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Voiceover:
Made in the UK, for MSPs around the world. This is Paul Green’s MSP marketing podcast.
Paul Green:
Here’s what’s coming up in the show.
James Lyon:
We’re offering a refresh, completely free, which would encourage them to stay on board as well. It is very much about longterm revenue and that longterm profit generation as well.
Paul Green:
We’ve also got a very clever idea for some physical help desk buttons that you can give to your clients. And we’re going to answer a question from an MSP about whether or not he should test his marketing to a general audience or a very specific vertical.
Voiceover:
Paul Green’s MSP marketing podcast.
Paul Green:
Have you ever had that thing when you’ve been out for lunch or dinner with some of your friends, but people who don’t own their own business, people who are employees, wage slaves, and the bills come in and however much the bill is, you’ve just grabbed it and you’ve said, “I’ll get this.” And they’ve all looked at you with astonishment on their faces, because there’s actually a couple of things happening in this situation.
Paul Green:
The first thing is when you’re grabbing it, you’re fully intending to put that on your business aren’t you? You’re fully intending for the business to pay for it and essentially you’re reducing your tax bill. Yay, you’re generous to your friends and your tax bill goes down at the same time. That’s a huge bonus. So that’s the first thing and they don’t realise that. They don’t realise that we do that.
Paul Green:
The second thing that’s going off is you’ve looked at the bill, and however much it is, it hasn’t seemed as much as it does seem to your wage slave friends and the reason for that is because as business owners, our relationship with money becomes skewed over time. I know back in my last business, where we were turning over somewhere between about 80 to 90 grand a month, which is a fair amount of money, that kind of money became normal to me because there’s 80 to 90,000 pounds going in, there is whatever was going out at the time, which was certainly a lot less than 80 to 90 grand and you forget that 80 to 90 grand is a phenomenal, huge amount of money and I think the more successful you are as a business owner, the more skewed your relationship with money becomes.
Paul Green:
Also, you and I have the ability to just take money out of our business at any point, if the cash is there, of course. And again, this completely skews our relationship with money. In fact, I think this is a good thing in a way because it makes us less dependent on one source of income. If you can just go and get $5, $10 $20,000 out of your business, or pounds, at any point, then that’s a good thing. It’s the whole point of us having the business is to have the freedom to do that, but again, it changes how we think about money.
Paul Green:
Now, the reason I mentioned all of this is not really to do with you taking your friends out to lunch, it’s more to do with how much you pay your team. So I’ve had a number of conversations with my MSP mastermind clients in recent months where they’ve been talking about how much they should be paying their employees.
Paul Green:
Now, I’m not talking here about third line techs who, I don’t know what it’s like in the States, but certainly in the UK, third line techs command an absolute premium. They’re rare, or the good ones who aren’t strange are rare. When you get someone like that, it is very much worth paying extra for those people – A, to get them and B, to keep them. But for first line techs for example, or for admin staff or even for marketing people or for salespeople, where there are thousands and thousands of people that you could employ in those roles, I think you can overpay. Now, I’m a big fan of overpaying to keep the best people, but I believe when someone joins your business, you shouldn’t be overpaying them at all.
Paul Green:
And the problem is, here’s us as the business owner taking out five, 10, 15 grand a month out of the business, whatever it is that we take, completely skewed relationship with money because we’re used to handle handling big sums, completely generous because we’re used to just picking up the lunch bill or taking our family out or removing cash out of the business, and we forget that our staff don’t have that mindset. Their relationship with money is not skewed. They understand the value of money almost better than we do, and for that reason, we don’t need to overpay them until they get to a point where they’re so critical to the business that we want to reward them and give them more money for keeping them happy and also for retention.
Paul Green:
So anytime you find yourself thinking, “Oh, I’ll just give my team a bonus of a couple of thousand pounds each.” Or whatever it is, and you’re looking at the bottom line and you’re looking at the cashflow impact, I think you need to just run it by ordinary people first. Maybe that’s your other half. If your other half doesn’t run a business, what do they think? Do they think it’s an obscene amount of money that you’re going to pay someone or that you’re going to give away to someone? Don’t forget to an employee earning, let’s say £20,000 to £25,000 a year, £1000 for free is a stunning amount of money. That just doesn’t happen, so you’ve got to use that weapon very powerfully and wield it only when it has maximum impact and don’t forget that your relationship with money is completely skewed, but theirs isn’t.
Voiceover:
Here’s this week’s clever idea.
Paul Green:
First time I heard about this, I literally squealed because from a marketing point of view, it is just beautiful. What is it? It’s physical help desk buttons that you give to your clients and they sit on their desks so they can press the button, physically with their finger, press a button when they need support from you.
Paul Green:
Now there’s a website, it’s helpdeskbuttons.com and you can get these buttons branded up to your business. They’re very, very clever. They look beautiful as well, they look quality. And it talks you through what happens when one of your users actually presses the button.
