MSPs: How To Win Back Clients Who Left

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Right, you're here, I'm here. And that means we can crack on with the show. Here's what's coming up today. How to win back a client who dared to leave you for another MSP. The horrendous truth of how MSPs are losing sales opportunities and annoying existing clients on the phone. And heresy. I'm going to introduce you to an MSP who thinks you should sell Google Workspace and not Microsoft. Welcome to episode 354 powered by MSP marketingedge.com Paul Greens MSP Marketing Podcast. I want to talk about a type of prospect that almost no MSP ever follows up with. The prospect is a client who left you in the past. Let me make the case right now for why winning back these kind of people is actually one of the easiest, cheapest, and maybe even most overlooked opportunities in your entire marketing. Winning back a client who left you is up to five times more cost effective than winning a brand new client. Because if you think about it, they already know your name, your reputation. They know roughly what working with you is like, even if you've changed in the years since they left. And yet research consistently shows that most B2B businesses do not do this. Almost three quarters of companies have no win back process at all. They lose a client and that's the end of the story. And so why does this happen? And specifically why does it happen with MSPs? Well, I wonder, is it down to pride and discomfort? Because I don't know about you, but I know for me it feels sometimes a little bit awkward to go back to someone who chose, you know, a competitor over you. And not just it's one thing if you pitch to someone and they choose a competitor in the first place. But if you've worked with someone for a couple of years and then they leave you for a competitor, that's where it almost feels slightly personal, doesn't it? And it can feel a lot more awkward. It almost feels like you're admitting weakness or you're chasing them and you don't want to be. I guess if you put it in like ex boyfriend, ex girlfriend terms, you don't want to be the ex that reaches out, right? Because that's uncomfortable. But they're not an ex boyfriend or an ex girlfriend, they're an ex client. And that discomfort is costing you easy revenue that sat there to be collected. Because let's be clear about the kind of clients we're talking about here. We're about talking, right? We're not talking about the ones that have been acquired by another business, that business is gone. We're not talking about the ones that have gone bust. Obviously, that business is gone as well. We're talking about if they have switched from you to another msp. So let's talk this through and all the, all the sort of, the aspects of it and let's deal with timing first. This matters more than you would think. If you reach out too soon, you're the needy ex. And of course they're still in the honeymoon period with their new provider. But if you reach out too late, you. You've completely missed the window where they realize that the grass wasn't greener on the other side, because that's why someone switches, isn't it? They leave you for another MSP thinking that with that msp, the other msp, the grass is going to be greener. And there does come a point where they realize that actually, yeah, some of the things are going to be different with that other msp, but some things will be worse, some things will be better because every MSP operates and delivers in quite a different way. So we did a little bit of research on this and the research broadly supports a timing window of somewhere between two to six months after they leave. And my gut feel would be towards the back of that. So if they leave you in January, you should be reaching out in June kind of time, or sort of April, May, June kind of time. And most attempts to win back a client happen far too early, right? They happen at the point that someone cancels or the point that the client says, actually we're not going to sign another contract. That's the worst point because that's the point the client is least receptive. And obviously, of course, you should have the conversation about why are you moving. What, what is it that's made you not choose another contract with us? Yes, of course that's a conversation you should have. But if they've just canceled, that's, that's too soon. The, the sweet spot then, and for an MSP specifically, is four to five to six months. That's your kind of target you should go for. And that's long enough for them to have left you be happy with their new provider they've boarded. And, and then it's also enough time for any problems to start to kind of surface. But it's not so long that they have accepted those problems, stop noticing the gaps. Because remember, switching MSPs is a distress purchase for most ordinary businesses. They don't want to switch msps. So if, if they're so motivated to do so. Then there comes a point with their new MSP where they're going to stop, they stop noticing the things that are wrong. But that first four, five, six months is a great time where, you know, all of the joy of the switch is gone. And now they're starting to be like, these are the problems with these guys. Right. The other thing I think you should