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Voiceover:
Fresh every Tuesday for MSPs around the world. This is Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast.
Paul Green:
Hello and welcome back to the show. Here’s what we’ve got coming up for you this week.
Jason Kemsley:
With these really high ticket volumes, tell them we’re seeing these large volumes, but we will be dealing with your issue and we’ll be back to you by this time.
Paul Green:
Plus, we’re going to be looking at how you can convert more of your break fix clients to proper managed services on a contract. And Jay McBain from Forrester Research is back at the end of the show with a great book recommendation for you.
Voiceover:
Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast.
Paul Green:
I believe that every MSP needs a telephone person, someone to make outbound phone calls to your leads and to your database on a regular basis. In fact, the clients that I work closely with both with my MSP marketing edge service and something where we work very closely with a number of MSPs, it’s called the War Room, you can have a look at that on my website. All of these people I’m recommending to them all the time that they get themselves a telephone person, someone to pick up the phone day in day out and just call people.
Paul Green:
Now, the reason why you need a telephone person comes down to the MSP marketing strategy that I suggest for most people. And that strategy is a very simple one, step one is you build multiple audiences of people who are listening to you. That would typically be your email database and your LinkedIn. Step two is you build a relationship with them and you do this by putting content in front of them, content on LinkedIn, and sending out an email or a newsletter. You could also send out a printed newsletter once a month. And then the third step is to commercialise that relationship, and that’s the point at which you find out when they’re likely to be so frustrated with their incumbent MSP that they’re looking to switch. And of course, by that point, you’ve had chance to build up a small relationship with them. So the chances of you getting a place at the table, let alone actually going on to do work with them, goes up fairly dramatically.
Paul Green:
Now that’s the three-step marketing strategy I recommend for all MSPs. It’s that final one that really needs a phone person. Someone ringing all of these leads and prospects for you to try to commercialise the relationship. Because the reality is, and you know this, if you’re not doing much marketing right now, just doing a bit of marketing doesn’t make the phone ring, being connected to people on LinkedIn doesn’t make the phone ring. I discovered this myself around about seven, eight, maybe 10 years ago now when I owned a marketing agency. We had exactly the same problem that you did, which was the phone didn’t ring. We ended up putting in place a fairly major operation to do outbound marketing. So we had massive databases of people to call, all of whom had opted in. But I had a full time team of three people making outbound calls. And their entire life, their mission was to book appointments for my two full-time field sales people.
Paul Green:
So just think about the numbers of that for the number of appointments that we needed because of our conversion rates, so to do the sales that we needed, it took three full-time people phoning people all day every day just to book those appointments to keep the two field salespeople happy. Now, that’s a fairly extreme thing and you certainly don’t need a team. You probably just need one person doing a few hours a day, a few days a week. But ultimately, if the phone isn’t ringing, and it isn’t for the vast majority of MSPs, then you’ve got to pick it up and dial it. But obviously not you because most MSPs, and I’m going to include myself in this, most business owners we don’t like doing outbound telephoning. I would rather lose a couple of toes than have to pick up the phone every day and do outbound calling, it’s horrendous. Do you agree with me? If you don’t agree with me and actually you quite enjoy it, then you’re in a very, very small minority of people who enjoy it enough to actually do it on a daily basis.
Paul Green:
Long-term, we want to put together some inbound marketing. Inbound marketing is the kind of thing discussed in They Ask You Answer, the great book by Marcus Sheridan. But true proper inbound marketing, where inquiries are coming to you all the time, that takes some setting up. And it’s a very long-term commitment for most MSPs, and by long-term I mean years. It’s a multi-year commitment for you to switch your marketing around to being inbound. So in the meantime, because you want to be adding more new clients and generating more revenue, you’ve got to do outbound marketing. And that means picking up the phone repeatedly and systematically.
