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Thank you to Paul Franklin, founder of Koala B2B, for joining me to talk about ‘intent data’, and how MSPs can track and use intent data to identify and engage warm leads at the point that they’re already interested in your services.
Paul Franklin is founder of Koala B2B, an intent data lead gen company. Paul has overseen millions of pounds worth of lead generation campaigns across the Tech B2B division he ran as Publisher for Dennis Publishing. The division included IT end user, cloud , and MSP/CSP/Reseller audiences specifically. He also ran the UK Cloud Awards for 6 years, a recognition and celebration of all cloud innovation in the country.
Connect with Paul on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-franklin-8922236/
NB this transcription has been generated by an AI tool and provided as-is.
Speaker 1 (00:00): Fresh every Tuesday
Speaker 2 (00:02): For MSPs around the world, around the world. This is Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. Podcast.
Speaker 1 (00:09): Hi there and welcome back to the show. Here’s what we’ve got coming up up for you this week.
Speaker 3 (00:13): Hi, my name’s Paul Franklin. I’m the guy who can tell you when companies are particularly interested in your products and services. I’m going to be talking about this and how you can tap into intent data on Paul’s show.
Speaker 1 (00:26): That’s my special guest, Paul Franklin. He’s joining me later on to talk about something called intent data marketing. It’s where you use data to find people who are clearly looking for an MSP right now. I’m also going to tell you about how to get better feedback from clients who’ve declined your offer and picked another MSP. How dare they
Speaker 2 (00:47): Paul Green’s MSP marketing podcast.
Speaker 1 (00:51): Can you hook a new client into managed services by selling them a lower value item? Well, I believe you can, and let me tell you why and give you some specific examples that you can use. So the idea about selling them something kind of lower priced is because the jump from being a prospect to signing a managed services contract, it’s a massive leap if you think about it from their point of view. And especially if they don’t know you and most people who are buying from you, they don’t know you. So they have maybe been referred into you, maybe they’ve done some Google searching, maybe they saw something that you did on LinkedIn, whatever it is. The point being is that going from that point of they’ve just met you to signing that contract, it’s huge. It’s a chasm. It’s a massive chasm in between the point they start and the point at which they finish.
(01:42) And I know that people do do this, and indeed many of the clients that you have signed up have done it, but it’s a big, big, big leap. So anything that we can do to reduce that down is better. What we have to do to take someone from being actually, they don’t just start as a prospect, they start as a suspect. They’re suspicious when they first find you. So to take someone from being a suspect, to being a prospect, to being an opportunity to becoming a client, to becoming a bonded client and a bonded client is where they stay with you for 10 years or more. To do that, we have to build trust. All of this, the entire journey is about building them trust, building trust with them. So this is where the concept of selling them something small, something one off and delivering it really well can help you to build trust.
(02:31) So the goal here is not really to make a great deal of margin. The goal here is simply to impress them. The best way that you can build trust with someone is to sell them something relatively low cost and deliver it really, really well. So for example, I’ll give you a couple actually backups, right? You might advertise something or you might find someone and say to them, Hey, let me have a look at your backups. What you are doing right now. I’ll be honest, it leaves you a little open. You’ve got one backup. It’s only in one site. Actually that should be mirrored elsewhere. It should be happening continuously. It shouldn’t just be a daily thing. Why don’t we get all of that set up for you? It will be X cost, whatever it will cost. You could do the same with password managers. You could sell someone a password manager for them and for their team.
(03:16) Relatively low cost. I appreciate actually, there’s an ongoing cost to that. It’s a subscription, but that’s okay as well. It’s a low cost, but you and I both know that you implement password managers properly for a business. Not only are yet, they’re safer, but actually they’re more productive as well, right? Password managers use properly by staff instantly removes a whole load of productivity hassles for a business. So these are perfect things that you could just sell someone as a startup. Now, let me give you a third one, and this is my favorite and it’s a little off the chart. It’s actually to sell something like a perfect video call setup. So if you imagine you put together, let’s say it’s a decent camera, it’s a USB microphone, there might be some LED lights, you might even link it all up to Alexa or something like that.
(04:07) And the point is that you have this perfect video call setup, which you sell as a one-off thing and you sell it and you go and install it for someone. And you could offer to do that for the owner of the business. You could then when you’re talking to them, you could say, well look, we’ve set you up this video call setup in your office. Why don’t we do the same for your home office as well? And then what about the rest of your management team? And then what about your salespeople and who else is doing video calls on a regular basis? Because actually the more professional you can appear to be on a video call, the better you will communicate and the better you’ll come across. You could even look at optimizing their teams or whatever platform they’re using. So can you see that?
