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Let’s discuss how MSPs can talk about AI without sounding like everyone else to win more consulting opportunities. Also this week, the pricing page no MSP dares to build, and what are the hot opportunities in the channel right now?
Welcome to Episode 353 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.
AI is probably the single biggest consulting opportunity sitting in front of your MSP right now. But of course there’s a problem. Almost every MSP talking about AI sounds exactly the same as all of the other MSPs who are also talking about AI. So today I want to show you why that’s happening and how to fix it. Let’s talk about how to talk about AI without sounding like everyone else.
If we’re honest, most MSPs are not true experts in AI. I know that you’re very capable users and you probably use Copilot or Claude or ChatGPT. I mean, you probably use all of them, right? You’ve probably had to play with all of the major tools available. But when I say that most MSPs are not AI experts, typically you are just a few steps ahead of the average person, depending on the kind of clients that you deal with.
These days, being an AI expert does only mean being a few pages ahead of everyone else because of course it’s changing so quickly.
I do think there is a big difference between being a capable user and being a credible advisor. They’re two completely different things. And the trap is, for most MSPs, if you are just a few pages ahead of your clients and your prospects that you’ve read a little bit more, you’ve watched a little bit more on YouTube, then you have to be careful not to turn that into genuine expertise. But what you have as an opportunity is the ability to talk to them about AI and how they can roll it out and protect themselves and protect their business. That’s something that they don’t know. And that’s something that even if you are only a few pages ahead of them in the book you still have the ability to talk to them about that.
For example, they might be looking at “How can we use Claude? How can we use ChatGPT within the business?” But they don’t know the questions to ask themselves. So they don’t know the concept of shadow AI, that their business’s data is being loaded into everyone’s personal Claude accounts right across the business. And of course that could be happening right now and they have no idea that this is happening. They don’t know that Copilot has those guardrails that you don’t necessarily get with Claude and with ChatGPT and with the others.
It’s almost a case of because they don’t know what they don’t know, and they don’t know what questions to ask, that’s why you can consult with them about their AI. So you’re not consulting with them about AI capabilities as much as the best way to roll it out across their business. And actually, isn’t that what you do already? You are already a consultant about the best ways that they can roll out technology and max technology in their business, and AI is just another strand of that. But when you are communicating that, you’ve got to be careful not to use generic AI messaging. And this is the issue with general MSP messaging anyway.
You’ve got to be careful not to use generic phrases because when ordinary business owners see the same phrases from all MSPs, it makes all MSPs look the same. And samey kills sales. So it’s exactly the same in AI. Here are some specific phrases that you might inadvertently use which make you sound the same. You might say phrases like “AI is transforming business” or “Unlock the power of AI” or “Stay ahead of the AI curve.” Those by the way, are all phrases which came out of an AI tool. And unfortunately they say nothing because all MSPs could easily put those on their websites or on LinkedIn posts. You look at any kind of vendor’s marketing collateral or emails and they’ll have variations of those kind of themes.
Let me go deeper. Let me give you an example of how not to do it. Imagine a LinkedIn post that says something like, “AI is changing everything. Is your business AI ready? Get in touch to find out how AI can transform your business or transform your operation.” So everything I just said there is technically true, but actually it’s meaningless. Nobody looks at a post like that and thinks, “Oh yeah, this MSP really gets it.” And it’s so easy to put out stuff like that because most MSPs are approaching AI in the same way. And in fact, the same way that they approach everything else in their marketing. They’re looking for that kind of broad, safe, slightly vague messaging often generated by AI, hoping that that’s going to appeal to the target audience. I think the fix is actually not to play it safe and be broad and generic, but you have to go right in to the specific problems that your target market has and be as specific as you can. And specificity sells. If samey kills sales, specificity sells. You try saying that when you’ve had two or three beers.
