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Welcome to Episode 277 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…
Does this sound familiar? Are you completely overwhelmed with what marketing you should be doing in the short amount of time you have to do it? Well, many MSPs are in this exact situation. There’s so much information and advice out there, the problem is actually cutting through all the noise and figuring out exactly what you should do and in what order.
I spent years figuring this out and refining it. And finally, you can discover the most important marketing things that will bring new leads into your MSP. They’re all in my brand new, easy to read book. Stick around for some of the best highlights.
One of the coolest things about recording a podcast or doing YouTube videos or even writing a blog every week is that it allows you to go back and see where your mind was years and years before. I’ve been working with MSPs since 2016, and the core marketing advice that I’m giving to you today is no different to the advice that I was giving nine years ago. Sure, some of the tactics have changed, but the good solid basic marketing strategy is exactly the same. Because a good strategy doesn’t change for decades, it’s just the tactics that change.
What I’ve really noticed over the last four or five years is that I’ve got considerably better at explaining what you should do in an easier and easier way. And I’ve spoken to thousands of MSPs over the years and I realised that the majority of them, they don’t want highly advanced marketing tactics and clever strategies that are actually quite difficult to implement.
The vast majority of MSPs I speak to just want marketing to be easy. They want clear, simple recommendations of what to do and how to do it.
And that’s driven me to refine my three-step lead generation system and the tasks that I believe you most need to do are contained within that. Now, I don’t think this is a mission that’s ever really completed, but in the last year or so, I believe I have made a big jump forward. And one thing that’s helped me with that is writing a book on this subject. It’s actually just gone on sale on Amazon worldwide. You can get it on your Kindle, including in the free Kindle library thing. You can also get a paperback copy. Now I’ve written a few over the years, but I genuinely believe that this one is the most powerful book I’ve ever written, because it’s the easiest to understand.
It’s called MSP marketing: Start Here. And I actually physically wrote the first version on an eight hour flight from the UK to Las Vegas when I was speaking at Scale Con in October, 2024. And then I took a few months to refine it and refine it again and just simplify everything down.
Now the book is designed to be a short, 60 minute read. I want it to be super easy for you to pick it up and read it in one or two sittings and just walk away with a very clear checklist of exactly what you need to do to build audiences of people to listen to you, grow a relationship with them using content marketing, and then convert that relationship, convert them from lead to prospect to client.
I’ll let you into a little secret. This is actually the first of a whole series of books that I’ve got planned. You should see my master plan word document, I already have the next five books all planned out chapter by chapter. So this one, this first book is called MSP marketing: Start Here because it’s designed as the start point. This is the one book that I wish I could get all 40,000 MSPs on the planet to read. If it could be one book, it would be this book.
I try not to do really overt plugs in my videos and on the podcast, but I’ve got to be honest, if there’s one book that you should buy and read this year, please make it this book. It is just a 60 minute investment, I promise you. And I help you make the link between how important good marketing is to live the lifestyle you most want to live. I’m not joking. If you can set up a marketing system that helps you to onboard one new client a month or whatever your MSP can handle, that will change your life forever. You’ll have a great cashflow, great profits, and ultimately you’ll be able to live exactly the lifestyle that you want to live.
In this book, I take you through my three step lead generation system. I tell you about the 11 tasks that are contained within it. It’s all there on the page, and as I said, you can read it as a paperback or on your Kindle. And I should have an audible version out later in the year. Did you know you have to kind of audition for Audible? Got my posh British voice on to do my best audition. Anyway, go and search Amazon now, MSP marketing: Start Here. Follow my easy plan and you really can change your life.
I’ll let you into a little secret. This is actually the first of a whole series of books that I’ve got planned. You should see my master plan word document, I already have the next five books all planned out chapter by chapter. So this one, this first book is called MSP marketing: Start Here because it’s designed as the start point. This is the one book that I wish I could get all 40,000 MSPs on the planet to read. If it could be one book, it would be this book.
I try not to do really overt plugs in my videos and on the podcast, but I’ve got to be honest, if there’s one book that you should buy and read this year, please make it this book. It is just a 60 minute investment, I promise you. And I help you make the link between how important good marketing is to live the lifestyle you most want to live. I’m not joking. If you can set up a marketing system that helps you to onboard one new client a month or whatever your MSP can handle, that will change your life forever. You’ll have a great cashflow, great profits, and ultimately you’ll be able to live exactly the lifestyle that you want to live.