look out for is trigger moments. So for example, the contract renewal date, if they left you in June, then the chances are that their contract renewal date every year or every two years or whatever is going to be in June, right? So if nothing happens at that six month mark and it's, there's nothing wrong with you reaching out to them a month before their contract renewal every year or every couple of years, whatever it, you know, depending on the contract they've signed, and just checking in with them saying just check and see how everything's going and if it's worth us having a conversation. Right. It's, it's, there are other triggers like this, like if there's a high profile cyber attack in the news or if, you know, for example, if you're getting really good at that AI consulting that we were talking about last week in the podcast, for example, and you notice that the competitor that they've switched to doesn't seem to be pushing that. You know, you can reach out to them, you can say, hey, I hope everything's going great with your, with your new company. By the way, we're now offering some high level AI consulting which is all about implementing safe AI across the business that's got sort of guardrails and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, all of that kind of stuff. So you're looking for these natural reasons to reach out to them and you should do it as I say, you should do it not just once, but do it at that six month mark. Do it at the 12 month contract renewal mark. Reach out if you have a thing that you think you're doing their competitors aren't doing. And at the very least, every single time their contract is up, there's going to come a point when they're going to leave those people. And actually they might have been sitting there thinking, why did we ever leave you? Right? People do that, they go over, they think the grass is greener and they sit there and they say, I wish, I wish we'd never left the other people. So actually when you reach out to them, you, you're being the bigger person and making it easier for them to say, we Made a mistake. Can we come back? Because actually their pride could stop them from reaching out to you and saying, can we come back? Because that's a horrible thing to do. That feels awkward. But if you're the one that's reached out to them, then you're doing the hard work of taking that loss of pride away from them. Does that make sense? Let's talk about how you actually do this. So your tone has to be completely free of any. Why did you switch? I told you so you have to get rid of all of that. I know it hurts when a client, you know it hurts me when a client leaves me. I've been doing, I've been in business for 20 years and every single client leaving has been a stab right into my heart. I'm sure it's exactly the same for you. And your clients are a lot bigger than my clients. So I know that financially it affects you a lot more. But also I'm sure that the knife is going deeper into your heart. And we carry that, don't we, as business owners? It's because the business is our baby. We do take all the good things and the bad things very emotionally. It's a very hard thing to get away from. So. But you have to get rid of all of that. So especially even if you know they've switched to a new provider that you know is just not as good as you, right? So if you know they've moved from a very comfortable experience to something that's not going to be quite so good, obviously you never say that to them. You don't go in and imply it. You don't be smug about it. Right. You have to go in, kind of just removing all of the emotions from it and, and just go in as a friendly person that they used to work with. And then I think you should make the outreach personal and not just personalized. So don't just send them an email or just, just, you know, just send them a standard letter in the post. Why not send them a note from you, like a one on one note. You could actually hand write something or maybe the 20, 26 ways to do a personalized video for them using something like Vidyard or Bombbomb or Bonjouro or one of the other platforms like that. And you might just be, hey, I just wanted to check in, see how it's going. It's been six months since work together, so I was just, I was just curious how everything is. I'm hoping to hear back that everything's wonderful with your new provider. Because you know, I want the best for you. But if, if that's not the case, I'm happy to have a conversation with you. We'd always love to have you back, you know, something as simple as that, but something personal from you as the owner of the business. And I think you should lead with curiosity rather than a pitch. I mean, some specific words you could say. Could be something like, you know, it's been a while since we work together and you can say it's been six months. So I just wanted to check in, see how things are going for you. But as I say, don't pitch that. You can open the door. You can say if ever you wanted to come back, I'm happy to have that conversation. And that's that thing that takes their pride out of it. Now if they do respond and there is a door that's open there, don't rush straight in for a sales pitch because remember, they already know what it's like to work with you. So I would just