First off, you need to know your target market and their specific problems. So let’s say you dealt with lawyers, for example, and lawyers was your target market. I know I always pick a vertical because it’s easy, we understand what we mean when we’re talking about the vertical of lawyers. And you ask yourself, “That ICP, that ideal client profile of a lawyer, they’ve got 20 staff, they’re a managing partner, they’re chasing ambulances all day long. What are the specific wants and needs and hopes and fears that that person has, that personality has?” And then when I get down to using AI, what’s the specific things that they are hoping AI can do for them? What do they fear about AI? What do they want from it? What do they need from it? Specific beats broad every single time.
For example, you might say instead of “AI can transform your legal business”, you can say, “We worked with a 12 person legal firm who were still manually copying over case details or looking up case details…” or whatever they’re doing, manually logging time and adding it into invoices for clients. “… And we actually saved them on average one hour and 12 minutes per lawyer per day across the entire business, which across the business resulted in a saving of 150 hours a month. So we freed up 150 hours of billable time every month.” One of the things that we know that lawyers care about is billable time. They want to be suing and doing paperwork, whatever they do. They don’t want to be sitting logging admin stuff. So that’s a very specific example that you can use to talk directly to a legal client. “We saved a legal firm of ours 150 hours a month of billable time that they can now invest back into clients using specific AI tools.”
How you do that is less relevant at this stage than catching the attention of your ideal client prospect, the person you most want to work with, with that kind of specific setup. And you can do that for lots of different clients. There’ll be a version for CPAs, for manufacturers. You can do it for general business clients, although it’s harder to do it for general businesses because for example, a manufacturer has different needs and wants and hopes and fears than a lawyer does. So when you start to try to appeal to everyone, that’s where you start generalising and being broad with your message, and that does not work as effectively as being specific does.
I think the other thing that you can do when you’re marketing your skills in AI or what you can do to help people is not just to talk about the opportunities, but to talk about the risk. You go and look at all the conversations about AI right now, and it’s all about the upside, all the good things that you can do. And no one’s talking about shadow AI. They’re not talking about data leakage, they’re not talking about the real risks of personal AI accounts with company data or rolling out AI across the company with company accounts, but without those data guardrails.
You’ve got people using tools like Claude. They’re rolling out Claude and giving all of their team Claude Cowork and actually that’s kind of terrifying because now Claude has the ability to go and do stuff on their laptop. You and I know that there’s a massive risk with that, but they perhaps don’t know that. So being the MSP who talks specifically about AI risk, maybe putting opportunity and risk together and actually having that conversation, that will differentiate you. Go and look at what other MSPs are talking about AI right now and it’s all of the pros and none of the cons. And maybe actually you want to be seen as that cautious, trustworthy advisor rather than just someone else who’s trying to sell the latest shiny new thing.
And then the third thing, and I’m going to relate this back to what I was talking about at the beginning, is don’t try to be an expert on something that you are not an expert on. As I say, most people are just two or three pages ahead in the book of AI. So don’t position yourself as an AI expert, but position yourself as an expert on strategising and applying AI to the kinds of businesses that you work with. It’s much more powerful to talk about practical applications and all of the risks and how you understand those risks and you understand how to roll it out in a way which is safe for the business and safe for you, a safe use of AI.
I see all of this as really good news because you don’t need to understand how large language models actually work. I know you’ve probably got a vague understanding of it, but you don’t need to be an expert on how they actually work. You don’t need to be an expert on the latest thing that came out yesterday because frankly, it’s tiring trying to keep up with that. You don’t need to worry about all of that kind of stuff because your prospects don’t care about that either. They just need someone they can trust. Trust to translate AI into specific outcomes for their specific businesses. That’s all they want, they want the outcomes, they don’t really care how they get there.
So I believe the MSPs who are going to win more AI consulting this year and next year won’t be the ones who know the most about AI. They’ll be the ones who can explain it and make it relevant to the specific businesses that they want to work with.
Let’s talk about the single most important page which is missing from most MSP’s websites. It is the pricing page. And today I’m going to make the case for why you need to go right onto your website and add a pricing page immediately, like today. In fact, I’m also going to give you nine different ways that you can actually do it. Could you be the MSP that dares to build the ultimate pricing page?
