Episode 154 includes:
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00:00 How best to persuade your prospects in advance
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08:28 A 'Work From Home' setup that could be a great sales tool
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15:14 How to create a new revenue stream from compliance
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24:26 A great book recommendation about changing the way you work forever
Featured guest:
Thank you to Shay Cohen from Kamanja for joining Paul to discuss a potential new automated Pen Test revenue stream.
Shay's career began as a technical support engineer for Windows desktop and server systems, and then moved to become a junior Linux engineer. Kamanja have developed a solution that involves the most experienced compliance consultants and MSPs in the market. This has resulted in a product designed to help to SMBs.
Connect with Shay on LinkedIn:
https://il.linkedin.com/in/shay-cohen-1749055a
Extra show notes:
Episode transcription
Voiceover:
Fresh every Tuesday for MSPs around the world. Around the world. This is Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast.
Paul Green:
Hello and welcome to a new, hot, fresh, sizzling podcast. Here's what we got coming up for you this week.
Shay Cohen:
How you can take the compliance headaches for MSPs and make a real revenue from it.
Paul Green:
That's Shay Cohen, he is an expert in compliance. Yeah, I know, not the most interesting subject to put in a podcast. However, compliance could potentially be a brand new profit stream for your MSP. We'll explain more later on in the show. We're also looking at work-from-home setups and whether you can use a work-from-home setup to persuade an existing client to buy something new from you or even persuade a brand new client to pick you in the first place.
Voiceover:
Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast.
Paul Green:
I got a strange tale of two books, one, which is the best book I've ever read and another by the same author, yeah, not quite so good. Years ago I read, it was probably one of my first ever marketing psychology books. I've talked about it on this podcast numerous times, it's a book called Influence by Dr. Robert Cialdini, and you have to read this. It was written in 1984. Robert Cialdini, who is a marketing professor, excuse me actually, he's a psychology professor who focuses just on marketing, somewhere in New York I think. He essentially invented the whole field of marketing psychology. He coined the term, social proof. So, go and find that book and read it and absorb it. If you find it a tough read, because it is a little bit technical in places, listen to it on Audible. But there are so many insights that you'll get about how to influence people with your marketing. So, that came out, what? 30 odd, 40 years ago, and when I heard about five years ago that Cialdini had written a brand new book called Pre-Suasion, well, I grabbed myself a hardback copy. I got literally the first edition that came out.
Paul Green:
I hungrily ripped it open from Amazon and I tweeted Robert Cialdini, who didn't reply and said, "I've got Pre-Suasion. It's amazing." And yeah, it's not such a great book, unfortunately. If I'm honest, Pre-Suasion is one idea wrapped up in a very big book, lots of padding. His original book, Influence is many, many, many great ideas, neatly packaged into a tiny and very well written book. I don't like to dismiss books. It's hard to write books, but Pre-Suasion by Robert Cialdini is not a book I recommend you read. In fact, what I'm going to do or attempt to do in the next 60 seconds is to tell you what the book is about and the implications on your MSP's marketing. The very concept of pre-suasion, which is if you like, pre-persuasion. Pre-suasion is where what goes before affects what comes after. Let me give you some examples which I've just made up on the spot, because normally when I talk about a book I reread the book before I come and mention it on the podcast.
Paul Green:
But I cannot bring myself to reread this book, sorry Dr. Cialdini. So, I'm going to make up some examples off the top of my head. So, let's do some from outside of technology. Let's say for example you were going to look at houses, and in fact what I'm about to describe happened to me when I was looking for the very house that I'm living in now. The state agent I went to, said to him, "Look, I want to live in this area, this village. I'm looking for this kind of house. This is my budget from kind of minimum up to, if you get past this, I'm just not going to get a mortgage on it. Can you take me and show me some houses please?" He took me to three houses and he deliberately took me to two of the wrong houses before he brought me to this house, which was very much the right kind of house. I think he was doing that deliberately because I think he knew that what goes before affects what comes after. So, he took me to the first house, it was a little bit pokey, it's got an old Victorian house, there wasn't much parking. It was nice, don't get me wrong, it was nice and it was within budget, but it just didn't feel right and it didn't meet my criteria. So, then we drove to the second house and this was exhausted.