Paul Green:
So, imagine you’ve got a user who’s struggling with something. Their help desk button is a USB port which is plugged into their computer and they can plug other USBs into that button. They don’t need to know your phone number, your email, they don’t need to know the URL of your website, they don’t need to know how to take a screenshot or anything like that. All they do is they use their finger to press the button, it’s beautiful, and then it comes up with the little form on their computer and it talks them through basic questions.
Paul Green:
So it asks them to describe the problem. It asks them to a tick box whether they want you to connect to the computer or whether they want you to call them. They can say how urgent it is. They can say whether it’s affecting just them or whether it’s affecting multiple people. It’s very well thought through. And then the help desk button actually does an amount of diagnostic work for you. So it starts to build a log of the last 20 actions that they took before the button was pressed so that you can reproduce the error, it collects all the system information, who’s logged in, all the real time processes, memory, CPU, disk usage, that sort of stuff. It does some network diagnostics. It does connectivity checks and it’s very clever, and of course it integrates with your PSA as well. So the idea is that you get a perfect ticket. They have a better experience because they’re physically pressing something with their finger and you get the perfect ticket, which makes it much more likely you’re going to figure out what’s going on and solve it more quickly. Literally everyone wins.
Paul Green:
Now, none of my clients who started using this yet in the UK, we talked about it a couple of months ago. The price, according to the website, is 30 cents per seat per month, which doesn’t seem a huge amount of money. I’m guessing you have to pay some money to actually buy the physical hardware as well, but I’d love to hear some feedback from you. If you’ve been using this in your MSP, what kind of impact that has had on your end users or if you go and try it, let’s have a chat and see what you think of this. This place to do that is I have a Facebook group and I’m on that Facebook group every single day. If you go into Facebook and type in MSP marketing at the top, and that’s how you join my Facebook group.
Voiceover:
Paul’s blatant plug.
Paul Green:
My intention when I created that community for MSP owners on Facebook was to give people a chance to come together and talk about marketing. I believe it’s one of the most under talked about subjects in the world of MSPs. Lots of chat about tech, but not enough chat about marketing and selling more and making more monthly recurring revenue and ultimately net profit as well. So as I said, you go into your Facebook app, you pop in MSP marketing at the top, go to groups and apply to join and me or a member of my team, we’ll just double check that you are an MSP because it’s a vendor free zone. We don’t allow vendors in or anyone else. We’ll just double check you’re in an MSP and then we will let you in.
Paul Green:
There’s over 650 MSPs in there right now and it’s a great place to discuss marketing, in fact, a great place to discuss stuff that we’re talking about on this podcast. I’m there every day including weekends. I’m happy to answer any questions that you have. Get on to the MSP marketing Facebook group. It’s another valuable resource as you’re trying to grow your business.
Voiceover:
The big interview.
James Lyon:
So I’m James Lyon, it’s MSP white label websites and we provide white label websites at outsourced prices.
Paul Green:
So you don’t build websites for MSPs, so that you don’t build the MSPs own website, you build websites for the MSPs to resell. How did you come up with this idea?
James Lyon:
So I’ve been selling websites for a long time. Websites itself is a great resell opportunity for MSPs. You’re in a perfect position to talk about digital transformation with clients and really I looked at what skills I could bring to the MSP market and that was helping you to sell websites and deliver them at offshore prices. So that’s why I created MSP White Label Websites.
Paul Green:
And we know that ordinary business owners and business managers, because MSPs are dealing with computers, they see that websites are about computers as well. And actually websites as we know are more of a marketing thing, but is this why you think so many MSPs get their clients saying to them, “Hey, could you do our website?”
James Lyon:
Yeah, it’s the trusted relationship that I think the MSPs have with clients. Websites can be a sore point for clients. They have their domain hosting with someone, their actual website hosting with someone else and their email hosting. And actually, it’s of much greater benefit to the client if everything can be condensed with one provider. And what we’ve found is that MSPs themselves are in perfect positions to look after everything under one roof for their clients.
Paul Green:
You and I know loads of MSPs who build their own websites for clients, but there’s also a whole chunk of people who don’t want to take on that pain, they don’t want to have to deal with designers, we know they’re getting content out to clients is a real pain. So, how does your service take that pain away for the MSP?
James Lyon:
In a real short sentence, we do everything for you. What we basically say is that all you need to do is manage the relationship with the client and we’ll do all the hard work for you. So we’ve got content writers and we’ll create order for content. We’ll do all of the backend management and project management for you, design the website, get it sent live. Within our packages as well we include 30 minutes maintenance a month. So any onsite changes that you have to do, you literally just push back onto us. We also sort out hosting. So really, all you need to do is resell our services and make a profit every single month from it.