I’ve been doing some research on this, and this isn’t just a thing that affects MSPs, it affects all B2B service businesses. In fact, I found a stat claiming that less than 10% of B2B service businesses have any kind of indication of pricing at all on their website. And obviously MSPs are firmly a part of that. So there’s this guy called Marcus Sheridan. I’ve talked about him on the show before, in fact, I’ve interviewed him on the show. Back in the day, he wrote a book called They Ask You Answer, and then he updated that a couple of years ago, it’s now called Endless Customers.
He has spent years and years studying pricing and why B2B businesses don’t talk about pricing. And he has so much data on this. And he says that when he started talking about this, which is probably about 15 years ago, 98% of all companies weren’t talking about the price of what they do online. And now he estimates that to be around about 94%, but that’s a rubbish shift, right? Almost nothing has changed there. Isn’t that kind of crazy? But Marcus makes a very, very simple point. He believes that 70% of any B2B buying decision, including from an MSP, 70% of it is made before the prospect ever talks to the company. That means people are coming to your website and deciding whether or not to inquire to you, and you have no idea that they’re doing this.
If your website says nothing about price, then you’re kind of invisible.
At the exact moment that they’re making a decision, you are kind of invisible to them. They’re entering your website, they’re making a decision not to work with you, and then they’re going away, partly because you don’t have any pricing information on your website. So I actually partnered with Marcus Sheridan on this because I believe it so strongly. And we built something called msppriceguide.com. It’s an AI-powered price estimator, which is specifically for MSPs. Marcus and his team built the tool. We took a version of it and we added in a whole load of MSP resources and tools into it. And I did that because I wanted to give you a practical way to solve this problem, not just be talking about it.
So why do MSPs avoid having more transparency about their pricing and why don’t they put their prices on their website? Well, it’s probably for the same three excuses that Marcus actually hears from every single industry that he’s worked in, and he’s worked in pretty much all of them. The first is that every client is different, so giving a specific price would be misleading. The second one is if I publish pricing, my competitors will see it. And the third one is that prospects will use the price to negotiate me down before we’ve even spoken. But actually, realistically in 2026, none of these hold up. So your competitors already roughly know what your pricing is, or they could find out in five minutes. Do you really think that one of your proposals hasn’t made its way into the hands of a competitor? It’s already happened. And prospects don’t want an exact number, they just want a kind of a rough indication. They want a sense of scale so they know whether or not to bother inquiring to you at all, because you might be roughly in their ballpark or you might be hundreds or thousands of dollars or pounds away from it.
Here’s the psychology that Marcus talks about. He says, imagine…. it’s almost like take yourself out of B2B, but imagine if you needed a new roof on your house and you Google roofing costs and you go onto four or five different roofing websites, but everyone you find, there’s no indication about price at all. So by the fourth or the fifth or the sixth site, you are not at all impressed. In fact, you’re starting to think, “I’m not really doing research here. I’m not getting anywhere. I have no idea how much it’s going to cost to get a new roof.” And that just makes you feel frustrated because you’re starting to feel like these roofing companies are hiding things from you. And that frustration happens every single day in real life when business owners are researching MSPs. They’re thinking exactly the same thoughts. Why don’t they tell me roughly how much it’s going to cost? What are they hiding from me here?
And there’s a newer reason that this matters even more right now. And that newer reason, obviously, is AI. Marcus has done some latest research on how AI search tools, so like Claude and Copilot and Chat and Gemini, when they’re researching specific purchase intents for people, they are starting to penalise websites that don’t address pricing. Let me say that again because that’s important. If someone says to Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, whatever they’re using, “Hey, this is me. You know this about my business. We’re looking for a new IT support company. Can you go and find two or three people we should be talking to, please, and give me a rough idea how much it’s going to cost?” If those AI agents come onto your website and there’s no indication of pricing, that’s a major negative against you because the AI knows that the human wants to know a rough idea of pricing. So if the AI tool can’t extract a rough price range from your price, they’re dramatically less likely to recommend you in their answer.
