Can your MSP offer an easy first purchase?

[00:00:02] Speaker A: No shortcuts maybe. But Good news. Growing MSPs have this show right here packed with real tactics, case studies, and all the inspiration you'll ever need. [00:00:15] Speaker B: Hey there. It's great to have you back on the show because this is what's coming up today. Do you have an easy first purchase for someone to start a buying relationship with your msp? Another question. Does your MSP have a culture of whatever it takes to keep clients happy? And finally, why it's so important to build your own personal brand as well as the company brand. Welcome to episode 290 powered by MSP. [00:00:40] Speaker A: Marketingedge.Com Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast here's. [00:00:45] Speaker B: Something you know already. It's just too darn hard to get new managed service clients. One of the biggest hurdles is that you're asking them to go from nothing straight to a monthly recurring revenue contract at the click of a finger. Surely convincing them it's safe to start spending their money with you is easy. You just put a strong case forward and then dazzle them with the service that they're going to be getting. Yeah, yeah, if only it was that easy. So if the client finds signing a contract with you a bit scary, how do we fix that? Is there a way to make them feel happy committing to you and spending money with you? Absolutely there is, and let me tell you what it is. What we're really talking about here is building trust. Trust is a massive currency within marketing and sales because the more trust that you have, the more likely people are to sign a contract and then throw themselves into your care. But the opposite of that is also the case. If you don't have enough trust built with your leads and with your prospects, then asking them to go from no buying relationship with you straight into a managed services contract is a big ask. I know it can be done and it is done every single day. But surely we should be trying to make our lives easier, right? If you look at this from the point of view of the person buying, and by the way, that's always a great way to look at any of your marketing and your sales. Always, always, always look at it from the other person's point of view. So when they start looking for a new msp, or maybe even their first msp, we call them suspects. They have their arms folded, suspicious of everyone, they find they are not overly impressed with anyone at all. And even if they've been given a warm referral from a friend, or they find an MSP online that has tons of social proof so it looks Like a safe choice. They are still suspicious asking someone to trust you with their technology. And as we said, it's a big ask. Now they might not know what they don't know about technology, but they do know that if you get it wrong, their business is dead in the water. And this is one of the reasons why it takes so much time to build a relationship and warm up an arms folded suspect, turn them into a lead, turn that lead into a prospect, that prospect into an opportunity. It takes time, it takes effort and it's exhausting because the risk is so big from their point of view. So let's see if we can de risk that for them. One of the ways that you could do that is with a risk reversal guarantee. I've seen only a small number, actually a tiny number of MSPs do a guarantee and the ones that do it the best, they have massive guarantees. They guarantee absolute complete delight, complete satisfaction, and if the client doesn't experience that, they can walk away. In fact, they will help them migrate over to another msp. I've seen one MSP even do a money back within the guarantee. If you're not happy in the first six months, we'll let you move somewhere else and you'll get your money back. Now if you're really confident about your delivery and your ability to create and maintain relationships with clients, then that's a smart route to go. However, for a lot of MSPs, a guarantee like that, and especially a money back guarantee is a very scary thing to do. So if that's you, maybe a better way is instead to give them an easy first purchase. What is this? It's something that they can buy from you that's a one off. It allows them to essentially sample your business. They can see what your customer service is like, what your delivery is like, what the quality of your work is like. Before they even have to think about actually, actually signing a contract with you. And this process affects them a little bit at a cognitive level, but it affects them massively at an emotional level. If you can persuade someone who doesn't know you to give you just a little bit of money to do a one off thing for them, then they are dramatically, and I do mean 10 times more likely to enter a long term managed services contract with you. Do you like the sound of that? Yeah, me too. So the final issue that we've got to fix then is what do you sell them? What is this easy first purchase that you could get them to invest in? Well, there are lots of different things that you could try. So you could start with something