Episode 202
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 How to encourage 'ghost' prospects to re-engage
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07:45 Grow your LinkedIn connections and email database at the same time
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20:36 Leadership, true client partnerships and the voice of the CIO
Featured guest:
Thank you to professional speaker and author Jeff Ton, for joining me to talk about the value of true MSP/client partnerships, and the importance of establishing a relationship of trust, transparency and respect with CIO clients and prospects.
Keynote speaker, frequent podcast guest and best-selling author, Jeff Ton has been amplifying audiences around the world for two decades. With deep experience as a technology and business executive, he draws on his background to educate, inspire, and entertain audiences large and small. Jeff authored Amplify Your Job Search - Strategies for Finding Your Dream Job (2020) and Amplify Your Value - Leading IT with Strategic Vision (2018). His insights have been featured in Forbes, Huffington Post, Information Week, among others.
When his teenage dreams of becoming a rockstar collided with reality, he traded his guitar for a computer keyboard and became a rockstar of a different kind. After launching his career as a software developer, Jeff became an industry-recognized leader and business executive, building teams and leading organizations in the banking, consumer electronics, real estate development, non-profit, and technology sectors.
Connect with Jeff on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jtonindy/
Extra show notes:
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- Grab yourself a copy of this week's recommended book, The Robert Collier Letter Book:
Transcription:
Voiceover:
Fresh every Tuesday for MSPs around the world. This is Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast.
Paul Green:
Hello and welcome back to the show. It's episode 202 and this is what we have for you this week.
Jeff S. Ton:
Hi, I'm Jeff S. Ton. I have spent 40 years in information technology and I have become an expert in how to relate to chief information officers. I advise companies all over the world on how to build stronger, more strategic relationships with their clients through these concepts.
Paul Green:
And on top of that fascinating interview with Jeff later in the show, I've got a clever idea for you. It's a way that you can build your LinkedIn connections and your email database at the same time.
Voiceover:
Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast.
Paul Green:
I'm pretty sure that the first time I heard the word ghosting was watching Spider-Man: Far From Home a few years ago. You know the bit where right at the beginning of the film that, I think it's Nick Fury, is ringing Spider-Man, and he presses red and basically ignored him. And Aunt May said, if you've never seen this film, you'll think it's the most boring sounding film, but Aunt May says, "You've ghosted Nick Fury. You can't do that." Something like that happened anyway, and I realized, oh, so that's the word for what happens to me on dating apps. I'm single and every now and again I have a three-month madness where I go on all the apps, which is by the way, the most depressing experience. If you are not single, try not to be single. It's just horrendous. Well, dating apps are horrendous anyway.
Anyway, this concept of ghosting, I think we all understand this. It's where someone just goes quiet. So you are in the middle of a conversation or you're in the middle of something, and the other party goes quiet. And I guess it's been happening forever. It's just these days it has a word. And technology makes it so much easier. So you're chatting away on your dating app and the next morning you say to someone, "Hey, how are you today?" And they don't reply. It's just horrendous because it just triggers off this whole thing of uncertainty and doubt and you second guess yourself, and it's awful.
And the thing is, prospects do it too. In fact, I was talking to an MSP just yesterday and he said three prospects in a row have said yes to him and then ghosted him. And we delved a little bit into that. I've heard of the odd one now and again, but three in a row? In fact, I set him a task to go and look for patterns, patterns in them or patterns in his behavior or his business's behavior. What's changed? What have you done differently? Because if three somethings in a row has happened, then something somewhere has changed. People don't just start doing that. So that's something he's gone to do.
But his prospects, they've said yes to him, they've said, "Yes, we want to go ahead." He's put together the contract, and then nothing. Radio silence. He hasn't heard from them, and he hasn't been able to get hold of them to find out what happened. I mean, it would drive you crazy. I know I joke about doing it in dating terms, but let's get serious. In business terms, that's awful. When someone has said to you, yes, I want to do this, it's like someone saying that they will marry you, and then you can't get hold of them to arrange is it going to be a church or a register office or Vegas?
