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A discovery call is the thing that turns a warm lead into a booked sales meeting – here’s a 6 part format for getting the most from them. Also this week, how to market your MSP during a quiet spell, and the secret to being recommended more by AI.
Welcome to Episode 356 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.
The discovery call is the most underloved, most misunderstood part of the entire sales process for MSPs. Most owners treat it as an opportunity to tell the prospect about their services, but that’s not what it’s really for.
Done properly, a discovery call is the thing that turns a warm lead into booked sales meetings.
And right now I want to give you the exact format for running one that actually works, including the differences between a B2B call and a co-managed IT one. And I’ve broken this down into six easy parts to make it easy for you to understand, follow along, and of course implement.
Part 1: The mindset shift.
When we’re talking about a discovery call, we mean normally a video call and it’s normally the first quality contact with a new prospect. And the goal of the video call, the discovery call is not actually to sell anything. It’s actually to do two things. Number one is to qualify the prospect as someone that you really want to work with, someone that’s worth pursuing. And then secondly is to make them feel as though, “Ooh, this is interesting. These are the guys we should pursue.” So you know that you want to work with them and they are intrigued… they feel heard, they feel as though you could be the right people for them.
And the way that you do that is by zipping your mouth because the prospects should be talking like 80% of the time. You ask questions, but then you shut up and you listen really, really carefully and you just occasionally reflect back what you’ve heard, what they have said. Because the best sales don’t come from talking at someone the best or having the best pitch. They come from actually the best listening. So most MSP owners, they get on a discovery call and start talking about their services and their accreditations and their qualifications and their tech stack. And do you know that the prospect doesn’t really care about any of that stuff.
At the very beginning of the process, which is what this is, they just want to know if you can understand their world and if you can listen to them. And feeling heard is one of the most powerful psychological forces in all of human connection. When someone feels like you genuinely get them and get their situation and you understand their hopes and their fears and their wants and their needs, then you’re going to form some trust. In fact, they’re going to know you, they’re going to like you and they’re going to trust you. And when those three things are in place, they’re much more likely to give you a wad of cash and commit to you for a three-year contract. Beautiful, right?
Part 2: The ask – how long should you request for a discovery call?
This is where B2B and co-managed IT are slightly different. So in B2B, I believe you should ask the business owner for just 15 minutes on a discovery call. Why? Because it sounds like a tiny, tiny commitment. Most people are going to say yes to 15 minutes, whereas actually if you ask them for 30, that feels like a bigger chunk and certainly you don’t ask for an hour. So 15 minutes is absolutely perfect. Now in co-managed IT, you do ask for 30 minutes and that’s because IT directors, even though they’re super busy, super overstretched, they also have more complex situations to explain. And 15 minutes isn’t enough to have a peer-to-peer conversation about the real frustrations in their life. Because with business owners, it’s them as a normal person talking to you as an IT expert, whereas of course with an IT director with co-managed IT, it is a peer-to-peer conversation.
However, in both these cases, you block out an extra 15 to 20 minutes in your own diary after the call. You know how you go into Calendly or Microsoft Bookings or whatever you use and there’s a buffer, you can have it automatically protect some time after the call. Always do that because good discovery calls almost always run longer than the time that you asked for, and especially when the prospect is really engaged and you don’t want to be midway through a great conversation and you hit your limit, your 15 minutes and you have something else booked. I mean, they might, that’s the downside of that. But 9 times out of 10, that call will go on much longer than you asked for. But mentally, they’re only going to commit to 15 minutes as a business owner, 30 minutes as a co-managed IT director.
Part 3: The structure of a great discovery call.
I believe you should ask just three questions and then close. And by close, I mean you ask them for the next thing. So you should do a very brief warm introduction, 30 seconds no more. We’re talking literally your name, what you do in a sentence, if you like your elevator pitch. Maybe if you’re clear on your ICP (ideal client profile) and your USP (unique selling proposition), so that’s who you want to work with and why they would work with you, if you’re clear on those two things, you will have a one sentence elevator pitch so use that. And then give them a reminder of why you’re doing this call, what’s the purpose of this call. All of this should be done in literally like 30 to 60 seconds. You should rehearse this so you can talk off the top of your head in just 30 to 60 seconds without boring them and without taking the first five minutes of the call talking about yourself, because it’s not about you. So do that and then hand over to them immediately. And then I would ask them just three questions or variations of these three questions.