that's perhaps not directly related to the technology services that you supply. One idea for this is perhaps a lunch and learn. What if you could get someone to give you 20 or 30 pounds or dollars and come and sit in a room with you for a couple of hours, eat a sandwich, sit there listening to you like that, talking about, I don't know, cybersecurity, productivity, something like that. The content of the lunch and learn doesn't really matter so much, but that's a very easy first purchase. And don't forget, you're asking them not just for their money in this instance, you're also asking them for their time as well. And a prospect who gives you both time and money is actually a very, very high quality prospect compared to someone who perhaps just gives you a bit of money or just gives you bits of time, but not both of them. So you could then take that lunch learn idea further and turn it into, I don't know, perhaps a seminar, maybe a webinar. Although I do think in person stuff is really better for this. You could even do on site training. I do know of an MSP that does remote training for companies on how to stop their staff clicking a bad link in the email. So it's only like a 20 or 30 minute session. They do charge for it. It's done on Zoom, typically over lunchtime. The real power of doing that training is as part of that process, as part of the delivery, the MSP has a review booked with decision maker at the end of the training, so he can go back and report to the decision maker on who struggled with the training, who may need further training. Here's a kind of a general assessment of what I think you know, the business's likelihood is that you may accidentally click a link, they can talk about other issues, other protections and all of this training and the feedback, these are just tools to get this MSP I know onto a quality call where with a decision maker where they're talking about that person's business. And as you can imagine, a lot of sales meetings come out of that process. So the prospect has been paying for training that ultimately gets them to trust the MSP and then they're very happy to go on, or many of them are happy to go on and have a sales meeting. And let's take that onto one other idea and that's to do some level of technology strategy consulting. So if doing seminars or training doesn't excite you, then obviously don't do it. You must Always do things like this that get you excited, otherwise you just won't do them or you'll do them in a very lackluster way. So what about giving someone a 90 minute technology review and perhaps even pulling together a technology strategy for them that could be, I don't know, like a 60 or 90 minute meeting, sitting with them, talking about their business, their goals, everything that they want to achieve, everything that's important to them and then you go away and you build a technology strategy for them. And I appreciate that that's going to be quite a light document because you've just had one meeting, you don't know them very well. But here's the thing, if you position it and price it accordingly for most businesses that have no technology strategy whatsoever, and isn't that the vast majority of businesses, something that's been built with 90 minutes of your time talking to them and then you going away and doing a bit of thinking and a bit of writing and actually committing a strategy to document? For most businesses, that's going to be way better than having no strategy document whatsoever. And remember the big picture here, the point of the strategy document is to open bigger conversations about their business, where they're going, what support they're going to need on the way. Please don't overthink this. Don't overthink what you can and can't do for just a couple of hundred dollars or pounds. In fact, I suppose you've got to think about the bigger purpose here, which is to get them buying something from you, something, anything, but then being utterly delighted by the delivery. And a side note on this, if you can find businesses that will pay you 1000 pound or dollars or more for that kind of strategy consultation that we were just talking about, as you can imagine, they will make much better managed services clients in the long run. [00:09:11] Speaker A: Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast still to. [00:09:14] Speaker B: Come, when I ask MSPs what they're trying to achieve with their marketing, an answer I often get back is to build brand awareness. And what MSPs really mean by building brand awareness is they want to be top of mind when someone's thinking of switching msp. Here's the thing though, building brand awareness these days isn't just about building up your company brand, it's also about building up your own personal brand. In fact, this is really, really important in 2025. And the good news is I found an expert to talk about exactly how you would do this. He'll be here in the next few minutes. So what's it like doing double the work? It's hard work landing managed service clients and then there's the constant hard work of making sure those clients are happ. You may be