So anyway, there is a way around ghosting. Because the thing about ghosting is it's more about them than it is about you. It's very easy for those of us on the receiving end of ghosting to take it personally, to think its something that we have done. But what you've got to remember, and this is not dating advice, this is business advice, marketing advice, what you've got to remember is it's about them and something that's happening in their world or their life. Maybe they've got a big project, maybe they've got an interruption. Maybe there's something happening in their personal life or in their business life, which is perceptually more important to them than switching MSPs or signing up with a new tech support firm. I know that seems crazy because to us it's the biggest thing in the world. We know that they need to get someone on and get their cybersecurity sorted and get those projects started, but they just don't see it with the urgency that you see it.
So as with a lot of marketing, you've got to take yourself out of your head and put yourself in their head and in their heart and ask yourself, what do I think has caused this? What is causing this complete breakdown of communication? And you need to do this before you become desperate. And I don't mean that you would ever be desperate, but you can appear to be desperate if you keep sending texts and keep WhatsApping them and you keep phoning them. This is dating advice now. This is dating and marketing advice. No one wants to be that person where it's a constant one-way stream of communication, because that is just depressing.
So what do you do if you think someone has ghosted you? Well, there are a couple of communications and types of communication that seem to cut through more than anything else. For example, writing a letter. So in the digital world that we are in, where everything is digital, physically writing, and I mean handwriting a letter, licking a stamp and putting a stamp on an envelope... Are there any stamps left that you can lick? Certainly here in the UK they're all self-adhesive. Anyway, writing a handwritten letter and sending that to them in the mail, that cuts through. Because it requires a modicum of effort. Anything that requires a modicum of effort cuts through.
Sending them a box, what we call an impact box, which we've talked about on this podcast very early days I think, right back in 2019 or 2020, that cuts through. Because it's a box that has some merch, some gifts, some candy, whatever. And again, you could put a handwritten letter in that. In fact, the impact box cuts through 10 times more than a handwritten letter does. A letter sits on their desk, an impact box has the staff going, "What's this? You weren't expecting something? Do you know what it is?"
So those kind of methods of communication cut through, but there's also ways of asking questions of them that can really cut through. So for example, there's an amazing book, it's called Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss. He's the former FBI chief hostage negotiator, and he has an amazing email if you are being ghosted. The email subject line is this, have you given up on this project? So you send them an email, or in fact you could put this in a written letter as well. Have you given up on this project? And the body's very simple. Hi Dave, it's been a few weeks since we spoke about your technology or moving your technology. Is this something you still want to do?
And we've used that email ourselves when we want to get through to someone and we've essentially been ghosted. And that's not just in sales. That could be just in setting things up, building partnerships. 99 times out of a hundred when you do that email and they respond, it's nothing to do with you, it's to do with them. They've had something come up. There was a personal crisis, somebody left, the budget's gone and they're too embarrassed to tell you. There's a whole number of different reasons, but what it does is it's the last attempt at shaking them and waking them so that you get something out of them.
An MSP I work with called Mitch also recommended another way of putting that, thank you for this Mitch. Mitch suggests, where do we go from here? Which is another way of saying the same thing. Where do we go from here? And that particular phrase works really well for him.
So I hope that you don't get ghosted by prospects or dates, but if you do, try one of those emails or try some other method of cutting through you. Remember, it's never about you. It's always, always about them.
Voiceover:
Here's this week's clever idea.
Paul Green:
One of the core marketing principles that I teach to MSPs all around the world is to use a very simple three-step marketing strategy. These are the three steps. You build multiple audiences of people to listen to you; then you build a relationship with them, and that's typically done through content marketing, and then you commercialize that relationship. And that commercialization is typically done by someone making outbound phone calls on your behalf. Not cold calling; it's warm calling because they're calling the audiences that you have built a relationship with through content.
Now, if we go right up to the top step, that's where it all starts and that's where you have to do the hard work of building multiple audiences. And you could, if you had the time and resources, build as many audiences as you could. For example, we have this audience, so by listening to my podcast, you're in an audience there. Thank you very much for listening. We have a YouTube audience. We have an audience of people who read our blog on our website, which gets a fair amount of traffic. We have a Facebook group, which is just for MSPs, the MSP Marketing Facebook group. I have about 8,000 connections on LinkedIn and I do a LinkedIn newsletter every Thursday. So you get the idea. We have lots and lots of audiences, and there are lots more that you could build. For MSPs, typically, the two audiences you should be building is your LinkedIn connections and your email database. And I have an idea for you today, very, very simple idea which will actually build both of those audiences at the same time. It's very simple.
