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Voiceover:
Fresh every Tuesday for MSPs around the world, this is Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast.
Paul Green:
Do you know what, this year is going so fast. How is it already the end of September? Here’s what we’ve got coming up in today’s show.
Chris Timm:
One of the things I find about our industry is we’re very much of a me too industry. We always want to use what everybody else uses. What it is that you want a PSA tool to do, and why you want to use that PSA tool.
Paul Green:
We’re also going to be talking about how you can overcome sales objections, and sticking with the same theme, the wonderful Jennifer Bleam has got a great book suggestion for you that’s going to help you close more sales and win more business.
Voiceover:
Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast.
Paul Green:
If there’s one thing an MSP can say to me that really makes my heart sing and makes me think, “Oh really? Have we got to have this conversation again,” is when someone says, “I just don’t get any leads off my website.” And I know it’s a major issue for most MSPs. It’s also a conversation that I seem to have two or three times a day. Now, normally the main reason for the fact that you’re not getting any leads off your website is because you’re just simply not driving enough traffic. 20 years ago, websites were sufficiently… Not quite rare, but sufficiently unique enough that having a new website and just having a website got you traffic. But that was 20 years ago. It’s now 2020, and I don’t know how many new websites are published every day, but it wouldn’t surprise me if up to a million new websites turned up or a million website refreshes were done every single day.
Paul Green:
Having a website doesn’t mean anything anymore. Just having it online means nothing. You’ve got to drive traffic to it. And that means either spending money or investing time. You’ve either got to spend money and buy some traffic, or you’ve got to spend some time and go out and build lots of different traffic streams. It’s not easy. It’s not cheap. It’s not something that you can just do in your spare time. In fact, I think the MSPs that do get more leads out of their websites are the ones that are investing that time and energy and money and effort into driving traffic streams. My website gets a fair amount of traffic. I couldn’t tell you off the top of my head. I suppose I could look in analytics and tell you, but we are constantly driving traffic. We’re doing paid stuff and we’re doing organic stuff. So the paid stuff includes SEO. We had an SEO company for a while. I haven’t got one at the moment, but we’re close to hiring another SEO company. SEO of course, being search engine optimization, making sure that you appear high in relevant Google results.
Paul Green:
We do Facebook ads quite a lot at the time. We do some targeted Google ads. Now and again we try LinkedIn ads on LinkedIn. A little bit hit and miss, but we spend several hundred, if not a thousand pounds a week on driving traffic to the various websites. And we do that because I want to make sure I’ve got high levels of traffic. I also include there some remarketing. Remarketing is where you’re putting adverts in front of people who’ve already visited your website. It’s that phenomenon that you’ve probably seen where you visit something, you look at something online, and then the adverts for that thing seem to follow you around the web. That’s remarketing, also known as retargeting. And a proportion of our advertising budget, of our traffic budget goes onto remarketing because it’s so much more profitable to pay to get someone back onto your website, someone who already knows about you at some level, than it is to drive cold traffic to your website.
Paul Green:
So we do paid stuff like that, and we do a load of organic stuff as well. We get a lot of traffic to our website from our own email list. When we send out an email, there’s always a link to click through to the website. That’s probably our highest proportion of traffic. Get a lot of traffic from our own Facebook group, because we’ve got around about a thousand noncompeting MSPs in that right now. LinkedIn, I’ve got about 4,400 connections, something like that, so that generates a fair amount of traffic. And then I’ll go and sit in forums. So places like the TechTribe with permission, and other forums where I can add value to conversations about MSP marketing that people are having. And by default that drives some traffic back to my website.
Paul Green:
So you can see, I probably personally invest, it’s probably around about three to five hours a week in driving traffic. As a business, we spend around about a thousand pounds a week and I have a full-time marketing guy called James and his job is… Well, one of his jobs is to drive traffic, so he’s probably spending 10 hours a week on traffic. So we take traffic very, very seriously, and so should you, because you only need one or two new clients a month, and if you could add one or two new clients a month systematically, wouldn’t that just change everything within your business? Well, partly that starts with getting more traffic to your website. And seeing as your website is the single most important digital marketing asset that you have, spending time and energy and effort and money to get more traffic to that site is a very smart thing to do.