Paul Green:
Here’s the thing, a good phone person can maximise the outcome from your marketing efforts. They can literally give you two, three, maybe even five times or 10 times the results from what it is that you’re doing right now. Because when you send out a piece of marketing, be that direct mail, an email, or just something on social media, it does resonate with people it’s just they don’t take action. Some of the people are seeing that stuff and thinking, “Hmm, yeah, these are the guys I would like to have a talk to if ever I’m ready to switch, but they don’t take action.” So what we’re doing with a proactive phone person is we’re helping them to take action, we’re making it easy for them. We’re never going to persuade someone who’s not interested in having a conversation right now to have that conversation. But what we can do is get those people who are nearly ready to have that conversation. We can engage with them, we can continue to build the relationship with them, and ultimately we can be there at the point they’re ready to talk, that’s a very, very powerful thing.
Paul Green:
The perfect person for this is a back to work parent. And dare I say, being positively sexist, this is the kind of role that actually best suits a female than it does a male. I’ve employed a lot of telephone people over the years, that full-time team of three took about 15 to 20 hires and fires to get there. I’ve got to say women tend to outperform men on the phone by a dramatic factor. And given the choice, I would always hire a woman to do this job for me. But it can be a male, a female, it doesn’t really matter who it is as long as they are pleasant and warm and engaging on the phone. You’re looking for someone probably with kids, who’s going back to work, maybe they can only work during the school hours, that’s fine, that’s great because we can give them great job flexibility on this. In fact, they could work from home using one of your VoIP phones and they could just do two or three hours a day, two or three days a week. Their timings just doing your work.
Paul Green:
That’s actually a highly desirable job for someone, that would really work for them. And their goal is well, they’ve got three goals really of things that they’re looking to achieve. The number one outcome is for them to book 15 minute appointments with you. So I assume that you are the sales person in the business or they’re booking the appointment with whoever does the selling. But what we don’t want to have to do is to teach this phone person how to sell managed services, that’s too difficult, it’s going to take too long to make that happen. So their only job is to warm someone up and to find a way to book a 15 minute appointment with you, preferably a video call because we can do so much more with a video call than we can with a voice call. And it’s you that does the hard work on that 15 minute call of converting someone into a full and proper sales meeting.
Paul Green:
Well, you can do that with your eyes closed, right? You do that all the time. Someone jumps on the phone with you, you have a chat with them, you click, you engage, you start talking about technology. It was supposed to be a 15 minute call and it turns into a 45 minute call, which by the way is a very good thing, and you push for a proper meeting. That’s what you’re good at, so you should be doing that because that’s the hardest thing to do. But a phone person, her first goal or their first call is just to book that 15 minute appointment with you.
Paul Green:
Now, if that’s not going to happen right now, their second goal, their secondary outcome is to find the perfect time to call back in the future. So someone might be at a position where they’re just not particularly happy with their incumbent, there’s a level of dissatisfaction, but they’re not quite ready to take action on that dissatisfaction just yet. When should we call them back? Three months, six months, nine months? I would argue if someone is likely to be ready to talk to you in the future, we don’t want to leave it too long. We certainly want to make sure they stay on the email list and you’re sending them printed stuff like a printed newsletter. But I would also just give that person a call every three to four to six months anyway just to keep in touch because you never know when the timing is right. People only buy, people only talk when they’re ready to buy or they’re ready to talk. So we’ve got to keep in touch with them to make sure we’re there at that exact moment.
Paul Green:
So their first and primary outcome is to book a 15 minute appointment with you. If they can’t do that, their second outcome is to find the perfect time to call. And their third outcome is to maintain the relationship and keep moving it forward. One of the best telephone people I ever hired was a lady called Miranda. She was amazing, and what made her amazing was her ability to build relationships on the phone. So she would ask really good questions, good research questions about their favourite subject. So the people she was speaking to, she asked them about their favourite subject. What’s everyone’s favourite subject? Themselves and their business. So she was really good at just asking open questions and showing, demonstrating that she was listening to their answers by asking follow up questions. She’d record all of that data in our CRM. So when she was calling back three or six months down the line, the first thing she’d do is she’d ask them how something had gone.
Paul Green:
So if they’d said that perhaps they were going on an important holiday or they were opening a new branch or something like that, that was one of the first things that she would engage with them. So instantly she was building and strengthening the relationship on behalf of my business by talking to them about themselves. She rarely ever talked about us because what we did was irrelevant. Her job was to book a sales appointment just as your phone person’s job is to do that. She didn’t need to know that much about the company to do that, she just needed to know a few key points about how we worked and what the benefits would be of sitting down and having that sales meeting. So if there’s one person that you’re going to hire in the next few months, please, please make it a phone person. I promise you that when you get the right person making the right calls to the right people, it really will have a dramatic effect on the outcome of your marketing.
