Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Fresh every Tuesday for MSPs around the world. Around the world. This is Paul Green's, MSP Marketing podcast. Happy Halloween. This is Vampire Paul. And welcome to the Shawl here's. Vatviv. I can't keep doing that. Here's what we've got coming up for you this week.
[00:00:18] Speaker B: Hey everyone. I'm Mariana henninger. I am obsessed with brand videos and the most amazing, powerful things that they can do for your business and building that emotional connection with your customer. So join me on the podcast to hear all about brand videos.
[00:00:33] Speaker A: And on top of that fantastic interview later on, I've also got a piece of advice for you in today's show that's so important it could save your marriage.
Paul Green's, MFP marketing podcast. Now let me start this week with a very funny story to tell you, told to me by a very good friend of mine called Darren. Now, it's important you know before I tell you this story that Darren is not a tech. He doesn't know about your world at all. In fact, he's from my world. He's a marketing guy, someone I used to work with in radio a long time ago. And now he works for some marketing agency somewhere doing something with video. I have no idea what he actually does. That's kind of not relevant to the story. He sent me a voice note a couple of weeks ago. And the voice note was about the experience that him and his colleagues had when they called their It support company. So their agency that they work for, they have an MSP. Of course, I'm not going to tell you the name, not going to tell you the name of the agency either. Because imagine if the MSP owner was listening to this podcast and realized it was their business. That would be horrendous. Anyway, they have a thing in the office that whenever there is a technical problem, they try themselves to fix it so that they don't have to call their It support company. So just think about that here. They have such little respect and such little love for their MSP that whenever someone's computer is broken, they all crowd around the computer and try and fix it themselves. And Darren said to me that it's a big thing if someone has to call it support. They all get a little bit kind of like the whole energy comes down. And I said to him, well, why is it we had a back and forth on this? And I said, why is that? And he said, essentially because it just seems to take them so long to respond to the request. Seems to take them so long to actually do anything. Everything just takes so long. And they would rather just try and fix it themselves. Isn't this interesting? Now, they also then had a technician come round. So once a year, a technician comes into the office and kind of does around all the desks and says to them, what problems have you got? And Darren has an issue with his printer, which is that when he goes to print stuff, it won't come out on the office printer. He can only connect to the boss's printer. So he reluctantly said to the guy, actually, do you think you could fix that? And him and a colleague were sort of sat the opposite side of the room having a little private conversation saying, please don't let him mess up my computer. Please don't let him mess up my computer. They have no respect for the MSP whatsoever. Now, I tell you this because it's actually quite an interesting insight into how ordinary people think and act, isn't it? Because we never really know what the conversations that are happening amongst the users and you could say, well, does it really matter what the users think? Yes, it really matters because I'll tell you what's going to happen at some point in the future. The boss of that business, and there's about 25 people in that business, the boss of the business is going to come out of their office one day and he's going to look around and say, where is everyone? What are they all doing? And then find them all crowded around someone's computer and will say, what's going on here? And they'll, you know, Dave's got an issue with his whatever. And the boss will just say, we'll ring it support. And the look on their faces and their response will tell him that something is up with it support. And this is how it starts. Someone switches from one MSP to another MSP, not because they're thinking with their brain. Well, most of the time they're not thinking with their brain. I need to save money or I need to do this. Most of the time it's down to an emotional response. My staff don't trust them. I am losing time and productivity because my staff don't trust it support people. So do you know what? Perhaps it's time to switch. This is why the world's best, simplest and yet most powerful marketing strategy is the right one for you. Because what we're really talking about here is getting the right message in front of the right person at the right time. My friend Darren's Boss isn't ready to switch MSP today, but he might be next week, or the week after, or the week after that. So here's what we need to do. We need to build multiple audiences of people to listen to us, at the very least, your LinkedIn and your email. Then we need to build a relationship with them. And we do this through content marketing. Send out an email once a week, an educational email, and post onto social media every day. And then the third step is we commercialize that relationship and we do that by making outbound phone calls. Not cold calls, not selling it's someone on your behalf calling up people like my friends. Darren's boss and just building the relationship, moving the relationship forward, trying to find that exact moment where their heart says it's time to switch from my incumbent to someone new. And hopefully that someone new will be you here's this week's. Clever idea.