lead in with questions. You know, how's the new setup working for you? If they're, if they're saying that something's not quite right, then say specifically, can you tell me what wasn't working? Which is good competitor info as well as them telling you what they're not happy about. You know, what's changed since we last spoke? What are some of the areas that you feel have gone down that you want to bring back up? What are some of the areas that you feel were better than we delivered that we can improve for you? So essentially you're saying to them, come back to us. You'll get all the things you used to enjoy and we're going to match the, the things that that other company was good at. Let them tell you what's actually going on because most often they will volunteer the problem themselves. And then if they do come back to you, be very wary of using financial incentives or financial penalties. I have heard of msps who when a client returns to them, they jack the price up. And I can see why you do that. And sometimes it's because that was a long standing client and the price was too low and they left anyway. If you do that, do it for the right reason, do it to equalize the prices, don't use it as a penalty, as a punishment for them, but also don't use a financial incentive to bring them back. Trust me, if they have opened the door and they are willing to talk to you about coming back to your msp, that's the motivation if they're willing to go through a switch again, they feel like they made a mistake and they want to come back to you. They don't need a financial incentive to do that. Giving someone a discount in this instance would just give away your margin. Don't do that. And then finally, don't give up after one message. As I say, it does take a series of of messages to talk to people. So at that six month point you might send them a video, you might send them an email, follow up, you might make a phone call, follow up to them. I know it's awkward, but trust me, at some point you're going to talk to someone and they're going to say, I'm so glad you called, thank you very much. We're all busy these days. We don't have time to watch the videos and the emails and answer the phone all the time because. But if you're gently persistent. I sound like an AI when I say that, don't I? Gently. That's a human thing though. Be gently persistent and just gently keep in touch with them till you have a conversation. You'll know where they are. Sending one video or one email and nothing more these days is just a waste of time, if that makes sense. Now, all of that there, what I've just talked about, that should be built into a standard operating procedure. I know you don't lose clients very often, but. But when you do lose a client, even if it's just once every other year, go to your system, set a date in your reminder system, whatever you use to reach out to them six months later, and build it into how you run the business in the same way that you build in any other piece of marketing. It all has to be a system because in marketing it's only when you've got systems that you really get the most out of it. You know, every MSP has a handful of clients who's left over the years and most of them are sitting in a spreadsheet or somewhere hidden away in the PSA compliance, completely forgotten. Today you could go and find those people, pick two or three who left for reasons that are completely fixable. And why not just send them a one to one video message this week? You might be amazed how many of them have been sitting there wondering if they made the right call in switching to the other guys at all. Paul Greens MSP Marketing Podcast I want to ask you something. How many marketing tactics have you sold, started over the years and then just kind of abandoned them? Maybe it was a LinkedIn push that lasted really well for three weeks and then just kind of died off. Or maybe it was an email sequence that you began but never finished, or a website update that's been in progress now for about a year. And really, this does happen to every msp. And it's not because the ideas were bad. It's because you didn't really know what you were doing, what direction you were going in. There was no map of them, of the progress you needed to make, of the direction you needed to go in, no clear order to follow. You didn't know what was next after the current thing was done, or how long you needed to go with that current thing. And that's exactly why I created my marketing wall Planner that has 36 actions in the order that you should do them. And it's on one large planner that you literally, physically put up on your office wall. So you always know what comes next. Now, this is completely free. I post it to you at my own cost. There's no catch of any kind. You don't have to. I'm not going to try and sell you a subscription off the back of it. You don't have to put your credit card in. You don't even have to cover the postage. I print it at my cost. I mail it to you in the physical mail at my cost. I do this so we can start a business relationship. So to get one of these, go to mspwallplanner.com you can do that right now or scan the QR code that's on screen right now if you're watching on YouTube. I want to talk about something that I think is a big problem across the