happy to bend over backwards to offer a great customer service, you've got a vested interest in it. But what about your staff? What if they don't all share your passion for bending over backwards? What if that's having a long term impact on retention that you won't feel until it's too late? Good news, there is a fix. A few months back, I was standing staring at huge amounts of delicious food in a brand new cafe that I'd never been in before. It was actually inside a meeting venue in central London and I'd be meeting some really cool people there. And we were delighted to discover that the in house cafe was serving real food, not just the usual crusty old sandwiches. And the food was subsidized and it was really cheap, like a hot meal for five pounds, which is about six and a half dollars, something like that. That's a bargain, right? So the only problem was the complete lack of flexibility demonstrated by the staff. They would only sell the set meals on the menu. And here's how my ordering experience went and I'm going you line by line because I did write it down after it happened. I started by saying, hey, can I have a jacket potato with just cheese please? And the server said, that comes with cheese and beans. And I said, well, I don't want the beans, so can I just have cheese please? And the server said, you don't want beans? And I said no, I don't want beans. And the server said, but it comes with beans. And I said, well, I don't like beans, I just want to have cheese please. And then I kind of paused a beat and I looked down and I spotted that there was broccoli. And I said, oh, actually can I swap my beans for broccoli? Don't judge me on having a baked potato with cheese and broccoli, I just like that. But anyway, the server said, no, I'm really sorry, but it's only cheese and beans. And I actually stared at her. At this point I was genuinely astonished and I said, so I can't have broccoli? And she said no. And I said, well, can I pay extra for the broccoli because it looks really good and now I just want some broccoli? And she said no, this is genuinely what happened. She said, no, you can only have cheese and beans. I said, really? And she said, she actually said these words. She said, it's our policy. You get some side salad, but broccoli isn't side salad. And I said, well, what if I don't have beans and I don't have the side salad, but I have some broccoli instead? And she kind of thought for a second and then she said, no, no, we can't do that. And I said, really? I said, but you'll make more money on the meal, so let me pay extra. I'd like to have broccoli. And the server said, and I know this is how bad this conversation was going. She said, look, if you want broccol, you'll need to order a meal that comes with vegetables. Jacket potatoes, they come with cheese, they come with beans, they come with a side salad. They do not come with vegetables. And at this point, I was aware that there was a long queue behind me. Everyone was starting to grumble. I was that guy. So I said, all right, I'll just have the potato and cheese then, please. And I looked really sad, and I'm just glum. I had a glum face and also made a mental note to buy broccoli on the way home. It didn't taste as good at home because it never does now. I promise you, I haven't exaggerated that story at all. My gut feel is that the server showed complete lack of flexibility because of the culture of that cafe. And maybe their whole day is geared around efficiently serving the hundreds of people who have meetings at that venue. So somewhere along the line, rather than do what's best for the customer, they've developed a policy of never deviating off the menu, because that makes sense, doesn't it, for an efficient process? But surely the staff should be given initiative to do something simple that customers would like, like swap one dish for another. In my business, the MSP Marketing Edge, we do have a culture of, you should do whatever makes marketing easy for our members. And this drives everything that we do. And it means that my team very rarely need to check in with me. So if a member asks them to do something that's a little bit off piste, it's not what we would normally do. If we can help, and if it makes marketing easy for that person, then my team just do it. They use their initiatives so we don't have to have conversations about should we do this? It's our culture, it's our mission, and we keep it alive by feeding it everyday and talking every day about what can we do to make marketing easy for our members. A culture doesn't come from putting up a sign on office walls. It doesn't come from telling your staff how to behave. It doesn't come from standard operating procedures. It doesn't come from what's obvious to you as the owner. Because as a side note, what's obvious to us as business owners is very, very rarely obvious to our team. If we don't tell them exactly what we want and why we want it. They are constantly trying to what we want and then give it to us. And this is a huge source of stress both to you and to your staff. A culture needs to be alive. It needs to be nurtured. Every