The 4 types of CRMs used by MSPs (and which is best)

[00:00:00] Speaker A: All right, you're here, I'm here, we can get this started. And this is what I've got coming up today. The four types of CRMs used by MSPs and which is best, the most important metrics you should focus on. And trust me, they're nothing to do with tickets. And Jennifer Bleem is back on the show today. In fact, she's going to reveal how you can actually make money from AI. Welcome to episode 345, powered by MSP marketingedge.com Paul Greens MSP Marketing Podcast One of the most common questions I get from MSPs when they start thinking seriously about their marketing is which CRM should we use? And on the surface that sounds like a really simple question, but actually the more you dig into it, the more complicated it becomes. Isn't that always the way? Because this isn't really a question about software, it's a question about frustration. What MSPs are really asking when they ask me about CRMs is, Paul, where do I put all my prospect data? How do I build a pipeline that I can actually see? How do I know who to follow up and when to follow them up? How do I stop things falling through the cracks? And why is all of this giving me such a headache? Those are all the kind of questions that MSPs really have. So before I walk you through the four types of CRMs that MSPs tend to use, let me say something to you. It's maybe slightly controversial, but I believe there isn't one best CRM for MSPs. There's only the best CRM for how your MSP markets and sells itself. And those are two very different things. And the reason so many MSPs end up with the wrong tool or with a perfectly good tool that they never really properly use, is that they chose the software before they defined the marketing process. And that's backwards, right? The tool should serve the process, never the other way around. Let's look at the four types of CRM based on the four types of msp. And the first type is what I like to call PSA led MSPs. So these are MSPs who basically live inside their PSA. Connectwise, AutoTask, Halo, PSA, Synchro, Atera, Cassia, whatever it is, right? Their agreements are in there, and this may be you, the billings in there, your tickets are in there. So for you, the idea of keeping your sales activity in exactly the same place feels logical and tidy. And actually, if your sales are largely driven by referrals or renewals, and everything's Kind of straightforward and simple, then this can work perfectly well. If you're not trying to build a sophisticated marketing engine, but you just want visibility on leads without having more software, then that might be the right answer for you. But a big word of caution. When a PSA vendor says their platform has a marketing module and a it's a little bit like a Swiss army knife saying that it has a saw. So technically yes, it's true, but it's not what you would choose if sawing things was, you know, something that you did every day. You can't use that tiny little knife every day on a tree, can you? It's just for the odd job. And it's exactly the same with your PSA. Most marketing modules in PSAs and I haven't looked at all of them, so if I'm wrong on this, please email me and let me know. But most marketing modules in PSAs are not really up to the job of actually doing good comprehensive marketing every day. The second type then is marketing led MSPs. And these tend to be MSPs that don't have enough leads and know that marketing has to be their principal growth activity. Again, you may be in this category right now. So they want to run campaigns, they want to publish content consistently, they want to capture leads through forms and importantly, and this is the right thing to do, is use automation to follow up all of these leads. So if that is you, the platforms to look at are things like HubSpot. Making sure that you've got the marketing hub, which is kind of HubSpot's broken into lots of different hubs, so you'll need the marketing hub. Or you could look at Active Campaign or look at Zoho one, or there are more budget friendly ones like mailchimp or Mailer Light. Or if you belong to the tech tribe then you get growably which is built on something called Go High level. And actually Go High Level itself is also worth looking at. Although it's cheaper than to actually join Tech Tribe and get growably than it is to buy go High level independently. So all of these platforms I was just talking about here, they combine contact management with automation and lead scoring and campaign reporting and they all do those at various different levels. But here's the thing, all of those tools I just mentioned, that they only make sense if you're genuinely prepared to use those capabilities because some of those platforms are not cheap. I'm looking at you. HubSpot. We're, we're a HubSpot shop. I love it, but it's $1700 a for all of the things that we use, right? It's a massive, massive bill every single month. And all of them come with a steep learning curve. I'm looking at you HubSpot. HubSpot is perhaps the steepest learning curve of any software ever, but it's worth it. And you know, it took us pretty much a year to migrate our entire setup from keep over to HubSpot. I don't recommend keep anymore. I do recommend HubSpot. Even though we went through months and months of pain, it was worth it anyway. The third type of MSP is a sales led MSP. So these are MSPs that are doing a lot of sales activity. They maybe even have or probably do have a dedicated