whole channel, and that is the phone, or specifically how badly so many MSPs handle phone calls. Sometimes I chat to other vendors and they tell me horror stories about ringing an msp. And they ring and ring and ring, and no one ever answers the phone. So today let's go through some of the crimes that MSPs commit on the phone. And because actually, if this is you, I know you don't want the vendor salesperson getting through to you. But what if it was a prospect? What if it was a client trying to get hold of you? Let's start with that most basic crime of all, which is not answering the phone. And a surprising number of MSPs, which are businesses built on providing a reliable support service. It's surprising how many just don't pick up the phone. It rings out or it goes to a generic voicemail. Now just think about how mad that is you're in the business of being reliably available for your clients. So your own phone, phone behavior must reflect that. And if they can't reach you on the phone because you're busy, then it's saying completely the opposite of we've got your back. And there is some research on this as well. Around 75% of callers report feeling really frustrated when they can't reach a real person, especially when they're already stressed about a problem that they've got, which is basically your clients. So here's the prospect version of this. If a potential client is ringing you to ask a question or book an appointment and they get no answer, no one answers the phone that says to them, you are not open for business and they will not call back unless they are desperate to work with you. Perhaps because they were referred to you, they're much more likely to move on to the next MSP that's been recommended to them by their AI tool. They don't leave voicemails, they don't try again. They just go elsewhere. And you might never know that you missed out on a hot opportunity. Right. The second crime is the generic and unhelpful voicemail. Hi, you've reached the office of XYZ it. Please leave a message. I promise never to do an accent ever again. No, but if there's no name, no warmth, no kind of real human being at the end of it, then it tells the caller nothing about that business and whether even they'll hear back. So don't have a hi, thanks for calling kind of voice message. Have a real person saying, hello, it's Dave here from XYZ it. Hey, do you know what? We're really busy at the moment or we're, we're supporting all of our clients at the moment. Leave a number, we're going to call you back within the next 15 minutes. That's all right. There's nothing wrong with a voice message like that. Crime number three is the call that goes to the wrong person. So a client rings with an urgent issue and ends up speaking to whoever happens to grab the phone, who maybe isn't equipped to help them and fumbles around and puts them on hold or promises a callback that then doesn't happen. So you've got to make sure that existing clients are getting right through, straight through to the help desk. I would say the way to do that is one number for support, another number for everyone else. Right. I know you can do the whole. Press one for this, press two for that. We're going to talk about that in a second. But if you've got a number that's coming into help desk and all of your help desk people are busy, you could then divert that call to a call answering service. So at least another human is talking to your human client and saying, oh, hi, yep, no, I'm on the help desk team, but I'm not able to help you myself. I'm going to get Dave to give you a call back in five minutes. Something like that would be a very simple way of doing it. Crime number four is actually having your senior engineers answer all of the calls. That to me feels like a waste of their time. And you could think it sounds good to the clients and kind of helpful for them on the surface, but actually if your senior staff are constantly being interrupted picking up the phone and having to talk about a password reset or a new user, then they're spending too much of their high level time on low level issues. This is why having a dispatcher is such a great thing. It's something we talked about in a previous podcast. Someone whose job it is just to answer the phone, reassure the clients, and then sort of route that work out to the technicians. In fact, often if you have a dispatcher, you don't need to hire so many technicians, which is great. It's easier to hire a dispatcher than it is a new technician. Crime number five is the triage black hole. A call comes in, it gets logged as a ticket, but the caller doesn't know what's going to happen next. They don't know if it's urgent or not. They don't know if it's a priority, if someone's going to get back to them. So them calling in and hearing nothing back, that's almost as damaging as you not answering the call in the first place. Crime number six is treating every client the same, regardless of urgency. So someone calls up and it's, it's a password reset or it's a new user thing or whatever, and that gets the same kind of response time or the same kind of, yeah, we're going to look into it. As someone who calls up and says, I've got 20 staff here who no one can access the Internet, we can't do our work. You and I know one of those is