And the first question is this, “Tell me about your business.” And this of course is their favourite question, it’s their favourite subject. Everyone wants to talk about themselves and especially as a business owner, we want to talk about our business because it’s our baby. So let them talk. Listen out for useful information that you can use. You should listen for size, sector, how they use technology day to day, what their kind of vibe is right now. Are they frustrated? Are they frustrated with their business? Are they frustrated with their technology? Are they frustrated with their staff? Are they growing? Are they stressed? Are they coasting? Are they ambitious? Are they just looking to save money? What is the vibe from them? And you should take notes either on paper or use one of those little devices like a Plaud or a Pocket or something like that, because there’s nothing ruder than typing along and they can see you looking down and typing away while someone’s talking. So it’s much better for you to write some notes on a paper or just use that Plaud, that Pocket, whatever you use so you have a copy of what they’re saying, but you don’t really want them to see that the meeting’s being recorded.
I don’t know about you, but I hate it when I’m on a sales call with a vendor and they’re recording that call because it makes me just sort of hold myself back a little bit, I don’t know why, maybe it’s just me. I almost feel like I don’t want them to use what I say against me in the future. Whereas of course, if someone’s just recording it using a separate device that’s listening to the conversation, that’s fine. And that’s not being underhanded, you just don’t want to put them off and you don’t want them to see you typing. When they’re talking, don’t interrupt. Let them talk. Listen with your ears. Let them do all of the talking. If they want to keep talking and answering that question for 30 minutes, fine, that’s their choice to do that. And the chances are that if they are a talker and they talk and talk and talk, and I say this as a talker myself, the more they talk, the more comfortable they’re going to feel with you. That’s great. So that’s question one.
This is question two, “What’s prompted you to look at a new IT provider right now?” And obviously you should put that in your own words, but this is your most important question. The answer tells you everything about how serious they are and what they actually need. So are they frustrated with slow response times? Are they worried about their security? Perhaps they’ve read something or a friend has had a security incident. Has there been a specific incident within their business that’s kind of shaken them up a bit? Or are they just renewing a contract and they’re just shopping around? If the answer is vague, you can follow it up with exploratory questions like, “How long has that been going on and what kind of impact has that had on the business?”
These kind of follow-ups really find the emotional stakes for you, which is where the real buying motivation lives. Now, if someone gives you a short answer and goes quiet, don’t rush to fill that silence. You can actually let their quietness and the pause do the work. So if you ask someone an open question and they kind of say blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and then they go quiet and sometimes they’ll look over to one side. They’re thinking, right? Some people are thinkers. They’ll talk, they’ll think a bit, and then they’ll talk again. Me, I’m a rapid instant question answerer. I’ll fill 30 minutes thinking as I go along. In fact, my girlfriend said the difference between me and her is she thinks to talk and I talk to think, which I thought was really insightful of her. Obviously she thought a lot before she said that, but some people, they think don’t get in the way, don’t interrupt their thinking time. Let them think, let them give you more because they will give you a higher quality answer if you give them that space.
And then question three, and again, put this in your own words. “What would amazing IT support look like for you?” And some prospects will have very specific answers to this because they have thought it through in advance, whereas others will just say things like, “Well, I just want stuff to work. I don’t want any more complaints from my staff. I want us to grow without having to think about it.” All of those kind of things. And it doesn’t matter which of those or any other type of answer they give you, all of those answers are valuable. The specific answers you get tell you exactly what you must address in your proposal, but the vague answers tell you that this person is still going through the process of thinking about it and they haven’t nailed down yet what they want, which means you have an opportunity to shape that vision with them. Now, this question also plants a seed. It gets them imagining a better version of the situation that they are currently in, and they can imagine that where you are part of that solution. We want them to be thinking about you as the answer, don’t we?
Part 4: The co-managed version.
So those were for a B2B discovery call. For co-managed, question one is very similar, but you want to understand their internal IT team. So how many people, how it’s structured, how long they’ve been there, all of that kind of stuff. So ask them to tell you about their setup, their team. You’re more interested in the humans and the reporting structure and stuff like that than you are the tech stack at this stage.