Paul Green:
And of course as we’d expect, it’s all monthly recurring revenue as well. This isn’t a sell a website for a couple of thousand, this is turning it into an ongoing revenue stream.
James Lyon:
What we’re not looking at is just a 12 month here. The reason why we’re looking at reselling services as a monthly resale is not thinking about a £1000 or £2000 income revenue generation there, we’re looking at a three year period minimum.
James Lyon:
What we’ve done is, within our packages, include a 12 month minimum program. Thereafter, the clients can roll over monthly, which we found helps them to stay on board for longer. And at the three year stage we’re offering a refresh completely free, which would encourage them to stay on board as well. So yeah, like you said Paul, it is very much about longterm revenue and that long term profit generation as well.
Paul Green:
So the goal is the MSP has a longterm revenue stream that they do very little work for, you have a revenue stream, but you’re used to doing the word because you’re used to doing that and the end client, the MSPs client, is happy because they have a great website which is updated regularly and is refreshed every three years.
James Lyon:
Yeah, exactly that. What you’re doing here is just looking at another way that you can help your client and that is via websites. MSPs are in the perfect positions to talk about digital transformation and helping clients with their website and we’re giving you an opportunity to kind of make money from that without having to do any of the work.
Paul Green:
How do we get in touch with you, James?
James Lyon:
My website is www.mspwhitelabelwebsites.com.
Voiceover:
Paul Green’s MSP marketing podcast. Ask Paul anything.
Andy Newbrook:
Hey Paul, Andy Newbrook from Crusade Computer Solutions here. We are going to send some direct mail campaigns to our cold list to then eventually give out our ethical bribe in the book. Do you recommend sending the test of 30 mails to a specific sector or just 30 general companies?
Paul Green:
That’s a great question. Thank you Andy and well done on doing direct mail. Direct mail has such potential impact because we don’t have much post these days. So I think direct mail is a very good thing to do. One caveat with that is to make sure that you follow it up on the phone. Direct mail itself doesn’t get a great response, but it paves the way for easier phone calls.
Paul Green:
Now to answer your question of should you do a test to a general audience or to a specific sector, I would always do it to a specific sector or a specific vertical and I’ll tell you why. You may have heard me say this phrase before, relevance increases results. The more relevant that someone perceives your marketing to be, the more likely they are to actually respond to it. And the beauty of sending a piece of direct mail to a specific vertical or a specific sector is you can make that direct mail seem more applicable to them.
Paul Green:
Let’s say for example, you’re targeting accountants or CPAs as they’re known in the States, you can put on the word accountant, you can talk about their practice rather than their business. Certainly here in the UK, accountants talk about having a practice. You can drop in a piece of software that is commonly used by accountants, and I don’t just mean Sage or zero, but some insider software that they use.
Paul Green:
Now that’s all you need to do. You only need to sprinkle a tiny, tiny amount of relevance into a piece of direct mail or in fact any piece of marketing, and you will typically get a better response rate from it because the accountants, or whoever at the other end, the other people that you’re targeting, if they perceive that it is targeted at them, they won’t think of it as being targeted. But if they perceive that it is relevant to them, they automatically assume that you are an expert in what it is that they do and they perceive that it’s more likely to be of interest to them. And you’re more likely to be a quality supplier. Relevance increases results.
Paul Green:
So the challenge to you actually is to do this in all of your marketing. I’m a big fan of MSPs having separate websites targeting separate niches, separate verticals because what it allows you to do is to appear to be relevant to a number of multiple audiences, but at the same time. So you keep your general website, but then you set up very specific targeted websites to each of the niches that you want to operate in. Yes, that’s extra work, but my goodness, that extra work doesn’t help pay off for you down the line.
Voiceover:
How to contribute to the show.
Paul Green:
Andy actually sent me that question from his phone. He recorded a quick audio question for me, just sent it over to me on email. Loads of people have done this now and I’d invite you to do the same. What’s that burning question that you’ve got that you’d love me to answer on the podcast? You can email it through to [email protected].
Voiceover:
Coming up next week.
Tracy Pound:
We can’t bandy around those types of terms not knowing whether or not the receiver of our message really understands what it is that we’re trying to say.
Paul Green:
That’s Tracy Pound from Maximity, she’s been working in the channel for more than 30 years and sits on the board for CompTIA worldwide. Next week, she’s going to tell you how you can think like a prospect so you can sell more to them without ever having to talk about technology.
Paul Green:
We’re also going to be talking next week about one of the scariest subjects that any MSP can think about, what if you got hacked? And you probably heard that Datto, Huntress Labs and Connect Wise helped to save an MSPs, access credentials from being sold on the dark web recently. We’re going to be talking about that and I’ve got a series of suggestions for you compiled from my MSP clients to help protect yourself from the hackers.
Voiceover:
Made in the UK for MSPs around the world, Paul Green’s MSP marketing podcast.
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