Paul Green:
However, there is a second part of this, and the second part is improving conversion. Because if you’re getting lots of traffic and you’re still not getting people booking 10, 15 minute meetings with you, then you’ve not got the right conversion. Now it’s a lot harder for an MSP to get conversions right than it is someone selling, let’s say, e-commerce products. Someone like Amazon, for example, they can be very, very focused on looking at their pages and saying, “How do we convert more? For every hundred or thousand or a hundred thousand people who visit this page, how do we increase the percentage of those people who actually buy this product?” In fact, one of the reasons that the Amazon pages look so ugly is because they’ve done a series of split tests over the years to determine what creates a better conversion, what creates better sales.
Paul Green:
Companies like Amazon, very successful online companies, are focused on traffic and conversion. And actually you should be doing exactly the same thing. So it is easier for e-commerce because they know when they get an instant conversion. But actually you know when you get a win as well. One the best practice calls to action right now on any B2B website, and especially yours, is for someone to book a 15 minute no obligation video call with you, and to use a live calendar, something like Calendly or Microsoft Bookings, put that into your website. It’s literally there on the page and they can go and book themselves a 10, 15 minute call with you there and then. And the reason that that’s best practice right now is because that’s the most convenient thing for them. If they’re on your website at 2:00 AM, then they can book an appointment with you. They can’t book an appointment for 2:00 AM, but at 2:00 AM, they can book an appointment that’s convenient for both you and for them.
Paul Green:
Incidentally, we’re getting six to eight appointments a week being booked online using exactly the same system. We use Calendly, and in a normal week… Well, if we don’t get six appointments, then something somewhere has changed. And remember, we’re driving lots of traffic and we’re spending money and effort and time driving that traffic, but we’re also getting the conversions. People are signing up for our services, such as the MSP Marketing Edge, but they’re also booking appointments with my business partner Ben. And Ben and they have a chat and sometimes they go into buy and sometimes they don’t. But the point is, we’re engaging with them, we’re interacting with them. It’s exactly the same system I would use if I was running an MSP.
Paul Green:
In fact, if I was running an MSP, I would take almost exactly the same website I’ve got now, I would obviously change the content because the actual services are being sold differently and being sold to different people. But I would use exactly the same system, and I would put the same amount of effort into driving traffic to that website. I’d still have someone, if the cashflow allowed it, spending up to 10 hours a week driving traffic themselves. I’d get someone who was an expert going on to forums and things and adding value, not just selling. You can’t just sell in those areas. You’ve got to add value, and people will just automatically end up looking at your website. And I would definitely spend that money on paid advertising. I would do that, especially if I had an MSP, because the long-term payback is huge. I mean, you think your average new client, you get someone today, they’re spending 500, 1000 a month on you and they will stay for 5 to 10 years. So the overall average lifetime value of a customer for you is huge.
Paul Green:
Could you afford to spend two, three, 4,000 pounds or dollars to acquire a new client? Yes, you can. The cash may take a little bit of time to be replaced, but you can keep doing that. In fact, the best marketing is systematic and it happens consistently. And if, for example, you know that by spending, let’s say, a thousand a week on buying traffic, that that gets you one or two appointments a week booked through your Calendly, and those one or two appointments, even if your conversion rate was down to one in three or one in four, you know that two appointments a week, which works out at, let’s say, eight appointments across the month, that will give you one or two new clients a month. And that’s exactly what we mean by consistent and organised systematic marketing.
Paul Green:
So you’ve got to look not just at your traffic, but you’ve got to look at your conversions as well. And there are a couple of tools that you can use for this. Some of these I’ve mentioned before in the podcast, hotjar.com is an amazing tool that will heat map, it’ll show you exactly where people are looking and clicking on your webpage, and it’ll also video users as well. You can’t actually see the person, but you can see exactly what they were doing on your website. Hotjar is free up to a certain level. Another one I would recommend is Google Optimize. Google Optimize is free. It creates copies of your pages so you can do split tests, marketing tests on what happens if you change different elements in the page. That’s exactly what Amazon and all the other big boys do. In fact, they do something called multivariate testing, where they’re testing lots of different elements at once. You can just stick with a simple split test, because of course you won’t have huge amounts of traffic going through your website. Certainly not compared to the likes of Amazon.
