Marketing an MSP is like boiling water

[00:00:02] Speaker A: You found it. If there was a podcast for MSPs hungry to grow beyond their wildest dreams, this is the show. We have a great show for you today with all of this why marketing is like boiling water. Get a better understanding of your prospects, pain points with five whys and my special guest today talk about how PR builds trust, authority and credibility in the AI age. Welcome to episode 299 powered by MSP marketingedge.com Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast. You must get so frustrated at how long it takes to generate leads and new clients for your msp. And you're not on your own there. Lots of other MSPs feel the same. But imagine if there was a quick and amazing fix for this frustratingly long drawn out problem. Well, there is. And even better news, while this painful long wait for new clients will be driving your competitors insane, you can train yourself to think differently. I think one of the things that MSPs find the hardest when they really start taking their marketing seriously is just how long it takes to win a new client. Because you read stuff on the Internet, don't you, about people who set up a funnel or they have a special offer or they do this new shiny tactic and they always, there's always a promise that you launch something at nine in the morning and you have your first sale by 9:30. [00:01:31] Speaker B: But. [00:01:31] Speaker A: But that's not really how it works for managed services. Managed services are a double edged sword in that you both benefit from and you're punished by them. Let me explain what I mean by that. On one side of the sword it takes a very long time to win a new client. But on the other side of the sword they pay you money every month in monthly recurring revenue and they stay for years and years and years and it's that kind of lifetime value, the revenue that the client contributes to your business and over the decade they stay with you. Well, that is what you've got to stay focused on with your marketing. So if you're measuring your marketing by doing a little piece of activity today, like sending an email or posting a blog post, or putting something on LinkedIn and you expect that is going to generate a hot lead who turns into a client tomorrow, it just doesn't work that way. You haven't got the right marketing mindset and that's always going to lead to you being frustrated with your marketing. Because the right marketing mindset is about having a great strategy and implementing that strategy day to day, but sticking with it until you're sick to Death of it. Because at the point that you're sick to death of it, that means it's actually just starting to cut through to the people you're talking to. So you keep doing it and keep doing it and keep doing it and it really does work like that. The strategy that I always recommend to MSPS is super simple. Three steps, six words. Build audiences, grow relationships, convert relationships, which means finding people to listen to you. For most MSPs that's linked in and your email list and your CRM. Then growing a relationship with them using content marketing like sending out emails and posting on social media. And that final stage, converting relationships about picking up the phone, finding out who's ready to have a conversation about switching MSPs. Now those six words there, that's a very solid marketing strategy. I use it for my own marketing, have done for nearly 20 years and my business, the MSP Marketing Edge, we help more than 700 MSPs to implement exactly that strategy. But it does take time. It's not a quick win. I'm going to be honest, there are no quick wins in marketing an msp. Of course there are short term tactics which come up, they work for a little piece of time and then they go away, they stop working. But trust me, you kind of want to ignore those and focus in on a long term strategy that's always there, working in the background to find the people at the exact moment that they are ready to leave their incumbent. They've been with their incumbent for like seven to 10 years. Something is unsett settled them. You want to be in front of them and build a relationship with them. So at the point that they are ready to make a new commitment to someone else, you, for years and years and years, then you've got to be there at that right moment. I like to think of this as like boiling water and I don't mean in a kettle or one of those cool cooker tap things. Have you seen those? You just kind of do a button like that and you get instant boiling water. We actually have one of those in our kitchen. They're quite cool. They're super expensive, but they are cool. Now I mean boiling water the old fashioned way. You get a pan, you fill it with cold water, you put it on the stove and you start the temperature low and of course the water barely moves so you turn the temperature up a bit and the water starts to just stir a little bit. And as you keep turning the temperature up and up and up, the water starts to get more active, it starts to get hotter. And hotter and hotter, it starts to move more and move more. And the difference between water that's actually boiling and, and not boiling, the difference is one degree. You can turn the stove up by one degree and take very, very hot, but not yet boiling water and turn it into boiling water, one degree. And that's kind of a useful analogy for marketing your msp. You keep putting. I was going to say pressure, but it's kind of influence. You keep putting influence on your leads and your prospects with all of the marketing activity you're doing, all of the content you're putting out, and, and it's one little thing