Is on-site support a competitive advantage?

[00:00:02] Speaker A: Want to grow your msp but fear that the one thing getting in the way is you. Here comes the mindset, the confidence and all the tactics to make it happen. I am so excited to welcome you to another episode of the podcast. This is what we've got coming up today. Something controversial to start with is on site support a competitive advantage. Your MSP's next five clients are sat in your dream 100. Let's talk about what it is and how to find them. And is this the only way that MSPs should increase profits? Welcome to episode 305. Powered by mspmarketingedge.com Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast Some MSPs do do it. Some MSPs make a point of saying no way. We're talking about providing on site support. Obviously, back in the day it went without saying, you just did it. But in our modern remote first world, the need for in person on site support has completely changed. So are you still providing or are you thinking that maybe you should, or that you never ever will again? Your decision could affect how successful your MSP is. So let's explore your options. Right now, let's be honest. A few years ago, having engineers who could turn up at a client's office and fix something kind of felt like a major selling point. But here we are in 2025 and most businesses now are hybrid or remote. That happened very quickly. And of course, almost everything can be fixed remotely. So is on site support still something worth shouting about in your marketing or is it yesterday's news? Let's look at both sides of this. The case for on site support being a competitive advantage first of all, and it starts with the fact that some clients love knowing that someone will actually physically come out if needed. You think about clients with manufacturing equipment, specialist hardware, or those who just feel reassured by a human coming into the office for them. We'll be there in person if you need us. That's a bit big. Comfort factor. And as we know, comfort sells. And not every MSP is offering this anymore, of course. So if most of your competitors have gone fully remote, you'll be standing out. As we're local, we're personal, we'll come on site. That could be a differentiator in your marketing. It's a trust builder. It says we're not just faceless techs in the cloud, we're real people here for you. Now let's look on the other side. The case against on site support being a competitive advantage. Because on the flip side, as we know, most day to day issues don't need it. Clients are used to remote support now. In fact, they expect you to fix things fast online over the Internet. And for many, the idea of waiting for someone to drive over and come into an office kind of feels old fashioned. It's not special anymore. And then of course there's the cost. Offering on site support means travel time, scheduling headaches. And of course engineers are less productive if they're on site. They're not doing three things at once like they are if they're in the office or working from home. So if your competitors are leaner because they don't offer it, that could make your prices look higher for something the client doesn't even value. It's tricky this, isn't it? So what's the answer? Honestly, I don't think there is a specific answer. It all depends on your target market. If you're serving local businesses who appreciate a personal touch, then absolutely keep onsite support and promote it as part of your premium service or offer it as a bolt on as like an upgrade. But if your clients are mostly remote friendly and they care more about speed than a handshake, on site support might not be the advantage that it once was. The key here, I think, is to know your audience. And don't just assume that on site support is a magic selling point. Test the message. Ask your best clients what matters most to them. And whatever you decide, make sure your marketing highlights the things your clients actually care about in 2025 and not just what MSPs cared about 20 years ago. Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast still to come, kind of related to what we were just talking about. If your profits are under pressure right now, you know you've got to do something. But what? Of course, growing sales and generating more revenue is the obvious answer. But what if actually the real answer was to cut costs instead? To review your vendors, switch to some cheaper suppliers and see if you can fix your profits by reducing your overhead rather than increasing your revenue. There's no right or wrong answer to this, but my special guest today has some very strong opinions about which way you should go, and I'm delighted to welcome her to the show in the next few minutes. Don't click send on your next bulk email campaign until you've heard this. Don't click post on that social media advert. Don't do any of the normal things you do to find new clients for your MSP until you've heard this. All of those specific tactics can work, but they need to be part of the right cohesive strategy. Let's introduce you to the concept of the Dream 100 and how it could completely change your idea of marketing forever. There's a book you really should listen to on Audible. It's called the Ultimate Sales Machine by Chet Holmes. Now, it's not about MSPs, but it could be because the concepts inside are gold dust. They are totally relevant to help you find great leads, nurture them and turn them into sales appointments. And one of the most exciting concepts in the book is that of the Dream 100 rather than spray and pray marketing, where you try and reach anyone, everyone. It's about identifying the top 100 prospects who would make the biggest impact on your MSP if they became clients. That might be because of their size or the number of staff, the number of endpoints they have. It could be because of their reputation in your marketplace. You know, servicing a famous local business is like having a celebrity client. It could be about their MRR budget, their monthly recurring revenue budget, or the opportunity for big profitable projects. Or it could also be about their positive attitude to technology. Now don't get too hung up