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Welcome to Episode 303 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…
Dream client alert. For many MSPs that target verticals or niches, they find accountants (CPAs) to be a very attractive sector. Are you targeting accountants? If not, you really need to hear this, and if you already are, then this is going to make things so much easier. Let’s deep dive into why accountants switch MSPs, what they’d want from you and how to grab their attention.
Accountants are a perfect fit for MSPs. They have a business that’s dependent upon technology. They’ve got compliance and regulations, and they’re often very stable businesses with lots of recurring revenue. So imagine this, you are sitting across the table from a busy accountant and they’ve literally got piles of tax returns and spreadsheets and calls with their clients all lined up. What’s the one thing that you know that they don’t want? More hassle. And understanding that is the first step in marketing your MSP to accountants.
Get inside their head and their heart and really understand what drives them and what would drive them to pick your MSP instead of someone else.
Accountants live in a world of rules, a world of deadlines, a world of compliance, and a world of absolute attention to detail. They value accuracy, speed, and security above almost anything else. So if you want them to even consider working with your MSP, your messaging has got to show that you understand their world. Talk about what matters to them, not technology. Instead show them how you help them keep their client data safe, how you help them to meet deadlines without system crashes, and how you help them eliminate the panic of last minute tech issues during tax season.
I mean you can literally paint them a picture, you can say, imagine your team working flat out in January (or whenever your local tax season is) and instead of the WIFI dropping in and out or your software slowing down or freezing, everything just works because in the background we’re monitoring everything, we’re fixing problems before you’re even aware of them, so you can focus on your clients and tax returns and getting things done while we are focusing on your technology.
Now that’s the kind of language that really gets into someone’s heart as well as their head. And then you start to think about how to influence them and get them to influence each other because accountants really do talk to each other. In fact, most people in any sector talk to other people in that sector. They ask for recommendations, they trust people who seem to understand their industry. So build up case studies specifically about accounting firms that you are helping or you’ve helped in the past. And use their words, words like, “Since moving to we’ve cut downtime by 40% during tax season.” Those kind of stories carry huge weight.
And here’s another angle, incentives. Accountants aren’t looking for freebies or gimmicks. They’re looking for partners who make them look good to their clients. So be that partner, show them how you’re going to help them impress their own clients. Maybe you could run a quick cyber security review for their top customers, but perhaps branded under their firm’s name. Or give them priority support during key filing periods. Little things like that really stand out.
Look at things like priority response during peak times, regular health checks before busy seasons, before the crazy time they have to file all the tax returns. Look at giving them a personal account manager who knows their deadlines, understands their industry, who they can pick the phone up to at any point. When you market to accountants, remember this, you are not selling IT support or technology. You’re really selling peace of mind, especially during their most stressful moments. You’re selling confidence that you know their world. That’s what they’re going to buy from you, not technology services.
So the next time you’re thinking about how to grow your MSP, don’t just target businesses in general. Pick a niche like accountants, learn what keeps them up at night, learn what they worry about, learn what they want and what they need, and show them that you got the answer. Show their heads and show their hearts. That’s how you build trust, loyalty, and a queue of accountants who wouldn’t dream of going anywhere else?
If you’re not winning enough new clients, this could be one of the reasons why.
There are four huge marketing problems that do massive amounts of damage to MSPs, and yet they’re so easy to overcome when you understand them.
Let’s look at what these problems are, how to spot if they’re damaging your business and how you can obliterate them forever.
Selling managed services is hard and slow. There are four big problems that cause this, all of which are out of your control.
Problem one, is that decision makers don’t know what they don’t know. Ordinary business owners and managers know next to nothing about technology. In fact, they don’t even know what they don’t know about technology. They can’t explain what the cloud is in a sentence that makes sense and they don’t understand how dangerous ransomware is. And this explains why you can’t talk to them about technology in the same way that you talk to another technologist, they just glaze over. And if they do that, you’ve lost the sale. No one buys something they don’t understand.
Which leads us onto problem two, prospects make buying decisions with their hearts and not with their brains. Their brain prefers to make decisions based on facts, and that’s a big problem for the ordinary decision makers because to them all MSPs look the same. Their websites might have different words and pictures, but the themes are the same and the messages are very similar. Many MSPs copy the marketing of other MSPs and consequently end up in the soup of looking samey. Faced with this, the brain says, well, they all look the same, I can’t make this decision. And the brain delegates the decision down to the heart.
