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Welcome to Episode 297 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…
I know I know, you want to grow your MSP, but actually you barely have enough time to stay on top of the big shows on Netflix, let alone learn how to improve your MSP’s marketing. But could you make the time if all you had to do was read or listen to just one single book?
Let’s dig into a new book that if you implement the simple ideas inside, it will dramatically improve your marketing. You’ll get more attention and ultimately a lot more business for your MSP.
What was your lockdown experience like? Well, some people had a terrible experience, of course, but others discovered new things about themselves. So for example, I discovered a bit of a renewed love of running which led me to doing a couple of half marathons over the years after. And actually I lost about two stone in weight, which sadly has come back now and doesn’t seem to want to go again. But also back then I fell in love with reading one more time and I got through tons of books that summer.
And one book that I read for the first time ever, which I had been meaning to read for years, was a book called They Ask You Answer, written by a guy called Marcus Sheridan. And this was instantly an insane book for me and it resonated with me in every possible way. So I went away and I implemented as much of it as I could in my own business, and I kept telling the MSPs that I was working with that they should do exactly the same. And actually, I decided I had to get Marcus onto my podcast, which finally happened in January 2023. If you want to listen to that episode, Google MSP Marketing Edge and Marcus Sheridan, and you’ll find the podcast episode. It’s episode 164. Marcus was very generous with that interview and it helped to position, They Ask You Answer in ways that made it super relevant to MSPs.
I tell you all of this as background as it helps to explain why I got so excited earlier this year when I heard that Marcus was releasing a new book. It’s been billed as They Ask You Answer 3.0. Version two was a bit of a refresher to the original book which came out in about 2019, whereas this new book is more than just an update, this is a reinvention for the modern age. You see, They Ask You Answer first came out in 2016, that was nine years ago, and the world has changed dramatically since then, hasn’t it? No more so than with the AI tools that we have today. And so They Ask You Answer has changed into something new called, Endless Customers. That’s the name of the new book and it’s available currently as a hardback, but it is also on Audible as well. And you can access more details about the book at the website endlesscustomers.com.
Now, let me be brutally clear about this. You NEED to read this book.
This is the one of the most valid marketing books that any MSP can read. And it’s not just ideas or opinions, it’s field tested stuff.
It’s been field tested for over a decade, and I know that many MSPs have used this. In fact, I know that Marcus Sheridan understands the MSP market based on my conversations with him a couple of years ago.
Endless Customers shows you how to become the most trusted and recognised MSP in your marketplace. How? By harnessing the power of the right content, getting your website right, the right sales activities, the right technology, and having a culture of performance. And there are so many big ideas in this book, but they all come with instructions on how to implement them, how to make them happen, and bake them into your business.
I look at a lot of MSP’s websites and their overall marketing, and I’ll be honest, the ones that excite me the most have used either this exact system or their own version of it. And you can see that those MSPs are so completely different from their competitors. You can see that the way they stand out, in fact, it almost makes me pity the MSPs that they are up against. And wouldn’t you want to be that MSP? Wouldn’t you want to be the one that other people look at and realise it’s going to be very difficult to catch up to?
So become that MSP before someone else gets there. It’s not an overnight transformation, but it is a transformation of your entire business. And it starts with one book, Endless Customers. Please get it, read it, listen to it, get copies for your team, give it to your team to read. In fact, there’s some suggestions inside the book about how you turn your entire MSP into an Endless Customers culture. This could be an insane differentiator and competitive advantage for your MSP.
Many MSPs hate this kind of work and refuse to do it, and yet by doing so they’re missing out on potential new clients. Wouldn’t you love a way to warm up reluctant prospects and build a solid relationship with them, before asking them to sign a monthly recurring revenue contract?
Well, that’s what this hated work can do. Let me tell you what the work is, why I think you should consider taking it on and how to use it as a marketing tool.
Would you take on a one-off project with no guarantee of monthly recurring revenue just to build a relationship with a prospect? I asked this question recently in my free MSP Marketing Facebook group. If you haven’t joined that by the way, just go onto Facebook, search for MSP Marketing, nip over to groups and you’ll see it there – MSP Marketing Facebook group. Free to join, but it’s only for MSPs, a vendor free zone. Anyway, I asked that question there and the answers were very clear cut. Many MSPs shouted, yes, a few shouted a very vociferous no, with a few kind of sitting on the fence. Let me read you out some of the comments.