an emergency, one of them is not an emergency. And clients really remember how they felt and about how you dealt with them during their moments of panic. So you've got to be able to say to them, right, this is a number one priority for us. We're going to go and press some buttons, find out what's happening. We're going to call you back in the next 15 minutes versus yet we can get you a new user set up. I'll be honest, this isn't a priority for us, it's a priority for you. I know. And. Oh, so your member of staff has already started yesterday and you didn't tell us? Not a problem, Just fill in a form. I'll send you the form through now. Fill that in and we'll get that done for you in the next hour. Or whatever is the case. Crime number seven is when they ring and they have to press 1 for accounts, 2 for support, 3 for sales, 4 if you're a vendor and I'm going to cut you off, et cetera, et cetera. What's that called? Is it ivr? Is it? People hate that. I know it's efficient, but if there's like four, five, six people in your business and they have to stab the buttons to get through to someone, it's really, really frustrating. There's a bank here in the UK called First Direct, and I haven't phoned them for many years, but I have an account with them. I have an account with lots of banks here in the UK and I know that if I phoned them back in the day, they used to. Their thing used to be 247 banking on the phone, right? And if you phoned them within three rings, you were through to a human, even at four in the morning. And I did used to call them at 4 in the morning when I was a radio presenter and I was ringing up to check something in my account while I was driving into work. It was great. And you never had to go through the beep, beep, beep, pressing buttons, all the different options, or even worse when you have to say to them. And that was one of the reasons I stayed with that bank and I loved them, because compared to ringing the other banks where it was, you know, you have 17 options, it was so frustrating. So if you have one of those IVRs or whatever they're called, just consider getting rid of it. Having someone, a human, who answers the phone and diverts the call to whoever needs is so much better because the human is talking to the human straight away. And I know there's AI things and there's automated things and this and that, but the more people put in place AI things, the more I believe actually real humans talking to real humans is absolutely the right thing. Right. Another crime is after hours in emergency Calls that nothing ever gets acted on. So something breaks for someone at 8pm on Friday. They can't reach anyone, they've left a voicemail, they're stranded. You know, they feel uneasy and that's not a good thing at all because actually they're going to be a little bit upset with you. Even though you, you, you know, you finish at 5 or 6 on a Friday and you're back on a Monday morning and you've told them that till they're blue in the face. And the voicemail said that it might be worth looking at. What if There is a 24 hour call answering service that I. Either they can just talk and log a ticket with and then perhaps that text comes through to your engineer or your duty engineer or whatever. Or actually look at an outsourced help desk for your, for your downtime. As your MSP gets bigger, you need to consider things like 24. 7 support. And most of the time it's actually just a few hours in the evening when we're doing a bit of work or a Saturday. It's never, rarely four in the morning. But once you've got that in place, that's a good value add for your clients. So what does good actually look like? Here are a few principles that I think are worth you taking seriously. So I think every call should be answered every time by a real human. The data that we've looked up on the Internet shows that person. People want a person and not an automated system, especially when they're stressed, which is your clients or maybe even your prospects. Prospects can get stressed because they don't want to have to switch from one MSP to another, but they do it. You should have a proper triage process. Someone whose job is to pick up the problem, understand the urgency, ask the right questions and prioritize it. That's your dispatcher. It shouldn't be your most senior engineer who's doing that. You should set clear expectations on every single call. If you can't fix it immediately tell them what happens next and roughly when they're going to hear from you. And get rid of that uncertainty. Because it's the uncertainty that creates the frustration, not the actual waiting itself. Pull together a plan for out of hours emergencies, whether it's just a third party answering service, just so a human feels that they've been heard, or whether it's a proper IT help desk. And this is the one that connects directly to your marketing. Every single phone interaction, whether it's with a prospect or an existing client, is a marketing moment. It either reinforces the trust you've worked so hard to build, or it undermines it. And one other thing. Make sure every single member of your team knows that if a prospect ever calls in and shows any interest in working with you, that is the highest priority call that can ever come into your business. Make sure