(04:48) That’s actually a perfect sort of one-off not too high price. I appreciate there’s a lot of kit in there. So it’s going to be some investment, but it’s a beautiful thing to do because also when you are setting it up, if you’re setting up for the boss that buys you and your time, you and your team some time with the boss, and it might be that you and one of your technicians goes along to the office to set it up and while your technician is literally setting it all up and optimizing it to the boss’s height and all of that kind of stuff, then you are having a chat to them about their business and asking them open questions about their favorite subject themselves and their business. In fact, we could take this even further. If I owned an MSP and I had some proof that people bought that kind of video call setup, then I would set up actually a front offer.
(05:35) I would put together a lead magnet on this. So a lead magnet is something you give to someone in return for their contact details. So I might offer on LinkedIn or even through paid advertising, the ultimate video call setup guide. And this would be a PDF guide, which they can get by putting in their name and their email address in my website. So I’m driving traffic to a landing page on my website. People who are interested in a better video call setup, they enter their email, their contact details, I then send them that PDF. But the purpose of that PDF is to make it seem more complicated and difficult than it actually is because what I really want to do is to sell them that setup myself. So I send them through that guide. I perhaps have some kind of email sequence follow up to it.
(06:18) I would definitely do a follow up phone call. I’d just give them a call, maybe not me, maybe someone in my office give them a call and say, Hey, did you get the guide? Is this something you’ve thought about? Tell me what kind of video call setup have you got right now? Oh, you’re just using your webcam. Are you, what lights have you got? Oh, you’re sitting in front of a window, are you? But with your back to the window. So actually you’re in silhouette and you can sort of talk people through all of this and then of course you sell them that setup and then you go on to sell it through them to all of the other senior people and it gets repeated around all of their staff. And as I say it, then you are then buying yourself some time with talking to them.
(06:56) By the way, if you are thinking, but Paul, we are not experts at video call setups. Yes, you are compared to the ordinary business owners and managers that you are dealing with. You are an expert because you can spend the time and make a decision on which is the best camera, which is the best USB microphone, which are the best LED lights. How do I get all of this set up with things like sight lines? So their eyes are exactly at the point that the camera’s looking at them. How do we set up the lights to be correct? Let’s be honest, if you don’t actually know this stuff, it’s an hour’s worth of researching, right? It’s really not difficult, this kind of stuff. So you can set yourself up as that expert and you can deliver this very, very easily and by yourself, that 2030 minutes of quality questioning time with the owner or with the manager of the business. Now, if you like the sound of this, please don’t overthink it. Just do a test. Get a video call set up, created something that you know can sell. Just try and sell it to two or three prospects and see if actually that time talking to them while it’s being installed is valuable sales time. It’s all something you can just test.
Speaker 4 (08:04): Here’s this week’s clever
Speaker 1 (08:06): Idea. I’m sure this has happened to your MSP. You’ve submitted a proposal, but you didn’t get the clients and they haven’t really told you why. Well, here’s an idea that you can try for better feedback. Such a simple idea. You deliver a box of quality donuts to the decision maker. And when I say quality donuts, I don’t mean something where you walk into like a gas station or petrol station or just a store and buy a small box of slightly stale donuts. I mean expensive, spend 20, 30 pounds or dollars on there’s band to be a bakery or someone near you that does donuts or cupcakes or something like that. The point is, they must be quality and nice. And then in that box, when you deliver it, you include a short note and the short note says something like, could you give me 30 seconds please to tell me why we didn’t get your IT business?
(08:56) Thank you. And then you put your email address at the bottom. Lemme say that again because that note is actually the critical thing. Could you give me 30 seconds to tell me why we didn’t get your IT business? Thank you email address. Now, most reasonable people, they will email you back and you can always call them to just say, Hey, hope you got my donuts, my cake, or something like that. And would you be able to tell me why we didn’t get the business? Why would they respond? Because you are essentially buying their feedback. That 20, 30 pounds or dollars you spent on decent donuts or decent cakes is you buying that little bit of feedback. What’s really interesting as well is that in doing this, it will demonstrate that you are a mature business owner just because you didn’t get the business, you didn’t drop off and sulk and fold your arms and say, well, I’m not talking to you if you are not talking to me.
(09:48) So this going to behavior, asking for quality feedback in this way, I really believe it works in your favor because you never know they might a few weeks or months down the line, they might develop buyer’s remorse on the MSP that they chose instead of you. And you want to make it as easy and as pleasant for them to be able to come back to you and say, guys, we made a mistake. Can we talk again? So you showing maturity in the way that you are asking for feedback, that’s a very smart thing to do.
