How MSPs Can Find New Clients With Direct Mail

[00:00:00] Speaker A: All right there. [00:00:00] Speaker B: Welcome back to the show. Here's what I've got coming up for you today. Five smart ideas for direct mail that's going to make you stand out. How your MSP can do video testimonials properly. And my special guest today talks about how we as business owners inadvertently self sabotage our own marketing. Welcome to episode 349, powered by mspmarketingedge.com Paul Greens MSP Marketing Podcast. If you're not yet using direct mail to warm up leads and find out who's nearly ready to buy from you, then I believe you're missing out on a major marketing channel for your msp. Back in May this year, I was a guest at the MSP show in London and I got to share a stage with Ian Luckett, Darren Strong and Mitt Patel. These are all people who've been on this podcast in the past. It was great to meet, particularly Mitt for the first time in real life and, and we were talking about what it takes to grow and succeed with your msp. Anyway, later in the day, I was interviewed by James Steele for the GTIA On Location YouTube channel, which, by the way, is well worth you looking up. There's some great content on there. And James asked me a whole load of questions about marketing, but the one that really got me going was when he asked about direct mail, because I am a massive fan of direct mail for msps and I think it's one of the most underused tactics in the whole channel. So. So today I want to give you five smart ideas for making your direct mail stand out and actually get a response. And let's start by asking, why direct mail at all? And remember, I'm talking about stuff that's sent through your letterbox. Physical, real life stuff. Well, here's why. In 1999, yes, I was alive then. I had 1,000 pieces of mail come through my post box every single day. I mean, we were inundated with mail back then. Those of us that were alive, we remember what it was like. So we had all of this stuff in our post box, but we would only get like three emails. And today, of course, it's the other way around, right? Everyone's inbox is full. Their email inbox is full, their notifications inbox is full. Their social media feed, it's all ping, ping, ping, ping, ping. It's a complete digital mess, right? So our brains and our inboxes in our digital world is completely full. We're now getting 3,000 things in every day, digitally but the physical post, well, that's almost empty by comparison. In fact, just before recording this, I went out and I checked my mail. Where I live here in the uk, I have like an external mailbox I haven't checked for a week, which shows how unimportant it is. I just went out there and I got two pieces of mail that were sent to me. One's like a bank statement that the bank can't actually physically switch off. They don't know which computer sending it to me. And then there was a letter from some company about something and, and three flyers for like dominoes and stuff like that. Right. So there's not a huge amount of physical mail. And this is good because it allows you to stand out in a space where there's not a lot of competition. A well crafted piece of direct mail gets physically handled, which means it's noticed. Notice what I just said there. I went out of my way to go and get my post. I don't go out of my way to check my notifications or my email. It's just something that I have to do every day and something I do choose to want to stay on top of. So I don't have 67,000 unread emails, which my girlfriend currently does, which is driving me crazy, I'll be honest. But hey, your competitors are almost certainly not doing this right. They are not sending direct mails. And that means that the physical mailboxes, the physical postal space of all of the prospects in your area or your vertical, that could be yours. Now, this works brilliantly alongside LinkedIn. It's imagine if you were hitting the same prospect in two completely different places. So you send them a message on LinkedIn or even just email them and the message is about the thing that you've sent to them in the mail, the thing you've shipped to them. That's very powerful. You can message someone about the same kind of thing using two or three different platforms and that's not overwhelmed. Three pieces of mail in a week is too much. Three emails on the same subject in, in the same week is too much. But the same kind of communication on three different platforms is very, very good marketing. So let me give you some ideas that you can take away from this and actually go and have a go. And the first of them is something called a lumpy envelope. So a flat letter gets opened last or not at all. And by flat, I mean it's literally physically flat. There's clearly a bit of paper in it and that's it. There's nothing intriguing in that at all. Whereas if you get something that's lumpy or bumpy, that always gets open first. Out of curiosity. And this is why, for years and years, and I don't know if they do this where you are, but here in the uk, for years, charities, when they used to send out sort of charity appeals in the mail, they would put a little pen or a pencil in there for you. Well, supposedly for you to fill in the form and send back your donation, but actually it made it lumpy. [00:05:05] Speaker A: You. [00:05:06] Speaker B: You'd get something you weren't expecting and you're like, oh, what's this inside here? So here's what you could do to do this. You could put something small and physical inside the envelope. This could be a stress ball. It's a pretty common thing for MSPs to use, a stress ball with your branding printed on the side. It could be a USB stick, perhaps one that has printed on it saying, do not put this in your computer. Yeah. You know that that's the first thing that people are going to do. I mean, it could be as simple as just a branded pen or a small toy or something like this, really, the item that you send out in the mail, it should tie into your message somehow. So a stress ball that says, is your it giving you stress? That would work perfectly. Or like we said, the USB that says, don't plug this in. And when they do, there's one file in there that says, read me, which says, we told you not to plug this in. This could be