This is a big problem and it’s a real problem right now. So what does pricing transparency actually look like for an MSP? As promised, here are several different approaches ranging from a very light touch to a full-on full commitment approach. And your job is just to pick whichever one of these feels achievable for you right now, but then please go and implement it.
Number one: The interactive price calculator. This is a tool on your website where the prospect answers a few basic questions about their business, such as number of users, current setup, and they get an instant rough price range. And that’s the thing that we built at mspriceguide.com to deliver that specifically for MSPs. So you could build your own, of course you could, I know you could code your own. If you just want an easy solution that’s already been built and is already AI powered, go to mspriceguide.com. Obviously the price of it is there on the webpage and it’ll show you what you can do and you can get started with that. You can get it into your website in about 20 minutes or so. It’s really easy to get going.
Number two: Just publish your starting prices. You could simply state on your website, you could have a page which says “Managed IT support starts from X per user per month.” And that X is a dollar price or a pound price or whatever currency you’re in. So there’s no commitment to an exact figure. You’re giving them a starting point, it starts from this. Or I guess you could do a range as well, couldn’t you?
Number three: You could do tiered packages. You could have three clearly labeled tiers, let’s say essential, standard, premium with price ranges or starting prices for each of those. And then just a clear explanation of what’s in each one. And they can see that essentials is this price and standard kind of goes up in price and premium goes up in price from that. It’s very easy for people to understand the pricing psychology of a good, better, best approach.
Number four: You could have a pricing factors page. Instead of giving them a number, you could have a page which explains what affects the price, which is number of users, complexity of infrastructure, compliance requirements, level of support needed, etc. And the idea behind that is you educate the prospect without ever having to give them a specific figure.
Number five: Have published case study pricing. Here’s what a 25 person law firm typically pays for our service. Or here’s what a 10 person accountancy, a CPA firm would typically pay us for our service. So you have some real specific, maybe anonymised examples that give them genuine context. Because if you want to work with 25 people law firms, then giving an anonymised case study of a 25 person law firm, obviously that’s going to attract that kind of customer.
Number six: You could do a cost of doing nothing comparison. Rather than just showing your price, you can show them your price compared to the cost of downtime or the cost of a breach or the cost of losing their client’s trust. And actually, if you set those potential costs against the cost of proper IT support, it makes what you do look like an absolute bargain, which I know it is a bargain. It’s just the clients don’t know it’s a bargain. So that’s a reframing thing. You’re reframing price as a relative rather than an absolute.
Number seven: You could have an FAQ style pricing page. So you answer the actual questions that prospects are typing into Google. How much does IT support cost for a small business? Or what is the average price of IT support? And you give them those kind of answers. Again, this is something that comes from Marcus Sheridan. Go and read Endless Customers. It’s an insanely great book. Every MSP should read Endless Customers. And he talks in there about why you need to answer all of their questions before they ever contact your business.
Number eight: You could do a request a custom quote form. You could say, we’ll get it to you within 24 hours. So it’s not a price that’s on the page itself, but it’s an easy kind of low friction way for them to inquire and get a price. And that does work well with a lot of the options we’ve just been talking about there where you give them indications. The one thing to remember is if your competitors have price on the page, whereas for you, they have to fill in a form and wait 24 hours to get a price, well not only does it give you another job to do, but it slows it down and it does kind of introduce a little bit off friction. Although obviously you can give them a much closer price than they would get just from going through a price calculator.
Number nine: Published minimum and maximum range. You could have a simple statement like, our clients typically invest between X and Y per month depending on size and complexity. And again, that gives them a kind of an idea, gives them an anchor. And you know that every client isn’t identical, but they don’t, so you need to sort of spell that out to them.