In this book, I take you through my three step lead generation system. I tell you about the 11 tasks that are contained within it. It’s all there on the page, and as I said, you can read it as a paperback or on your Kindle. And I should have an audible version out later in the year. Did you know you have to kind of audition for Audible? Got my posh British voice on to do my best audition. Anyway, go and search Amazon now, MSP marketing: Start Here. Follow my easy plan and you really can change your life.
Did you know that people only buy managed services for one of two reasons? So if you want to make more money, you need to understand and get comfortable with these two reasons. It’s then, and only then that any marketing you do can actually be effective and not a complete and painful waste of time.
Let’s take a brief dive into what these reasons are, how you can influence the way your prospects see you, and ultimately make a ton of money for your MSP.
Tell me, have you read a book called Ready, Fire, Aim by Michael Masterson. It really is a great book packed with goodies, and I love the emphasis inside on taking action. I was flicking through it again just a couple of weeks ago when I re-read the section on something called frontend/backend sales. And the frontend is what new clients see and buy, so this is the core products that they see you selling and they use to compare you against other MSPs. So for you, that might be the basic support you offer, or if you’re still doing break/fix, it would be that.
Now the backend is all of the other products and services that clients go on to buy once they’ve bought the frontend. That’s a recurring service contract, it might be some kind of software, maybe even hardware, particularly if they’re doing hardware rental through you and of course projects. Lots of lovely backend for you. And typically backend sales are far more profitable because you don’t have to pay the cost of acquiring the client again, they’re already your client, and B, you already know them. So the impact of delivering the extra service is less.
Remember, the goal here is increasing profit, not just turnover. Anyone can grow a business at the expense of profit. The trick is to grow turnover and net profit at the same time. And for that, you need to sell a lot more in the backend. People only buy for one of only two reasons, sometimes they buy for both those reasons, but you need to feed both of these in the backend services that you sell.
Most purchases are made to either fix a problem, we call these needs, or they are to make the buyer feel good, we call those wants.
You should have an almost endless supply of backend services to meet both of these criteria. But focus more on the wants than you do on the needs. Michael Masterson writes in his book that 90% of all purchases are made to satisfy wants. Once someone’s a client, they will buy more from you so long as you put more of the right things in front of them. So here are three questions to ask yourself.
Number one: What problems do my existing clients have? What desires do they have? Number two: What products and services can I offer to meet those wants and needs? And number three: How do I communicate those products and services in the least salesy and most efficient way? Now, this next bit’s interesting because the answer to question one will come from talking to your clients. The answer to question two will come from talking to your clients. And guess where the answer to question three will come from? Yes, it’ll come from talking to your clients. It really is as simple as that.
In fact, you should systemise you or whoever is the big decision maker in the business talking to clients at least once a week. If you are the CEO of a grocery store, you’d go onto the shop floor to do this, and your equivalent to the shop floor is manning the help desk for a couple of hours. Or if you can’t do that, then make customer satisfaction follow up calls. Or if you don’t want to do that, perform some formal strategic reviews or QBRs, quarterly business reviews as they’re known. Or just pick up the phone and just call a couple of clients every week just for a chat. It’s possible to be close to clients and how they’re feeling without losing the necessary helicopter view needed to lead the business into the future. In fact, if you want to feed your backend of extra services you can sell them, it’s essential to do this.
Featured guest: Patrick O’Donnell is SVP, Americas Sales, Barracuda (a cyber security solutions provider) where he is responsible for accelerating Barracuda’s sales, driving the go-to-market strategy, execution, and programs for the sale of security, data protection, and XDR offerings through the channel.
Building a successful MSP isn’t just about what you do, it’s also very much about the way you think. There’s a whole movement towards a very specific way of thinking. And if you and your technicians have this way of thinking, then you’ll achieve immense things. And if you don’t, frankly, you’re probably going to be battling against the wind.
My special guest today, he helps MSPs to embrace this mindset, and he’s going to explain it to you in a way that makes it so easy to understand and implement within your business.
I am Patrick O’Donnell. I’m Senior Vice President for the America Sales for Barracuda Networks based in New York.
Amazing. And thank you so much for joining me on the podcast, Patrick. So we are going to explore something today called a growth mindset, and why every owner and manager of an MSP needs to have a thing called a growth mindset. And don’t worry, in this interview, we are going to explore what exactly that is, where it’s come from, and Patrick’s going to make it really, really easy for us.
Let’s learn a little bit about you first of all, Patrick. You work for Barracuda, tell us what you do at Barracuda and what’s your background.
