Hosted By
Thank you to Jeff Pugel from Ignition for joining Paul to talk about how to start selling based on value, not price.
Waking up in a cold sweat at 3AM in the spring of 2019, Jeff knew he was done with corporate life. After 20+ years in advertising and media sales, Jeff realised small business owners have been misled on what they need to know about growing their business. Jeff’s mission is to accelerate profits and guarantee a quantifiable Return on Investment from his hybrid marketing coaching/consulting services.
Connect with Jeff on LinkedIn.
Voiceover:
Fresh every Tuesday for MSPs around the world. This is Paul Green’s MSP marketing Podcast.
Paul Green:
Okay. I cannot believe that today is February. How fast is this year going? Here’s what we got coming up for you in this week’s show.
Jeff Pugel:
Talking about the three common lead generation mistakes that most MSPs make and how to overcome them. So you are now selling based on value, not price.
Paul Green:
That’s Jeff Pugel, he’s a lead generation expert, and he’s going to be here later on in the show to tell you the three classic mistakes that you might be making while trying to generate more leads for your MSP. Plus, we’re going to be talking about testing your marketing, and I don’t mean anything clever, like split testing. You may have heard of AB split testing in the past. I mean actually physically testing all the different elements of your marketing. There are things you may have set up years and years ago. When was the last time you they’re actually working?
Voiceover:
Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast.
Paul Green:
So we’re early enough into a new year and yet sufficiently far enough away from the end of 2021, that you’ve probably forgotten any problems that you had with your holiday system at the end of last year. What I mean by problems? Well, when I talked to most MSPs, the problems they have are typically that everyone leaves it till the last minute to take their holiday. So you get to the beginning of December and suddenly everyone realises, “Oh, I’ve got seven days that I didn’t take.” Or worse, “10, 12 days. I didn’t take.” And suddenly in December, which is already a short and weird month, you’ve got people all over the place trying to take extra holiday. Well, they’re not trying to take extra holiday. They’re trying to take the holiday they are entitled to. It’s a really weird thing that as you get to this point of a year, no one’s pushing and pushing to take holiday because they haven’t got that urgency deadline.
Paul Green:
Of course, what creates that urgency deadline is in most businesses, any holiday entitlement you’ve got expires at the end of the calendar year. So there is a deadline. And we know from marketing psychology, that when someone has a deadline, it forces them to make a decision and take action. It’s why I love dead deadlines in marketing, either scarcity deadlines, or actual physical switch off, it’s going to stop on this date deadlines. They force decisions, whether they’re buying decisions or not, it doesn’t matter. The point is rather than someone sitting on the fence for another six months, they’re making a decision to buy or not to buy. So that can work very well in marketing, but it doesn’t work very well for smooth and pleasant operations in December. Now I discussed this a few months ago with the members of my peer group. So my products, my service, the MSP Marketing Edge, one of the things that we do with a small number of the members in that service is we have peer groups.
Paul Green:
So we have a number of Zoom peer groups that meet every two weeks and then we have an actual physical in real life peer group, which meets once a month in the town where I live, the town of Milton Keynes in the UK. And yes, I would love to run one of these in the US and maybe later this year or maybe next year, but obviously travel and COVID and all that kind of stuff just makes it impractical at the moment. But we were sat discussing this, I think it was either our November or possibly our December meeting, probably the December one. And we were discussing holiday systems and how actually it can be incredibly disruptive not just to operations but to your mindset and to your mental wellbeing of getting on with running the business and being a good boss and making sure that people take their holidays.
Paul Green:
All of these things clash. They come together and clash in December. So we came up with a set of very simple rules. And the reason I’m telling you about the of now is if you were to adopt these rules for your MSP, you need to introduce them now, you can’t wait till the end of the year and introduce them, because that would not be fair. And one of the things we know about human psychology is that when someone perceives something to not be fair, it’s really, really offensive to them. We are believably driven by being fair and the perception of being seen to be fair. So if you’d like these basic holiday rules, then I would introduce them to your staff now, I think the beginning of February is a great time to introduce something like this to your team.