salesperson or maybe there's a couple of partners within the business and one of the partners focuses all of their time on marketing and sales. And in this instance the MSP wants clarity on the pipeline above anything else. So they want defined stages, they want forecasting, they want some accountability for follow up. Actually that's more of a problem if you've got two, two or more salespeople and often they will want a dashboard as well that they can look at every day and understand what's going on. So if you've ever said out loud I genuinely don't know what deals we've got on right now, then you're probably in this group. And in that instance I would recommend something like Pipe Drive. That's a great choice if you're in this group. HubSpot again is good for this. It has something called Sales Hub which is like the functionality you Switch on in HubSpot. And again, Zoho is worth looking at. Zoho, CRM, fresh sales and something called Close. I've not looked at those two myself, but I've heard other MSPs talk about them so they're all worth looking at. And these systems are often simpler than the big enterprise platforms we're actually just about to talk about. But they tend to be far more structured than a PSA add on. They have a different functionality to the pure marketing ones. So if you go get something like HubSpot, you can do the Marketing Hub, you can do the Sales Hub and you get both of those in the same software and they integrate, which is great, but obviously you pay the price for that in terms of cash. Whereas if you go something like mailchimp as your marketing tool, it doesn't typically have the sales thing. So that's typically where you have these separate tools. Ultimately to have both tools, a really good marketing tool and a really good sales tool in both. In one CRM you're going to pay for that functionality. So these sales tools I was just talking about there are built more for sales clarity than for actual marketing ability, although they do all overlap in some kind of way. And then we come on to the fourth type, which I'm going to briefly mention for completeness. But it's very, very few MSPs. Certainly the kind of people who listen to this podcast or watch it on YouTube is probably not in this group and that's enterprise led MSPs. So for these businesses, these MSPs we're talking Salesforce, you know, Microsoft's Dynamics 365 NetSuite CRM, the very powerful, the very expensive. You think $1700 is a lot of money, Paul Salesforce, you probably can't even switch it on for, for more than a few thousand dollars a month because these are enterprise solutions and they demand a level of process maturity and some level of internal ownership that most MSPs just don't have. Certainly not the kind of MSPs that this podcast and this YouTube channel is aimed at. So if you don't have those clearly defined sales stages or solid reporting requirements, if you don't have someone internally who can spend half of their working time maintaining data quality and just, you know, hygiene of your CRM, then these systems are not for you because they become very expensive, very overcomplicated. They're kind of just big, expensive, overcomplicated databases more than anything. And you don't want that. You want your CRM, whatever you choose, whether it's down at the kind of the free to get going end of the market like mailchimp or, or at the very expensive but very good tool set end like HubSpot. You want them to be revenue driving assets. That's what they're supposed to be. So to pull all of this together before you ask yourself, which software should I use, which CRM should I pick? A much more important question first is how do you generate leads? How do you turn those leads into warm prospects? How do you convert them into clients? If you know the answers to those three questions really clearly, then the right CRM quickly becomes a, a pretty obvious choice. But if you can't answer those three questions, no software in the world is going to rescue you. The process always must come first. Paul Greens MSP Marketing Podcast. Right. I'm going to make this as simple as I can. Three things for you. Number one, I'm giving away A free wall planner that lists all the marketing actions that you need to do to go from zero leads to new click clients. Two, it's completely free. I print it and mail it to you at my own cost. And yes, it is a physical thing and there are no catches whatsoever. You don't have to enter a credit card. I'm not trying to get you to start a subscription, nothing like that. It's just me starting a marketing relationship with you. And three, to get it, just go to mspwallplanner.com or if you're watching this on YouTube, scan the QR code that's on screen right now. So, have you had a chance to listen to or watch last week's podcast? Because back then I said that every MSP needs to think of itself as a media company and a marketing company rather than a technical company. Now, I'm not going to go into that again. You can just go back and find episode 3, 4, 4 on the interweb. We have them all on every podcast channel. They're on YouTube and they'[email protected] but today I want to take that one step further. Because once you accept that marketing is a core function of your business and not just something you kind of get round to when things are quiet, the next question becomes, how do you know whether or not your marketing is working? And this is where a lot of msps go wrong. Not because they don't measure