So my background really since I got out of grad school, has been in sales and in tech sales. I started with IBM, most of my career spent at IBM, both in the US and overseas in Asia and China and Japan. Worked for GE for a little bit, their GE digital division. In the last several years I was priorly at Datto, and for the last year and a couple of months, I’ve been at Barracuda. So I run the US North America sales organisation for Barracuda. We’re a fairly well-known cyber security company.
I’ve been in business for 21 years, 100% channel focused, helping our customers and our partners solve challenging cyber security and helping our customers protect against threats. Whether it’s email network security, application security, or things like extended detection and response, 24/7 security operations centre. We cater to all kinds of partners, resellers, VARs, solution providers, as well as MSPs. And MSPs serve a lot of customers who may not be as sophisticated in terms of having large IT staffs or chief information security officers. They’re fairly underserved, but what they do know is they do need security and they see the evolving, expanding threat vectors, and they want to be protected against that. So we help our partners protect their end customers.
Amazing. We’ll talk a little bit more about Barracuda towards the end of the interview. You sound like you’ve had one of those cool careers where you get moved abroad and you get to live in another culture and really enjoy yourself for a couple of years. Now, I’ve never done that, and I suspect the vast majority of people that are listening to us or watching this on YouTube have never had that kind of corporate, you get a week’s notice to move to Japan or something like that. Is that as cool as it sounds, or is it actually a bit of a drag when it happens?
Well, anytime you move, it’s stressful, there’s always stress, and we had young children at the time, but we loved living in Japan and we loved living in China. We were there for about five years in total. So a great experience for the family, for myself, to experience other cultures and be resident in that geography is a gift. It was a gift to me and a gift to my family and my kids. It’s an experience they’ll never forget, nor will I. And so it was a lot of fun. But yeah, moving halfway around the world does introduce some stress. But it’s a great company behind us with IBM and great markets in which to sell and serve and support customers. I love living in Asia. It was a great experience.
And then one day you got the phone call, you’re coming back to New York. It’s like, oh, do I have to really? Anyway, we are talking about this thing called a growth mindset today. Let’s start right at the beginning. Let’s assume that our MSPs listening and watching this have never heard of growth mindset before. So can you introduce us to the basics? What is this, where does it come from, and why is it so important?
I think a large part of what we’re going to talk about with growth mindset is based on some work from a pretty renowned psychologist, a professor at Stanford University, Carol Dweck. And for anyone who’s interested and may not have read her book, she actually wrote a book about this, which is incredibly instructive, it’s very interesting. It’s called Mindset, the New Psychology of Success. A lot of things I’m going to be talking about as it relates to whether it’s MSP or end customer or any type of partner or any individual or any company, it’s based on her work. And so her research is on this concept of mindset. There’s a growth mindset and there’s a fixed mindset. And so she talks about the difference between those two sets of beliefs and how they could impact the firm in a good way and in a not so good way. And how do you recognise that and how is that translated into behaviours? And how can you get your team, whether you’re a team of two or a team of 10 or a team of 300, how can you get your employees and your management team adopting a growth mindset versus a fixed mindset? And what does that look like?
That’s the basis of the growth mindset research that she’s done, to help companies and people understand where they fit, how they can adopt some of the growth mindsets. And what are some of the downsides that business owners, particularly MSP owners, need to be sensitive to recognise when it exists and what did they do about it.
Yeah, no, that makes perfect sense. So can you give us an example of a growth mindset and a fixed mindset. And I appreciate, I might be putting you on the spot a little bit with that, but if we were to take, let’s say, take two technicians, let’s take technician A and technician B, technician A has a fixed mindset. What does that look like? Technician B has more of a growth mindset.
Well, the fixed mindset, as Carol talks about, is this belief that in a fixed mindset your innate abilities and talent and intelligence is limited. And so when you have that belief system that your abilities and your intelligence and your talent are somewhat limited and can’t be impacted, that impacts and is manifested through certain types of behaviour.
People with a fixed mindset tend to avoid challenges. They don’t receive feedback very well. They view actually constructive feedback as kind of a personal threat because it undermines this notion of their inherent abilities, which they think is limited. So they feel more challenged when they’re given feedback and don’t take it in the manner in which it might be intended by a manager or a team leader or even a colleague or peer. That’s not a good place if you’re an MSP business owner and you’re trying to grow.
You want people who adopt a more positive growth mindset, who feel that with energy, effort, guidance and constructive feedback, they can improve, they can get better, that their abilities, talents and skills are not fixed.
