Episode 171
Welcome to the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This is THE show if you want to grow your MSP. This week's show includes:
-
00:00 How to structure your day to manage your MSP effectively
-
6:02 Growing your client base with LinkedIn Live
-
12:48 How you can retain staff and use data to grow your business
Featured guest:
Thank you to Darren Strong of Scalable MSP for joining me to talk about how MSPs can improve their operational data and hiring practices to build their business.
Darren works with over 60 MSP Business Owners every quarter to help them and their teams to build profitable, scalable companies to achieve more value for their futures.
Darren has also been heavily involved with the ConnectWise Evolve peer group as a facilitator for over 9 years and in that time has seen the highs and lows that MSP owners face.
Connect with Darren on LinkedIn:
https://uk.linkedin.com/in/darren-strong
Extra show notes:
- Listen or watch every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform, hosted by me, Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert:
- Subscribe to the MSP Marketing Action Monthly magazine:
- Remember to check out the creator tools I mentioned, including LinkedIn Live, over on LinkedIn
- Find out about my MSP Marketing Edge service:
- Subscribe to my YouTube channel:
- Subscribe to this podcast using your favourite podcast provider:
- Got a question from the show? Email me directly: [email protected]
- Grab yourself a copy of this week's recommended book, Crossing the Chasm:
Transcription:
Voiceover:
Fresh every Tuesday, for MSPs around the world. This is Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast.
Paul Green:
Oh, hello, it's you. Welcome back to the podcast. Here's what we got in store for you this week.
Darren Strong:
Hi, I'm Darren Strong from scalablemsp.co.uk. We'll be talking about retaining talent and using data in your business to execute on your strategy here and your legacy plan.
Paul Green:
And that interview with Darren is later on in the show, we'll be talking about how you can better retain your staff and also use data to grow your business. We'll also be talking this week about LinkedIn Live; is it a useful tool to get more clients for your MSP?
Voiceover:
Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast.
Paul Green:
Literally just before I recorded this week's podcast, I've just rerecorded some new onboarding videos for my core service, it's called the MSP Marketing Edge. And one of the challenges that I set for our new members in those onboarding videos is to try to find at least 60 minutes, and ideally 90 minutes, every single day to work on their business as opposed to working in their business. What's the difference between the two? Well, working in your business is admin, definitely technical work, you could argue, chatting to your staff about stuff, that's all working in your business. The only real activities working on your business is stuff that gets you brand-new clients, stuff that gets your clients to buy more often from you, and stuff that gets your clients to spend more every single time they buy Those three big activities, those are the definition of working on your business.
Now, many MSPs really struggle to find time every day to work on the business, especially if you're a small business and it's just you and a bit of help. It's certainly the bigger the business, the more resources you have, the easier it is to spend more time working on your business. But everyone, and I truly believe this, everyone can find 60 to 90 minutes a day to work on the business. And typically, certainly in the early years, this has to be done at a time when perhaps other people aren't working. Put another way, some people get ahead in the time that other people waste. Now, I've built two businesses from scratch now, and the very first one, which I started in 2005 and sold in 2016, it was a marketing agency, not in technology, in healthcare. That business was built, in the first probably six or seven years, at 5:00 AM in the morning. Now, I don't do this anymore because I'm too old and because I value my sleep, and also I don't need to do this anymore. I would if I absolutely had to.
But back then I would get up at 5:00 AM every single weekday, I tried not to work weekends, 'cause it's important to have a complete break. But every single weekday I would get up at 5:00 AM and I would work for 90 minutes on the business. So by the time my family was starting to rouse from their deep slumber at 6:30 AM in the morning, I'd done 90 minutes worth of work. Now, to put that in context, I literally got out of bed at 5:00 AM, I microwaved a mug of coffee that I'd prepared the night before, and I was sat at my desk, in my office, in my house, hair everywhere, smelling, in pajamas, don't wear pajamas to bed, but you get the idea. So we're not talking any presentable, not looking all gorgeous as I am right now. We're talking literally stinky breath, fallen out of bed, but I'm on it.
