Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:00 Made in the UK for MSPs around the world. Lisa's pole greens, MSP marketing podcast. What do you mean it's already August? How did that happen?
Speaker 1 00:00:13 Mommy? Here's what's coming up on today's show
Speaker 2 00:00:15 Google. Who's always been regarded as having a great culture. Their average employee tenure was only 1.9 years. I looked at it and said, well, wait if I have a business that needs my employees to stay longer than Google's business, how do I do that? We're also going to look at how you,
Speaker 1 00:00:31 You can do a marketing audit on your competitors. See if they're doing more marketing than you're doing. And we'll answer the question of whether or not you should be using something like customer thermometer to see how happy your clients are.
Speaker 0 00:00:44 Full greens, MSP marketing podcast.
Speaker 1 00:00:47 I'm quite unusual for a business owner in that I don't lease a brand new car. Most of the business owners I know, and many of the MSPs, not all, but many of them, they lease brand new cars through the business. And especially if you're doing it electric, you know, an electric car, it can be quite a tax efficient way to do it. But for some reason, I'm still a bit grounded in 2005 with my car purchasing. So I bought my last car. It was a BMW five series. It's still sat on the drive, outside my house right now. Absolutely adore it. There's only a couple of years old when I bought it. But for me in my head, I'm getting around that massive depreciation. Leasing to me is like renting a house. It just seems like throwing away good money. And if you buy a brand new car, you seem to lose all that value when you first drive it off the forecourt.
Speaker 1 00:01:31 No. So that's the way I think. And I know I'll get feedback from people telling me I'm wrong and I should be leasing a Tesla cause I wanted Tesla and all of that kind of stuff, but I'm quite happy with my car choice. And what I liked about when I bought this car was I got to play the game with the salesperson. Obviously this is all pre COVID. This is back when you could just waltz into a car dealership and you know, just take a car out for a test drive and smile internally. And think this is the one, this is the one and try and hide it from the salesperson. So you can negotiate. And that's what the game is. Isn't it it's a negotiation. And I remember sitting, I went to one of those car supermarket places, and I took this one out for a drive.
Speaker 1 00:02:08 It was lovely. I mean, it got all the toys, you know, all the bells and whistles. It was exactly what I wanted. I knew it, he knew it, it was kind of a done deal. But then we went back inside and I sat opposite him at a desk. And I tried to play cool across my arms, across my legs, sat back in my chair. And he said to me, so what do you think? And I said, it's okay. It's all right. I'm going to need a deal. That was my exact words, because I sound like such an idiot. Hearing myself say that I'm going to need a deal. And that's what I said to him. Now, obviously this is the game. All people play this car showrooms. And one of the first things that the car sales guy had said to me that morning when I went in was we don't discount our cars, which is a very sensible thing.
Speaker 1 00:02:51 And I do not recommend you discount your services in any way, but even though he'd said, we don't do discounts. I said to him, I want to deal. And we thrashed out a deal. And I was just a couple of years ago now. I can't remember exactly what the deal was, but I think I'm pretty sure that they threw in a year's worth of servicing. I seem to remember, I didn't pay for that a full tank of fuel, which was quite important for me because often you'll pick up a new car and it's got no fuel in it and that's just annoying. Um, and they threw in something called guard X, which is, you know, that special chemical that they put on the seat. So when your kids pour their fizzy drinks all over it, it doesn't actually damage the seats and they put something on the outside as well.
Speaker 1 00:03:28 Um, I think they did an we'll Polish for me, obviously new mats. I think I asked for a Butler show pain and he laughed at that one. I said, no, that's not going to happen. Cause you see all those items that he gave me as part of the deal. And I'll just put the word deal there into inverted commerce. All those items were just things that the, you know, their preparation guys would do. They were selling 10 to 20 cars a day. I seem to remember quite a high number of cars. So then just got a whole load of guys, constantly chucking these cars out. I wasn't really asking for anything that difficult, but we want you to feel like I'd got a deal. Cause I always ready to spend my money there. And then I was very happy to do it. And I did go on and actually buy some extra stuff from them.
