Episode 173
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:
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00:00 Why paying your (small) suppliers faster makes business sense
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07:09 The Six Steps from 'suspect' to 'loyal customer'
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18:01 How this MSP uses AI in real life
Featured guest:
Thank you to Trenton Schuttler of Net Guardians for joining me to talk about how his use of generative AI has transformed his MSP.
A self-confessed tech nerd, Trenton worked in a variety of industries including Medical, Dental, Legal, Production, Manufacturing, even large scale bakery automation, before founding Net Guardians to help people, businesses, organisations, leaders and teams across the world, overcome their challenges and find new innovating ways to integrate the latest technology to help them Grow, Scale, and Succeed like never before.
Connect with Trenton on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/trenton-schuttler/
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:
- Trenton and I discussed Chat GPT-3 and Jasper, I'd definitely recommend checking those out
- 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, Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable:
Transcription:
voiceover:
Fresh every Tuesday, for MSPs around the world, this is Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast.
Paul Green:
Hello and welcome to episode 173 of the show. Here's what we've got coming up for you this week.
Trenton Schuttler:
Hey, my name is Trenton Schuttler. I use generative AI with my team every day. It lets us truly unlock the power to transform my MSP, and on this upcoming podcast, how you can use it to really unleash the power within.
Paul Green:
And as well as that interview later on in the show talking about AI, we are talking about the six stages that clients go through from where they're a suspect with their arms folded and they don't know you, all the way through to being a very, very happy bonded client. How do you move them faster through that process? We'll talk about it later on in the show.
voiceover:
Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast.
Paul Green:
What I'm about to say in the next few minutes, you might think I've lost the plot. You might think I've gone completely insane in the membrane. But no, I haven't at all. I'm going to suggest that you pay some of your suppliers faster, that if they offer you 30 days, you pay them in three days.
Now that may go against every piece of business advice that you've ever been given. However, I have a good reason for saying this, and I could have put some context on first. You should only do what I'm about to suggest if cash is not an issue for you. So if you've got plenty of monthly recurring revenue, and in fact, your costs are covered on the first of every month by your MRR that's coming in, this is for you. Whereas if you're still at a stage where cash is a bit of a struggle, and you do have some difficult months and particularly months where you perhaps don't guarantee, you can't guarantee, that you personally are going to be paid, then this isn't quite for you yet.
But why would I suggest that you pay suppliers faster? Well, let me first of all define which suppliers you pay it faster. We all have big suppliers and little suppliers. So big suppliers are those massive companies that the super companies that all MSPs have to deal with in some way. Whether they're happy about it or not, I don't necessarily think you should pay them any faster. So if they offer you 30-day terms, you should pay them on 30 days. In fact, that helps them with their cash flow forecasting. I'm sure it does. You should, as a matter of default, always be asking your big vendor partners for better payment terms. If you buy two or three products from the same partner, and if you can get hold of this week's account manager, you can say to them, "Hey, I'm on 30 days. How could we push me back to a 50-day payment terms?" I truly believe, the big companies, your job is to slow down the cash. Always pay them on time, of course. You should always pay your bills on time, but you should slow down that cash.
No, the suppliers that I'm talking about that you should pay faster are your smaller suppliers. For example, let's say your landlord. Let's say you rent some premises and your landlord isn't some faceless corporation. It's a guy or it's a woman who lives down the street who pops in now and again, you should pay them perhaps a little bit faster than you would pay everyone else. Maybe you'd pay them early. Maybe you've got other local suppliers. Maybe there are other local businesses that you do business with. I think, when you're dealing with smaller businesses, you should always pay as fast as you can.
Well, it's a kind of a reputation for me, but I've had a reputation for a number of years, both in this business and the previous business, for, if you put in an invoice today, I'll pay that today or tomorrow, regardless of the date that's on it. And as I say, I don't do this with the big companies. They get paid on the day that it's due. But anyone else, so anyone who works with me in any capacity, any capacity at all, who is it's a person or it's a small business or I know them, I will always pay them faster.