Now, this is pretty exciting for me because I get to do something and say something here which genuinely could save your marriage in 2024. It could improve your relationship with your children next year, and it could certainly make your business better, make it more robust, make it easier to grow it, and even make your staff happier. What is this thing that I've got, this miracle cure all thing? It's actually something very, very simple. Here's what I want you to do. I want you to grab your calendar right now. Pause this podcast if you need to go and grab your calendar. And I want you to look ahead to 2024, which remember, today at time of broadcast is only two months away. Then what I want you to do is I want you to look at all 52 weeks next year and decide which of those weeks you want to be on holiday. Now, if you have kids, it kind of makes sense that those holiday weeks should be when your kids are off school. If you have someone important in your life again, it kind of makes sense that you pick some holiday time when they can also have some holiday time. But here's what I want you to do. Whether you can do it now or whether it's something that has to be done tomorrow, I want you to find those holiday weeks and I want you to block them out in your calendar, and then I want you to block them out in your MSPs, like company calendar, whatever tool you use to coordinate who has leave. The thing I want you to do is I want you to pick two, three, four, whatever is appropriate, however many weeks next year for your holidays. And I want you to lock that into your diary now. And then I want you to tell your spouse, I want you to tell your kids and certainly tell your colleagues, this is when I am off next year. Nothing is going to change this. These are my holiday weeks. And particularly if you've allowed yourself a generous holiday and look, you know, I'm assuming you're the owner or the manager of the MSP, you should allow yourself a generous holiday. And what I want you to do is to lock those holidays in and schedule everything else around those holidays and not just do that next year, do that in 25, do it in 26, do it in 2027. I kind of wasn't exaggerating when I said that this could save your marriage or build your relationship with your kids. And I certainly wasn't exaggerating wasn't exaggerating when I said that this will improve your business. Because the stuff we're talking about here is you taking time for the really important things, which is family, which is thinking about your business, not just doing stuff in your business, but thinking about it, that having time off is absolutely critical. And yet it's so easy for us to forget this. It's so easy for us to get to March or April and think, oh yeah, we need to book some holiday time, we must get round to that. And then you discover that your service desk manager is booked off the first two weeks of August, so you can't do it then. And then someone else is off in September and suddenly the owner of the business, the person who, let's be honest, in terms of driving growth, is the most important person in the business, can't go and take the holiday that they need to do. So yet again, it's another year where you don't get a proper family holiday, or worse still, you have a family holiday, but you're doing some help desk stuff or doing some work stuff in the morning. So it's not a holiday.
I know working holidays are all the rage, but for me, a proper holiday is where you have a complete break and that's it. There's no work whatsoever. It's really, really healthy. Do you know what? As well, you will last longer. Not just physically because you're more rested, but mentally because you're more rested. And actually you'll stay a business owner for longer as well. My first few years as a business owner, back in sort of 2005 to about 2008, I was working like 80 hours weeks. I was taking barely a few days off a year. And I wouldn't still be a business owner today here in 2023. If I'd carried on at that pace, I would have burned out so quickly. But I learned from a mentor of mine very quickly the power of doing this. Take some holidays that you want to have, lock them in your calendar. Everything else works around those holidays. Can you do this?
Perhaps towards the end of this week, you're going to slump down on the couch, on the sofa at the end of the day, crack open a beer and do a little bit of a YouTube rabbit warren. Do you do know you just put on YouTube, you think just for five minutes and then 3 hours later you've watched all sorts of really cool videos because YouTube knows more about what you want to watch than you do. Well, if you're doing this and you don't want to have that guilty feeling at the end, then why not go on to my YouTube channel? Because we are trying very hard to make it as entertaining as we can. But you will also learn about marketing your business, discover some ways to grow your business while you're having a beer on the sofa, on the couch. Go on to Youtube.com. Slash MSP. Marketing.
[00:10:08] Speaker B: Hi, I'm Mariana Henninger and I help businesses like MSPs build trust faster and sell more quickly with a two to four minute brand video and building trust quickly.