things, because they do. MSPs are actually really good at measuring things. Your PSA is full of data, isn't it? You've got ticket volumes and response times and resolution times and SLA compliance and all of that kind of stuff. And I know that stuff gets tracked and reported and reviewed, which is all great. Those metrics, the ones I was just talking about, they matter for running a good service operation. But the problem is, none of those numbers tell you whether or not your business is growing, or whether your marketing is working, or whether or not you're lining up winning new clients in the next month or the next quarter. They just tell you how well you're looking after the clients you already have. And yes, yes, I know that that's important, but it's only half the picture. And for many MSPs, it's actually the only half they're ever looking at. So when they ask an MSP owner how their marketing is performing, the answers I usually get are things like, oh, yeah, absolutely, our LinkedIn following has gone up, or we're getting more website visitors, or oh, well, we had a 22% open rate on our last email. And those things are not meaningless. Audience size and engagement are indicators of potential future growth, but they are very far from the numbers that matter the most. Because you can have 10,000 followers or connections on LinkedIn and win zero clients, but you can also have 200 connections on LinkedIn and be having three sales meetings a month. Followers and connections don't pay your bills. New clients absolutely do. So what should you be tracking? Well, you might be surprised by this because I believe that when it comes down to it, you should only really be tracking two numbers, just two. But if you can get these two numbers right, everything else in your marketing will just make sense. It will just contribute to new clients. So the first thing to track is something called MQLs, which stands for Marketing Qualified Leads. An MQL is someone who's engaged with your marketing in a meaningful way, which suggests that they might one day be ready to buy. I mean, it's a big might, but it's kind of a level of engagement. So not just someone who likes a post or opens an email, but someone who has taken a more deliberate action. Maybe they've downloaded something or they've replied to an email, or they've clicked through to your website from your LinkedIn content and they've spent a little bit of time on it. All of these things are good measures of engagement. Maybe they've responded to a direct message or they've asked you a question, or they've just generally engaged in a way which signals something beyond passive consumption. Right. They're being proactive, they're warming up. They're not ready to buy yet, but they're moving in that right direction. So that's the first thing to track. The second thing to track is SQLs. So we had marketing qualified leads. SQLs are sales qualified leads. And an SQL is someone who is actively considering switching MSP. They've probably had a discovery call or some kind of level of conversation with you. They've asked about pricing or services, and you can see that they're asking the right kind of questions. And they've agreed to maybe a zoom or a teams meeting or something like that. So they are, if they're not there right now, they are right on the edge of a live buying conversation. Does that make sense? Now here's why these two numbers are so important. Together they give you a clear picture of whether or not your marketing machine is functioning properly. So if your MQL number is growing month on month, then your marketing is working. You're pulling people into your world, you're warming them up and they're engaging with you. If your SQL number is growing, then your conversion process is working. You're turning warm relationships into real opportunities. And if either of those two numbers, the MQLs and the SQLs is, is flat, it's just, or it's, or worse, it's falling, then actually you know where the problem is. So you're either not generating enough warm interest and that's a marketing problem, or you're not converting that interest into conversations, which is a sales process problem. Two very different problems with two very different solutions. And you can only really see the difference if you're tracking both of those numbers. And actually, as we said, most MSPs aren't tracking either of those numbers. So if you're still watching the vanity metrics like Follow Accounts, Open rates, you're feeling good or bad based on how many people are connected to you on LinkedIn, then unfortunately you have no idea whether your marketing is generating actual commercial momentum or not. What I'd encourage you to do if you haven't got a CRM that does this for you. Well, we were just talking about CRMs, weren't we? Go and get one of those. Or if it comes to it, just set up a simple spreadsheet, right? And at the end of each week, write down how many MQLs you added that week, how many people took a meaningful step forward and how many SQLs are currently active. How many live buying conversations do you have going on right now? And that's it. Those are only really the two numbers you need to track. You could track all of the others because they feed into them, but if you just tracked your MQLs and your SQLs every single week, that's going to make a difference. Because I know it's a cliche, but it's true that what gets measured gets managed. So if you're serious about consistently growing your msp, those are the