Paul Green:
So these are the three basic rules that we came up with. And these might not be the exact ones that you would use, but maybe they’ll inspire something for you. Rule number one, no clashes. Now what that means is that two people who do a similar role cannot both be off on holiday at the same time. There’s nothing we can do about one of them being sick and one being on holiday, but we can certainly proactively plan and make sure they’re not off on holiday at the same time. If you’ve got a couple of level three techs and they both decide to go away at Easter, well that’s a problem, you’ve just lost the entire level three capacity of your business. And guess who’s going to have to do the level three work. Yes, it’s you, isn’t it? So a very simple rule of no clashes. There is software that you can buy for holiday planning. I mean, if you’ve got lots and lots and of staff, then you may choose to invest in that.
Paul Green:
I don’t have a specific one to recommend to you, just go and Google it and you’ll find something that you like the look of. And where you’ve got lots and lots of staff, you need rules, don’t you? You need groups of people. So if this person in this group is off, then this other person in this group isn’t off, different kind of rules. In most small businesses, we’ve got typically under 10 people, it becomes more about, if Dave is off, then John can’t be off at the same time. So you can set up some very simple rules for that and just use a company calendar, have a very simple way for people to see who’s off and whether or not they can book time off. Now, it’s really important if you use this rule that you do not have flexibility on it, because what’s going to happen is, let’s say we’ve got Dave and John who do similar roles.
Paul Green:
Dave is going to be proactive. Mrs. Dave is going to say to him, “Come on, come and book some holiday. I want to go away with the kids.” So Dave’s all proactive and gets his holiday booked. And then of course John gets within a week of wanting to go away somewhere, looks in the calendar and of course Dave has beaten him to it and he’s going to come and knock on your door and he’s going to say, “Oh, is there any chance you can make an exception this time?” You’ve got to say no every time. Just because John hasn’t been proactive and hasn’t worked ahead, why should you have to pay the price for that? So no clashes is the first rule. The second rule should be, use it or lose it. Now I’m not sure what the legal situation is where you are, but certainly here in the UK, every full-time employee is legally entitled to a fair chunk of holiday.
Paul Green:
And most businesses, my own included, have a rule that if you don’t use that by the end of the year, then you lose it. I know a few business owners over the years, who’ve allowed their staff to carry unused holiday over into the next year and sure there are special circumstances that you might apply now and again, and it might be on a case by case basis or just if even with something like COVID, you might choose to let people carry that over. But let me tell you, because I did it once in my business years ago, more than 10 years ago, once you’ve done it once, it sets a dangerous precedence that you will do it again. And we got all caught up in a loop of, “Oh, can I take this holiday? And this is from last year, but I’m going to take this from this year’s allowance.”
Paul Green:
And, “Hey, why can’t I carry over into next year? Because I did from this.” It’s just far too complicated, so much simpler. And I believe all rules should be very, very simple, so much simpler just to say, “If you don’t use it, then you will lose it.” In fact, that goes hand in hand with number one, no clashes. It encourages your people that they’ve got to book that holiday. And there’s no point waiting until December and trying to take 24 days holiday because guess what? Everyone will have already booked up those days. Now, one thing you could do to make it fair again, and just to help remind your staff that they’ve got to use it or lose it is you could schedule a quarterly email to them. So you could go into your outlook or whatever you use and write an email reminding of the basic rules of booking the holiday and send that email in March, send the same email in June, send it in September.
Paul Green:
And perhaps just, I don’t know, November or something just before the year ends, but essentially schedule those in now. So you have a once a year task to schedule in the holiday reminder emails. That will be a very elegant solution to the problem of, “But you didn’t tell me, you didn’t remind me that if I don’t use it, I lose it.” Because there’s always going to be someone that acts like that and hits you with that accusation. So the first rule then is no clashes. The second rule that I suggest is use it or lose it. The third rule is that it’s not your problem. And what I mean by that is if they don’t use it and they lose it, it’s not your problem. If there’s a clash and they can’t take a holiday, because they weren’t proactive enough, it’s not your problem. You, as the boss, as the owner of the business, have got far more important things to worry about, than whether or not Dave or John have taken their holiday.