Paul Green:
But if you agree with me that your website is your most important and always will be your most important digital marketing asset, then don’t you owe it to your staff, your family, your bank manager, your clients, even, and certainly future potential clients who haven’t yet discovered you, don’t you owe it to them to take your website more seriously, and to make sure that you’re not only driving a lots of traffic to that website, but also that you’ve optimised that website so that it converts as well as it possibly can?
Voiceover:
Here’s this week’s clever idea.
Paul Green:
Most of the MSPs that I meet are not traditionally sales people. They’re typically technicians. Maybe you’re exactly the same, but technicians who by the very nature of needing clients and work and money have had to learn how to do sales. In fact, I can talk to an MSP owner of 20 years experience who’s been out there selling for 20 years and may have put together a fairly impressive business with a good number of staff and a high level of turnover, and even then they would say, “Well I’m okay at sales, but I don’t enjoy it and I’m not very good at it.” Which is insane because often they’ll have a 50% or 75% close rate, or often even better than that. As the business owner, we tend to be better salespeople because we’ve got a passion. We absolutely love what it is that we do, we know that we can help the prospects, and we’re not coming at it from a sake of “got to get the sale to get the commission.” That’s not how business owners work, is it?
Paul Green:
We work very much in a way of, “I can help this person. And you know what, we’re good at what we do. They deserve to be with us, because if they’re not with us, they’re going to go with some other MSP and the solution just won’t be as good as our solution.” Now, the reason that I mention this is if you’re not a confident salesperson, despite the fact that you’re actually an epic salesperson and may have been an epic salesperson for some time, then you may struggle with some parts of the sales process, such as for example, overcoming objections. And if you look at some of the objections that are thrown out, there’s loads and loads of free advice online of how to overcome objections, but I think you’ve got to put together the thing that sits right within you. It’s got to feel emotionally right for you to have the right answer, to not try to sound too slick, but to know that when someone objects to something, that actually you’ve got a good answer.
Paul Green:
And the first thing I’d say about this is that objections are not really objections. They are sales questions that haven’t yet been answered. So when someone says to you, for example, “Hey look, this looks great, but it’s just too expensive.” That’s actually better than them just saying no. Because when they’re just saying no, they’re not giving you anything to work with. They’re not feeding back. I don’t even believe a no means no, but that’s for another day. But when someone says, “Hey, this is too expensive,” what they’re saying is, “We really want this, but we just haven’t got the resources to pay for it at that level.” And of course the way to overcome this objection is to show them either the return on investment of whatever it is that you’ve proposed to them, or of course to look at taking parts of the solution out.
Paul Green:
Now, many MSPs will only sell a minimum stack for their own protection as well as their client’s protection. But you can look at some of the extra add-ons, some of the nice to haves, and you can say to your prospects, “That’s fine. We can reduce the price, but we’ve got to ask, which of this don’t you want? You wanted a VoIP solution. You wanted triple backup. You wanted encryption. You wanted blah, blah, blah, blah. Which of these things do you no longer want and we can take them out.” Another common objection that comes up is when someone’s with an incumbent MSP that they’re kind of dissatisfied with, but not dissatisfied enough to actually make the switch yet. And it can be very frustrating. And this happens a lot, this really does happen a lot. It can be very frustrating for you to go through a sales process with someone where you know you can help them, you know you can make them happier, and maybe you’re slightly more expensive or the pricing is slightly different, but certainly they seem keen.
Paul Green:
And yet down the line they make the decision to stick with their incumbent, the ones that they don’t really like. Sometimes that’s down to inertial loyalty, where it just feels easier to stay than it does to move on. Sometimes they’re just not right, it’s not the right timing. Sometimes they feel like they’re going to give the other guys another chance. Yes, another chance, even though they’re unhappy with them. What’s the way around that? There’s only one way around that really, and that’s to stop trying to talk to their brain and instead talk to their heart. And I believe that’s best done not by you, but by your existing clients.
