Episode 227: MSPs: Get 408 comments on a LinkedIn post

Episode 227 March 19, 2024 00:34:05
Episode 227: MSPs: Get 408 comments on a LinkedIn post
Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast
Episode 227: MSPs: Get 408 comments on a LinkedIn post

Mar 19 2024 | 00:34:05

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Hosted By

Paul Green

Show Notes

Episode 227

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:

Featured guest:

Thank you to Fractional CTO & CPO Mark Herschberg, for joining me to talk about his experience of being on the receiving end of spammy, untargeted ‘cold’ marketing, and for offering alternatives to MSPs to engage with their leads and prospects in a more meaningful way.

Mark Herschberg is the author of The Career Toolkit: Essential Skills for Success That No One Taught You and creator of the Brain Bump app. From tracking criminals and terrorists on the dark web to creating marketplaces and new authentication systems, Mark has spent his career launching and developing new ventures at startups and Fortune 500s and in academia, with over a dozen patents to his name. He helped to start the Undergraduate Practice Opportunities Program, dubbed MIT’s “career success accelerator,” where he teaches annually. At MIT, he received a B.S. in physics, a B.S. in electrical engineering & computer science, and a M.Eng. in electrical engineering & computer science, focusing on cryptography. At Harvard Business School, Mark helped create a platform used to teach finance at prominent business schools. He also works with many non-profits, currently serving on the board of Plant A Million Corals. He was one of the top-ranked ballroom dancers in the country and now lives in New York City, where he is known for his social gatherings, including his annual Halloween party, as well as his diverse cufflink collection.

Connect with Mark on LinkedIn:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/hershey/

Extra show notes:

Transcription:

NB this transcription has been generated by an AI tool and provided as-is.

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Fresh every Tuesday for MSPs around the world. Around the world, this Paul Paul Paul Greens MSP Marketing podcast and welcome back to the podcast. Here’s what I got in store for you this week. [00:00:14] Speaker B: Hi, I’m Mark Herschberg. I’m a fractional CTO and I am sick of all the sales spam I get from MSPs. Join me on Paul’s podcast to learn better way. [00:00:25] Speaker A: And on top of that interview with Mark later in the show, we’re going to talk about LinkedIn and how I got 408 comments on a single post. I’ll tell you how you can do exactly the same thing.

Paul. Paul Greens MSP Marketing podcast let’s talk about whether you can generate leads by physically knocking on doors. One MSP is doing just this and has two super hot prospects. So I work very closely with about 20 MSPs and we jump on a Zoom every other week and we discuss their marketing in detail. And one of them told me something totally shocking a few weeks ago. You see those MSPs with me? We’ve been working to implement my three step marketing strategy. You may have heard me talk about this in the podcast before. It is the absolute cornerstone, the bedrock of everything I do with MSPs. Three steps. Step one is you build multiple audiences. Step two is you build a relationship with them. And step three is you commercialize that relationship. So that means growing your LinkedIn and your email and other audiences. It means putting out content on a regular basis, at the very least daily on social media and weekly on email. And then that third step is commercializing the audience. And typically that involves, well, what I suggest is you go and get a back to work mum to pick up the phone on your behalf and to call people so that you personally don’t have to. And these phone calls that she’s making, they’re not sales calls, they are relationship building calls. The idea is to find out where someone is with their existing relationship with their incumbent MSP and see if they’re ready to switch today, or whether we should just do some more relationship building with them or whatsoever. So I’m working with an MSP who has done their own version of this. And sometimes it makes me really excited when people take advice and they tweak it and change it and go off and do something different. And this instance is definitely exciting. Listen to this. The MSP I’m working with isn’t phoning people. Instead, he’s getting in the car for a couple of hours a day and he is going out there and essentially calling on businesses in fact, his target is seven calls a day. So when he first started he literally did the other businesses in his building and then the next day he did the businesses in the next building and then he was going down the street. And as the days go on, he’s working further and further away from his office. But every day he literally goes and knocks on seven doors. How cool is that? Right? And he’s very motivated to do this because of those seven knocks he will typically get to speak to and you’ll be shocked by this two or three decision makers. So let’s just put that in perspective. If you were to make seven outbound calls, I would expect you to speak to zero decision makers, right. It can take 10, 15, 20, even more outbound calls, unsolicited outbound calls before you get hold of a decision maker. And yet this guy is going and knocking on seven doors. And on average, and it is an average. Some days it’s more, some days it’s less. But it balances out. On average he’ll knock on seven doors, talk to seven receptionists and end up speaking to a couple of decision makers. So as you can imagine, he is very very motivated to do this because the second he’s having a one on one conversation with the business owner, he’s bought a couple of hours of their time, right? And he takes along some printed materials with him. He’s got some stuff that we put in the MSP marketing edge, particularly our IT services buyers guide. And out of this and talking to these decision makers, he’s actually got a couple of genuine hot prospects. People who are really, really upset and unhappy with their incumbent. They’re happy to talk to him. He’s moving it forward to having an engagement, moving towards putting in a proposal and that’s fantastic, right? In fact, in fact, if he can win a client off the back of this activity, that becomes then his activity, right? Because here’s the thing, it doesn’t really matter what you hear me telling you to do, what you hear other marketing people telling you to do, what you read on the Internet. What I think you have to do is you have to find the activities that work the best for you in your business. And when you find those activities and if you’re comfortable with it, many people would not be comfortable knocking on doors. But this guy is, right, good for him. He’s found something that works for him and the return on investment is actually pretty good. 2 hours out on average, having two conversations, generating some good prospects every week or every other week, that’s a fantastic return for him. You find the things that work for you and then you stick with those things, but you keep doing them. That’s critical. If you find something that works, you can’t do it for a few weeks and stop. You need to turn it into a system. Here’s a question for you. What do you do in your business that other MSPs don’t do? What marketing really works for you, that you love, that you just don’t see other MSPs doing? Here’s this week’s clever idea.