they understand the very simple system to get hold of either you or who does the selling. And what happens if you or that person are on a vacation, a holiday, so that that person, the prospect, can can speak to someone immediately, ideally without them ever having to be called back. Here's an idea. Go and test your own phone system this week. Ring it from your mobile. Experience exactly what happens when your prospects and clients ring up. Or maybe do it from someone else's mobile so they don't recognize the number. If what you hear embarrasses you even slightly, you've got to fix that. In fact, you've got to fix it before you spend another penny generating more leads or working on your client retention. Because right now you might be losing leads or even just annoying customers when they're phoning you up. The Ms. MSP Marketing Edge Member Update if you're an MSP Marketing Edge member, don't forget that you have unlimited access to world class support. And I know that every vendor says they have great support, but we genuinely do because we know that one of the reasons you join us is because marketing feels very difficult to you and it's the complete opposite of the tech work that you enjoy. So I have a team of people who are there to answer your text questions. So if you email into us for example or use like the chat on our website or on our portal, but also they will jump on one to one calls with you and that's to help with any aspect of your marketing that you're stuck on, not just implementing the MSP Marketing Edge system. In fact every week we do loads of calls with our members just to help them get past their problems. So if you want to access that, just go to support in the portal. It's there at the top of the navigation. And if you're not yet a member we have two memberships available. We have a B2B one if you want to win business owner clients and we have a co managed one if you want to win it director clients and each of those is only available to 1 per area, 1 MSP per area. So check if yours is available. Just put your postal code or your zip code [email protected] Membership Paul Greens MSP Marketing Podcast. Surely this is heresy. We all know that 99.84% of the channel sells Microsoft and all right, yeah, I made that stat up, but it's probably not that far off. And yet this MSP believes that you should instead be selling Google Workspace. Get your rotten tomatoes and eggs ready as we put him in the stocks and let him try to convince you himself. [00:25:38] Speaker B: Hi, I'm Dan Taylor, I'm the owner of AppCDU. We're an MSP focused mostly on the education vertical and focused on Google. And I also run a system called Workspace Audit. [00:25:48] Speaker A: And thanks so much for joining me on the podcast, Dan, because we are going to go into dangerous territory today because one of the things you want to talk about is why MSPs should be selling Google Workspace. And already I can hear thousands of people across the world going. A deep intake of breath at the thought of selling Google Workspace instead of selling Microsoft. But we're going to explore that today and I know you do a lot of that within your msp and we'll talk about the audit tool that you have as well. But just give us a bit of background about you. So we can hear that you're British, but you're not based in the uk. In fact, from, from what you and I were just saying before we started our interview, you've got a very international business by the sound of it. [00:26:23] Speaker B: Yeah, that's right. I mean, we work with international schools, so they're obviously international. I'm from the UK, from Yorkshire, but I've been in Prague for 20 years, just outside Prague. My team's in Philippines, UK, Czech Republic and Dubai. So really, really very international and focused on. On schools. [00:26:38] Speaker A: Yeah. And so do you work with schools in lots of different countries as well? [00:26:41] Speaker B: Exactly, yeah. I mean, international schools. So you probably know, I mean, it's a huge market. I mean, if you say, say Dubai, for example, there's almost 300 international schools in Dubai. Bangkok, there's 200. You can pick, pick a city across Asia or the Middle East. There's. It's a big market. [00:26:55] Speaker A: Yeah, no, it sounds like it. And it's interesting that your, your MSP is highly focused on the education sector because the small number of MSPs that I know who are Google shops, essentially they resell and recommend Google Workspace. Not all of them, but many of them do tend to be more education focused than business focused. And that's one of the things I hear from msps when I talk to them, is not a Criticism, but an observation that ah, Google, that's not for businesses. But I guess your message is that's not actually the case. [00:27:23] Speaker B: It absolutely isn't. And you know, although, you know, we very much, most of our history we have been education. We're now working with more and more businesses, even up to some enterprise as enterprise customers, 30,000 user businesses. So it's really changing and we can talk a bit about that later about how it's shifted from education to business. [00:27:42] Speaker A: Yeah, well let's do that now because we're not having a technical conversation about Google today. Obviously we're