In fact, I was such in the habit for this, I used to fall out of bed at 5:00 AM and instantly, as soon as I woke, my brain was like, "Right, we're doing this and this and this and this. Let's see if we can get that done in 90 minutes." And you know what it's like when you have a deadline, and mine was an immovable deadline, at 6:30 AM people were waking, child was young back then, very young, child would wake up. There is activity, can't focus anymore. So I pretty much built that business in the first 5, 6, 7 years from 5:00 AM to 6:30 AM. And I would go into work, I would get to my office at, let's say, 8:30 AM and my staff bombarding me with daft questions as they do. And it didn't matter because I felt epic, absolutely epic, because I had already done the most important thing. It didn't matter what happened and how my day was completely ripped away from me by clients and by staff and other people, I'd already done the most important thing.
And there were perhaps a handful, in those number of years, a handful of times that I didn't get up at 5:00 AM and work on that business. And we reinvented that business several times. It wasn't a linear thing, that we started it in 2005 and it grew linear, in a linear way, up to 2016. I struggled with that business for a good 5 to 6 years. We didn't get any traction with it, I had to reinvent it a number of times, and then we just found a model that worked, which, as I say, that was a marketing business so I don't need to go into the details of that. The point is the work that was done in the morning. Some people get ahead in the time that others waste.
So my challenge for you is this; if you are desperate to grow the business, I mean truly desperate, you really want it, it's like, "It's got to happen this year." We're already a couple of months into the year or certainly at this point of the year, you've got to do something different. And that means finding time to work on the business, getting more new clients, getting those clients to buy from you more often and getting those clients to choose to spend more every single time they buy. You need 60 to 90 minutes every day. Now, 5:00 AM might be too extreme for you, but what about 6:00 AM? What about 10:00 PM? What about Saturday mornings or Sunday mornings? I mean, an hour a day is better than trying to do a four-hour block on one particular day because it's too easy to lose time on that four-hour block. But actually, something is better than nothing. What's the time that you're wasting? Where's the dead time, and how could you refocus that back in on working on your business and achieving the things you so desperately want to achieve this year?
Voiceover:
Here's this week's clever idea.
Paul Green:
Usually, when I give you a clever idea in this podcast, it's something that either I've tried or a friend of mine has tried somewhere or an MSP has tried. I try not to bring experimental ideas into this podcast. However, I'm going to break my own rule today because I have an idea that I would like someone somewhere to test to see if it's worthwhile. And there's not a lot of risk in this, it's not going to cost you money, it's going to cost you a little bit of time, but it could really make you stand out. And as we have been talking about on the podcast, I think it was the last week we were talking about this, do you remember me saying last week that samey kills sales? You've got to stand out and be different from all the other MSPs. So here's my idea; there is something in LinkedIn called creator mode. Now, this is something that was only introduced, it was either about a year ago or maybe just late in 2021.
But creator mode is where LinkedIn, you essentially turn on a different type of LinkedIn. I've had this going for about 45 weeks or so now. And in creator mode, people can't just connect to you, they can follow you because you are creating content. So for example, you may have heard me talk about LinkedIn newsletters a lot 'cause LinkedIn newsletters are awesome. And LinkedIn newsletter is where you publish a newsletter once a week, say, and you can build up a list of subscribers. And these subscribers are separate to your LinkedIn connections. You can only do that when you're in creator mode. You can Google how to turn on creator mode, it's fairly easy to do. But the whole point of creator mode is you are creating content. One of the other tools, and I'm sure there will be many other tools that LinkedIn are working on and will release down the line, but as well as newsletters, one of the other tools that LinkedIn offers to you is the ability to go live.
So we've seen this before. Facebook has been doing this for, oh my goodness, it must be a decade at least, where you can go live on Facebook. And do you remember when that first came out and everyone was just going live all the time? My first ever Facebook Live was me drunk walking back from a train back to my house, and I was live-streaming going to a kebab shop, which is embarrassing. In fact, I had to delete that video 'cause I didn't realize that when someone connects to you on Facebook for the first time, the first piece of content they see is your most popular content. That was my most popular content, so that wasn't necessarily one I wanted new friends and MSPs I was connecting to to see. Anyway, I digress. On LinkedIn, you can just go live. Literally, you press a button, you go live and you are broadcasting a video. It occurred to me that LinkedIn Live is cool, but what if you use LinkedIn Live to try to achieve what we're doing here? What if you did a live broadcast, kind of like a podcast, on a regular basis?