Now, you could say, "Paul, that's crazy. Surely, the cash is better in your bank than it is in their bank." And that's the case with the bigger businesses. Yes, the faceless businesses where an accounts clerk is the only one who notices that you've paid. When it's a small business, when for them potentially, every penny is important, I think the reputation that you build up by being a fast reliable payer can go such a long way. In fact, you can build lifelong partnerships and genuine partnerships. We throw around these word partnerships in the channel like it's an easy thing. It's not at all. A partnership comes from trust, and trust comes from action. You build trust or you lose trust based on your actions.
I'll give you an example of when this was incredibly useful for me. So about two years before I sold my last business, so this is around about 2014, but I mean, that's nine years ago, we had a massive cash flow crunch. We had a couple of months where, I can't remember what it was. I think we'd over recruited and sales dipped. I saw it coming and it was horrendous. Ah, this was just after I couldn't pay my stuff. That's right. You may have heard this story before. I was at a Christmas party.
In fact, I was in the Premier Inn hotel room where all my staff were out drinking, having beers, texting me, saying, "Where are you? We're having fun." And I was desperately trying to scrape together enough money to pay them the next day. And that was kind of the start of this. And we just didn't have enough money to get through the next month. We actually sold our way out of that crisis. By that, I mean, we just buckled down and sold and sold and sold and sold. But for three months, I needed to do everything I could to stop cash going out.
And that was where I could ring people like Steve, my designer, and... I forget the names of the other people, but there were lots of regular folk who did stuff for us. And I rang them all and said, "Hey, you know how I always pay your invoice the day that it comes in. I'm going to be honest with you, cash is really tight right now. How would you feel if I took 60 or 90 days to pay your invoices? I will pay them. I will prioritize paying you above anyone else. But how would you feel about giving me temporarily 60, 90 days to do that?" And every single one of them said, "Absolutely. Of course, we can." And of course, I paid them as soon as I could. In fact, I was able to pay them earlier than I thought I would be and we got back onto track. And of course, as soon as I could, I put them straight back onto immediate payments.
Now why would they all do that to me? I mean, maybe you could argue partly that was them protecting their business and protecting a key client of theirs. Or maybe it was just the fact we'd built up trust, because for years, I'd paid their bills the day that they had put the invoice in. So it's maybe just worth something having a look at. If you've got a finance person in your business, or if you pay the bills yourself, maybe you could categorize them by big evil faceless corporations where no one cares if I pay early, so let's ask for longer terms, versus lovely, friendly, smaller business, it makes a big difference to someone if I pay my bills on time. In fact, maybe it gives us not just that partnership, but it gives us some kind of leverage. Maybe we become a more important client to them because they can trust us to pay on time every single month.
voiceover:
Here's this week's clever idea.
Paul Green:
You might not have realized this, but when someone goes from a Google search to being a client of yours for the 10th year running, there are actually six distinct stages that they go through along the way. And I'm going to tell you what those six stages are today. Now this is very much a simplification of a sales funnel. Sales funnels are actually deeply complex. There's actually tremendously more stages than six. There's all sorts of nuances and things in there, but my job, I believe, is to simplify all concepts down, all marketing and sales concepts down, so they're easy for you to understand, and so you know what action you need to take at what stage. So let's talk about what I believe are the six stages that people go through.
The first stage is where they are a suspect. So this is the point where, let's say they're a business owner or a manager and they are looking for a new MSP. They've reached that point where their dissatisfaction with their incumbent MSP is high enough that they're willing to go through the high level of pain to switch to someone else, because of course, these people, they don't know what they don't know, and therefore, they didn't really understand technology, the difference between MSPs, and they are more likely to stick with, well, better the devil you know. But there does come a point where the pain of staying is so high, in fact it's higher than the pain of actually moving. And that's the point they start Googling. It's the point they start asking their friends, "Who do you use for your IT support?" And just generally being aware of who is around them.
At this stage, we call them a suspect. They've got their arms folded. They're deliberately scowling when they're Googling because they don't trust anyone because they don't know anyone. Like I was just saying about paying people faster, trust builds up over time. You cannot force someone to trust you quickly. In fact, this is one of the downsides of marketing. You're asking them to trust you with one of the few things in their business that can destroy their business if it goes wrong, which is their IT. If you think about it, why does anyone ever hire an MSP? They're trusting people they don't know with one of their most critical functions.