Paul Green:
Let that be their problem. Why should you even have to get involved in it? In fact, you don’t have to, if you set out these simple rules, you give them the tools and the reminders they need. You can shut off. It’s no longer your problem. You have fulfilled your bossly duties and now you can just it to your team to sort out their holidays on their own.
Voiceover:
Here’s this week’s clever idea.
Paul Green:
If ever you are having a consultation with a marketing expert, this is one of the most embarrassing things that can happen to you. I was doing a consult with one of my MSP Marketing Edge clients. And we were talking about various bits and bobs. What was working with marketing, some of the areas that were less effective. And one of the things he said was, oh, I can’t remember exactly what it was now, because it was a few months ago, but it was, “Oh, this thing clearly doesn’t work because no one ever does it.”
Paul Green:
We were on a zoom and we did a screen share and we went to have a look at this thing. I forget what it was. It was a sign up or a contact box or something like that. And I said to him, “When did you set this up?” And it was probably something like 2017, I think he said it was about four or five years ago. And I said, “When was the last time that you actually tested it? And that you know it works?” And he says, “Oh, of course it works. It’s bound of work. It’s always worked.” And so we tested it. I filled in my details there and then, and I pressed the button and nothing happened.
Paul Green:
So I pressed the button again and nothing happened. I tried it in incognito and Firefox and nothing happened. He tried it his end, nothing happened. And as you can imagine, he was quite embarrassed by that. That’s an embarrassing thing to have because we don’t know how long that form or whatever it was, has been broken, that could have been broken for years and years and years. And that’s why I’ve got a timely reminder for you in this week’s podcast to test your marketing. I mean literally test everything. Because we set up marketing stuff all the time and we set it up and we forget about it. And then three or four years later, we kind of stumble across it in some way. And we forget. In fact, as I’m recording this, I’ve just had an email from James, the producer, you all right James?
James Lett:
Yo.
Paul Green:
And he was telling me about a webpage he’s just discovered on our website, which is horrendously out date. And yet we’ve been actively sending traffic to it. So even I get it wrong. I mean, we have a lot of different marketing elements, but it’s ever so easy to do this. It’s far too easy for a piece of your marketing to fall over or be out of date. And for you not to recognise it, especially if you are very proactive with your marketing. I mean, in my marketing, we’ve got websites, we’ve got automated email campaigns, we’ve got Facebook stuff, LinkedIn stuff, and we don’t really have a central log of it all. We probably should. In fact, there’s an idea for another podcast subject, but really it’s just a case of going and looking at it sometimes and just checking everything is okay, particularly clicking buttons, click all the buttons, fill in all the forms, press everything to see what’s broken.
Paul Green:
It’s almost unheard of when you’re doing a big test like that to not find something that’s broken. I always do. Whenever I have a good sweep of my website and the end of the year tends to be, about a month or so ago, I had a good sweep through all of our websites. Just checking little things, checking all the little details were still right and checking all the links still linked to things. And I found two or three things. They weren’t big things. They were minor things, but to me that’s important if you find a minor fault on a website, well, it’s the broken windows theory, isn’t it? The broken windows theory is if you’ve got an abandoned building and you permit the local youths to throw stones at it and break the windows with no consequence, as in no one boards up the broken windows, then eventually the crime will escalate.
Paul Green:
They’ll start by smashing all of the windows and then eventually they’ll break in. And before you know it, that old abandoned building has been burnt down to the ground. That’s essentially what broken windows theory is. If the small things aren’t corrected, then eventually the big things become an issue. In fact, one of the ways I seem to remember reading some time ago, one of the ways that they tackled the big crime problem of New York of the 1970s and ’80s was by enforcing people paying for the tube or the underground or whatever it’s called in New York. The subway? That sounds more New Yorky, doesn’t it? So people were just going on and off the subway all the time without paying, that had become routine and actually they police enforce or the mayor’s office or whoever enforced, everyone pays for the subway. They enforced no jay walking on the roads.
Paul Green:
And these little actions actually led to a reduction of overall big, horrible, violent crime. Because when someone’s on the little actions, it makes you think that someone’s on the big actions. So it is important to get little things right. Here’s something little you can check in your marketing. It’s 2022 now, go and have a look at the copyright on your website. What year does it say? Does it automatically flip over each year? Ours do. We set a little bit of Java script to make that happen, so we didn’t have to think about it, but we still go and check because to me, your website still showing as 2021 copyright, it’s a little bit out of date. You can’t afford to be out of date, just as you can’t afford anything to be broken at all. So give yourself half an hour later on today, go and check that everything works in your marketing.