malware. I don't know how people would take that, actually thinking about that. But the curiosity alone of having lumpy mail or bumpy mail dramatically increases your open rates. Now, it is worth you knowing that the, the cost per mail is going to be higher depending on how your postal system works. Typically, if it's. If it's lumpy, if it's got bulk, you end up paying more for it. But you're sending this to a small targeted list. When it comes to direct mail, it's always quality over quantity. There's no point sending out thousands of these, but you would send out 50 to your hottest prospects, particularly if you can follow them up by phone. Idea number two, a personalized letter that genuinely looks personal. So for this, you wouldn't do something that's been printed with your logo on it. Instead, you go the complete opposite. You pull together a letter that looks like a real human wrote it. So, for example, this could be a handwritten envelope. You might actually put a real stamp on There. And yes, that means a little bit of licking stamps. I think most stamps have their own glue these days, but they would put their first name at the top, that kind of stuff. The opening line should reference something specific about their business or sector. Essentially, it should feel like you have sat down and physically written this to them. So you wouldn't write a generic letter inviting them to a webinar or, you know, is this a good time to talk about your IT or something like that? Well, actually maybe you would, maybe you'd write a letter to someone that says dear Dave, can I ask an open question? Are you happy with your current IT support? If you are, please throw this in the bin. If you're not, please call me on this number or please email me on, on this address or something, you know, or please, here's my live calendar or something like that. And, and actually the more it looks like someone has just personally written, the more likely it is to be opened and read and of course acted upon. So there's a couple of ways that you could do this. You could either do it yourself on your computer and download a handwriting font and then print that off on your printer. It's kind of cheating if you do that though, and everyone can tell. So I would say go the extra mile. What's the extra mile for this? Well, something like, for example, there are services out there that will either use robo writers. I mean it's literally a robotic arm that has a pen and that will write. There is even a services hit one, certainly one here in the uk. There's bound to be one in the US that will get actual humans to write these letters for you. And I suspect that we as humans can tell when something's been robo written versus handwritten by human. Because handwritten by humans there'll be a kind of a lack of consistency, won't that even people who've got really nice handwriting that there are different ways that the letters are written, whereas I guess a robot just does it exactly the same each way. But even a robot is better than printing something. So just go have a look for services for that and that'd be really interesting for you to test that and see how that works. Okay then. And idea three, the follow up sequence. So one piece of direct mail rarely works and that's why earlier I recommended you send them out in small batches when you have a phone person to follow them up for you. But actually what if you sent three pieces of direct mail over like six or nine weeks? You know, you could do Something simple like the first piece could just introduce yourself and offer something useful to them. No hard sell. Maybe just say, you know, we've got an IT Services Buyer's Guide on our website, something like that. And that in itself is only going to interest the people who are nearly ready, willing and able to have a conversation. But that in itself is a valuable piece of direct mail. And then a few sort of three, four weeks later, you could send another direct mail which might reference the first letter and say, oh, actually I sent you this thing. We have an IT Services Buyer's Guide. Did you want one? Or you could offer a new idea. You could say, oh, we've just written a guide about increasing your business's productivity with copilot or with teams, essentially, you're just gently reminding them that you exist, but you're still adding more value into their life. And then the third one you could send again another four or five weeks later, just could be like a very final piece with a very simple, clear call to action. Are you looking to change your IT company in the next six months? If you are, here's my Life calendar, something like that. And each letter should feel like a natural continuation of a conversation, not sort of three separate campaigns. And if you think about it, this is the kind of thing that you do with an email sequence or a LinkedIn messaging sequence anyway, so. So it's a really smart way of just building a relationship with someone. The difference is you're doing it in that space where there's no competition because no other MSP is writing to them. Most people, if they're going to do something like this, they'll do one letter, they don't get any responses and they say that it fails, right? Direct mail doesn't work for msps, which is nonsense. A sequence, and especially we have the follow up. This is where the results really come. And I cannot stress this more, and I'm going to say it for the third, third time, right? Send some direct mail to someone and expect a response. You're not going to get it. People don't act on it that way. But the real power of that direct mail is to make it easy for you to follow them up by email or LinkedIn message or definitely the phone. Send someone a postcard or a letter and phone them a week after they receive it or three or four days after they receive it. And I promise you, I promise you, it will be so much easier for you to A, get hold of them and, and B, actually have a conversation with them. And even if they're not in the right place at that time, that's okay. The point is you're having a conversation. You can then schedule them for follow up in a year's time or whenever is going to be an appropriate buying time for them. When someone gets a piece of direct mail, they do pick it