two numbers that will tell you what's actually working and what's not working right now. The MSP MSP Marketing Edge Member Update so if you're already an MSP Marketing Edge member, you probably know that one of the most used parts of our service is our world class support. Because unlike all of the other content suppliers out there that just give you content and kind of leave you, just abandon you with it, we give you three things. We give you first of all a system for your marketing, then we give you all of the marketing content you need to run that marketing system. And then thirdly, we give you what we believe to be the world's greatest support while you you're implementing that marketing. Those three things have been designed to fit together to help you get results. So we've got our very lively members only Facebook group. We have our weekly events and member calls. And of course you can book a one to one call with a member of my team at any point. In fact, we do have members who will have two or three one to one calls a month. And that's great. That's a service that's there for all of our members. Anything that we can do to help you implement your marketing and get more of those marketing qualified leads we were just talking about and the sales quality qualified leads. That's what we're here to do and how we can help you. And by the way, if you're not yet a member, we now have two memberships available. We have B2B marketing which helps you to win more business owners as clients. And we have co managed IT marketing which helps you win more IT directors as clients. But for each one, we only work with one MSP per area for each of those memberships. So you can see if your area is available or not by entering your postcode or zip code. [email protected] membership, Paul Greens MSP Marketing Podcast. We're all talking about AI every single day. Because of course we're all using AI all day, every day, right? I certainly am. And I wouldn't be surprised if you are as well. But here's the one conversation that we're not having about AI. How are you making money from it? As an msp, you're very well positioned to make a lot of money helping your clients to get their heads around AI. And you may only be two or three pages ahead of them in the book of AI, but you're two or three pages ahead of them. And that's a significant advantage for something that's moving faster than anything's ever moved before. My special guest today is an expert at helping MSPs make money from AI. And here's her advice. [00:18:20] Speaker B: Hi there, I'm Jennifer Bleem and I'm the sales Sherpa. I help MSPs get more revenue, usually from their existing clients. [00:18:28] Speaker A: And Jennifer's back on the show. Welcome back, Jennifer. It's been too long. I can't remember when you were last with us, but you're one of those people that should be on the show every single year because you always deliver so much value and I've been following you on LinkedIn over the last few months. Stalking, let's call it what it is. I've been stalking you on LinkedIn and you are starting to answer the questions that MSPs are asking me, which is really interesting, and the questions that they're asking me, which I can't yet answer, which is why I wanted to get you back on the show. Everyone is talking about AI every single minute of the day. But how do, and this is the question that MSPs ask is how do I turn AI into revenue? And you put out a post three, four months ago. I can't remember what it was, but it was, it piqued my interest of like, Jennifer's a smart cookie and she seems to have figured out that answer of how does an MSP turn AI into revenue? So tell us what you've been doing over the last year, because I know you've. You've gone really, really hard into that area. [00:19:27] Speaker B: I have. And that's exactly the question I'm asking. Right. There's all this AI buzz and kind of the first step is I want to use AI inside of my own msp, whether it's for ticket, triage or whatever, all the things. Right. There's a lot of different ways to use AI. And then that seems to whet the MSP's appetites and then they're like, wait a second, this really is magical. Maybe it's not going to solve every problem in the world, but it's in the same box as technology. Like, my clients see me as the technologist or the trusted advisor. How can I money from AI? Am I selling the tools? Am I having conversations like what? What does that look like? And so you're right, I went all in on AI. I actually killed my core offering. It is gone. I no longer do anything other than help my MSP clients have AI conversations, discovery, and then monetize AI. So that's what I'm all about. [00:20:20] Speaker A: Amazing. So without asking you to give away all of your secret sauce, because I know you do a lot of work with MSPS directly, so give us, give us an idea of some of the areas, because I guess we could guess some, couldn't we? Such as helping businesses to implement AI or helping them roll out copilot or whatsoever. But are there many more areas that the MSPs just haven't thought of? [00:20:40] Speaker B: Yeah, there really are many areas. So Copilot is usually where most MSPs start. It's very normal. I take a license, I mark it up A bit maybe I give some expertise and expert advice on which level they should go with. Sometimes they do some kind of access control or database management. This person should only have access these, you know, this data silo, et cetera. But it is much broader than