Paul Green:
The most efficient way to get your existing clients to talk to your prospects is through the medium of a case study. If you could put together a really powerful case study, literally take one of your clients who’s had the most dramatic results or the most dramatic change, or someone that you’ve helped in the most incredible way. Perhaps you’ve been working with them for 10 years while they’ve tripled the size of their business, and you were a key part of that because IT was absolutely mission critical. That would make a great case study. And the case study is a story. It takes them on a journey and shows them and teaches them how good IT has made such a difference to this other business, which is run by someone like them. Case studies work because they’re a form of social proof, and social proof is where most people prefer to do what most other people are doing. And social proof works particularly well when we feel like we’re seeing social proof from someone like us. We’re much more readily influenced by someone we perceive to be like us than by other people.
Paul Green:
In fact, a smart thing to do would be to post a printed copy of the case study to your prospect before the sales meeting. So actually you overcome this objection of, they want to stick with their incumbent MSP because you’ve shown them and you’ve demonstrated to their heart how trusted you are with your existing clients. Another objection that comes up is pricing, and this may frustrate you as well, where you’re offering something at a price and it’s a good price, and I don’t believe any MSP should be offering low pricing at all. But then they come back to you and they say, “Hey, we went with someone else, or we’re thinking of going with this other person because they are cheaper than you.” 99 times out of 100, the prospect is not comparing like for like. They’re comparing apples with bananas because it’s very difficult for them, a non-technical person to look at your package and to look at your competitors’ package and genuinely make a comparison.
Paul Green:
It could be that your competitor is excluding all sorts of things that actually you’re including with your bundle. The only way around this is to help your prospect do a line-by-line comparison. And I do not ever recommend that you bad mouth your competitors, but what you can do is take their proposal and take your proposal and actually you do a chart for your client and show them what’s included with yours and what’s included with theirs. Now in the unlikely event that actually the stack is the same, but you’re more expensive, there’s got to be a reason why, because this is where the complexity of IT comes in. You probably have better vendors, better suppliers, better products, better services. Here you’ve got to educate the prospect why.
Paul Green:
Most people, not all, but most people do not buy on price alone. If most people bought on price alone, there would be no premium offerings in this world. We would not have luxury cars, luxury homes, luxury jewellery, watches, bags, all that kind of stuff that we buy. We would just have the cheapest nastiest tat that the planet could output. Now there is plenty of cheap, nasty tat around, but there’s also plenty of premium stuff around. You must never ever assume that the majority of people buy on price alone because they do not. Price is a factor, but it is not the factor. And you look at a business owner or a business manager who’s trying to achieve something with their business, they’ve got goals and ambitions and targets and a team, and sometimes spending that extra 100 a month or 200 a month can make a dramatic difference to get them faster to where they want to be.
Paul Green:
Whereas saving that 100 or 200 a month frustrates their staff, it means everything’s a bit slower and more difficult and whatsoever. And this is a pure objection thing. And remember, just like any marketing or sales, we’re not talking here to their brains, because their brains cannot make good cognitive decisions because they don’t have the information that you have. You’ve got to talk to their hearts, their hearts and their emotions, and you’ve got to keep reminding them that this is a good choice. Most people like you would make this choice. This is the right thing for your business. Your staff will love this. It’s the emotional stuff and not the cognitive stuff that gets you through those sales meetings and gets those objections overturned.
Voiceover:
Paul’s blatant plug.
Paul Green:
What are the kind of marketing stuff you’re trying to work on right now? I’ve got a bunch of free resources for you. They’re all on my websites. The vast majority of them there’s no kind of download thing, as in you haven’t got to put your name or your email in. You have if you want a copy of my book, but the rest of it, you can get completely free. If you go into paulgreensMSPmarketing.com/resources, you’ll find a ton of stuff in there. We’re talking webinars, special reports, recommendations for other services that I work with. There’s loads of good stuff on there. PaulgreensMSPmarketing.com/resources.
Voiceover:
The big interview.
Chris Timm:
Hi everybody, my name is Chris Timm. I’m from Sondela Consulting. I’m the PSA guy. We help MSPs to turn their PSAs into well-oiled machines.
Paul Green:
And there’s a question which I frequently get from the MSPs I’m working with and people who listen to this podcast, and it’s not actually a question that I’m qualified to answer. The question is which PSA should I use? So Chris, can you clear this up for us once and for all today, which is the best PSA?