up, intending to do something, but often it then just goes down again. Whereas if someone in your office or you, but better someone in your office follows them up by phone, they're much more likely to have a decent conversation about their business. So the way to look at it is that the direct mail opens the door and makes it easier for callers. Right, I've got two more ideas for you. Let me whiz through idea four and five. Idea four is the grabber at the top of the letter. So it's a physical object actually glued to the top of a letter and that really increases readership. So the classic examples from back in the day are a coin you stick or like a $1 bill or something like that, and you say, I wanted to get your attention before this gets lost. Or another classic one is like a sticking plaster, you know, like a band aid. Is your current IT support just patching over the cracks. You could do a tea back, couldn't you? Let's have a virtual cuppa and talk about your it. And this sounds gimmicky, but I've looked, not recently, but in the past I've looked at data on response rates and just adding the tea bag or the coin or the, the sticking plaster or something like that works because it's unexpected. These are lower cost than sending a stress ball or something like that. Important though is that the attention grabber that you're gluing to the letter must link to the content of the letter. In fact, the whole letter explains the object. And then idea 5 is send something worth keeping. So instead of just sending them a letter that's going to go in the recycling, send them something that's got shelf life. I mean, I mentioned earlier, like the IT Services Buyer's Guide that can be a very good thing to send out to your hottest prospects. Or you could just do a one page guide that maybe even laminate it. Five questions to ask before you switch your IT provider. Or if it's towards the end of the year, you could send a small desk calendar with your branding on, or a printed checklist, IT security, something like that, or copilot ideas, something they'll pin up, you know, next to their desk or stuff like that tends to stay there the idea is that every time they look at something that's pinned up on their desk, you, your name is there. And that's some very important passive brand building between now and when they're ready to buy. In fact, the wall planner is a great example of this principle. Something useful that stays visible. And I've got a wall planner I'm going to offer to you very, very shortly. Before I do, let me just throw in a bonus sixth idea, something I just thought of. Printed newsletters. These are still a massive and criminally underused tool to stay in touch with hot prospects. Because the beauty of a newsletter is it's seen as an educational and, and a communication tool. It's not seen as a piece of sales literature. And that means it gets stuck on walls, it gets passed around a business, it goes in drawers and stays there for years. I've heard from Quite a few MSPs who sent out newsletters for a number of years and then later on down the line they've won deals from someone they actually stopped marketing to and they haven't marketed to them for a few years. But that person rang them out of the blue, talking about a newsletter that they'd sent like three years before. And this is why we actually give newsletters to our B2B MSP Marketing Edge members, because the newsletters are so powerful. Just a reminder on this direct mail that the list, the people you're sending this to matters as much as the creative of what you actually send to them. And none of this works if you're sending this to the wrong people. So you do need to either build or buy a list of the exact businesses that you want to work with in your area. Of course, LinkedIn is a brilliant source for this. You can, you can find the decision makers, get their business address, you could, or you can just get their domain name and use a data enrichment tool to build that list for you. As I said earlier, a small targeted list of 50 ideal prospects, the kind of people that make you salivate at the thought of working with them. Do those people brilliantly and that will always be to mass mailing of 500 people that you've just bought from a data broker. Direct mail is not dead, it, it's just been abandoned by the vast majority of businesses who can't be bothered to do it. And that is your opportunity. Pick one of those six ideas, put together a list of your 50 dream prospects and send them something genuinely surprising. And don't forget to follow them up by phone, because if you do this Right. Not only will they remember you, but you might even get a really hot lead and even a sales meeting out of it. Paul Greens MSP Marketing Podcast. You know, given everything that we've just been talking about with direct mail, I should mention that I do practice what I preach. Not just in this, actually, but in almost everything that we talk about in this podcast. Because the wall planner that I'm about to tell you about is a piece of direct mail. So it's a large physical planner that I print and post to you completely free of charge. And on this planner is 36 marketing actions that you could take to go from no leads to winning new clients. And I've put them in the right order that you should do them. And it's big enough that it can go on your office wall. So it's the kind of thing that's worth keeping. And in fact, that's the point, like I was just saying, right? It stays on your wall. And that's keeping my name and my business's name, the MSP Marketing Edge, in front of you for as long as that wall planner stays on your wall. But the value it gives to you is anytime you're thinking, what am I going to do with my marketing edge? What should we actually do? You can just look up at the wall planet and the answer is right there. So we genuinely give these away for free. There are no catches. You don't have to enter a credit card, you don't have to pay for postage. There's no catch. I'm not trying to get you to start a subscription. It's not one of those click funnel things that, you know, tricks you into starting something. It's nothing like that. It's very straightforward. You go on, you enter your details, and we send it to you at our cost. And we're doing