It's kind of crazy, isn't it? This is why social proof, like case studies, testimonials, reviews, are so important. This is why the way you present yourself is so important. This is why never ever talking tech with them. Don't talk technical, talk business with them. Talk about productivity and keeping staff happy and sleeping at night and being safe and all of that stuff. That's what turns them on. What doesn't turn them on is technical stuff. Anyway, I digress. So they are suspects. They don't trust anyone, but they are ready to go and start talking to people.
Now, your goal is to take them from being a suspect to the next stage, stage two, which is them being a lead. So a lead is where you know who they are, as in they've joined one of your audiences in some ways. So someone connecting to you on LinkedIn is a lead. Someone who joins your email database, your email newsletter, is a lead. Someone who is connected to you in any other audience, perhaps you've met them at a networking meeting and you've shaken their hands, and you kind of gently rubbed it on your trouser leg afterwards, and you've taken the business card from them, they are a lead in some way. So you could and should have hundreds if not thousands of leads.
In fact, one of the goals for you, because marketing is a numbers game, because you're basically waiting for the timing to be right, you can't force the timing to be any faster. So the bigger the numbers, the luckier you get on timing. One of the goals for you as an MSP owner is to get as many leads as you can into the business. And lead generation is a lot simpler than MSPs believe it to be because it is about multiple audiences. It's about building up your LinkedIn connections, building up your email list, building up your YouTube subscribers if you do YouTube, building up your Twitter followers if you're crazy enough to do Twitter right now, possibly the most unstable social platform to be on right now, but you get the idea. So build up multiple audiences and those are the leads.
From there, we go into stage three. And stage three is where they go from being a lead to being a prospect. Now, what's the difference between a prospect and a lead? A lead, as we say, is just someone who's in one of your audiences, but you wouldn't necessarily know much about that person. You certainly wouldn't be having routinely a two-way in-depth engaged conversation with them. You might comment on their posts on LinkedIn or vice versa sometimes, but that doesn't make them a prospect. They're a prospect at the point that in some way they've put their hand up and they're saying to you, even if they don't use these words, "I would like to talk to you about us doing business, please." Now they may do this by filling in a web form. It might be because you've phoned them and they've responded or they've booked a video call with you, or maybe you just got chatting at a networking meeting. There are dozens of different ways that someone becomes a prospect, but the prospect is where you actually start.
Well, it's kind of like where you get interested in them. It's like, yeah, you are having a conversation with them and you are interested because you're thinking, "Right, could I do business with these people? Is this the right kind of business for me?" So that's the point they become a prospect. Essentially, that's the real start of sales, isn't it? Everything that's gone before is marketing. So taking people from being a suspect to being a lead... Well, up to that point really, that's marketing. And that in itself is a big job, and this is where sales kicks in if you wanted to differentiate between the two.
Now the prospect, next we need to move them onto stage four. Stage four is where they become an opportunity. So not every prospect becomes an opportunity. What's an opportunity? It's something where you're willing to do business with that person. So you may have someone phone up, and theoretically, that's a prospect and you ask them questions about their business. It turns out, there's two of them in the business. They use Windows XP machines and they've got a broken iPad they want to get the screen repaired. That's not a business, is it? That's certainly not a business you would want to support. You would want to look after, I'm guessing. Maybe you have a minimum user number or a minimum tech level, or you want them to have a certain mindset towards the way they invest into their IT. And anyone using Windows 7 or XP or any of all of that, they're telling you that they don't have the right mindset towards investing. Or it's a big opportunity to upgrade them.