that makes the difference, that one degree that turns them from being a prospect into a client. The problem is just like boiling water, you can't jump straight to that one little thing you can't jump straight from to the one degree that turns hot water into boiling water. You have to have done all of the work building up to it beforehand. And that's exactly the same with marketing. You can't just jump to that trigger that makes them become a client, because actually it's different triggers anyway. Different people respond to different things. You've got to put all of the work in and keep doing that at work so you reach that one degree that takes them from hot water to boiling water. Does that make sense? I do love a good analogy. I hope I've explained that one really well to you. I guess what I'm trying to say is that marketing your msp, it is difficult, it is long term, but it will pay off for you very, very well. With clients that pay you monthly for like 10 years, there are hundreds of industries around the world that are so jealous of you for that recurring revenue, for that retention. All you have to do is win more of those clients. And you do that by building audiences, growing relationships and converting relationships, making sure you've got the right marketing mindset so that you market every single day to get that extra degree that really makes the difference. Paul Green's MSP Marketing podcast still to come. So, as you know, we're a couple of years into the start of the AI age, and while we all may have loads of ideas where we might go in the next 20 years, none of us really know exactly where we going to go. But as things stand today, just as AI has made it easier to generate content and do marketing, it's becoming really clear that we need to keep building trust and credibility with humans. This is more important than it's ever been because everybody can do all of this extra stuff. With AI. I've got two special guests joining me today to talk about how you can do this using the marketing tool of PR public relations. They're going to be here in the next few minutes. How much do you understand about what's happening in your prospects heads and hearts and I mean really happening when they're thinking of switching msp, what are all the questions that are running through their heads? What are all the opportunities they're hoping to benefit from? What are all the fears that are holding them back? Right now I've got a very clever framework for you to use to understand exactly what's happening in almost any anyone's mind, especially a prospect. It's a superpower that you can develop which will help you close more clients for your business. I want to talk about how you can get a better understanding of your prospects. Pain points with five whys. No, not five guys. The rather excellent burger chain. I mean five whys. It's a problem solving method developed by the founder of Toyota quite some time ago, about 100 years ago or so. And I believe that you can use it in your MSP sales. The idea is that you keep asking versions of why until you get to the real core of someone's problem or desire. So here's an example. It's a bit of a sort of a two way conversation between you and a prospect. Prospect says, we need better Internet. And you say why is that then? And the prospect says because our connection is really bad. And you say, well, why is it really bad? And the prospect says, I don't know. You tell me my staff complain all the time that their computers are slow. And you respond with, well, why do you think that is? And the prospect says, well, they tell me they can't get their work done fast enough and I am fed up with their complaints. And you say, hmm, it sounds like an obvious question, but why are you fed up with their complaints? And the prospect pauses for a second and then says, I just want them to get on with their work. I want them to stop hassling me with questions and complaints all the time. And you say it sounds like you have a lot of frustration there. Why is solving that so important to you? And the prospect says because I'm trying to build a business here. You know, my staff are holding me back. And you say, so your staff are holding you back because their technology is holding them back. Would you agree with that? That's pretty badly acted by me. In fact, it sounds like bad dialogue from a cheap novel. But you get the idea in Your own words, right? As part of a natural conversation, can you see the power of that? Can you see that that's a very tool asking why again and again and again, asking why about each of their answers to understand what they really want and why it's so important to them. And all of that done in one short conversation. In fact, in that conversation, you've moved the prospect from I just need this solution to actually uncovering their real desire. I want you to remove any technology blocks so I can grow my business. Understanding what's really motivating them deep in their heart helps you to close the sale and better serve the client once they're working with you. Right? Do you get that? Well, here's a question. Do you already use the five whys in your sales Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast still to Come in the last few months on this podcast we've talked loads about the new book Endless Customers by Marcus Sheridan. It's like the version 3.0 of his original book they Ask youk Answer. And creating good content that answers prospects questions is still very much part of his marketing strategy. But what kind of content should you create? Another MSP has this exact question and I've got some suggestions for you and him. I'll tell you what they are in the next few