that for all the reasons I was just talking about. It helps me to start and build a business relationship with you. So to get your own free one, just go to mspwallplanner.com you can do that right now. Or if you're watching this on YouTube, you can scan the QR code that's on screen right now. Earlier on, I mentioned a guy called James Steele. I told you that he'd interviewed me at the MSP show a few months back. Well, he actually runs a service called MSP Testimonials. You can look him up on LinkedIn and he gets testimonials for you so that you get all the benefits of social proof without having to actually do the Hard work. And yes, I'm going to get him back on the show in the next few months. But in the meantime, let me give you my take on how to do video testimonials properly. Because getting this right can genuinely transform how quickly prospects trust you. Why are video testimonials so powerful? Well written reviews are good and have power, but video testimonials are on another level entirely. And that's because a prospect watching a real client of yours talk unedited on video about their experience, well, they get three things at once. They get the words that they're saying, but they also get the tone that they're using with their voice and they get the body language. And those three things together is all of communication. When we're talking to someone face to face or to a certain extent on a video call, you lose a bit on a video call and in video, so it's not perfect, but when you're talking to someone and you can see their body and you can hear the tone of their voice, right, it just communicates at a higher level than a few words can. Even a phone call, a phone call where you've just got someone's voice doesn't communicate as well as a video call does. Doesn't communicate as well as a video or seeing someone in real life. So a written review is better than nothing, but video testimonials are better than everything. I looked at some stats for this and 92% of B2B buyers trust peer recommendations over any other form of marketing. So your videos will put that recommendation right in front of them on your website and on LinkedIn. And the reality is, most MSP websites have no video testimonials at all, which means even you having just one of those puts you ahead of almost all of your local competitors. That's pretty cool, isn't it? Now, the biggest mistake that MSPs make with their testimonials is saying to a happy client, hey, could you write us a Google review? And then just leaving it at that. And you get from that, generic written reviews, full of cliches. So they say things like, great service, very professional would recommend. And they say that because they don't really know what to say. And also it's a job to be done, right? It's like, yeah, okay, I'll help you do tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, done. But when someone says great service, very professional, unfortunately that has zero impact on the people reading it. So that being said, if you then ask them to do a video testimonial and perhaps ask them to just record it. That's not going to work. They're going to say, well, most of them aren't going to do it. And those that do do it will just give you those generic words. You've actually got to get something going with them where you're having a two way conversation, you're off camera, the they're on camera, but they're just answering your questions. And that's so much easier for them. Actually it's a bit of hard work for you or you hire someone like James to do it for you, but it's so much easier for them to just answer questions. So what makes that great video testimonial and how do you get it? Well, you want to get the client talking about the specific problem they had before they came to you. The before is really important because then it shows how much the after has transformed their business. So you would ask them to, you know, you get them set up. Maybe you're doing this on a call, maybe you're doing it in real life. You know, you've got a perfectly good camera. It's in your phone. Anything that's like less than five years old is a perfectly good camera. Make sure the lighting's all right. Get perhaps a little time, icon them that's plugged into your phone. That will do the trick. And then just ask them a series of questions. So you might ask them to describe their business. You might say to them, literally, what kind of technology problems were you having before you came to us? And the thing with asking questions like that is you've got to kind of go a little bit deeper. And we call it pressing the pain in interviewing. So if someone says, oh, we were very disorganized, you ask a follow up question. How did that disorganization cause you problems? You know, what was the, what was the biggest thing that made life difficult for your staff? And you'll notice that all of these questions are open questions. So you've got closed questions where the answer is yes or no. Did you have breakfast today? That's, that's a closed question. The answer is either yes or no. But what you want when you're interviewing someone is open questions. What did you have for breakfast today? The answer to that is almost infinite. So get them talking about the before, the pain they had. Get them talking and describing the moment they realized that something needed to change. That's very much an emotional hook. People don't change MSP because their brain is telling them to. They change because they're sick to death of it emotionally. It's all always, always and well, when business owners are buying you, it's always an emotional decision that they, they why they pick you over someone else. So we want to see that in your video testimonials. What's that emotional hook? And then ask them questions that get them to explain what life looks like now. And we want them to be very concrete and specific. So literally you say to them, how has this made a difference to your business? How much easier is it to run your, your business with working with us? That's a bit of a leading question there, Paul. How much easier is it for you to run your business when we're working with you? But there's nothing wrong with that. The best interviewers in the world use leading questions all the time to get the