MSPs: This simple upsell generates new MRR AND boosts retention

[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. Boom. [00:00:12] Speaker B: And this podcast gets going once more. We are here every Tuesday and this. [00:00:17] Speaker C: Is what's coming up today. [00:00:19] Speaker B: A simple upsell that generates new revenue and strengthens retention at the same time. Let me tell you about the marketing tactic that turns leads into prospects into clients. And my special guest reveals the huge mistake MSPs make by not setting context when using AI tools for marketing. Welcome to episode 310 powered by MSP. [00:00:41] Speaker A: Marketingedge.Com Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast. [00:00:46] Speaker B: Could this be the most valuable upsell any MSP could deploy? It's something that almost every single client wants but rarely gets from their msp. And it not only generates new monthly recurring revenue for you, but also has a huge and positive effect on retention. Let me tell you what this upsell is and an easy way you can roll it out in the next seven days. The upsell I'm talking about is an at home support package. Now think about how most of your clients work these days. They might have an office, they might be completely remote. And of course you're already looking after their office tech, their business tech. But the reality is, as we know, people just work from anywhere these days. And they also work at any times in the evenings, on weekends, sometimes even when they're on a vacation, on holiday. And here's the problem. When they're working from home out of hours and something goes wrong with their it, they don't have anyone to turn to. Not unless they wait till, I guess like Monday morning or something when you and your team are back. And we all know that that must be deeply frustrating for them. We also know that you don't want to do support in the evenings and the weekends. [00:01:54] Speaker C: You know, work, life balance. [00:01:56] Speaker B: So this is a source of friction for both parties. And we should be doing everything to remove friction between you and your client. All friction has to go. So this is where your at home. [00:02:06] Speaker C: Support package comes in. [00:02:07] Speaker B: It's such a simple upsell. You could do a setup project perhaps by bundling a couple of things together. You could maybe have a laptop doc, some, you know, like a keyboard, wireless keyboard, maybe do a wifi survey for their home and install some boosters, something like that, maybe even a check in. [00:02:22] Speaker C: On their home security. [00:02:23] Speaker B: But the real winner and the monthly recurring revenue is a 24. 7 help desk. And the secret sauce for this is. [00:02:30] Speaker C: That you don't have to provide that 24. [00:02:33] Speaker B: 7 help desk yourself, you can outsource it. There are plenty of white label providers out there who will handle those calls in the evening and at weekends for you, often under your brand, so your clients still feel like they're talking to your msp. You might choose to be very clear with your clients that it is an outsourced help desk. But they have access to all of your systems and you train them and you're constantly working with them and updating them because no human expect another human to provide genuine 24 hour service from their local office. [00:03:01] Speaker C: I think you're almost being a bit. [00:03:03] Speaker B: Disingenuous with your clients if you're not honest with them about how you do this. But if you didn't want to use a white label provider, you could always team up with an MSP on the other side of the planet so you can handle each other's out of hours calls. However you do this, the important thing is to focus on the impact to your client. Imagine being able to say to them, you know when you're sat doing some work at like 9 on a Sunday evening because you want to get ahead for the week, but there's something, something wrong with your it and normally you'd have to wait until Monday morning to contact us and that means you've lost productive time. But business no longer works like that anymore. So with this at home support package, you can get help whenever and wherever you're working. I mean, that's a very, very compelling pitch, isn't it? It makes sense for your clients and it creates ongoing monthly recurring revenue for you. So everyone wins. And the best part is you don't even need every single client to buy it. If just a fraction of your clients take up this package, it becomes a lovely new stream of profit with very little extra effort. So here's my suggestion. Put together a simple offering. Brand it properly and make it available to all of your clients. Talk about it at every strategic technology review and in all of your marketing. In fact, this could even become a front end usp, a unique selling proposition for you. If you're the only MSP in your area who offers genuine 247 support, that's a fantastic differentiator. In fact, it's a reason right at the beginning of the relationship that someone would pick you in the first place. So position this as peace of mind, because that's what it really is. Is this possibly the perfect upsell? Is this something that's genuinely valuable for your clients, easy for you to deliver because you're outsourcing it? And Something that builds monthly recurring revenue for your msp. [00:04:51] Speaker A: Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast still what. [00:04:56] Speaker B: Are your favorite AI tools to use for marketing? There are some really good ones out there and they can really help you to get good quality marketing done with less investment of time. But what's really important when you're using these AI tools is setting context. An AI tool is not really