That leads to problem number three, inertia loyalty rules. This is the thing that keeps us with our CPA/ accountant years after we decide that they’re not right for us. And it’s what persuades an ordinary person to stay with their incumbent MSP long after they’re ready to move on. Why? Because better the devil you know, it feels safer to stay with someone I know but dislike than it is to move to you. These decision makers might not understand technology, but they do understand that if it goes wrong, they’ll be in big trouble. And people are more motivated to avoid pain than they are to pursue gain.
Problem four, people only buy when they’re ready to buy. There are so many things you can sell that you can persuade people to buy today rather than tomorrow. But managed services is not one of those for all the reasons we just discussed. For many decision makers, switching MSPs is a distress activity. They’ll keep putting it off until it becomes urgent, and it’s only on the day that they wake up ready to act that they’ll start paying attention to your marketing.
There is good news though. You can overcome these problems by asking yourself three magic questions and I have some suggested answers for you as well.
Magic question number one: How can you know when the time is right? There are a couple of ways to know. First, people leave clues by their behaviour. So for example, we give the members of my MSP Marketing Edge a comprehensive IT Services Buyers Guide, which is updated every year, in fact, we’ve just released the 2026 version. And it’s about how to pick an MSP. But the reality is that no one in their right mind would want to read this unless they were thinking of switching MSPs. So the very nature of someone requesting an IT Services Buyer’s Guide is a signal of intent. And you can also use tools, HubSpot to track how much of your marketing someone consumes. An increase in activity can be a signal of intent. Or a better way, you can just ask them. Get an outbound phone caller for your MSP and call people all the time. And these are relationship building calls by the way, not sales calls. Make sure your caller asks people when their current contract is up. Some won’t know, some won’t say, but many will. And then target them with a marketing campaign two to three months before.
Magic question number two: What are the emotional reasons that people would buy from you? Now this is a biggie. Think back to problem two that I just mentioned, which is that people buy with their heart and not with their brain. So give prospects plenty of emotional reasons to pick your MSP and you will totally transform your marketing. Luckily, there’s an easy way to answer this question. You just ask yourself, what are the benefits of working with your MSP? So for example, they’ll be much better protected from cyber criminals, so they’ll sleep better at night. Their technology will never hold them back. Their staff will complain less. Benefits talk to their hearts while features talk to their brains.
And that leads nicely into magic question number three: What are the logical reasons that people would buy from you? Ask yourself this, what are the features of working with your MSP? Is it 24/7 support both in your office and when you’re working at home? Is it that they have a strategic technology review with you every year? Is it a proactive approach to updates but done out of regular hours? Make your own list of the top three to five answers to magic questions two and three, and then make sure those answers are all across every piece of your marketing. Emotional reasons and benefits first, logical reasons and features second.
Featured guests: Jeffrey Newton is a true MSP veteran who’s spent 18 years in the trenches, personally driving teams to over $500K in Monthly Recurring Revenue without ever compromising service quality. As co-founder of Cyft.ai (http://cyft.ai/), he spotted the critical gap between on-the-ground expertise and rigid PSA systems, then built the industry’s first Service Intelligence platform to capture those invaluable insights in real time using voice.
If only a veteran MSP of 18 years could share what they’ve learned, so you could grow your MSP even faster. Oh, actually look no further, because today’s special guest is unmissable. If you want to grow your MSP by attracting new clients, the chances are you are making some fundamental marketing mistakes, but it’s okay. Previously, this guy spent 18 years working for MSPs and knows all about the good, the bad, and the ugly in marketing your MSP.
I’m Jeffrey Newton, co-founder of Cyft AI, former MSP veteran of 18 years.
And that’s exactly why we want to get you on the show today, Jeffrey. Now that you’re out of actually doing the marketing and bringing home the bacon for a load of MSPs, you’re doing your new venture, which we’ll talk about in a second, I want to look back at what you’ve been doing over the last 18 months and the things that you did that moved the needle the most. That’s the value that you’re going to give us today.