Here's what you do. First of all, you set yourself a daily task. Or better still, you don't do it, because as the owner or manager of the business, you've got more important things to do, which is growing the business. So you get a virtual assistant or an admin person to do this for you. Everyday, and you make this a daily task so that anything that's daily happens on a regular basis or is more likely to keep happening; every day you go and you attempt seven to 10 connections on LinkedIn. So you find between seven and 10 business owners, business leaders, people that you would like to do business with, and you connection requests to them. And that's it. That's the LinkedIn part.
Now, let's assume you get two to three new connections a day. So of those seven to 10, two to three people accept your connections. You're with me so far on this? Here's the clever bit. What you then do is you acquire their email address and you add them to your email database. We'll talk about the legals of that in a second, and then we will talk about the specifics of how you do it and what you send them.
First of all, let's talk about acquiring their email address. There are two ways that you can do this. So you can either just pay and have it done easily or you can do it in a way which takes a little bit more time, but it costs you nothing. And you could argue it's a more robust way of doing it. So the easy and less cost-effective way of doing it, so the easy way that costs money, is you go buy a plugin for something like Lusha, L-U-S-H-A, Lusha, and there are alternatives to it, just Google for that. What that does is that gives you information on someone. So when you're on their LinkedIn profile, it'll display what information it knows about someone.
Now, I haven't used it myself, actually, my team has, I personally haven't, but I believe from the MSPs I work with, I believe it costs around about one US dollar per email address. So if you're looking at someone's LinkedIn and you click the show me the email address button, that's going to cost you a dollar or a credit, which costs you a dollar, but you get the idea. So you're essentially paying a dollar. Now, if you're only doing two or three of these a day and you've got that cash for speed, that might be a way of doing it.
But there is another way to find someone's email address. So let's say you've got a lawyer and his name is Derek Smith, and he works for sueeveryone.com, that's the name of these lawyers firm. And you can go into Google and put this in speech marks; so you're looking for an exact match. What did we say his name? Derek Smith. You put in
[email protected]. So that's his website, sueeveryone.com. His name is Derek Smith. So you put in
[email protected] in speech marks and you search for that. And if nothing comes up or Google suggests an alternative search, or maybe even shows you results for an alternative search if it's found nothing, that tells you his email address is not Derek.Smith. So then you try
[email protected], then you try DerekS, then you try Derek. There's probably about five or six different variations of someone's email. But most people in most businesses, they have either first name dot last name or first name, last name, or just first name or first letter of the first name, surname. There's a number of variations you can work through.
And what you typically find is when you come across the right one, suddenly you get a page of results. And it might not be lots of results, but you'll find that there's the odd webpage with their email address on, or there'll be some other listings somewhere. When you Google an email address in speech marks, then it's very obvious when you've come across that person's email. So obviously you are not doing this, someone's doing this on your behalf. So you do that. You've now acquired that email address. Now that took maybe three minutes to do, but you didn't have to spend any cash doing it, other than the time of the person who's doing that.
Let's recap where we are. We've got two or three new LinkedIn connections each day. And those people, we are finding their email address and we're adding it into your CRM. The legals of this are technically they have not opted in. However, and I say this, this is not legal advice, this is just Paul advice, which will not work in a court, often it's better to seek forgiveness than it is to ask permission. If you're adding two to three email addresses to your CRM, you are not going to trigger off many spam filters. The reality is when you email them the first time, and I'm going to tell you what email to send to them, the vast majority of people are just going to ignore it or read it and undo it or maybe unsubscribe.
The thing we want to avoid more than anything is someone hitting the spam button. I've worked with lots of MSPs doing this, and the proportion of people that hit the spam button is lower than you think. So you might hit the spam button a lot, but then you are an M P. You don't operate with technology how ordinary people do, and they are maybe not as vigilant as you are at whitelisting, blacklisting, spam reporting. And they probably don't report phishing attempts either, that's just because they've got other things to do. So I think adding two or three addresses a day that you have acquired is fine.
I know there are anti-spam laws, and particularly in Canada there's some very aggressive anti-spam laws. Those anti-spam laws are typically aimed at the big spammers that will email a million people about whatever today's scam is. That's not what you are doing. You have, what's the phrase that we use? Is it just cause? I can't remember. There's a specific phrase which came out of GDPR, which is a data protection act here in the UK and in Europe. I can't remember the exact phrase, but essentially you are emailing them about technology that can help their business. You are not a spammer and they can unsubscribe because you are using a proper CRM with an unsubscription link.