that and it almost shifts into a consulting conversation. So it is everything from would you like me to add AI to our quarterly business reviews and I'm speaking that way to an MSP you're going to message a little bit different to your clients. But literally that is valuable to the small business owner because it is an MSP. Most of the MSPs I'm talking to are a bit overwhelmed also as of the time of this recording I have a co work, a Claude co work license and I have one use case for it and I feel like that is barely starting and I'm a bit overwhelmed. Even though I've been in the AI world, I'm great with gems and custom GPTs and perplexity and like you, you name the LLM LLM, I've probably used it. But then when I shipped into Agentic it's a little overwhelming. I'm a little concerned about security. So if I'm overwhelmed, if the MSP is overwhelmed, so is the small business owner and more so. And for that reason that strategic advisor or the qBR conversation or TBR conversation, that's a piece of it. So that's one revenue revenue stream. And then you asked for kind of commonalities. I'll give you one that we're seeing and it's what I call the hub and spoke methodology. This is really for those companies that have 50 to 100 employees and up. And when we get into companies that large, what we are finding is they have multiple disparate software tools. So I just did some consulting with a large security vendor and they had, let's call it Salesforce is the hub. They then have, you know, maybe it's pipedrive is a spoke where they're, you know, their sales pipeline lives in that tool. And maybe they have a finance tool and maybe they have a. How close are they to becoming, you know, the top tier client? And so all of a sudden I'm telling you, every single phone call I learned about three new software tools that had data lakes all, or maybe data puddles is a better way to put it because they were all in these disparate tools and they had so much data they were sitting on, so much intelligence they were sitting on. But for even a salesperson to make a decision, they would have had to log into 12 tools tools, which means they weren't doing it. So there was literally data sitting there, not being used. And we're seeing that same exact thing inside of a small and medium sized businesses where they have multiple data lakes and we need to pull. It's not necessarily that we're pulling all of the data from one into Salesforce or whatever we choose as the hub. It's an intelligent like a matching. Which pieces do we really need and how do we get those into the singles, the single hub. And what is that single hub. And then you can get into security provisions but once you've got the data in there, you can start to do all kinds of fun queries. And right now you can't do queries if they're in disparate places. So that's one of the commonalities we're seeing is just that hub and spoke around data. [00:24:07] Speaker A: I love that, I love that the concept of the hub and spoke. And it does make sense. People are going to look back in 10 years time, I was going to say 10, 20, 30 years time, 5 years time and say wow. Can you. Do you remember when people used to have their data in lots of different applications? What's normal to us today is going to be almost like Victorian, you know, to people just five years from now. [00:24:26] Speaker B: Well, just like. Do you remember when people used to have a server in the closet? Companies that do, but most of them don't have a server in the closet. And you know, like our, our children and grandchildren are going to be like what's a server? You know, just like what's a cassette tape? So it, you're 100% right. [00:24:43] Speaker A: Or granddad, did you used to book your own restaurant tables? Because of course within a few years we won't be booking our own restaurant tables. Now on that note, I, I must do a. What's the word? I must declare when we're recording this interview, which is, which is right at the end of March 2026. This won't go out on the podcast till I think it's like June. And the reason I'm doing that is because you mentioned Claude co work earlier. Codex as well. I think you mentioned a couple of things. [00:25:08] Speaker B: Yes. [00:25:08] Speaker A: And it's like all the, all the tools of today at the end of March, by the time we get to June, it could be like today Claude is, is the, the one, isn't it? It's like I'm using Claude so much. I'm, I'm gently experimenting with co work with, with caution. I've discovered the other day that the Claude browser plugin can operate my, my, my stuff in my browser and I've set it to keep asking me permission, but I'm like, I'm watching it scroll through a hundred of my LinkedIn newsletters to analyze it and I'm like, whoa. And it's slow and it's clunky and it forgot all the data when I shut the plugin. But it's like, if it can do that now, what can it do in 12 months? So that, that caveat, that's the word I was looking for. The caveat is we're recording this at the end of March because by June perplexity might have come up with, with, you know, Comet 7 or something or whatsoever. Which actually leads on to. My next question is you're, you're doing this full time now? I, I'm, I'm a dabbler, so I watch a lot of YouTube videos and I, I haven't got around to downloading OpenClaw yet because I'm a bit scared of it. And I have, I've got the Mac mini, but I never actually downloaded the software. Software, but. So I'm a dabbler. You do it full time. But an