What if every single, I don't know, Tuesday at 7:00 PM, you went live on LinkedIn just for 15 minutes to talk about how to use technology to make more profit out of your business, or to be more productive? In fact, it could be The Productivity and Profitability Podcast. Try saying that after you've had a few beers, Paul. Wouldn't that be cool? 'Cause remember, ordinary people don't really care about technology per se, they care about what it can do for their business. They care about profitability, productivity, all of that kind of stuff. So doing a formal podcast like this, where you have to record something and edit it and put it on all the platforms and promote it and all of that, don't get me wrong, the rewards are great, we have a huge audience, we get loads of MSPs talking to us and joining our services because of this podcast, and thank you for being a listener or a viewer, depending on which platform you're consuming this on, but it is a lot of work. I do a bit of work and producer James, say hi, James.
James:
Ah, hello, hello.
Paul Green:
Producer James does tons of work on this because he's actually the secret weapon. A quicker way to get going with a regular broadcast is just to do that live on LinkedIn. So challenge there, do you fancy that? Do you fancy giving it a go and seeing if this is the thing for you, if maybe you could be one of the first MSPs to start doing a regular podcast, which, of course, your LinkedIn connections would see as well? I'm just thinking actually, 7:00 PM on a Tuesday wouldn't do it, you want to do it during the workday, so maybe at lunchtime. Lunchtime would be a good time to do it. Could you be the first or one of the first MSPs to start doing a lunchtime, once-a-week live broadcast on LinkedIn? If you do, do it for at least three or four weeks, see what reaction you get. You won't get a lot of reaction, but the goal is to be doing this consistently.
And just drop me an email and let me know, would you? 'Cause I'd like to watch it, see what you're doing, and also, of course, see if it does actually help you start conversations with prospects. That's the whole point of all of our marketing, it's engagement and moving prospects forward, further and further and closer to you becoming a client or then becoming a client of yours. So if you do do this, just drop me an email, would you? It's
[email protected].
Voiceover:
Paul's blatant plug.
Paul Green:
Right, hang on two seconds. The postman's just been and I just want to see what's in today's mail. So okay, we've got a flyer there, a bit of junk mail, that's no good. A bank statement, which banks still send out statements in the post? Well, clearly my bank does. Oh, and this is much more interesting. Look at this, it's the Marketing Action Monthly. This is actually my own newsletter, my own printed newsletter that I send out every month to MSPs all over the world. Let's crack this baby open. Let's see what's inside for this month. Let's have a look. Oh, look at that. That looks good. So inside this issue we've got "Give LinkedIn Newsletters an Hour a Week", I said I talk about those, don't I? "Prepare Your MSP Now for the Shift to MSSP", managed security service provider, and another one, Your Attitude and Not Your Aptitude Determines Your Altitude. Well, those are the headlines. We've got here, what is this? 16 pages. I know exactly how long it is, I write this myself. 16 pages every month, printed and sent to your door.
See, the thing is, if you are serious about improving your marketing, actually getting something in your hands that you can read on the toilet is, well, it's much more likely you'll read it and much more likely that you'll take action on it. In fact, we've even summarized on the back the action points that you should be taking. Go and have a look at this because this could be a game changer for you. This could really get you taking action on your marketing and making this year the year that things start to happen. There's a reason that we call it the MSP Marketing Action Monthly because it's all about getting you to take the necessary actions that really improve your MSP. You can see all the details of this and how to get it shipped to your door, regardless of where you live in the world, at paulgreensmspmarketing.com/action.
Voiceover:
The big interview.
Darren Strong:
Hi, Darren Strong from Scalable MSP. We help MSPs specifically to improve their operational, financial and data that they run the business on.