Welcome to the show. It’s kind of weird for me to do this with you because I think previously you’ve been the one interviewing me when I’ve appeared on your videos and on your show. So it’s so cool to be doing this the other way around. Let’s just start off with finding out about you. So assuming that the MSPs, watching this on YouTube, listening to this on the podcast, assuming they don’t know you, they haven’t heard of you before, just tell us about your background. Tell us how you got into the industry and what you’ve been doing for the last 18 years or so.
Yeah, absolutely. So I stumbled into the managed service provider world out of college, straight out of it. So it’s all I did professionally for 18 years. I worked for Best Buy initially before they bought the Geek Squad even, so I was one of those folks that came out that way. And then I stumbled into a big boy IT job, which happened to be for this small MSP, and I had no idea what it was. I thought I was at the top of my game. Day number one, I had to join a bunch of laptops to a domain. I had no idea what a domain was, and that was where it all sort of started. And so I spent then the last 18 years traversing all aspects of MSP. I did the tech stuff for the first 10, and then I ended up in that weird VCIO account management sort of blend. And then that led me into the sales and growth side of the business. So I was a sales rep and then built and grew and managed sales and sales and marketing teams for the last eight years on that journey.
And what was that like moving from the technical side of it to the dark side – the sales and marketing?
It was almost like a coming home, although I never knew that’s where I was meant to be. I was having no training or any of that stuff on the tech side. I was never the smartest guy in the room, but I did know how to find the smartest person in the room and unlock them as a human to help me figure out how to grow and solve those technical problems. And so I always felt a bit like an imposter on the tech side because I just didn’t have maybe the foundation. I was a decent Googler and I could talk to people and I’m a great troubleshooter, but again, I’d fail every certification I attempted to take because I just can’t take standardised tests or any of that stuff.
And so when I finally sat in that sort of A&M account management and VCIO seat for a couple of years, I realised that I really wasn’t doing what you would expect that job to do anyway. I was literally just working with the seven sales reps. Each one of them booked me on every single one of their meetings and I showed up and it was really a great, I mean it worked out great for both of us. I didn’t have to do any of the sales stuff. They put me on stage, I did my thing, and then we closed deals and then I walked away from all the other sales stuff. So naturally when a sales position opened a couple years into that, I realised I was on the wrong side of the commission coin since I was in more of that technical role. And so I took the sales rep job and then got humbled insanely fast on the first deal that I ever had to run after winning and closing for so many years in a row. That was where the journey really began.
I bet, and there aren’t many people that have done that transition that fully anyway. There are people I think I’ve spoken to, well, most MSPs, let’s be honest, do sales and marketing, but it is very much a distress activity, it’s something you’ve got to do, whereas you did what is probably abhorrent to most people, which is what you ditched all of the technical work and you moved over. But it clearly worked out well for you. So now that you are out of that journey, you’ve got your brand new initiative, your brand new venture, Cyft AI, which we’ll talk about in a second.
As you look back now, what are the things that you did that move the needle most? And to me that’s more interesting asking you to look back when you are out of it. Because as someone who is still, I’m 20 years into my marketing journey, still doing marketing day in day out, as much as part of my job is to look at what moves the needle and what doesn’t, when you are in it often I have to come out of it and have a bit of a break to look and reflect and say, what’s worked well?
What’s working for MSPs? So you are kind of out of that now. Look back over that time that you were doing sales and marketing, what were the things that you wish you’d done more of? And maybe as part of that is what were the things you wish you’d done less of?
Yeah, that’s a great question because I went through this exercise live when I was trying to figure out that answer. And the individual that really lit the light bulb for me was a podcast I saw of Brad Lee one time. It was a stage presentation that was essentially these four words, do more, get better. What the heck? His whole premise there was how you grow your business is by doing those two things and those two things only, it’s the only thing you have to focus on, do more and get better. I’m like, well, that’s way too simple, right? I overcomplicate everything. I over-engineer it all. That’s just the way my brain works. I’m a problem solver.
But I really sat with how he went into that hour long conversation and ultimately what he was saying is look back at how you’ve gotten to where you are and understand of all the 50 things that you’ve done, all the initiatives, all the marketing stuff, all of it. Was it the golf course outings? Was it the sponsored holes? Was it the cold email? Was it pay per click?