minutes. We all hate wasting our time on anything that doesn't deliver results. So if you're really keen on finding new managed service clients in 2025, how do you avoid wasting your precious time on outdated marketing activities? In this new world of AI? Some tactics don't work anymore and some are way more important than they've ever been. I have two special guests today who both believe that PR public relations still has a very important place in your MSP's marketing toolbox. Are they right? Are they wrong? The answer just might surprise you. [00:11:52] Speaker C: Hi, I'm Shantae Micah and I am one half. I'm the co founder of Good News. [00:11:57] Speaker B: Hi and I'm Josh. I'm the other half of Good News. Handle all of the tech and back in infra. [00:12:02] Speaker A: And you know what? This is the first time, I think, in five plus years of the podcast that we've actually had two guests at the same time. So you guys are already doing a first. Thank you so much for coming onto the show. I am so excited to have you on because we're going to talk about pr, which in itself is a bit dull. And I say that as an ex journalist who's also an ex PR guy. PR being public relations, you Two are PR people, but we're not really interested in getting in the media and getting journalists to talk about you. What we're going to talk about today is using PR as a way of building authority, of getting audiences in your market to trust you, to believe you, to understand you, all of those kind of things. And I'm a big fan of using PR and using it to influence the kind of people that ultimately, as an ms, you want to go on to do business with. So let's start. Let's first of all, just delve a little bit back into your background and Shanti, just tell us a little bit about you and how you got into this. This world, how you got going with this business. And how did you meet Josh as your business partner? [00:13:03] Speaker C: Oh, yes, I love this story. So I've been in the PR space, but it's been called brand marketing, it's been called brand awareness, and I've gone in and out of companies. But PR is what I got my master's in 20 years ago, and I stepped into a role that was for global communications. That role after that sent me to Israel, where I was an expat, opening up multiple markets. I came back stateside, and that was when the emergence of social media was happening. So I was asked to figure that out for a multibillion dollar company at the time, which was interesting. And then I ended up meeting Josh about 11 years ago is what we decided. And it was at a digital marketing agency. And we were both leads, we were both running enterprise accounts. And these were for big companies like espn, Time Warner Cable, Dell, Adobe, Citrix, forgetting a lot of them. But Josh was running his team, I was running my team. And we never actually worked on the same team, but we'd find just these sidebar conversations where we would just be talking about things that were important to us. And that's where we both realized that we have a lot of the same values when it comes to how we manage teams, how we create systems that can then align people from the client side to the people that you have on your team. And we were at the same agency for five years that I went my separate way. Josh has moved all around and, and, but we kept in touch. And about four years ago, I reached out to him and I said, hey, I just had this big change in my career. Let's catch up. And from that, we. We ended up catching up and then becoming accountability partners on separate projects. And then one fortuitous day, Josh was like, would you ever want to do something together? And the Idea for good news came straight after and it was from a lot of people in my circle that were asking me for big PR strategies because had no idea how PR worked. It had this mystique to it. And I thought, I think I could do something with that. My frameworks of 20 years, I'll put it into a book and then we'll put it into a system. And then with Josh's background we turned it into what good news is, which is engineered omnipresence. Like we're able to engineer this for people and then demystify it so that people in fields like MSP can actually use it where before it felt like elusive and separate, like a future them problem. So that, that's the summary. [00:15:36] Speaker A: That's a great summary. Thank you for that. And I agree with you that PR is a bit mysterious and well in the past it was very mysterious. And when I was a journalist back in the sort of the mid-90s up till 2005, which is when I started my first business, you know, it was, it was, I remember I hated being contacted by PR companies but the reason that business owners like msps hired PR companies was because they didn't know how to get on the radio, get in the local paper, get in the local tv. And I think what has, what has changed dramatically in the 25, 30 years since is well first of all the local media, well, all media no longer has the, they don't control the distribution anymore. The Internet has put the distribution into anyone's hands. But, but I think what has gone alongside with that and why companies like yours still exist and still thrive is because the amount of noise has gone up like probably by, by x thousand percent. Josh, is it, is it worth in 2025, is it really worth the owner of a small business like an MSP that might have three Is it really worth them trying to get media coverage, you know, trying to influence what's said about them on social media? Is that what kind of modern day PR is all about? [00:16:46] Speaker B: This is a phenomenal question. So I come from the digital marketing world. So we kind of. Shantae and I have