intelligent at all. It can only work with the information you're giving it, and context is a massive part of that. My special guest today is an expert at this and he's going to be explaining how to give greater levels of context to the AI tools you're using to speed up your marketing. He's going to be with us in the next few minutes. There's no way I could make this any simpler. MSPs who use this marketing strategy win new clients faster. So why isn't everyone using it? Because it's not new, it's not sexy, and I'll be honest, it's not fun to do. It's something that has to be done to speed up new client acquisition. But look, let's give you the business case for IT to see if it's something that you want to implement. Let me tell you what it is, why it works, and how the best MSPs implement it. I love marketing. I mean, I literally love it. Marketing has not only paid my mortgage over the years, it paid off a mortgage back in 2016 by letting me build up a business and selling it. It allowed me to acquire rental properties. It allowed me to try my hand at property developing, which actually was a. [00:06:19] Speaker C: Disaster, but we won't get into that. [00:06:21] Speaker B: It's also allowed me to get involved in a few other people's business ventures. And I say this not to boast at all because my success is modest by most standards. In fact, I consider my work life balance and my solid relationship with my 15 year old child Sam. I consider that to be my greater marker of personal success than what I've actually achieved in terms of bank accounts and businesses and all of that kind of stuff. I'm just trying to show you the sheer life changing power of marketing because I want to inspire you to take marketing more seriously in your msp. When you get the marketing right, it allows you to find people who could one day buy your services. It gets those people to choose to start a conversation with you, join one of your audiences and be educated and entertained by you with your content marketing. But there does come a point where if you want to sell them your services you have to move them from being someone you talk to mostly on LinkedIn, YouTube and email, to being someone you talk to offline. And the single most powerful tool to do that is the phone. In that business that I sold in 2016, which was a healthcare marketing business, we had 12,000 leads which back then we emailed twice a week. So that's 24,000 emails a week going out. And we used a CRM to track every single open and every single click from every single single person on that list. I then had a team of three telesales, people sitting, looking at that list, using their brains and figuring out who haven't we spoken to for a few months. And then they just called those people. I mean, that was all they did five days a week. And that was how we generated £1 million, which is about $1.3 million a year of revenue in that business. We did that every year because we could see who the leads were, who was active, and by phoning them we. [00:08:07] Speaker C: Could find out who was ready to buy. [00:08:09] Speaker B: Good marketing puts the right message in front of the right person at the right time. And using the phone accelerated that process. Of course, yes, the phone is inefficient and it's difficult. More often than not we couldn't get hold of the person we were calling. Gatekeepers can be very, very effective. But when we did get hold of them, we attempted to have a relationship building conversation. At least once a day or once every other day we would have a very high quality conversation with a lead and we were able to book a sales appointment with them and turning them from a lead into a prospect. Now if I owned an MSP like yours, I would do exactly the same thing today. Yes, even in 2025, I would build audiences of people who were willing to listen to me and these audiences will be the decision makers and influences in the businesses I wanted to work with. And then I would educate and entertain those people using good marketing content, building up a light relationship with them and building up my business's profile as well. But ultimately what would make me money would be having a telephone person looking at all of marketing activity, picking up the phone and making outbound phone calls to these people. This is the three step lead generation system. My MSP marketing edge service is based around, number one, build audiences, number two, grow relationships and number three, convert relationships. I know this is a very hard thing to do within an MSP if you don't already have this kind of function set up, it really isn't easy to get started and telephone People are the hardest people to hire. This certainly isn't the kind of job that you would want to do yourself, right? Most of us started the business, so we didn't have to do this kind of thing. But I promise you, making outbound calls is essential to turn leads into prospects in the same way that sales meetings are essential to turn prospects into clients. [00:09:55] Speaker A: Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast still to. [00:09:59] Speaker B: Come when you're doing any kind of marketing, it's all about how to stand out. What makes your message different to the messages all the other MSPs are sending out. Take LinkedIn for example. If you're sending someone a direct message, surely that's just another bit of digital noise. [00:10:15] Speaker C: But wait. [00:10:16] Speaker B: My friend Ian Luckett from the MSP Growth Hub has a great idea how to stand out when you're messaging people on LinkedIn. And he's going to share that with you in our brand new section called Marketing Minute. That's coming up in the next few minutes. Of course you're using AI tools, but are you using them the right way to