Question two is what’s prompted you to look at external IT support alongside your internal team? So you want them to talk about strain signals. You want them to talk about capacity pressure or a specific incident, or maybe there’s a security requirement that they can’t meet. Or maybe there’s been a board conversation that’s made them think, “Do you know what? Our team hasn’t grown and yet the business is four times the size. They won’t let us hire extra people. We need some external help.” So you’re kind of exploring the strain. Strain is what sells co-managed IT.
And then question three becomes what would the ideal relationship between your internal team and an external partner look like? And again, this is crucial because it tells you whether or not they understand what co-managed is, whether or not they are open to the kind of arrangement where an external team like yours works with an internal team like theirs. And throughout a co-managed call, you want the IT director talking about their frustrations more than anything else because they rarely get to vent to a peer, someone who actually understands their world. So you can be that person.
Part 5: Go for the close.
And that is booking the next thing, the thing you want off the back of the discovery call. And I believe that next thing is proper sales meetings. So I genuinely believe that discovery calls are never, ever, ever the place to pitch or quote or run through your services in detail. They are a bonding call. It’s about opening up the prospect so that they connect to you and think, “I really hope these guys can be the people that we can work with.” So when that discovery call is naturally winding down coming to the end, you should say something like this. “Do you know what? This has been really, really useful. Thank you so much. And based on what you’ve told me, I think there’s definitely something worth exploring properly here. I’d love to set up a proper meeting where I can come and meet you and your senior team, see your setup and talk through what working together might look like. Would that be worth your time?” So you put that in your own words, but notice what you didn’t do there. You didn’t pitch, you didn’t quote, you didn’t talk prices, you didn’t run through your service tiers because all of that you do after the sales meeting at the appropriate stage. But if they say yes to an in real life meeting and like 9.4 people out of 10 will say yes, then you say that’s great and you send them a calendar invitation with a link for them to add that to their calendar. So that sales meeting is locked in, you send them a calendar invitation straight away and that’s locked into their calendar for you to go and visit them.
But here’s the thing, before that sales meeting, do send something else to them and send them something physical in the mail. I would send them a printed letter thanking them for a great video call and just confirming when you are coming to them and if there’s any prep that they need. For example, you might say, can you make sure that there’s a meeting room where we can talk privately, for example. You may also, if you have them, send them printed case studies, ideally from clients in a similar sector to them or of a similar size. Or if you don’t have those, just send a general case study. Better than a printed case study is a video case study which might be on your website or YouTube. In fact, you could send both. You could send a printed case study and then you could put on it, see a video version of this at your website.com/case study, something like that. And that physical piece of mail arriving before the meeting does something that no email ever can. It’s going to make you stand out, it’s going to make you memorable, it’s going to show that you are different than every other MSP that they are speaking to right now. And throughout this whole sales process, anything that you can do to stand out is really, really good.
Part 6: Talk less.
This is the one habit that changes everything. And I’ve mentioned it already, but it’s really important. And for someone like me, it’s really hard, but even I have learned this during a sales process. The thing is, talk less. Throughout this whole sales process, every time you feel the urge to explain something about your business, instead ask a question. The discovery call and even the sales call itself, the in real life sales call is not about you shining out. It’s about them feeling understood and heard. This is really important in the sales meeting. So the discovery call is not a mini sales presentation. It’s a conversation where your only job is to ask really good questions, but only a short number of them, listen properly and make the prospect feel like you genuinely understand their world. If you get that right in that first 15 minutes or 30 minutes, however long your meeting is, then the actual real life sales meeting and the chances of them becoming a client are almost guaranteed.
Every MSP hits a quiet spell at some point. The pipeline looks thin, the phone just isn’t ringing, and you get that slightly sick feeling inside that something’s not quite right. All business owners go through this, especially MSPs. And today I want to talk about what to do when that happens because the way you respond in those moments says everything about the kind of business that you’re working so hard to build and it’s going to determine how quickly you come out the other side.
So let’s talk about the mindset piece first. If you expect me to just give you a list of things that you can do, a bunch of ideas, I mean I can do that, but I don’t think that’s really going to help you. Because a quiet spell for your MSP is almost always a lagging indicator of work that hasn’t happened in the past, rather than an indicator of where you are right now.