Chris Timm:
Funny you should ask that question, actually. I’m actually in the process of writing a book and I’ll cover that in the book. In my opinion, a PSA is like a car. A car is a car is a car. They all do the same thing. They all go from A to B. Fundamentally there’s no real major difference between the PSA tools. They all do the same thing. So in my opinion it’s down to personal choice, and down to what works right for your business. Because I can’t say the best PSA tool is this or you must use this for your business because it may not be right for your business. So just because it’s right for mine doesn’t mean it’s right for yours. So I always think of the car analogy. They all do the same thing. They all fundamentally work in the same way. And PSA tools are pretty much exactly the same as that.
Paul Green:
So what’s your background? What qualifies you to be Mr. PSA?
Chris Timm:
So I’ve run an MSP business that I ran for around eight years. I then went to work at Autotask, one of the big PSA vendors for five and a half years where I headed up their pre and post sales and implementation teams. I learned a lot about PSA’s and how they work and how MSPs use them in their business. And I now run a business helping MSPs to get the best out of their PSA tool. I have a vast amount of knowledge of both the MSP industry and how a PSA tool should be used in an MSP’s business.
Paul Green:
So it’s interesting that you say, and I completely agree with you, that you pick the PSA that’s right for you, that fits your circumstances. Now I know that you work with essentially one man bands right up to huge MSPs, advising them on their PSAs. What are some of the factors that you look at to help you advise them on which one to use and then how to get the most out of it?
Chris Timm:
The first thing we do is we’d go in and just understand how their business operates, what they’re trying to achieve in their business, what do they want to use a PSA tool for? And then we look at all of the processes that they have in their business, how those processes work, and we align those into the PSA. So we really just sit down and try and understand their business, try and see how we can fit the PSA into what they’re doing, not just from a ticketing perspective, but from billing and reporting and projects and all of those kinds of things as well.
Paul Green:
Some of my clients, they almost seem to be repeat switches. So they’ll start off on Autotask and then they’ll switch after a while to ConnectWise Manage, and then they’ll switch over to SyncroMSP, and there’s whole series of other things in between. And obviously it’s a major project every time you switch your PSA. So what do you think it is that dissatisfies MSPs about their PSA?
Chris Timm:
That’s a great question, and actually I covered that in my book as well. I think fundamentally that the reason being is that people choose a PSA for the wrong reasons. Many MSPs I talk to, they buy it because they want a service desk. Then it comes to doing something else in their business, they realise it can do billing, and then they realize that the way your PSA tool does billing is completely different to the way they do it, so they try to switch to another tool to see if that’s going to do it any better. Or what they do is they’re hearing from other people, they’re going on to forums, on Facebook and asking the question that you asked right at the beginning, “What’s the best PSA tool?” And a hundred people will come back and go, “Syncro is great. It works for us.” And they’ll go and use that because everyone else says it’s best.
Chris Timm:
One of the things I find about our industry is we’re very much of a me too industry. We always want to use what everybody else uses rather than actually using something that’s right for our business. You need to fundamentally understand what it is that you want a PSA tool to do and why you want to use that PSA tool and then go find the tool that actually does what you need it to do, not just from a service desk perspective, but running your entire business.
Paul Green:
Of course, that me too, it comes from social proof. We’re actually psychologically driven at a very deep level to do what most other people are doing because there’s perceived safety in numbers. So that behaviour absolutely makes sense. So how many PSAs are actually out there, Chris, because obviously we’ve mentioned three of them, but there must be hundreds, surely.
Chris Timm:
Well is a good 10, at least. I mean there’s obviously the big ones that we all know, so there’s ConnectWise and Autotask and Tigerpaw. And then there’s some other really smaller ones. Syncro and Atera. There’s a new one I recently came across called Bluetrait. There’s HaloPSA. So there’s a whole bunch of them. They’re all designed for all different levels of MSP. Some of the smaller ones pitch themselves specifically for the one and two man companies, whereas the bigger ones, even though they pitch themselves for the bigger companies, can still be used for the smaller one and two men bands. There probably is hundreds, but I know of at least 10, 12 PSA’s that everybody knows about.