So as I say, not legal advice. The one CRM you don't do this with right now is mailer light. So all the other CRMs, absolutely fine behavior; MailerLite is not. MailerLite a number of months ago has set its you are a crook settings very, very high. It's got a very, very sensitive trigger. So you could send out a hundred emails and get one spam complaint, which is not the end of the world on any other CRM, and Mailer Lite, based on a set of other circumstances, will just shut down your account. So essentially there's no mucking about it. I think it's because for years people have been using MailerLite for spammy activity and they're fighting back against it. So for now, don't do this in MailerLite, but other CRMs are fine.
Now what email do we send them? The email we send them, the first email we send them is something to acknowledge what we've done. We don't tell them that we've acquired their email address, but you will say something like this. So you might set this up as an automated canned email that goes when you first add someone to your list, it says something like this. "Hi Dave. We've just connected on LinkedIn. I hope you don't mind that I've added you to my email list." So we acknowledge what you've done. This is what makes this not spammy behavior. "Hi Dave. We've just connected on LinkedIn. I hope you don't mind that I've added you to my email list." And then you say something like, "I'm going to send you occasional emails." Or better, "I'm going to send you one email a week with technology advice that many other," insert industry, "find of interest. With technology advice that many other lawyers, dentists, chiropractors find of interest."
The idea being, we want this person to open this email, see a word that's relevant to them, which is lawyers, CPA, accountant, whatever it is they do, and go, "Okay", and just click back. Or they make a conscious decision to unsubscribe, because that's fine too. If they don't want the emails, we want them to unsubscribe. There's nothing worse than emailing people who don't want your emails. Why don't more people unsubscribe? They just don't. So we send them that email. "We've connected on LinkedIn, hope you don't mind I've added to my list. Lots of advices of interest to other lawyers. If you don't want to get these emails, there's an unsubscription link below. Thanks very much. I hope we get a chance to speak in the future. Yours, Paul."
That's it. Simple as that. And then you add them to your normal weekly email that goes out. So for example, if you use a service like our MSP Marketing Edge, we give you every week a weekly email. In fact, we give you an entire weekly marketing system where an email is just part of it, all about driving traffic back to fresh block content and video on your website. But there you have a very, very simple system that you can start using literally today to grow your LinkedIn connections and your email database at exactly the same time.
Voiceover:
Vols pulls blatant plug.
Paul Green:
I just glossed over that weekly marketing system that we do in the MSP Marketing Edge. Let me tell you what that is, because it's actually something you could replicate yourself. So every week we give our members a brand new syndicated blog. It's a blog they can put on their website and a video. We have a UK presenter, a lady called Annie. We have a US presenter, a lady called Laura, and then we have an Australian voiced version. So there's no presenter on screen for the Australian version, but... What's her name? I can't remember her name. I pay her invoices, but I can't remember her name. Anyway, we have three different versions of that video. The idea is that you take the blog and the video and you put that on your website. So you've now got a blog article about something that's of interest to ordinary business owners and managers, and there's a video on the same subject. And the two things go on the same page. That's the first step of the weekly marketing system.
Next, you send out an email to your email database, and the email is about the blog or the video and you're sending the traffic back to your site. That's the second step.
The third step is you then schedule a week's worth of social media on LinkedIn and any other platforms you use. We deliver long forms of social media content for LinkedIn and Facebook and short forms for Twitter threads, any short form that you use. Does anyone still use Twitter? Apparently. And that's the third step. And one of those social media posts drives traffic back to your blog. So you see how this is a system, this is about integrating everything.
The final step is, you take that blog and you turn it into a LinkedIn newsletter. Because LinkedIn newsletters algorithmically are still very, very important.
That weekly marketing system is the crux. I mean, if you were to do that and implement that in your business, we're talking a few hours work; and my team literally hold your hand while you're doing it. If you do that, you've got a marketing system that 80% of other MSPs don't have. It's so powerful. And there are so many other things as part of the MSP Marketing Edge, it's not just that weekly marketing system. We have tools, videos, things that can go on your website, guides, press releases. There's training, you have direct access to me, there's an unlimited number of things.