The pipeline problem you have in your MSP today is a result of marketing that you didn’t do months ago.
And getting your head around that is really important because it stops you from making panicky short-term decisions that could actually make things worse. The worst thing that you can do in a quiet spell is panic. Panic leads to dramatic, expensive, ineffective things, actions that actually damage your positioning and your confidence. For example, when you panic and you’re like, “Oh, I haven’t got a pipeline. What do I do?” You might drop your prices, but you should never drop your prices ever, ever, ever, just to win work, right? You should never blast an email out to a cold email list because this never really works. You should never chase prospects in a way that signals that you’re desperate because believe me, prospects can smell desperation and it repels them. It pushes them away. The right response depends almost entirely on one question. Have you been doing consistent marketing for months and months or have you not?
If you have been doing consistent marketing and you hit a dip, well, it happens. It happens to me, it happens to everyone. Dips happen when you’re doing everything right because marketing is not a tap that you turn on and leads flow immediately. It is in some sectors, but it’s not for MSPs. Marketing is more like a garden, you plant seeds, you water, you talk to your plants and you wait for them to come up and give you a crop of new business. The answer if you are having a dip and you’re doing consistent marketing is not to change what you’re doing. Keep working on the garden. In fact, double down, speak more to the plants, give them more sunshine, give them more water, double down on what you know has worked. And it’s crazy how often I talk to MSPs who are using a specific marketing strategy or tactic and it has worked really well for them and then they’ve stopped using it and they never use it again.
The whole point of marketing is you have to run a series of experiments to find out what works for your specific business in your specific market. Does that make sense? So look at your existing database of prospects and leads. Who have you had good engagement with in the last six to 12 months, who’s gone quiet? These are the people who already know you, who’ve already shown interest. They’re the closest thing you’ve got right now to a warm lead. And this is one of those rare situations where just picking up the phone is actually completely the right answer. So not cold calling them, but warm calling your hottest prospects. Ring the people who’ve engaged with your content, who’ve replied to an email, who maybe downloaded something or attended a webinar in the past. Call them. It’s a brief personal low pressure connection call. “Hey, I was just thinking about you. I wanted to check in, see how things are going.” That’s it.
Similarly, direct mail to your warm prospect list or a personal direct message on LinkedIn to connections who’ve been engaging with your content or a slightly more personal version of your regular email. All of these are the right things to do if you’re doing consistent marketing and you’re just unfortunately having a dip right now. And then don’t overlook your existing clients. Pick up the phone, not to sell anything, just to check in with them. How’s business going? Is there anything that we could be doing for you right now? And at the end of the call, say something like, “Do you know one thing that really helps us grow is word of mouth. So if you ever meet another business owner who you think might be switching IT support, I’d really appreciate it if you just pass my name onto them. Would you be happy to do that?” And most happy clients will say yes immediately. They just need to be asked. Some of them will go and do that because it’s weird, they’ll be at a barbecue next weekend and they’ll get chatting to a new business owning friend who starts talking about their IT support.
So all of those things I just mentioned there, those aren’t long-term strategies. They don’t really scale, but they are legitimate emergency responses when you need to generate some momentum right now from your consistent marketing if you’re having that dip. And they work because they’re personal rather than broad. Does that make sense? It’s just taking the work you’ve already been doing and just doing a bit of extra work to those people you’ve been consistently marketing to. So that’s the easy part. The harder part is if you haven’t been doing consistent marketing. So if you kind of dip in and out of marketing, you’ve got an empty pipeline, as in there’s no real leads or prospects in your pipeline, there’s no database as such, you don’t have an email list, you haven’t built up your LinkedIn connections, you don’t have a bunch of engaged prospects, you don’t have a good audience that knows you and likes you and trusts you, then the quiet spell that you’re having is of course not bad luck. You haven’t done the work. And that’s not an attack or a criticism, it’s just an observation because a lot of MSPs are in this position. And what you’re suffering from is the natural consequence of not having in place a marketing system.
