Episode 31: SPECIAL: Get new clients deep dive

Speaker 0 00:00 Made in the UK for MSPs around the world. Lisa's pole greens, MSP marketing podcast. Speaker 1 00:09 Hello, and welcome to a special extended episode of the NSP marketing podcasts. Now, one of the most common questions that I'm asked by MSPs is how do I get new clients? I think it's the number one marketing question, because MSPs are great at retaining clients and upselling them. The challenge is always in bringing new people on board. So recently had an opportunity to do a marketing consultation for an MSP owner. He's not someone who's a client. We were just chatting on LinkedIn. And I realized there was an opportunity here to do a really in depth. If you like a deep dive consultation for him on how to get brand new clients in a way that actually benefits you as well. And he very graciously allowing me to record the whole thing. And that's what today's episode is. So this is about three times, four times longer than a normal episode, but I think as you listen in, you'll realize this has an immense power in helping you to get more new clients for your MSP. Speaker 0 01:04 Paul Green's MSP marketing podcast, Speaker 2 01:07 And it was Jim Smith and I'm the owner of proper sky. We are a managed service provider located outside of Philadelphia. Speaker 3 01:13 So Jim, you and Ali caught up on LinkedIn and we started chatting on LinkedIn about your business and about how difficult it can be sometimes to get more new clients and increase your monthly recurring revenue and net profit and all the things that most MSPs want to increase. So I thought it'd be quite handy for us to have a chat and essentially for me to give you a consult. And of course this, this could form part of the podcast. So let's start by just getting the very brief history of your business. So tell us how you got started, how long you've been running, how many texts you've got and what kind of clients you're working with right now? Yeah, Speaker 2 01:47 I started in 2006. I was actually in the United States peace Corps. We helped a lot of nonprofits and small businesses. I was stationed in a little Island in the South Pacific called Tonga. It's a small country, about a hundred thousand people. And one of the things that was consistently clear to me is that there were a lot of people doing it that didn't do it very well. And so when I got back to the States, uh, I decided that instead of getting a job, I'd start my own business, helping nonprofits and small businesses with the right team. So in 2006, I actually, uh, I wrote a little script, uh, believe it or not, that would read Craigslist. And, uh, if anybody mentioned the word server or windows or Linux or something along those lines, it would actually text me, uh, a message. So, you know, 2006, I was pretty high tech and the, uh, first, uh, five people I called, uh, for them are still customers to this day. Speaker 2 02:35 Uh, yes. Um, so that's that, that was how it started. So, and ironically, the first customer that I landed, I was helping them with a, uh, new Buntu server and a bunch of mail server for a Nigerian arts collective. And, uh, this guy ended up partnering up with another guy in Atlanta that was purchasing dermatology practices. So they purchased their first practice in Philadelphia. I helped build their data center. Uh, we helped, uh, you know, at the time it was 2003 server, 2003 cluster SQL server backend that practice grew from, uh, four providers, four offices to, I think it was almost 70 providers and 60 offices across seven States by the time we were done. And I just sort of grew up on the back of those guys between 2006 and 2013. So at one time we were, I think 12 was, was my staffing level at that point, then that company, uh, crashed spectacularly and went out of business. So in 2013 there were 90% of my monthly recurring revenue. Uh, that was a huge, well, I mean, basically, Speaker 3 03:35 Well, you do quite well to survive cause to lose 90% of your monthly recurring revenue and still be here seven years later, Speaker 2 03:41 I'll tell you. So we, we, we actually, uh, we purchased LabTech. They had given me a free pass, I think, to the it nation conference, which I, you know, I'd never been to. I went to that conference. I was sitting at the bar feeling sorry for myself. And I bumped into this guy who was another MSP from Seattle. He was like, listen, there's a guy that knows a lot about this, but you need to look at your business as a way for you to sustain a lifestyle and not being a technician, you know? And he's like, take a look at the way that managed services are run and the model of it. And, uh, you know, I think you'll find that you'll have some pretty good success. Know I came back from that conference renewed and I basically had a whole bunch of break-fix customers that I picked up over the years, just small doctor's offices and just, you know, random people that I bumped into and helped. And I basically said, Hey, listen, we're only selling managed services contracts. We're not doing hourly work any longer. And if you want us to be able to help you, here's what it's going to look like. And that was 2013. So now we're back up to a, we were at nine and we were hiring a new, a dispatcher and salesperson. Speaker 3 04:39 So you're up to nine staff again. Now, then, um, let's talk about what kind of clients you'd like for the business. So is it general clients that you have just in the, in the Philly area? Speaker 2 04:48 Correct. So we target right now, specifically the five counties in and around Philadelphia. Speaker 3 04:54 Paint me a picture of what the perfect client looks like. So let's say the phone rang today and you picked up the phone and it was someone who said, Oh, I've been referred to you. Or, you know, I've been on your website and you say, well, tell me a little bit about your business and imagine everything they say, every single word they say, has you celebrating? Cause you just want this person as a client and you want their business. What does that business look like? Speaker 2 05:17 The business has significant investment in technology and that's either in the way of cloud or they understand the value of providing, uh, accessible toolkits and just tools to their staff. Right. Um, so that's, that's one of the things that we always look for is, you know, somebody that really tries to invest highly in technology. The other thing is, um, we also look for organizations that are regulated. So we, we, we have a lot of solid experience in the HIPAA and medical space. So, you know, doctors and physician groups are always pretty good fits for us. You know, generally speaking, we look for people that are looking to partner with an it company, uh, and just outsource the headache, right? So we, we want to basically serve as the, you know, the, the virtual CIO, if you will. Right? So we don't want them to have to worry about that the day to day technology, they understand that it's important for the organization. They get it's important, but they really want to be able to speak to a business owner, uh, about what their needs are. And not necessarily A's in, in a technical capacity. Right. So that's good. And you know, a big old budget. Speaker 3 06:24 Yeah, absolutely. I must, at this point and point out for most of my UK listeners will, will know this, but most of my U S listeners weren't, which is that in the U S you guys get away with charging. What seems like 10 times more than MSPs can get away with charging in the UK. And we have no idea why it's, why there's this disparity, but you know, you, sometimes I see things in forums, places like the tech tribe, which I'm a member of, or my own MSP marketing Facebook group, and, you know, us people will talk about charging several hundred dollars or a couple of hundred dollars per user. And here in the UK, which charging the equivalent of $50 per user, it's absolutely insane. But there we go. That's just, that's just the way of the world. So I'm going to come back to regulated industries later, cause that's gives me a germ of a marketing idea, which I want to come back to in a bit, but what are you doing marketing wise right now? So not let, let's forget your existing clients for now and how you're upselling them and servicing them. It's just part of them. Let's talk about new clients. So specifically, what are you doing right now to get new clients into the business? Speaker 2 07:24 A lot of, a lot of what's on your podcast resonates with me. So most buyers nowadays are a bit more sophisticated, right? So there's so much more information and it's so much easier to vet the quality of a managed services provider online without ever picking up the phone. Right. And not only that, but, uh, you know, a customer is so far down into the buying cycle. Once they're searching for managed services, that they're, they're pretty much ready to commit, or they know exactly what they're looking for in this relationship looking to establish. So with all that being said, I've been focusing on very specific what I consider down level keywords in Google ad words. Um, in my marketplace, it's very expensive. It's a, it could be anywhere from 35 to 45, us dollars per click for the search term, you know, managed services. So we have some, some traction there. Speaker 2 08:10 Um, I have a, an organization that I had hired. I had outsourced my marketing originally to, uh, an organization well known in the MSP space. And they had recommended doing long tail geographical landing pages. And we tried that for about a year. We didn't get much traction. Um, I hired on an agency from, for us. It was a pretty, pretty high spent. We did a lot of content marketing. We were using, you know, outsource content marketing, and we were doing email blasts. Uh, we were doing some social media stuff. Um, and, uh, we also just recently turned to buying inbound links through different services. It's kind of a hodgepodge. So I've been focusing less on sales and I guess more on marketing. Um, but I haven't really found a silver bullet. I don't really know where I need to be my time and energy. Um, and, and that's, that's, you know, I think part of the challenge Speaker 3 08:59 Yeah. And an officer it's led to this conversation. So do you, have you mentioned, you're doing email blasts, is that to a database of your own prospects that you've put together? Speaker 2 09:09 Yes and no. So we have not done a very good job at collecting potential