looking at this from a revenue, from an opportunity and an operations point of view as an msp. Well, let me first of all declare we use Google. So within the MSP Marketing Edge, we're a Gmail business and that was a conscious choice of mine 10 years ago because I don't like Microsoft products. Don't tell anyone that, you know, so I'm, I'm, I'm a big fan. You know, it, it just works. And I know people laugh at me when I say oh, we use Gmail because it just works. But guess what? It does just work. And I see what the hell that msps have to go through sometimes with Outlook and all of the other associated things. From, from your point of view, is it, is it simply a case that it's easier to use and administrate or is it, is it a case that there are, it opens up other opportunities or is it, is it something else? [00:28:30] Speaker B: You know. Yeah, it's interesting. I mean it's basically a religious war. Microsoft, Google. I mean I've been a member of some MSP forums and just posting Google question got me hate. I mean if you promote Google, some people see it kind of as an attack on their existence. I just want to say I'm from the Microsoft world. I was an mcse. That was my background for many, many years until I discovered Google. But definitely it's changing a huge amount and really becoming a big business thing. I mean before, you know, like education wise. I mean just some numbers for you. In the US it's roughly 80% of schools use Google Workspace, so. And it's 60% in the UK. So you know, it's, it's a huge number, but that's also increasing with business. [00:29:10] Speaker A: Yeah. And I guess I wonder if Google's playing a very clever long game in that they are. Well, I'll give you, I'll give you an example of some software from a previous career of mine. So I Used to be in radio. I used to be a radio presenter and we used to use a piece of software to schedule the music on the radio stations called Selector. And the people who owned Selector, which did dominate the market, they gave the software for free to all of the universities and anywhere there was a student radio station. So all of the students and like the next generation of radio people grew up using that software. So then when they came into the workplace, they already knew how to use it. Do you think that's one of the things that Google's trying to do with its education program? [00:29:45] Speaker B: Absolutely. I mean, it's the crack dealer business model. You know, you get people hooked on your product and then you hope they keep using it afterwards. And, and you see that in the numbers. I mean, small businesses, businesses of one to nine people overwhelmingly use Google workspace. You know, I mean, roughly if you talk about the numbers, it's, you know. Well, actually overwhelmingly it's like 60, 40 Google to Microsoft and that switches when you get to above nine people. But yeah, absolutely, I think that's Google's, Google's in. And I think the other way they've got in after the university is startups, you know, because that's overwhelmingly Google startups, FinTechs, it's like 95% your workspace. [00:30:22] Speaker A: So for you as an MSP, as you're supporting these larger businesses, what are some of the, again, without getting technical, but what are some of the limitations that hold you back with Google or have they sort of ironed those out over the years? [00:30:34] Speaker B: You know, I think if you're coming from, it's 100% cloud based. That's the thing. So if you're coming from a world where you want to have desktop apps and you want to have that kind of syncing and that experience, I think Google is very hard. You know, I think limitations, I mean, you can look at individual apps. I mean, most people would say Excel has got more functionality than Google Sheets, Outlook has got more functionality than Gmail. So you could probably say, you know, it is a bit more of a basic solution, although it is catching up and there's a lot of integration. But I think that would be the main, the main criticism would be, you know, some of the apps are a bit more basic, but I would say it's more than compensated by the simplification of the administration and the management of it. Yeah. [00:31:13] Speaker A: So looking at it from a, from an operations and a profit point of view, then I guess you're spending less time playing around with settings to achieve the Things that people want. But how does that affect you from a revenue point of view? You know, do people expect to pay less for for Google Workspace and is there less margin for you because they're buying something when. And you know, everyone has a free Gmail and everyone, you know, they see Gmail or Google Sheets as a schools thing. [00:31:38] Speaker B: Yeah, it's a really good point and it's hard for me to answer that because I've never supported Microsoft customers. I've only as an MSP in my Microsoft career, I was an employee. But I think yes, I would say the revenue, anecdotally the revenue would be lower you'd make per customer, per se in Google compared to Microsoft. But on the plus side, you would be able to take on more customers. I think it would work out Net you would make higher income and obviously reselling the licenses, you'll get a similar margin, you know, reselling Google licenses that you