Paul Green:
Every automated email, everything on your website, every link in your LinkedIn, your Facebook and your other social media profiles, click everything, check everything. Oh, by the way, just as a courtesy, if you are ever on anyone’s website and you click something and it doesn’t work, just drop them a courtesy email and tell them, we are delighted when someone emails us and tells us that we are getting something wrong or that something’s broken. Why are we delighted? Because we can fix it immediately. And in fact, if you find anything broken on my side, please do let me know. I will genuinely be very grateful to you, just as I’m sure you would be grateful if someone emailed you to say a little piece of your marketing, wasn’t quite working as it should do.
Voiceover:
Paul’s blatant plug.
Paul Green:
If you are new to the podcast or just new to focusing on marketing for your MSP, then there is a great free resource that’s available to you. It’s a book I wrote, the quick guide to getting the marketing right in your MSP, the book’s called Updating Servers Doesn’t Grow Your Business and we have physical print copies in the UK and the US, which we will ship to you completely free. This isn’t one of those things where I want you to enter a credit card for the shipping and then I’ll try and sell you something. There’s nothing like that at all. We literally will, the books are printed, they’re sat in warehouses in, I think, it’s Essex in the UK and Chicago, Illinois in the US. And we will send them to you at our cost. Why? Because it’s a great way to start working relationship. Maybe you’ll go on to do some business with me in the future, maybe you won’t, either way you can get hold of a physical copy of this book.
Paul Green:
And I’m just looking at page seven of the book. It’s actually been quite a few years since I reread it. I’m going to have to reread it myself. And I got little panel at the bottom of page seven, which says, “Understand this. You are not going to get to the end of your life, look back and wish you’d spent more time fixing computers and advising on IT strategies. Instead you’ll wish you’d spent more time with your children or your other half or just having more fun, hang gliding, golf, whatever your thing is.” See this isn’t a book just about marketing, it’s a book about marketing and growing your business in real life. I have an 11 year old child. She’s awesome. And I want to spend more time with her, not less time with her, that work life balance thing is so important, but I do also want to grow my business at the same time.
Paul Green:
And without wanting to sound like one of those, you could have it all type people on the internet. You can actually, you can grow your this and improve your marketing and spend more time with your kids. And the secret to do that is actually doing less yourself and getting more done by other people. Whether they’re people who work directly for you or they’re freelancers. Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself. Get a copy of this book, Updating Servers Doesn’t Grow Your Business. You can get your copy free at paulgreensmspmarketing.com. That’s my website and yes, it’s got my name in it, paulgreensmspmarketing.com.
Voiceover:
The big interview.
Jeff Pugel:
Hi there. This is Jeff Pugel CEO and founder of Ignition. I focus on working with small business owners who desperately want a proven and tested method that will not only increase their cash flow and profits in the shortest amount of time, with the least amount of effort, but also with the lowest amount of capital and risk.
Paul Green:
All of the things you’ve talked about there, we could do as podcast subjects, let’s do an hour long special, Jeff, talking about cashflow and making money and whatsoever, but actually what I’ve got you on the show today to talk about is lead generation. Because it is consistently the number one question that I get asked about, whenever I do webinars or go to events, as we started going to now. MSPs find it really easy to turn a lead to a client or certainly it doesn’t seem to be that difficult. The issue they’ve got is how to get in front of more people. So what’s your experience of lead gen with MSPs, Jeff?
Jeff Pugel:
They’re typically making three common mistakes. Unintentionally sabotaging their success. The first being is that they fail to get any type of professional help, look at professional athletes, the most famous professional athletes out there. They all have their own coaches. They have their support staff. If the best athletes in the world have coaches and support staff, don’t you think by reason, a local MSP should probably have some help and a support staff along the way, versus going on their own.
Paul Green:
But you know what most MSPs would say to that. I’m sure you hear the answer when you ask them that exact question, which is, “Hey, but marketing isn’t what we are here to do. We are experts at stopping things going wrong and fixing things when they do go wrong.”