They can be improved, and guidance can be a pathway to growth. And so that’s kind of one of the main differences that Carol talks about in her book is for someone who does have a fixed mindset, first of all, how do you recognise it, and then how do you coach to get them to a more growth oriented mindset.
Yeah, I mean, that’s a great question in itself is how do you recognise someone with a fixed mindset? As you were talking about different mindsets to different technicians, I’m sure some MSPs listening to that would think, a lot of my technicians don’t take feedback well, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that in itself is an indicator of a fixed mindset. The way I always understood it was that if you believe in the fixed mindset that you believe you can’t grow, you can’t learn, you can’t develop that you’re born with these skills and yeah, you can do some training, but you never really change and get better. Whereas of course, growth mindset is the complete opposite of that. So what would you look out for in a technician to identify someone who is potentially locked as to what they think they can do?
There’s a couple of things. One we just spoke about, is someone who is hesitant or pushes back strongly on constructive feedback. That is kind of a red flag. Someone who avoids challenges, who doesn’t seek to go above and beyond or is afraid of failure. Typically, people who have a fixed mindset, fear failure and fear making mistakes because they feel it will reflect poorly on their sense of self and on their inherent abilities, which they believe are fixed. So it’s threatening to them. So they won’t go above and beyond. They will avoid challenges. They will be defensive when feedback is given, even though the feedback comes from a good place, they have a negative reaction to that.
They also see effort, in some cases, as futile. And if you’re an MSP owner, and let’s say you have a small MSP, but you’re growing, you’re growing really well, you’re hiring, you’re bringing on staff, and you’re serving clients and customers, those are not characteristics you want in your frontline employees, particularly if they’re serving your most important asset, which is your clients, your customers that you’re serving in a monthly recurring revenue model. You’re trying to deliver impact for the monthly recurring services that you’re billing for. You want people who adopt a growth mindset, not a fixed mindset.
Those are some of the things that I think owners should be astute for and not ignore. So when they see those signs, don’t avoid it, lean into it. Probe, ask questions, get underneath where that might be coming from, because if it’s left unchecked or employees aren’t challenged around some of those dimensions, that could be cause for concern and it needs to be addressed.
Yeah. Now here’s an interesting question. I’ve met, or spoken to at least a thousand MSPs over the years, it may be even more, and the vast majority who have started their own business do have that growth mindset, because I think it’s very, very difficult to be in either the kind of high impact corporate jobs that you have or to run your own business if you don’t have that. But I have met a small proportion of MSPs who’ve got that fixed mindset, and you can see it in their business. You can see it reflected in the people that they’ve hired. And typically, those people struggle.
When you’re the owner of the business you are not responsible to anybody. And I’ve always said that’s one of the double-edged swords of being a business owner, is that you are unfireable, right? The only way you get fired is if the business collapses because you’ve been so inadequate as a business owner. But there’s no boss to fire you, there’s no one to give you performance management. And we all see a lot of very, very bad, not just within the MSP world, but around the world, we see a lot of bad business owners managing to do 20, 30, 40 years in business just because they’re unfireable.
So how would you, as an MSP owner recognise if you were inflicted with a fixed mindset? And how would you start to identify that and how would you start to tackle it?
Most MSPs that I’ve worked with, and similar to your experience, they have a growth mindset because they want to grow their business, they’re open to how do they get better, they’re open to exploring new avenues whether it’s revenue, recurring revenue or new services or working with their teams to elevate their performance or their certification or their training or their development. But I sometimes see MSPs, MSP owners, who are just content with, I don’t want to grow my business, I’m happy the way it is, and that may be fine for them. But they still want to be profitable, even if they don’t want to grow their revenue, they want that revenue that they are and the customers that they are serving to be happy and well served. And for that, you need employees who will carry out that mission, whether your growth intentions are lower or higher, you want your employee base embracing a growth mindset every day, every week, every month.
So it does require a level of self-reflection. And if you don’t recognise that in yourself or your company or your management team, that’s a problem. But it starts with one question – What are your plans for growth? Often when I talk to new MSPs I haven’t met before, I say Talk to me about your business. Where are you growing? Where are you not growing? Where do you feel unsettled and uncomfortable in terms of your business or your business plan? And if they’re like, Hey, everything’s great, everything’s fine. I’m happy with my growth. I’m not looking for aggressive growth. I’m kind of happy and content with where we are right now. That’s kind of little bit of a red flag, right? I know I’m dealing with somebody who’s a little bit different than the norm because the norm is not like that for most MSP owners.