[00:10:18] Speaker A: And certainly selling more quickly is something every MSP wants because the sales cycle is so long. And you're going to explain for us exactly what a brand video is later on in the interview. But thank you very much for joining us, Mariana. I do appreciate you having on the show. Very amusing. Just before we started the recording that I'm in my usual spiel I do with my guests of explaining how I've got a clapper board and how we're doing video. And then you said to me, so very politely, you said, paul, I'm a video producer. I know why you're doing all of these things. So thank you for being kind with me, because I'm not a video producer. I'm just a guy that stands in front of a camera. Let's talk a little bit about you before we talk about brand videos and building trust. Give us an idea of your background and how you got yourself to this point with your own business, producing videos for businesses.
[00:11:02] Speaker B: For sure. I love it. So I'm a documentary filmmaker. I've been in the journalism sort of documentary world for about 15 years. I have an Emmy, another nomination for another emmy, and I'm absolutely obsessed, Paul, with passionate, intimate, beautiful, personal storytelling. And I believe that's how humans connect with humans. People do business with other people. MSPs do business with other it's, at the end of the day, the focus on how you're interacting with another person who's providing a service, who's solving a problem in your life or in your business, that human interaction is incredibly valuable. And so my entire work as a documentary filmmaker has been focused on really understanding what the emotional touch points, what the emotional connections between people are. And to me, the reason I love documentary filmmaking is because a good documentary film has the power to transform the way that you see the world and to help you see the world in a different way because you've connected with what that other person is going through and you feel something. So that is like the biggest objective to any video that I make. And now I'm focused on making brand videos. And the idea is, what do you want your customer, the person that you're serving, to feel at the end of watching this?
[00:12:29] Speaker A: So you've actually got a real Emmy.
[00:12:32] Speaker B: Yes, I do. It's right there. Wow.
[00:12:34] Speaker A: And it sits on your desk. That's so cool.
[00:12:37] Speaker B: I know. I need to reshuffle things around. So it's kind of in the background right now. You have a gold lamp, but not my Emmy.
[00:12:43] Speaker A: But anyway no, you absolutely do.
If you're just listening to this, go and watch this on YouTube.
I think you're the first emmy award winner that we've ever had on the show. What was the project that you won the emmy for?
[00:12:56] Speaker B: That was a story about a man whose mother was dying of dementia. And when we think of diseases, terrible diseases like dementia, obviously the person who is suffering from it is kind of the center of the story. And this man, he essentially decided to document what that meant, what that meant to have his young mom diagnosed with dementia. He didn't know what to expect, and so that's what drove him to start to pull out a GoPro and start kind of filming his interactions with his mom and posting them on YouTube. And all of a sudden, he kind of went viral when one day he would take his mom for a milkshake every time he saw her, and one time they're having a milkshake and she forgets who he is. And obviously that's heartbreaking to experience that. Long story short, the story kind of focuses on him and the idea that caretakers have this massive toll that's not always talked about.
And so it's a really touching story. I had to cram it into ten minutes because my boss at the time thought it should be super short. I had enough for a feature film, I think, and people are like, is this the trailer? But at the end of the day, sometimes less is more, and it's very impactful.
I don't recommend you watch it unless you have a box of tissues.
[00:14:18] Speaker A: So it's not like a barbenheimer thing, maybe, where you have something happy to watch. After you've watched this, I think you.
[00:14:25] Speaker B: Go back and you appreciate the family that you have, perhaps is kind of.
[00:14:29] Speaker A: The yeah, I can imagine that. So you talk about producing pieces of filmed I don't want to say the word entertainment after you've just described that, but what you won your Emmy for was essentially entertainment. I guess it was educational, but it was at a heart entertainment. You talk about moving people and affecting them emotionally, and obviously this is something you're now doing with businesses rather than actually creating filmed entertainment. So how did you make that leap? Where was that natural jump for you?
[00:15:00] Speaker B: Yeah, so I'd been in the journalism documentary world for so long, about 15 years, and traveled all over the world. I've been to Afghanistan and Haiti and Israel, and I've lived in different continents, and that was my entire life. I loved it, and I really could have kept doing that my whole life, but I had been at NBC at that point for about five years in this position, and a couple of things were happening. One, I had sort of reached the sort of salary ceiling that I could get without becoming a manager, which I didn't want to do. I still wanted to be in the field, meeting people, being a filmmaker. And then the second thing is, I've kind of been a closeted entrepreneur my whole life. I started my first business when I was six years old in my neighbor's garden shed, that I asked them to empty out so I could build a little school and would charge students $0.25 apiece to come and learn how to read before they went to first grade. It was just like a business. I've always wanted to make my own money, and so I've always found ways to do that. And it was kind of at a point where I had to ask myself, if not now, when?