Paul Green:
I mean this house was, it was big, it was huge, it was lovely, it just wasn't a great house. It wasn't the right house. And then he brought me to this house, and this house wasn't perfect but it ticked a lot of the boxes. In fact, it was near the top of our budget. It needed a lot of work doing to it, which is what I'm having actually done right now, but it was amazing and I literally fell in love with this house as I walked in. I was reflecting on this a few months later as all the paperwork was going through, where if he'd taken me to this house first then maybe I wouldn't have been so open to it, so receptive because he almost told me, "Well, I'm going to take you to two houses which I don't think are right for you. Then the final house I think is perfect." What goes before affects what comes after, so he pre-suaded me. He did that by deliberately showing me the wrong choice before he took me to the right choice. Lots of people do this in many, many different ways. How would you do this within an MSP? Well, there's lots of different things that you could do.
Paul Green:
For example, you could pre-suade your prospects by sending them things before they ever meet with you. So, let's say you've got a prospect meeting with someone next week, it's the first time that you're going to meet with them. You could pre-suade them by posting shipping out to them some social proof, as Cialdini talked about in Influence. So, let's say you have a case study done, in fact let's say you've had an amazing case study done. It's one of your clients, they've had an amazing amount of success and you have wrapped that case study up into almost like a booklet. It's there as a printed form and you send that out to your prospect with some candy or with some chocolate or some merch of some kind, mugs, pens, doesn't really matter, whatever. You send it all in a box, we call this an impact box and you send it out to them and you say, "Hey, can't wait to meet you next Thursday. Please, before we sit down and discuss your business, please can you read this case study. Or even better still, here's a link to it on YouTube. Read this case study and go watch one of our clients talking about our business on YouTube."
Paul Green:
This is pre-suasion because you will be the only MSP that does this and the chances of you winning the sale are dramatically higher than your competitors because they are reading, the prospect is reading and watching a happy client. Someone like them are having a great experience with your business. What great pre-suasion. It's almost setting up that yours is the sale to lose, if you understand what I mean by that. You've got to perform quite badly not to win that sale. That's a great example of pre-suasion. You could do exactly the same with your existing clients. If you're doing a strategic review with them, you're going to build them a technology roadmap, then you might do exactly the same thing. You might send them a technology roadmap of another client and say, look, we are going to sit down and we are going to work out your technology priorities for the next two, three to five years. And I'm going to ask you to commit to that roadmap because then I know the work I've got to do, you know what you've got to budget, and actually this is taking a very strategic overview of your business, which they will love.
Paul Green:
You can pre-suade someone, you get them coming into that strategic review thinking immediately, here I am ready to commit to three to five years of technology spend with my MSP, with my IT company. This is amazing. This is exactly what we want. So, the book itself you can skip, it's a big long read with one idea in it, and that is the idea that what we do before affects what comes after. If you want to get more sales and you want better conversions and clients to say yes to you more often, then you've got to put more work in before you are actually going to see them. Case studies, prep like that, all of those kind of things. It really is a worthwhile use of your time.
Voiceover:
Here's this week's clever idea.
Paul Green:
Now, here's another persuasive tool. This isn't quite pre-suasion, this is almost bribing your clients to do something. You see I've had this idea, I think it's a cracker. I'd be interested to see what you think about this. You can let me know by the way, any feedback on this podcast, just email
[email protected]. It's me, you will actually reach the real me at the end and I will reply to every single email that I get, as long as you're not rude to me. So, this idea is to use technology to bribe either an existing client to commit to a new contract or to sign off a big project, or maybe to get a brand new client to choose you in the first place. Bribe probably isn't a good word, there are probably legal ramifications of the word bribe, he says, thinking of the UK's Anti-bribery Act.
Paul Green:
So, let's say persuade, it's something you give, it's a freebie. You give someone a freebie, but the freebie you give them is unique, expensive, and beautiful. And that's what makes this ideally something that's going to make you stand out from all the other MSPs. Now, the idea behind this is that you build them a unique work-from-home setup, because we know right now two odd years, was is it two and a half years on from the start of the pandemic that everyone has some element of work-from-home right now. So, if you've got a decision maker, either an existing client or a brand new prospect and you're trying to persuade them to make a sensible choice and pick you, what you could throw into the mix is you say to them, hey, look, when you make this commitment we are going to come into your house and we're going to set you up with the ultimate work-from-home set up.