day, every conversation you have internally, every meeting, every project, you have to openly talk about your mission. You have to remind yourself that everything you do is aimed at the thing you're trying to do. This is what we do when we're talking about making marketing easy for MSPs, because we know internally here, the more that we do that, the more MSPs will join us and therefore the more successful we will all be together. Which is great. And it's no different within your msp. So that leads me to an interesting question for you. Do your technicians have the power to use their initiative? And more importantly, do they know that they have that power? Flexibility and initiative needs to be a culture within an msp, not a policy or a sign that's on a wall. And I know there's a fine line between what the CL think you should be doing for them and what you're actually doing for them, and expectation setting is a huge thing for you. But I promise you, a culture of do whatever makes technology easy for clients would be a very powerful retention weapon within your msp. Do you agree? [00:15:55] Speaker A: Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast still to. [00:15:59] Speaker B: Come have you ever wondered why doing marketing that works and getting new clients for your MSP seems to take takes so long? Is it like this for other B2B businesses? Or are you missing a trick somewhere? Are other MSPs signing up clients faster than you? These are all really common questions, feelings and doubts. And I have a very clear answer as to why sales and marketing takes so long for you. Let me give you the answer in the next few minutes. How many of your clients actually know the name of your msp? Or do they just refer to you as the tech guys or IT support? It's virtually impossible to build a brand for your business name because that takes years and years and tons of cash. But there is a brand that's very easy to build and can be incredibly profitable when you get it right. My special guest today is an expert at building this brand. He's going to tell you what you should do, why you should do it, and how to get started. [00:16:58] Speaker C: Hi, my name is Alan McLaren, I'm a personal branding expert and I live just outside Toronto in Canada. [00:17:03] Speaker D: And from the UK to you over in Toronto. Welcome onto the podcast, Alan. [00:17:07] Speaker B: It's great to have you here. [00:17:08] Speaker D: And we are going to delve today into what personal branding is. And it's really interesting. I think you and I have very similar opinions about how powerful personal branding can be for msps and how actually it can help them to beat their competitors and win more sales just by building your personal brand. I know there's going to be a lot of questions from the MSPS listening to this and watching this on YouTube about, about, wait, what's the difference between a personal brand and the company brand? And we're going to come on to that just down the line. [00:17:35] Speaker B: But let's first of all just delve. [00:17:36] Speaker D: Into you and sort of set you up with some credibility and some context. [00:17:40] Speaker B: So tell us briefly about your career. [00:17:41] Speaker D: How do you come to be a personal branding expert? [00:17:44] Speaker C: Well, it's interesting. Everything, as you all know, is an accident, right? Nothing actually happens intentionally with respect to your careers. I started my career at Canon, as in sales. So I started down the sales side of the house, became an executive after about 10 years, and then as a president of a company and then got into IT security. So I know a little bit about that and technology. I ended up coming to personal branding after 20 years of a career in corporate. I actually started my own marketing agency. And then during that 18 last years, the last four of it, we moved into personal branding because we saw an opportunity to actually change the world through one CEO at a time by helping people tell stories. And so I came to it through a lot of hard knocks, but a lot of experience on both the tech side and the sales side. [00:18:30] Speaker B: Oh, I love that. [00:18:31] Speaker D: And what a mission statement, changing the world. One CEO at the time. So how do you end up moving from something like IT security into something like marketing? Because they're two completely different worlds. [00:18:41] Speaker C: Well, it's my business partner's fault. So she was a PR person all her life. And so we met at an Internet at a NASDAQ listed company that I was running morning. And then after we sold, I sold off some of the parts of the business. She came to me, says, what are we going to do now? I said, what do you mean we? She says, oh, well, you know, you're a sales and marketing guy and I'm a PR person. Why don't we start an agency? I said, we have no ideas, we have no money, why would we do that? So we decided to start a marketing agency. That was it. It was no more complicated than that. But at the end of the day, you know, sales and marketing, every company, that's what's important, right? As an msp, all