You don’t need to do all of these, of course. I would just pick one of the things that we were just talking about there. The point of this isn’t perfection, you’re just trying to make it easier for them to look at you and get a specific idea of roughly how much it may cost them. Those people who are visiting your website but are not contacting you, if there’s no pricing information there, then you are losing those people. And I believe that actually that’s now today a competitive disadvantage, both with the human buyers, but also increasingly with the AI tools that they’re using to do research. So pick one of those approaches and please try to get something live today if you can. It doesn’t need to be perfect, but it does just need to be implemented.
If you are an MSP Marketing Edge member, have you yet joined me on one of our Tactical Tuesdays? This is something new we introduced a couple of months back. We meet as a group for a group call every Tuesday, it’s a live call and a maximum of 60 minutes. It’s very much a discussion, not a presentation, I do talk about a specific subject for about 20 minutes or so, but the MSPs, some of them jump in and interrupt me. Or Sarah, my colleague who’s on the live chat during that call, she’ll jump in and interrupt me if there’s a relevant question. So we very much just talk about that specific subject and then that merges into a general discussion where we’ll talk about their specific marketing problems right now. And sometimes that’s implementing the MSP Marketing Edge system or some other marketing question or just business growth in general.
It’s a really, really good call each week, it’s my favourite thing to do every Tuesday. So if you want to join one of these, they’re at the same time every Tuesday. I won’t give you the time now because obviously it’s different in all the many time zones that we’re in. But go into the portal, go to the navigation, it says Tactical Tuesdays in the middle of the navigation, and please do join me next Tuesday.
If you’re not yet a member, we have two memberships available. There is a B2B one if you want to win business owner clients, and there’s a co-managed one if you want to win IT director clients. And each of these are only available to one MSP per area, check if yours is available at mspmarketingedge.com/membership.
Featured guest: Greg Jones is a #1 Amazon Best-Selling Author in Managed Services, IT Growth, and Business Leadership, a multi award-winning MSP growth strategist, and one of the most influential voices shaping the global IT channel.
As Senior Vice President of MSP Enablement for EMEA and North America at Kaseya, Greg leads strategic initiatives that drive the growth, performance, and long-term success of thousands of managed service providers across multiple continents. His remit spans global partner strategy, enablement, community leadership, and ecosystem expansion, positioning him at the centre of one of the world’s largest and most influential MSP ecosystems.
What I personally love most about this podcast is how it allows me to connect with really important people in the channel who have very valid things to say that we can all benefit from. And my special guest today is definitely one of those people. He’s going to tell us about a project he was working on earlier this year that thousands of MSPs have already benefited from. Plus he’s going to tell us what the hot opportunities are in the channel right now.
Hi, I’m Greg Jones, Senior Vice President of MSP Success at Kaseya.
And very much a friend of the show. It’s good to have you back on, Greg, it’s been a couple of years since you were last on. And I think that’s because you’ve done nothing but fly around the world continuously in that two years. You’re a very difficult man to get hold of, but everyone knows you within the channel. It’s an absolute delight to have you back on. Thank you so much. So we’re actually going to talk about a couple of things today. We’re going to talk about a book that you released, it’s a number of months ago now, I know it’s become a bestseller on Amazon, which is amazing. Congratulations.
And I want to use that book then to go into what the state of the channel is right now as it were. And as I say, as you are someone who talks to MSPs literally every single day, I would say you’re right at the cutting edge of what’s happening out there. So it’d be really good just to get your take on how things are right now, what you think could happen the rest of this year, and of course, as we go through into 2027.
Before we do all of that, for the rare number of people who don’t know who you are, do you want to just give us the 30 second potted history of you and what you’re doing right now at Kaseya?
Sure absolutely. First and foremost, thanks for having me on, Paul, always an absolute pleasure. My name’s Greg Jones, I head of the MSP success arm of the business at Kaseya for the EMEA and also North America region. So what does that mean? Well, it means if you imagine everything kind of away from products and services, really about MSP success. So helping MSPs with their business operational maturity, help with the likes of guidance, sales, marketing, consultancy. I head up a lot of the programs like Kaseya’s global partner program around enablement. I also look after programs like MDF, marketing development funds. I’ve been with the business for around about eight years. Before that, I was on the MSP side of the fence. And then before that, I was at local and central governments working on a lot of large scale IT projects around education, building skills for the future. So yeah, potted history spanning back 27 years now, something like that.