Paul Green:
We're going to get a highly professional webcam, we're going to attach it to your desk so it's fixed and all the wires are hidden and it'll look beautiful. There'll be some LED lights on the side, we'll have a professional proper microphone for you. It'll all be set up and it'll be wonderful. It'll be on your desk. Hey, do you have an Alexa? You do? Okay, we'll bring some smart plugs and we'll set them all up as well so that when you say Alexa, you know can say, Alexa, switch on, switch off, whatever it is, and please don't let my own Alexa go off. Are you going to? Well, the blue ring is on. That's a scary thought. Sorry if I've just triggered your Alexa there, but you get the idea. So, you set them up with this amazing work-from-home setup. I mean you could go even further if you wanted to.
Paul Green:
You could get them a stand up, sit down desk. You could get them one of those expensive ergonomic chairs. What was it? The Herman Miller ones. You could really go to town on that and you could actually put a dollar value on that of a couple of thousand dollars. Certainly a decent camera, lights, microphone, all the other bits and bobs that go with that. There's an expense for that, but this is free to them. So, you're setting this up in the boss's home, in the decision makers home as a thank you for them picking you for their business. Now, what's the cash cost to you? Well, it's going to be a little bit less than the retail value, but yes, there will be a cash cost and I would look at that as a marketing investment. Let's say it cost you a $1,00 plus the hell of sending a technician to someone's home.
Paul Green:
I know we don't want to go near homes and I know as well, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, yeah, at some point that work-from-home setup is going to break and we are going to have to go and support that, or maybe even go into that home, and I know that's hell. But if that wins you a new client that's spending a couple of thousand dollars a month and they stay with you for 10 years, is visiting someone's house now and again to fix their broken webcam if you can't do it remotely, is that such a big deal? I didn't think it is. I think that's a great investment in marketing. That's what I would do if I ran an MSP. And the thing is, you can actually probably recoup that actual investment anyway, because you could say once you've set up the work-from-home setup, you could say to the decision maker, would you like us to replicate this in your office for you?
Paul Green:
So, not your home office but your workplace office, literally exactly the same setup. So, you just plug your laptop in wherever you are and it works exactly the same. And of course many, not all, but many decision makers will say, yeah, I quite like that. You charge for that. That becomes a project. In fact, you could even take that a step further, if they have a management team you could say, would you like us to set up this professional video calling work-from-home setup for you and all of your team? So, the one that you get in your house is free Mr. or Mrs. decision maker, to do it in your workplace or to do it for your senior leadership team's homes there's going to be a cost to that. Even if you say to them, look, you just please cover the cost of the equipment and we'll install it at no cost for you.
Paul Green:
Now, the reason I think this is such a good idea is because no one's doing this. If everyone was doing this then it would be routine, it would be boring and it'd be very samey and samey kills sales. But right now I don't know of any or many MSPs that are doing this, and that's the opportunity for you. It doesn't have to be a work-from-home setup, you just got to ask yourself, what could we give to our new clients or our existing clients as a thank you that's relevant to technology that genuinely will make their working life better? I can't think of anything other than a work-from-home setup. Maybe you can, and if you can, go on, do drop me that email because I would love to feature your idea in a future issue of this show. It's
[email protected].
Voiceover:
Paul's blatant plug, blatant plug.
Paul Green:
I've got something brand new for you this week and it's a freebie for you. In fact, you are one of the first MSPs in the entire world to know about this because we have launched a magazine. It's a free magazine, it's called MSP Marketing Magazine. Does what it says on the Tim, and you can get a copy absolutely free. Now, this isn't a magazine that we're going to be doing on a regular basis, it's just like a one-off thing that we are giving away free and you can get it on our website. All you got to do is fill in your contact details, you go into our email database, we will send you a physical copy of this magazine for free. But it is good stuff. It's brand new content which I've written myself. There's case studies in there of other MSPs. You can get marketing ideas from them and we'll ship this out to you completely free of charge. All you need to do is go onto Paulgreensmspmarketing.com, in the navigation click on learning hub and you'll see my little face up at the top offering you a free copy of the MSP Marketing Magazine. Just go on to paulgreensmspmarketing.com.
Voiceover:
The big, big interview.
Shay Cohen:
Hey, my name is Shay, I'm the CEO and the co-founder of Kamanja and I'm an expert in compliance market.