Paul Green:
So for your book, have you had to purchase all of these PSAs to use them and really get to grips with them?
Chris Timm:
Not really. So even though it’s about PSA profitability, but it’s actually focused predominantly on the Autotask product. And although I call myself a PSA experts because I understand PSAs, I can’t possibly know how every PSA tool works. So what I do is I focus predominantly on the Autotask side, because that’s what I know, but yes, I have looked at all of those PSA tools and understand how they work from a billing perspective and how their ticketing works and how they differ from some of the other tools.
Paul Green:
So Chris, let’s dive into the book. What’s it going to be called by the way, and when is it due to be published?
Chris Timm:
It’s going to be called PSA Profitability and it’s scheduled to be published around about mid to end September. It’s actually in peer review at the moment, based on the peer review, if that all goes well, then I’m scheduling around about mid to end September.
Paul Green:
That’s fantastic.
Chris Timm:
And it’s predominantly going to be around PSA profitability. So how to get your PSA set up to give you maximum profitability.
Paul Green:
Okay, so give us a sneaky preview, give us one or two small things that you can do with your PSA that will help you make more profit from it.
Chris Timm:
Well, I guess you’d have to buy the book to find out, but… No, I’m kidding. Basically, one of the biggest things where people go completely wrong is they don’t enter costs into the system. So things like engineer’s costs, costs of services, because that’s how a PSA fundamentally is going to work out the profitability. The same we look at very, very simply what the revenue is that you make in your business minus the costs gives you profitability. So a lot of MSPs I see get to a point where they haven’t entered in the cost of their engineer, mainly because they either don’t think that they need to have the costs in there, or they’ve just never been told where to put it in. And fundamentally that’s one of the big mistakes people make, and you’re never going to get profitability out of that. So I talk about that in the book, talk about entering costs of everything that you bill for. So including a resource, which obviously, or a user in this case, which does have a cost against it.
Paul Green:
Thanks, Chris. Give us your website address and tell us how we can get in touch with you.
Chris Timm:
Yeah, so my website is Sondela Consulting, sondelaconsulting.com, or you can reach out to me on Twitter, which is some SondelaConsult or through Facebook or LinkedIn as well.
Voiceover:
Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. This week’s recommended book.
Jennifer Bleam:
Hey, Paul, it’s Jennifer Bleam from MSP Sales Revolution, and I recommend the book Gap Selling by Keenan. Keenan talks about this concept that the sale is not made based on whether or not your service is superior to someone else’s service, it’s based on your ability as a salesperson to enable the desired outcome and help the prospect to feel why they want or need your service. This is so important with MSP becoming such a commoditised marketplace. So making sure that you are articulating the value of what you provide and showing them that there is a gap between what they believe they have as the prospect and what you can provide. Super important.
Voiceover:
How to contribute to the show.
Paul Green:
If you’ve got a book suggestion just like Jennifer, or you just want to have a chat with me about anything you’ve heard on the show, you can drop me an email. It’s [email protected]. And even though I’ve got a very efficient virtual assistant who will sort through your email and pop it in a box somewhere, don’t worry, I will personally reply to that. I reply to every single email I get and I get two or three emails every week about the show. So go on, drop me an email. [email protected].
Voiceover:
Coming up next week.
JB Fowler:
Managed service providers can start to look at, are these other systems that are now connected to the network, they can monetise that.
Paul Green:
that’s JB Fowler from Domotz. Now we all know that there’s more profit to be made selling more services to your existing clients than there is bringing on new clients, because new clients are quite expensive. And next week, JB’s going to give you a whole series of ideas of additional services that you can sell to your existing clients. I’ve also got a couple of books to recommend to you. Now I’m not a tech, as you know, but I’ve read these books and they’re about hacking, and I found them really entertaining. So entertaining that if I enjoyed them, I’m sure you will enjoy them as well. Two great books suggestions for you next week, and we’re also going to be talking about luck. Are you a lucky person? Do you even believe in luck? I don’t believe in luck at all. I believe that luck is actually something that’s in our complete control and I’ll explain exactly what I mean in next week’s show. See you then.
Voiceover:
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