Voiceover:
Here’s this week’s clever idea.
Paul Green:
We all know that having proper managed services clients on a contract is the way forward. It’s the monthly recurring revenue that makes your business so much more pleasant to run. And of course, retention is better when they’re paying you something monthly. Everyone wants subscriptions. Just look at what Jay McBain was saying in the podcast just a few weeks ago, he was saying about all of the big vendors, all of them moving towards a more subscription based model. You want subscribers, they want subscribers, we all want subscribers. And that’s why it’s sometimes frustrating if you’ve got a bank of break fix clients who just will not move over to a contract, why is that? What is it with these people? Don’t they I understand that we’re in the subscription economy right now and it’s all about getting someone onto a subscription?
Paul Green:
Lots of MSPs that I speak to who have break fix clients really struggle to get those clients to move over to a contracts to manage services. This seems to be across the board and there are a number of reasons why. One reason could be that the mindset of someone who’s enjoyed a break fix relationship with you for a long while, it could be that their mindset is that actually we get great value for money thanks. When something’s broken, we ring you up, you fix it, that’s pretty much the end of it, and I just pay the bill. They may not really truly understand the benefits of having you proactively working on their stuff on a daily basis. I know education is a big part of moving someone from break fix over to managed services.
Paul Green:
The other possibility is that clients don’t see break fix services as up to doing managed services. As in they’ve got you in two different pots. So you fix their computers every now and again for 10 years, but when they’re actually looking for, I’m going to put this in quote marks, “a proper IT support company,” that they don’t see that that’s you, even though that’s what you’re doing with 80% of your clients. A lot of why people buy or don’t buy is down to psychology, it’s down to how they think and what their perceptions are of you. Perceptions are incredibly powerful persuasive tools.
Paul Green:
But we’ve got an idea here which a few of my clients have tried and seems to be giving not great results, not the best results in the world because frankly it’s an uphill battle trying to convert break fix to managed services. But it is showing some signs of working. What it is is something called a trip wire. Now, a tripwire is a marketing term for low level, low priced products that gets people into the habit of buying from you. And once they’re in that habit, you can use tools like your strategic reviews, your technology reviews to upsell them onto a decent level of revenue.
Paul Green:
So here’s a trip wire that you could try. And this is not going to have a huge amount of profit for you. But remember the purpose of this is not to generate profit, is to get them into the habit of being a subscriber. The tripwire is simply installing an RMM agent on their computer. And actually you say you market to your break fix clients, “Hey, would you like us to look after all of your updates for you? Would you like us to keep all of your computers up to date automatically without them ever interrupting you? Would you like us to get alerts when there are problems on your computer? So we can fix things faster if you want us to fix them. Would you like us to do all of that? Oh, and by the way, would you also like us to reduce the rate that you pay every single hour?”
Paul Green:
So normally we charge, hey, whatever it is, $200 or 200 pounds an hour. If you come on board with this special trip wire offer,” you wouldn’t use that word, trip wire, but you get the idea, “then you’ll pay the lesser rate of $100 or 100 pounds per hour.” The price for this Mr. Or Mrs. Break fix clients is simply five or 10 pounds or dollars per computer per month. So essentially let’s look at the big picture of what we’re trying to do here, we’re trying to get the RMM agent onto all of their computers. They literally pay nothing for it, they pay five or $10 or pounds a month, whatever just covers the cost for you or makes you a tiny bit of profit. But what this is, this is like a foot in the door.
Paul Green:
So yes, you’re doing the updates for them, but you’re being notified when there are problems. You can pick up the phone and call your clients and say, “Hey, just had a notification you’re out of memory or you’re out of this or this is going to happen or that’s going to happen or whatsoever is the problem. Would you like us to fix this for you?” And they say, “Yes.” And you say, “Great, that’s going to take an hour. You’re paying less than anyone else because you’re on our special deal, so it’s only going to cost you $100. Got to say, though, if you were one of our managed services clients, which is only $100 a month, we’d just fixed this automatically. In fact, we’d have proactively fixed it, you wouldn’t have even known about it it would have all been done for you and it’s actually cheaper in the long run.”