MSP has other things to do, like keeping their clients secure, actual, you know, what you get paid to do, projects, you know, managing stuff. How is, do you see a lot of fear from msps that it's too easy for them to fall behind when they're setting themselves up as the font of AI knowledge for the small business clients they're looking after? [00:26:27] Speaker B: Yeah, so I hear two different fears. I hear the fear of falling behind. And there's some technology ways that you can stay up. You could set up an RSS feed. So I have an RSS feed that goes into my Monday.com and then once a week I just scan through all of the headlines and usually the headline I can eliminate two thirds of the headlines and the ones that are interesting I can double click on. And so that is one way to stay up to speed. So I do hear that a little bit. The bigger fear is what happens if my clients are doing this without me. So, you know, that introduces shadow AI. Some MSPs are a bit leery to bring up AI because they don't feel like a, they don't feel expert enough. And so then we introduce shadow AI. You know, another organization comes in, deploys whatever AI solution it is. Claude Bot, what, whatever. It almost doesn't matter what they deploy if they're not An MSP or an mssp, they probably are not thinking about security like they should. And so there is this. There. Most MSPs are torn right now. Like, I know I need to be bringing this up, but I don't feel like I know enough. So it's, it's less about falling behind and more like an identity shift. Like you, you. If you're using a large language model, if you're using copilot, if you're either vibe coding or you understand the concept of automations and agents and you could maybe list one or two use cases. You are way ahead of your clients. Way ahead. And that's enough to guide the conversation. [00:28:02] Speaker A: Yeah, I guess in. There's a, there's a, there's a saying in the expert world which you and I have both heard because we position ourselves as experts at what we do and there's nothing wrong with that. I always recommend MSPs position themselves as experts. Exactly. Say. But the common thing is, and this isn't such a problem for people like you and me who have got a few years under our belt. But you know that whole thing of be careful not to listen to the expert, who's only one page ahead of you in the book, I guess, which obviously you and I, we've, we've read all the books. So it's, it's. And we've, we've lived that life for 10, 20, 30 years. Whatever is the case. The, the. I guess the issue with AI is everyone is only one page ahead of everyone else because the book is being written as we speak. And actually we're still on page one of chapter one of whatsoever of the book. [00:28:50] Speaker B: Yes, I call that the intelligence tsunami because a lot of people will say, oh, AI is growing exponentially. And it is. But really what we have is that large language models are growing exponentially and the ability to create video content is growing exponentially and agents are growing exponentially and tools are growing exponentially and then we stack them all on top of themselves and it's no longer exponential growth. I don't know what the word is. I don't think we have a word in the English language to say exponential cubed. Like I don't know what that word is. And so I call it the intelligence Tsunami. If you stand on the shore and just watch, it is going to be devastating. If you're brave enough to get on the surfboard, you're going to really have a significant advantage over the poor people that are on the, on the sand. [00:29:38] Speaker A: Although I guess the other way of looking at it is that you're, you're. By knowing that there's. That tsunami is coming, you can help those people move to safety. And that's where the MSPS help their clients. [00:29:47] Speaker B: Yes. [00:29:48] Speaker A: Yeah. Which I, which I love that. Okay, to. So one kind of two final questions and then we'll just talk about what you, you're actually doing to help MSPS right now make money out of AI. So my, my. It's kind of the same question, but with a negative and a positive slant. I try very hard to make everything positive on this podcast because I tried to create the podcast I want to listen to. Yes, the, the. I have to tell you, my, my girlfriend caught me listening to my own podcast the other day. I was in the car listening to this very podcast and she kind of got in. [00:30:17] Speaker B: She. [00:30:17] Speaker A: And she said, are you listening to yourself? I'm like, no, no, not at all. Anyway, the question is about the future. And this is a bit of a crystal ball thing because no one knows and everything moves so fast. It's crazy. So I read a blog by a guy called Ed Zittran. I don't know if you've come across him, Jennifer. So he writes a very negative blog. It's called where's your Ed at? And it's very negative, but he would call it realistic in that he writes about the economics of AI. I'm glad you're writing that down now. You're going to love this. He writes the longest blog articles. They're all like 5, 10,000 words. But he writes about the economics of AI and I forget the numbers. But for example, let's not name names, but your big players. He are basically spending five to $10 to win a dollar. And so they, all of them need all of this hundreds of billions or, you know, billions and billion, billions of dollars of funding every year. And his. He compares that to every other economic cycle in