responses they want out of someone. Do you know what you're trying to get from these video interviews and the best testimonials? They make a prospect think, oh my goodness, this is us. He, this guy here, or this woman here is describing my situation. And that's why you want it to be very, very specific about the problem they had, how you helped them, and the outcome that they had. Now, in terms of length, the interview may take 15, 20 minutes, but you want the outputted video to be around about two to three minutes is one of those where less is more. So two to three minutes of their best fits is perfect. Don't put your questions in, just their replies. And obviously you can get this stuff edited. Well, AI can edit it for you. Descript is a pretty good tool for that. Or you could just find a human on Fiverr or Upwork to do that for you. I've been interviewing professionally since I was 19, which is quite a long time. So let me just give you a few other things, a few other ideas of getting the best out of the people you're interviewing. First of all, never hand them a list of questions in advance. Never ask them to prepare anything. If you give them a list of questions or you, you ask them to just have a think about stuff, then you get wooden scripted answers. The best thing is no prep. They come in, you sit them down, you make them comfortable, you chat to them before, and then you just keep asking them questions. And you can ask the same questions again if you're not happy with the response. You can ask the same questions again, but don't ask using the same words. So, for example, so I might say to someone, so tell me what your life was like. Tell me what your Business was like before you started working with us. And the answer they give isn't quite right. So two more questions later I might just throw in. And before we were on the scene and working with you, you must have had some problems. What were they? Do you see how that's the same question, but I'm kind of just asking it in a different way? So it's okay to brief them lightly. You can tell them what you're going to ask. You can tell them they haven't got to memorize anything. You can tell them to be relaxed. I've already said about you asking open questions, not closed questions. That's really important. But also let them ramble, right? Some people are talkers. I'm a talker. If you've ever seen me being interviewed by someone else, you see the fear in the host's eyes when they realize they asked one question and I can do a 10 to 15 minute answer. I don't always do it, but uh, but actually if someone does that and they, they're just talking naturally and it makes sense, let them talk. Right. Your job is to be invisible as the interviewer. It's all about the client's story. That's everything is getting out their story and getting them to talk about it on camera. So let's say you've been through this process. Whether you've used someone to do it for you or you've done it yourself. What do you then do with your video testimonials? Well, obviously they go on your homepage of your website that that's the biggest place to put them because probably you're getting most of your traffic there. You'd weave them into your sales processes. So you'd send out some of your testimonial videos to a warm prospect before a meeting. Obviously you'd put them on LinkedIn as well. You could actually put the full version, like the whole interview. You could put short clips on as well. No one's really going to go and watch it. But the fact that there's a 20 minute version there shows, you know, that your client is really happy to keep talking about you. And maybe actually just the two to three minute version, as I'm thinking about that, the two to three minute version and some clips, you'd put it in your email newsletter that goes out to prospects. You know, any kind of social proof that lands in someone's inbox or their LinkedIn or anything is absolutely perfect. You know, one great testimonial interview can generate weeks of content. In fact, James Steele's service turns his interviews, which are around about 45 minutes. He'll turn them into a whole bunch of different marketing assets. So you've got the video, of course, but it'll do shorts and quote cards and a case study PDF and a sales one pager and social posts and even landing page copy and all of that kind of stuff. And that's very powerful. So hey, one video testimonial from one happy client, done properly and used consistently across your marketing will do more to convert warm prospects than almost anything else that you can produce. Your clients would probably say yes if you. If you only just ask them. So go and ask the MSP MSP Marketing Edge member update if you're an MSP Marketing Edge member. And thank you if you are. Last week I mentioned the website framework inside your portal and this is something you can use to make your website better with the structure as you improve it. It's also a very, very good framework, if I do say so myself. So this week I want to tell you about something that goes hand in hand with that framework. Every month I do a live website review for one of our members. So I go through literally their entire website and I measure it against that framework and then give specific suggestions for what to change to generate more leads from the website. Because that's the only reason you've got the website right. Each review runs around around about 20 to 25 minutes. And it is genuinely so detailed, I don't just skim it. It's a proper but structured critique. So the way it works is a monthly draw. When you remember, you enter once and you're in that drawer forever. So the longer you remember, the better your chances get. If you haven't entered yet, log in now to your portal and just go over to the website reviews section. You'll find it in the navigation. If you're not yet a member, we have two separate memberships available. We've got B2B which is to help you to win more business owners as clients. And then we've got co managed it, which is which is about helping you to win IT directors as clients. And each of these is only available to one MSP per area. You can check which of these is available for your [email protected] membership. Paul Greens MSP Marketing Podcast we all know that we