Paul Green:
Now, how you go about doing that upselling, you’ve got to be a bit cute with that, you’ve got to be a bit subtle with it, and you’ve got to build up an argument, a persuasion in their brain over time. But the point is they’re in the habit, they’re a subscriber, it’s a start. And once you’ve got them as a subscriber, it’s so much easier to sell more to them. You’ll know this from your clients, it’s dramatically easier to sell something else to an existing client than it is to try to get someone to become a client, a brand new client in the first place. So why not give that a go? If the RMM thing doesn’t work for you, just have a think about something else. What’s another trip wire you could use? Something very simple, very low cost that just gets them into the habit of buying something from you on contract.
Voiceover:
Paul’s blatant plug.
Paul Green:
If you want to get your marketing fundamentals sorted, I have a live training program that starts every month, which is designed exactly for you. It’s live training delivered by Zoom by me personally. So it’s you and me and a small number of other MSPs on a Zoom call. Now we do do a fresh course every single month and there are limited places every month. And I’ve got to be honest, it sells out every single month and so it should. It’s called The Marketing Accelerator, it is tremendous value for money because over five weeks we cover off all the marketing fundamentals for your business. We look at your website, we look at how to profit from LinkedIn, we look how to build multiple audiences of people, like I was talking about earlier with that marketing strategy, and how to build a relationship with them, we look at multi-touch point marketing campaigns, and we look at a success blueprint which covers off every single area that you need to work on to grow your net profits within your MSP.
Paul Green:
And across these five week program, you have full access to me on email. So for five weeks you can directly ask me anything you like about any aspect of your marketing. Now, this marketing accelerator is so, so low cost. In fact, you could argue this is my tripwire although it’s not a subscription it’s a one-off cost. But it’s my way of getting you to start a relationship with me, a working relationship because I only charged for this 49 pounds plus VAT if you’re in the UK, or anywhere else in the world it’s just $69. And that’s it, a one off payment for this five week live training program that already hundreds of MSPs have gone through.
Paul Green:
So we start a new course every single month. And the next course is due to start in around about month’s time, on the 28th of April. But remember, we only have a finite number of places. And at time of recording, and remember I record this a few weeks ahead, we only have seven places left on that April program. So why don’t you go and check out all the details of this, paulgreensmspmarketing.com/accelerator. Join me for this five week live training course and we will get your marketing fundamentals sorted out.
Voiceover:
The big interview.
Jason Kemsley:
Hello, I’m Jason Kemsley, technical director of Uptime Solutions. Have been in the MSP channel now for 10 years. Originally started as an MSP and then Uptime quickly transitioned into a vendor which has grown to have hopefully one of the best reputations in the outsourcing market today.
Paul Green:
And you guys are looking after tens of thousands of users for MSPs, is it just in the UK or do you deal with MSPs around the world?
Jason Kemsley:
We are very lucky, we get to work with MSPs around the world now. Well, it was traditionally UK, that was our main growth point to begin with. But now we’re thankful that we work with MSPs around the world, so you really see the best of everything.
Paul Green:
I bet you do, but I bet you also see the worst of things as well because of the partnerships that you have with clients. Obviously you’re looking after so many end users, that’s what I wanted to get you on the show to talk about Jason. You’re looking after these tens of thousands of people worldwide, what are some of the customer service lessons that you’ve learned from this?
Jay McBain:
So it’s a really key one, especially given the times we’re current in. Everyone sees varying ticket volumes, everyone sees slightly abnormal requests to what we would traditionally see. And for me and for us, it comes back to one word in its entirety, and that’s expectations. In my experience and many well-known people in this industry’s experience, if you can set the right expectations, no matter if that is slightly longer than you would like or maybe slightly a bit more difficult than you would like, it means that user knows what’s going to happen and ultimately can see the journey through or prepare for the outcome. So something we’ve been really conscious about, specifically back in March last year and a little bit now, is with these really high ticket volumes. Communicate with your users, tell them, “Hey, we’re seeing these large volumes.”