Paul Green:
Thank you very much for joining us. I think you're joining us from Israel today, which I believe you're the first guest we've ever had on, unless I'm wrong I'm pretty sure in three years, nearly three years, you're the first guest we've had from Israel. So, we are going to talk today about compliance and I realize I'm risking thousands of MSPs hitting the stop button on their podcast. But actually we're going to talk about compliance made easy and actually turning it into a revenue stream for your MSP. Before we go on to talk about that, Shay, let's talk about compliance from ordinary business owner's point of view, because you have an accountancy degree, so you probably have a small insight into the world of accountancy. I'm sure you've looked at the law and there are many other regulated industries. For a lot of ordinary business owners and managers out there compliancy is a real headache, isn't it?
Shay Cohen:
Yeah. You're right, 100%. Actually most of the companies when we're speaking with they don't want to hear about compliance and when they have a customer that ask them to do so, they are trying to bypass it in some other ways because there is a lot of things to do, a lot of data to collect, a lot of task that need to be implemented on many, many systems that they have. So, they try to do bypassing, try to find a way how to do things that will not let them doing compliance.
Paul Green:
So, they're looking for shortcuts is essentially what you're saying?
Shay Cohen:
Yeah.
Paul Green:
Because I guess too if you're a lawyer or a CPA, a certified professional accountant or some of the kind of regulated industry that need for, no one wants compliance. No one wakes up in the morning being like, woo hoo, I get to do compliance and paperwork today. But in their worlds they need to be compliant in order to sit within the regulations which allow them to operate business freely. Now that desire for shortcuts on compliancy, that's not just sat with those end users, those end business owners and managers. In your experience do you see that MSPs are also looking for shortcuts when they have to get involved with compliance?
Shay Cohen:
Actually when we spoke with some MSPs, what they do in some way they don't want to do the compliance and they refer it to someone that actually does it. Some consultant security or someone in that profession. In other way when it comes that they need to do it, it will be very expensive for the SMEs or to the end customers because a lot of data and a lot of things to be managed, collect evidence, configure environments, and do a lot of things in order to be compliant. So, when it comes to that the MSP if they're not referred it will be very, very hard for them to comply then if they do so. For the end client it will be very, very expensive and very, very exhausting to collect and do all the task that they required. So, some cases some clients need to be for example SOC 2 and they need to be also in ISO, ISO 27001. So, doing this both compliance and do [inaudible 00:18:27] and all of these task is quite hard for them. And for what we see there is not enough resources in the company to do all the things that are related there for compliance.
Paul Green:
Yeah. No, I imagine. And do you know what? I never thought we'd be talking about ISO standards on this podcast. If I was to make a list of things we must never talk about, that's actually on that list. So, let's come talk about your platform. Obviously you and your colleagues have created something which actually allows the MSP to keep this service in-house. So, this service of helping their clients stay compliant, keep it in-house, but there's not a huge amount of work for the MSP to do, I mean that sounds like exactly what we're looking for. Talk us through how this platform was created in the first place.
Shay Cohen:
Actually we have found first of all that MSPs, it's hard for them to learn new system and adopt new system and platform. When it comes to compliance it's harder, if you want to start to provide the Azure or AWS services you need to do certification that will take you a lot of time to learn and pass some exams, et cetera. So, what we tried to build here it's first of all answer the first problem of the MSPs, don't refer your customers to someone else, make money for it. So, what we did we build a platform that help MSP with wizard, step-by-step wizard, you don't need to learn the standard, do not need to read nothing, just open Kamanja platform, do step-by-step wizard. We giving you everything that you need for help your clients to be compliant. Just three days, two hours a day, you will implement your clients easily.
Shay Cohen:
Now, the second thing it's during the compliance you need, the customer what you need to do is process a lot of system. Same goes with risk management, asset management, questionnaire systems. If they will not buy it, they will use Excels and try to speak with their vendors to answer the question, the questionnaire, a lot of mails and ping pongs. So, what we did in Kamanja, we put all of this solution, enterprise great solution into one platform and evidence collection between all of them. So, what it give to the client and to the MSPs, the MSPs have a multi-tenant SaaS solution. All the time we updated with all the frameworks that are relevant and have a fully cross mapping between all of them. Which means once you do SOC 2 we tell you what left you to do in ISO 27001, you have all the cross mapping. Everything that you need for compliance, you will not need to do something else, just follow step-by-step wizard, you don't need to learn, you don't need to be a certificate, nothing. Just use Kamanja, you have all the tools and your client will be compliance quickly.