Now let’s talk about how to achieve an insane amount of engagement on one LinkedIn post. In fact, this is so effective, I gave it a name. I call it a 48 hours LinkedIn frenzy. So let me tell you what I did, how you can copy it and how you can use it to generate leads for your MSP. Now, let me first of all tell you the stats of what I achieved with this LinkedIn post. I’ve got the stats here on a little bit of paper. So this one post, which I call it a 48 hours LinkedIn frenzy, this particular post actually ran for nearly two weeks until suddenly the algorithm stopped putting it in front of people. Now, let me just give you some context of the size of my LinkedIn Network. So I have around about 8000 people. I’m connected to most of them MSPs. There’s some vendors in there as well. And then I’ve got around about 9000 people who are following me. So there will be some crossover between those two figures. If you don’t know what followers are on LinkedIn, by the way, it means I’m a content creator. So at some point in the past, I’ve switched on. I’ve literally flicked a switch in LinkedIn that says I’m a content creator. And that means I can put videos on there, I can do a LinkedIn newsletter, I could go live if I wanted to. But I tell you this so that you know I’m coming at this from quite a big network. However, the results are still replicable by you, regardless of the size of your network. So the post that I put on this one single post, it got a total of 16,093 impressions. So that means it’s come up in front of people 16,000 times. Now, I don’t believe that that’s 16,000 people. I think it has just come up in the feeds of people 16,000 times. There’s no real way of knowing how many people have actually seen that, just as there’s no real way of knowing how many of them paused on that. How many of them just flicked past it? But that’s still the highest number of impressions I’ve ever had on a post. To give you some context, my second best was around about 1800 impressions. So that gives you an idea. Just that’s nearly a ten times improvement, isn’t it? Just on this one post. Now, this is where it’s really exciting. These posts generated 408 comments. 408. Which again is by far the most number of comments I’ve ever had. In fact, normally I’ll get like six or seven comments. Now, I must be honest, half of those comments are from me. And in fact, one of the things I’m about to tell you that will sort of help you to make this happen for your MSP is that I replied to every single comment I got. So 204 people commented on this post, and I replied to them 204 times over a two week period. How cool is that? I didn’t realize I’d done quite that much work on it. And then this got as well, then 89 connection requests. So that’s 89 people who connected with me. And that’s a mix of me connection requesting them and them connection requesting me. 89 people directly off the back of this post. So let me tell you exactly what I did and why it works and what the psychology is. And as I’m telling you this, write this down because you can copy exactly this. So I put a post on LinkedIn, and it was a very specific kind of post offering a very specific thing. I offered a free guide, so I put together this guide and it was called your MSP’s ATM, or if you’re british, cash machine, automatic telemachine ATM. I think the rest of the world knows what that is. And it was a little guide about how to grow the monthly recurring revenue within your business. Quick spoiler alert on that, if you want to know, is three things you do a profit matrix, which is where you have a grid of who’s buying what. Then you do strategic reviews, which is a better name for quarterly business reviews. So you sit down with every client and talk about their business, and then ideally you lock them into a technology roadmap, which is like a three year strategic plan for where their technology is going to go. And all of that was in my 40 page guide. So I was giving this away for free. And I said to everyone in my network, if you want to get a copy of this, you’ve just got to comment below. Now, the commenting below is deliberate. This is strategic because I could have just put a link to the PDF there, right? But it would not have had 16,000 impressions and generated 400 comments. I wanted the engagement, and the reason I wanted the engagement is because when LinkedIn can see that lots of people are engaging on something, it shows it to other people like them. And this was exactly what I was hoping to do. Those 89 connection requests that I got are all new MSPs people that I’ve never spoken to before, who presumably maybe if they knew me, but they were never connected to me. So this is brilliant. So I posted this and I said, comment below and I will send this guide to you. So they commented below and every single comment. I then did two things. First of all, I replied to the comment to say, oh, thanks very much, David, I’ve just DM’d that to you. And then I actually dm it to them. Actually, I did it the other way around. I sent the dms first, then I replied to the comment. So what I’d do is I would sort of open it up. And if you do this on a desktop, it’s kind of easy. Let’s say you’ve got 20 new comments and you click the name of the 20 people, but you hold down whatever the button is on your keyboard that opens it as a new tab, right? So you’ve got 20 new tabs, and then you can go along and you literally, if you’re already connected to them, you just copy and paste your message, change their name. Hi David, thanks very much for commenting on my post. Here’s the guide to creating or to turning your MSP into an ATM, as promised. And then there’s a link to a PDF which I’ve got hosted on my website. And then if I’m not connected to them, I do a connection request and I put the same message in the connection request. So you know when you connection request someone and you can put your message in? Well, that’s exactly the message that I put in. But I then, as I say, replied to every single comment so that they knew that that was coming. But also, of course, from LinkedIn’s point of view, that then is more engagement. So let’s just stop for a second and look at this. Just what have we got so far? We’ve got a post that’s gone on LinkedIn offering a guide, and the guide is something that the audience really wants. There’s not a single MSP who doesn’t want to turn their business into a cash machine, right? So then to get it, they comment. I then send them a message with the guide and reply to their comment. So I’ve now got more engagement on my post and I’ve got a direct message into their inbox. This is all good so far. Now, the next thing that I did is when I did connection request someone brand new, I used a very specific phrase in my reply, so the phrase was connection request. So every new connection on that post I can track, because I use the words connection request. And when I was just putting those stats together just now, just before this recording, I literally went through the post and I searched for the words connection request as a phrase and it appeared 89 times. So that’s how I know I got 89 new connections out of it. Do you see how smart that is? And the reason I did that is I’d hoped this would be as popular as it turned out to be, which is great. And I now know not only have I had massive engagement, but also I’ve had 89 brand new contacts out of it. So that’s the methodology. That’s pretty much it, but it’s what you could do next that’s really exciting. You see, even if you’ve only got, I don’t know, what, 501,000 in your network, you probably wouldn’t get 408 comments, but you might get ten or 20 comments, which might be more than you would normally get on a LinkedIn post. And once you’ve got these new connections and you’ve direct messaged someone, you’ve sent them a DM. You can then do an outreach follow up. You could follow them up again by direct message, or you could send them an email. A lot of people’s emails are in their contact details on LinkedIn, or you can just go and google it or use a plugin like Lusher. It’s really easy to find someone’s email once you have their LinkedIn profile and you’re connected to them. And obviously, once you found their email, you can find their website, you can find their phone. The whole beauty of this is you get a bit of engagement within LinkedIn, but very few people are going to come back off the back of that and buy from you. Although I say that we got, I think it was four new members to the MSP marketing edge directly off the back of that post, which is really cool. And thank you if you are one of the people that joined. But for an MSP, it’s not quite as simple as that. I’m selling a very simple marketing subscription that helps you with your marketing. You’re selling a very difficult, complicated and complex bespoke service that they are going to commit to and hopefully stay for ten years. Needs a little bit more selling for that. So you would definitely do some kind of outreach. Essentially, you use this as an opportunity to message them, to email them, and definitely to phone them. The magic is absolutely done on the phone. Like I was talking about earlier in the podcast. Now, something really important if you’re going to do this, is to get the timing right. Don’t put your post out on like a Friday because that will kill it, because LinkedIn usage is massively down at the weekends. Don’t do it on a Monday because Mondays suck. Do it on a Tuesday or a Wednesday. That’s a great day to do your 48 hours LinkedIn frenzy, which may go on for even longer anyway. But also it means that when you come around to next Monday or Tuesday, you can actually then pick up the phone and start to call people. There’s no point calling them six weeks after that post went out. You’ve got to call them in a timely manner. And when you call them, you can say, oh, hi, I’m calling about our conversation on LinkedIn. And you can say, hey, Dave, my name’s Paul, we were just chatting on LinkedIn. In fact, you asked for my free guide about whatever it is, and I sent that over to you, just checking, have you received that? And of course they say yes or no, whichever it is. Some people will say they haven’t, even though they have doesn’t matter. And then of course, you follow it up with the killer question, a question which gets them engaged, because it’s getting them talking about their favorite subject. And that killer question is, so tell me about your business. What is it you guys do all being? Well, 15 minutes later you’ll be able to be pushing them and talking about, well, if it’s someone calling on your behalf, then you’re talking about booking them a 15 minutes zoom with you, which is the next step in the sales process. If it’s you yourself that’s done these calls, then obviously you’re talking about pushing them into either a paid consultation or actually having a sales meeting. And that would only happen if they were unhappy with their incumbent. But you know what? You phone enough people, and especially if they’ve engaged with you on LinkedIn, and eventually you’ll find someone who’s nearly, nearly ready, willing and able to buy from you.