If I don't kind of pause on this career that I've built and this amazing journey that I've had and start a business and kind of see how I can take all of this knowledge and experience that I had gained at that point and combine my two passions. Because the entire time I'd been passionate about business and marketing and sales and growth and making money, all these things really excite me. But I had never really worked with them or been involved in them. And I decided it was time to combine these really two big passions of mine. And that's how know formed brand magnetic.
[00:16:40] Speaker A: And of course, that's something that Michael Gerber talks about in his book The E myth Revisited. He calls it the entrepreneurial seizure, doesn't he? Which is where once you've got that idea in your head that I should do this thing, I should do it for myself, if you don't let it out, then you remain a very unhappy person. I'm sure there are many unhappy colleagues of yours. Is it 30 Rockefeller Place? Is that where NBC is? It rings a bell from 30 Rock, which is a sitcom I vaguely watch for a while. Anyway. Less showbiz stuff, more brand videos. Explain to us what a brand video is, because we talk a lot about video on this podcast, and videos are so important for MSPs, even though few of them ever really embrace it. But what specifically is a brand video?
[00:17:22] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. A brand video is probably something you've not seen before. So it's a two to four minute video that is focused on the parts of your story that, you know, resonate emotionally with your audience, and it's filled with compelling visuals. The two kind of most important questions that you need to ask is, what do I want my audience to feel after watching this? Which is, how does my audience feel right after engaging with me in business, right after hiring my services as an MSP, for example? And then the second question is, what do I know resonates with my audience? So whatever journey I've been on as the founder of my business, as the person who is hopefully passionate about being an MSP, what is it about my story that I know my audience will connect with and will understand?
For most businesses, you want your audience. For most MSPs, you would probably want your audience to think, oh, I can trust this person. Like, wow, look how driven they are. Look how obsessed they are about what they do. Look how organized they are. Look how much they've done. Which I kind of try to stay away from accomplishments and awards and other things that we might use for marketing purposes and really focus on your story. As a human, we think about the know, like, and trust factor in marketing. And I'm sure you've talked to your audiences about, you know, the no is obviously awareness. People have a problem they need to solve, so they come to an MSP, or they're looking for one. So let's say they become aware of you and we want them to get to trust, which is when they're ready to buy. Right? But we kind of skip over the like so what makes you likable as an MSP? What makes you likable as a human? And that's what your brand video is going to focus on in, like, two to four minutes.
[00:19:12] Speaker A: I love this. I love this so much. Because the average MSP doesn't know much about marketing. They're fantastic at what they do with the technology and looking after clients and helping people. But when it comes to marketing, they don't know what to do. So without any help, the average MSP will just chuck themselves together. A website, which is about accreditations, it's about qualifications, it's about what we can do. And look, we've got a partnership with Cisco or whoever brands that most people haven't heard of these days. And a constant drum for me that I'm beating is exactly what you've just said. Actually. Prospects pick you or don't pick you based on their ability to get to know you, to like you, and to trust you. So I'm hearing nothing but good things here. So a four minute video, this is the one thing that would concern me a little bit. And I know that I will sit and happily watch and or the Star Wars show on Disney Plus, which is 48 minutes an episode, and I'll happily sit and watch that. But I know that they've probably spent $10 million filming that. And no MSP has $10 million or even a million dollars to film a four minute video. So how do you stop that four minute video being boring? Because I often find with videos that the shorter the video, the better. Unless you've got the ability to really tell that good story, which most of us don't have.
[00:20:27] Speaker B: Yeah, no, absolutely.