Paul Green:
So, let's talk about the difficult thing which is risk. If I think of, often when I'm doing these interviews I picture MSPs that I know well, particularly those who are quite cynical and I can imagine them folding their arms and saying, well it's all very well with Shay coming up with a solution like that. The person I'm picturing at the moment, I can imagine him saying risk, if I take on board helping my clients be compliant, I am therefore taking onboard some level of responsibility for that, as opposed to let's say setting up their 365, which the MSP will know they can do a 100% because that's what they do. Something like compliance which is a distress activity, it's okay, we could do it, we could use a platform like this, but what if we end up being responsible for something that's not done properly? So, how do you manage that level of risk, that risk of it not being done properly?
Shay Cohen:
This is very good questions. Actually what we do in Kamanja we provide to the MSP automatic risk management. What it mean, once you enter the type of the asset that you want to check we providing you all the risk that are related, depends on the stand out this type of asset. For example if you're using of Office 365, we're telling you regarding to this compliance, this is the risk that need to be checking 1, 2, 3, 4. You need to do this mitigations in order to help your client to be compliant with it. And all of this is by the standard requested. What is the more good thing on Kamanja that we do? We provide to the MSPs and also to the client all the options to implement some task. For example, we are not telling you, okay, this is the task, we're telling you actually how to do it and we're giving you between 1 to 20 options how to implement every task by the standard and guide you how to do so.
Shay Cohen:
So, this is actually help them to not doing mistake and taking the responsibilities. By the way, we generate automatically reports, so you don't need to waste time writing reports. You just press one click, you get a risk assessment report automatically. You can provide it to your client and tell them, okay, this is what I did, tell me if this is enough for you, this is by the standard. You get approval of the top management and all those things that they requested by the compliance. And by the end of the day there is an auditor that need to review this, so the auditor give you the last stamp that what you do, you do it well.
Paul Green:
Okay, wonderful. Shay, thank you so much for appearing on the podcast today. We have an understanding now of how your platform works. Just tell us what's the best way to get in touch with you and have a look to see if it's the kind of tool that could create a new revenue stream?
Shay Cohen:
Thank you. You can reach us through our LinkedIn. You can just press Kamanja, write Kamanja on the search box. You can use our website, Kamanja.io. There is a book a demo, and you can immediately reach my calendar and 30 minutes call and we will start to be friends.
Voiceover:
Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast. This week's recommended book.
Mike Andrews:
Hi, this is Mike Andrews, CEO of NovaBACKUP. The book that I recommend is Rework by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson. Jason is the CEO of Basecamp and David is the inventor of Ruby on Rails. They just pretty much simplified entrepreneurship. One of the sayings in there that I like is, "When you stand for something, decisions are obvious." Bootstrapping, growing business, increasing productivity, reducing the over planning of things and getting exposure, that's kind of what it's about, kind of that whole simplifying business and growth. Also, a blog that I'd recommend would be from a company called OpenView Venture Partners. The founder, Scott Maxwell, he's got plenty of success in my industry, but they got a lot of insights into just the SaaS, cloud computing and storage industries to name a few. And they're kind of the experts in what we call product-led growth, which I believe is the future of most technology, and they arguably invented that term. So, they give you a lot of information in these weekly bites to be able to understand that market and grow with it.
Voiceover:
Coming up, coming up next week.
Chuck Canton:
Hello everyone, this is Chuck Canton, the CEO of Sourcepass. Super excited to join Paul's podcast to share our journey that we're embarking on to build a billion dollar MSP and some of the ingredients we're infusing into that mission to accomplish.
Paul Green:
Wherever you listen to this podcast, do subscribe so you never miss an episode, because on top of that interview with Chuck next week we'll be talking about your MSP funding your future lifestyle. In fact, the more it funds your future lifestyle, the more enjoyable your business becomes now. I'll explain that one fully next week. We'll also talk about when clients act like idiots and whether or not you should apply an idiot tax. We've got tons more content for you on YouTube, just go to youtube.com/mspmarketing and join me next Tuesday. Have a very profitable week in your MSP.
Voiceover:
Made in the UK for MSPs around the world. Paul Green's MSP Marketing podcast.