the owners know that without sales you have nothing. You could be the smartest technologist in the world, but you need to sell. So I understood that well, and she understood how to market came together. And then the pivot to personal branding really became that technology caught up to marketing. And if you didn't have the right target audience, it would squash you. AI would squash you. And you know that people can learn all about marketing on Facebook and on YouTube. And so we decided to go to a place where nobody is, which is the world of personal branding. And we'll talk about how important that is for MSPs going forward. [00:19:47] Speaker D: Well, let's do that right now because it's interesting you mentioned AI and I have a feeling everything you're about to say is going to be music to my ears. Because I believe in AI is getting better day by day. And I believe that the better and better AI gets, the more you need to push towards your own authentic personality within the marketing. Because if your competitors are just using AI produced stuff, whether it's good stuff or whether it's AI sloth, it's still AI generated. And the point is that anybody can do that, but not anybody can be you. [00:20:18] Speaker B: Is that really the basis of what. [00:20:19] Speaker D: You mean and what you define by personal branding? [00:20:21] Speaker C: You should do the commercials for me. I love it. So what we look at it is really the human to human approach. So. Exactly aligned, Paul, with what you're thinking about. Think about what differentiates you from another MSP. I've got this sock, I've got this. I've got four of them. I got 500 technologists I like. It's the same story, but you are the difference. The trust that you build as an owner, as a leader is the difference. So what we say is how do you build trusted authority with the people that matter? Because think about how you started your business. It was all the first clients were all relationships. So we're talking about is how do you build your personal brand to build more relationships, to drive more referrals to your business? That happens when you're out There, your monk, your company marketing is difficult because how do you differentiate between two. I'm bigger, I'm faster, I'm stronger, they all sit. Nine, four nines, five nines, doesn't matter. It always comes back to the humans you're going to deal with will differentiate you. The accounts payable people that you deal with, the technicians you deal with, the sock you have, all those things are important, but your ability to express that is really the secret sauce. [00:21:31] Speaker D: Yeah, I completely agree. So from a practical point of view then, how do you. Well let's take this back a step. Let's say you're an MSP owner and you are the primary salesperson within the business, which is let's say 80% of MSPs. And you, you know, maybe, maybe that person has heard me say over the years on this podcast, be the face of the business, but maybe not acted on it because, because they, they don't want to. Maybe there's a fear of putting themselves on the website or they, they, they, they want to keep the branding professional or you know, whatever that means. [00:22:01] Speaker B: What are the, what are the practical. [00:22:03] Speaker D: Steps to actually starting to build up your personal brand? And how do you make sure that your personal brand isn't overshadowing what you're trying to do with the business? [00:22:11] Speaker C: Well, it's interesting you say overshadowing, it's complementary, isn't it? When you think about your personal brand and the business, you are the company, right? Unless you're a 400 million dollar MSP. But most of the people we're talking to are not. So, so what you do, the first thing you do is look at and say, okay, you're all technologists. Do you understand LinkedIn and how to use that, that as a tool? Not, we'll talk about content in a second. But you, you know how to build relationships and nurture relationships on LinkedIn. Your clients by the way, are all there. They're there inside your customers. So the first thing I would do if I was msp, I'd say who are my customers and am I connected with them on LinkedIn? Then I'd connect with them and I would follow them and I would nurture them. Hey, great job Paul, that's wonderful. Then I'd go see who their connection connected to. They're all, all potential clients and I would never sell a thing. I would just say, hey, I understand you're connected to Paul, so am I. What a great guy, huh? Yeah, he's a great guy. Happy to be connected to you. And you say nothing else because here's the secret sauce in your title. It says msp, IT Security, IT Services. Pick something, that's how people will recognize you don't have to ever pitch them. I'll give you a quick story. I saw a guy on WhatsApp doing a great job on a marketing app. And I went, boy, he's interesting. And I went and connected with them and hey, I just saw you on WhatsApp. I just wanted to connect with you because I thought you were a fascinating guy. He says, I see you're a personal branding expert. I need some help with my