Anyway, the point is, you mentally do this whenever you talk to a prospect. You mentally run through and say to yourself, "Is this a good prospect for me? Is this actually an opportunity?" And don't be afraid to turn away work if it's not an opportunity. In fact, you may have a referral partner. There might be kind of like a break fix shop or some other MSP, maybe a one-man band in town that you can refer this kind of work onto. Why let that person go back out into the world of Google when you can actually say, "Hey, look, we can't help you here because we deal with minimum five staff, 10 staff," I hate the word user, "five staff businesses. But look, my friend David runs a computer supports and repair service. He's just down the road. Would you like me to give you his number? Would you like me to give him your number?" And you don't have to pay each other for those referrals because David can refer stuff that's too big for him up to you. Something like that can be a very clever thing.
So where are we? So far, we've taken them from being suspect, to being a lead, to being a prospect, to being an opportunity. We know what happens then. You do a sales meeting. They love you. You love them. You get married, and they become a client. And that's stage five, them becoming a client. But that's not the final stage. You see, the final stage, and this goes, we're now out of sales and we're into long-term retention. I guess, if you were to do the three phases of this, you've got marketing, you've got sales, and you've got long-term retention. We're in that final phase now, and it's to turn them into a bonded client.
A bonded client is where you and they have literally... I know I joked about you being married to them when they buy. That's not really marriage. That's kind of more a... It's not a one night stand. It's an affair. It's a steamy affair. Even that sounds wrong as well. Someone come up with something better for that. But you get the idea. The long term... Okay. When you get married to someone, you expect it or you hope it's going to last forever, but you know there's always an opportunity. That's the wrong word. There's always the possibility it may not last forever. I guess that's the same when someone becomes your client. So let's say getting married, bonded is where you're going to celebrate your silver wedding anniversary together, because a bonded client will not leave you unless you die, they die, their business goes bust, your business goes bust, or they get bought or Armageddon happens. Their idea of hell is leaving you. That's what bonded is.
Bonded comes from a number of different things. First of all, it's dictated by what happens in the first 90 days. So your first three months with a client, that dictates what happens to them long term. The second thing is, it's dictated by the relationships that they build with you. That doesn't have to be with you personally, but their business and your business. The relationship building is such an important part. And that's certainly in the first 90 days, but ongoing from there as well. And then thirdly, there's shifting you from just being a supplier to being a strategic advisor to them. I'm a big fan of strategic reviews, QBRs, quarterly business reviews. Sometimes quarterly is way over the top, way too often for most clients. So strategic reviews and also putting together technology roadmaps where you literally work on a document together of what their technology is going to be, what they're going to do, what they're going to invest in in the years ahead, and that's where you move them into a sixth stage, being a bonded client, but only when you can move into a strategic role.
Here's a question for you. Which of these are you good at within your MSP? Which of these work for you? Which of these need work? Most MSPs are pretty good at the sales phase, but they're rubbish at the lead generation phase, and they don't systemize that long-term retention. They kind of just go with it and hope that the clients will bond with them over the years. Just because someone stayed with you for 15 years, and they were your first ever client, doesn't mean they're bonded with you. It could just be that they're quite comfortable with you. In the same way that there are many husbands and wives who stay together because they're quite comfortable sitting on the couch, watching TV, eating crisps together or chips together, it doesn't necessarily mean that they're going to make it to that 25 years. What are you doing systematically to encourage that kind of bonded client within your MSP?
voiceover:
Paul's blatant plug.
Paul Green:
Let me make this super simple for you. If you want to generate new revenue, and you want more new clients, and you want to be the number one MSP in your area, go to mspmarketingedge.com.
voiceover:
The big interview.
Trenton Schuttler:
Hi. My name's Trenton Schuttler. I'm an MSP owner, and I am passionate about AI and cutting edge generative technology. I use it all the time.
Paul Green:
And thank you so much, Trenton, for giving up some of your time to come and join us on this show. You and I got chatting a couple of weeks ago about AI and how AI can be used in marketing, and how it can be used in other parts of the business as well. And of course, AI seems to have just gone crazy since... I think it was around the middle of December last year when ChatGPT-3, I think it is, ChatGPT suddenly became a big thing. And suddenly, you could have a normal conversation with a chat bot that seemed to reply in a very, very normal way. And I'm sure, many MSPs have looked at this, and also, I'm sure there are other MSPs that haven't looked at it. I know, for you, this isn't the first time that AI has been a big thing, that you've been using Jasper, which is a more commercially available chat bot. I know you've been using that for some time.