Look, this is really, really simple. If you want to have a better life, you need more clients, because more clients means more cash coming into the business. The cash can be used to buy resources. The resources can service the clients better, but also free you personally up from having to do all of the work. And that means that you can spend more time at home, have a better relationship with your partner, and be a better, more present parent for your kids. It really is a direct correlation. That’s how it works for business owner parents like you and me. So how do you get new clients? Well, you need to up your marketing game. I have a simple marketing plan for you to follow, and I have all the white label marketing content that you could possibly need to implement that plan. And I only work with one MSP per area. Go and see the full details of what I do and how you and I could possibly work together. MSP Marketing edge big interview.

[00:16:38] Speaker B: Hi, I’m Mark Herschberg and I am a fractional CTO. [00:16:42] Speaker A: A fractional CTO. What a fantastic job title that is. I think to a whole load of people outside of our world, they wouldn’t have a clue what that is. But of course, we know exactly what that is. And thank you for joining me on the podcast. Mark, you and I got chatting, and we were chatting about how awful it is to be at the other end of the spammy emails and the cold calls and all of the terrible marketing that lots and lots of MSPs do. And we’re going to get today your experience of what it’s like to be on the other end, which I think will be quite eye opening for any MSP who’s doing any kind of cold marketing. Before we get on to that, let’s talk about you and your background and what you do now. Because actually, although you’re a fractional CTO, you’re involved in quite a lot of things, including cybersecurity. [00:17:29] Speaker B: I do a number of things, and you’re right that my graduate work at MIT was in cybersecurity. I have built a lot of tech startups, from classic early stage startups to helping Fortune 500s play startup. And I’ve done a lot of cybersecurity, but also ad tech and other areas independent of that. So I have that one path doing tech. I have another path where I’ve been teaching for over 20 years at MIT, professional skills to our students. Things like leadership, networking, negotiating. And I put all that in my book, the career toolkit, essential skills for success that no one taught you because we don’t teach people these skills. And so now I have this parallel career where I teach these skills to businesses and I speak all over the world about. And related to that, I created the brain bump app to help people retain these professional skills. [00:18:20] Speaker A: Okay, so we will come back round to the book and to your brain bump app towards the end of the interview. Let’s first of all, just take a little side diversion into cybersecurity and how that’s changed. So you said you’ve been teaching at MIT for 20 years, when you were involved in cybersecurity, back when you were a student, which I’m guessing is more than 20 years ago. How different was cybersecurity back then compared to what you see now with ransomware, phishing and all of the rest of it? [00:18:47] Speaker B: Cybersecurity back in the 90s when I was doing my graduate work, and then first out of school, it just meant, can we get HTTPs? Can we encrypt all those important bits going over the Internet? Can we encrypt your password on the database so when they break into it, it’s not just easy for them to get. We were really doing encryption 101. And of course, today we’re in a very different world. Things are encrypted. We won that battle. But of course, we’re facing challenges with things like ransomware, with things like people are not using passwords. Well, we’re seeing social engineering as a primary form of attack. And so we’re recording this in 2023. The challenge today is how do we move away from passwords, whether it’s adding two fa, which we’re making progress there. But there’s, of course, the cost, the human, the time cost that people don’t like. So can we find alternatives? In fact, one of my companies, Averon, we had a passwordless authentication system, and of course, I think that’s going to be the trend in the future, moving to passwordless, but also the zero trust that we’ve been talking about in the cybersecurity realm for a while, and it’s just starting to really percolate and get into those end user devices. [00:20:06] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. And it is fascinating to see pass keys come in over the last six, nine months or so. And I don’t think they’re going to, my personal opinion, as a non tech, I don’t think they’re going to be the final iteration of the passwordless future, but it’s certainly a step in the right direction. And at the same time, of course, AI is making cybersecurity even more terrifying. I was reading some stats. I think it was just a couple of weeks ago that we’re playing this out in 2024 and last summer. So summer 2023, the number of attacks in July and August went up, whereas normally in July and August, they go down. And that’s because the cybercriminals go and have a vacation in July and August, but not when they’ve got AI and they’re using AI, as you say, to try and do more social engineering. And, well, any MSP listening to this or watching this on YouTube would be able to tell us just how terrifying that’s getting. So, yeah, cybersecurity, let’s pop that one back in its box. And let’s talk about cold spammy outreach. So you are a fractional CTO, and that means you’ve clearly ended up on a whole bunch of databases somewhere. Are you inundated with cold marketing, or is it just the odd approach now and again? [00:21:19] Speaker B: I literally get about four to six inbound requests a day. Now, these vary. I’d say the number one type of inbound request I get is from an Offshore development shop. That’s probably number one. Hey, we’ve got engineers and we can build things for you. I also would say recruiters are up there. We’ve got engineers and you should hire them. But I get quite a few MSPs, and then I also get direct vendors as well. And so I’ll typically get a few MSPs a week and maybe about two or three vendors a week, and they’ll just hit me up and they just look and say, oh, he’s a CTO, so what do we know? We know he has authority. We know he has a budget. And so then it’s just timing and need. We talk about bant qualified budget, authority, need and timing. They don’t know whether I have a need. They don’t know whether I have timing. And their philosophy is, well, why should I bother spending my time researching? I just want to waste his, because, hey, I’m only wasting 1015 seconds of his. But happens over and over every day and it drives me nuts. One of the things I’ve done to counteract this is I maintain a blacklist. When I get that spam, I put people on the blacklist and this blacklist is shared with other ctos and they share theirs with mine with me. So, great. You want to keep emailing me, you’re going to be hurting yourself, because this is the best counterattack I have for all the spam I’ve been getting. [00:22:51] Speaker A: I love that. Absolutely love it. So we are talking here about completely cold. So these aren’t people that have connected to you on LinkedIn, they’re not people who you’ve met somewhere or there’s no relationship at all, it’s literally someone somewhere has bought a list and has sent you an email, whether an MSP, a recruiter, a vendor, or whatsoever. And they’re just trying to. Almost trying to get you to reply as if you’re going to reply with, yes, I need 22 engineers. Please send me this now, or please will you come in and pitch for my 400 seat business that I’m looking after? And I assume that they’re completely cold and there’s no relationship then 100% cold. [00:23:27] Speaker B: I didn’t register for a webinar or anything. Even worse, being a fractional CTO, now people can guess my email address. Sometimes I’m getting pitches on LinkedIn. Otherwise it’s not that hard to guess an email address. I will even get an email to one of my addresses, but they’re talking about one of my other clients because I’ll have list on LinkedIn, multiple titles. And you can tell this is pretty much automated in some way, or they probably. I don’t think they’re quite using AI yet, but we’re getting there. They probably have some very low cost laborers and just saying, here’s a bunch of people, you figure out where they’re working and guess their email and just take this template and send it to them. So I get that multiple times a day. Some of them do tend to be from. A few of them are from a list where I see the unsubscribe and others do tend to be just one off. There’s no unsubscribe, so I assume it’s not a mailing list. [00:24:23] Speaker A: Yeah, but it’s still irritating. And obviously it’s doing some damage because it’s going on to that blacklist. What for you would be a more authentic way of trying to reach someone like you. So you are clearly a decision maker that people want to speak to because, as you say, using your bant methodology, you’re someone who potentially unlocks access to business. What for you would be a much more authentic way of reaching out to you. [00:24:46] Speaker B: When I talked to these folks, I don’t do it much these days, but their philosophy was always, well, you never know. Maybe this could be helpful to you. That would be like me just going through the phone book and saying, hi, Alice, are you there? Listen, I’ve got a used 2005 Toyota. Well, I was just calling because maybe you are in the market for one. No. Okay, great. Hey, Bob. Hi, my name is Mark. Listen, are you in the market for a used 2005 Toyota? And just going down the list because, hey, maybe someone out there needs it. That’s their philosophy of, well, I might be helping someone, and that’s utter.