Jeff Pugel:
Yeah. True. But I’d rationale, I was like, “Well, key thing with marketing and lead gen is, well why are we all here?” We’re running a business and running a business is to get revenue, to get profits. And you can’t be helping people unless you have people raising their hands, wanting to talk with you. Products just don’t sell themselves, unfortunately. It’s a competitive landscape. Yeah. That actually leads me right into my second mistake I see, is often they don’t know the fundamentals required to sit successfully market their business and attract as many new clients as their business can handle. So they’re actually probably leaving business on the table.
Paul Green:
Oh, without a doubt.
Jeff Pugel:
Yeah. And just the third one is, most MSPs have absolutely no idea how to use their marketing to generate immediate cash flow, which is what it’s about.
Paul Green:
Okay. Now that’s the thing I think is going to be of most interest in this interview. So we’ll come back onto that in a second. Let’s, first of all, talk about the marketing fundamentals. You just mentioned that in your second mistake there, what do you see as the marketing fundamentals for an MSP?
Jeff Pugel:
Everyone is unique out there and problem is, most people are competing on the same superlative marketing. “We’re the best, we’ve been in business since 1352 BC. We have this, that.” That’s the other thing, nothing that differentiates them from everybody else. So what happens is, they end up competing on price because they’ve given their customer, the prospect, no other basis to compare themselves against everybody else. Well, how do they differentiate from the next MSPs? And we were just talking about on the pre-show a little bit, as you know, we’re start to work with one new MSP here in the States. His special angle is on cybersecurity. So all of a sudden, now that’s a very different conversation. They say, “Hey, we can come in and manage your email.” “Oh, that’s interesting. Cybersecurity. Tell me more.”
Paul Green:
Yeah. And as we were discussing the problem with using cybersecurity as your differentiator, is the ordinary people you want to reach, don’t really understand cybersecurity. It’s as much a blank to them as a technology is. I think you’re absolutely spot on with this, Jeff, the differentiation is very, very hard for MSPs. And certainly when you’re inside the business, you look and you say, “Well, we do the same stuff as all the other MSPs in town do. So how do we differentiate?” My own personal take on this is that you have to differentiate around the people that you take the unique face of the business, this which is typically the business owner and you then build that person up and there are great examples of this worldwide.
Paul Green:
You could look at Tesla, for example, now Tesla sits in so many unique categories, it was the first sexy electric supercar, but it’s also in the category of it’s got one of the few living billionaires like Henry Ford type figures or one of those unique figures that people will look back on in history. And okay, Tesla will exist long after Elon Musk is gone, but it certainly gives that business an edge. And you could argue that here is one of the world’s richest men, is very successfully the face of that business and gives that business extra element of differentiation.
Jeff Pugel:
Speaking of differentiation. Let’s take a different angle here. What customers are ultimately looking for is information to help them make a decision. So what information can you give your customers to help them make that decision and also help them make the best possible decision possible when deciding to buy your services? That’s a differentiator. If you can shine the light on a problem that they’re having, that they don’t know they have, and then come in at the same time and say, “Hey, we can help you solve it.” That’s a magic formula.
Paul Green:
It really is. And getting practical then with that, how would you actually go about educating that audience? Would you do it with a buyer’s guide? Would you do it with videos? What have you found to be the most useful practical methods?
Jeff Pugel:
I found the best methods, believe it or not, is one on one marketing. And what I mean by one on one marketing is to keep it personal. People like to do business with people. And especially in a relationship business like MSPs, you’re buying the person that’s running the company as much as you are their service. You’re not buying widgets, that’s a very transactional purchase. You’re buying a very considered purchase, much like an accountant or a lawyer or a doctor.
Jeff Pugel:
You want to meet the person. So think of ways you can get in front of them personally to start distilling that information, whether it’s maybe it’s holding local informational events in your community, doing direct outreach, having conversations with people. I know one local MSP that every Friday they set up shop in the back of a coffee shop and have literally an open two hour office hours type of session, where they will answer any questions that people come to them with. And they’ve gotten so known in the community for that, they just know on Friday mornings between 9 and 11 am, show up at this coffee shop and this, this IT company will be there, happy to talk about your IT problems over a cup of coffee.