leads, email addresses, right? So we have some captured forms on our website, the contact form, one of the projects I've actually been working on is we're, we're a ConnectWise shop, you know, not to speak guilt ConnectWise. They've been a fantastic partner and I love it, but their, their email newsletter tool leaves a little bit to be desired. So, um, what we've been trying to do is integrate our ConnectWise tool with our CRM tool. In this case, we're using Zoho and we're trying to set up a two way sync between the creation of accounts and prospects inside of ConnectWise that sync into Zoho, and then putting the leads into Zoho and then choosing which ones to sink back into ConnectWise and then using Zoho as the marketing tool, because there's so much more integration into and visibility into who's looking at what, on your website, based on the content that you're sending out. Speaker 3 10:02 Yeah. That makes perfect sense. Okay. There is so much we can talk about off the back of this. I must just mention in terms of ConnectWise not being a great CRM, I don't think ConnectWise is, is a great marketing tool. Um, I'm sure I have no direct experience with it, but I'm sure auto task is the same, cause that's not what they're designed for. Of course, whereas you look at something like Zoho CRM or MailChimp or MailerLite or active campaign or infusion soft, which are all designed from the ground up to be marketing tools. And I think that, you know, that that kind of integration between the two is a good idea. Although maybe we'll come back to this down the line, ConnectWise really shouldn't be used for any marketing at all. I would focus ConnectWise on delivering to your existing clients and focus Soho, or would you have a CRM you're using to, to focus on prospecting. Speaker 3 10:48 And it's only when someone becomes a client that you shift them off, off Zoho and into ConnectWise. So I realized two different systems kind of jars with people, cause we all want nice elegant things that talk to each other, but actually, you know, marketing to prospects and delivering to clients are two completely different jobs with different communication levels. But we'll come onto that if we can. So first of all, you're in a really, really good position gym. And apart from the fact that you you've nearly lost the business seven years ago and you recovered, and we could have that conversation with a hundred people in the same boat and 95 of them would have gone under and gone and got a job. And I don't know about you, but that's my idea of hell is ever having to work someone else ever again. So massive, genuinely massive round of applause to you for, you know, pulling round a, a business turnaround like that because you've been through that. Speaker 3 11:33 I think it's probably made you more resilient than a hell of a lot more people. You know, I think many of us have been through good times and bad times and been through recessions, but to, to be in a position where you've essentially got to start again from scratch, you know, seven, eight years after you have hard work down there down the polar coal is, is a, is a massive thing. So you've got this mental resilience, which is awesome. I think the other thing you've got going in your favor is you're doing stuff. So your investing into SEO, SEO being search engine optimization, you're spending on Google ads, even though it's costing you 30, $40 a click you're hiring marketing agencies, you're doing content marketing. This is awesome because I don't know if you've found this in your marketplace, but in most marketplace I look at, there are very few MSPs that are actually doing any marketing at all. Speaker 3 12:20 So you take, I mean, how many, how many MSPs would there be in your marketplace in Philadelphia, hundreds, hundreds, hundreds. Yeah. And you know, if we were to do a Google search and look to see how many are actively on Google or home, and they're doing something or they're actually putting stuff on their blog or actually on social media, it will be a reasonably small percentage of those. It's not going to be a massive number of them. And that's quite exciting because that, what that does is that creates opportunity for a small number of players in each marketplace. And we would see this, not just in Philadelphia, not just in the States, we would see this absolutely worldwide. So the fact that you understand that you need to Mark it and you need to do stuff. It gives you a massive, massive, psychological advantage over all of your competitors. Speaker 3 13:01 So I've said this a few times in the podcast over the last year or so, or the last half year or so, which is you don't need to outrun everyone. You just need to outrun a few of your competitors. It's like the analogy of if, if you and I were in the woods and we were, we were hiking and suddenly a bad wakes up from hibernation and starts chasing us. And we ran and ran and ran and ran and ran. And eventually we got to a clearing and we're both utterly exhausted and we can't run anymore. And you start to you, you take off your shoes and you get your, your trainers, your sneakers out of your backpack, and you put them on your feet and I'd say to you, what, what are you doing? Are you mad? We've got to outrun the bear and you say, no, I don't have to outrun the bear. I just have to outrun you. Speaker 3 13:40 And that's all that you've got to do. You, haven't got to outrun hundreds of MSPs. You just got to outrun two or three that you know, that are also active marketing in your marketplace. And by default, you kind of beat the others. So think what I think I can help you with today. And this will be useful for all the MSPs listening to this is to give you some strategy to put onto this onto your marketing. So you're doing a whole bunch of tactical stuff, which is brilliant, but I think there's, there's just a bit of a strategy shift. And the great news is it's not a massive, massive difference to what you're doing now is just giving it some more shape, some more format so that it can actually be more useful for you. So the first thing I want to cover off is the principle of longterm marketing for MSPs. Speaker 3 14:22 So I love, I love working with MSPs because most of them don't market, which is great for someone who supplies marketing services. But also because as you say earlier, when you, when you, when a client, you keep them for years, you've still got your first client that you got from a Craigslist scrape, which is pretty impressive. But then we can talk to most MSPs who have got their first or their second or their third clients still, you know, 10, 20 years on to MSPs keep clients for a really long time. And that means your average lifetime value of a client can be absolutely massive. It can be. I'm sure that that client has been with you for what coming on for nearly 20 years is probably spent hundreds of thousands of dollars with you over their time. So the Aboriginal lifetime value is massive. That means you can afford to invest a fairly significant sum of money to win a new client. Speaker 3 15:06 Jim, do you have an idea in your head of how much you would be willing to spend to win a new client tomorrow? That is a good question. I do not know the answer to that, but if I said to you, I've got a client they're going to stick with you for another 10 years. They're going to spend up to $3,000 a month for the next 10 years. And they're yours. Give me $5,000. Would you give me that $5,000 easily? I would give you 5% of the total cost. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Well, there we go. So you're, and that is absolutely the right mindset because the reality is it's going to cost you that much to win a new client. Anyway, if ever you look at how much you spend on marketing every year. So it's every single dollar cent pound penny that you spend every single add up, add it all up, add your time in every single hour you spend doing something and you divide it by the total number of new clients, which is probably a very small number because most of them is PS only when a handful of new clients every year. Speaker 3 15:55 And you look at the cost of that, and it's probably already costing you, you know, a few thousand, if not several thousand dollars per new client. So it's really exciting that you've you've, um, we've got this really big average lifetime value. What's also exciting is most MSPs benefit from something called inertia loyalty. So this is one of the reasons you have these clients for so many years. I mean, some of them, you super serve them. You've got special relationships with them, but then there'll be a whole bunch of clients you've got that you don't necessarily super serve them. You just look after them. Well, you're not really completely embedded in their business as a partner, as much as you say you are, they're just, they're just clients. And we all have clients like these. We have super clients and we have average clients. And then we have a couple of really terrible clients that we really should fire. Speaker 3 16:37 And those kind of middling clients, they stay with you, partly because they're enjoying what you're doing, but partly out of inertia loyalty, it just feels like it's too difficult to go anywhere else. And this is what makes your sales cycle so long, because when you're speaking to someone else, who's thinking of switching from their incumbent MSP and switching over to you. The thing that stops them from doing it is inertia loyalty. And you maybe you've had this yourself where you've had a really good set of meetings with a prospect they're really engaged. They liked the price. They liked the service. They liked you. And you know, they don't like their incumbent. They're disappointed with the service levels. They're disappointed with how things aren't as good as they used to be. You put in the proposal, everything's great. And then you call them up a few weeks later and they decided to sign another contract with their incumbent, even though they don't like them. Speaker 3 17:25 Have you ever been in that situation? Absolutely. Yeah. And most of them have, and it's really frustrating. And you think maybe you've done something wrong, but no, you haven't. It's this is inertia loyalty a play. Now we need to know about this inertia loyalty. Cause this is the thing which slows the sales down. And it comes down to an emotional decision. And Jimmy may have heard me say this on the podcast before that the decision makers that we