Paul Green:
And you're exactly the kind of person that all MSPs should be talking to as we get going into this newish year, I say newish, it's now February. I don't think it's a New Year anymore, Paul, when you get to February. Darren, you actually have a pretty good solid background in the MSP world because you own an MSP as well.
Darren Strong:
Correct. Yeah, so we own MSP, which I think is more unique to us. Even though we're a consultancy business, we're still in that world. So that world's moving very fast, especially security, et cetera, nowadays. So we're keeping in touch with that world and I've been in that world for over 20 years now, first of all helping other MSPs, owners to build those businesses, and then in the last three years, running my own.
Paul Green:
So talk us through your background and your history, how do you end up as a consultant to MSPs and the owner of one as well?
Darren Strong:
So started off in corporate IT, so doing corporate internal IT, then I joined a business. So I went from a corporate IT team of about 240 people in IT alone to an MSP that had 6 people, helped that owner to build that business to a maximum of 50 people, £6 million turnover, went through the recession, went through couple of M&As, good and bad, and then joined a peer group. And during that peer group we learned a lot about running the business and getting the best out of those tools. And then I created my own MSP three years ago. And then off the back of that, just born out of demand, lots of MSPs that I knew from the peer group were asking me to help them with their businesses, operational, financial and tools. And so born out of just that demand, we've started to build a consultancy business, and now we've turned that into its own brand and we're driving that forward.
Paul Green:
That's awesome. I love it when MSPs or people who are working in MSPs have that entrepreneurial spark, and they spot an opportunity in the market because this marketplace we're in is so huge. It's exciting when someone sees something and absolutely goes for it. So what do you think are some of the biggest challenges for MSPs as we go throughout this year?
Darren Strong:
So I think the biggest challenge is actually retaining talent, retaining talent and hiring new talent, and what does that look like? And especially I think we're not very good at nurturing our own talent, so we tend to go in, very knee-jerk reaction at the last minute, "I need a Tier 3 person and I need them tomorrow," versus, "Actually, let's bring on an apprentice and let's nurture that and create a nurture system of doing that."
Paul Green:
But, of course, creating a nurture system is a 5 or 10-year investment in a Level 3 tech, isn't it? And if you've got a demand for a Level 3 tech today and you've got more work and too sophisticated work that your Level 2 techs can cope with, that's not going to answer the question, or that's not going to fill the need, as it were. Can you see why MSPs are so tempted to cut corners and just jump into finding the first half-decent person they can find?
Darren Strong:
You're not going to speak to any MSP that says, "Oh, I've got four hours spare today, so I think I'll do some planning." We're all maxed out, we've all got no time, we're all firefighting, customers don't tell us, "Thank you for polishing my shiny server." They're calling us with issues, we're in a negative industry, and so typically those owners as well are from a technical background, so they're not comfortable planning and being in a planning phase of working on their business. And so there's no forecast, there's no financial forecast, there's no hard data within the business for them to use strategically. The MSPs that I see over the last 10 years that have grown intensively but also kept that margin on the bottom line and also grown well-established businesses that start to run on their own are actually people that have really targeted the planning and the sales.
They've turned their MSP into a sales business, not a technical business, and they've got strong planning that helps them to look at resource demands, resource nurturing and training, and those openings within the organization that you can be strategic about rather than being knee-jerk reaction when you need it right now, which is probably six months later than you did actually need it, it's just that you're seeing that maximum pain right now.
Paul Green:
Yes, that makes perfect sense. I love that, where you're talking about an MSP turning their business into a sales business that happens to deliver managed services rather than a managed services business that happens to need to do sales. There's a quite significant and dramatic difference between those two. Right, I'm going to come back onto hiring and retaining talent in a second. You mentioned data a few times, and obviously you're an expert at this, this is what you do. In fact, you don't just consult on it, you live it as well. What are some of the most important data points that an MSP can track and can actually leverage and use to make good decisions about the future?