Jay McBain:
Or whatever it is you’re struggling with, you might be a help desk right now struggling with a member of staff you’ve lost for example. You don’t need to communicate about how big your struggle is. But as long as when they contact you you can say, “Hey, we’ve got a couple of bits right now but we will be dealing with your issue and we’ll be back to you by this time or we’ll be back to you at this time.” Even if that’s four or five hours passed maybe outside your contract SLA, usually allows for them to make the relevant plans they want around it. Obviously in the event of a critical, you don’t want to do that, but it allows people to prepare around you rather than necessarily you making them manoeuvre around yourself.
Paul Green:
So setting clear expectations for the clients and I guess obviously then coming through on those expectations as well. Is customer service really as simple as that? Because obviously the vast majority of people listening to this, they’re there in the world of customer service. It’s the very nature of being an MSP, you’ve got to look after people. You were doing it at a scale, at a tremendous scale. So is it really as simple as clear communication and setting expectations?
Jason Kemsley:
You can obviously, and there’s some well known people in the channel that talk about these bits, you can obviously get down in the weeds and there’s lots of individual things that you can do. But whether it’s automated notifications, whether it’s automated response emails, the trigger based off SLA or whatever, all of them are intended to set expectations or set out some roadmap for your user or your end customer so that they know what’s going to happen. And in current circumstances and in future circumstances, I do transparently believe that if we can just set the right expectations and of course follow through on them, just like you said, Paul, then you can fail to a certain degree, but that’s a high-level conversation. There and now in that ticket, the user’s got what they’ve expected from you.
Paul Green:
I guess part of it. Then he’s looking at things from their point of view. And from their point of view, they, to a certain extent, don’t really care that you’re busy, the call volumes are up, the tickets are up, that everyone certainly wants to work from home and, they didn’t yesterday. They just care about the problem that they’ve got right now. And in fact some of my MSP clients talk about how the printer not working is a major disaster for the end clients if it stops them from completing that job that they’re working on right now. And obviously it’s quite hard to reprioritise that client that a printer not working is actually not as important as the server not working, which they’re dealing with with the other client. Do you find this?
Jason Kemsley:
Moving slightly aside from customer service, that’s where having an agile business really comes into it. Something that has come about dramatically in the last year or two is the idea of a quick wins queue or something where those tickets that are just nice in and out transactional tickets can be done with very little stress or overhead. You can take the call, get it fixed on the call, and pass it back out. One of the things that we do and I’m not necessarily wanting to just talk about how we do it, but you can’t shy away from those phone calls. We find so often that a call that comes in and a lady has a printer issue and maybe she’s doing some invoicing, it’s the last day of the month, something like that. We can hear in her tone or voice and her expressions that this is a big problem for her. If that came in via email, I’m sad to say, it’d probably be categorised on the lower end of the priorities.
Jason Kemsley:
So expectations and using our skillset, which is we’re humans and we can hold conversations with each other and we can read tone of voice and interpret what we need to from the language they’re using, you can usually make the right outcome. So in that particular example, if you don’t shy away from that phone call and you have a triage person or some quick wins person, you can quickly identify that a five minute fix here is going to make the world of difference and likely leave you have some positive CSAT score as well.
Paul Green:
That makes perfect sense. CSAT score of course being customer satisfaction. I don’t like jargon on the show I know you don’t like jargon either. But you’re absolutely right about the email and the phone thing. And it’s no different with marketing, you send an email out to someone or someone engages with you on social media or on an email and it’s open to interpretation. Whereas actually when you speak to someone on the phone, you know exactly where they are because we give away don’t we? We give away, in so many different ways, emotionally where we’re at right now. That’s why I’m such a fan of every MSP having someone somewhere phoning people for them. I think that’s such a big thing.
Jason Kemsley:
The sales and marketing process and you would never… Cold calling existed for a reason, because you can hear their tone and you can make a decision. The minute they become a help desk customer, we hide behind ticketing systems and emails. So it’s just as important in the day-to-day service as it is in the sales process.