Yeah. It’s scary how quickly those years can go, isn’t it? It really is. So you had a video series on LinkedIn and it was very popular. And am I right that you launched this during COVID back in 2020?
Yeah, it was actually earlier than that, so it was 2019 I launched it. I was out with a partner and he said something that was absolutely gold and I just had to get it out there. It just dawned on me. I was going to take a video of it and I was going to post it. And then it got that many clicks, likes, comments, I just thought “This has got legs. It could move into something.” And also as well, I’m out with MSPs all the time and I thought there’s so much good information out there. And as you know, Paul, we’re better together as an MSP community. Advice, guidance, tips and tricks. Why don’t I do it every single week? Call it one minute Wednesday. Bit of a pun there, it’s never one minute long. And really just sharing tips across the industry. Sometimes it’s me, sometimes it’s MSPs, sometimes it’s vendors, sometimes it’s celebrities, if say we’re coming off stage and there’s a keynote speaker and I can grab hold of them and get them for a couple of minutes. So yeah, that’s really where it started and got traction really quick throughout COVID.
Yeah. I think the reason I probably have it in my head as a COVID thing is because that’s actually how you and I met. And you’d had some seriously top names on that recurring program in that series. And I remember looking at it and I can’t remember if you emailed me or I emailed you, but we were brought together. It was possibly by Mark Copeman, I know you know Mark well, as do I, in fact everyone knows Mark Copeman well. And yeah, it was one of those things during COVID. We all lost weight, we all exercised more, and we all watched your LinkedIn series.
So how long ago was it you turned it into the book? It must be getting on for six months ago now. Tell us what made you decide to take that, I guess anything that’s been on LinkedIn in the past just sits there and no one ever revisits it, was that what motivated you to kind of immortalise it into book form?
Yeah, it’s a really interesting question, it was a number of reasons really. One, if I’m honest, one of my mentors was pushing me to do a book for many years. And also a lot of MSPs that I met or meet out and about say, “Hey, I love your one minute Wednesdays. They’re quick, they give actionable tips and tricks. It’s no fluff, it’s not staged, we make errors in there, there’s bumps along the roads and it’s just raw content for actionable things you can take away.” And then a few MSPs said to me, “You should take that and put it into a book. There is a wealth of knowledge there.”
One of the things I didn’t want it to be about was all about me, if that makes sense. There is that much knowledge and literally hundreds and hundreds of tips that we’ve done every single week over the years. It was one, how do I pick the content, how do I pick the speakers? So I kind of picked a narrative and a theme and reverse engineered it. So it’s not I’m leaving anyone out of the book for a reason, but there was just no way we could get that amount of people into the book. I keep getting asked for volume two, but it was painful enough to get volume one out. So I’m not sure about that.
And that’s really where it developed. It launched in February. It was amazing to see how the MSP community got behind it for an incredible charity, Alder Hey Children’s Charity, but it just blew me away. I knew our industry is incredible and powerful, but I had no idea until that launch day, if that makes sense, just how powerful. Within 14 hours it had become bestseller in the UK, best seller in the US. And within a few days we were over 8,000 copies sold within just a few days. It was mind blowing. It was so nice to see.
Yeah, it’s wonderful. And you did a LinkedIn post just a few days before this interview where you said that up until recently, if you typed in “MSP” in Amazon, your book came up at the top. And do you want to just tell us what’s actually beaten you to the top listing?
Yeah. So I’ve been really, really fortunate because of the MSP community, the book is always, whether you search “Greg Jones” or “MSP” on Amazon it come up as number one. And I was explaining this to somebody and telling them and showing them. And lo and behold, I was beaten on number one spot by the words “MSP”. And I looked and it was a tin of paint, which just blew my mind. So a tin of paint has officially pushed me off number one spot, multi-surface paint.