Darren Strong:
It all stems back to your service catalog. So what are you delivering as a service, which can be a very hard question to answer if you've never done any planning or any documentation. So often I find, when I'm consulting, that actually we don't know or we can't agree on what time the service desk opens, for instance. And so what services are you delivering and what are those pots? So if you've got certain IT pots, certain security pots, certain professional services pots, what is the revenue that those pots bring in, monthly, quarterly and yearly? And then what is the COGS to those revenue? So how much does it cost you to deliver that service, whether that be software tools, hard COGS, fully burdened rate of individuals? Then we've now got the true profitability of that service.
Now we can start to plan, if we pull this lever on this service and we create 25% more revenue in this pot, what does that mean? Just historically, if we bring on an IT customer, it may be that in the first six months we earn 25% of the revenue in professional services because we've got to do onboarding, we've got to do projects, we've got to get their networks to a certain level, we've got to document it, what does that look like across the different services that you provide? Then we can look at what's the financial plan moving forward, that then leads into what resources do we need to provide those services if we are successful? Then we turn that into a sales model and say, "If we need to achieve X amount of lagging indicator," which is a sale, "how much of the leading indicators," like your outgoing calling, your sales resources, your prospect meetings, your opportunity creations, "how many of those do we need to actually hit that financial target?" Now we've got a plan on paper to say how we're going to take the business from A to B.
Paul Green:
But for the average MSP, that's a thousand miles away from the way that they run the business now. Psychologically, what needs to change? What needs to shift for you to get to a position where you're going to go through the pain of putting a plan like that together?
Darren Strong:
What I see is two things. It's either pain levers, pain, you've hit the maximum of your pain threshold as an individual. So you're working the 60, 70 hours, you're not getting anywhere, you're not putting any more to the bottom line, the business isn't growing past, let's say, £1 million or £2 million, whatever those ceilings are, and you're just fatigued. And it can't continue like this for the next 10 years, so that creates a stop. And at that point you start looking around for, "What is the things I need to do?" Or it's because someone's actually talked to you about your legacy plan and saying, "Right, okay, what do you want out of this?" You're telling your wife, your spouse, "I'm doing this for 20 years, I'm doing 60 hours a week, we will create this legacy," i.e., this retirement plan and this net worth, but actually what is that? And so then when you start to track that back, you can see that the business hasn't grown over the last five years, so how am I going to hit that target? So something has to change.
And typically, that's the way that you are leading the business. Typically, it's not because you've not got good people in the business, typically an MSP has got good people, it's all about are they in the right seats and have they got the leadership and mentoring in place so then they can achieve what they need to achieve?
Paul Green:
I think one of the hardest moments for a newish business owner, let's say, someone within their first 3, 4, 5 years is when they realize that it really is all on them. And I don't mean that they have to do it all, but the success or the failure of the business is 100% down to them and their attitude and the way they think, and more importantly, the way that they act. Let's talk about the talent then, Darren. So we started right at the beginning talking about retention and how you should be keeping people and nurturing them and training them. For those MSPs that do need an urgent recruitment fix, they need to fill a hole today, talk us through some of the practical things that they can do, and then we'll come onto that long-term nurturing.
Darren Strong:
I think, first of all, it starts off with what do you actually need? I see a lot of MSPs' knee-jerk reaction that they want a Tier 3, they get just an advert out there, but there's no setup for success. So what is the job description/role profile? What does good look like? What sort of KPIs are they going to be held accountable to? What type of person does that need to be? What experience do they need to have? There's no structure around what does that actually need to look like because you're knee-jerk reacting that I need that resource and I need it now, and I'm going to basically employ the first person I meet on an interview. So I think it starts with what do you actually need? And actually, do you need a Tier 3 person?
It may be that actually you've got Tier 1, 2 and 3 structure, but if you did an analysis, like I did on a customer a couple of months ago, you'll find out that actually your Tier 3 engineers are doing a lot of Tier 2 and a little bit of Tier 2, and your Tier 2 engineers are doing a lot of Tier 1.So actually, if you hire two or three Tier 1s instead of a Tier 3, you could fix the problem. So is that actually the problem that you need a Tier 3 engineer, or is it just because the team say, "We're really busy and we need a Tier 3 engineer"? So I think it goes back to the data, then set them up for success and then use some avenues, for instance, LinkedIn is a great one, and also there's some avenues that you can create on some platforms that allow you to look at the area that you are in. And are any of those MSPs, are any of those employees putting their CVs up online, for instance?