First of all, we’ve got here some big fans. Darren said: Every day if their finances check out and there’s additional opportunity. And he means of course, for monthly recurring revenue. Sebastian said: Yep, best way to get in the door and also getting paid for a lead instead of you paying to acquire a lead. I like that. And James agreed with him saying: Providing the project is costed for and priced that shows it can deliver a profit at your required rate. You never know where that prospect may be in 12, 18 or 24 months time.
Rob said as well: Yes, definitely. A lot of our MRR has come as a result of one-off projects. We use it as an opportunity to impress and give an experience that they may want more of, often going slightly over what they were expecting and highlighting other things whilst working on the project. It gets their thought process whirring. It’s also an opportunity to get in and see what they are really like. Oh I like that, so it’s almost like he’s checking them out as they’re checking him out.
And then finally, for the yeses, Jeff said: Yep, absolutely. We have gained many clients from a relationship built just from a one-off project. Some of our biggest clients, even most of them, have had a bad relationship with another MSP. Doing a one-off project allows them to try us. You can prove to them you’re going to do what you say, at the time you say it, and within the budget that you gave.
Now then, as I said, there were a couple of people sat in the middle. So Jim said: It depends on the project. I regularly refer people to other computer repair guys locally as I’ve become quite adept at spotting nightmares on the phone. I like that. And actually Dan replied to that exactly this: Scope out whether there’s any leverage. If there isn’t, don’t waste your time.
And we did have a few definite nos as well. Gerard said: Nope, little chance it leads to MRR. Also too much sales and overhead time. And Rick said: No, as he’s a hundred percent focused on MRR. Our model for the last 20 years, defining the edge of projects with people you don’t know on equipment you don’t support or didn’t sell is a slippery slope best avoided.
So where do you sit on this question? To me, it’s a very smart way to overcome one of the biggest marketing problems that all MSPs face.
They won’t buy from you until they trust you, but they can’t trust you until they like you, and they can’t like you until they know you. Asking a business owner or manager to sign a contract and shift everything over to you, it’s a massive perceived risk for them. What if you can’t deliver what you say that you can deliver? What if their technology goes wrong? What if it damages their business? What if? What if? What if?
Well, you can overcome this massive perceived risk with great marketing, especially leveraging social proof like testimonials, reviews, case studies and risk reversal, such as a great guarantee. But you know what? Successfully doing a one-off project is way better. It’s the ultimate proof that you can deliver and it buys you time to have quality conversations with them about their overall technology, what they love and what’s frustrating them. Ask the right questions and listen really carefully to the answers and you’ll soon hear the people who are desperate for better help and really hope that you can provide it. So where do you sit on this debate?
Featured guest: Dustin Puryear is the founder of Giant Rocketship, a SaaS company helping MSPs and IT teams eliminate chaos with automation-first helpdesk workflows. A former MSP owner and software architect, he brings real-world experience to every talk. Dustin is known for his tactical insights, clear frameworks, and no-nonsense approach to IT service management.
If you could go back and talk to yourself the night before you started your MSP, what advice would you give yourself? Assuming it’s not, don’t do it, maybe you tell yourself about the biggest mistakes that you are going to make along the way, so that your younger self could avoid those mistakes. I’ve been speaking to a vendor who used to be an MSP and we’ve been playing exactly this game. Right now check out his biggest sales and marketing mistakes and see how they compare to yours.
Hey everybody. My name is Dustin Puryear. I’m the founder of Giant Rocketship. I was an MSP owner. Now I’m on the vendor side and fully automate ticket and work management for MSPs.
You went from the light side to the dark side, but thank you for joining us on the podcast. And by the way, really cool company name. I’m looking forward to hearing about how you came up with the name Giant Rocketship, that’s one of the coolest vendor names that we’ve ever heard. And let’s be honest, we’re surrounded by vendors with really boring technical sounding names, so that in itself stands out.
Dustin, I think you’ve got a really interesting story and we are today going to talk about the marketing stuff that you wish you’d known back in the day when you were an MSP. Let’s talk about that, tell us your MSP story. How did you get into it in the first place? What was the technology when you got into it? Are we talking sort of pre XP? And what was your MSP story? How did you get started? How did you end that story?
Yeah, interesting. So I come from the dot-com era, for anybody that knows that. I was a developer, I was a young kid out of college and that company was in streaming media in early 2000. It folded as you would guess, and I was looking for, what am I doing next? Single, no kids. I was like, well, I could just start a business, what’s the worst case here that I move in with my mom?