human history and it's unparalleled and it obviously can't continue like that forever. So, so if you were to ask if I was interviewing Exitron, which makes me think actually I should. If I was interviewing him, he'd have a very negative opinion of AI and that whatever AI can or can't do, its current model isn't sustainable. Where we're. I'm paying 20, what, $22 a month for ChatGPT, maybe the same again for Claude. I'm paying for Gemini and actually I'm probably burning several hundred dollars worth of compute and tokens and all that stuff. But in the back end that can't go on forever. So I guess, I guess what I'm asking from you is, and I know you're a natural positive optimist. So what do you see as the optimistic next couple of years for AI? And do you see a potential downside of where actually one day we're going to have to pay the 2, 300amonth for exactly what we're doing now? [00:31:57] Speaker B: Okay, so let me answer this twofold. First of all, I literally just skimmed an article this morning that said the commoditized $20 a month model is going to have to die because we're shifting from $20, you know, a 200amonth in terms of agentic token spender. Sometimes it's $100 a day is, you know, sometimes what I'm hearing. And so it breaks the mental model of oh, I'll just stack up these different tools for 20 bucks a month. So I don't, I don't think you or he are that far off base. I do think the models will need to shift, but I don't, I think there will be a gradual shifting because I think what we will see first is pretty significant consolidation. And I think we're already seeing the beginnings of that. If we, if we think about, let's say maybe Q3, Q4 of 2025, every new release was pretty massive. You know, we went from Micro Content window or context windows to Mac huge context windows. Now it feels like we are still seeing outside looking in feels a little bit like one upmanship, you know, Copilot releases something and then chatgpt releases something, then probably perplexity, you know, and so, but, but the releases from Chat GPT today to Chat GPT in three weeks are much, much smaller. And that's how it is with anything. As you, as you move up the scale and you're much better and better and better. It, it, you can't change it by 50%. You can't get 50% better because you're already nearly perfect. And so we're seeing that already. And so what that means is that in a year, give or take event, it's going to be a pretty flat playing field. And what it will become is that maybe ChatGPT and Claude, let's just compare those two, they have different context windows, they have different writing styles, but broadly they do the same thing or the one that does more, which at the time of this recording is probably Claude will either buy up and close down ChatGPT OpenAI. We're going to see consolidation. I mean We've seen Microsoft do that historically where they buy up a really tiny competitor and, and then they just close the doors. And I think we're going to see similar things there. So consolidation first and then probably the shift from small dollars to larger dollars monthly. [00:34:19] Speaker A: Yeah. And definitely towards agentic. And I think we can all see that that's when AI gets really useful, when it can actually do stuff for us. [00:34:27] Speaker B: Yeah, totally agree. [00:34:29] Speaker A: Yeah. Okay, thank you. Jennifer. This has been amazing. I'm conscious that this interview is already out of date. Literally. You and I have just finished working, recording it. It's already out of date. So we need to get you back on. Maybe we should just get you back on every week just to talk about AI slides. That wasn't an actual offer though, just. [00:34:45] Speaker B: I understand. [00:34:47] Speaker A: Just. So give us a brief overview of what, what do you actually do then to help MSPs make money from AI and what's the best way to get in touch with you? [00:34:54] Speaker B: Yeah, for sure. So I have an eight week program called the AI Monetization Launchpad. And my MSPS come in with no packaging, no pricing, no offer, no sales process, no outward facing lead magnets or branding. And when they come out at the end of eight weeks, they have all of those things. They have a package, they have a price. More importantly, they have pipeline. They have real valid AI opportunities in the pipe, not usually closed yet because 8 weeks is a very short amount of time to start a deal and then close it, especially in this world. And then I also have a program ongoing where people can get lead magnet packets and webinar packets and help with closing. It is all around creating AI opportunities and revenue. So those are, those are my two key offers right now. And you can go out to my website, mspsalesrevolution.com aioffers to get 10 AI offers that msps should be selling right now. And then you can poke around. I've got blog posts and videos and all kinds of content out there to help. [00:35:57] Speaker A: Coming up, coming up next week. Thanks for listening or watching this week. Next week we're going to ask this question. Is Facebook advertising super hot for msps again? Because it used to be years ago and then it kind of went off the boil and stopped being useful. But they've made a significant change to their ads platform. I believe it could be a place for you to go and get leads. So let's explore this in more detail in next week's show. See you then for MSPs around the world. Around the world, the MSP Marketing podcast with Paul Green.