help your marketing? Many MSPs get this a little bit wrong and actually do damage to the marketing messages they're putting out because the AI doesn't really understand what the end goal is. My guest today is an AI marketing expert and he's going to tell you why you must use AI like Iron man and never use it like Terminator. [00:10:55] Speaker D: Hi, I'm Mike Montague, founder of Avenue 9, an AI marketing agency. [00:10:59] Speaker B: And thanks so much for joining me on the show, Mike, because we are. [00:11:02] Speaker C: Going to talk about how to use AI tools to tell better stories about your MSP to boost your marketing by telling better stories. And we know that the better the stories you can tell, the better the response on the humans that you're trying to reach. And ultimately those MSPs who are more emotional and tell great stories with their marketing, they tend to win more clients because ordinary people can connect with them better. [00:11:24] Speaker B: So before we start talking about that, let's, let's hit the lowdown on you. Because you're not just your average marketing guy, are you? [00:11:31] Speaker D: No, not quite. I've had a long, interesting journey. I won't go all the way back and tell you all the details along the way. But I was on the radio in my 20s and I was the prize guy. So it was my job to go out to some random car dealership or something and figure out what their story is and then find an interesting way to tell it in a minute or less on the radio right away, a couple of times. And so I practiced literally thousands of commercials that I had to write on the spot over like a 10 year period. And then I moved to be a professional sales trainer because the pay and hours are much better, by the way, if you're wondering. And it was basically my job then to write stories and help people craft their pitches and their 30 second commercials and their marketing copy in a way that connects with people in a human first way, in an audience centric way, rather than just like the normal marketing slop that happens with AI now, but also the marketing slop that happens with humans when they start going into resume speak. And our company's been in business for 37 years and we have 200 blah, blah, blah, and, and especially in MSPS we can get into technical speak and acronyms real fast and make our audience tune out and sort of lean in. And that's what I help people with. [00:12:54] Speaker C: That's really cool. And I also was on the radio in my 20s for 10 years, but not, not doing the prizes. I was, I was, luckily I was able to sit in the studio and actually just talk nonsense while other people were doing what you were doing. And of course radio in the us, so much different to radio in the uk. So I think you got some fantastic training. I've always said that my, I trained as a journalist originally and that journalism training and then 10 years on radio was the best marketing training I've ever had because it teaches you to look at everything from someone else's point of view and to, as you say, to shape messages and learn how to communicate more effectively. It's great. Maybe every MSP should go and get trained as a journalist and go and work on radio. Maybe that wouldn't. [00:13:31] Speaker D: I think so. I mean every sales and marketer should because it's about asking questions, not giving the information and it's about listening to other people's stories and finding out what the emotional hook are and the, the interesting parts and the problems that you can solve or, or need to highlight. And so I do think it was an amazing sort of boot camp and training ground for the rest of my career. [00:13:54] Speaker C: But the money's rubbish, which is why we're both doing something else right now, talking about stories. I think you and I both have seen probably 3,000 examples of bad ways to use AI to generate content. [00:14:08] Speaker B: You mentioned AI slop earlier. [00:14:10] Speaker C: That's a common thing. You can tell when contents come out of AI. And I think you could also tell when an MSP or any business has used AI AI to try to tell. [00:14:19] Speaker B: Their story because there's something just not. [00:14:21] Speaker C: Inherently human about it. And even though AIs understand how we. [00:14:25] Speaker B: Communicate, I think they're missing that, that ability to just, just tell a story and just, just be able to communicate. [00:14:31] Speaker C: It one human to another. [00:14:32] Speaker B: What is it about storytelling that's so. [00:14:34] Speaker C: Important in your marketing? [00:14:37] Speaker D: I'll give you the story about this one. Have you heard the Terminator versus Iron man analogy yet? [00:14:43] Speaker B: No, I haven't. [00:14:44] Speaker C: Go for it. [00:14:44] Speaker D: Oh, it's a popular one. But if you remember the, the Terminator movies with Schwarzenegger, he is an AI agent. He's a robot that is completely AI. And you give him a mission and he's going to go out and do everything, you know, in his capability to accomplish that mission. That's what a lot of people are trying to do with AI agents and, and AI bots is have them just in one line. I'm going to give it a mission. I want you to go write my website copy and then expect it to go and do all the website copy for you and you never have to touch it again. You don't interact at all. You've just given the Terminator a mission. The opposite is Iron man from Marvel, which is Tony Stark is a billionaire who's smart, funny, charismatic. He wraps himself in the Iron man suit, surrounds himself with technology, and he has Jarvis AI in his ear that gives him information and data that he wouldn't otherwise have as a human being. And it turns Tony Stark into the superhero that can solve the problems and accomplish the missions. And