I was 22 – 23, I was a Unix admin coder guy. So I started a consultancy for hospitals and agencies. Then I realised it was hard for me to reproduce myself, started bringing in Windows people and then suddenly I realised I had a IT company and then we converted to a fixed fee model, which made me a MSP. And then 20 years later I sold that puppy.
That’s it. Simple as that. And do you miss it? I know that’s a strange sounding question.
I miss some of the relationships. The company that acquired us, actually, I was talking to the owner the other day and he said, man, you had some really good connections. Like the owners still ask about you, how’s everything going? And yeah, sometimes I’m just like, I need to reach out to ex customer A, B, or C and just go have lunch with them. Because I would have regular core lunches with the customers and I do miss that level of relationship. It’s not totally outside of how a vendor works with their customers, but just the scale a number of customers makes it more difficult to have that many relationships. So I would say that type of intimate relationship with your customers is probably what I miss the most about being a MSP.
Yeah, that makes perfect sense. And a lot of people would sell their MSP, go and have six months off and then start another MSP. Was that not something that appealed to you?
I thought about it, but Giant Rocketship had started as a little side project that came out of my MSP because we developed it originally for the MSP. So I really couldn’t just sit on it unless I was going to fold it. My Rocketship customers wouldn’t be happy with that. And also I think it scared my wife thinking that I would just be home all the time because she works from the office and I’m high energy, talkative, constantly making noises, banging on things, and I don’t know if she would’ve been on board with me taking six months off. So the votes were tallied and it was clear that I should just sprint to the next opportunity.
I love that. I sold my first business in 2016 and I was going to take six months off. It was six weeks and I started what is now my business I run now. I was so bored within six weeks, which is just nuts. So people like us, we are going to be in our eighties and nineties running businesses you know. It’s going to be quite a sad state of affairs, I think.
Yeah, I can see this full retirement concept. I mean, sometimes I’m like, Ooh, I just want a break. But I don’t know that I’ll ever actually fully retire. I enjoy it, and yes, it can be stressful sometimes, but actually I do better when I’m under stress. I underperform when I have no stress on me. I’ll dither, I’ll procrastinate, but if I have stress on me, I’ll perform well. And so actually I think I just thrive under a high pressure environment.
Right. In which case, let’s ratchet this up. We’re going to talk about Giant Rocketship at the end of the interview. Just before we ratchet up the pressure, how long have you not been an MSP? So how long have you been a vendor for?
Well, I just sold my MSP in October.
Oh, okay. So just last year then. Okay, so already then you’re a little on from that. And what’s some of the marketing stuff that you’ve learned in this kind of vendor startup phase that you wish you knew back when you were running that MSP?
Well, that’s the thing is our MSP, we were in the $2 to $3 million range, so not huge, but bigger than average. And there were things that we just weren’t mature on yet. And one of them was just how important strong KPIs are around marketing. I don’t think people properly track their marketing dollars. And the next thing, and I can talk about this all day long, is not being patient enough with marketing. The reality is sales should have a relatively quick turnaround. If you bring in an SDR, that person should start hitting within a few months. You might not be making your money back, but you’ll know whether you’re going to get something. Marketing, you’re looking at a solid year to really start seeing the return on marketing.
MSPs don’t budget properly for marketing because they want a faster turnaround. They could be going in the right direction but they’ll abort a project because they don’t see the returns fast enough. And that’s broken thinking.
Yeah, I’m smiling and laughing and nodding as you say this because that’s exactly my experience. And do you know what, that’s a normal experience as well because as business owners, we are not used to waiting 3, 6, 9, 12 months for something to pay off, are we? We’re not quite the instant gratification, I need it in the next five minutes, that a lot of consumers are, but when you say to someone, oh, you’ve got to wait a year for that, that just seems nuts. That seems like the wrong thing to do. So did you learn that lesson in your MSP or is that something that you realised from reflection after exiting it?
I would say at the tail end of the MSP I started really understanding the timeline of marketing better. And I would say exiting it and being able to evaluate where I succeeded, where I failed in marketing and sales with my MSP and where I could apply that with Giant Rocketship. And I kind of joke, but I’m serious that Giant Rocketship has made me unlearn more than it’s made me learn because the service model, the way you sell it can be very different than a product model. But now that I’m in Rocketship and I have people that are really focused on how do you get the marketing working and what does that life cycle look like and when do you start a conversation and when should it hit to see if your numbers are correct? That’s just really opened my eyes to just how short term my thinking as a MSP was.