should be doing more marketing and most MSPs genuinely intend to. So why is it that so many talented, hardworking MSP owners who are look up at the end of another week or month or quarter and realize their marketing still hasn't happened. My special guest today has a fascinating if slightly uncomfortable answer to that question. It turns out the biggest obstacle to your marketing isn't your workload, your budget or your lack of ideas. It's you and specifically how you're getting in your own way without even realizing it. [00:28:52] Speaker A: I'm Corey Dunham and I help service led businesses get really clear and creating consistent business process. [00:29:00] Speaker B: Oh, we like the sound of that, especially in the context of marketing, which is why you're here today. So thank you Corey for joining us on the podcast. So we're going to talk today about how the owners of the MSP kind of screw up their own marketing by getting too involved in it, by overthinking it, by fiddling with it and getting their fingers in, and how there's a time and a place to do that and there's a time and a place to let go. And I know that you work with, with, with hundreds and hundreds of business owners across the planet, not just MSPs, but other kinds of businesses as well. And I know you see this and you battle this on a regular basis. So before we kind of jump into that, just tell us a little bit about you. I know you're in Michigan in the U.S. but what's your story? How did you get to be the guy you are today? Working with businesses, helping them with their marketing and their processes? [00:29:45] Speaker A: Yeah, for me pretty much raised in Michigan and my stepfather started our marketing business, family marketing business, back 1980, which is 46 years at this point. And I've been involved since late 80s, graduating out of high school. So it's been 40 years for me. And throughout that whole time I have been introverted, quiet shy and have had imposter syndrome. And I've never really wanted to work with people. I've always wanted to be behind the scenes, behind the computer in production and support and helping people out, but never wanting to have leadership level influence. And then through the decades I've been around so many mentors, great business people, great, great people in terms of learning to develop some extroverted characteristics or people skills that have allowed me to really communicate well from my introversion. And a lot of people don't think I'm introverted from speaking and keynotes and everything I do right now. So. But I love the, I love helping people out. I love empowering people, especially when they feel so limited in everything they're doing and just giving them both a boost to say, hey, I've had Some transformation. I totally believe you can have transformation with some tweaks, some learning lessons or developing some skill sets. So. And then two, I have a family, I've been married 26 years and three kids in college. So I love that family aspect and developing that passion for doing, you know, why do we work? You know, yes, we can do it because we love what we do, but also too many times that also funds a lot of the experiences and fun stuff in our personal lives. [00:31:26] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly that. In fact, the best and most balanced business owners are the ones that have got that why haven't they? They've got why of the family. And the reason we're doing this is, is not just to pay the bills, it's for this. [00:31:36] Speaker A: Right. [00:31:36] Speaker B: You know, there's not many marketing companies left on this planet that were started in 1980, so bravo to you. And did you say it was your father in law or your father. [00:31:45] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:31:45] Speaker B: Started it? [00:31:46] Speaker A: My stepfather started it, yes. Stepfather, yeah. Yeah. [00:31:49] Speaker B: So that's, I mean, bravo to you for sticking in that business for so long, which is amazing. [00:31:53] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:31:54] Speaker B: And it's interesting. You talk about being an introvert. I, I always thought I was an extrovert because I used to be a radio presenter, I was a journalist. I'm happy, I'm happiest on a stage, but I'm happy on the stage when I'm talking to an audience. And then I discovered years ago that if, if when I'm off a stage and the audience is coming to talk to me, makes me feel uncomfortable. And someone told me it might have been on this podcast a few years ago, someone said to me, so an introvert or an extrovert is someone who gets energy from a situation like that. An introvert feels exhausted after a situation like that. And I realized that actually I'm an extroverted introvert, which was a big insight for me. And it sounds like you're in a very similar place. Basically you and I are going to need to lie down in a darkened room after we've done this podcast. Right? [00:32:36] Speaker A: Yeah. And actually I've actually shifted. So I used to be more in that realm of oh, I need some time out or I never wanted to be around people or speak. But now it actually really gets me excited and actually increases my energy level when I'm doing it. And even afterward I'm so jazzed up by it, I don't need the rest most of the time. So I don't know what's going on with me. Maybe I am introverted. Extroverted. Introvert, maybe. Yeah. [00:33:00] Speaker B: But I guess we can change. You know, we change, we mature. We're different people than we were, you know, back in the day. So let's jump into, into marketing. So you know that most people listen to this, they own their msp, they operate their MSP as well, not everyone, but that's, that's the sort of the core of our listenership or people watching this on YouTube. And you and I know this very well because we deal with it every single day. What is it about owners, business owners, that makes them overthink their marketing, makes them interfere with it, makes them stop stuff that's working, makes them, you know, carry on too long with stuff that isn't working? What, why, why do owners, business owners, it's not just msps, it's all business owners. Why do we do it? Why do we put ourselves through this year after year after year? [00:33:43] Speaker