Speaker 1 00:04:07 I bought the gap insurance, which, you know, pays off your debt. If you write your car off, when you've still got outstanding debt on it, or certainly the gap between the debt and the value of the car. And I bought something else from them as well. It might have been an extended servicing pack or something like that. Can't remember, but I enjoyed that process. And part of that process, I wanted to feel I could got a deal. Now, when someone buys from you, it's exactly the same. Cause something very key to remember. And that is that people hate being sold to, but they love to buy. In fact, they love to buy so much that even when they're buying something for their business, even when it's a B2B purchase, they still adore buying it. And this is something that you can leverage because when you're talking to a prospect and you're talking about the service levels and you're talking about what's in their monthly package and you're talking about the projects, you've got to hold something back to offer them a deal.
Speaker 1 00:05:03 Not everyone is going to need a deal, but you know what? Everyone's going to want a deal. What if you could say to one of your top prospects, thanks, look, here's what we've put together for you. This is the right package. This is what we do. We do not discount, which absolutely should be tattooed on your head. We do not discount because you do not want to be the MSP. That discounts by discounting, you devalue the relationship before it's even started, but you can be the MSP that offers deals. What could you throw in that extra for their monthly subscription? That really costs you very little. And yet for them it feels like a deal. Maybe just, maybe you could upgrade them to a new security pack, which is what a couple of pounds or a couple of dollars a month worth of subscriptions for you to add in some safety tools.
Speaker 1 00:05:53 But for them they protected. Maybe you could up them. So instead of just backups, they're on continuous backups, which again is just a setting for you. Isn't it? What are those settings in all those different subscription packages that you've got that really the setting could be. It has no financial impact on you. If you use setting a over setting B, but there is a perceived deal for the client. What if they perceive that they're getting something better? What if universally? And you make sure that this doesn't become known, but universally for your clients, if they choose the middle package, you have grade them to the top package. If they choose the top package, you throw in some extra stuff. If they choose the bottom package, you upgrade them for free and inverted commerce to the middle package. So basically right from the get go, they're getting more than they signed up for.
Speaker 1 00:06:39 You know, whenever I'm selling one of my training programs, we always bundling bonuses. Always, always do that because it's something which makes people feel like they're getting a good deal. Or if we don't do a bonus up front, they will do a bonus in the background. At the time of recording, I've just started a brand new live training program. It's a five week program on my website called the MSP marketing accelerator. And I've just done. My first live call today took about two hours to talk to the 27 MSPs on board with that training. And the first thing I did was I dropped a value bomb for them. Love that saying drop the value bomb. The first thing I did was I said to them, look, you didn't know you were going to get this when you signed up for this program, but you're going to have direct access to me on email, please, don't send me an essay or ask me to do a 20 minute website review of your website.
Speaker 1 00:07:25 That's not going to happen, but your here's my email address. And you can send me short questions and I will happily answer those questions and send me as many as you like. And the reason I did that, and I was always planning to do that was because I wanted the people who just committed to joining me on a training program. It wasn't massively expensive, but I wanted them to feel that instantly they got good value and we debated my team and I, whether or not we put that into the sales literature or whether or not we offer that just as a bonus for people when they started on day one. And I'm glad we did it that way because it makes people feel like they've got a really good deal. So then they relax. They enjoy the training, they implement it and they end up with better marketing for that MSP.
Speaker 1 00:08:03 So what have you got them? What can you do to create the feeling of a deal? Because people buy emotionally, they do not buy with their head. They're not making cognitive buying decisions. They're making emotional buying decisions that deal could really see all the brand new client that you could then keep for 10 years, have a chat to your team, identify what you've got. Don't cheapen your product in any way, but how can you put together an absolutely killer deal, which we'll just seal it for you. Here's this week's clever idea. Whenever my clients asked me about how they can track their competitors and their competitors marketing nine times out of 10, I say, I wouldn't bother with that. Just focused on your own marketing, because the problem with looking at what your competitors are doing all the time is you take your eye off the real ball.