want to reach the business owners and the managers who were trying win over is new clients. They don't know much about technology at all. They don't know much about managed services about it support. In fact, they don't know what they don't know. And so for that reason, they can't make cognitive decisions about picking a new MSP. They literally cannot tell the difference between one MSP and another. Speaker 3 18:07 They can't look at you and decide if you're a good MSP or not. So when they can't make those cognitive decisions, it becomes a purely emotional decision. So if I put this another way, your prospects are picking you or not picking you based on whether or not they like you. And this is a kind of a punch in the face for all those exams and all those qualifications or there's accreditation's and partnerships, because people are picking you whether or not they like you, or don't like, you sure, if you can't deliver the service, they'll soon leave you. But the reality is you can't deliver the service because you've kept clients for the narrow 20 years. So if they're making emotional decisions, what we've got to make sure we do is appeal to them at an emotional level. And we've got to give them plenty of emotional reasons to pick you so roughly and kind of making these figures up now. Speaker 3 18:51 But 80% of their decision is based on their emotional reaction. And 20% is based on their cognitive reaction. So in our marketing, we've got to give them lots of emotional reasons to pick you. And then we've got to give them a small amount of cognitive reason for their brain to rubber stamp. The decision, their heart will make the decision that brain will rubber stamp it. So there's a three step strategy that I recommend for this. And there's loads more about this on my website. If you go to Paul Green's MSP marketing.com and go to the blog, you'll see that I'm in this for four and a half years worth of content in their videos and articles and infographics and all sorts of stuff, explaining this exact process and embellishing it and going into a hell of a lot of detail, but essentially the three step process to get more new clients and to build relationships with them is first of all, to drive quality traffic. Speaker 3 19:37 And we're going to come back to that one in a second, because that's a biggie. The second thing then is instead of just driving quality traffic to our website, to use it, to build audiences instead, and again, we'll come back to what that means. So we're going to drive quality traffic. We're going to build audiences. And then the third thing we're going to do is we're going to build a relationship with them. So if we go back to the very first of those, which is driving quality traffic, and it sounds like you're already on top of some of the traffic sources and the three big traffic sources for MSPs are the big three platforms. So Google, LinkedIn, and Facebook, and I'm not surprised to hear that you're paying 35 $40 a click for a major metropolitan city. That sounds about right. And you know, Google was cheap 15 years ago. Speaker 3 20:18 It wasn't it, but it's certainly not cheap these days. It's not, no, it's not. And you know, the, the downside of Google ads is that it's, it's a, it's a one off hit. You pay you $40. You get someone on your website and then 12 seconds later, they go back, they hit the back button. They didn't realize they'd just cost you $40. They didn't realize that, that you know, that they're literally sucking cash out of your bank account and giving it to Larry and Sergei. Actually, they're not even there anymore, but you get the idea. So Google ads are great for short term traffic, but really long term, I would be focusing on SEO on search engine optimization to appear at the top. Now Google have completely revamped over the last sort of five years, the way they do their search listings. And it's actually quite hard now to be at the top of Google. Speaker 3 21:02 If you remember, five, 10 years ago, people would talk about, you know, let's get up to the top of page. One of Google. The top of page, one of Google is now two swipes down on a mobile phone. It's because most people are doing this on their mobiles. You've got to swipe down twice past the adverts, which look like organic listings, which is a very cruel trick that Google have pulled off. The adverts look exactly the same as organic listings. Apart from a tiny little green thing that says ad, she got to swipe past those. You got to swipe past the map because Google has decided that it support is a retail business. And therefore it brings up the map and then you get to the top of Google. And I think longterm, you'd be better off taking those, you know, $40 per click and investing that into search engine optimization so that you, you are not a, probably a very big ask in a city like Philadelphia. And I'm not a technical expert on SEO, but I think longterm, you, you want to be getting more organic placings higher up because then you're not paying that cost per click then. So you might get lower amounts of traffic from it, but that traffic is going to be higher quality. And it's going to be people who are looking directly for what it is that you sell. So that's the first platform. Second platform is LinkedIn. What are you doing on LinkedIn at the moment? Speaker 2 22:09 Right now, I try to engage with, uh, different people that I've met. And, uh, you know, I post maybe once or twice a week, I try to find something that I believe is meaningful or, um, engaging, I guess. And then I just sort of post there. And then I also just, you know, once a day or I reach out to vendors or I, I check different partners and see what they're posting about. I try to comment and not vote as much as I can, uh, get involved in some partner sites. Speaker 3 22:35 I see LinkedIn is the number one B to B marketing tool for MSPs right now, Jim, when you started the business all those years ago, if I'd said to you, Hey, how would you like a database of virtually every prospect out there, which is completely searchable. It's virtually the most up to date database on the planet. You can search for anyone. You can connect to virtually anyone. You can message virtually anyone. Oh, and by the way, it's free for actually pretty good functionality. Would you be interested in that? And you know, all those years ago you'd have snapped my hand off wouldn't you? It would have been amazing. Absolutely. And that's, that's how we've got to look at LinkedIn because LinkedIn is a bit of a pain. It does feel like everyone is they're selling to us all the time and you know, it feels like everyone's putting content on, but the reality is it's just a massive UpToDate database. So there's three things that I recommend you do with LinkedIn every day. And they're the three CS, the three CS are connect content and contact. And let me go take you through the three of them. The first of them is connect. So do you, do you pay for LinkedIn or did you pay for sales navigator or is it just a free? Speaker 2 23:33 No, I've been considering it. I wasn't sure if it was worth the money, but you know, I'm convinced now. Speaker 3 23:38 Okay, well, it's, it's, I don't think it is worth the money to be honest. Um, so apologies to anyone from Microsoft or LinkedIn, that's, that's listening this, um, but sales navigator is actually really expensive and all it does is it takes the, it takes the brakes off. So on the free version of LinkedIn, you can connect to. And if I've got this figure wrong, don't shoot me because these figures change all the time. But I think it's around about 20 a day. So you can attempt to connect to 20 people a day. And for most MSPs that are spending a maximum of an hour a day on LinkedIn that's enough. That really is enough. And if you attempted to connect to 20 people a day, every single day, five days a week, you know, that's a hundred potential connections a week. Even if only 10% of those people actually accept your friend request or your connection request, you're growing your, your LinkedIn audience by, by 10 people every week, which is pretty powerful in the long term with all of these things. Speaker 3 24:28 It's the long term is the compound that that really makes the difference. So only would just be connecting to up to 20 people a day in terms of who you connect to. You just got to ask yourself who's out there in the marketplace that I want to speak to. And actually in an Uber tip for this is to find someone else who's already connected to the people that you want and then go and look at their connections. So, for example, I don't know if you, if you go physically networking in, in Everett, all in, in your area. Um, me, I find networking a bit of a drag. I don't like getting out there, but it is quite useful to know who's out there who are the Uber networkers, who are going out and meeting people, connect to them on LinkedIn and then go and have a look at their connections. Speaker 3 25:07 Cause if someone is out networking in your area, three, two, three, four times a week, or more than they are going to be connected to virtually everyone else who is out there. So it's always a lot easier to say, you know, see who else is out there? Who are the, who are the lawyers who are most active? Actually, no, you wouldn't do this to lawyers. Would you? Who are the CPAs, the accountants who are most active in the area, who's running advertising campaigns, who, you know, who's the, who's the go to person for something. These are the people you should be connected to on LinkedIn and then go and have a look at their connections to see who you'd be most interested in. And there are actually a couple of tools that you can use, which are strictly against LinkedIn's terms of conditions, but they work. Speaker 3 25:44 Most of them is they, they sit as a plugin to your Chrome. So they essentially are automating human behavior. On your behalf. One of them is called duck soup, which is D U X dash soup in soup that we would drink. There's another one that's called. I think it's called LinkedIn helper. And there's a third one that's called Alfred. If you just Google, Alfred, LinkedIn, and all of these just automate your behavior for you. So they do come with a health warning and you need to follow their instructions and do exactly what they, what they say, because they say that they're technically against LinkedIn's terms conditions, but there are automated tools to help you with this. So our three CS we've got the