Do you want to just give us an overview of your MSP, what kind of resources you have, and how you got into starting to use AI in the last year or so, or whenever it was?
Trenton Schuttler:
At Net Guardians, we try to focus on leveraging the latest cutting edge models and tools coming out. Deep learning and machine models have always been something of a keen interest to me. So as they started emerging, I began looking for ways to incorporate it into our existing stack, given that we already had so many different components of AI all throughout it. Given your security solutions for email, IRONSCALES and Avanan, leveraging AI models to detect natural language processing to highlight phishing attempts, over to SentinelOne, utilizing its AI behavioral analysis to track potential threats on an endpoint. So we already had a lot of AI components, and those are just some of the more popular tools that we use that habit.
When the models began maturing, it drew my attention to be sure, but at first, it was hard to really find a way to quickly and easily leverage it. One of the issues I always found were the prompts. Crafting the prompts and figuring out how to interact with it, it wasn't very easy. Powerful, mind you, but certainly not easy. As I embarked on discovering more about this platform and these tools, it wasn't clear at first how it could be incorporated, because there's a lot of different APIs out there, a lot of different variants and flavors. And depending on what you're trying to do with it, whether you're generating text content or maybe creating the perfect image for a blog post, you might use a different tool and they're not all made the same. I find that, much like many of the tools that we use as MSPs, while the given AI model might be capable of multitasking or multipurpose tasks, it probably isn't well suited to it.
A great example being coding, writing code. ChatGPT absolutely can write PowerShell scripts, not necessarily really advanced or complex ones, but it certainly can generate them, will get you started. Jasper can't code. So for me, if I'm looking at the two models from a text generation standpoint, I see both being used by two different halfs of my team, marketing and content creation, service customer success. They can all benefit from leveraging these language models to generate impactful, compelling language to use in your PSA tools, your CRMs, your sales pipelines, quoting tools, you name it. It's able to really, really write in a way that you want it to, that you need it to.
And I don't just mean generating the content you need it to. I mean, chatting with it and giving it feedback as it's working on the content you need it to create. It's like having that superpowered assistant that we've always dreamt of, working for you, live, right before your eyes, generating content. "No, change this. I like that part. Take this and incorporate elements of humor. Okay, that looks great. Now rewrite the whole thing." That's just a little snippet of some of the more casual, quick interactions that I've had. This stuff is truly amazing.
Paul Green:
Do you have your team, all of your team actively using it? Was that a difficult sell for you, or was it a case of it just took, let's say one technician to suddenly find that basic PowerShell scripts were really easy and suddenly all of your technicians wants to use the tools?
Trenton Schuttler:
There was absolutely some slow starters, dragging their feet. Maybe thought it was a little gimmicky at first would be my guess. But as of today, I believe, everyone on my team now has their logins and have started at least experimenting with some of the tools. There were definitely a few holdouts. I've pretty much been feeling like I'm beating a dead horse though, mentioning it all the time, everywhere. I've even used it to write a really short motivational speech to give to my team one morning during our team morning check in.
And I got to say, Paul, the looks on all their faces when I was done was incredible. That was one of the most productive weeks I can remember.
Paul Green:
No, I bet. Did you tell them that you generated it using AI?
Trenton Schuttler:
Well, I guess I just did, since they're probably going to listen to the podcast.
Paul Green:
Busted. You're completely busted now. So, Trenton, you've been thinking about the uses of AI within an MSP for some time. What are some of the risks that you have identified?
Trenton Schuttler:
This is actually something my team and I were talking about just this morning. These tools are immensely powerful and capable of great things, but as they say, with great power comes great responsibility. Not to get too corny here, but it's so true. These tools could be leveraged in really unsavory ways. I remember reading a post not too long ago from a security researcher, claiming to have utilized ChatGPT, and through some trial and error and determination, were able to bypass some of the filters to get it to craft a polymorphic malware family that is capable of pretty much blowing by any modern protection platform. And that kind of thing is terrifying. And that's just from the security side of it.