A: Yeah, as owners, I think it's just the perspective that you come from. Most owners with their business, it's their baby. Nobody can do anything better or make better decisions than they can toward the thing that's so close. And I feel intimate to them. So they're not separated from that, their entity, their business. They should have a perspective that, okay, it's a business, I have values and vision for it. However, this is a team aspect and you have to consider what team you have and be really clear both in the communication, your vision, your direction, and then being willing to communicate that in a clear way. And I've seen situations with me as an owner and other owners that they think they're clear. They think and feel they're clear. However, when it gets, the message gets passed, many times things are left out or just very unclear. And I also take this from my experience as becoming a getting a private pilot's license and that we have to be extremely clear in those communications. When we're talking to a tower, whether we want to request to take off or request the land, there's specific things we have to say in order to make sure we understand what is happening. And just by asking the question, after you communicate something and just by asking, does everybody understand? And people shake their heads, that does not mean people understand. [00:35:10] Speaker B: No, that's very true. And it's very interesting, the pilot analogy. So I am a little secret into my life. One of my YouTube favorites is watching videos of air traffic control conversations with, with planes that have perhaps got into difficult situations. Or do you remember when Harrison Ford landed on a, on a taxiway like 10 years ago? And that video that video is out there. And he calls himself a schmuck. And it's. But it's fascinating. It's really easy to see how he made the mistake. [00:35:36] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:35:37] Speaker B: And when you watch about the. Because all these air traffic control conversations there. And actually, you're right that the aviation industry has standardized what we say and why we say it, but in our businesses, we can't do that. Do you think the problem is that we as owners have as much time as we want to think about something. So we might think, oh, this is broken and this is what I want to do, and then we'll go away for two weeks, three weeks, think about it, let it settle, be happy with it. And then by that point, we've convinced ourselves, oh, I know exactly what to do. It's A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J. Hey, hey, team. Everyone. I want you to do abcd. Everyone. All right, that. Yep, good. And there, of course, that's the first time they've heard it. So we've had three weeks to sit on it, reflect on it. Control. [00:36:16] Speaker A: Control. [00:36:16] Speaker B: Freaky. They've just heard it and they're thinking, what the hell just happened? Do you see that a lot? [00:36:21] Speaker A: I. I do, actually. And I want to even go into that a little deeper in terms of. It's not just over one, two or three weeks. It is many times after hours, all through the night, through their interactions, that it keeps hitting their head. They're dreaming about it, they wake up thinking about it, and they just. It irritates them that they're not getting the results they want. So therefore they, oh, we gotta have this happen. And depending on the culture in this business, they don't listen to other people. They don't take many other people's advice. And if you haven't created the culture of trust and a safe space, then I've seen it in many cases where I've worked in these situations with owners and they just take over everything. And if you say something opposite, they say they might have an open conversation or culture, but when you say something, you know you're either going to get penalized or you're going to get looked down or just going to get ignored for the umpteenth time, which then at that point people get resonated to the fact that why even contribute or say anything that might be a positive impact. [00:37:26] Speaker B: Yeah, no, I agree. And the greatest asset and the greatest liability of us as business owners is that we never get fired. You know, we keep going. And until the business, as long as the Business has clients and revenue and profit. We keep going. Right. And that's, as I say, that's the greatest thing for us. But it's also the thing, I think that holds our business back more than anything. [00:37:45] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:37:46] Speaker B: So what other owner level decision making do you see? And let's, let's pivot this back, back to marketing. [00:37:53] Speaker A: Yes. [00:37:54] Speaker B: What other owner level decision making do you see that directly impacts marketing? Is it holding onto the wrong thing for too long? Is it not having patience? Is it, is it those and other things? [00:38:05] Speaker A: Yeah, I, I don't know that it's holding onto things too long. I feel it's just the patience level and that it's, it's hard. In many of our marketing efforts, I can't remember the saying decades ago, but one person said, man, I, my marketing is working 50% of it. I just don't know which 50% it is. So I think not being able to really identify the direct correlation with your marketing and your efforts many times allows for some of these changes like, ooh, let's do something different. I want this to grow. I have some goals, I have some aspirations, I have a vision. Let's make this work. And by changing directions too fast and being impatient, you are going to lose some of that consistency. Some of the trust development that you're creating with people and that, oh my gosh, are you confusing all of your clients, why and prospect by what you're doing? Because you're going over here, you're going over here. Rather than maybe making a smaller decision to tweak only one thing. You got 10 things that you could tweak, tweak only one and see how that works. It's the same thing as developing software. You don't want to tweak 10 different things because you have no idea. And if something breaks, which, which one of those things broke or is now sucking away the outcomes that you want? [00:39:23] Speaker