Speaker 1 00:08:50 And the real ball is what you're doing with your marketing at the same time. I know that sometimes you just want to know what your competitors are doing. So here's how to do a very simple competitive marketing audit is to find out what it is that your competitors are doing. Just almost, if you like establish a baseline, you almost want to establish, are these people doing something or not? Are they active marketers or are they people that we can just ignore? Because remember in any marketplace, there's only really tiny handful of MSPs who are actually doing any marketing, the vast majority of them, aren't doing anything particularly significant. Now all sorts of clever tools that you can use. And I'm going to list a couple of tools at the end. If you Google, how to do a marketing audit on your competitors or how to see your competitors marketing, you'll see a whole load of paid tools.
Speaker 1 00:09:40 My gut feel is unless you're in a very, very big market with a lot of very aggressive competitors who are throwing a significant amount of money at marketing, you're just not going to see any results from these tools. These tools are for the big boys. You know, the guys who are spending 20, $30,000 a day on marketing, they want to know what their competitors are doing and what keywords they're using and all of that kind of stuff. I honestly think for your average MSP, you're just kind of wasting time and money with stuff like that, but you can do the basics and here are the basics. The very first thing you can do is you can look at their website, go in and find the sitemap, their website. And that way you can see every single page that they've got available. Because of course not all of us linked to every single page in our navigation.
Speaker 1 00:10:26 I have hundreds of pages on my website, which linked from the navigation, cause they're just not relevant, but they're still there. If you were to look at the site map, you'd still be got to find them. If you really want to spend your life looking for those. But if your competitors go and have a look, you can, I see what kind of marketing offers they've maybe done in the past. You can see all sorts of things. How do you find someone's site map? Simple. First of all, you can try just looking for it directly. So if you go to their website.com forward slash sitemap dot XML, or even maybe just forward slash sitemap, that might do it. And if that doesn't work, then just Google this search term and we'll put this in the show notes site, colon their website.com and then a space and then file type colon XML.
Speaker 1 00:11:10 Cause all the site map is it's an XML document, which is fed into Google, which tells Google all of the pages on that website. And once you've found that it's very easy to go and see where all the pages are, by the way, if your competitor has a lot of pages or a really big site map, or you've just got a lot of competitors, you want to do this for, then there are some paid services. There's one called vision, short site maps.com. I only know this because I'm looking at the advert for it. And it says free site map generator. No, your competitor's website thing is that's an ad. And if someone's paying a number of dollars for me to see that ad, then the chances are it's a premium service in some way. But the thing for most of your competitors, just go looking for that site map extension, that's the easiest way to do it.
Speaker 1 00:11:53 So find all their pages, have a good look through it, go and look at all their blog pages, look at everything. The other thing that you can do is you can look to see how their website has changed over the years. Have you heard of the way back machine? If you just Google the phrase way back machine, it's an internet archive. It's actually a website that takes screenshots of websites on a reasonably regular basis. So there is a historical record. It's like a museum for how websites used to look. And by the way, your inevitably at some point think, Oh, I wonder what Amazon looked like in 2004 and you will lose. You will lose an evening so easily looking at popular websites from back then, but you can go and see old versions of your own website. And more importantly, the old versions of your competitor's website, what kind of stuff were they doing back in the day?
Speaker 1 00:12:41 And how has that changed now, if it's not on the website is almost as informative as what is on the website right now. The other thing that you can do as part of your marketing audit is you can just Google your competitor's name and what you get to see from this is their overall digital footprint. So you will see their website. Of course, that will come up. You will see potentially listings in public directories like here in the UK, we have something called companies house, which is a register of all limits, these companies and that company names should come up when you Google their name and you can have a look at the listings there, you'll see reviews. In fact, you'll see all sorts of stuff. If you've never Googled your in company name and not just looked at the first page, but the second page and the third page and the fourth page, you find stuff that people have said about your company online and you had no idea really, really is quite a scary thing to do.
Speaker 1 00:13:32 And this is your digital footprint. And this, by the way is what some of your prospects and some of your leads are doing before. They're thinking of buying from you. So you should definitely do it for your business and you should do it for your competitors as well. While you're doing this. Something else you should do is set up a Google alert for your competitors' names, put their names in inverted commerce, over a Google alerts, and then set it up so that you get alerted every single time. That name is mentioned in a new place on the web. So you'll get a new alert every time they get a new review or they appear somewhere else on the web. And it goes without saying that you should be doing that for your business name as well. So you're alerted when someone's talking about you. Now, these are just the basics.