There's also all kinds of implications around privacy and data and data governance. What is okay to feed into these tools? What is okay information to feed into a ChatGPT algorithm? Even if it's helping you be more effective, we need to be careful. We need to be selective. And that's something that we're talking about constantly. I don't think that there's any one proverbial silver bullet to that question, if I had to say honestly, and I think a lot of that is because so much of this is still coming into focus. We don't know what it's going to look like when GPT-4 gets released.
And the developers and designers behind these platforms are certainly making every effort to try and build safe platforms. But we as experts and professionals using them have to be mindful of what we feed into it, because there's so much risk with these platforms and these tools. If you give it the wrong information, suddenly, your client's info could be out there on the web through some other chatter's conversation. I don't know how much input builds into the models because it's not like I have visibility inside these companies, but it's certainly something that concerns me.
Paul Green:
And your clients, because this would give us quite an insight into how ordinary business owners and managers think about AI, are they even aware of ChatGPT? Have they realized how advanced, relatively advanced, the AI models have become in the last couple of years? Because I was chatting about it at the weekend. In fact, as part of my prep for this interview, I was chatting about it with a business-owning friend I was socializing with. And I said, "Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, ChatGPT," and he went, "Chat what?" And I said, "How can you have not heard of ChatGPT?"
Trenton Schuttler:
Oh my gosh.
Paul Green:
This is just an ordinary business owner. He doesn't operate in our world. It is literally passed him by. And he's sort of my age, little bit of gray hair but not too much. And I was horrified at just how little awareness he had of that. So your clients, are they aware of it? Are they talking to you about it? Are they wary of it? Or similarly, is it just sort of passing them by at the moment?
Trenton Schuttler:
I think we have a bit of a split camp in that. Clients that I've been actively working with for projects or engagements, quoting, absolutely are aware of it. I mean, just think about how our conversation went. Now put yourself in the shoes of one of my clients that's actually talking to me in person all the time, there's no way they were getting away without hearing about it. Even on sales meetings, initial assessment meetings, I've brought it up and talked about it. And I do that because the world changed back in December. When ChatGPT released, everything really changed. A lot of folks might disagree with that and say that we're still a long way off from a lot of the monumental improvements and differences in how we live and work. But these tools, these systems, they're here to stay, and they're only going to get better. Tomorrow isn't tomorrow anymore. It's today. It's now.
I pretty much advocate about it, pontificate, talk about it, bring it up anytime I can. I'm going to be meeting with one client of ours that's a marketing firm for small businesses in the area here, because I have a feeling, once they know about Jasper, they're going to fall in love. The beautiful thing about a tool like Jasper, for an organization like this one that I mentioned, the client, with the right application and the right approach, it's not some scary thing that's coming for everybody's jobs. It's a tool. It's going to enhance and elevate those teams and their ability to produce and to service their clients. It comes right back to that whole business process improvement, right? Understand our client's business, make the right recommendations, show them and introduce them tools that can truly help them to achieve that greatness they've always dreamed of, freeing them from the shackles of technology. It's a really, really awesome thing and I'm really excited to share it any chance I get.
Paul Green:
It's funny. You're talking about it being used by a marketing company. And you say about it not coming for people's jobs. Actually, I think there are some low level jobs which potentially will be replaced by let's say, take Jasper. So I've played with Jasper since our conversation and it's good. It's really good. I mean ChatGPT is good. Jasper is, as you said to me, is the next level on. And if you look at someone who's selling basic writing on Fiverr or Upwork, I would argue that, if you know the subject that you want to be written about, and you know the style in which you want it to be written, and you have the ability to edit and to curate content, there is less work for you to give to external writers, low level writers. I think there's absolutely a place for experienced writers who have spent 20 years crafting words because they simply can output better content.