first C is connect. The second C is content. And you said you posted, was it two, three times a week? That's probably fair. Speaker 3 26:29 Yeah. Okay. So I would turn that into five days a week and it might feel like that's too much, but on social media, that's not too much because social media is constant disposable content and the kind of content that you should be posting. I would forget responding to vendors and talking about high level stuff. Because what we're trying to do here is you're trying to build a database of people who could potentially buy from you and engage with them and build a relationship with them. So I would focus on talking about things that are of interest to ordinary business owners and managers, but making sure you talk about it from their point of view. So for example, um, most things about something, laptop encryption, for example, you and I know that everyone should have their laptops encrypted. Do all of your clients have the laptops encrypted? Speaker 3 27:12 Yes. Oh, okay. So you're, you're actually ahead of the curve on that one then. So you could, you could, um, write something on LinkedIn. It literally needs to be a couple of hundred words just off the top of your head of here's. Why every single one of my clients has an encrypted laptop. And you would then talk about the benefits of laptop encryption. And when I say talk about them, I don't mean the technical aspects of it, but the data safety aspects, or you could throw a story out, like, let's say you were obviously, this, this wouldn't be when we were in lockdown or in quarantine. But let's say when you were you're on the way back on a train, back from the city back home on night, you accidentally fall asleep on the train. You managed to just wake up as it's your stop. Speaker 3 27:47 You rush off the train. Yes, you did it. And then you realize you left your laptop on the train. And for my, if that happens to my clients, it's a minor inconvenience. Cause no one can access their data. No one can do anything with it. All. They've got to worry about it. He's getting a replacement device and we put their data back on their device for them. But if you haven't got an encrypted laptops, suddenly you've left all your data for anyone to read. That could be all your client data. It could be all of your business data. It could be all your financial details and anyone could read it. So can you see how that's written from the, from the prospect's point of view? Yeah. Yeah. And that's the kind of content, there's a hell of a lot more interesting to them than the kind of technical stuff that, that, that we are interested in. Speaker 3 28:27 Essentially, anything you see on any of the, the channel websites is, is not of interest to ordinary people. And maybe that's a slightly extreme way of putting it, but you know, it's so easy to get caught up in latest product vendor, this vendor there, and it's, it just doesn't resonate with ordinary people. What resonates with them is really basic stuff. Like the fear of losing data, the fear of losing that business, losing money, losing time, all of those kinds of things. And we've got to translate all the techie stuff so that it's of interest to them. So we've got connect is the first C content is the second C O and actually on contents, we need to, um, you, you mentioned about commenting as well, commenting on other people's posts is a great way to drive people to your personal profile as well. Because in fact, it's a great way of getting people to friend request or connection request you. Speaker 3 29:14 So you almost want to seek out people in your city who are saying interesting things, especially those people we were talking about, who are Uber connected and go and comment on their posts. Particularly if you can add some value, I mean, you should, you know, you can use hashtags to go and look for things like, you know, hashtag technology, hashtag computer hashtag windows. So there's, there's probably a thousand that we can think of. And you can do all sorts of clever search just to try and find people in your area who are talking about things that really you should be commenting on. All of this is part of painting you as an authority figure as someone, if this is such a cliche, but thought leader, I mean, LinkedIn defines itself as interesting people talking about the things that matter to you, somebody from LinkedIn stood up and said that on a stage once LinkedIn is interesting people talking about things that matter to you. Speaker 3 30:00 So your challenge Jim is to find those people in, in, you know, in just 10, 20 minutes every day and, and comment on their posts. And ultimately you're going to get some more traffic from that. So our first C was connect. Our second C was content. And our third C is contact. As you start to build up your LinkedIn profile with the kind of people that you'd really like to talk to, you need to start contacting those people because you're going to have a database. And there's no point in having a database on LinkedIn unless you're working really working that database. So there's two types of contact that I recommend the first is just to drop them a message and let, once you connect to someone on LinkedIn, you can just message them. You can actually automate this with some of those tools we were talking about earlier. Speaker 3 30:40 Personally, I think a blend of automated messaging and real life messaging is the right thing to do. And you might just sit and go through your database once or twice a week, go through, have a look, say, Oh right, David Smith. I haven't spoken to him ever. I'm just going to drop him a message. And you, you might have, it might be something that you copy and paste, but it might be just to play. David's it's been, we've been connected for a few weeks. Now. I run a local, it support company, just half a mile, a couple of miles down the road from you. Tell me what what's frustrating you with your technology right now. And even, I mean, that's quite a Crossway of jumping into it, but there's a number of different things you can do. And what I would recommend is you do what you're comfortable with. Speaker 3 31:15 So if you're a very aggressive salesperson and you're not afraid to put it out there, you'd be more aggressive with your messaging. If you're more comfortable just taking it easy and building a relationship over time, then you'd just start to get to know people. But our thinking is we always think that everyone's commenting and everyone's messaging. And the reality is they're not LinkedIn stats found about three or four months ago, said that something like only 3% of people who are active users of LinkedIn post content once a week or once a week or more than once a week. So it's not everyone that's posting content. I know it's it's, I may have that stat slightly wrong, but it's not a massive, massive number of people. You know, if I look on connected to just under 3,300 people as of time of recording, and I get probably four messages a week that are unsolicited. Speaker 3 32:01 So you'd think with three more than 3000 connections, I'd be bombarded with people trying to sell me stuff. And the reality is I'm not. And maybe my audience is slightly skewed cause I've been doing a lot of audience building from my side, but I wouldn't, you, you can't be scared of this stuff. You know, the worst thing that can happen. Well, the second worst thing that can happen is they ignore you. And the worst thing that can happen is that they can send you back some abuse, but maybe we'd flip those around. Maybe it's worse to be ignored than it is to get some abuse back. Cause that's still engagement that there we go. So Google, so we were talking about driving traffic. Google was one of our big platforms. LinkedIn was our big platform and the third big platform is Facebook. And Facebook is not a B2B marketing platform. Speaker 3 32:40 Facebook is aimed at consumers, but we can use it to reach the B to B decision makers that we want in their downtime. And where Facebook really has a power for you is if you were to run some adverts on a Friday or a Saturday or a Sunday, you can reach people who are board, business owners and decision makers who like to operate at a high level who are in their downtime. And that they're frankly, just a little bit bored and this can be a very powerful thing to do. So I think for Facebook, the power for you is running ads and run them at weekends. Now Facebook in America adverts work much better in America than they do in the UK because you have sheer bulk numbers of people to reach how many people live in Philadelphia and the Philadelphia Metro. It's something around 5 million, I believe. Speaker 3 33:22 Yeah. I mean, that's, that's just, it's just enormous. And even if you said, you know, what percentage of those are business owners, it might be what, 20%, 30% something like that. Yeah. The MSLA, which is the census. I there's something like 400,000 businesses. It's amazing. So that's, that's, that's 400,000 people for you for you to reach, you know, no, no one in any city in the UK would have anywhere near those, those number of figures because Facebook ads work best. If you, if you're throwing an ad up big numbers, really big numbers. So you might run a campaign Friday to Sunday and you might limit it to two or $300. And, but still target those 400,000 business owners and your campaign might be very simply to persuade them to come and join your email list, for example. So you might have something that you're giving away in return for them to come and join your email list. Speaker 3 34:08 Now I'm going to talk about that a little bit more cause you remember, I was talking about the three step process, the three step process being drive quality traffic. The second step was build audiences or build multiple audiences. And the third step was then build a relationship with them. So this is where we start to go into building multiple audiences because the longterm power of marketing for your MSP is to build some audiences and build a relationship with them. And there's really two to three audiences that you absolutely have to build. The very first one. And the one that's most important is your email list. So yes, you might run some Facebook adverts at weekend, every single weekend, aimed at business owners in your area and driving them to your website and getting them to give you their email address and essentially opt into your email database. Speaker 3 34:52 Now, the reason