Speaker 5 (10:17): Paul’s,
Speaker 4 (10:18): Paul’s blatant plug
Speaker 1 (10:20): Plug. Smart business owners make smart marketing decisions and 700 MSPs are now part of the MSP Marketing edge. If you want new clients and an awesome life for you and your family, but you’re feeling stuck, well, you can get the answers you need Inside the MSP Marketing Edge, my online portal gives you a simple plan to follow and white label marketing content to help you get new clients and make more money. Join the MSP marketing [email protected],
Speaker 4 (10:51): The big, big,
Speaker 5 (10:52): Big interview.
Speaker 3 (10:54): Hi, I’m Paul Franklin. I’m a intent demand generation owner and I’ve got a great deal of experience with MSPs marketing from the publisher perspective.
Speaker 1 (11:07): And thank you so much for joining me on the podcast, Paul. And we’re going to talk about what exactly intent means in a second and how MSPs can use that within their marketing. But first of all, tell us about your publishing background. So although you are not, as you were telling me just before the interview, you’re not a technical person yourself, you’re not an SP owner. You obviously know MSPs inside and out because you’ve actually been serving them as a publisher of websites. Tell us what you did.
Speaker 3 (11:32): Yeah, absolutely. So I was publishing director at Denis Publishing for a number of years, ran the p and l for the IT B2B and it B2C divisions. From the B2B perspective, we had IT pro cloud, pro channel Pro where we had audiences that were targeting or we were speaking to audiences that were technical end users, business decision makers, but also very much the channel MSPs, CSPs, all of those sort of managed service providers. And we tracked through Channel Pro especially, we tracked the sort of evolution of MSPs from when, I guess originally it was the reseller wholesaler dynamic all the way through to the modern offering and service provision that the MSPs and CSPs offer right now. So I manage those brands. We spoke to MSPs and end user entities and the tech partners on a very regular basis. We also ran the UK cloud awards when cloud became or before cloud became ubiquitous and it was really important for cloud and managed service providers to really help people understand the offerings that they were bringing to market.
Speaker 1 (12:50): So that’s quite some CV there. And for our international audience, you may or may not have heard of Denis Publishing. It’s a fairly sizable operation here in the uk and the founder was a guy called Felix Dennis who passed away quite a few number of years ago now, but he was definitely one of those highly eccentric billionaires or multimillionaires, and he wrote a fantastic book called How to Get Rich, which is worth reading. In fact, if you get it, get a copy of the hardback version, which is the edition I’ve got. It’s just on my bookshelf just over here. And the pictures on the inside of the hardback are pictures of checks that he’s written to the UK Tax Authority, which was called Inland Revenue back in the day. And we are talking checks more than you will ever earn in your career, and that would just be one of his checks that he wrote, but really eccentric guy and it’s a really interesting book. So let’s talk about this intent marketing. Can you explain for us and assume that I’m seven years old as you’re explaining this, what exactly is intent marketing
Speaker 3 (13:51): Intent data and the idea of intent is a concept that there are signals around interest in products and services that can be captured. And there are a number of what can be described as intent data platforms out in the market that capture a level of interest. And it might be based on keywords, it might be based on ip, it might be based on cookie data, and they can capture levels of interest in particular themes or subject matters or products or services keywords. And they can identify which companies are showing a particular level of interest in those keywords and products and services and things like that.
Speaker 1 (14:36): Got it. So we could assume that at the point that a business is nearly ready, willing and able to let’s say switch from their incumbent MSP over to new one, they have a pattern of behavior, which because of our digital world, we can track that or certain platforms can track that pattern of behavior. Would that be a correct way of putting it?
Speaker 3 (14:56): Yeah, that’s absolutely right. They can track interest in very particular things or broader sort of general themes. And this is very much international, so you can identify companies across any different geo what they’re interested in. And some of these platforms give you that sort of score so you can sort of see which are really, really interested, which are moderately interested and which are just very averagely interested in particular things. So yeah, absolutely. If somebody was to be thinking about different products and services that an MSP might be offering that could be picked up, that level of interest, that level of engagement, that sort of level of research really can be identified and picked up.
Speaker 1 (15:38): Okay, so in a second at the end of the interview, we’ll of course talk about what you do, Paul, because you have a business I know that takes that intent data and you turn it into leads or you help to turn it into leads for MSPs. But before we get there, just tell us a little bit about these platforms because intent data and intent marketing isn’t something we’ve talked about on the podcast before. So what kind of platforms are out there? Give us some names if you can, and are they any good? Are the good ones, bad ones? What kind of money are we going to be shelling out?
Speaker 3 (16:05): Yeah, there’s a number of them. Probably the most, well-known is Bombora, and that’s a very solid platform that uses intense signals from a number of different websites and platforms internationally that it sort of puts its tags on or these individual publishers allow for a BOMBO tag to be there so it can pick up interest around certain keywords and topics. That’s a fairly robust system, probably the most commonly known, most widely known. There are others like Six Sense is a very good offering that is actually sort a bombo partner as well, but has its own sort of intent data around keywords. There are others like Expanding Group as well, which has got its own sort of marketing cloud. Yeah, there’s a number of others and some of the additional ones tap into the likes of Bombo as well. So there’s a whole sort of ecosystem around intent.