on the number. It might not be 100 to you. It might be 58 of the hottest prospects. The point is that you relentlessly pursue this small group of targets. You go above and beyond to cut through the noise and stand out to them again and again and again and again and again. They are your number one most important marketing focus every day. And you're aiming to grow your relationship with them to build familiarity and trust so that the day that they wake up ready to switch msps, whenever that is, they immediately think about you. What can you do to target these people? Well, there's an endless pot of ideas. So here are 10 from me and heads up. There's a lot of real life physical stuff in this list because it's a smart way to cut through the noise. The key thing with all of these ideas is that the more relevant the recipient perceives it to be, the greater impact it's going to have. Idea 1 Target them with an integrated marketing campaign. So for example, a piece of direct mail, follow up emails and a follow up phone call. Actually every month we supply a new marketing campaign for exactly this purpose to our MSP Marketing Edge members. Idea 2 Print off a relevant blog article or LinkedIn post. It could be one of yours, but it doesn't have to be. Write a few words on a post it note such as I saw this and thought you'd Find it interesting and then send it to them and enclose your business card in the envelope. Idea 3 Build a small case study about one of your clients. Get it professionally designed and printed and mail it to them. Add a note that says, we'd love to help you create a transformation story like this. Idea 4 Send them a printed newsletter every month or every other month. And yes, this is another asset that we create for our MSP Marketing Edge members. Because it works. It's really powerful. Printed stuff stands out like you wouldn't believe. Idea 5 Record a personalized video on Vidyard or Bonjoro. Make it about a tech subject that's relevant to them, such as right now, the urgency of Windows 10 end of life. That would be a great subject for the next couple of weeks or so. I know it feels very late in the day for that, but it isn't. Idea 6 put on a short webinar or better still, a real life lunch and learn and invite your dream 100 to attend. 30 minutes talking to a human in real life can have the same impact as 100 digital interactions. Idea 7 Send a gift. It's more important that it's thoughtful rather than expensive. Here's a cheap idea that's really impactful. Call their reception. Find out what the decision maker's regular coffee order is. You know, black, two sugars, and then get that printed on a mug with their name. Pop your logo and website address on the other side and just send it to them with some decent coffee beans. Hassle factor, High impact, off the scale. Idea 8 follow up that mug with a phone call to check that you got their order right and then just ask if you can pop in for 15 minutes to have a coffee with them. If you do that, take in your own matching mug with your own coffee order printed on the side. Idea 9 offer a free or low cost paid tech audit. This is an old marketing tool that's fallen out of favor in recent years, but it ticks every box in terms of engagement, interaction, and finding opportunities to sell something to a prospect. And then idea 10 target them with retargeting ads that follow them around the web. Send them to a page of case studies on your website. You want them feeling in their core that these guys are everywhere. This is very, very powerful. So tell me, what do you think of the Dream 100 concept and what other targeting ideas do you have? Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast still to come, you'll hear marketing people saying that you should use every possible channel to speak to Your leads and your prospects. But does that mean you're just creating yourself tons of extra work, checking lots and lots of different platforms? Should you really be using live chat, Facebook messenger, WhatsApp, SMS? I know we had an SMS expert on last week's show, but do you really want to be talking to leads and prospects via text message? Another MSP has asked exactly this question and I'm going to try and tackle it later on in the show. You can see your profits are down and as the business owner, that's starting to affect how much money you can take home. So what's the most effective way to deal with this problem? Should you reduce costs or should you focus your time on increasing sales? My special guest today is an expert at operations and she's got a unique spin on this exact problem that you're going to want to hear. [00:10:25] Speaker B: Hi, I'm Monica Ozeruk, owner of Mosek Consulting, and I love helping MSPs with their operations. [00:10:31] Speaker A: And thanks for joining me on the show, Monica, because we are going to answer a massive question today. If your profits are under pressure, should you reduce operating costs or should you increase sales? And the flippant answer to that is do both. But as we know, any business owner has a finite amount of time and energy and effort. So in that situation where their own personal income is going down as the profits are going down, cut costs or increase sales. And you and I are going to, we're going to gently debate that, I think, on the show today, because I suspect we'll come at that from different sides. But before we do, let's find out a little bit about you. So what do you, what do you do in the channel? How long have you been here? And tell us some cool stuff about you? [00:11:13] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. I've been consulting msps for the last five years. I come from a process improvement operations background, so I actually did a postgrad in procurement and supply chain management. Not usually something that we talk about here in the MSP world, but I'm trying to bring some of those best practices here and I do think we are going to have a little bit of a debate. I think I know which side I'm leaning towards and I think I know which side you might be leaning towards, but I'm really just here to make sure that people know where they can cut costs and where they can improve their operations