would get reselling Microsoft licenses. [00:32:09] Speaker A: Yeah, that makes perfect sense. And then the final thing I guess we have to look at is AI. So obviously Copilot is now starting to mature as a product. And one of the reasons you'd integrate that into 365, 365 is because of the guardrails and the ability to do things with Copilot that you can't do currently with Claude and ChatGPT, etc. In terms of Google's Gemini, is that as mature a product yet in terms of those business guardrails? [00:32:36] Speaker B: I mean, again, your audience is going to hate me, but I think it's night and day how much better it is. I mean, if you look at most of the recent benchmarks, Copilot against Gemini is streets ahead. Gemini has suffered in the past from not being as well integrated into all the apps, like taking something from a Google sheet and putting it into Gmail. But with the new updates literally this month, you can do all that. So it's definitely, you know, as an AI LLM and a model, it's much better. [00:33:01] Speaker A: Okay. It's a very objective thing though, isn't it? Which LLM is better? And just by the way, just as we recorded this in May 2026, I say that because obviously by the time this gets broadcast, the whole world could have changed. Again with AI, that's typically what happens. [00:33:16] Speaker B: I mean, another thing to add as well, Paul, is that, I mean, people often dismiss Google because they say, I mean, let's talk about again, some numbers. If you talk about the enterprise market, it's almost 80% Microsoft and it's almost just over 20% Google. But then, so they say, okay, that's only 20%, but that's 20% of a huge market, you know, billions and billions of pounds and dollars market. So, you know, and I would say even though the Google MSP market is competitive, it's less competitive than Microsoft and it's definitely less competitive relative to the number of customers out there. So you know, compare competition per customer is, is better in the Google sphere than it is in the Microsoft sphere. [00:33:53] Speaker A: Yeah, interesting. Okay, so if you're listening to this or watching this on YouTube and you have, you have hate mail, don't send it to Dan, don't send it to me, just put it on Reddit. I think that's probably the best place for all the next. [00:34:04] Speaker B: Yeah, I don't mind, I can take. [00:34:06] Speaker A: Okay. Okay, well just as long as I don't get it, that's fine. Because I don't like emails like that. Let's talk about your, your SaaS business that you've put together. So this is something that directly relates into Google Workspace, isn't it? [00:34:18] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. It's called the tools called Workspace Audit. And we've done a tool which simplifies the management, not just security, but operations of Google Workspace. I mean, as I mentioned, Google Workspace is simpler. There's one admin console, whereas Microsoft, you've got multiple systems. You know, like you've got the admin center, you've got the exchange portal, you've got all kinds of things, you've got one admin center, but still there are hundreds of settings in different places. So we've made a tool that allows you to go through, identify the high priority issues, fix, fix them in an orderly way, get a security score. And if you've got multiple MSP is one thing that's very interesting. You've got multiple customers, which you do. You can manage all in one portal. So you can manage all of your Google customers in one portal, track the scores, even manage things like third party apps, DNS settings, everything in there. So that's what our SaaS has created. We created it for sell to businesses and schools, but we're getting more and more interest from msp. So that's great. [00:35:11] Speaker A: Great. And I'm guessing this is one of those tools that you built to fix your own frustrations. [00:35:15] Speaker B: Exactly, exactly. We've been doing security audits. One thing most MSPs do is security audits. We've been doing that for decades and we built this to simplify that and it kind of grew and now it's our main thing. I'm an MSP operator myself still now, even with this, so we know what's required. [00:35:31] Speaker A: All right, Dan, thank you so much for your time telling us about that. So just tell us, what's the website address to go and find out about that tool? And, and also for those MSPs that just want to reach out to you and just have a chat with you, where do we find you? I'm guessing LinkedIn is the best place. [00:35:44] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. The website is workspace audit.com you can email me dan apps edu.com apps edu or [email protected] and search for Dan Taylor, LinkedIn. You'll find me and it'd be great to connect with anyone. [00:35:57] Speaker A: Coming up, coming up next week. Thanks for listening or watching this week. Next week we're going to do one of our infamous deep dives into a specific vertical. Vertical is financial services, including insurance brokers. So if you want to win more financial services clients, we're going to delve into why they switch MSPs and how to influence them at a psychological level to pick you. See you then for MSPs around the world. Around the World, the MSP marketing podcast with Paul Green.