What are the things that convert and work? Do a lot more of that. Double down until you master what is working and then eliminate the distraction and the friction of all the things that are not working in that process.
So you need to do more of the things that were previously working. And then the second part to that is get better. So when you strip the focus away from I need to do all these things or be in all these places or be on all these platforms, and you narrow it to the things that were already working for you, then you can look at, okay, well if I went to that golf outing and I got one client from three events or whatever, how do I get two? How do I get three?
And what really came out of that was really shrinking the objective to the absolute point of completely tangible and absolutely possible. So if you notice the numbers I was using, it wasn’t like, how do I grow my MRR by a hundred thousand dollars this year? It was, how do I go from one to two, which Peter Thiel talks about going from zero to one, which I do think is probably a bigger challenge, but when people make that transition, it’s just don’t overthink it as much as we tend to do, the way that our minds work. And so strip it down to first principles and also acknowledge and recognise exactly where you are.
Most people listening are probably somewhere between 5, 10, 15 years into their business. They might be, maybe some are still at that sub million dollars or elsewhere, but they’ve accomplished things. But how’d they get there? You have to kind remember what got you here won’t get you there component to that, but there’s still a lot of things that got you to where you are. We just sort of abandoned them along the way because we listened to some buzzword or stage speech or something else and got distracted.
Yeah, that makes perfect sense. So you’ve talked a lot there about, you’ve almost talked around specific answers, which is okay, I understand you’re talking about how you simplified what you did, but I know everyone listening to this just wants the answers, Jeffrey. So what were the things you did that actually moved the needle? I feel like a proper hard news journalist here. You gave a politician’s answer and I’m forcing you back onto the question.
Yeah, going back at the macro level, it’s hard to deduce it sometimes down like 18 years, but if I really had to and think down a level it’s going to be, that messaging was far more important than kind of everything else. So when I look back at that, well, what did I do? What was working and what wasn’t? One of the reasons that all those sales reps were pulling me into those meetings along those years was the emotional intelligence or the EQ side of being able to take the process and add the nuance that was specific to the architect, versus the neurologist versus the oncologist. Because in MSPs specifically, we like to talk about the stack and we like to talk about all the things that don’t truly matter. Instead, the messaging, like making it so relevant that the person that you’re talking to feels seen, heard, and understood, will move so much more from a conversion standpoint than any extra effort of marketing. And so to strip that down, one more layer to hopefully get closer to your answer is, take those actions that you see as your process today, take the deliverables that you have in the business today from both a sales and marketing asset standpoint, and really look at them through the lens of – can I have this one conversation with one person, talking about solving one problem so explicitly clear that if we were both closing our eyes, they’d be able to raise their hand and say, Jeffrey is talking exactly to me. And really just really stripping it all the way back down. That tends to fight my own innate challenge when marketers would tell me, you got to pick a niche, you got to do these things. And you’re just like, ah. But I don’t want to narrow, I don’t want to reduce the amount of opportunity I could have. It’s like the biggest fallacy because as soon as you do, people raise their hand and self-identify with, oh, I want your help. That’s me. So that would be the one thing for sure.
Okay. I love that and I love that because really good marketing is not about the technical stuff. I completely agree with you on that. Really good marketing is about the emotional connection that you have and what you’ve just talked about there. It does not scale. So having emotional in-depth conversations where you really connect with someone and they really feel, and it is a feeling, not a thought, they really feel as though, wow, these guys or this guy or this woman or whoever in front of me gets me, right? I can trust them with my business. And that’s a lot less about the technical than it is about the human connection. And I know I’ve had MSP say to me before, but Paul, that doesn’t scale, but for an MSP doesn’t need to scale because the average MSP listening to this would be overwhelmed getting one new client a month, just one new client a month will be overwhelming if you are onboarding 12-13 new users every month, which sounds amazing, but actually the reality is I’ve worked with MSPs who’ve got to this position and it’s almost one of their fears of what if we have too many clients?