So Indeed is a good one, they do one where you can subscribe to it, it will notify you if there's a certain category of individuals putting their CVs up. Obviously you then can reach out to them and offer them a coffee, and go and speak to them, see what they're like. And then I think then it also leads on to a great onboarding. Again, I see so many people, it's a knee-jerk reaction, you're six months behind the curve, you need them now, so their first day, they're put in front of the wheel and they're expected to drive the car just because they've got IT experience. So what does that onboarding look like? Don't set them up for failure, don't put them in front of a customer that they're going to go wrong, the customer doesn't forget. Then they're banned from working on that customer forevermore, and that's just a spiral that happens. So I think that onboarding is a key function. It should take roughly three months.
And during that, they should shadow individuals, they should shadow other team members in other departments to learn how your business functions and how they can have an impact, good or bad, on those departments. If they don't fill out a chargeable ticket correctly, how does that impact finance? How does that impact invoicing runs? If they get to learn that, they can then change their behavior because of that, and then slowly introduce those items that you want them to be successful with 'cause you've already got the role profile, you've already got the KPIs. And I can't remember the book now, but a real good methodology that I use is painting what does good look like. So giving them live dashboards or reporting on a regular frequency, which means they can finish the day or finish the week knowing, "I've been successful."
There's a lot of data around an individual needs to feel successful. That isn't just that they got a paycheck or they got a pay rise of X, it's because they feel successful in the business and they know they're doing a good job. So you've got to enable them to be able to see that. And maybe even compare them against their peers. If you're going to give them a KPI, what are other people in their team achieving as an average? So then you can work with them to get to that average, rather than it just being your gut feel that they need to do more tickets.
Paul Green:
I love that. Absolutely love that. And in fact, when you were talking about taking on someone with IT experience, and on day one, just dumping them on your clients because they know IT, I was thinking a good analogy for that is commercial airline pilots. So as a commercial airline pilot, you can fly a Boeing 747 from London to New York, but if you move on to a different kind of aircraft, let's say a Boeing 777, then you have to spend hundreds of hours transferring over. So the principles of flying the plane are exactly the same, but the actual setup of the plane is different. And it occurred to me that that's actually a good analogy. In fact, you can steal that analogy, Darren, if you want to, that's yours.
Darren Strong:
That's great.
Paul Green:
You can pop that one in your tool set. Yeah, and no one airline would expect a pilot to transfer to a different aircraft without a dramatic amount of onboarding. And yet, as MSPs, that's what a lot of MSPs do. Okay, final question and subject then, let's come back to those Level 1 techs that you were talking about earlier. And one of the things you said right at the start was, let's hire Level 1 people that we know can stay with us for a number of years, and can perform better and be upgraded and be promoted to being Level 2 and maybe even Level 3. What do you look for when you're looking for someone like that? 'Cause you're not just looking for someone to clear tickets, you're looking for someone who's obviously got the right mindset, got the right attitude and really wants it, but also will stick with you. I think that's got to be the critical thing.
And that's hard because these days, different generations are used to flipping from, I don't know how old you are, Darren, but certainly I'm 48, and when I started my career, I was expecting to have three or four employers. And it worked out that it was probably a roundabout right actually, but then I started my own business so everything changed. I think kids entering the workforce today are probably going into it expecting to have three or four employers in the first few years because they will flip from thing to thing to thing, or from employer to employer, where they think they can get a boost. So what kind of people are we looking for right at the beginning, that can go on and become our future superstars?