Paul Green:
I agree, completely agree. Let’s turn to looking at technicians. So I’m not expecting you to give me a number, but you must be managing a lot of technicians. What are some of the things that you’ve found over the years work best for you to help your technicians deliver better customer service and ultimately get tickets cleared but keep the clients happy?
Jason Kemsley:
There’s a few things that we’ve done very, very well with. One of them is finding the personality and then upskilling because ultimately the values and the fundamentals of a person is what we look for, not necessarily their skillset. Skillsets can be attained and grown. So focusing on personality and whether you’re an MSP listening to this and you’re hiring or anything like that, using something like the camel, lion, monkey type personality tests so that you can make sure you’re getting the right people is first point. The second point is clear expectations, and I’m sorry, Paul, there might be a copyright on the word expectations somewhere, but expectations. And if we can give them very clear guidelines or expectations on what their role is, whether that is you’re expected to do first-line items and your KPI is 10 tickets a day X time locked. With just three things it’s very, very simple for someone to essentially live up to or complete the amount of work they need to complete or complete the goals that they’ve been set.
Jason Kemsley:
What we find in this MSP space is everyone does everything, we’re all Jack of all trades. We all know a little bit about windows, a little bit about Linux, a little bit about Mac. But if we can just put you into a specific area where you consistently do a series of tasks or you consistently work in a similar area, you can usually become quite efficient at it. And usually as long as you’ve got expectations behind that, they’re clear there’s no barriers to delivering.
Paul Green:
Tell me more about the badger, the monkey, and whatever the other animal was. I’ve not heard that one before.
Jason Kemsley:
So the badger, the monkey, I think it’s badger, no it’s monkey, lion, camel, and turtle. There’s a personality test online and forgive me I don’t know what it’s called. But if you Google camel, monkey, turtle, and lion, there’s a website you can make your staff take a personality test or even potentials. And it will rate or put them into a certain category and they all have a definition and we all fall into one or a subset of two. So someone like myself, I’ve got half the traits of a lion. I jump into things usually a bit too quickly and need to put more thought around them. But I’ve got a bit of monkey in there as well, in that I’m a bit tactful. When you work out your core values as a business, as we’ve all done, possibly listen to this, yourself included, Paul, when we look at our core values, we can then work out what type of people make that an excellent business to be in.
Paul Green:
That sounds great. I’m going to go and Google that and certainly try and get the animals right. There are no badges in there at all either.
Jason Kemsley:
No, I’m sorry about that.
Paul Green:
No, I think I was the one that introduced the badger into the conversation. Jason, tell us a little bit about Uptime Solutions and how can we get in touch with you?
Jason Kemsley:
Uptime Solutions, we provide white labelled help desk NOC and SOC services to MSPs, we are channel only, we are lights on 24/7, we’ve offices in the UK and New Zealand. And anyone can reach out either to me on LinkedIn, Jason Kemsley or can hit our website uptimesolutions.tech.
Voiceover:
Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. This week’s recommended book.
Jay McBain:
Hi there. I’m Jay McBain from Forrester Research, the principal analyst for channels, partnerships, and ecosystems. In terms of a book, I probably have a shelf full of over 100 channel books that have come out in the last decade or so. But the one I always refer to and it’s an old book by Malcolm Gladwell called The Tipping Point and the chapter two about Paul Revere. Some of the things inside that book are so relevant today and it’s a little bit of my North star, as we see where managed services is going in the future. Some lessons there that continue to play true.
Voiceover:
Coming up next week.
Stephen King:
I am Stephen King CEO of GrowthForce. I’m going to be on the show next week to talk about how do you increase profits by making the most important decision, getting your pricing right?
Paul Green:
We’ll also be talking next week about how you can stop your staff from making the same mistakes over and over and over again. It’s incredibly frustrating for all business owners, and we’ll talk about how you can practically eliminate it from your MSP next week. We’re also going to be talking about something called the happy balance. There are five things that you need in your life in order to be happy. And your business plays a massive part in that because when your business isn’t quite right, it can dramatically affect the happy balance and it can push you into unhappiness. I’ll tell you what those five things are next week and how you can affect them, look forward to seeing you on next week’s show.
Voiceover:
Made in the UK for MSPs around the world, Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast.
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