Speaker 1 00:14:12 You're not going to get a lot of strategic stuff off here, but I'm pretty sure that you'll find something of value about your competitors in there. Something that maybe has been sitting in plain view for years, but you just didn't know about it. Then we get onto the clever tools and there is a tool in particular, which will allow you to see what Facebook adverts your competitors are running. And it's actually a Facebook tool. If you go to facebook.com forward slash ads forward slash library, this is the Facebook ads library. And you can actually look up your competitors adverts just by searching for their brand name. So you type in the brand name at top, and if they have a Facebook page, Facebook will tell you about it. And then if they are running any ads, it will show you their ads. Only the ones that they're currently running.
Speaker 1 00:14:59 Sadly, it won't show you any historical ads. It will just show you what they're currently running. And that reminds me, I don't think I've told you yet to go and check out their Facebook. Those are some basics when they go and check out their Facebook, go and check out their LinkedIn, go and check them out on Twitter. All of these things should probably have come up in their digital footprint, but having to look at that adverse in the Facebook ads library can be a fascinating insight into what they're doing as well. Can you do exactly the same thing when it comes to looking at Google ads? Yes. I think you possibly can. There's a website called spite Fu spy, fiu.com. And that will allow you to search for any competitor and actually download that keywords. Again, it looks like a paid for service. You might not be bothered to look at that, or maybe, maybe if there's a particular MSP in your area area, that's really dominant all over Google ads.
Speaker 1 00:15:48 Maybe this is your way of finding out which keywords they're using and then going to have a look at their specific adverts, either way, whatever you do with all of this, you've got to remember not to obsess over what your competitors are doing. That wasn't a particularly strategic series of ideas there. I could have suggested a SWOT analysis, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats. If you Google, how to do a competitors' marketing analysis, you'll find all sorts of strategic advice online me. I think you're just unless you're a marketing manager for an MSP and it's a big, and you really should know all of this stuff. I think for your average MSP owner that listens to a podcast like this, I honestly don't think your time is well spent obsessing over your competitors in this way. Find out what they're doing. Sure, but make sure you don't obsess over it.
Speaker 1 00:16:34 If you're going to obsess over one thing obsessing over your own marketing pools, blatant plug. So while you're checking out your competitors, marketing and looking at your own, perhaps I can just slot in here, a service that I've got, which may help you. It's called the MSP marketing edge. And we deliver content every single month to more than 220 MSPs around the world. In fact, we only sell it to one MSP per area. So you never clash your marketing doesn't clash with any, no one else in your area. And what we do is we have four elements to this program, the stuff that you get, monthly stuff that you get weekly there's tools that are available to you. And then there's a whole bunch of support. So the biggest part of this and that the crowning jewel as it were, is what we deliver to you every month.
Speaker 1 00:17:19 There is so much stuff. There's an educational guide, advert some blood verse in a pack. There's a video there, emails to prospects and clients, a month's worth of social media, a sales letter, and a newsletter that you can print off and send to prospects. There's a press release to send to your local media and campaign in a box, which you can use to commercialize all of this. And then we send you more stuff. Every week, we send you more up to date, social media content, and we send you more videos. And then we've got tools on offer to you. There's a book called email hijack about email security, which you can put your name on the front and use as if you'd written it yourself. There's a plugin to the website. Have I been poned, which you can use? So the people can go onto your website and check whether or not their email address has been breached.
Speaker 1 00:18:03 And we've set it up in a way you can use it for data capture as well. And there's a massive Corona virus, 30 day campaign in a box, which is one of the many tools available to you. Now, we also have a Facebook group for this. It's an exclusive Facebook group, only for my clients. If you're not one of my clients, you won't be in there. And we're just about to launch enhanced support, where we are offering hundreds of how to videos, literally videos to show you how to do every possible marketing function that you could ever need to do as part of your marketing. And there's a handholding service as well. You can jump on a one to one zoom call with a member of my team and they will talk you through any part of your marketing that you or your team are stuck on. This is literally a no excuses service. Now we are removing for you all the excuses that have stopped you from implementing your marketing and we're making it easy. And it's so affordable as well in the UK. It's just 99 pounds plus VAT per month in the U S and around the world. It's $129 per month. And you know what? There's no contract cancel any time. MSP marketing, edge.com.