I think that's a much better way to think about it, especially if you're an msp, is how can I give myself superhuman abilities that I didn't have rather than how can I replace myself with an AI robot? Does that make sense? [00:16:02] Speaker C: Yeah, that makes perfect sense. So essentially enhancing yourself using the tools, which is all that Tony Stark does. I love that analogy. [00:16:11] Speaker B: I've never heard that before. [00:16:12] Speaker C: And that makes perfect sense when you think of the Terminator as an AI agent. And it's actually kind of terrifying as we enter the agentic. Agentic sort of era of, of AI. [00:16:21] Speaker B: I think we all know it's going. [00:16:22] Speaker C: To go a bit Terminator anyway, but we'll just put that off for a few years. [00:16:25] Speaker D: It's going to. But I think we can still. I think Ironman would beat Terminator pretty quickly, actually, if we look at it. But yeah, I think in marketing it's definitely true because what happens is every time a New channel comes out, we get telephones, we get telemarketers, we get emails, we get spammers, we get social media, we get ads and dm' and, and stuff coming into our feed. And people abuse the channel until it doesn't work anymore. So I think we can officially say with AI that this is going to proliferate so fast that it's going to ruin the channels. We can't possibly have thousands of people sending thousands or millions of messages to everybody on the planet. We're going to need AI to defend ourselves against AI messages and it's going to have to sort itself out pretty fast. So that scalable model of just spam the heck out of everybody doesn't really work. And it never really has ever. It works just well enough for people to keep trying it. Or this promise of this pipe dream of like, oh, if I can just cheat the system enough and find the shortcut. Well, if the shortcut works, everybody takes the shortcut. And then it's not the shortcut. That's just the regular path everybody goes. So what works in marketing and what we know about psychology is that trust is slow. AI speeds things up. It's an amplifier and it makes things move really fast. But buyers don't move really fast when they're thinking about changing their MSP or they're thinking about solving a problem. They have to emotionally go through some buying processes and recognizing their problem before they get to buying a solution. They're not going to see one AI automated message and be like, oh, you're right, I'm going to fire my MSB and I'm going to hire this guy. So there still has to be a relationship here. The other thing that happens is there's some problems with, I call it like the photocopy of a photocopy. Any of us that are old enough to remember copy machines know that like with generative AI and the, the terminator method, it starts to break down. You can't train AI on AI generated data and you can't have it just take this one line prompt and keep going over and over again. I use a sales example here a lot. Where did you know that in America, 53% of salespeople miss their quota for the year? And if we think about what AI does, it predicts what's most likely the most predicted outcome. So if you ask it to write your sales script, it's going to write a script that is missing quota, that is the average, the mean of what everybody else would expect it to write. So if we want to get it to write something like the top 1% of salespeople would say or the top 1% of marketers would do. We have to do something different. And that's what I wanted to talk about here today is I call it either context engineering or degenerative AI, which means we take a whole bunch of data and we whittle it down to something really powerful and pithy and concentrated that then we can send out rather than trying to take this one thought and expand it and water it down to all this other content that we might make for our marketing. [00:19:34] Speaker C: Yeah, I understand exactly what you mean. And actually I've been watching the rise of Grok, which of course is Twitter's AI or Xai's AI. [00:19:43] Speaker B: And you know, Grok has been trained. [00:19:45] Speaker C: On Twitter and anytime I go on Twitter, it's just full of people firing at each other with machine guns. Bit like Reddit, you know. So I don't know, I don't know if we, if we should be. I guess it's that context, as you say, and actually using what you called. [00:19:58] Speaker B: Context engineering, can you give us some. [00:20:00] Speaker C: Practical examples of how an MSP would do that? [00:20:03] Speaker B: How would you use context engineering? And also with the context of stories. [00:20:06] Speaker C: As we've been talking about. [00:20:08] Speaker B: So give us some practical examples of how MSPs would use that. [00:20:11] Speaker D: Yeah. In short, this is what I do at Avenue 9 for, for my clients is I'll go and I'll interview the founder about why they started and what's important to them and what they believe their unique selling proposition is I'll interview their top salesperson or, or team members or top technical person or I'll interview their best clients or their vendor partners and stuff. And when we have these longer conversations, we can condense those down into messages. So I love what you said about Twitter and Grok. Well, if you're training on 144 characters of craziness, if you expand that out into try and write a book, you're going to get pure madness. If you take a well written book that's educational or an encyclopedia of information, and then you say, I need you to write a blog post about this concept. AI does amazing. It's like, oh, let's bullet it down to just the main key points. And so that's really what I try and do is start with some sort of scalable story, some sort of conversation that you're