and what that looks like on the other side. [00:11:48] Speaker A: Yeah, that makes perfect sense. So we've pretty much given our sides away, haven't we, on this, which is I'm coming out thinking, exactly, yeah, you're cutting cost person. And me, I see that growth is the answer to everything. Although I'm going to caveat my own answer with I know that MSPs find it hard to grow and to get new clients. Although I'll caveat that answer with actually there's always plenty of revenue to be made from existing clients. But tell us then why you think so. Let's take that scenario, let's go back onto that scenario. So, and I hear this from, you know, I talk to msps all the time, my MSP Marketing Edge members, I talk to other MSPs I'm not yet working with. And you do often hear that of, you know, oh, revenue has been flat especially this year, you know, and let's not get political but things happened early this year in the US and we've got conflicts all over the world and the last few years has just been, it's been tough going this year has been, has been, I think tougher than it has been for a couple of years. And lots of MSPs, you know, benefiting from the fact they keep the clients forever. But also sometimes they've had clients go bust. They've had clients that have been swallowed up by bigger businesses that have got an internal support team and there's just a lot of pressure. So why do you, what do you see as the priorities for an MSP in that situation where actually profits are down, which obviously affects their own personal income, but they're their own personal costs are going up at the same time? [00:13:09] Speaker B: Well, I think that the thing is, and I mean I'm going to caveat my answer to you always need sales, so you always need an element of sales. You do need sales in the beginning to grow. However, sales are not something that you can forecast with 100% accuracy. You do not know what your sales are going to look like. And we have had a tumultuous year. It has been a lot, there's been a lot of surprises. People are feeling that pinch if you continually to change chase sales in this economy. It's difficult and it's not going to be the same playbook that you've used prior to what you did in the past. Also sales are great to a point, but then your business is going to get to a certain level and all of a sudden you have all these employees, roles might be undefined, people might have overlapping jobs. You've started to develop waste in your operations. And what I mean by that are two people pulling almost the Exact same report and looking at it in two different rooms, pulling two different sets of analysis and when they could be talking to each other or they could be working together. When I talk about improving operations, it's the focus of. We feel like we're underwater. We feel like we're not getting new customers. Maybe let's look internally and look at our quote to cash process and see if there's anything that we can do to improve that process internally to define responsibilities and to save costs. [00:14:27] Speaker A: Yeah, that makes perfect sense. And I agree with you about bloat and waste. And you know, I've. I grew a business between two 2005 and 2016, which I sold. It was a marketing agency. And then, and then in, in this business, which I started in 2016 in the channel, you know, we, we've been through a couple of things of, of getting. Realizing we were bloated. And it happened, it happened so easily. It happened so quickly because you, yeah, you fix a problem, you fix a problem, you put a fire out and then you get a year down the line, you're like, hang on a second, why do we do that? Or why is that still a manual process? Or what. What was the, what was the thing we were trying to fix with that? But. And I think that's easy to look at when you think about software, especially you know, these days where, where software does EV and automations and zapier and all of this can help to just make things easier. The area where I think most MSPs emotionally struggle with is when you're looking at I've got too many people. And do you find that the MSPs you're working with are quite happy to slash a bit of Software or Move PSAs, but in terms of losing people, that's a step too far always. [00:15:30] Speaker B: And I don't know if I'm a bad person, but I always recommend firing, which I don't think I really am. It's awful. I don't do it lightly. I think there are a lot of instances where MSPs grew organically. They maybe hired friends, maybe there were really loose job descriptions when people were hired or someone said, hey, I can do that or I can do that. And all of a sudden it snowballed into a role where they got promoted or they've been elevated. You know, the best tech goes into the service manager role. Did they get training? Did we really define that role before we did it? And so it's not necessarily always firing someone, but it is better defining their own role and responsib I do think that everyone has enough people. I think, you know, we always need to hire as we grow. But at this point it's about right sizing, it's about leveraging those automations, those tools, those AIs to be able to keep who you have today but continue to scale without everyone feeling the pinch and feeling so frustrated. I don't know about you, my MSPs are stressed out right now. Everyone feels really overworked. [00:16:35] Speaker A: Oh, I think MSPs are always stressed out. You know, I always. Exactly. In the nine years I've been in the channel, every MSP I've ever spoken to has been stressed out. It's the nature of the job, isn't it? [00:16:44] Speaker B: Yeah, but I don't think it necessarily has to be that way. I think it's, it's making the job descriptions a little bit clearer, a little, it's slow down to speed up and I don't know how many MSPs feel that they have the space to be able to do that. I am very empathetic to that and that's why it's helpful to have someone externally come in with a playbook and say here are some things that we can do to make it a little bit easier, faster so that we take something off your plate. [00:17:07] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. And I agree with you as well that you, you've