grail of the 21st century? A great way of doing it is with SMS text messages, but can MSPs do that? What are the pros? What are the cons? And how do you actually do it? Well listen up because my special guest right now is an SMS marketing expert, and he’s got this message for you.
Hey, I’m Chris Brisson, CEO and co-founder of Salesmsg.
And it’s epic to have you on the show, Chris, thank you so much for joining us because we’re going to answer a very big question to today. Should MSPs use text messages, SMS, as part of their overall marketing mix? Now, you are an expert at this to the extent that you started your own company. So tell us about the business that you started. What kind of got you started with that in the first place?
Yeah, well, first of all, thanks for having me, super excited to be here. So, I had my own company, we were sending emails, we were making phone calls, but no one was picking up and no one was replying to those emails. But magically when I could text them, I actually got responses. And so rather than using my own phone, I thought, there’s got to be a better way. How do I put this into a product? Turn it into a software? And essentially that’s where the idea came from. It was just in need of me wanting a conversational texting platform so I could send and receive texts to leads and customers. And obviously today it’s grown past that with a lot more automation and engagement tools. So you can grow your list, you can engage with them and essentially convert leads faster, close more deals, and use SMS too, sort of at the front of the funnel, connect with people.
So yeah, MSPs, I mean I’m a marketing professional, so most of the stuff that we’re doing is how are we capturing leads? So if we’re doing social, if we have web forms, we have contact forms, we are already capturing this information, and in most cases, maybe we’re capturing a phone number, but we’ve never really done anything with it. And so maybe when they fill that form out, we’re emailing, maybe we’re calling and they’re not picking up and so now we have this sort of back and forth game. SMS sort of closes that gap or text messaging or messaging closes that gap. Ultimately, everyone is on their phones, more and more people don’t want to talk on the phone or get calls from unknown numbers. So it’s transformed into a whole different platform, but ultimately it started with that core problem – how do we make messages great again?
I love any business that’s been started by someone who’s solving their own problem and realises, Hey, if I’ve got this problem, other people are going to have this problem and there’s a business to be created. That always fascinates me, and it’s so exciting to see that you’ve built that and you’ve grown it, and obviously you’ve taken it and started building in automation, all of the other stuff. What is it about SMS that stands out? The difference between SMS and email, is it the fact that email is passive? So the email sits there waiting for you to go and check it, which makes it convenient for the consumer, whereas an SMS demands my attention because it could be my other half, it could be my child, it could be a friend or something. Is that the thing that makes SMS more effective or is it something else?
Yeah, I like to say there’s really three channels. Again, we’ve got calling, we have email, and then we have messaging or SMS. And so SMS is just sort of native on the phone, there’s no app to download. Obviously around the world WhatsApp as a messaging platform is how in the UK or in Latin America, that’s the messaging platform.
When you send a text message, it’s a 98% open rate. The stats are within 15 minutes, 85% of people are going to open that text message, because it’s an inherent tool, everybody has it.
It’s changed a lot, it’s gotten more busy, obviously, because it’s so effective. The carriers really from even a WhatsApp perspective, they want to limit the bad actors that are coming through. And so how do you cut through that clutter? Context really matters, so when somebody is going to your website, they’re filling out a form, they’re requesting a demo, they are buying your product. At that moment, that’s when you can engage with SMS. So one great thing we do is when someone books a demo, we just automatically send them a text message, Hey, it’s Chris, thanks for signing up for the demo. Hey, what’s the number one thing you’d love to talk about on our call? And it just starts that conversation because really what you’re trying to get to is a conversation, is an engagement, and you may discover, and we discover all the time, this is not a great lead, or, this actually is a great lead, boom. Then you open up the opportunity, Hey, can I just give you a call?, and you can bypass that. So when you call somebody cold, the likelihood they’re going to pick up is very low. But if you go from SMS and have a conversation with them and say, Hey, can I call you real quick? Hop on a call, and now you can move towards that. So it really becomes more of a, I would say, a permission-based channel to get to that next step.
Now, there’s amazing things you can do from, again, the lead engagement side, putting it into an AI agent that could essentially have conversations capture data. It’s really quite simple to do, but that’s this new future of AI messaging. So conversations have always been sort of this, there’s a human on the other end, and there’s a delay in a response, and that’s dependent on people and team to sort of get to those responses. But now with this AI world, you could essentially scale conversations like code. And so that’s sort of this new future that every business has that new capacity to allow conversations in their business to help them grow.