I won't sugarcoat it, Paul. It's actually kind of hard to tell your own story on your own. It's much easier when you're working with somebody who has the expertise and who kind of can guide you along the way. So with my students, I've created frameworks for them to do a lot of this sort of starting work yourself, but in order to get to that story that's very well crafted and is a conversion tool for your business. It's not just your origin story. It's not just the story that you tell about yourself. It really is thinking about the intersection of who you are with what your audience resonates with. That is the golden sort of roadmap for a brand video that works like it should. And so if four minutes makes your story boring, then don't do four minutes, do two. Do half of that. The idea for a great video is usually that less is more. So we call it in the filmmaking business, trimming the fat. So it requires sometimes a lot of massaging and processing your story. It's not something that you just kind of throw together, although I will say so that's kind of my official answer.
But I will say if you're not ready for a brand video yet, or if this is just the first time you've even heard of it, whatever the case may be, just the idea that you're coming on and sharing keep it short, but sharing a little bit about who you are, who the person is behind the MSP, is already going to do wonders for your business. It's already going to differentiate you from everyone else. And one other point that I want to make, based on something that you've said, I think there are still businesses who are kind know MSPs, other businesses. There are a lot of folks making this mistake where their website is basically all about them, their credentials, their experience. These are the clients we've worked with. This is what we can do. Look how awesome we are. Pick us.
If you read Story Brand by Donald Miller, which you might have spoken to folks about, your audience, your customer is your hero, and they're the person who you should address your website to. So depending on who I work with, they're either in one end of the spectrum or the other, where they're either only talking about themselves or they're only talking about what we can do for you. And here's how amazing your life will be when you work with us. And what I try to do is kind of think about how can we meet in the middle where you are focusing your messaging on your customer and what the transformation in their business, the amazing results that they can have by working with you. So it is about them, but ultimately they still want to know. It's still so important to know who that person is behind that business. So what makes you different from the MSP that's competing with you in the same market or whatever the case may be?
How are you differentiating yourself? Because messages tend to sound the same after a while. And the thing that really will set you apart is who you are as the MSP behind your business.
[00:23:36] Speaker A: Yeah, I completely agree. This is awful when you have a guest on and you agree with everything that you say, but I agree completely with you there. There's no conflict here because actually your average prospect, someone that's a normal business owner that's looking to switch from their incumbent, that they're not happy with anymore for emotional reasons. They'll switch over to someone new. They'll do a beauty parade of, let's say, three or four or five MSPs. And if all of those MSPs will say the same thing and what you're saying here is you've got even if you only go slightly down this route, you've got an opportunity to stand out and be different by I love that mix of talking about them and talking about yourself.
Let's just as a final exploration and this is putting you on the spot a little bit, but let's say you did start working with an MSP. We'll give him a name. His name is Dave. And Dave which state should we have Dave in? Let's have Dave in South Carolina. And Dave's been running his MSP for five years. There's him and five of his staff. He's married. He's got two kids. He goes to church every Sunday. He supports the local baseball team. Don't ask me what that is, but that's Dave, and he's just a regular guy, right, who happens to be an It owner. He loves what he does, but he wants more clients. Now, I'm not asking you to tell us exactly what you would do with Dave, because I'm sure that's a very long process, which we can't do in the three minutes left of this interview. But what's the kind of approach that you would take in a situation like that? How would you start to delve into what someone's story is, and how do you get that out?
[00:25:08] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. So I start with those two really important questions is, first of all, hopefully Dave knows so much about his audience that is the one thing that you should do for your business. No matter what you're doing in business, you should understand your audience, understand their pain points as if they were your own. Understand. But adding to that layer of understanding them is understanding again, how do they need to feel right before they buy from you? So 95% of purchasing decisions are based on subconscious. A study by Harvard Business School kind of revealed that. And what is the subconscious? It's how you feel. It's not how you're thinking logistically and logically about price point and what exactly you're getting those things. You can diminish that part of your brain by tapping into the emotional state of that person. Trust is an emotion, right? And we know that trust leads to buying. And so for Dave, I would want to know more about his audience, and I would want to know, are most of the folks that he speaks with, are they dads as, like, maybe the literal league coaching is something that what personality traits of Dave do we learn by the things that he does? And in that universe, of all of Dave's personality traits, which ones will resonate with his audience the most? Which ones will they identify with and start to see Dave as that friend? Start. To see Dave. Like, man, I want to work with Dave. He's a cool. Like I like him. His values are similar to mine. So that's what I would tap into first. As we're thinking about Dave's core story, and then the additional layer to the brand video is just thinking about compelling already. I was like watching that brand video as you were describing it in my head, because I'm thinking about all of the things that can kind of illustrate Dave when he's not on his computer doing work. We don't need to see that because we're all doing that.