you want them to do this is you want to have a bunch of people that you can send regular emails to. And the reason why your email list is the most important list is simply because we cannot trust Mark Zuckerberg. And we cannot trust LinkedIn not to steal those other audiences from us because the other audiences you want to build our LinkedIn and possibly on Facebook. And I'll come back to that in a second. LinkedIn is great. It's a great place to build a huge following, but tomorrow morning they could change the algorithm. And that's what I mean by them, stealing it from us. You know, LinkedIn will have its own targets, its own priorities. They could change the algorithm tomorrow. They could detect that we're using automated tools tomorrow. You could be blocked tomorrow. It happened to me about a year ago and I've got a massive Facebook group, the MSP marketing Facebook group. Speaker 3 35:34 And as of time of recording, we've got nearly 800 members. And about a year ago they changed the algorithm. And most of my content stopped appearing in the newsfeeds of the members of my group. And luckily very luckily they reversed that within a couple of weeks, but I had a couple of weeks where engagement absolutely fell off the cliff and anything I put in that group virtually, no one saw it. And I live in fear of that happening every single day. So that's why, you know, as much as Facebook and LinkedIn, a great places to build audiences, the only audience that you completely control is your email lists. So Jimmy, you said you're using Zoho CRM. I know quite a few MSPs use and that I understand is quite quite a good bit of kit, which is great. Can from that, do you generate, can you generate a form which goes into your website that someone can fill into enter your data? Speaker 2 36:18 Absolutely. Yeah. In fact, we actually do that right now. There's a one, two, three, four forms on the website and all of them feed into Zoho. Speaker 3 36:27 Yeah. Perfect. So, so, and what to get people get when they do, what does it say on the forms that they will get in return for them giving you their email address? Speaker 2 36:36 Yeah. You hit right in the heart of the issue. Paul. So, uh, one was supposed to be a free consultation for a network evaluation. Right. Which, uh, I, you know, I think my click through rate is like 0.06% or something. It's, it's, it's terrible. Uh, the contact form is actually located in the footer of the website. So, uh, on, on every page. So people scroll down to the bottom that that has a click through rate. It's not very good. Uh, and the contact form serves dual purpose where it's sales and service. So I'm going to say about 50% of the info that comes in there is either sales or some sort of vendor trying to sell something. Uh, and then the other half is support requests. Um, so okay. Speaker 3 37:12 Offering the free audit. Sounds like a great idea. It's actually a, it's a step too far, too soon. So someone who's just on your websites browsing around, they know they are, you said right at the beginning that people are becoming more sophisticated and they know that a free network audit is, is giving you the ammunition that you need to sell them stuff. And they're not stupid about that. So it's for someone who's in a relationship with your idea, I mean a marketing relationship that might be inappropriate next step at some point, and we'll come onto that in a second. But the, for someone who's just browsing your website, they're not going to give their email address to get that because it's, it's, they're making a commitment to you and people these days, don't like to make a commitment until they're so, so ready to actually make that commitment. Speaker 3 37:52 So what I'd recommend you did instead, Jim is give away some kind of information and we call this an ethical bribe. So the kind of information that you'd give away is something which can be packaged up as something they've got to have so much show that they will enter their contact details to do so. Now there's a great example of this actually on my website. Cause you know, I've built now, this is my second business that I've built using exactly this model. And by the way, all the marketing I'm talking about here is exactly what I do with my own marketing. I drink my own Koolaid to, to use a phrase that's that's passed around. Um, if you go onto my website, which is Paul Green's MSP marketing.com, you'll see on the homepage, I'm offering you a book. And it's a book that I wrote actually four years ago, it's called updating service. Speaker 3 38:32 Doesn't grow your business. You can get a copy for free and shipped them. We literally send them out, physically free in the USA and in the UK and everywhere else in the world. It's a PDF and you fill in your details and the reason that people and we've had more than 2000 MSPs now fill in their details to get a copy of that book. And in my last business, which was sold in 2016, we had 12,000 people. And that was, that was a healthcare marketing business. And we had 12,000 veterinarians dentists and opticians. They happily gave over their contact details to get that book. And all of these people did that because they wanted the book. And the book was the, was this thing called the ethical bribe. It's something cause people don't like handing over their contact details, but they will, if there's a compelling offer for them to do it and you have to work quite hard to show them that it is not a con, that it is genuinely free. Speaker 3 39:19 You know, there's no, there's no fix, there's no fiddle or whatsoever. So I would recommend you switch to that kind of approach. And you, you literally give them something, some information that that's free in return for their contact details and it's gotta be packaged well. And a book is great packaging because that book, and I'll let you into a secret that book costs me 49 Pence per copy. So I had 5,000 printed, 49 penalties, probably 70 cents, 80 cents, something like that, or maybe six 65, 70 cents. It's not a great deal of money. It costs me a hell of a lot more in postage than it does in, you know, the natural printing it. But it's, it's the perceived value. And we write four 99 or four, $4 99 on the back of that book. And that's the perceived value of that book when actually it costs, you know, not, not under a dollar under, under a pound, it's not a great deal at all. So I would put together some kind of packaged information, but nothing techie, nothing technical. The second you say the word network, your dad, you know, the second you start talking about vendors, you're dead. I would focus on data security, data security is the big thing right now. It's the hot topic. Even those uneducated business owners and managers that you want to reach, who don't actually know much about data security know that they don't want to be hacked. This, would you agree with this? That they're starting to be a lot more aware of the risks. Speaker 2 40:32 100%. We're actually dealing with one of our largest customers right now, their entire financial package, uh, hosting infrastructure was compromised. It took almost four weeks to get their books back and that's horrendous as well as a disaster. Yeah, he's existed Speaker 3 40:47 Do, and this is a bit sneaky and you might have to be a bit cute to this, but you could take that story and you could actually turn that into an anonymous case study. So you could strip out any details that identify the business. You could strip out anything because you don't want to embarrass your clients. Of course, no one wants to do that, but that would actually be an incredible ethical bribe. A Caitlin, a retail, one Philadelphia business was hacked so badly. They couldn't access their own, their own accounting system for four weeks or, or whatever, whatever the sort of the big headline is. Speaker 2 41:18 The vendor was completely in communicating that there was no communication whatsoever from the vendor's perspective about what had actually happened. And what had happened is we, I had called a bunch of consultants and third parties around this and sort of eat out the details, you know, piece by piece from these people. Um, but it seems like nothing was siphoned off. Everything was basically encrypted, including all the files, active directory servers, everything, it was all, all destroyed. Speaker 3 41:42 So they were completely screwed. So that would, that would make a great case study. You wouldn't go into the details of it. You wouldn't identify them. You go, you wouldn't go into the technical details, but you'd focus on the emotionals. I mean, if, what, what was the conversation that you had with the business owner? How, how did he, or she talk to you when they were telling you about this problem? Speaker 2 41:59 So, yeah, I mean, we've been working with the CFO and she was just, she was like a ship lost at sea. She's like, I don't even know what to do. I don't know which bills to pay. I don't know what our receivables are. I have no idea what cash flow looks like. And you know, she was just paying bills on hunches, you know, uh, based on what, what she think needed to be paid. And it was, it was a trying situation for her and the whole, the whole team, her whole finance team. Speaker 3 42:21 I've just had an amazing idea for the title of what this could be called, the conversation you never want to have with your it support expert. That's awesome. No, that's great. Thank you. Thank you. You wouldn't call it Alex. He's quite expert, but some something along those lines, the conversation, the phone call, you never want to make to your it support company. And you could actually tell that story. You could talk about, you know, you could almost put words in her mouth and say that, you know, you recreate the conversation that you had. The fact she was lost. She didn't know what to do. It took four weeks. Their suppliers were ringing up. That's amazing. Cause you've got to look at this from what about other CFOs who are reading this and who are thinking, they're looking at this thinking. I cannot imagine being in this situation, that would be hell I would lose so much time. Speaker 3 43:04 I would worry so much. You know, how, what effect would that have on my career? Whether you, whether you go with that or do something similar to that. And this applies to everyone listening to this podcast, that kind of case study approach, particularly when you've saved someone, because that has a, like a heroic ending