Speaker 2 00:19:14 The big interview. I am Peter Melby, CEO of Greystone technology and creator of the boss, our babysitter framework around how to connect with and manage employees.
Speaker 1 00:19:24 So it's one of the most common questions that comes up really is how to get the most out of your team, whether it's through difficult times, like now, where we can't physically sit in an office with our team in the way that we could a few months ago, or just in normal times, tell us more about your, your boss or babysitter concept
Speaker 2 00:19:40 Rooted in the idea that most managers and myself included do more babysitting than we intend to. And then we want to, we want to trust our team members. And we like it when we feel like we can trust our team members, but we don't do it very well. And our team members don't do very well at times of being trustworthy. And so we spend a lot of our time still doing very basic management tasks instead of really leading an organization forward. And my view of that is that we just really don't understand how humans work very well, and really incorporate that into our culture. A reference a study done a few years ago that talked about the fact that Uber has a terrible company culture and terrible employee retention. Their average employee tenure is 1.2, three years, which is pretty bad. That means that's a refill every position every 15 months, but the same study said that Google who's always been regarded as having a great culture. Their average employee tenure was only 1.9 years. So it wasn't that dramatic. And so I at it and say, well, wait, if I have a business that needs my employees to stay longer than Google's business, how do I do that? And for us, it came with a, a very stark realization of how people actually work, what they actually want and being able to align those things culturally within our organization.
Speaker 3 00:21:06 So you have an MSP with a roundabout, a hundred staff. This isn't just some theory you've come up with. You're actually out there doing it with quite a scary number of staff in the most I've ever had was 15. And that was, that was bad enough. I can't imagine having a hundred, but what do you, what do you actually do? And you, you must obviously have junior managers underneath you. You can't physically coach and mentor a hundred people in one go. So, so how do you do it?
Speaker 2 00:21:29 There's no magic wand. One thing that we need to do, but the culture that we've built is around a few different ideas. And the first idea is that on a long enough timeline, every company culture, succumbs to the laws of human nature, the number one thing that we need to understand is that people by nature are focused on themselves. I am you are. And even when we're doing things that seem like we're going above and beyond for somebody else in many cases, it's because it makes us feel good because we like the achievement and there's nothing wrong with that. So when I say selfishness, I don't need, I don't use it in a negative frame. It's more just how we're wired to think about things. So what we talk about as the fact that if, if my selfishness and our company's focus on achievement, aligned with our employees, focus on their achievement, then we create lasting culture.
Speaker 2 00:22:20 It's when I pretend that my employees are going to care more about my company than they do about themselves, that's never going to happen. And so rather than try that, we've recognized that we can align, you know, our, our company culture with and be very connected in reality. And so we have two monthly meetings. We have one monthly meeting within each four to seven person team. And then we have a one monthly meeting. That's a one-on-one between each employee and their supervisor that are very, very specific in the ways that we ask questions and prepare for those meetings so that we can get very efficient information moving in our company, but still very truthful.
Speaker 3 00:23:00 Can you give us an example of the kind of information that you'd get asked for meeting like that?
Speaker 2 00:23:04 They often that the employment process is all based on lies, and we say that jokingly, but it's relatively true. When someone shows up for a job interview, they're not coming in as their true self they're coming in and showing the side of themselves that they, that they want you to see so that you hire. And when we come into a job interview, and even when we write up a job posting, we are saying here we're the best company to work for. So we're only showing the best side of things. That's something that, that humans are often incentivized to do. You know, that when we go to work, I'm only going to show what I succeed at, because that will help me get that promotion or that raise as long as they think I'm doing things well, well, as a business owner, I need to know that things being done well, or I need to know if they're not being done well so that I can change our approach and make sure that we succeed.