personal brand. I didn't pitch a thing. So that's what I'm talking. Build relationships and build trust. There's another step, of course, that you can take, which we'll talk about in terms of content development. But if you just start with relationship building and relationship nurturing, your prospecting is only going to be online and you'll never have to pitch once because it'll all come from those natural relationships. [00:23:58] Speaker D: Yeah, I love that. And we'll come on to the content in a second in terms of bravery of putting something on LinkedIn. And I see msps overthink this all the time and I understand why. You know, it's. It's easy for someone like you. Easy for someone like me because we're communicators, we're marketing people. That's what we do. But if you're on the other side of the coin and you're actually a technical genius, but not, not a community, you know, not great at communications, what do I actually write in that headline? You know what, what kind of photo do I put on LinkedIn? And you know, what would your advice be on that? [00:24:29] Speaker C: Well, the first thing, we overthink everything. So think about this. I'll make it easy for you. So let's assume as an MSP, you have a thousand connections on LinkedIn, 500 connections on LinkedIn, they know you, right? They've connected with you. Talk to them. They don't care about the perfect headline or the perfect picture or the perfect. They just want to know where you are, what you're doing with your life, right? Because they're the first concentric circle that supports you. Those thousand connect you to 500,000 other people. So when you over produce personal branding, it looks like marketing and marketing is not trusted because you're selling me something. If I'm there to help you. If we talk about content for an example, and you're an IT security one, well, what are you going to do? You're not going to say, well, I have the best. Best, you know, soccer, the best. That doesn't matter. No one cares about that. You're helping people strategically. What they need to think about, how they need to approach it, how they need to do their training internally. You're giving away all your secrets to people you can. They do that every day with customers, every single day. So do that. Be like you're in front of a customer who's asked you a question about that, about your IT services, but not in a sales way, in a. Well, this is how. If you were a consultant, you'd say, this is how I would approach it. Go pick the best MSP that delivers the best culture to you. But let me help you do that. They're already doing it. Just don't overthink it. And if you're afraid, guess what? It's normal to be afraid. Yeah, there's nothing wrong with being afraid. [00:25:58] Speaker D: Everyone else is afraid, too. But the difference is if you can power through the fear, right, and just, and just change it. I love that. [00:26:03] Speaker C: Just quickly for a moment, Paul. They've already built a business. They've already had the alligators at their ankles already. Ready. You're telling me a video scaring, Scaring you a little bit. It's time to kind of practice it. So let's be practical until you get good at it and then you're. You'll fly on the other side. [00:26:21] Speaker D: Yeah, I love that. I love that. [00:26:22] Speaker B: And also, do you know what? [00:26:23] Speaker D: If you make mistakes and it's, it's never permanent, is it? And I remember, I think it was last year, the British Prime Minister, who'd only been in power for a few months, he was talking about some hostages being released. And he, he, in a live TV conference, he actually said, he said, and. [00:26:38] Speaker B: They released the sausages, the hostages. [00:26:41] Speaker D: Obviously, the entire world picked up on that. [00:26:43] Speaker B: And this is, this is like a. [00:26:44] Speaker D: World leader on, you know, on a world. [00:26:46] Speaker B: On a world platform, but it was. [00:26:48] Speaker D: Forgotten within weeks and it hasn't affected his credibility or anything like that. [00:26:51] Speaker B: So, you know, if a world leader. [00:26:53] Speaker D: Can make a stupid mistake like saying sausages instead of hostages, maybe he was thinking about his dinner that night then. And get away with it then you can certainly get away with making a video that isn't quite as good. Okay, let's talk one final question about LinkedIn then. I just want to look briefly outside of LinkedIn and other things you can do with your personal branding. So you've mentioned content a few times. What would your Advice Be to MSP on using content on LinkedIn to increase your personal brand and to make you more authoritative and more authentic and more desirable as an msp. [00:27:22] Speaker C: Obviously I mean this easiest question ever is what are the questions that you get from your clients not about the technical stuff you do, but about the strategic stuff you do. Because the MSP result is the work you do and that's fantastic. And people expect that you're going to deliver on all the ways you deliver deliver. But before they decide even to get to