where you've saved them and you've put it back to normal and you've put in place measures. So they never get hacked. Again, that's a very, very powerful thing to do. And I think ordinary people would find that quite interesting. So you need this kind of ethical bribe and you then use your CRM where whichever CRM you're using to generate the forms on your page, which you've got, which is amazing as do people feel that in the CRM then sends them over that ethical bribe and all of this of course is automated. So no human has to get in the way and screw anything up. I think what you're looking for next, then Jim, if you don't have this already in place is to have a standard email sequence that starts. So when someone joins your list right now, do, do they get a series of emails or is it just a case of waiting for you to do something? Speaker 2 44:00 There, there was no drip campaign built into the ConnectWise CRM. That was one of the major shortcomings of it. The challenge I always had with Paul is basically the managing two systems, right? Export them all the data out of one system and then importing it into another system. The, the management piece of that was sort of really cumbersome. That's kind of why we looked at building a sync tool. Speaker 3 44:19 This is the reason then to cut ConnectWise out of this and connect wise is a great system for servicing clients. And it's not a great system for marketing. And the fact that you can't do drip campaigns, which is it's a basic staple of marketing shows it. So I would be tempted to, and we won't get drawn into too much of the technical side of this, but I wouldn't be tempted to just stick with Soho. And I, I've never personally used our hope. And I'd be very surprised if you couldn't do a, what you call a drip campaign or an automated sequence of emails from Zoho when they, when they join your list, I assume you can anyway. Yeah, you can. Great. So, so th the reason I can understand your, um, your desire to have all your prospects in ConnectWise, but actually if you, if you keep them all within Zoho, you haven't got to manage two different systems. Speaker 3 45:04 They come on into Zoho, they fill in the form themselves, they trigger a campaign and you then send them an email every week forever. Until one of three things happens, either they buy and they become a client or they die, and there's no one to talk to anymore, or they say to you, bye bye. Which is basically, they unsubscribed from you. And the standard practice to do this is first of all, you have that email sequence. So everyone who joins your list, the first, it could be five. It could be 10, but the first let's say 10 emails that they get are always the same 10 emails. So you have a standard set of emails that you send that to people. And what those emails do is those explore the most important subject. So you might have an email about laptop encryption. You might have an email about disaster recovery. Speaker 3 45:46 You might have an email about hacking. You might have an email about reusing passwords. You might have an email about dark web monitoring, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So over the first 10 emails, you're covering off all the different subjects that might emotionally affect these people. And then when you reach the end of that email sequence, you drop them into what's called a broadcast bucket. And a broadcast bucket is where once a week, you go into Zoho and you send out an email and that's what people would traditionally think of as sending out the email newsletter. I don't like the newsletter format. I prefer that you just send out an email, one email, one subject, but you do get the idea from that. So you have an automated sequence for everyone joining your list so you can educate them. So they're a little bit up to speed. Speaker 3 46:27 And then, because your sequence doesn't go on forever, but because we do want to email people forever, that's when you would have an email going out where you go in and do a broadcast every week, that makes a lot of sense. And then also it seems like segmenting the support amount of completely from the marketing system. Exactly, exactly. Cause the emails you send to clients are completely different than need to send to prospects with prospects. We want to leverage fear and fear based marketing. And we don't have to be extreme fear based, but something as simple as someone leaving a laptop on a train and letting someone access all of their financial details, there's a huge amount of fear there. And most people are motivated more by the avoidance of fear than they are the opportunity to gain something. But you wouldn't use fear-based marketing with your clients because they shouldn't have any fear because you're looking after them. Speaker 3 47:12 So it's a completely different setup. You know, something like teams, for example, I'm sure your clients use teams, but they don't use it as well as they could do for your clients. You'd want to send them lots of information and advice on how to get better at teams and all of which the call to action at the end would be, look, anytime we can help you with this, pick up the phone, call the help desk. We'd be delighted to help you talk you through it. Screenshare et cetera, et cetera. Whereas with your prospects, you don't want to screen share with prospects. You don't want to support prospects until their clients. So what you do is you tell them what the clever things you can do with teams, but you wouldn't necessarily tell them how to do those clever things. Instead, you'd say to them, if your it support company, isn't telling you how to do this, we should have a conversation hit reply to this email, or give us Speaker 2 47:52 Call on this number. So I have a question for you. So based on some of the feedback that you've given me, I'm just going to kind of work my way back here. Sure. So I write a white paper or some sort of case study that talks about, let's say in this situation, the accounting people couldn't get access to their clothes for four weeks, right? So I write up how it was broken, you know, the emotions that this caused and then sort of how we fixed it. Right. I generate that first and then I'm going to build some sort of landing page or some sort of page to collect just meme Madras. Hey, if you want to get the whole story in a PDF form, here it is. Here's a summary of what we talked about, et cetera, et cetera. And then I would potentially market that on LinkedIn as opposed. Speaker 2 48:28 And then, you know, reach out to business owners on Facebook saying, Hey, we just wrote this great content. It was about, you know, one of our customers that lost their data for four weeks and you know, here's something great. And then tried to trickle in and collect these email addresses. And then once I start collecting email addresses from this content, put them into a drip campaign where I'm sort of reaching out to them through two different channels. One channel would be a drip campaign that speaks to loss of access to this records. And then when I ran out of that content, then move them into the Sote sort of like evergreen weekly mailing list. Speaker 3 48:59 Exactly, exactly. Cause if you think about this three step system, it's very well, the three step strategy for very simple it's drive quality traffic, build multiple audiences and build a relationship with them. And the first two are one off tasks. So one off tasks to drive a bit of traffic. Okay, you have to repeat it weekly, but it's a series of one off tasks. It's definitely one of tasks to build the audience. They join your email list once the genuine LinkedIn wants. That's it, the thing that goes on forever is the building the relationship. And that's the real secret of this is building relationship. And most MSPs, they might start off with that sequence, but then they never get out of the habit of doing the weekly broadcast. And yet that is critical. The most critical thing. Now I send out, uh, two emails a week to my list. Speaker 3 49:40 One of them is this podcast and another one is another piece of content and it is literally I could be lying in hospital with my arms and legs broken, you know, in traction. And you would still, I would still get the nurses to, to proper laptop up in front of me. So I could do my weekly broadcast email because it is such an ingrained habit in me because I know even though it's not going to generate me any cash this week, I know that it helps me to build a relationship with my audiences. And the whole thing with this is that people only buy at the exact moment they're ready to buy. And we don't know when that moment is for some, it could be tomorrow for some, it could be a week on Wednesday for some, it could be, you know, March next year. Speaker 3 50:15 So what we've got to do is we've got to keep putting our stuff out in front of people so that we remain top of mind. Cause they don't, they forget this very quickly. I mean, your, your clients forget you, you know, never nevermind the prospects. If I was to ring a whole bunch of your clients and ask them what the name of your business was, they wouldn't know what the name of your business was. They wouldn't know if it was proper sky. They would just say, well, this is the it support company, isn't it? So if the clients are like that, the prospects certainly don't remember you, you've got very low name recognition as have all MSPs amongst clients. Cause we haven't got time or money or energy or effort to go out and do brand marketing. So instead of what we do is we're doing direct response marketing where we putting stuff in front of people regularly enough that at the point they're interested, that's the point at which yes, they will. Speaker 3 50:55 They are more likely to pick up the phone or to engage with you. This is great. This is really wonderful. Can you see how this is kind of the same of what you've been doing already, but we're just putting a little bit more structure onto it. Yeah, exactly. It seems systematized. And I understand kind of, you know, basically building an audience and regular content and then making it a humanizing it. Right? So taking away a lot of these technical details. Exactly, exactly. Cause we were trying to talk to their emotions. So I've got one final thing to give to you, Jim. And you know, I don't think it's going to take you that long to get this set up. Cause you've got most of the building blocks in place. You're just reshaping them a certain