probably got, unless you win a massive, massive, massive contract, you've probably got enough people, I think. And it was, was it Jason Kemsley? I think it was. Who was one of our guests, I mean we must be talking nine months ago. And I'll maybe if I can find the, the podcast, we'll link to it in the show notes and he, he was telling us how many technicians he needs per client or per user. I think they'd actually worked a formula out and it was it users than you can, you can expect. So you know, obviously a first line technician can handle a lot of users per, per day, whereas a third line technician, I, I think maybe it was tickets, I can't remember but they worked out the average number of tickets per client or per user and then, and then from that they were able to work out exactly when and forecast when they were going to need new technicians. So they were, I was going to say squeezing the most out of every technician. That's not what they do but what they were doing is making sure they weren't overstaffed. But they, but they were, they were ramping up, up the staff when they, when, when the work ramped up. And it is so easy, especially when you're a smaller business, to, to, to look at your two people that are doing, you know, your technical work and think, oh, but I don't, I don't want to make them too much, too much busier. We'll get someone else on. And before you know it, you're in a situation where, yeah, you've got way more resource than you, than the work, which is always the chicken and egg thing anyway, especially when you're very early in the business, the first three, four years. Okay, final question for you, Monica. If, if you had a 60 second consult with an MSP, which is the person who's listening to this on the podcast or watching this on YouTube right now and they, they've just said to you, oh my goodness, profits are down. Right? So we've kept our customers and profits are down and you haven't got time to ask all the intelligent questions that I know you would ask. What are some of the main areas that you would suggest that they looked at to review their costs and make sure that they're not overspending on things they're not using? [00:18:58] Speaker B: I think it really comes down to quote to cash process and for me it's all about bottlenecks. So I would do a quick, high level exercise and I would say in your quote to cash process, what's the one department, one thing that is the most frustrating that everyone complains about that everyone in your organization has a problem with. And they'll say it's invoicing or it's whichever it is. And we say, okay, here are three things that we can do to define that role. The three metrics that I would track on a monthly basis to make sure that role is doing what they need to do. And here's a job description on how they're supposed to do it. [00:19:28] Speaker A: Nice and simple. That's brilliant. Thank you very much. So tell us a little bit more about the work that you do. What kind of MSPs do you work with and what's the best way to get in touch with you? [00:19:37] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. I have a YouTube channel, so I started in Connectwise PSA environment and I have a YouTube channel which my own parents say is too boring to watch. But it's because I am very detailed and I really go through and walk through in the weeds about what you're doing in your PSA environment. I would say YouTube's a great place to follow me and as well on LinkedIn, Monica Ozeruk or my website in terms of What I do, there's three levels, so I do project based consulting. If you have a project similar to what we were talking about, one bottleneck, one problem. We can do an hourly one. I have two accelerator programs, one for project management, one for procurement and then I'm looking at a vco. But that's invite only at this point, so please check out my website. It is Moser Consulting. M O Z A R U K Consulting Dot. [00:20:26] Speaker A: Paul Green's MSP Marketing podcast. Paul's personal peer group. Alrighty, we have got to the end of the show and it's time to answer another one of your questions. Here's producer James. What have you got for us today, my lovely? Well, Paul, we have a lovely long question this week that comes from MSP owner George, who's from the city, home to the Beatles in Liverpool. And the question is, should I use live chat on my website? But Also what about WhatsApp messenger, text message or other ways of getting in touch with me? So here's the thing. Buyers in 2025 expect instant answers. If they have to fill in a form and wait days, they might move on. A live chat or messaging option can feel more personal and quicker, but only if you actually respond fast. So if you've got the capacity to reply quickly, yes, it can absolutely win you more leads. But you need to use the channels that your leads and prospects prefer to use, and that's going to depend market to market. So, for example, where I live here in the UK, pretty much the whole country uses WhatsApp and chatting to a business via WhatsApp is a lot easier than using a live chat functionality on their website. So in your market that might be a bit different. For example, if you're in the US, where surprisingly, WhatsApp isn't as popular as it is in some other countries, then you might do that through text message, through sms, but really you should only stick to the channels that you can manage. Well, if you want to offer live chat and you want to do it from like 7 in the morning till 10 at night, it's probably something you're going to have to do off your own phone. Or of course, you find a service to do it for you. Now, to submit your own question, you can email me, go to MSP marketingedge.com and head to the Contact Us page. Coming up, coming up next week. You're not going to want to miss what we're talking about next week because there are so many cool AI tools around right now and I've got a number of them to suggest to you. Some of them are useful for your marketing, some of them are great for increasing your productivity. But I'm going to explore some of the best ones in next Week's show for MSPs around the world. Around the World the MSP Marketing Podcast with Paul Green.