Yeah, I love it. So I love your emphasis on conversations and engagement over and above just sending out message, broadcasting something. And almost the broadcast of, Hey, something’s happening, do this, it almost feels like the 2010 way of doing texting, whereas essentially you’re just using it as another channel. Because you’re right, it’s all opening up on the phone, whether it’s on my email, my WhatsApp, my Telegram, my SMS, one of my other messaging channels. It’s all just messaging. But as you say, everyone, every single phone on the planet, even the old Nokia ones from 1997, they all still get text messages and they all still work, so that makes perfect sense.
So I think if I was talking to an MSP about this, they may have one or both of two fears. The first fear they might have would be, but I don’t want to interrupt someone. I don’t want to interrupt them at the wrong time. That would be the first fear. The second fear would be, oh, text messaging, that’s for consumer marketing, whereas we’re doing business to business marketing. In your experience and with, I think you work with thousands of companies, how valid are those two fears?
Not very valid. I think the way to look at it is most folks when they come into SMS, they think about that and like, well, how do I apply this to my business? So we have a framework, it’s called “Textize Your Business”. And what that means is you can use it to capture leads, to connect, to convert, and then to really care for your customer. So we’re a B2B company, we generate leads, we want to engage with those leads, we want to drive them to a meeting or to sending a promotional text to get them to buy a product. We also want to get a review from them, and we also want to support them being a customer.
B2C is sort of this high volume SMS marketing, which is, Hey, we’re going to broadcast and the core is we’re going to drive revenue. However, in a B2B is you have that capture, connect, convert, and care. And so the way to look at that is how can we use messaging to capture leads? So if you’re speaking from stage or you’re doing a presentation, you have an audience, how do you convert that audience into leads? You can have people scan a QR code or text this phone number, and you can put them through just an automated little bot to capture their name, their email, Hey, thanks for checking out the presentation, what’s the best email I can send you the slides? Oh, my email is this. And then boom, you capture an email, you can then push it to your marketing automation tool to deliver that lead magnet. So that’s one way to do it. If you have web forms, which most everybody has, now you can turn that into a mechanism to capture to then get into that conversation if you will.
And so the conversation is two-way texting. So you can text from your computer, you can call, you can use your phone, we have a mobile app. And so anywhere you are, you can get into those conversations. And then the conversion side is if you want to send out those promotional type texts or you need to book a meeting, we’ve got a way to take leads into booking meetings. So one thing that MSPs can look at, especially if you’re offering these services to other companies, is what I call sort of this messy middle. So there are companies that are generating leads and they need to convert those leads into meetings. Well, how do you go about doing it? Well, you’re calling, you’re emailing, maybe you’re texting, and you have this sort of messiness in between to go through this qualification process.
The new way is to put them into an AI SMS or messaging conversation that can engage with them with real language, using AI and your brand and is going to qualify them. So for us, it’s important to know, Hey, what CRM do you use? Where are you based? And these qualifying questions that this AI agent can effectively capture that information, qualify, and then book a meeting. So you go from generating leads to booking meetings, and so it can eliminate a lot of this messiness that happens in between because messaging is the channel that people connect. And so then the care is how do we support those customers through all that. And you can integrate this into many tools, but that’s the way to look at it. And you go, oh, wow, now I can layer on how do I integrate messaging to do this? One of the big challenges businesses have is you do meetings and there’s a no-show problem. A tiny little message, little text that you can send is if we’re going to go out to lunch, Paul, probably the night before or the morning of, I would just send you a text, Hey, just following up, are we still on for noon today? I just want to make sure. And just that little confirmation text can increase 10, 15, 20% attendance to your meetings. And so these are just some of these little tiny things you can do across the business that will make a great impact. And so that’s the way we look at textising it.
I love that. I mean, you’ve just thrown some insanely great ideas out there. Let’s bring it back to first steps. So if you assume that the MSPs who are either listening to this on the podcast or watching this on YouTube, not using SMS, right now. Maybe don’t have a lot of automation platforms because many of the MSPs that I speak to, they might have a basic CRM, but they’re using it as a place to keep email addresses and just send emails, there’s not necessarily an automation platform. There’s all those things you could do, but where would you recommend the average MSP should get started with building SMS into their marketing funnel?