way. There are three things that I recommend that you do that really will accelerate this and we'll get you a lot faster to having you sitting down with people actually having proper sales meetings. Speaker 3 51:40 The first of those is video. Do you have videos on your website at the moment? I do not. You don't? Okay. So video, we talked earlier about engagement and how we want to emotionally engage them. Video is the number one engagement tool, nothing beats having videos. And uh, I have a service in the UK, which unfortunately is not open to you in Philadelphia. Cause my partner won't fly to Philadelphia, which is very selfish of him. It's a great place to go. Why wouldn't you do that? Um, but if you go and have a [email protected], so it is a, it is a British site, MSP videos.com at UK. And on that site, you can see whole series of examples of the kinds of videos you want on your website. And you'll see there some great examples of primarily the ones to look at or where the clients are talking about the MSP. Speaker 3 52:27 Because if you could imagine someone coming into your website and seeing, instead of whatever's on your website at the moment they see a video and the video is your best clients, three or four of them talking about how great your business is. And from a pure persuasion point of view, your clients are a thousand times more persuasive than you could ever be. There's literally nothing that you could say that they couldn't say better because they can be more persuasive. This is what we call social proof. And social proof is where most people prefer to do what most other people are doing. And if they can see that already, here's some business owners in this area and they trust Jim and his team, therefore they must be people worth trusting. So video is a really written, absolute must. And it, you know, it's the kind of thing that even if you have spent a couple of thousand dollars recreating these style of videos that you'd see on my website, it really is worth doing it. Speaker 3 53:17 And with the clients that I've got that have put these videos on the website, they see a return quite quickly. Some of them, not all of them, but some of them see a really quickly because they are persuading prospects. So video is the first thing I recommend. The second thing I recommend is that you use direct mail. So don't mail is physically sending stuff out to people that don't know again, if you, um, if you do any, any posting people's stuff out to people at the moment, I don't, I don't, it's a it's new to me. Okay. Well the beauty of direct mail is, and I don't know if this, this is the same for you as it is for me, but 20 years ago I had too much in the post and didn't really get many emails. And now in 2020 I have far too many emails and I get very little in the posts. Speaker 3 53:57 I don't know. Is that the same for you? Yeah, it's definitely similar here. Okay. So direct mail is beautiful because it has a huge standout factor. So if you do direct mail well and, and you can do it badly and you can do it well badly is sending out crappy laser printed things on really thin paper, you know, in, in, in nasty envelopes, everything's very thin, tacky, nasty. That's a bad way to do direct mail. A great way to do it is to send out beautifully designed, beautifully printed stuff on thick paper, that's gone into nice envelopes. That's got a stamp on it as opposed to actually being franked cause it has got a stamp on it. A real person must have done it. And um, you know, if you were to send out to take that email sequence that we were talking about earlier, where you're sending out 10 emails to people, when they join your list, once you've got someone's email address, you can pretty much go and look up their website and find out their address. Speaker 3 54:46 What if as part of that automated sequence and you can automate these kinds of things. You sent out a very, very nice piece of direct mail that was just introducing them to your company. And obviously you'd make it more about them than about you. Cause all good marketing is more about the prospect than it is about the seller, but you sent something out. It was couldn't even be like a four page piece of direct mail. That's nicely folded. It's full color it's been done for you perhaps by a service like stamp, which is S T a N N hey.com. So it looks like Stamford. It's actually sta November, November pete.com, which operates in both the U S and the UK. And you know, that you can automate, they have APLs you can automate sending out a piece of direct mail to someone, uh, via, via your, via your CRM and using stamp. Speaker 3 55:30 Now imagine what an impact that's going to have on them. It's going to have a huge impact on them that you could take that a step further using the word impact. And we we've talked. I can't remember. It's been on the podcast before on up, we've talked about using something called impact boxes. In fact, yes, this was in the podcast. A number of weeks ago and impact box is where you send a box of stuff to someone. So you don't just send them just a letter and introductory letter, but there's like an introductory letter and there might be some free gifts in there. And it might be some chocolate bars. There might be a mouse mat. If people still use mouse mats, it might be a like a beer mats. You could have some branded stuff. This is the kind of stuff that you can let your imagination go wild. Speaker 3 56:04 And you're kind of restricted really by budget and the imagination and that's all, but there's a real power of sending stuff out to people. And I don't know if this is the case in the U S I suspect it would be, but here in the UK print is really cheap right now. And that's because over a number of years, lots of printers bought lots of really, really big printing machines. And they're just being under use right now. So the cost of printing has come down dramatically and I'd be very surprised if that wasn't the case in the States as well. And of course you can send it to another state or to another part of the country and have printing done elsewhere and have it shipped over to you. Cause shipping of course is relatively cheap these days. So I definitely think you should do print. Speaker 3 56:41 The third thing that I think we should do, which would really catapult your relationship with people forward is to get someone to call your database is for you. So you've got your LinkedIn database, you've got your email database. You might have a Facebook database as well. People you're connected to on Facebook. If you wanted retail businesses, you might have an Instagram database as well. Or if you're really passionate about Twitter, you might have people who are connected to on Twitter. The thing that really moves your relationship forward with all of these people is somebody picking up the phone and calling them on your behalf. And this is not telephone selling. This is not a tele sales job because telesales, we all have negative thoughts. When we think about telesales, tele sales is an awful job. It's people who don't want to make the phone calls, ringing people who don't want to receive their phone calls. Speaker 3 57:26 Spam calls know no one likes making or receiving those. But what we're doing is warm calling and you want someone typically a back to work. Mum would be great for this, uh, someone to come and sit in your office for two to three hours a day. And they're just picking up the phone and they're calling people on your behalf. And the conversation literally should be, Oh, hi, David. It's Sandra here calling from Jim Smith's office at proper sky. I mean, he just asked me to give you a call and then the conversation goes on from there. And what they're doing is they're building the relationship on your behalf. May they might ask key questions, just such as some. So do you have someone looking after your it right now? Oh, you do. Okay. And do you know roughly when your contract ends, we all know the power of knowing when someone's contract is up or you might ask them that the best question anyone can ever ask the prospect, which is on a scale of one to 10, where one is awful and 10 is amazing. Speaker 3 58:12 How would you rank your current it support company? And obviously if they rank them highly, there's not much of an opportunity for you there, but if it's anything sort of seven, six or below, there's a massive opportunity for you there. And then the follow up question from that could be, why did you give them that score? Which is really good at uncovering what it is that they've done to emotionally unengaged their existing clients. But there's a real power in this. When, when I had my healthcare marketing business, the one I sold in 2016, we had 12,000 prospects. We sent two emails out a week, so that's 24,000 emails a week going out. And we had a three strong team of people. We call them the telephone intervention team and their job was to ring people who clicked on emails. So we had a couple of thousand clicks a week that meant that they were active. Speaker 3 58:54 These people are alive, they're reading our stuff, they're consuming our content. We rang them. We didn't bring a couple of thousand. We rang probably a few hundred every week. And then the job of the telephone intervention team was to book a sales meeting. And that was it. And it might have taken them something like 40 to 50 to maybe even 70, 80 dials to get hold of. And I think we needed to speak to 15 to 20 people to actually book a sales meeting, but it meant that each person in a day could book maybe two sales course. And, and just off the back of sending 24,000 emails a week and having three people phoning those people, we were able to keep two fields sales executives to field sales reps, busy out on the road, seeing people. And, and that was the system that we use to grow and to maintain that business. Speaker 3 59:38 And it was beautiful. And do you know what if I owned an MSP tomorrow, I would put exactly that system in, so everything we've just talked about here, I would do that. Now you wouldn't necessarily scale it to that height, but someone making calls for two to three hours a day and I would suggest the next step is not jumping straight to a sales meeting. The next step is probably 15 minutes on the phone with Jim or whoever, whoever does the selling, whoever is the technical salesperson within the business, which I guess would be you, wouldn't it? Speaker 2 00:04 Yeah. For right now. It is. Yeah. But