The only real answer in this situation is you’ve got to build a marketing system. I’m sorry, but there are no short term golden bullets that are just going to win you clients. The only way you can do that is start throwing money at Google Ads and hoping that you get a lot of people who’ve got broken technology clicking on the ad and calling you. But even then it’s going to cost you thousands just to get those calls coming in because that’s the case with Google Ads right now. Google Ads really good, getting you in front of someone who’s got an immediate urgent problem right now, but it might not be the right kind of work. It might be break fix work. It might not be the right kind of client and you are going to be paying thousands for that. So if the real answer is to build a marketing system, I know that the temptation in a panic is to look for a shortcut, a quick fix, a golden bullet, but I genuinely believe that those shortcuts just kind of put you back.
Unfortunately, the buying cycle in managed services is very, very long and very slow. No one wakes up on a Monday thinking, “Right, I’m going to switch IT provider” and switch on a Friday. That’s very, very rare. So the right mindset here is to accept there is no quick fix, there are no emergency actions, but what you have to do is you have to throw yourself into marketing as thoroughly as you can and do as much good solid marketing to build a marketing system for your MSP. And that means you’ll never be in this position again. Like I was talking about earlier, if you’re doing a lot of marketing stuff and you have a dip, you can start shaking the tree a bit more and working your audiences a bit more, but you have to get that marketing system in place first.
The marketing system that I recommend, which I’ve been recommending for 10 years to MSPs across the globe, and all of my MSP Marketing Edge services are based around this. It’s a 3 step strategy, six words, super simple, it’s this – build audiences, grow relationships, convert relationships. So build audiences is where you build up people to listen to you. So the two audiences most MSPs do is your LinkedIn connections and your email lists. Then you grow relationships, that’s about putting content in front of those people. So content on LinkedIn every day, not just posts, but a variety of content and you send out an email once a week. Those are the two basics that you do. There is a lot more that you can do. And then the third step of that strategy is convert relationships. That’s the shaking of the tree. That’s about phoning people who are in your audiences and just asking them where they’re at, getting intel from them, finding out who they’re with, when their contract is up, how comfortable they are right now with their IT support. And if you want more on that system that you want to build, if you go onto my website, mspmarketingedge.com/3step, there’s a video there, it’s about eight minutes long, and I talk you through that 3 step strategy in more detail.
I do believe that you have to have a long-term approach to your marketing. The MSPs I see that really struggle with their marketing are picking it up and putting it down. Pick it up, put it down. They do a campaign for a couple of weeks and then they stop and they don’t do something for three or four months. And that marketing does not work in managed services. In fact, it creates the illusion of activity, but it’s not actually generating results for you. So that reinforces the false belief that marketing doesn’t work for MSPs. The big picture is, marketing does work for MSPs. The MSPs who rarely have quiet spells are not lucky. They’re the ones who market consistently, even during the busy periods when they didn’t feel like they had the time to do the marketing. They keep it going 365 days of the year. And the irony of marketing your MSP is that the best time to do it is when you’re busy and don’t think that you need it. The worst time to start marketing is when you’re quiet and you’re desperate and you desperately need new revenue. So a full pipeline is not the reason to ease off your marketing. In fact, it’s proof that your marketing is working and it’s a signal to keep going.
So if you take one thing from what I was just talking about here, let it be this, your future sales pipeline is being built or not built right now by the marketing that you are doing or not doing right now. So the quiet spell you might be feeling today is basically an echo of things you did or didn’t do months and months ago. And future you is going to be very grateful to now you if you put in place that marketing system now and you start working on your pipeline and growing your pipeline today so that future you benefits from that. Sure, quiet spells are uncomfortable, but they also show you exactly what your marketing has or hasn’t been doing. I know you’re desperate for new revenue, but I promise you if you don’t panic, but make a decision about what kind of business you want to build and what you’re prepared to do to get there, the answer is always the same. Consistent long-term marketing. Start today, keep going, and I promise you long-term, the quieter spells will get shorter and they’ll get further apart every year.
Featured guest: Jimi Gibson is the author of UNINVISIBLE: Invisible Owners Create Invisible Companies and VP of Brand Communication at Thrive Internet Marketing Agency. A former professional magician with 25+ years on stage (including the MGM Grand and his own theater in Myrtle Beach), he now helps business owners become the recognisable, magnetic face of their brand.
He created the Business Visibility Index, a proprietary study of 400 companies measuring how owners show up in AI search. His work has appeared in Forbes and Entrepreneur, and he speaks regularly on TEDx and keynote stages.
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