So you said you got to $2 to $3 million revenue, which as you correctly identify is not usual. It’s a little above where many people get to with their business. What were the marketing and sales things that you did back in the day that you think moved the needle the most?
Well, at that size we were very referral heavy, and that was a huge thing, just getting out there. I don’t know if they have the saying in the UK, but pressing the flesh, just shaking hands, kissing babies. But you need to be out there. If you are an owner for a MSP and you’re at $1 to $3 million, you still need to be going to your chamber meetings every week. You still need to be going to events where business people go, like learning sessions with your chamber or with your economic development agency in your state. Your face needs to be out there. You need to be out there on social media. You need to keep it obviously apolitical, you need to keep it straight narrow on business stuff, and you need to know what your job is. And as an owner for a MSP up to $3 million, you are the closer and you’re the face of the company, and that’s what you’re selling. A $10 million MSP is selling process. A $1 million MSP is selling the owner. And I think people get their wires crossed when it comes to that.
Yeah, I agree. And in fact, you are absolutely spot on. I would say probably 80% of the MSPs on the planet are owner driven businesses, they’re personality driven businesses. So the business comes from, the owner’s personality, it’s the force of energy they’ve got or the force of energy they haven’t got. It’s partly pressing the flesh, it’s partly the follow-up calls, it’s partly how they’re reflected on social media, but it is very much based around a person.
And you’re right, there comes a point where that business has to outgrow the owner. Now you can still be the face of the business. I’m the face of my business but believe me, I do very little work in the business. In fact, my job is this, only I can do this, only I can be on social media and writing our content, but I don’t do any of the customer service. I don’t write any of the content for our MSP Marketing Edge clients or anything like that. And it’s a very difficult transition for MSPs to make. And in fact, many MSPs don’t even like the fact that they are the face of the business, even though they are the face of the business. It’s a very difficult thing.
Final question about your MSP. If you did decide to start another MSP, what are the two, three things that you would do differently from day one. And I’m not looking for tech stack software choices or anything like that, I’m looking from a marketing, sales, and growth point of view, what are some of the two or three things that you would go in and instantly say, oh, I would do X, Y, Z differently?
Well, I do want to take one step back. And you brought up stack, and I actually just had this conversation with somebody the other day. If you’re a $1 to $3 million MSP and you’re focused on selling your stack, you are completely having the wrong conversation. That size customer doesn’t care about your stack. They literally don’t. A $500 million organisation that’s bringing you in for tier two escalation support, they care about how you run things. Smaller, they just want to know how you personally are going to handle things and what your account management looks like.
So if I were to go reinvent myself, I would completely do it differently. One thing is I would absolutely be all in, it took me a long time to learn that my face needed to be out there in the business community, and I just struggled with that. I just thought it was how good of a technical person I was. And it took me 10 years to realise, that from day one, I need to be out there shaking hands, telling people what I own. Second, the biggest mistake we made as a MSP, this is from the sales and marketing aspect, was we weren’t niched down enough. I was a solve all problems MSP. We had a few hotels, we had a few small banks, we had a lot of healthcare. I would niche down to one segment and I would go all in on that niche because I would be able to 10 x my marketing dollar. Whereas when I was broad based, I was one 10th the marketing dollar, because it was spread so thin. And people don’t understand that when you’re a broad based MSP, your marketing dollars are extremely expensive compared to a niched down MSP.
Yeah, I completely agree with you. Let’s talk about the vendor then. So you started Giant Rocketship back end of last year. First of all, tell us what is Giant Rocketship? What does it do? Obviously you work with MSPs, but what specific use cases or what problems do you solve? And tell us a little bit about the marketing you’ve been doing for it.
Yeah, so the use cases, what I found and what I’ve seen at all the MSPs is they’re just overwhelmed. They have more tickets coming in than they have technicians. They keep hiring more and more dispatchers and managers and service managers, and it doesn’t work. It doesn’t scale. And so Rocketship fully automates the service management. So we team up the service manager, service coordinator if you have one, and then we just tell you, look, this is great, but you won’t need to hire more service coordinators. You’re good where you are. And we fully automate the flow of work through your MSP. Rocketship makes a decision what technical resources do what work, when they’re going to do work, it tells them what order to do the work, and it tells them, don’t touch this ticket for three days. It’s as though every technician had their own personal secretary that was constantly optimising their day. And that is what Rocketship does.