basically I pre prequalifying the sales lead. Yeah. Right. Speaker 3 00:08 So you'd be delighted to have two 15 minute phone calls a week with prospects. Fantastic. Wouldn't it be? Well, that would change everything cause that, that would turn into one, maybe two sales meetings every week. And we all know that that actually you get to a point very quickly where you, you don't want any more of those sales meetings cause you, there's only a finite number of new people that you can onboard. Exactly. So I think we've, we've kind of reached a natural end and you can imagine I could talk for another five hours about stuff that you could do details that we've kind of skipped over. If you've got any questions, Jim, and I'm more than happy to be available to you on email and I'll, I'm off the end of this recording. I'll, I'll give you my email address and you're more than welcome to sort of, you know, as you're implementing this to just keep, keep talking to me. And that's my way of saying thank you for, for sharing this with our audience, but what are the questions do you have right now? Speaker 2 00:53 So, so I think one of the challenges I have, right? So as I'm moving as a business owner from doing the work to managing the work, and I think one of the challenges I have is freeing up either the time or the funds to get high quality marketing work done, like writing those articles for me is tedious. And it's, it's emotionally draining. Like I have a hard time generating this content, but what I found is that the five or six meal blog posts that I've actually spent the time to write have 10 times more engagement than any of the stuff that I've purchased. Is, is there a service that you recommend, is there a point that you recommend, is there a strategy where do I set that line as an owner that has these time constraints on generating good stuff that people want to read while not, you know, watering down the messaging or, or, or anything along those lines? Speaker 3 01:40 Can I ask how old you are, Jim? Uh, 40. 40. Okay. So, um, do you have a family? I do a dose six year old, a four year old. Oh, perfect. Okay. I have a nine year old, so I'm kidding. Kids are greater than age aren't they? Until they turn into teenagers and then they stopped being fun. I'm told. Um, so you, you want to spend more time with your family, but you also want to grow your business so you can get more cash. So the family can do the things that the family wants to do. You know, we're all looking for a balance of time and cash and family and fun because you will have some fun as well, but also we want to do some meaningful work. And that's really interesting. You say that when you go through the pain of writing that blog article, you get a better response from it and no wonder, cause you've got a passion for it that that no one else will have. Speaker 3 02:19 There's a wonderful acronym. Um, that's, that's I use a lot, which is DOA. And if I said to you that let's say I've been watching CSI Philadelphia, if such a thing exists. And, and the, the guy was DOA, what would that traditionally mean? A dead on arrival. Exactly. And that's what we as business owners will be. If we keep trying to do everything in the business. So there has to come a point where we flip that acronym round and we turn it into something else. We turn it into delegate, outsource, automate. And I think this is the secrets to being a successful business owner who also doesn't get divorced and sees their kids loads. And, and also has lots of cash in the bank. You've got to take every single job that has to be done. And you've got to ask yourself, do I really need to do this? Speaker 3 03:04 Because you should only do what only you can do. And the reality is there are a billion writers out there who can write this content for you. So can you delegate it to someone on your team? Probably not this job. There are many other jobs. You can technical jobs, especially if you're caught doing any kind of technical work, but anything, something like this, you couldn't delegate. Therefore could you outsource it in some way? There are a couple of platforms for you to look at. One is called fiverr.com. Fiverr has two [email protected]. Fiverr seems to be international people per hour seems to be more UK based. There's one, which seems to be more stateside based and that's upwork.com and what these platforms are there places where you could hire people to do services on your behalf. So if you went into these platforms and typed in article writing, and you'll see, there are a lot of article writers out there and you want to pick for a writing job. Speaker 3 03:57 You want to pick someone who is based in your country and speak short language natively, cause you want, you don't want to have any kind of language barriers. There's lots of things you can outsource offshore, you know, to other countries, but writing. Isn't one of them. There's one of this, one of the things that has to be done by someone that lives in you and speaks lives in your country and speaks your language. So you'd go in there and you'd look for a writer. And what I would recommend to find the perfect writer is that you give the exact same brief to three or more writers that you like to look off. So you go and look at their portfolios, you look at their costs and you'll, you'll soon find three or four that you liked the look of, but then you give those three or four or five exactly the same job. Speaker 3 04:35 And what I would recommend that you do is you record a short MP3 brief, and that's how you ensure that they all get exactly the same brief. So it could be let's let's let's fall back on laptop encryption. Again, it could be that you want to do an article on laptop encryption. So you literally grab your phone. You record a brief, you, you tell them about why it's important. You talk about what you want to get over in the article. You remind them that it's going to be written from, to appeal to an ordinary person who doesn't know about technology. And then you'd send those different writers that exact brief. Then you get back your three, four, five pieces of work and you can now compare those pieces of work. So you could see which piece of work you liked the best. And that's a great way to find a new writer. Speaker 3 05:12 You then agree to talk to them. It might be weekly. It might be, but essentially you jump on a video call or a phone call together and you talk about the subjects you want them to write. And essentially Jim, you write the content without having to write it. So you make sure you record that call. Let's say it was, you were talking about disaster recovery and, and, and you'd say, right, let me give you a case study of disaster recovery gone wrong. And then you talk and we, we switched you on and we have five minutes of you talking about this and how the client was an idiot and this and that and this and that and this and that. And at the end of it, you've, you've given that writer loads of content. And because they've been recording it, they can go and get that transcribed. Speaker 3 05:51 So my like rev.com or one of the other transcription services available, and they can literally take your words and then just shape your words and, and put some structure into it and make sure the grammar is correct. And all of that kind of stuff, because we don't speak as well as we write, we speak in, in a completely different way to our written skills, but a good writer would be able to turn that content round. So it's your content. That's taken you five to 10 minutes to get it out your head. And it's someone else to spend a couple of hours shaping it into great written content. That's great. That's great advice. Thank you. Thank you. And that, by the way, that that system for finding writers, loads of the people I talked to in the MSPs I worked with have tried that and it worked beautifully. Speaker 3 06:28 And then you, you, um, you can stick with that writer on the platform because these platforms are there places for you to find people to do work, but they also make it safe, safe for both you and the seller. Actually you pay money into the platform to show that you've got the money, but you don't release the money until you're happy with it. It's like PayPal used to be 20 years ago. You know, it was kind of an escrow system. Um, what I've found is when you've, when you've worked with someone for a couple of months and you're loving their work, you just come off platform and you have to be careful how you have that conversation. Cause the platforms don't like it, but there's no point you paying their fee. Well, put it down this, you, you can pay less money and they can earn more money if you come off platform. Speaker 3 07:07 But obviously you need that relationship. And that trust first, because once you come off platform, there's always that risk that, you know, you're not, the quality is going to go down or you or you're not going to get what you've paid for. Okay. That's great, Jim, thank you so much. You've been absolutely brilliant and I hope that's been useful to you. I'm going to give you my email address in a second one. We stop the recording, but thank you so much. And I genuinely hope that you, if you can put some of this stuff into place, there's going to be such a difference to you getting more new clients into the business. Speaker 2 07:31 Oh, absolutely. So we could do a case study followup and how I took your advice and sort of the impact it's had on my business as I think it would be a great second followup podcast. So I can't thank you enough for the time and the energy. And um, I'm sorry, I didn't find your podcast sooner that the quality is stellar while you do great job, you share a lot. And I I've been enjoying everything about it. It's been wonderful Speaker 1 07:50 Coming up next week. Next week, we're back to our more usual format. I've got an interview with Darren winger. He's an MSP video specialist based in the UK. And he's going to tell you how to influence people on your website, through the power of using video. We're also going to talk about the most frictionless call to action on your website, how to get people to book more phone calls with you. And we'll start to look at a marketing super power of understanding how prospects think. Essentially, if you want to influence what they buy. You've got to look through their eyes, see you next week Speaker 0 08:23 Made in the UK, the MSPs around the world, pool greens, MSP marketing podcast.