The thing is, we only work with one MSP per area. So the thing to do first is to see whether or not your area is available. Go to mspmarketingedge.com. You can pick your country and then put in your postal code or your zip code and it'll tell you whether or not we're working with one of your competitors or not. It won't name your competitor, but you'll see if your area is free. If your area isn't free, please do join the waiting list. Every now and again someone gives up their membership and we will be in touch and give you, if you like, first refusal on it before we start marketing to other MSPs. So you can check that now at mspmarketingedge.com.
Voiceover:
The big interview.
Jeff S. Ton:
Hi, I'm Jeff S. Ton. I'm a speaker and author and I like to say an explorer, an explorer of leadership.
Paul Green:
And especially an explorer of leadership within the MSP space, because I know you're going to talk to us today about the voice of the CIO. Thank you very much for joining me on this podcast, Jeff.
Let's talk about your career first of all. What gives you the right to come on to this podcast and be an authority on the voice of the CIO? Tell us about your background.
Jeff S. Ton:
40 years in technology. I guess that's what gives me the authority. I started in tech 40 years ago as a programmer. That's what we called ourselves back then. Now you would call them a developer or maybe even a dev. But I spent most of that career on the practitioner side of the desk, growing through the ranks of management, working for various companies, various industries, but became chief information officer for two separate companies here in the US where I'm from; I'm in Indianapolis, Indiana. And was privileged to lead a couple of organizations as their CIO.
And then I like to joke and say, I moved to the dark side. I became a vendor and moved to a cloud services provider, a managed service provider, here in the US as their head of product. One of the things that I was able to bring to them was that perspective, that view from the seat of the CIO? What are they thinking about? What are they worried about? How do you approach them? And I was able to provide that guidance. So fast-forward towards this stage in my career, I launched my own business about three years ago doing just that; speaking, writing, doing leadership development, but always with this idea of changing the face of IT, developing the next generation of IT leader and helping MSPs understand what's on the mind of the CIO.
Paul Green:
Yeah, so I mean, what I'm about to say by the way, is a joke. It's not considered to be offensive in any way. But if you've been doing this for 40 years, when you first started, were you sort of feeding ticket tape into machines to program them?
Jeff S. Ton:
Just about. Just about. We had our job control language on the mainframe, were still punch cards.
Paul Green:
Wow.
Jeff S. Ton:
So yeah, we were still doing punch cards at that point. But our software, our programs were actually typed into a 32x70 screen, for those of you that are old enough to remember those. And it was pretty slow-going. I can remember joking that, hey, we programmed in color. We had both amber and green for our screen. So it was quite a thing when the graphical user interface came about in the, what, nineties.
Paul Green:
Yeah, no, I bet it was. I bet it was. Here in the UK I live about 10 miles from something called Bletchley Park. I'm not sure if that's something you've heard of, but here in the UK it's where during World War II, all of the code breaking efforts were. So it was super top secret actually until the nineties. It stayed a secret for 50 years after the end of the war. And it's now home to the most amazing interactive museum that shows you about code breaking. It's also home to the UK's National Museum of Computing. Which is fascinating, because it has technology from the sixties up till pretty much 10 years ago. And you see those massive, you talk about mainframes, which even to someone like me, I'm only 48, don't really know what a mainframe is other than a big computer. And you see them working in these massive rooms and you realize that your mobile phone that you've got in your pocket has 3 million times more computing power than something that's taken up this room.
Jeff S. Ton:
Yes.
Paul Green:
It's a pretty awesome thing, especially an awesome thing to take your kids to see.
Anyway, we digress. Let's come back to chief information officer. Just so everyone listening is absolutely clear what that is, what would you describe as a chief information officer? What's their role and what do they do, and how is that relevant to MSPs?
Jeff S. Ton:
A CIO, chief information officer, is the senior leader of technology for an organization. They may not have the title of chief Information officer; they might be a VP of IT in smaller organizations, they might be a Director of IT, but they are the top level person that is responsible for managing and directing the strategy on how the organization leverages technology to deliver their goods or services. So they have this complex role of they have to understand technology, most certainly, but they also have to understand the business and how the business provides value to its customers so that they can always bring solutions with that technology lens in their mind as they're working with their business peers.
Paul Green:
So from an MSP point of view, we are talking about a very high level strategic relationship.