Speaker 2 00:23:53 So a couple of the things that we ask in a team meeting, everybody prepares a very simple sheet. We call it a story sheet. Uh, they talk about what, even just how they're progressing in each aspect of their, their job, each of the five, you know, up to five things that can comprise their job description. And then they answered the questions. What am I proud of in the past month and what new I wish I had done better? And what am I stressed out about? What am I excited about? Just getting that basic level of your depth in, in human thinking and what we call psychological safety to be able to share openly and hear others share openly about their successes and their challenges. Those questions, you know, are at the root of that team meeting. And then the one on one goes deeper in each one on one, the employee and the manager, each answer four questions, and the employee answers the question, how satisfied am I in my job?
Speaker 2 00:24:48 And how engaged am I? We have a little red, yellow, green scale. It's very simple, but we ask the employee what, you know, what are you working to improve so that we can understand how they're viewing themselves. The manager will answer questions. Like what successes have you seen, you know, in the employee's work, but also what do you need the employee to, to adjust or to change? Or what actions do you need to correct? So once a month we have employees saying, here's what I'm working to improve and manager saying, here's what we need you to improve. And like clockwork, when you look at the piece of paper and you realize 80% of the time, those things align. And so we recognize that our people generally know where they're failing and we don't need to tell them that we need to help them figure out solutions to that. And just by asking questions in a different way, rather than walking up to an employee randomly and saying, you're failing at this, you need to fix it. And being very directive about that, we get a level of, of engagement and success at correcting action that we didn't see before that.
Speaker 3 00:25:48 So this is very clever. It's, it's a constant nonstop feedback process between, uh, the team between the individual, between the manager. So I can see how that works. It's 20 odd years ago, I did, um, a six month performance coaching diploma, which taught me if some of those questions you were saying there, you know, declaring something that you, uh, that you think has gone well and something that you think you could have done better. That that's, that's almost exactly the same language that I learned on that course 20 years ago. So that's fascinating. Do you not find that when new people come into the team, they find this a really foreign and almost slightly scary process, or do they, do they tend to embrace it quite quickly?
Speaker 2 00:26:25 It takes a little bit of time for sure. We we've been doing this now on some level for 10 years. What we've learned is that how we bring people into the company is very important. Even during the interview process, these are the types of things that we do, you know, in our company. And then when we are very transparent about that, the first team and the first one on one meeting, many of them come in quite nervous. But the great thing about those meetings is that some of the other questions that we answer, they get to see all of their new peers talking about things that they wish they had done better. So it's, it's incredibly encouraging and, and oftentimes disarming to see other people admitting their challenges, admitting their faults and getting positive engagement with that. And there's a question on the one on one that is, how can I support you better as a leader? And that's a question that a new employee that doesn't necessarily know how to answer because they haven't had a lot of time. But even just knowing that once a month, we're going to, I'm going to be asking that question of them in a formalized way, tends to disarm things a little bit. So people do engage relatively quickly once they get past those, those first couple of meetings. So you said that
Speaker 3 00:27:34 Uber has an average tenure of about 1.2 years, and Google was 1.9 years. You know what I'm going to ask you or your business for your MSP. What's the average.
Speaker 2 00:27:43 All right, now we're at 2.8. It's it's come up from, I think, 2.6 in the prior measurement. So we're obviously working to improve that. But the thing that we've also recognized is that employee retention is not the most important metric. I mean, it's a very important metric to know, but there are times where employees outgrow their capacity or desire to be engaged with what we're doing or that our company grows to the point that those jobs are not the right fit anymore. And one of the most dangerous things that we can do is pretend that they are, but what our processes and our culture has allowed, have allowed us to do is create an engagement where we can have those conversations as it's happening instead of six months, 12 months, two years later, when we wonder why they're not performing in their job. So we track a number of things. We track employee turnover, average employee tenure, but we also track things like regrettable turnover. Who's an employee that left to go to a similar position. You know, her who who's an employee that left, where we didn't get a chance to engage with them prior to that, or who's someone that we had to fire because we didn't effectively coach and manage them along the way. And there are some nuances in there that have helped us a lot too.