Yeah, so running a quick audit. Do you have web forms? Great. Are you capturing a phone number? Awesome. Are you sending a text? No, that’s a great place to start. On your website, do you have your phone number? Is that phone number textable? One of the things that we find is a lot of businesses out there are using maybe an older calling platform, and it’s just calling, there is no SMS. So we can enable that number to become textable. And what happens many times is they enable texting for that number they’ve had for 5, 10, 15 years, and all of a sudden text messages start coming in and they’re like, Oh my gosh, how have I been missing this? And so there are these hidden assets that are already existing in the business. One, do you have a number, is it textable? Two, do you have web forms? Add SMS to get to this quick engagement to have a real conversation with them. Three, are people buying a product through yours? You’re probably already asking for a phone number. What are you doing with that? So those are three super simple assets that you already have in your business. That messaging can enhance the business big time.
Yeah, I love that. Chris, you’ve been absolutely great. Before I let you go, I’m actually going to ask you, and I never normally do this on the podcast, I’m going to ask you a trivia question. We have a service called the MSP Marketing Edge, and just a few months ago, one of our pieces of social media content that we wrote was about the first ever SMS message that was sent. So this one is top of brain for me. So two questions for you. When was it sent? And you can give me just a year. So what year was the first ever SMS sent and what was the first ever SMS message?
You’re putting me on the spot. I should probably know the answer to this question. Oh my gosh, Paul, I don’t know. I do not know. Okay, I’m going to say, I’m going to guess 1983, and it says hello.
Bit early, it was December, 1992, which is surprising. I’m 50, so I was like 18, and I can’t believe the first SMS was only sent when I was 18, that made my head explode. And it was an engineer in the UK working for a company called Vodafone, which still exists, which is one of our big four networks here. And the first ever SMS message simply said, Merry Christmas, simple as that. It was a test from one engineer to another, and in fact, they actually developed SMS, I think I read this somewhere else, they developed SMS just as a way for the engineers to communicate with each other when they were out fixing all the cell towers and stuff like that. And then some executive at Vodafone saw it and thought, oh, I think the customers would like that. And the legend goes, I think that’s where SMS comes from. So there you go. You can now use that as a bit of trivia in future podcast interviews and just look like a genius.
Chris, that’s been a really informative interview, thank you so much. So just tell us a little bit more about your business. What exactly is the platform? I mean, you mentioned you can send text messages from your laptop instead of a phone, which we can all immediately see the advantage of that, but what exactly does your platform do and how can MSPs go and have a look at it, maybe get a demo and see if it’s right for them?
In a nutshell, we allow engagement over SMS. And so as you generate leads, you can have conversations over SMS, and we help you drive speed to lead, so leads generated to get to that next step, to engage with them, to book a meeting, to drive revenue. And so we’re really big on that front end part of the business. So most companies come to us, we’re like, look, I’m generating these leads. I’m not engaging with them. And SMS has been this massive unlock of like, whoa, this thing works really well. So that’s a big focus for us. We’re a calling platform as well, so you can do messaging, calling, do a lot of really cool automation stuff as well. That’s actually really easy, it’s not an overwhelming task. So they can just go to salesmessage.com, check out the site. We’d love to show you what is possible with messaging with SMS. And soon we’ll have WhatsApp for the rest of the world, which would be really fun and exciting.
Ben, who is an MSP owner of seven years in Richmond, has this question: What is a trust badge?
A trust badge is any logo or any other kind of image on your website that makes you seem more trustworthy. Kind of makes sense, doesn’t it? It’s a way of sucking up credibility from businesses and organisations that you’re associated with. Many MSPs put vendor logos on their website, but please don’t do that. Trust badges only work when the person looking at them has heard of the company and ordinary people don’t know what Kaseya is.
A better form of trust badge is to put media logos. The mainstream media might not have big audience figures anymore, but they still have huge credibility. If you’ve been featured in any relevant newspaper, blog, radio station or TV station in the last five years or so, you can justifiably get a badge made up that says, as heard on or as seen in so-and-so radio station or XYZ TV or whatever, just as long as your appearance was in editorial and not the consumer complaints section. And no, you don’t need to ask them if you can use their logo this way, this isn’t legal advice, but often it’s better to seek forgiveness than it is to ask permission.
Now, if you don’t have any media appearances, then you could always use client logos. If you have a specific vertical, any clients will do because they’ll just see, oh, there’s other lawyers like me or dentists like me, or whatever your vertical is. For general businesses in a geographical area, then just pick your best known clients, who are the prolific networkers or the infamous businesses around town because every town has them.
One final thing, trust badges look really cool on a webpage when you make them all grayscale, and there are some really cool tools online that will make logos grayscale for you without you having to faff about with Photoshop. You could probably just do it in AI as well.
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