very different perspectives on this. So I'm biased towards digital marketing. I come from SEO and content marketing. And so this question hits in a very good, good way because now transferring kind of over and really doubling down on pr. I think it shows really where I'm putting my bets is is the play to invest in right now and I'll explain why that is. In the past you could show up via SEO, you could show up by your content marketing, social and you could generate noise, you could generate top end noise and that was great for a small MSP startup or whatever type of business. However, that doesn't necessarily translate into trust and credibility and that's really what we're seeing in today's day and age. And that's further compounded with AI. Everybody's losing trust and getting a little more skeptical. So having trust in your brand, whether you're a massive MSP or you're a much smaller startup, it's absolutely the currency in which you need to leverage for growing your brand. And there's a lot of other factors that go into this and we will get into, I'm sure in a minute, but that PR is by far and away the biggest bang for your buck. Dollar in, dollar out. You're going to get 100 times more with PR nowadays than you would have with SEO or kind of any of these other channels. That's exactly what we're seeing. [00:18:20] Speaker A: Yeah, I love that. And you're right. In a second we are going to come to some practical stuff that msps can do to improve their. I'm going to use a term that you use, Shantae, which is omnipresence. I absolutely love that. Being everywhere all at the same time or the perception of being everywhere. Shantae in of how PR has changed, never mind all those big shifts over decades. The last two years, what was it, two and a half years since ChatGPT went mainstream? As Josh was just saying, anybody can churn out hundreds of pieces of content. You know, that's been a massive game changer in itself. But the core fundamentals of marketing have not changed, which is we want to, we will only buy from people that we trust, that we like, that we know that we have a relationship with, that we perceive as an authority. So how has your work changed and the work that you, that you recommend MSPS and other business owners do, how has that changed in the last couple of years? [00:19:15] Speaker C: I would say that, you know, AI has been this great equalizer when it comes to any type of content you can create. But like with anything, it's garbage in, garbage out. With PR you can certainly generate a lot of pitches and I see this happening where journalists are already bombarded and there's been massive shifts in the media landscape. You know, traditional media conglomerates laying off a lot of writers and yet the writers that remain are still required to hit a beat in a body of work with the same cadence, if not more so. They, you know, their work has tripled. So they're still required to, to get those stories. They need your pitches. But what they need are pitches that are pithy and powerful and personal. So they need to be relevant. So just plugging in, you know, an AI into AI, a framework for a PR pitch, it's not going to get you anywhere. We don't need perfection when it comes to PR pitches. We need precision. You know, I know that a lot of journalists, including yourself, you, you know, as a host of a show, you get dozens, if not hundreds of pitches per day. And most of them are going to be off the mark because they're not considering relevance. They're not considering the audience before themselves. They're not considering how a journalist is a caretaker for their audience. So the shifts that we're seeing is that it's still a numbers game, because to hit timing, you do need to be pitching regularly, but you need to be pitching with more precision so that research on the front end is even more important. Knowing what their audience is talking about, knowing the relevant cultural conversations, knowing what they care about, all of that should be demonstrated in your pitch. And your pitch should still be under 200 words. You really have no reason on that initial pitch to go bigger. And every journalist, they'll see the difference. It is a remarkable difference when you get a pitch that is like, oop, they got it. And you suddenly become this source to a journalist who's already burdened beyond. So I would say that the things that have changed is precision. You just need a system to create that precision. And then the reps. [00:21:28] Speaker A: Okay, well, let's, let's come on to that system in a second. You mentioned me getting pitches. I only get around 20 to 25 a week, which is not unbearable. But I was, I was saying just before recording yours, yours stood out, as you would hope a PR companies would stand out. But because you'd actually done the research, you'd actually looked into me, you, you'd clearly spent time on it and not just got an AI to transcribe an episode and pull out a. Oh, I listened to this and this was my insight. Because the insights, never, never real insights. You, you can see through that, a mileage off. So if I, if I'm doing that, then journalists who are getting hundreds of pictures a day are definitely seeing that. Let's, let's bring this back to making this real to the MSP owner. So the, the average MSP who's listening to this or watching this on YouTube is the business owner. They've got somewhere between 3 5, 10 staff eager to grow their marketing. Marketing is a bit of a distress activity. It's something they know they have to do, but they don't necessarily enjoy it because it's the complete, the opposite of tech work. And as we've already established, PI is very good for building