And the answer is, well, you stop selling or you slow down the sale. You don’t never stop selling, but you slow down the sales. You say to someone, Hey, you can sign the contract today, but we can’t onboard you till January or whatever is the case. But for most MSPs, you don’t need to have more than three conversations, good quality conversations, or maybe even two conversations with two separate people for one of those people to just fall in love with you. And that’s really what good marketing is. We don’t need 20,000 new customers, we need 10 a year if that, and they just got to fall in love with you. And that comes from listening to them and connecting with them. So I love that. So you’ve just distilled 18 years of hard work into – be you and connect with people. If I can summarise that up into like five, six words.
And you’re right. And to give you the most direct answer to your question, I appreciate you pushing me on it. It’s exactly what you just said. Thinking back and looking at, okay, well what was it that truly made it work? We focused on the inputs that guaranteed the outputs, and what was that input? For us, it was first time appointment, we measured everything down to how many first time appointments were we getting per month, and that was the only number that mattered. We obviously reverse engineered well, how do we get those? But it’s exactly to your point, you don’t need to have 50 new meetings this year. You don’t need to make things so complex and so large that you’re never going to get there because you get frustrated, exhausted, confused, or any of the other parts in between. It’s just how simply could I sit down and think about the ways that I can get one conversation this month if that’s where you are, and then just break it down to one week and work it backwards.
Yeah, exactly. It just becomes a numbers game then about getting those quality conversations. But as we know, MSPs do struggle to get those quality conversations in the first place, hence a lot of the other guests that we have in five, nearly six years of this show talking about how exactly to do that. Jeffrey, let’s come off that subject. You are one of those interviewees I could interview for about 40 minutes, but we don’t have the space for that today. Maybe we’ll do a special with you at some point down the line.
I do want to talk about your new venture because I know you’ve just had the most insane year and you’ve got these exciting next year coming up. Tell us why you left your MSP, what the venture is, what it does, what the benefits are, and tell us all about it.
Yeah, absolutely. So what made me change really to the dark side, if you will, the vendor side was being exasperated of 18 years of being a buyer of vendor products that by and large never truly solved through the solution that they provided, meaning that bringing the solution on created one or more additional problems for me to implement it or become whatever. So I got tired of the same challenges and the same problems. Once AI really hit the market, and today’s AI if you will, it was more about we could actually solve problems that weren’t technically solvable before. And so when I saw what was possible with human voice, so we’re a voice solution, it was one of those things where I couldn’t unsee it anymore. And what I saw was natural language just speaking straight into Cyft and that natural language getting immediately turned into a new ticket creation with the time entry, and it was done flawlessly in seconds, not minutes, and it never touched the PSA. And so the opportunity then through that lens to become a co-founder of it and really bring it out for all of those innate acute problems that I experienced over 18 years, sitting in every one of those seats was just sort of like Pandora’s box in a playground. And so never really looked back. And that has been the last year really getting to the point where we’ve just officially launched last month and now it’s crazy.
Yeah, I bet. And I have to ask you, because I’m a big fan of AI. I love every day it seems like there’s a new AI, well, there are probably 200 new AI solutions for something coming up there. And I agree with you that voice is absolutely the future. I dictate everything. I dictate my messages on WhatsApp, my SMSs, I dictate my content now. I’m so much faster to just get it out of your mouth and it is to type it. And I think we can all see, there are some things that just make sense, don’t they? And one of them is talk to your computer. It’s like Star Trek, right? In Star Trek, they did a bit of button pushing, but it was mostly just saying, computer do this. And Alexa and Siri, if they worked like they promised they were going to work seven years ago, we’d all have much better lives today.
So just very briefly, because I’m fascinated by someone like yourself, a clearly intelligent person throwing himself into something that you’ve seen and you’ve been blown away with, how difficult is it from, and I appreciate you are not a coder, but from a coding point of view where you’ve probably got those AI tools that can take that speech and understand it, we all know that using ChatGPT using copilot or any of the other systems, it’s not quite there yet. It’s really good. There’s some cool stuff you can do, but that leap between cool stuff you can do and it’s an essential tool don’t take it away, is we are not quite there. So how are you guys managing that challenge, particularly around something like ticketing where you can’t afford to get that wrong, more than one in X hundred tickets say,
Right? That’s a brilliant question because ultimately what you’re talking about is most things don’t solve for context, and yet context is where all of the value collectively pools. Which again goes back to my heartburn over the industry was, it just didn’t quite fit for us, for me, for an MSP. Now, whether that was language, whether that was dictionary, whether that was even understanding what an RMM was because it’s not an actual word. All those things were just sort of like, so how did we go about that? Knowing that enablement and adoption was the number one challenge of any tool, at least in this industry because it’s what I knew we bypassed the need to change the workflow at all. To adopt Cyft. We write locally on your hardware as an example, which solves for a lot of different things, but the main thing it solves for is your texts don’t have to stop working the way that they already work for it to start doing what it does.