I don’t swear very often, but that’s really where we are, because you’re really putting your needs in front of the needs of the other person, and you need to reverse that. You need to start out by saying, how can I offer you value? I know your time is busy, I know you have lots of people. I’m probably not even hitting you at the right time. I want to do something that is helpful to you. So you say, hey, he was great, I’ll keep him in mind. So start by offering value. Now. The value could be, here’s a free report on the state of the industry. Here’s some information that might be helpful to you. Even then, it’s still spam. I’m still not happy to get it. But at least you’re trying to say, here’s something that could be useful to you that has nothing to do with trying to earn me more money in this first outreach.

[00:26:08] Speaker A: Yeah, I love that. So putting the other person first before you think about yourself. And here’s the crazy thing. The average MSP, when they win a client, they’re getting a good amount of profitable monthly recurring revenue that will keep coming in for, I don’t know, seven years, ten years, 15 years. So the stakes are kind of really high. And I’ve never been a fan of cold, real, hardcore cold marketing. I’ve recommended it a few times to MSPs in the recent years. I haven’t. Partly because email deliverability has got harder, partly, as you say, mark, is because people’s tolerance for it has just been going down and down and down. And it’s not a strategy we recommend anymore. The strategy we recommend is attempting to build low level relationships with audiences. So you build an audience of people on LinkedIn, you build an audience of email, people whose email you got permission to email. And there’s a way of linking the LinkedIn and the email. Not technically, I mean, but getting information from people’s LinkedIn into email, but building a relationship with people so that at the moment, someone like you is looking for someone like an MSP. Actually, there’s a very low level relationship, and it always will be low level. But half the battle of marketing is getting the timing right, and you’ve got to get the right message in front of the right person at the right time. And obviously getting someone’s backup on day one, five, six months before they’re ready to make that, even start thinking about that buying decision is obviously the wrong way of doing it. Now we’re going to talk about your book and what you do, and you’ve made an interesting switch somewhere mid career. So you’ve got this very tech career, and then you’ve moved into non tech stuff. What was it that made you make that switch and move over to write the book and create the app? [00:27:52] Speaker B: Now, I do have both careers going in parallel. Early in my career, I knew I was a software engineer, and I knew I wanted to be a CTO. What I recognized is that to be a CTO, it’s not just about being the best engineer. It’s not just writing lots of code and being good at. There were all these other skills that I needed. Leadership, networking, negotiation, team building, communication. Just like if you’re running your own business, you do need to understand how the business operates, but you need to know how to sell, you need to know how to build a network, you need to know how to communicate with your clients. And these are not skills we teach in school. So I had to learn those skills on my own. Quickly realized I want my whole team to have these skills. So I began to upskill my team. And then MIT got similar feedback from companies saying they’re looking for these skills. They’re putting together a program. So I reached out to MIT and said, I’ve got some content. I’m happy to give it to you. Maybe this will help in your program. What I thought would be a one and done meeting turned into, can you help create more content and can you help us teach? And there is an example. I reached out to MIT. Now, I wasn’t trying to sell anything, but I reached out to say, let me give you something. Here’s something that might be of value to you. And it turned out we then built this long term relationship where I said, come teach for us, which obviously gave me a lot of value because I have credibility of now being an instructor for over 20 years at MIT, which. [00:29:15] Speaker A: Is a fantastic thing, I think, to go on any cv. So tell us what the book is about and tell us what the app is about. [00:29:21] Speaker B: The book has ten skills. The ten skills that we see in surveys over and over, and you might see it list as five skills or 50 skills. It’s just where you draw the lines. So the ten key skills, I’ll run through them quickly, how to create and execute a career plan. And even if you’re an owner, by the way, you need a career plan. Your title might not change, but your career needs to develop how to work effectively. Things like corporate culture, and that might be your client’s corporate culture as well as your own. How to interview there’s lots of information on interviewing, but many of us have to interview other people to hire them and we’ve had no training. Then there are chapters on leadership, people management, process management. And the final section, four chapters, communication, networking, negotiations and ethics. And these are the skills. Again, we see over and over companies want they’re skills we need to be successful as an entrepreneur, as an employee. So the book has these ten chapters. Each one has a mental shift, how to think about and then concrete things you can do to be better in that particular category. [00:30:26] Speaker A: And the app that fits alongside the book. Is that a way of supporting people who are working their way through that book? [00:30:32] Speaker B: Absolutely. One thing I have found from years of teaching and from learning is that we quickly forget things. How often do we read a business book or self help book, or listen to a great podcast like this, only to forget the key ideas weeks or even days later? I didn’t write the book to sell copies. I wrote books, the book to help people. So brain bump takes the key ideas from my book as well as other books, blogs, podcasts, classes and talks, puts it into the app. So it’s like these little flashcards with categories, but you don’t use like a normal flashcard where you just sit there and read through it either. You get it just in time. So if you’re going into a conference, you’re thinking, what were those negotiation tips? You pull it up, then open it up and flip through it two minutes before you walk in the room. Or if you’re trying to remember things from that book you read, or you’re learning to be a better manager or salesperson, you might set up. So you get like a daily affirmation. But it’s one of the tips from the source that you’ve been learning from that’s going to help keep it top of mind and help reinforce it. And it’s all hyperlinked so you can go back to the original source when you want to go deeper. And so it’s a completely free app that just helps you retain information and use it when and where you need it. [00:31:46] Speaker A: That’s so smart. It really is. So, Mark, thank you for being on the podcast. Just tell us. I know it’s probably kind of obvious with an app, but tell us where we can get the app, where we can get the book. And for those people listening or watching right now that want to have a chat with you, what’s the best way to get in touch. [00:32:00] Speaker B: You can get in touch with me three places. First on LinkedIn and it’s do not pitch me anything. [00:32:09] Speaker A: Please do not no cold emails, no cold nothing cold. [00:32:13] Speaker B: And my two websites. For the book it’s thecareertoolkitbook.com. You can also get in touch with me there and you can learn more about the book. There’s a bunch of free resources as well. And for the app, which is free on the Android and iPhone stores, you can also go to brainbumpapp.com and there you can follow links to the stores or you can watch the 92nd video to learn more about it. [00:32:35] Speaker A: Paul Green’s MSP Marketing podcast this week’s. [00:32:40] Speaker C: Recommended book hi, my name is Ryan Sherrer and I recommend the book rework. One of the reasons why I love this book is even back when it was written and up to today, the message still holds strong that as we move into a technical age, there’s a lot of ways that you can reevaluate your standard business practices, not only to save money, but to be more efficient, to claim back some of that time, for your family to claim back some of that income that maybe you’re spending on things that you’ve just been led to believe in the business world you need. And it’s structured with such a success story, you won’t ever do business again the same way after you read this book. [00:33:18] Speaker A: Coming up next week. [00:33:20] Speaker C: Hey, it’s Joel Klettke from Case Study buddy. [00:33:22] Speaker A: Join me on Paul’s podcast, where I’ll. [00:33:24] Speaker C: Be talking about customer success stories, how you can get started using them in your marketing, and see some really great ROI from the great relationships you’ve built. [00:33:32] Speaker A: On top of that interview with Joel, we’re going to ask whether hashtags are still valid on LinkedIn. If they are, could you own your local hashtags such as hashtag it? Support your town. 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 MSP marketing podcast.