That’s really clever. So how have you achieved that? Is that some kind of AI based solution or is that sort of based on the rules that you wished your technicians had followed back when you had technicians?
It’s a combination. We definitely have AI in there. And so the AI is more on predicting things, looking at the cadence of the staff, who’s running fast, who’s running slow for the day, for the week, for the month. It’s also somewhat rule-based. It understands that Meraki and Ubiquiti tickets go to the network team, password resets go to this other team. And then it understands ticket priorities, SLAs, and we have a bunch of our own unique ways of looking at stuff. For example, Rocketship understands that regardless of a ticket priority, some appointments are more important than the other. It’s more important to make the appointment for a VIP on a medium priority ticket than it is to make an appointment for a high priority ticket for a receptionist. That’s just the brutal reality. And so Rocketship understands all these conflicting priorities, massages them together, and then hands them kind of on a silver platter to the technician and just says, this is the optimal path for you to be successful for the day.
Yeah, I love it. It’s such a clever idea. And are you finding the marketing of that as a vendor on the dark side, are you finding the marketing completely different to how you used to market your MSP?
Yeah, because there’s almost no relationship selling with a product. And so the marketing is obviously you have to self brand, you know how that works. So as a founder, I do have to brand myself, Hey, I know what I’m talking about and I’m the founder. And so that’s important, but Rocketship has to stand on its own without the founder. It can’t be a hundred percent founder led, unlike a service company. And so I definitely had to learn some hard lessons and we continue to learn the lessons of what’s the vocabulary we need to use with customers? What are fun words we think are awesome but a service manager says, I have no idea what you’re talking about. And that’s so common in marketing, you think you’re saying something that’s clear, but your audience is unclear. They don’t know what you’re trying to tell them. And in marketing, you’re constantly testing, testing, testing everything that you say. And so that’s kind of where we are right now with the marketing is we’re constantly testing what’s the vocabulary we need to use and where are the people at that we need to reach.
Yeah, I love that. My one piece of advice, which obviously will change over time, but for how to get those exact words, is interview your clients. Literally record yourself interviewing them. Put the transcripts into ChatGPT or insert your generative AI engine of choice, and get it to do some deep research on what are the common words, what are the common phrases? So something like, you and I know that the word tickets is a standard word that’s everyone in the MSP world uses. A user doesn’t, users don’t call themselves users, but we know that they’re users and they submit tickets. So those are standard ones. But I bet you if you interviewed 10 MSPs and put every single word they said and got ChatGPT to analyse all of that and do some deep research, I bet it would give you two or three phrases that you can literally use those exact phrases in your marketing.
That’s a great idea. I haven’t done that.
That’s free. Well, I say that’s free, I’ll send you a bill for a $1,000 because you’re in startup mode, so you’ve got tons of cash. I’m joking. Dustin, that’s a fantastic interview, thank you so much for telling us about your MSP and your new venture. Let’s get you back on the show in the years ahead because it’d be really interesting to see how you develop that. I’m sure you have a ton of ideas of where that’s going to go as you grow your user base and you get more MSPs using it. Just finally tell us where do we go to connect with you? Have a look at a demo of that and get in touch.
Yeah, so giantrocketship.com, should be very easy to spell. That’s one of the things I like about that name, giant rocketship.com. You can reach me via email [email protected] and we’ll get back to you the second you reach out to us.
Patrick has a 12 year old MSP based in San Francisco, and he’s trying to make his website as effective as possible. His question is: Do I need to worry about Google’s Core Web Vitals?
Oh, a nice quick answer to this one. Yes, Google’s Core Web Vitals is still a thing in 2025. I wouldn’t stress about it too much, but you do need to keep an on it, as it is important to your search results. So essentially, Core Web Vitals is a way of measuring how pleasant it is for people to use your website. So how fast does the page load? How fast is it when you interact, and how long does it take for the page to become stable? Your Core Web Vitals score will have an effect on your organic search results.
The easiest thing to do here really is an online test to see how well your site does right now and see what you need to improve. And of course, there are plenty of online tests for this. There’s a nice simple one at webpagetest.org/webvitals. But there’s also a Core Web Vitals report in the Google Search Console. So if you just Google “Google Search Console”, make sure it’s set up for your site, which you should do anyway because it’s got all sorts of useful stuff in there. And remember the basic rule, just do what Google tells you to do. If it’s identified something that needs to be improved on your site, then that’s your to-do list.
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