Jeff S. Ton:
Yes. From an MSP perspective, it's your customer. Most of the time, even if you're dealing with a vice president or director and you're selling MSP services, most of the time because you're asking your client to outsource some of their services to you, the CIO is going to be involved in that decision, whether they're right there at the table with you or whether they're behind the scenes making a decision. But that decision to partner with an MSP, and I don't throw that word around loosely; partner, really when it comes to MSP, you become an extension of their technology team no matter what service you're providing. It might be help desk, it might be managed network, it might be managed security. Whatever it is, you're becoming a partner to that. And because of that, CIO is going to want to make sure that you are the right partner to solve the problems that he or she is trying to solve.
Paul Green:
It's interesting you throw that word partner out there because it's probably one of the most abused words in the channel right now. Any vendor gets a new client at let's say an MSP, and immediately they're a partner. And as you said there, you are not a real partner until you are in bed together and you're having every meal together and everything is the same.
Jeff S. Ton:
I talk about that a lot, Paul, about this concept of partnership. Every vendor that walks into a CIO's office says, "I want to be your partner." It got me thinking as a CIO, what does that mean, partner? So I started thinking about, well, if I want my vendor partner, my MSP to treat me as a partner, I needed to treat them as a partner. And I boiled it down to three words; trust, transparency, and respect. And if our relationship is based on mutual trust, mutual transparency, and mutual respect, I feel like we have a partnership. And then we can do business together.
Paul Green:
So here's the interesting question then, and I love the three letters you've got there. The interesting question is, if you assume the average MSP isn't truly partnering with its clients; so it's early clients, yes, it may have partnered with just through over-servicing because the new keen business owner was so keen to make an impact on their clients. But as they get busier and as they take staff on, that service level has normalized and they aren't true partnerships, it's a service provided. How do you, as an MSP owner, how do you move from doing a good job to being a genuine partner, a genuine CIO to your clients?
Jeff S. Ton:
Well, I think one of the first steps is you have to have senior level people on your staff who can sit down and have a conversation with the CIO, with those senior IT leaders about what are their business challenges. I always told my vendors I would know we have a good relationship when you do two things. Thing number one, you tell me when I'm wrong. Because I don't know everything and I don't need people just saying yes all the time. I need to know when I'm making a mistake. And the other one was, to tell me when you can't do something. Because you're not good at everything. Where are your specialties? What things are you, to use Jim Collins, what are you best in the world at? And those are the things I need to know and understand. The rest of it I'll use a different partner for, and that's okay. We'll be stronger because of it.
So I think that's the key is you have to elevate those conversations to find out what's on the mind of the CIO. Probably it's not your call volume if you're doing help desk services, but more than likely it's what kind of customer experience are you giving to my end users? And if my customers, my end customers are calling in to that help desk, what experience are you giving them? That's what I'm going to care about more than the number of tickets that you're closing for me.
Paul Green:
Yeah. So what you're talking about there is a true partnership, isn't it? It's putting yourself into the mind and the feelings and the mindset of the other person and trying to figure out by asking them what it is that they want and they need. So what keeps them awake at night and what will allow them to sleep more soundly?
Why do you think it's so difficult to ask those questions though and to develop that relationship?
Jeff S. Ton:
Well, first of all, a lot of CIOs, they're in that position and they don't always trust their vendor. And I go back to the words that I used at the beginning there, the trust, transparency and respect. We start these relationships very cautiously. And I'm not going to show you behind the scenes because gosh, Paul, I just know you just want to sell me some more stuff. So that's going to be my approach. And so we're kind of dancing this tenuous dance with each other. And what I found as CIO was it took me opening up about my business and my department before I really got that mutual communication going with my vendors.
What I would do is I'd do an annual summit, an annual planning summit. Where I'd take my team offsite. And I started inviting my vendor partners, the partners, not everybody. If you sold me paperclips, you probably weren't going to be there. But if you were a true partner with me, you would be at this summit and you would see my budgets, you would see my business plans, you would see my strategy, what we've been successful at and what we haven't been successful at. And that opened me up to, "Hey, Jeff, I can help you solve that problem." And many, many times they could. Because I took the time to open up. So I think it's a two-way street, which is not always what you want to hear when you're on the MSP side of the desk. It's like, how do I break down that barrier?
And I really think it begins with having conversations about what are the struggles? Know your CIO, know your clients. And this takes a lot of time. But if they're posting on social media, what are they posting about? What's on their mind? Are they posting about generative AI? It seems like everybody is these days. What can you do to help them understand how to use generative AI? That may not even be anything that your company does, but it's something that's on the mind of the CIO. And if you can help them solve a problem, you're going to become a trusted advisor.