trust, building authority, all the things you want as big picture items from your marketing. So, Josh, let's throw this at you and Shanti, feel free to jump in. What's a good system for an MSP owner to go about actually getting that kind of third party mentions that gives them great authority, greater credibility. [00:22:52] Speaker B: Absolutely. So I'm going to start kind of small scale because what we've found is when MSPs are starting to get into this, like you said, it's not their, it's not their body of work. Right. Doing pr, getting those pitches out the door. So I'm going to start small and give you really practical steps here. The first thing that we would recommend almost always is podcast getting on podcasts, because podcasts are. There's so many different valuable kind of tangible assets that you get from being on podcasts. But you also get a lot of psychological benefit from being on podcasts. So let me break it down. The first thing that I would recommend an MSP to do or someone on their team, I would have them go to itunes or Spotify and I would say start looking through different podcasts and aggregate a list of, you know, 10 to 20 podcasts that you would love to be on. Right. That you have a message, you want to share your message of your brand. I'm not talking about stats. I know once we get into the MSP world, people love stats and the figures, uptime, all of the things that kind of we nerd out on, but instead look and see what stories you can tell, such as how you rescued a client from a ransomware attack or something like that. Something that's pithy and really tangible. So you'll have your list of 10 to 20 podcasts that you want to be on. Sort them by how much visibility you think they have. You don't need to get really scientific with this in the beginning. Just try to sort them out into, hey, this is a phase one, meaning this is an emerging podcast, smaller podcast, phase two, kind of more middle of the road, they have some momentum versus phase three. This is going to be the big top end podcast, have a massive amount of exposure. And then what you're going to do is you're going to break down your story. So come up with maybe Five different angles in that story. Take that, take a client case study, right? How you rescued that client from ransomware and break it out into five different angles, right? Oh, we could talk about this way, you know, this way. Break it out and then, then overlay those two, your list of your podcasts that you want to reach out to and then those stories. And then this is where the rubber meets the road. When you're writing that pitch, try to synthesize a pitch that is under 200 words. Has to be really short, really pithy, and really, it has to be value to the host, but more importantly, value to their audience. And this is where people start to go wrong when they're leveraging AI tools too heavily, is they come out with these pitches that are more self serving or serving to the host and not to the audience. And really the core value here is we're creating value for the audience. You satiate that, you fulfill the request of the host and you win. And then the last step here is find their email. There are a handful of free tools out there you can use. Hunter IO is a great one where you can plug in their domain, the domain of the podcast, find someone to reach out to and send that pitch. And the reason I say start small is what's going to happen is you're going to start sending these pitches out the door and you're going to start to get, you're going to get a lot of misses, but you're going to get some hits. Those hits are going to teach you about how to tell your own story. And that's going to be one of the big kind of differentiators. Right. Coming from the MSP world, you might think you know how to tell your story, but really you're going to get real world feedback by who responds to you. Oh, that's the way that you're going to tell your story. And then you iterate on that, your next 10 pitches are going to be kind of changes of that same pitch and then you're going to continue down the line. And what we've seen is once people land their first podcast, they get on the shows, they're on fire. Like they are so stoked they want to tell that story a hundred more times and then they get the assets back of, hey, it just went live and they can share it on social media. They didn't even have to edit it and now they're really on fire. And so there's kind of this addictive nature to it as well. And that's why I say start Small, you'll start to feel the energy and the momentum and you're going to want to go all in. So that's where I would say to start kind of any msp, start on that small scale and then ramp up from there. [00:26:50] Speaker A: Yeah, I love that. Thank you. And Shantae, it's our final question, unfortunately, because you guys are so good. We've already been talking for getting on for about 13, 14 minutes. So let's take those podcasts as the first step. And I agree, that's a great place to get going and build up your enthusiasm, see if actually you like being interviewed. Shantae, where would you take it from there and just give us kind of two or three bullet points where you would. Would expect an MSP to go from there? [00:27:12] Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, most of you will be compelled to go for top national, but what I have Learned in my 20 years of experience is industry and trade is probably going to be where you have your buyers and your most interested parties. It's more niche, but it's going to do a lot for you. Then I would say digital, digital publications. You could canvas an entire space of digital publications. You could be a contributing