I love it. Of all the showbiz things to push you off the top spot as well, it was a tin of paint. I just love that. Everyone now should just go and do a test search on Amazon just to see. So let’s briefly finish on the book. You mentioned the charity and I think I’m right in saying all the proceeds from the book have gone to this charity. Now we have listeners and viewers on YouTube all around the world. So can you just explain what that charity is and why you picked it, Greg?
Yeah, so all the profits from the book, even the cost to make the book and everything about that, I took on those costs personally. All of the money that comes in from the book arm goes to Alder Hey Children’s Charity. It is the largest children’s charity in EMEA so it’s in many different countries. It’s based in the Northwest of England and it’s just an incredible charity that just blows my mind. So for many years, I’ve been a business ambassador for them sitting on their boards, facilitating business connections and opening doors, really driving sponsorship and money for the charity arm of Alder Hey Children’s Charity.
I first come across them many years ago when I was on the MSP side of the fence. And it was through a connection back in the early days in BNI, Business Networking Institute. And they had an event at the facility at Alder Hey, and they have what they call the bat cave, it’s an innovations cave around technology. So you can go into the bat cave and see the journey of say a little girl, and you can see her whole hospital journey through technology. So a lot of the technology and surgeons that are there are using technology to push the boundaries of what is possible, if that makes sense. So as to make the experience for the child or the individual when they come in less daunting, but also so the surgeons are more prepared. So for instance, the little girl on this particular day that we followed, she had an issue with her aorta going into her heart. And the surgeons were able to provide scanning and mapping, not only use virtual reality, but augmented reality to walk down the aorta and see the issue so that, it wasn’t 100% lifelike, but they had an idea of what they were walking into before the surgeon made an incision, if that makes sense.
And it’s that being pre-armed and pre-warned really. So even down to the fact of printing organs or veins or vessels and devices out so that they can just feel it, hold it, look at it, get a bit of a better understanding. And a lot of the times, some of these leading surgeons are flying in from across the globe for more of the complex treatments. And quite frankly, I remember being extremely moved that day from a business event, seeing the use of technology having the impact of children’s lives. And I don’t have kids myself, but it just blew me away. And yeah, I knew from that day I wanted to get involved somehow and support that business.
Yeah. I love it. Well, it’s a great book, it’s an incredible charity. The Best of One Minute Wednesdays, it’s on Amazon right now, let’s get it back up to that top spot and beat the paint, I know we can do that. Greg, let’s just finish off by having a little look at what’s happening in the channel right now. So let’s timestamp this interview because let’s be honest, you’re talking there about medical technology, if the medical technology is moving at a fast pace, we know that the channel is moving at the fastest pace ever. So we’re recording this literally right at the very, very beginning of June because we do work so many months ahead on the podcast. So as someone who’s very much in touch and you’re looking at the channel, what are you seeing right now? Are you seeing MSPs excited by AI? Are they feeling threatened by AI? Is it all about AI? We all know that cyber security is still as big as it used to be, even if it doesn’t get as much attention as AI because it’s not new and shiny, but it’s still there. What are you seeing right now? What are the trends?
For the first time ever, we’ve seen SMB/SME spend outpace enterprise spend around technology, which is phenomenal.
You think we should all really be celebrating, but there’s a lot of MSPs that are worrying at the moment in terms of the market. There seems to be this race to the bottom. A lot of SMBs/SMEs challenging around price, but also it’s very competitive at the moment in terms of the services that an MSP needs to deliver to really be successful in the future. I guess what I’m trying to say is what got us here in terms of the services will not be what wins and certainly dominates going forward. Lots of new trends coming in, certainly the likes of compliance as a service with the likes of NIST, HIPAA, DORA GDPR, all of those being mandated in a lot of tenders, RFPs and frameworks.