And I think the ability to use a tool like Jasper, as you were saying right at the beginning to, "Take a bit of this. Rewrite that. Can you make that more friendly? Can you make that harder? Can you put that into bullet points?" And it's just there instantly is exciting. What if, and it is very much a what if, because I don't think anyone outside of a particular building in San Francisco knows, but what if Google develops the ability to detect AI-detected text? Now if that's the case, and let's say you... I don't know if you've done this with your website, but let's say, on an MSP's website, you've got 200 blog articles, and they were all generated by AI. And perhaps you haven't done any human editing. So it's pure AI text. The question is, could Google, maybe not yet, but in the near future, could it detect that? And if it does detect that, could Google decide that, "Hey, that's like link farms. That's not right. We want good long form content written by humans, not short form content written by AI."?
Trenton Schuttler:
One of the dynamics we're likely to see as a result of exactly that happening is almost a shift or a new category of content that is human generated. So as we shift and move more towards these times where video, imagery, text content stories can all be generated by AI, I can absolutely see we're in that same world, the truly human crafted content becoming so much more special. Because while it may be not put together in exactly the right cadence to send your message, sometimes it's those imperfections that can really make something special. If you live in a world of perfection everywhere, when you find those flaws, they tend to stick in your mind a little more. So I think, while content being generated by AI is certainly a big issue today, one that's undoubtedly caused great alarm within the halls of Google and Facebook and all the others, I definitely believe that it's not going to bring providers or content creators down.
And I think that because the content this stuff generates really is very good. It may not be written word for word by human today, but all of these models were trained on content that we created at some point in the past. It's trained on human knowledge. It doesn't seem like it's a different thing. And I think that's where there is so much controversy and debate and lack of clarity. And everyone's unsure and uncertainty generates fear and doubt. And so then, you get second guessers and naysayers. I mean, Google's had plenty of these models for a long time. They're just internal because they don't want to release them. I am curious to see what Google will be releasing. They've hinted at preparing to release some kind of a ChatGPT competitor. Certainly, they will have a wealth of data, so I'm quite curious to see what they produce.
Paul Green:
Yeah. It's going to be a very exciting couple of years. And let's be honest, all of us would love to jump forward to the stage where we can have a proper conversation with our devices. Siri, we always thought Siri was going to be that thing that you could just talk to, and it would just understand you and it would keep the thread of a conversation, and that has not been the case. And certainly, the tools that are out now are a bigger step closer to that, with all the implications that go with that.
Trenton, thank you so much. I officially declare you to be a thought leader in AI for MSPs. I think you can take an early adopter position in that and go forward with it. And I've just realized, you and I so missed an opportunity. We should have deep faked this entire interview. We could have replicated both of us on video and audio, just to show how good the AI tools were. But no, we're human. Look, just pull your face out and poke yourself a little bit for those watching on YouTube to prove that we really are real. For those MSPs listening that want to get in touch with you right now, Trenton, what's the best way to connect to you?
Trenton Schuttler:
The best way to connect would definitely be LinkedIn. Send me a message or a mail, Trenton Schuttler, Net Guardians Tech of Santa Rosa, and I'd be happy to chat. I'm passionate about this stuff, and if you ask me a question, chances are, you'll want me to shut up at some point because I just keep on talking. I am so passionate about this stuff. You give me a time of day and I will fill your ear with thoughts.
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Paul Green's MSP marketing Podcast. This week's recommended book.
Jamie Warner, Invarosoft:
Hi, this is Jamie Warner from Invarosoft, and the book I recommend is Purple Cow by Seth Godin. If you want to learn how to differentiate your MSP in a very competitive market, this is the book for you, to find out the tactical strategies you can implement to be the best in your market.
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Coming up next week.
Dan Albaum:
Hi, I'm Dan Albaum, marketing leader and author of The Impact Makers: Voices of Leadership. And I'll be sharing with you some of the key learnings from the book, about how global exceptional leaders drive improved performance, based on a servant leader mindset.
Paul Green:
Go on, wherever you are listening to this right now, or watching it, subscribe, so you never miss an episode. Because on top of that interview, next week, we are going to be looking at the value of strategic partnerships, what they are, how to form them, and how to nourish them so they get stronger. We're also going to be looking at the huge marketing and sales value of the lunch and learn. If you want more, there is a ton more content for you right now at youtube.com/mspmarketing. Join me next Tuesday, and have a very profitable week in your MSP.
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Made in the UK, for MSPs around the world. Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast.