No. And let’s be honest, within the MSP world, there is no other sector where there’s so much change. I’ve only been here since 2016, and even in, what’s that, seven, eight years, nine years, I can add up, well clearly I can’t on the fly, the whole of the technical world has completely changed. Cyber security is so different today to what it was back in 2016. So I agree with you, I think for an MSP owner there’s always so many opportunities, new things, new ways of generating recurring revenue and new ways of protecting the clients from themselves.
It’s the nature of the beast isn’t it, of being an MSP and the world that we live in with cyber security. It’s fast evolving, and you almost have to have a growth mindset just to keep up with the fast pace and the growing threats.
Well, thank you for coming on to talk about this, Patrick. And I certainly think for everyone listening, watching this right now, you definitely should read Mindset by Carol Dweck. It’s probably on Audible because most great books like that are. It’s really funny. my daughter was taught this eight years ago at her school. She’s only 14. So at the age of six, they were teaching growth mindset. And in fact, I remember watching a Netflix show a couple of years ago, it’s called Drive to Survive, I don’t know if you’ve seen it, Patrick, it’s about Formula One. And one of the Formula One drivers had a big crash and a kid fan stopped him coming out of the pits and said to him, How are you going to use this crash to positively influence your performance going forward? And I thought, that’s just brilliant. You wouldn’t have heard kids talking that way 20 years ago. Came off as a bit precocious to be honest, but it was still great that the kid was asking a guy who’d just written off a $200 million car and he was asking him how the crash was going to help him improve his performance in the future. Because that’s how we want our kids to be thinking. So thank you for coming on talking about this. Just finish off Patrick by telling us a little bit about Barracuda. What exactly do you do? What are the benefits and how can we get in touch with someone?
Yeah, sure. Before I do that, again, I would echo the same thing you just referenced with your listeners on Carol’s book, it’s just a great book. And the last piece of advice I’d give any MSP owner is lean into it, challenge directly, but professionally and where you see something that gives you some pause that somebody on your team or your management team may not be embracing fully. Talk about it, lean into it, embrace it, challenge it.
As far as Barracuda, a little bit about Barracuda. We’ve been around for 21 years. This is not new to us. We have a very robust platform from email to network security, to application security to award-winning XDR services. We are a 100% channel company. We only work with the channel, whether it’s VARs or resellers or solution providers, the hyperscalers or distribution channel, but also MSPs. So we’re 100% focused on the channel and we serve for MSPs who serve the underserved market in SMB and the low end of enterprise, that’s their sweet spot.
That’s a big sweet spot for Barracuda as well, for customers who recognise that they have a challenge with cyber security, but may not necessarily have the staffing or the technical staff to be able to keep up with those threats. Barracuda makes it easy for our partners to be able to serve those clients with our award-winning platform. Starting with email, which is the biggest threat vector of all the way through network and application and data protection, backup and recovery. So classic MSP managed recurring revenue services.
We want to make it easy for our partners to buy, to consume, to deploy and manage our offerings. So that’s what Barracuda is all about. I would encourage anyone who’s listening to this podcast or YouTube, if they want to get in touch with me, connect with me on LinkedIn, I’d be glad to get you connected with other members of our team. Again, in service to MSPs who just do yeoman’s job protecting so much of our economy from the bad actors and cyber security threats. So we’re thrilled and honoured to work all kinds of partners and serve hundreds of thousands of organisations worldwide with our solutions.
Daniel in Michigan owns a new and quite small MSP. He only has one technician and somebody else that helps out from time to time and his question is: How do I free up my time?
Oh, have no doubt. It is impossible to grow your MSP and therefore reach your life goals on your own. Success is about doing the things you most want to do in life. And no successful person ever achieved their success without a ton of help from other people.
So the simplest way to do this is to pay other people to do things so that you don’t have to do them. You should develop a mindset, I know we’ve only just been talking about that with Patrick, but you should develop a mindset of you should only do what only you can do. Let me say that again because it’s so important. You should only do what only you can do. And anytime you catch yourself doing that something someone else could do for you, you are literally wasting your time and you’re not making any progress towards your goals.
So for every little job that’s on your plate, ask yourself, how can you DOA it away. DOA being an acronym for Delegate, Outsource, Automate. And it’s also worth communicating to your staff on a regular basis what you need to focus your time on and help them to understand the benefits to them. For example, by working on the business and improving, you are attracting new clients, you are growing your monthly recurring revenue, and this will help you pay them more. If they understand that taking stuff off your plate ultimately helps you to pay them more, everyone is happy and everyone is really focused. Plus you get loads more time to yourself.
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