author to digital publications, start leveraging those for local, if local would be meaningful to you, it's necessarily meaningful to everyone. And then with all that, you use all of that for leverage for top national. A top national journalist. If you're showing up in trade, the validation that you're a good resource has already. Some of that work's already been done for them. [00:27:57] Speaker A: Yeah, I love that. That's a great checklist. Thank you very much. You guys need to come back on the show, right? I need to get you back on. We only allow a guest on once a year, so 2026 of 2027. I'd love to get you guys back on. In fact. In fact, it'd be really interesting to have you back on in two years to see how that AI that huge leap forward. I mean, who knows what's going to be happening in two years time. Right. But let's finish up for now. And you can arm wrestle. I know you're in physically geographically separate locations, but you can arm wrestle about who's going to tell us about good news, what do you do and how do you help msps? [00:28:32] Speaker C: Yeah, I'll take this one. Yeah. So good news, we create visibility systems. So we're not a PR firm, but we help people engineer that omnipresence that you would get from a PR agency. It's that you own the contacts and we do all that research, we turn it into a visibility system for you, and then we mobilize that so that it's, it's turnkey. So you are the one sending the pitches, but we create those pitches for you and we support you for a year under every single project. But to get started with us, I would say go to our website. There is, it's highgoodnews.com hi, as in hello, hi, good news. Com. And we have a banner there where you could get a podcast sampler list. So if you opt into that takes you through about a two minute intake and we will tell you a handful of podcasts that you would be perfect for and then we can start talking about next steps. [00:29:30] Speaker A: Paul Green's MSP marketing podcast. Paul's personal peer group. Oh, it's Q and A time producer James. What's our question today? Well, our question this week, Paul, comes from Mitch, an MSP owner in the west of London. And on the face of it, his question sounds rather cryptic, but I'm sure that it'll make more sense in the context of your answer. So the question is, do you have content suggestions for Endless Customers? Yeah, that is a book that we've been talking about on the podcast over the last few months since it came out and it is a book I highly recommend as well. Every MSP should read Endless Customers. It's been written by a guy called Marcus Sheridan who originally wrote a book called they ask, you answer, and that was about answering the questions that prospects have before you ever really start talking to them. One on one. Endless customers is the version 3.0 of they ask you answer. And it's a complete reinvention of his marketing strategy for the AI age. Now, trust me, it's a book that you should read, absorb and implement. And creating great content is still at the heart of his marketing strategy. So I've got here a very quick brainstorm for you of some really great Endless customers content ideas that you can use. And I'm going to hit you with these at speed. So if you just want a written list of them, you can get a transcript of this [email protected] Here we go. And by the way, I'm going to talk about teams a lot. You can take teams and replace that with any other piece of software. In fact, a smart thing to do will be to take all of these ideas. Take a version for teams, take a version for Outlook, take a version for all common sources software that all businesses use. What is teams and how much does it cost? How do I start using teams in my business? Why does teams sometimes not work properly? What are the 10 most common teams problems? How do I best use functionality in teams? Which is better teams or competitor? You could add in Zoom or something like that. Which is the best software for collaboration? A review for 2025 should your vertical buy new PCs? Can a vertical use Macs and PCs at the same time? Reviewed best PCs for vertical in 2025 the ultimate guide to optimizing software in your vertical what are the remote working best practices for vertical in 2025? Which is the best password manager for vertical? The top 10 compared to should your company hire an IT person or use an msp? I'm sure you've got your own ideas. I'd love to hear those. If you want to send them over to me, get my thoughts on them, or even submit your own question, email me, go to mspmarketingedge.com and head to the Contact Us page. Coming up Coming up next week before we finish today, a big shout out to Ian Makness, an MSP here in the UK who's actually become a good friend of mine mine over the last couple of years. And I know he listens to this podcast every week alongside his 14 year old daughter Tara. If you ask me, that is some seriously cruel parenting going on there. Imagine having to listen to this show every week as a teenager. Awful. Anyway, next week it's a special episode. We're celebrating 300 episodes of the podcast. We've been here every every Tuesday since November 2019 and I have an astonishing story that you will almost not believe. It's a feature length interview with a well known vendor in our space who nearly lost it all a few years ago. Anytime you have a bad day, I guarantee that this guy had a bad day a few years back that's worse than all of our bad days put together now. He's been very generous sharing his story in a way that's going to inspire and motivate you. And it's all coming up next week for MSPs around the world. Around the world. The MSP Marketing Podcast with Paul Green.