B: Yeah, that. Just as a side note, that 50% of your marketing thing, my brain, and you've been watching me, Corey, so you know, I haven't googled this. My brain says it was a guy called John Wanamaker who was I think like a 19th century entrepreneur, business owner. But I'm sure there's a thousand people now googling that to see that I'm wrong. So we'll move on from that. You're right. The analogy to software there, the comparison to software is spot on because, you know, and MSPs are very technical, process driven people who, you know instantly understand that. Oh, absolutely. If I've got 10, 10. If I change 10 things at once and I get a better performance or a degraded performance, which of those things? So we'll change one thing at a time. But then in their marketing, they, they, they do completely the opposite. They'll change everything. They'll change all the headlines and the images and they'll, they'll try a different approach and let's, let's do Google Ads instead of Facebook and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And, you know, you, I guess this is where the frustration comes in. And it's, it's frustration. And it's the emotional thing, isn't it, that the emotional impact of marketing not working? It's the most common complaint from msps. My marketing does not work. How do we as business owners arrest that emotional reaction to that so that we, we can, you know, change one thing at a time or give it time or give it patience or whatever we need to do? [00:40:43] Speaker A: Yeah, a couple of things is, and a lot of things I do in my work with MSP owners is that you have to work on yourself first. It's all about self leadership before you're leading other people. Yes, we have impact and influence on other people, but if you're not leading yourself and developing maybe this new skill set of slowing down when it comes to making decisions and really being thoughtful about it, bringing more people that are important on your team, get their honest opinion. And like I said earlier, you have to create this culture of trust. Two things I know for me that I've had to work on, and I've seen this in other owners, is that they don't admit their mistakes. When everybody else makes a mistake, it gets known, it gets felt. But when they make their own, when they make mistakes that are obvious to the whole team, they don't own it, they don't show it, they don't apologize. So now they're in a different level from everybody else on the team. And once again, trust within your team decreases because they say, wow, the owner doesn't take ownership of their mistakes and what they're doing. So be more human, humanizing and be more human in those areas and then really work hard to create an environment of trust. Not false trust, but truly listening to people, acknowledging them when they contribute. Appreciate that they're willing to share what's happening there because everybody involved with you wants to succeed. They don't want to wake up every day and have a tough time at work because they're dealing with stuff at home already. They want to go to work someplace they're excited about someplace there's a passion, a mission and they have support for and they have the tools to do their work with. So making it an easier situation for that human being to do their work and to be able to actually communicate with you when they have a challenge of some sort and to open up about something that might be a little more vulnerable than normal, whether they have a medical issue, their kids are sick, whatever it may be, but just being open for that. And like I said, as an owner, I've had a challenge coming from coming back in the 80s and 90s, being in business along with, I've seen this with other people even in for a short period of time. Once again, it's their baby. They own it. Nobody else can help out. And they've got to learn to change these mindsets and attitudes and willing to. I think having a mentor and a coach many times, whether it's a mentor coach, a friend, somebody who can tell you the truth without you getting ticked off, or them feeling like they're going to lose their job, that's important to have that a different perspective helping you. [00:43:28] Speaker B: Yeah, that's really cool. And I love how you, what you've just talked about there applies to the entire business, doesn't it? It's not, not just the marketing as much as that's great marketing guidance. You know, it would be very. It's easy to recognize that's just general good advice for running your business. Okay, Corey, thank you so much for your wisdom on today's show. Just tell us a little bit about what do you actually do with MSPs to help them with their businesses, with their marketing and what's the best way to get in touch with you? [00:43:55] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. One of the biggest areas is pretty much I coach the leadership. I get them clear and aligned with what they're pursuing. Then we help with team alignment and then also help them with that consistent business process for producing the revenue that they're seeking. And the best way to contact me is either through LinkedIn. I'm on there along with my podcast, which is unapologetic leadershippodcast.com and then on my website, corydunham.com, c o r y d u n h a m.com Coming [00:44:29] Speaker B: up, coming up next week. Thanks for being here this week. Next week, it's a very special one because it's our 350th episode to market. I'm going to do something I've never done before on this podcast. I'm going to take you through a complete, if you like, a raw audit of your episode, MSPs marketing across every single important area. So, website, LinkedIn, email, social proof, social media, lead generation, all of it. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to lay out, if you like, the best practice. So essentially I'm going to tell you what good looks like and what most MSPs are doing and not doing, so you can identify where the gaps are in your own marketing. I know it's going to generate some work for you, but it will be worth it because you'll have much better marketing at the end of it. Episode 350 is here next Tuesday. I'll see you then for MSPs around the world. Around the World, the MSP Marketing Podcast with Paul Green.