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Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Fresh every Tuesday for msps around the world. Around the world, this Paul Paul Paul Greens MSP Marketing podcast and welcome back to the podcast. Here's what I got in store for you this week. [00:00:14] Speaker B: Hi, I'm Mark Hirschberg. I'm a fractional CTO and I am sick of all the sales spam I get from msps. Join me on Paul's podcast to learn better way. [00:00:25] Speaker A: And on top of that interview with Mark later in the show, we're going to talk about LinkedIn and how I got 408 comments on a single post. I'll tell you how you can do exactly the same thing. Paul. Paul Greens MSP Marketing podcast let's talk about whether you can generate leads by physically knocking on doors. One MSP is doing just this and has two super hot prospects. So I work very closely with about 20 msps and we jump on a Zoom every other week and we discuss their marketing in detail. And one of them told me something totally shocking a few weeks ago. You see those msps with me? We've been working to implement my three step marketing strategy. You may have heard me talk about this in the podcast before. It is the absolute cornerstone, the bedrock of everything I do with msps. Three steps. Step one is you build multiple audiences. Step two is you build a relationship with them. And step three is you commercialize that relationship. So that means growing your LinkedIn and your email and other audiences. It means putting out content on a regular basis, at the very least daily on social media and weekly on email. And then that third step is commercializing the audience. And typically that involves, well, what I suggest is you go and get a back to work mum to pick up the phone on your behalf and to call people so that you personally don't have to. And these phone calls that she's making, they're not sales calls, they are relationship building calls. The idea is to find out where someone is with their existing relationship with their incumbent MSP and see if they're ready to switch today, or whether we should just do some more relationship building with them or whatsoever. So I'm working with an MSP who has done their own version of this. And sometimes it makes me really excited when people take advice and they tweak it and change it and go off and do something different. And this instance is definitely exciting. Listen to this. The MSP I'm working with isn't phoning people. Instead, he's getting in the car for a couple of hours a day and he is going out there and essentially calling on businesses in fact, his target is seven calls a day. So when he first started he literally did the other businesses in his building and then the next day he did the businesses in the next building and then he was going down the street. And as the days go on, he's working further and further away from his office. But every day he literally goes and knocks on seven doors. How cool is that? Right? And he's very motivated to do this because of those seven knocks he will typically get to speak to and you'll be shocked by this two or three decision makers. So let's just put that in perspective. If you were to make seven outbound calls, I would expect you to speak to zero decision makers, right. It can take 10, 15, 20, even more outbound calls, unsolicited outbound calls before you get hold of a decision maker. And yet this guy is going and knocking on seven doors. And on average, and it is an average. Some days it's more, some days it's less. But it balances out. On average he'll knock on seven doors, talk to seven receptionists and end up speaking to a couple of decision makers. So as you can imagine, he is very very motivated to do this because the second he's having a one on one conversation with the business owner, he's bought a couple of hours of their time, right? And he takes along some printed materials with him. He's got some stuff that we put in the MSP marketing edge, particularly our IT services buyers guide. And out of this and talking to these decision makers, he's actually got a couple of genuine hot prospects. People who are really, really upset and unhappy with their incumbent. They're happy to talk to him. He's moving it forward to having an engagement, moving towards putting in a proposal and that's fantastic, right? In fact, in fact, if he can win a client off the back of this activity, that becomes then his activity, right? Because here's the thing, it doesn't really matter what you hear me telling you to do, what you hear other marketing people telling you to do, what you read on the Internet. What I think you have to do is you have to find the activities that work the best for you in your business. And when you find those activities and if you're comfortable with it, many people would not be comfortable knocking on doors. But this guy is, right, good for him. He's found something that works for him and the return on investment is actually pretty good. 2 hours out on average, having two conversations, generating some good prospects every week or every other week, that's a fantastic return for him. You find the things that work for you and then you stick with those things, but you keep doing them. That's critical. If you find something that works, you can't do it for a few weeks and stop. You need to turn it into a system. Here's a question for you. What do you do in your business that other msps don't do? What marketing really works for you, that you love, that you just don't see other msps doing? Here's this week's clever idea. Now let's talk about how to achieve an insane amount of engagement on one LinkedIn post. In fact, this is so effective, I gave it a name. I call it a 48 hours LinkedIn frenzy. So let me tell you what I did, how you can copy it and how you can use it to generate leads for your MSP. Now, let me first of all tell you the stats of what I achieved with this LinkedIn post. I've got the stats here on a little bit of paper. So this one post, which I call it a 48 hours LinkedIn frenzy, this particular post actually ran for nearly two weeks until suddenly the algorithm stopped putting it in front of people. Now, let me just give you some context of the size of my LinkedIn Network. So I have around about 8000 people. I'm connected to most of them msps. There's some vendors in there as well. And then I've got around about 9000 people who are following me. So there will be some crossover between those two figures. If you don't know what followers are on LinkedIn, by the way, it means I'm a content creator. So at some point in the past, I've switched on. I've literally flicked a switch in LinkedIn that says I'm a content creator. And that means I can put videos on there, I can do a LinkedIn newsletter, I could go live if I wanted to. But I tell you this so that you know I'm coming at this from quite a big network. However, the results are still replicable by you, regardless of the size of your network. So the post that I put on this one single post, it got a total of 16,093 impressions. So that means it's come up in front of people 16,000 times. Now, I don't believe that that's 16,000 people. I think it has just come up in the feeds of people 16,000 times. There's no real way of knowing how many people have actually seen that, just as there's no real way of knowing how many of them paused on that. How many of them just flicked past it? But that's still the highest number of impressions I've ever had on a post. To give you some context, my second best was around about 1800 impressions. So that gives you an idea. Just that's nearly a ten times improvement, isn't it? Just on this one post. Now, this is where it's really exciting. These posts generated 408 comments. 