Now, what does it do? It actively captures this conversation that you and I are having as if I was helping you on a support ticket so that I’ll have all of the context of that conversation, not just fixed it or worked on issue or rebooted router 33 minutes. It’s all the context, all the stuff that’s never going to make it to your system of record to begin with. The PSA. And we do a bunch of other things with it and it’s, yeah, it’s amazing, it’s wonderful, but really it’s about solving for context for the first time. And we can take care of things like automated time entry or ticket creation or the things that are the bane of every MSP or technician’s existence because it always has been that way. But that’s really just solving for the foundational challenge of how as a business do you capture the context to unlock real business intelligence or what we call service intelligence. If a tier one technician is having a conversation with you, Paul, are they going to hear the same thing that a tier three would or a business owner or a CFO or a VCIO, or we can bring all those personas to every conversation so that we can hear things and filter things through those lenses and surface those opportunities for you.
Yeah, I love that. I love businesses that are built around a passion to fix the problems that you have suffered from, and those are always the best businesses because you don’t need to have product managers, you don’t need to do user interviews and all of that stuff. You’re literally just solving your own problem. And if you’ve got a problem, then the chances are that many of the 40,000 other MSPs have got that problem as well, which is really cool. Jeffrey, let’s stop there. Thank you so much for your time. Just tell us very briefly about Cyft. Tell us where can we get more details and most importantly, how can we get in touch with you?
Yeah, the best place to follow me personally is directly on LinkedIn, Jeffrey Newton. And the best place to get in touch is [email protected]
Lloyd in Washington is quite frustrated. His MSP is growing and he’s been able to employ a couple of techs, but he’s frustrated with them. His question is: How do I stop my staff from making the same mistakes again and again?
When your staff make the same mistakes again and again, as I said earlier, this is a little bit more about you than it is about them. It’s kind of a reflection of you and your leadership skills. And please don’t be offended or threatened by this. It happens to me. It happens to everyone, all business owners. And as much as we’d love to, we can’t control everything all the time. So as our business gets bigger and we need more people, we have to put in place five elements to ensure things are done the way we want them to be done and eliminate mistakes along the way.
Here’s the first of those five – Systems. Build a system and or a checklist for every repeat task, no matter how frequently or infrequently it’s repeated.
Which leads onto two – Training. Give formal training to your team on how to implement those systems. It needs to be utterly clear in their heads what victory looks like.
Now, that training leads on to number three – Coaching. Regular one-to-ones can pick up problems and keep them on track when the effect of the training starts to wear off.
To help with that, number four – Environment of excellence. If you tolerate poor performance from even one person, it will send the wrong message to everyone. And by the way, this includes your own performance. Remember that your staff are kind of like children. They’re more affected by what you do or don’t do than by what you say, just like kids.
And then the final one is – Action on poor performance (aka the crunch meeting). To maintain that environment of excellence, you’ve got to take action on poor performance. So the most appropriate way to do this is through one-to-ones. Sometimes though, you do need to escalate things and make them realise it’s getting urgent now and they need to change or it’s going to affect their job. Of course, always get HR advice before a crunch meeting, but this is a good phrase to use. If you were in my shoes and these issues kept occurring, what would you do? Ask that question, then stay silent for as long as you dare after asking. And that forces them to answer. You kind of owe it to them that they get a little bit scared that they realise that actually the stakes are getting higher because that could be all it takes to force them into action.
And finally, never forget as busy and desperate for staff as you probably are right now, you should never be afraid of poor performing staff leaving. You should actually be more afraid that they’ll stay.
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