already having in your business. So this might be your quarterly review meetings with your clients. You sit down and say, tell me about Your problems. What's working? What's not working? All of us have these tools now. You got Copilot already turned on. Take that transcript from that meeting and upload it to AI. And now you can do some really cool stuff. Hey, what did we talk about in this quarterly review that would make a good blog post that my other clients don't know about? Or what question should I have asked in that interview that I didn't? Or what do you think is most important for this client going forward in order to make sure that they renew with me at the end of the year and we can start asking AI interesting questions. Again, that Jarvis AI idea of like, what information did I not recognize while I was live in this conversation? But I believe the value for AI and humans going forward are conversations. Because AI needs to learn how to speak like a human. So it needs examples of people talking like humans in the language they use and the stories that we use in order to replicate those. But also humans need these analogies, these relationships, this back and forth, and it's a question and answer. So where we said Twitter is the wrong format, you're getting kind of comment versus comment in Reddit or, you know, hard opinion, and hard versus hard opinion, you're not getting this back and forth conversation that podcasts like this are perfect because you can ask me a question, I give an answer. And then when AI looks to give a summary answer of this, oh, here's a great example. Let me repurpose what Mike said about context engineering rather than what somebody was yelling about on a different platform. So I think if you kind of reverse engineer the structure of your conversations, you can find three to five supporting examples, stories, analogies, or even action steps or frameworks that you need to go through in order to do whatever you're trying to do. Sales, marketing, or other content. [00:23:15] Speaker C: Yeah, no, I get that completely. And you know what I am cautiously optimistic about and always on AI that's listening to every, maybe not personal, but every work conversation you're having, every single thing. And you know that's there. Capturing tasks for you, organizing them, prioritizing them, reminding you to follow things up. I. I can see nothing but benefits for that. If it's private, if it's safe, and. And obviously if it has the context of what you're trying to achieve. And we can all see that that would be a massive leap forward with. With an AI. [00:23:41] Speaker B: Mike, you've been amazing. [00:23:42] Speaker C: We are so going to get you back on the show in future years, especially when we get near the terminator stuff because I think you're going to have some insights on that. [00:23:50] Speaker B: So just tell us a little bit more what you do with Avenue 9. What do you do to help MSPs and what's the best way to get in touch with you? [00:23:56] Speaker D: Yeah, I talked about how we started with the interviews, but then we build this context layer for a custom GPT or AI and a marketing process and strategy around it. I've kind of find there's, there's three hard parts to marketing. One is like the strategy and finding the story and an angle in your market that works. Two is putting it together into a plan to reach the audience you're trying to reach. And then three is making all of those other formats and channels and messages to reach those people. So one of the cool things about AI is if we do those first two parts right, the third part becomes super easy and you can get nine times the return on your marketing than you were getting two years ago. Because we can now instantly make those marketing messages in other languages. We can turn them into sales pitch decks, social posts, blogs, emails, whatever we need. We can now automate all of the last part of that. But if we do that before we do the context and the strategy, it doesn't work very well. So I'm happy to help anybody do that that wants to try to figure it out. Luckily, I'm an Internet marketer so I'm really easy to find. If you Google, Mike Montague or Avenue 9 will come up right away, but LinkedIn is my preferred platform. I also host a podcast, Human First AI Marketing, where I talk to different AI experts about what they're doing and cutting edge stuff and how people are using it for marketing. If those are interesting for you, go check it out. I'd love to chat Paul Green's MSP. [00:25:21] Speaker A: Marketing podcast, the Marketing Minute. [00:25:24] Speaker E: Hey, this is Ian Luckett from the MSP Growth Hub and my 60 second tip is stop sending text messages on LinkedIn. Send a video message. Now, you might need to practice this a little bit, but the power of having the connection of someone seeing you personalizing their video and giving the message so that they can see that you're an actual human and that you actually care about what they're doing and what you're doing makes it even more powerful and more chance for them to get back to you. So give it a go. Remember to rehearse it first and good luck. [00:25:51] Speaker A: Coming up, coming up next week, next. [00:25:53] Speaker B: Week we're looking at how you can be 10 times more efficient in marketing your MSP in fact, I've got a specific idea which will help to make sure you never waste time again. It's so simple you won't believe you. [00:26:05] Speaker C: Thought of it yourself. [00:26:06] Speaker B: Or if you have, I'm going to suggest you push it to a new extreme. I'll reveal exactly what I'm talking about and how you can do it in next week's show. [00:26:16] Speaker A: See you then for MSPs around the world. Around the World, the MSP Marketing podcast with Paul Green.