(17:12) They are expensive, they are a significant level of investment, but they will hopefully enable you to identify genuine interest in particular keywords. So you can really drill down into security or cloud or whatever it might be, and you can identify via Geo. And also a lot of these providers will enable you to identify not just those companies that are really interested, but maybe some contacts within those companies as well that you might want to speak to. So there are sort of, I guess a database of provision, a little bit like ZoomInfo, where you can actually identify some people within those companies that are demonstrating and showing this level of intent.
Speaker 1 (17:55): I love it. This is really smart. Well, it’s really smart if it works. And that leads onto my next question is, it’s one thing to know that there is some kind of intent within a company, but what in your opinion is the best way to actually capitalize on that? So to take the intel that’s coming out from this platform and then to approach the company in a way which doesn’t seem creepy or doesn’t seem kind of weird that you seem to have approached them at exactly the right moment.
Speaker 3 (18:20): The Intel platforms can help spit out a Target account list or help you build your A BM, your account-based marketing strategies, but they’re still cold. They haven’t engaged with you. So I would always, always recommend that you are still warming these potential contacts and leads and you’re engaging these companies from a starting point of a cold position or a top of funnel position. You still want to be engaging them with relevant content. You want to be speaking to them consultatively, just because people have shown levels of intent, doesn’t mean they’ve got the credit cards out and they’re willing to buy there and then they still need development from a sort of sales perspective.
Speaker 1 (19:02): So let’s talk about what you do within your business then. I’m assuming that you use exactly this kind of engine to gather together that intent data and then you manage campaigns to help to generate leads off the back of it.
Speaker 3 (19:14): Yeah, absolutely. We plug into a number of different intent data platforms. We identify the keywords our customers believe their own clients are interested in, and then we engage those people directly. So against your ideal customer profile, if you want to reach the IT director and the CEO, we’ll identify those people within the companies that are showing greater levels of intent, greater signals of interest. We’ll engage those people. It might be through content syndication, it might be through social, it might be through telemarketing. We will engage them and gather consent, and then we’ll patch the leads through to you as an MSP, whether by Excel sheet or we can patch directly into your CRM. And that’s the whole solution that we offer. So we engage and we take care of the whole campaign. And the real reason we launch and the whole point of it is that we hope we can provide warmer leads so we understand, and we know they’re not necessarily going to have their credit cards out immediately ready to buy, but we also really believe that they are much warmer than if you’re just starting from the very top because they’ve gone through that intent, that content syndication and that consent process.
Speaker 1 (20:32): And as we know about all marketing, it’s often just a case of getting the timing right, isn’t it? Someone will only, well, people will only buy when they’re ready to buy. And what this is doing hopefully is showing you, hey, these people are nearly in a position where they are ready, willing, and able to buy, which is just Paul, thank you so much for joining us on the show. Tell us what your business is called and what’s the best way to get in touch with you.
Speaker 3 (20:53): Thanks, Paul. The company is koala b2b.com. It’s international, and you can reach us at Koala B2B to the number that’s the website, and we look forward to hearing from you.
Speaker 2 (21:05): Paul Green’s MSP marketing podcast, this week’s recommended book.
Speaker 6 (21:11): Hi, my name is Matt Tompkins of Two Brothers [email protected]. My book recommendation is Donald Miller’s Marketing Made Simple. Now, Donald Miller has written a series of books from StoryBrand through his latest business, made Simple all great books, but Marketing Made Simple I think is really, it is a great entry-level book for any business owner who is trying to get their hands wrapped around their own marketing and it breaks down things in very simple terms. As the book says, marketing Made Simple. It’s a great place to start to understand your marketing if you’re doing it yourself, or understand your marketing if you’re hiring someone to do it for you. So that, let’s face it, you don’t get ripped off or taken advantage of Marketing Made Simple by Donald Miller. My book Recommendation of the Day
Speaker 2 (21:54): Coming up, coming up next week.
Speaker 7 (21:57): Hi, I’m Brian Hoppe. I have built an MSP up to 45 staff and also built and sold a second MSP. Join me on Paul’s podcast where we talk about how to scale your MSP.
Speaker 1 (22:09): On top of that interview with Brian, we are going to talk about how to guarantee you delight every single client by systemizing a way to underpromise and over deliver. Join me next Tuesday and have a very profitable week in your MSP
Speaker 2 (22:24): Made in the UK for MSPs around the world. Paul Green’s Marketing podcast.
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