Speaker 3 00:28:58 Peter, thank you. How can we get in touch with you and learn a little bit more about boss or maybe
Speaker 2 00:29:03 Boss or babysitter.com is a site that we have that has some resources about this. As you mentioned, my full time job is running my MSP, Greystone tech.com. LinkedIn is a great place to get in touch with me. I think that's how we initially connected. Um, and I, I love connecting with other companies, other MSPs, other non MSBs are around this people thing, because at the end of the day, it services is a people business. Whether we realize it or not, where people serving people, and that is something that we're all challenged by because people are difficult and, uh, feel free to reach out. We'd love to chat and, uh, look forward to staying in touch with as many people as possible. Green's MSP podcast,
Speaker 4 00:29:42 Ask Paul anything. Hi, my name is John Benson from your architect. Should I use something like customer thermometer to see, or you, my clients are
Speaker 1 00:29:49 Great question, John. Thank you. And I think the short answer is yes. If you really care about knowing early on when your clients are starting to become dissatisfied, because look, the way to go in MSP is really easy. I've mentioned before Jay Abraham's three pillars of growing a business. You get more new clients, you get your existing clients to buy from you more often, and you get your existing clients to spend more. Every single time they buy. And there is a fourth one as well, which is you do everything in your power to retain your existing clients. Now, most MSPs are really good at this, which is why you've still got client number one or number two, or number three from back in the day, all those years ago. But still you need to keep a wary eye on all of your clients and just spot the levels of dissatisfaction when they creep him.
Speaker 1 00:30:34 Because there's a percentage of your clients who are dissatisfied right now. It might only be a small percent, maybe five, maybe 10%, but unless you've got literally three clients and you're over servicing those people, which is actually not a great longterm strategy anyway, cause it can only go down from there unless you've got three clients. If you've got more than that, there's always going to be some level of dissatisfaction somewhere and it starts off small. And that level of dissatisfaction starts off small as well. But it grows over time. It's often over the small things. It just seems to take longer for you to answer the phone. These days, nothing seems to be fixed as quickly as it used to be. I really liked it when Kevin was here and now Kevin seems to have gone. You see what I mean? All those kinds of small things.
Speaker 1 00:31:16 So think using customer thermometer just gives you an overview. It allows you to know generally how satisfied are people. Cause you probably hear about the big screw ups cause you have to get involved and you have to go and fix it, implicate the clients. But does anyone ever tell you about the small screw ups? The simple fix ticket that took four hours because it got forgotten about the tech who forgot to ring someone back the fix that actually made things worse. Does anyone ever tell you about these things or are they just hoping that you won't find out about them? So something like customer thermometer or one of the other systems could actually be a very, very good way for you to know if you like an early warning, sign the customers directly telling you with the press of a button at the end of a support ticket when there's some kind of problem that actually they really would like you to get involved and plicate.
Speaker 1 00:32:04 And if you can get involved before they become unhappy, then your chances of keeping that client long term have just gone up dramatically. How to contribute to the show. We are now open for new questions that I can answer on this podcast. What have you always wanted to ask me about marketing? It could be something really simple, like John's question there, or it could be something devilishly difficult that you think is going to get me, whatever your question is. I will put it on this podcast and I will answer it two ways that you can get your question to me. You can either just do a simple voice recording on your phone and email it through to hello at Paul Green's MSP marketing.com, or you can go onto this podcast page and you'll see a little orange button just underneath the audio player and that's something called speak drive. You can click that button and there, and then in the browser send me a voicemail it's really simple to use and it just works. Go on, submit your question to me either, email it over or stick it through that podcast page. I'll really appreciate it. And I'll answer your question on the podcast as well.
Speaker 0 00:33:07 Coming up next week, I was booked an appointment from a cold call. I booked an appointment with the marketing director at Microsoft. I had him in absolute hysterics within just a few minutes and he actually turned around to me and said, Michelle, if your organization has got half your first auntie, then I will give them a job.
Speaker 1 00:33:27 It's Michelle Mills Porter. She's an expert on using the phone to communicate better and be more persuasive. And she's going to be here on the show next week, telling you how to use that phone as your best secret sales weapon. Even when you hate picking it up and dialing those numbers. We're also going to be talking next week about making the transition from being just a supplier to actually being a trusted partner. It's what we all want. And yet how do we actually do it? We'll talk about that next week. And also we'll look at how to upgrade your website to help you win more business. I've got a series of simple things you can do that will make quite a difference to your marketing. See you next week
Speaker 0 00:34:08 Made in the UK, the MSPs around the world, Paul Green's NSP marketing podcast.