408. Which again is by far the most number of comments I've ever had. In fact, normally I'll get like six or seven comments. Now, I must be honest, half of those comments are from me. And in fact, one of the things I'm about to tell you that will sort of help you to make this happen for your MSP is that I replied to every single comment I got. So 204 people commented on this post, and I replied to them 204 times over a two week period. How cool is that? I didn't realize I'd done quite that much work on it. And then this got as well, then 89 connection requests. So that's 89 people who connected with me. And that's a mix of me connection requesting them and them connection requesting me. 89 people directly off the back of this post. So let me tell you exactly what I did and why it works and what the psychology is. And as I'm telling you this, write this down because you can copy exactly this. So I put a post on LinkedIn, and it was a very specific kind of post offering a very specific thing. I offered a free guide, so I put together this guide and it was called your MSP's ATM, or if you're british, cash machine, automatic telemachine ATM. I think the rest of the world knows what that is. And it was a little guide about how to grow the monthly recurring revenue within your business. Quick spoiler alert on that, if you want to know, is three things you do a profit matrix, which is where you have a grid of who's buying what. Then you do strategic reviews, which is a better name for quarterly business reviews. So you sit down with every client and talk about their business, and then ideally you lock them into a technology roadmap, which is like a three year strategic plan for where their technology is going to go. And all of that was in my 40 page guide. So I was giving this away for free. And I said to everyone in my network, if you want to get a copy of this, you've just got to comment below. Now, the commenting below is deliberate. This is strategic because I could have just put a link to the PDF there, right? But it would not have had 16,000 impressions and generated 400 comments. I wanted the engagement, and the reason I wanted the engagement is because when LinkedIn can see that lots of people are engaging on something, it shows it to other people like them. And this was exactly what I was hoping to do. Those 89 connection requests that I got are all new msps people that I've never spoken to before, who presumably maybe if they knew me, but they were never connected to me. So this is brilliant. So I posted this and I said, comment below and I will send this guide to you. So they commented below and every single comment. I then did two things. First of all, I replied to the comment to say, oh, thanks very much, David, I've just DM'd that to you. And then I actually dm it to them. Actually, I did it the other way around. I sent the dms first, then I replied to the comment. So what I'd do is I would sort of open it up. And if you do this on a desktop, it's kind of easy. Let's say you've got 20 new comments and you click the name of the 20 people, but you hold down whatever the button is on your keyboard that opens it as a new tab, right? So you've got 20 new tabs, and then you can go along and you literally, if you're already connected to them, you just copy and paste your message, change their name. Hi David, thanks very much for commenting on my post. Here's the guide to creating or to turning your MSP into an ATM, as promised. And then there's a link to a PDF which I've got hosted on my website. And then if I'm not connected to them, I do a connection request and I put the same message in the connection request. So you know when you connection request someone and you can put your message in? Well, that's exactly the message that I put in. But I then, as I say, replied to every single comment so that they knew that that was coming. But also, of course, from LinkedIn's point of view, that then is more engagement. So let's just stop for a second and look at this. Just what have we got so far? We've got a post that's gone on LinkedIn offering a guide, and the guide is something that the audience really wants. There's not a single MSP who doesn't want to turn their business into a cash machine, right? So then to get it, they comment. I then send them a message with the guide and reply to their comment. So I've now got more engagement on my post and I've got a direct message into their inbox. This is all good so far. Now, the next thing that I did is when I did connection request someone brand new, I used a very specific phrase in my reply, so the phrase was connection request. So every new connection on that post I can track, because I use the words connection request. And when I was just putting those stats together just now, just before this recording, I literally went through the post and I searched for the words connection request as a phrase and it appeared 89 times. So that's how I know I got 89 new connections out of it. Do you see how smart that is? And the reason I did that is I'd hoped this would be as popular as it turned out to be, which is great. And I now know not only have I had massive engagement, but also I've had 89 brand new contacts out of it. So that's the methodology. That's pretty much it, but it's what you could do next that's really exciting. You see, even if you've only got, I don't know, what, 501,000 in your network, you probably wouldn't get 408 comments, but you might get ten or 20 comments, which might be more than you would normally get on a LinkedIn post. And once you've got these new connections and you've direct messaged someone, you've sent them a DM. You can then do an outreach follow up. You could follow them up again by direct message, or you could send them an email. A lot of people's emails are in their contact details on LinkedIn, or you can just go and google it or use a plugin like Lusher. It's really easy to find someone's email once you have their LinkedIn profile and you're connected to them. And obviously, once you found their email, you can find their website, you can find their phone. The whole beauty of this is you get a bit of engagement within LinkedIn, but very few people are going to come back off the back of that and buy from you. Although I say that we got, I think it was four new members to the MSP marketing edge directly off the back of that post, which is really cool. And thank you if you are one of the people that joined. But for an MSP, it's not quite as simple as that. I'm selling a very simple marketing subscription that helps you with your marketing. You're selling a very difficult, complicated and complex bespoke service that they are going to commit to and hopefully stay for ten years. Needs a little bit more selling for that. So you would definitely do some kind of outreach. Essentially, you use this as an opportunity to message them, to email them, and definitely to phone them. The magic is absolutely done on the phone. Like I was talking about earlier in the podcast. Now, something really important if you're going to do this, is to get the timing right. Don't put your post out on like a Friday because that will kill it, because LinkedIn usage is massively down at the weekends. Don't do it on a Monday because Mondays suck. Do it on a Tuesday or a Wednesday. That's a great day to do your 48 hours LinkedIn frenzy, which may go on for even longer anyway. But also it means that when you come around to next Monday or Tuesday, you can actually then pick up the phone and start to call people. There's no point calling them six weeks after that post went out. You've got to call them in a timely manner. And when you call them, you can say, oh, hi, I'm calling about our conversation on LinkedIn. And you can say, hey, Dave, my name's Paul, we were just chatting on LinkedIn. In fact, you asked for my free guide about whatever it is, and I sent that over to you, just checking, have you received that? And of course they say yes or no, whichever it is. Some people will say they haven't, even though they have doesn't matter. And then of course, you follow it up with the killer question, a question which gets them engaged, because it's getting them talking about their favorite subject. And that killer question is, so tell me about your business. What is it you guys do all being? Well, 15 minutes later you'll be able to be pushing them and talking about, well, if it's someone calling on your behalf, then you're talking about booking them a 15 minutes zoom with you, which is the next step in the sales process. If it's you yourself that's done these calls, then obviously you're talking about pushing them into either a paid consultation or actually having a sales meeting. And that would only happen if they were unhappy with their incumbent. But you know what? You phone enough people, and especially if they've engaged with you on LinkedIn, and eventually you'll find someone who's nearly, nearly ready, willing and able to buy from you. Look, this is really, really simple. If you want to have a better life, you need more clients, because more clients means more cash coming into the business. The cash can be used to buy resources. The resources can service the clients better, but also free you personally up from having to do all of the work. And that means that you can spend more time at home, have a better relationship with your partner, and be a better, more present parent for your kids. It really is a direct correlation. That's how it works for business owner parents like you and me. So how do you get new clients? Well, you need to up your marketing game. I have a simple marketing plan for you to follow, and I have all the white label marketing content that you could possibly need to implement that plan. And I only work with one MSP per area. Go and see the full details of what I do and how you and I could possibly work together. MSP Marketing edge big interview. [00:16:38] Speaker B: Hi, I'm Mark Hirschberg and I am a fractional CTO. [00:16:42] Speaker A: A fractional CTO. What a fantastic job title that is. I think to a whole load of people outside of our world, they wouldn't have a clue what that