Paul Green:
That’s a very elegant solution. Isn’t it? That’s just beautiful. And what I love about all of this, Jeff, is we are talking about people. I think so often when you’re talking about marketing, it’s so easy to get caught up in, “Right, should I do this on Google or that on Facebook or what’s my pay per click or my cost per acquisition.” And all of this kind of stuff. And actually isn’t all marketing, it just comes down to one set of people trying to persuade another set of people that they are the best people to deal with? And in fact, we’ve talked fairly consistently in a number of answers there, about using the people in the business, you, yourself, to differentiate the business and then your lead gen should be based more around people as well. Absolutely love this, Jeff, completely agree with your approach. Now let’s talk about you turning your marketing directly into cashflow. It was something that you teased earlier on.
Jeff Pugel:
Here’s the thing, when cashflow is suffering, most small business owners tend to almost always blame the marketing medium itself. And I like to call that the tactical part of the equation without any guard or how good or how bad the strategic messaging is in that marketing piece. And that’s a problem I see across so many businesses nowadays, is everyone’s more focused on the shiny objects, the tactics, the Google, the Facebook, the TikTok, this platform, that platform, rather than coming back and understanding what’s the messaging that’s going into that. And that comes back again to, I think, this knows maybe our fifth time we’ve circled around, is on the people involved, what makes this MSP special versus everybody else? And because the problem is talking about cash flow is if you don’t start to talk about the strategic, you end up talking about the platitudes, which you talked about a second ago.
Jeff Pugel:
“We have the lowest prices. We’re the best service. The best value. We’ve been in service since before slice bread.” And that’s not giving that local business owner any decision are making criteria besides price. All humans want the best deal when we buy something, it’s just ingrained into our nature. Unfortunately, when using any type of platitudes in marketing, like I see so much do so many companies doing, there’s absolutely no way to tell who’s actually offering the best deal out there. And because of that, we’re intrinsically wired to base our buying decision on those who have the lowest price. And when you’re competing on price, you have nowhere to go but down and that’s going to hurt your cash flow, your revenue, your profitability and then it just unfortunately becomes a downward spiral.
Paul Green:
And of course you are acquiring the worst possible clients because people who are picking an MSP on price are not normally the right kind of clients. We certainly don’t want those kind of people. Jeff, tell us a little bit more about you, what you do with MSPs and how can we get in touch with you?
Jeff Pugel:
I help MSPs become the most profitable company that they can. So they are seen as the solution out there in their marketplace, not a solution. To find me you can head on over to my website at ignition.llc, while there, have a new ebook I just finished writing that talks about some quick ways one can tap into some of the things we talked about here today, to help grow their business. And often with very little to no advertising or marketing cost.
Paul Green:
Hey, you’re not using my podcast for your own lead gen, are you?
Jeff Pugel:
I’m a marketer, right?
Voiceover:
Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. This week’s recommended book.
Todd Kane:
Hi, I’m Todd Kane with Evolve Management Consulting. And the book I would recommend is the Effective Executive by Peter Drucker. This is an excellent, excellent manual to help you understand how to be more effective in any position, especially for us working in the knowledge industry. It’s a bit of an old book, but it’s time well tested. It’s an excellent, excellent read. You’ll find tons of insights in there about how to better manage your time and your attention.
Voiceover:
Coming up next week.
Aaron Nihat:
Hi everyone, I’m Aaron from Cornwall IT and I’ll be here on the show next week and I’ll be telling you how you can improve your website’s Google rank with my top SEO tips.
Paul Green:
We’re also going to be tool about how ordinary decision makers don’t buy technology, they buy outcomes. In fact, there’s a number of things that they buy and we’ll look at exactly what those are next week. Stop selling technology and start selling these things instead. Plus I have a six month reminder for you to raise your prices. Prices should always be going in one direction. It’s up, up, up. We’ll talk about how to do that next week and why you mustn’t be scared to put your prices up, especially for new clients coming on board for the first time. Join me next Tuesday and have a very profitable week in your MSP.
Voiceover:
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