That's not a compelling visual, but we want to think about the things that sort of are supporting aspects of Dave's story that not only very literally kind of illustrate what he does, but sort of bring us in that emotional journey. And that's what a good movie will do, right? When you're just carried along, it's called narrative transportation. When the part of your brain that's thinking, can I afford this? How difficult will this be? Yada, yada, yada. Boring, boring, boring. Numbers on a page. And instead we're thinking about, like, of course I'm going to work with Dave. He's awesome.
I don't care how much it costs, he's my guy.
[00:27:42] Speaker A: I love that phrase, narrative transportation. And I'm laughing as well, because it sounds like the least interesting thing about Dave is all the technology stuff. And the most interesting thing is everything else, his actual life. And actually, if you think about how we used to buy back in the 1960s so I know you live just outside New York City. One of my favorite in fact, probably my number one favorite TV show of all time is Mad Men, which maybe you've seen. It's about the advertising world on Madison Avenue in the 1960s. And it's so much more than just about advertising. It's just a snapshot of America at the time. It's an utterly compelling show. And one of the things that's interesting is how difficult it is to get messages to people. When you're buying from someone, you have to physically meet with them because it's the you can pick up the phone, but even the phone is difficult and the technology that we have today isn't there. And I think about how did people buy 50, 60 years ago? They met with each other, they had a drink with each other. They shook hands, they met each other's. Families go back 100 years ago, we were trading out of our houses, weren't we? It's almost like we've come full circle. 150 years ago, shops were people's houses. What we have here in the UK of pubs, bars in the US, they were people's houses. You stayed in people's houses. And now we work from home. We don't quite trade from home. But anyway, it's very similar. So what we're looking at doing here is using video to try to replace that, because we've lost that from the we lost that actual physical connecting with people, and it's really cool that we now have the technology to replace it. Anyway, I love that we're going to let Dave get back on with his computer stuff. I'm sure Dave is not looking forward to his filming session, but it'll be worth it, Dave, when you get lots of new clients. Mariana, thank you so much for sharing with us. Tell us a little bit more about what you can do to help MSPs and how can we get in touch with you?
[00:29:32] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. I think the best place to send folks is Brandmagnetic.com. I've got a Brand video starter guide that is a great place for you to kind of start thinking about what your story would be, how would you craft that core story, what visuals would be involved there, and it's a great sort of starter place for folks. Brandmagnetic.com.
[00:29:52] Speaker A: Paul Green's, MFP Marketing Podcast this week's recommended book.
[00:29:58] Speaker C: Hi. My name is Henry Duncan. I'm the managing director of Lamware, a specialist MSP to the UK financial services sector. My book recommendation is the Phoenix project. It's the story of Bill, an It manager at a manufacturing company. It's tuesday morning, on his drive to work, Bill gets a call from the CEO. The company's new It initiative, codenamed the Phoenix Project, is critical to the future of the company, but the project is massively over budget, very late, and in complete chaos. The CEO wants Bill to report directly to him, fix the mess in 90 days or Bill's going to lose his job and his entire It department will be outsourced. It's a race against the clock. It's the journey that Bill then goes on is one that I think anyone who's been tasked with growing an It function or building an It business will totally relate to. It's full of moments that will make you smile and cringe at the same time when you recall some of your own similar experiences coming up next week.
[00:31:00] Speaker A: Hi, I'm Josh. I'm a technical recruiter at Beaumont. I'm going to tell you all the problems that you have with finding and retaining technical stuff and how to fix them. And on top of that fantastic interview next week, we're going to look at how to make things easier. Easier for new clients to choose you, easier for them to deal with you on a daily basis, and certainly easier for them to spend more with you. We want to remove as much friction within your MSP as possible, so everything dealing with you seems easy. Join me next Tuesday and have a very profitable week in your MSP. Made in the UK for MSPs around the world. Paul Green's. Ms MSP marketing podcast.