Darren Strong:
So I think that goes back to the what's the culture of the business? What's the values of the business? And how do you provide your service? What makes you different? And definitely the ability of communication, unbelievable is the telephone. This era that we're looking at don't want to talk on the telephone and can't talk on the telephone, so that's the first thing you've got to teach them, what's their telephone behavior going to look like? So I think you need to make sure that they're going to fit the culture, they've got the values, they have a spark about IT, they've got a passion to grow and move forward, and maybe even an openness to ask. They're inquisitive, they want to ask, but they're not scared. So they want to ask, every little step of the way they want to know more. So they're inquisitive. And then you've got to set them up for success. So you've got to make sure that your ticketing system, whether it to be built in to your ticketing system as task lists, or whether it be external processes.
So many times we put an apprentice or a Tier 1 engineer on the frontline and we don't get anything out of them for six months, they don't match our expectations or match our requirement of what it costs us to employ them. So then we remove them from the business. It's not their fault that we haven't set them up for success. We've made it where it's too complicated to read our documentation, there's no technical documentation, they don't know where passwords are, they don't know how to do certain things. So really structure your ticketing system so they can categorize a ticket and get a process. So every time they categorize a ticket, they get a process. They follow that process, they might have some automation on scripts that they run. They don't know what those scripts do, they just know what the output says. Then they might recategorize the ticket.
And what you're looking for is that first 15 to 30 minutes that, A&E triage. You walk into A&E, you go to a nurse, they triage you and they move you onto x-ray, to a doctor, et cetera. That's what you're looking for, that first initial reaction when you're looking for 75 to 80% of your tickets being closed in that first 30 minutes. But the customer feels that they know what they're talking about, but we know their following some structure behind that. It's not a rigid structure, so they don't become a robot, but they're following a step-by-step structure that is questions that aren't yes or no answers. So they can't passively read it, they've got to read it and give you an answer. If it's a server disk space, rather than it just being, "Is it low, yes or no?" "Actually, is it low, and what is the current disk space?" That then means when they escalate it, the Tier 2 engineer gets more details about it was at this size on this time, now it's this size, how much is it consuming, for instance, if it does have to be escalated.
So I think setting those Tier 1 people up for success, and I think also painting what the pathway's going to look like. Often, if you don't paint that pathway, you will lose them to somebody else that may be offering them a £1,000 a year more. They didn't realize that you weren't going to give them the £1,000 more, but it was going to be in three months time when they equaled X. So plotting that pathway out alongside certification, experience, KPIs, CSAT, et cetera, so they know what that next two to three years could look like if they want to be successful and what pace that could go at.
Paul Green:
Darren, you've been an absolute star, sharing what you have spent many, many years learning the hard way. Please tell us again the benefits of working with you and how can we get in touch with you?
Darren Strong:
So you can reach us on scalablemsp.co.uk. We're all about looking at the core of the systems, the process, the strategy, and enabling the business to grow, but doing that using data. So we bring the best practices, but we're not just bringing one box, we bring multiple boxes, tailor that to your environment. And the biggest USP we've got is that we do the heavy lifting. So rather than you having to reconfigure your systems or build processes, we build those tailored processes and systems for you and help you to engage with them inside your business.
Voiceover:
Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast. This week's recommended book.
Per Sjofors:
Hi there, my name is Per Sjofors and I'm also known as The Price Whisperer. The book I recommend is Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore. It's an old book, but I read it every couple of years. And it's all about how you elevate your company from being a company selling to early adopters, to being a company selling to an early mainstream market. And that gap, that chasm, is where most companies fail. And the book tells you how not to. You read it, you love it.
Paul Green:
Coming up next week.
Marc Gordon:
Hi, I'm Marc Gordon, the Customer Experience Expert. Look for my interview coming up, where I'm going to be sharing with you ways that you can create better, more efficient, more effective customer experiences to keep your customers coming back.
Paul Green:
Whichever platform you are watching or listening to this podcast on right now, please do subscribe so you never miss an episode, 'cause on top of that interview, we're also going to be looking at recruitment. And I've got a very specific and very clever recruitment tool that you can use to dramatically lower the amount of time and energy you have to spend trying to recruit great people for your MSP. We have more great advice and content to help you grow your business on our YouTube channel, it's youtube.com/mspmarketing, or just search for MSP Marketing in the search bar. 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.