is. But of course, we know exactly what that is. And thank you for joining me on the podcast. Mark, you and I got chatting, and we were chatting about how awful it is to be at the other end of the spammy emails and the cold calls and all of the terrible marketing that lots and lots of msps do. And we're going to get today your experience of what it's like to be on the other end, which I think will be quite eye opening for any MSP who's doing any kind of cold marketing. Before we get on to that, let's talk about you and your background and what you do now. Because actually, although you're a fractional CTO, you're involved in quite a lot of things, including cybersecurity. [00:17:29] Speaker B: I do a number of things, and you're right that my graduate work at MIT was in cybersecurity. I have built a lot of tech startups, from classic early stage startups to helping Fortune 500s play startup. And I've done a lot of cybersecurity, but also ad tech and other areas independent of that. So I have that one path doing tech. I have another path where I've been teaching for over 20 years at MIT, professional skills to our students. Things like leadership, networking, negotiating. And I put all that in my book, the career toolkit, essential skills for success that no one taught you because we don't teach people these skills. And so now I have this parallel career where I teach these skills to businesses and I speak all over the world about. And related to that, I created the brain bump app to help people retain these professional skills. [00:18:20] Speaker A: Okay, so we will come back round to the book and to your brain bump app towards the end of the interview. Let's first of all, just take a little side diversion into cybersecurity and how that's changed. So you said you've been teaching at MIT for 20 years, when you were involved in cybersecurity, back when you were a student, which I'm guessing is more than 20 years ago. How different was cybersecurity back then compared to what you see now with ransomware, phishing and all of the rest of it? [00:18:47] Speaker B: Cybersecurity back in the 90s when I was doing my graduate work, and then first out of school, it just meant, can we get HTTPs? Can we encrypt all those important bits going over the Internet? Can we encrypt your password on the database so when they break into it, it's not just easy for them to get. We were really doing encryption 101. And of course, today we're in a very different world. Things are encrypted. We won that battle. But of course, we're facing challenges with things like ransomware, with things like people are not using passwords. Well, we're seeing social engineering as a primary form of attack. And so we're recording this in 2023. The challenge today is how do we move away from passwords, whether it's adding two fa, which we're making progress there. But there's, of course, the cost, the human, the time cost that people don't like. So can we find alternatives? In fact, one of my companies, Averon, we had a passwordless authentication system, and of course, I think that's going to be the trend in the future, moving to passwordless, but also the zero trust that we've been talking about in the cybersecurity realm for a while, and it's just starting to really percolate and get into those end user devices. [00:20:06] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. And it is fascinating to see pass keys come in over the last six, nine months or so. And I don't think they're going to, my personal opinion, as a non tech, I don't think they're going to be the final iteration of the passwordless future, but it's certainly a step in the right direction. And at the same time, of course, AI is making cybersecurity even more terrifying. I was reading some stats. I think it was just a couple of weeks ago that we're playing this out in 2024 and last summer. So summer 2023, the number of attacks in July and August went up, whereas normally in July and August, they go down. And that's because the cybercriminals go and have a vacation in July and August, but not when they've got AI and they're using AI, as you say, to try and do more social engineering. And, well, any MSP listening to this or watching this on YouTube would be able to tell us just how terrifying that's getting. So, yeah, cybersecurity, let's pop that one back in its box. And let's talk about cold spammy outreach. So you are a fractional CTO, and that means you've clearly ended up on a whole bunch of databases somewhere. Are you inundated with cold marketing, or is it just the odd approach now and again? [00:21:19] Speaker B: I literally get about four to six inbound requests a day. Now, these vary. I'd say the number one type of inbound request I get is from an Offshore development shop. That's probably number one. Hey, we've got engineers and we can build things for you. I also would say recruiters are up there. We've got engineers and you should hire them. But I get quite a few msps, and then I also get direct vendors as well. And so I'll typically get a few msps a week and maybe about two or three vendors a week, and they'll just hit me up and they just look and say, oh, he's a CTO, so what do we know? We know he has authority. We know he has a budget. And so then it's just timing and need. We talk about bant qualified budget, authority, need and timing. They don't know whether I have a need. They don't know whether I have timing. And their philosophy is, well, why should I bother spending my time researching? I just want to waste his, because, hey, I'm only wasting 1015 seconds of his. But happens over and over every day and it drives me nuts. One of the things I've done to counteract this is I maintain a blacklist. When I get that spam, I put people on the blacklist and this blacklist is shared with other ctos and they share theirs with mine with me. So, great. You want to keep emailing me, you're going to be hurting yourself, because this is the best counterattack I have for all the spam I've been getting. [00:22:51] Speaker A: I love that. Absolutely love it. So we are talking here about completely cold. So these aren't people that have connected to you on LinkedIn, they're not people who you've met somewhere or there's no relationship at all, it's literally someone somewhere has bought a list and has sent you an email, whether an MSP, a recruiter, a vendor, or whatsoever. And they're just trying to. Almost trying to get you to reply as if you're going to reply with, yes, I need 22 engineers. Please send me this now, or please will you come in and pitch for my 400 seat business that I'm looking after? And I assume that they're completely cold and there's no relationship then 100% cold. [00:23:27] Speaker B: I didn't register for a webinar or anything. Even worse, being a fractional CTO, now people can guess my email address. Sometimes I'm getting pitches on LinkedIn. Otherwise it's not that hard to guess an email address. I will even get an email to one of my addresses, but they're talking about one of my other clients because I'll have list on LinkedIn, multiple titles. And you can tell this is pretty much automated in some way, or they probably. I don't think they're quite using AI yet, but we're getting there. They probably have some very low cost laborers and just saying, here's a bunch of people, you figure out where they're working and guess their email and just take this template and send it to them. So I get that multiple times a day. Some of them do tend to be from. A few of them are from a list where I see the unsubscribe and others do tend to be just one off. There's no unsubscribe, so I assume it's not a mailing list. [00:24:23] Speaker A: Yeah, but it's still irritating. And obviously it's doing some damage because it's going on to that blacklist. What for you would be a more authentic way of trying to reach someone like you. So you are clearly a decision maker that people want to speak to because, as you say, using your bant methodology, you're someone who potentially unlocks access to business. What for you would be a much more authentic way of reaching out to you. [00:24:46] Speaker B: When I talked to these folks, I don't do it much these days, but their philosophy was always, well, you never know. Maybe this could be helpful to you. That would be like me just going through the phone book and saying, hi, Alice, are you there? Listen, I've got a used 2005 Toyota. Well, I was just calling because maybe you are in the market for one. No. Okay, great. Hey, Bob. Hi, my name is Mark. Listen, are you in the market for a used 2005 Toyota? And just going down the list because, hey, maybe someone out there needs it. That's their philosophy of, well, I might be helping someone, and that's utter. I don't swear very often, but that's really where we are, because you're really putting your needs in front of the needs of the other person, and you need to reverse that. You need to start out by saying, how can I offer you value? I know your time is busy, I know you have lots of people. I'm probably not even hitting you at the right time. I want to do something that is