But also we’re seeing different buying patterns from SMBs/SMEs out there. And I truly believe that it’s because we’re starting to see the younger generation certainly move up into management and even C-suite positions now. And they have a very different expectation of technology. They’re digital natives. They expect instant gratification around technology and have an instant requirement for it. So if they need something, it’s not like me and you, Paul, back in the day, you’d have to put a request in or look at a certain software. They simply just go to a website, sign up to a software as a service and expect it. And that has driven a huge amount of change, but also challenges for MSPs being able to deliver such a wide and diverse range of not only tools and technologies, but skill sets within their MSP business.
So a lot of MSPs are starting to look back at outsourcing, which back in the day sometimes was frowned upon. Well, I’m a big fan of outsourcing or offshoring, providing you’ve got frameworks and processes and procedures in place. It can be incredible to be able to pivot, shift, adapt and evolve really. So it’s very, very interesting at the moment. What I would say is we’ve just launched our MSP report recently, and the number one reason that an SMB will leave an MSP is not because of poor service. It’s actually because the MSP does not provide the tools, the technology, or the service of that business needs to be competitive or win in the marketplace. And you’re right, Paul, it goes back to that AI, automation, machine learning. And a lot of it, when I look back to the roots of it, a lot of it is not leading edge technology. So I’m not asking people on this podcast to run out and buy the latest shiny tech.
A lot of the biggest wins at the moment are coming from helping businesses with flawed business processes and technology sits around that, if that makes sense. So I’m very optimistic. The market is still very buoyant out there. MSPs do need to pivot and adapt. And as always, focus on that sales and marketing. Still seeing MSPs struggling with that massively. So my key focus to all MSPs is focus on that top of funnel sales and marketing.
That’s fascinating. And you’re talking about outsourcing, it’s so interesting, I was talking to one of my MSP Marketing Edge members the other day who was moaning about, “Now we’ve got to do AI have we? Once upon a time we just fixed computers, and then we had to manage all the services, and then we had to do all of this, and then we’ve got to keep them safe and now we’ve got to do this.” And I said, “Well, you could look at it as now we’ve got to do that. Or you could reframe it as what a great opportunity that they’re turning to us to do these things.” And of course there are MSPs that take this even further and they’ll build websites for people and they’ll manage their social media and do all of these things because ordinary business owners will look at a website as a computer thing. It’s not, it’s a marketing thing. But if the business owner sees it’s a computer thing and the MSP either has the skill set or is outsourcing it to a trusted partner as one example, then to me that’s a really interesting thing. So maybe a lot of that, Greg, is then about the mindset. And it’s so easy to do this for 20 years and get really ground down by it because everything’s changing all the time?
It is, but as you say, it’s a huge opportunity. If we look at say the compliance as a service, so that market is tapped to be worth 78 billion by 2028. And the adoption of compliance at the moment is outpacing the likes of cyber security. So it’s a huge opportunity, but also as well, it’s a way that you can have deeper and better conversations with your customers. And as you say, possibly if you haven’t got the skillset to bring it in-house or the resources or the funds, because attracting good talent’s hard and also retaining. Sometimes looking at an outsourcing partner to help with those pieces can be absolutely gold. They’re very agile, you can, in some cases, ramp them up or down, but also it allows you to be able to pivot and adapt. And if you don’t do it as an MSP, trust me, it’s going to cost you business and somebody else is going to offer it. No longer can we say we don’t do that piece. We do everything else, but this piece sits over here. They’re not looking for that. They’re looking for someone with the whole 360 approach to their business around technology.
Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Greg, I could talk to you for hours about this because you’re clearly someone who thinks a great deal about where MSPs are going and what’s developing in the channel. Let’s get you back on the show next year. Just for now, for those MSPs that want to follow you or maybe get in touch with you, what’s the best way to do that? I’m guessing it’s through LinkedIn.
If you’d like to connect with me, please connect on LinkedIn. I’m constantly sharing information to help MSPs grow and scale. Jump over to LinkedIn, type in Greg P. Jones. That’s my URL at the end. And I look forward to connecting with you on there.
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