use an msp, why wouldn't they do it internally versus externally? What are the objections you get from your prospects? What are the conversations that are happening on Google right now? Go find those out and then and just talk about those things. That's what you talk about every single day. It's just your competitors aren't because they're all afraid. So you're going to get out there and you're going to start talking about why it's important to outsource your IT security. You're going to say well it's really simple. You can hire people internally but now you got to manage them. Hr, all the things that you go through, they got sick, they're away today. And the virus happened to kick kick the crap of all of our networks now we're screwed now. Well you, you've got us. You don't have to worry about that headache free feel. Oh I see. But you're not pitching, you're just pitching the idea of outsourcing versus insourcing because each of them have advantages. Think of the voice of your customer and deliver that way. And if you're afraid to do videos, take your phone and practice until you're comfortable doing videos. We believe in video. A hundred percent of our content is videos. 100 except, sorry, we do newsletters and other stuff but of the personal branding content because it's the most authentic and that's what people want to YouTube. [00:28:49] Speaker D: Yeah, no, I completely agree. We do, we do a lot of videos, we give a lot of videos to our MSP marketing edge members because that you cannot beat those, those videos, they're, they're really, really powerful. Even though the LinkedIn algorithm is, isn't quite as much in love with video today as it was 12 months ago, it will go full circle because what will happen is there'll be less video on LinkedIn and some vice president somewhere at LinkedIn says O consumption is down but TikTok's getting bigger again. We've got to ramp it up. And all of these Things that, they're always cyclical. Okay, let's get move away from LinkedIn for our final subject, which is personal branding outside of LinkedIn. So other, other stuff on the web, but also offline. How give us some practical things that you can do and I'll, I'll throw one out that I use in my life, which was never an intention, it just kind of became this way, which is. So this podcast goes on all audio platforms, but also on YouTube. So anyone who's watching on YouTube will see I'm wearing a blue shirt and guess what? I always wear a blue shirt. In fact, you might think it's the same one. There's nine years of video content, but it's not actually the same one. [00:29:52] Speaker B: It's. [00:29:52] Speaker D: I have, I get a procession of blue shirts. But it's now got to a point now where if I'm not wearing a light blue shirt, you know, and I've met people in real life and when I've wear a checkered shirt and they'll say to me, paul, you're wearing the wrong shirt. So you see, and that's become almost a piece of my personal branding is having a light blue, blue shirt. Now that's it. That was an accident. It was just something I fell into. But is that the kind of thing that we mean by personal branding? That kind of consistency of your appearance, of the way you present yourself, or is it. Is that just a small component of a bigger thing? [00:30:24] Speaker C: At the end of the day, personal branding is about your, your authentic self. How do you come across in everything you do? What hats do you wear, what roles do you play? Part of it can be a shirt if you like it. Like you look at, you know, politicians, they tend to have a uniform, right? But because you're spending time with people, especially online and, and I think you mentioned YouTube as an example. It is the most important platform, surprisingly, because it's there forever and it is your showcase of everything you do is there. So when you pull people over and they become a subscriber now, you, you own them in a positive way. And LinkedIn, even though so because it's more transitory, only 2 or 3% of people actually see your content every day. But to continue the offline conversation outside of LinkedIn and YouTube, what you're talking about can be important, but it doesn't really matter that much. You've done it for nine years. That's why it matters most people have not done it and won't do it for nine years. Right. I don't care about my uniform, I'll wear this, I'll wear sweatshirts, I'll wear whatever. It doesn't matter to me. To me, it's about my voice, the authenticity of what I'm trying to do, which is give away as much as I know know with holding nothing back to everybody who wants to listen to me. That's my brand. I will do it from my heart, not from my head. And people like that will be part of my tribe and people who don't like that will go somewhere else. And, and in marketing, repelling is not a bad thing. [00:31:44] Speaker D: Yeah. [00:31:45] Speaker C: Because you know that you're dealing with your target audience that matter to you and what MSPs tend to do. In my experience, because I've, I've had MSPs. A part of the IT security business I have have is they're so hung up on the technical