helpful to you. So you say, hey, he was great, I'll keep him in mind. So start by offering value. Now. The value could be, here's a free report on the state of the industry. Here's some information that might be helpful to you. Even then, it's still spam. I'm still not happy to get it. But at least you're trying to say, here's something that could be useful to you that has nothing to do with trying to earn me more money in this first outreach. [00:26:08] Speaker A: Yeah, I love that. So putting the other person first before you think about yourself. And here's the crazy thing. The average MSP, when they win a client, they're getting a good amount of profitable monthly recurring revenue that will keep coming in for, I don't know, seven years, ten years, 15 years. So the stakes are kind of really high. And I've never been a fan of cold, real, hardcore cold marketing. I've recommended it a few times to msps in the recent years. I haven't. Partly because email deliverability has got harder, partly, as you say, mark, is because people's tolerance for it has just been going down and down and down. And it's not a strategy we recommend anymore. The strategy we recommend is attempting to build low level relationships with audiences. So you build an audience of people on LinkedIn, you build an audience of email, people whose email you got permission to email. And there's a way of linking the LinkedIn and the email. Not technically, I mean, but getting information from people's LinkedIn into email, but building a relationship with people so that at the moment, someone like you is looking for someone like an MSP. Actually, there's a very low level relationship, and it always will be low level. But half the battle of marketing is getting the timing right, and you've got to get the right message in front of the right person at the right time. And obviously getting someone's backup on day one, five, six months before they're ready to make that, even start thinking about that buying decision is obviously the wrong way of doing it. Now we're going to talk about your book and what you do, and you've made an interesting switch somewhere mid career. So you've got this very tech career, and then you've moved into non tech stuff. What was it that made you make that switch and move over to write the book and create the app? [00:27:52] Speaker B: Now, I do have both careers going in parallel. Early in my career, I knew I was a software engineer, and I knew I wanted to be a CTO. What I recognized is that to be a CTO, it's not just about being the best engineer. It's not just writing lots of code and being good at. There were all these other skills that I needed. Leadership, networking, negotiation, team building, communication. Just like if you're running your own business, you do need to understand how the business operates, but you need to know how to sell, you need to know how to build a network, you need to know how to communicate with your clients. And these are not skills we teach in school. So I had to learn those skills on my own. Quickly realized I want my whole team to have these skills. So I began to upskill my team. And then MIT got similar feedback from companies saying they're looking for these skills. They're putting together a program. So I reached out to MIT and said, I've got some content. I'm happy to give it to you. Maybe this will help in your program. What I thought would be a one and done meeting turned into, can you help create more content and can you help us teach? And there is an example. I reached out to MIT. Now, I wasn't trying to sell anything, but I reached out to say, let me give you something. Here's something that might be of value to you. And it turned out we then built this long term relationship where I said, come teach for us, which obviously gave me a lot of value because I have credibility of now being an instructor for over 20 years at MIT, which. [00:29:15] Speaker A: Is a fantastic thing, I think, to go on any cv. So tell us what the book is about and tell us what the app is about. [00:29:21] Speaker B: The book has ten skills. The ten skills that we see in surveys over and over, and you might see it list as five skills or 50 skills. It's just where you draw the lines. So the ten key skills, I'll run through them quickly, how to create and execute a career plan. And even if you're an owner, by the way, you need a career plan. Your title might not change, but your career needs to develop how to work effectively. Things like corporate culture, and that might be your client's corporate culture as well as your own. How to interview there's lots of information on interviewing, but many of us have to interview other people to hire them and we've had no training. Then there are chapters on leadership, people management, process management. And the final section, four chapters, communication, networking, negotiations and ethics. And these are the skills. Again, we see over and over companies want they're skills we need to be successful as an entrepreneur, as an employee. So the book has these ten chapters. Each one has a mental shift, how to think about and then concrete things you can do to be better in that particular category. [00:30:26] Speaker A: And the app that fits alongside the book. Is that a way of supporting people who are working their way through that book? [00:30:32] Speaker B: Absolutely. One thing I have found from years of teaching and from learning is that we quickly forget things. How often do we read a business book or self help book, or listen to a great podcast like this, only to forget the key ideas weeks or even days later? I didn't write the book to sell copies. I wrote books, the book to help people. So brain bump takes the key ideas from my book as well as other books, blogs, podcasts, classes and talks, puts it into the app. So it's like these little flashcards with categories, but you don't use like a normal flashcard where you just sit there and read through it either. You get it just in time. So if you're going into a conference, you're thinking, what were those negotiation tips? You pull it up, then open it up and flip through it two minutes before you walk in the room. Or if you're trying to remember things from that book you read, or you're learning to be a better manager or salesperson, you might set up. So you get like a daily affirmation. But it's one of the tips from the source that you've been learning from that's going to help keep it top of mind and help reinforce it. And it's all hyperlinked so you can go back to the original source when you want to go deeper. And so it's a completely free app that just helps you retain information and use it when and where you need it. [00:31:46] Speaker A: That's so smart. It really is. So, Mark, thank you for being on the podcast. Just tell us. I know it's probably kind of obvious with an app, but tell us where we can get the app, where we can get the book. And for those people listening or watching right now that want to have a chat with you, what's the best way to get in touch. [00:32:00] Speaker B: You can get in touch with me three places. First on LinkedIn and it's do not pitch me anything. [00:32:09] Speaker A: Please do not no cold emails, no cold nothing cold. [00:32:13] Speaker B: And my two websites. For the book it's thecareertoolkitbook.com. You can also get in touch with me there and you can learn more about the book. There's a bunch of free resources as well. And for the app, which is free on the Android and iPhone stores, you can also go to brainbumpapp.com and there you can follow links to the stores or you can watch the 92nd video to learn more about it. [00:32:35] Speaker A: Paul Green's MSP Marketing podcast this week's. [00:32:40] Speaker C: Recommended book hi, my name is Ryan Shearer and I recommend the book rework. One of the reasons why I love this book is even back when it was written and up to today, the message still holds strong that as we move into a technical age, there's a lot of ways that you can reevaluate your standard business practices, not only to save money, but to be more efficient, to claim back some of that time, for your family to claim back some of that income that maybe you're spending on things that you've just been led to believe in the business world you need. And it's structured with such a success story, you won't ever do business again the same way after you read this book. [00:33:18] Speaker A: Coming up next week. [00:33:20] Speaker C: Hey, it's Joel clicke from Case Study buddy. [00:33:22] Speaker A: Join me on Paul's podcast, where I'll. [00:33:24] Speaker C: Be talking about customer success stories, how you can get started using them in your marketing, and see some really great ROI from the great relationships you've built. [00:33:32] Speaker A: On top of that interview with Joel, we're going to ask whether hashtags are still valid on LinkedIn. If they are, could you own your local hashtags such as hashtag it? Support your town. 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 MSP marketing podcast.

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