Paul Green:
Yeah. Even if that problem is that, let's say they're bored or people above them are hitting the drum of, "We've got to be using AI." And they can't see an application for it, but it becomes a discussion between the two of you. "Well, hey, did you know you are already using AI because it's built into teams and it's built into this. Let's find a way to communicate that back to your board and to explore other things." Yeah, I like that. I like that approach.
Jeff, let's talk about things that you do to help MSPs. Now, I heard a rumor that you too have a podcast. Is this true?
Jeff S. Ton:
I do. I do. I host a podcast called Status Go. It's actually published by an MSP here in the United States, Intervision Systems. Intervision Systems was, when I went to the vendor side of the desk, I joined a company called Blue Lock, which eventually was acquired by Intervision Systems, so they were my previous employer and now they are one of my clients. I host a podcast for them. It's a weekly podcast targeted at the technology professional who wants to break out of the status quo. I would say we lean mostly to the practitioner side of the desk, but I know from the listeners that I talk to that we also have a lot of MSPs that listen to us as well, to really unpack what's in the mind of the CIO or the technology professional.
Paul Green:
And for those people who perhaps don't listen to podcasts, he says on a podcast, which is a bizarre thing to say.
Jeff S. Ton:
Is there anybody that doesn't?
Paul Green:
I don't think there are. Even in the UK, podcast listening isn't anywhere near as high as it is in the US. To this podcast, we have way more listeners in the US than we do in the UK. I don't know if that's a cultural thing or people in the UK just don't like my voice. Who knows? Who knows? It's a weird thing.
But you have a book as well. Tell us about your book.
Jeff S. Ton:
Yeah, so I have a couple of books. The first one is Amplify Your Value: Leading IT with Strategic Vision. And it talks about as a CIO, how do you lead your organization strategically? We have a lot of CIOs who can lead tactically. I think leading strategically is incredibly important. For those that are MSPs out there, and I know your audience is predominantly MSPs, Paul, think about it as amplify their value. You could read the book and understand how you could help them amplify their value. I've done some keynote presentations to MSPs using that spin on it.
The other book that I've written is called Amplify Your Job Search. I wrote this really at the beginning of the pandemic when so many people were losing their jobs. It's a combination of strategies that I have learned throughout my career and strategies that I have coached other people to use to find their dream job, to find their next job. And both of those are available through our friends at amazon.com and also there in Europe as well.
Paul Green:
Fantastic.
And for those people who just want to get in touch with you and just say hi, perhaps pick your brains, what's the best way to contact you?
Jeff S. Ton:
LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a fabulous way. I am on there constantly throughout the day. It's always a tab that's open. So you can reach me on LinkedIn or my website is www.jeffreyston.com. Pretty straightforward. It's my name. Would love to hear from you.
Voiceover:
Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast. This week's recommended book.
Scott Bywater:
Hi, I'm Scott Bywater. I'm an email copywriter, and the book I recommend is The Robert Collier Letter Book. Now, this was written decades ago. I mean, my book is all tattered. But the reason I recommend it is it gives real examples of letters which work, which you can send out. Either you can use as your email copy, and you can also send out in any format. You can send out a sales letters to your existing clients, you get new clients, all of that sort of thing. And it's just a treasure trove of letters which have been proven to work. As the old saying is, everything old is new again. So if you want to want to new idea, something I learned from Perry Marshall, if you want a new idea, read an old book.
Voiceover:
Coming up next week.
Steve Spiegel:
Hey, I'm Steve Spiegel, founder and CEO of CrewHu. Everyone wants to grow their MSP. And to do that, you need to keep your clients happy. But newsflash, keeping your clients happy is really hard if you aren't keeping your employees happy. And I'm going to tell you how you're going to make sure that you have the happiest staff.
Paul Green:
Right now, whichever platform you are listening to or watching this podcast on, please do subscribe. If there's a notification bell, click that as well and then you'll never miss an episode. Because next week we're returning back to LinkedIn again. And in fact, I've got three specific content ideas for you. Three things that you can try on LinkedIn to get more engagement from your existing connections. Join me next Tuesday and have a very profitable week in your MSP.
Voiceover:
Made in the UK. For MSPs around the world. Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast.