side, they forget the end of the day, you're solving a problem for humans. You are serving technology problems. But there's someone in charge of that technology that is always up at night. And you can help them by your. By saying, I, I know Paul's got it. I know these guys, they tr. But Paul's got me. He's got my back. [00:32:16] Speaker D: Wow. [00:32:16] Speaker C: How do you do that at scale? You do that online and of course, all the events you go to to you show up with that same attitude. Physical events, webinars, podcasts, you show up the same way all the time. And then people go, that Paul guy, he's like. And then the attributes start getting described. That's what you want to be. Because the word I use is in an event, physical or virtual, your personal brand shows up before you do and it stays after you leave. So are they saying the right things about you? Are you delivering value at every turn? If the answer is yes, yes, check the box. And your business will start to thrive because more people will want to work with you. [00:32:54] Speaker D: What a way to end the interview. Thank you, Alan. Really appreciate your time coming on, being authentic, giving us all of this amazing knowledge. [00:33:01] Speaker B: Just briefly tell us, what do you do? What do you actually. [00:33:03] Speaker D: What does your business actually do to help MSPs? [00:33:05] Speaker B: And what's the best way to get. [00:33:06] Speaker D: In touch with you? [00:33:07] Speaker C: So best way to reach me is on LinkedIn, Alan McLaren [email protected] and go check out the stuff we do. We essentially work with founders, builders, entrepreneurs to help them build their personal brand brand both online and off so that they can do exactly what I, what we've talked about today to differentiate their business and to humanize their business and to drive more business. And we do that through what we call a brand DNA, which is a strategy session. And then we either become their coach or we do it for them, depending on their model and their budget. And the rest, we make their lives easier, just like they do to their clients. We do for them. And Our website is strataoriginals.com Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast. [00:33:52] Speaker A: Paul's personal peer group. [00:33:54] Speaker B: Okay, Master of the levels producer James, what's our question this week? [00:33:58] Speaker D: Thanks, Paul. [00:33:59] Speaker B: Well, audio levels aside, the levels of frustration in this MSP must be through the roof. This week's question comes from Christian, whose MSP is in Illinois, and he asks, why is my marketing and sales so slow? Yeah, that's a very common question. And the short answer is, because you work in a sector with a very, very, very slow sales cycle. In fact, it's one of the slowest that I've ever seen. You're working against three big things. The first is a lack of understanding. The people you're trying to reach, they don't get technology, so it's easier for them not to think about something, because that's what we do when we don't get something. The other thing you're working against is fear. They don't really know how their technology's been set up, no matter how many times they've or whatever documentation you've given them. And that means that they're scared of changing something and breaking it. And the third thing you're working against is inertia. Loyalty. It seems easier for them at an emotional level to stay with an existing supplier, even if they don't like them. And that's because of the lack of understanding and the fear. So these three factors and loads more, they all contribute to a total lack of urgency on the part of your leads and prospects. However, there are two pieces of good news. The first is that people buy when they're ready to buy. And that means that right now there is a hot prospect in your area who would love to talk to you. The challenge is knowing who that person is and knowing the right time to talk to them. This is why you need to be constantly increasing the amount of marketing activity that you do and speaking to more and more and more people play the numbers game. The other piece of good news is the insane lifetime value that you benefit from because you win loads of of lovely monthly recurring revenue from clients and they stay with you for years and years and years. And that really doesn't happen much elsewhere either. So These are the good things. The answer to getting more clients, as I said, is just to do more marketing activity, do more stuff, speak to more people. Now, to submit your own question, you can just email me, go to mspmarketingedge.com and head to the Contact Us page. [00:36:13] Speaker A: Coming up, coming up next. [00:36:15] Speaker B: Thanks for listening this week. Next week, let's look at what you should do when your client says they'd rather buy their365 their365 direct than buy it through you. Should you fight them? Should you educate them? Or should you just roll over and let them save their $2 a month for MSPs? [00:36:33] Speaker A: Around the World around the World, the MSP Marketing Podcast with Paul Green.