Warning! This friction kills MSPs' sales

[00:00:03] Speaker A: Yes, you, the growth minded MSP. I heard there's some really great stuff in this one. Let's listen together. Oh we are back and it's gonna be a great one because here's what I've got for you today. Removing friction and barriers to sales. Can your MSP's technicians close this many tickets? And my guest talks about how to live a great life while still creating the business you've always dreamed of. Welcome to episode 256 powered by mspmarketingedge.com Dot Paul Green's MSP Marketing podcast as an MSP, you're hardly inundated with calls from people who want to buy from you. Well that's my experience at the MSP's that I work with, certainly. So when you do have someone making contact with you, your job is to make sure you've removed every single piece of friction from the sales process. Let me tell you about my experience of the exact opposite of this, where I was desperate to buy something and the friction in doing so was so great it drove me into the arms of a competitor. So im not going to name the company that I was trying to buy from as thats not really fair in a podcast and YouTube video like this. Just know that its not an MSP, its not a company in the channel, but it is a supplier of marketing services based in the US and I've been doing some research recently into a new marketing initiative that we're doing to promote the MSP marketing edge and this service was the perfect solution. I'd managed to answer all of my questions online on their website, which is actually the first piece of friction that you and I need to talk about. If an ordinary business owner or manager goes onto your website, will you answer as many of their questions as you can? I'll be honest, for most MSP's the answer to this is sadly no. Most MSP's don't have the basics in place, such as explaining what you do, how you do it, what makes you different from the other it companies they're looking at. And most importantly, you probably don't have an indicative idea of pricing on your website. Now I know that this is a very emotive subject because the price depends upon how long the string is. But when it comes to websites, I very much follow the advice of Marcus Sheridan. In his book they ask, you answer, which definitively says you should put prices on your website because it's one of the most basic things that people are looking at. Anyway, I digress. So I answered all of my own questions on this potential supplier's website and I was ready to buy and that was where I ran into real trouble because it really wasn't obvious how to buy from them. There was a call to action button. So the thing that they wanted me to do and that took me through to a page which did actually talk about their pricing and their packaging or their packages, but you couldn't actually select one of the packages and go through with the purchase, which was really weird. So I thought perhaps the website was having some kind of blip. I refreshed it, I left it for 24 hours and I came back the next day, but nothing had changed. It was exactly the same. Here's the thing, sometimes what seems obvious to us, what seems obvious, what we want them to do is not obvious to every other human on the planet. So I clicked on the live chat button, but it was out of hours with the time zone that they were based in and there was no option for me to leave a message on live chat for them to reply to. So I looked up their email address and I sent them an email. And 48 hours later. And yes, this was during the week, this wasn't the weekend. 48 hours later I still hadn't heard anything, which is nuts. It was kind of like they didn't want the business. So I sent another email chasing my original email. Ah, and this time I did get a reply about 3 hours later. And you won't believe what the reply was. They asked me to book a video call with them, a zoom with them. They sent through a live calendar and said that the only way to buy from them was to actually have a meeting. Now I completely understand the need to qualify buyers and check that they're the right kind of buyers for you, but we're not talking about something like managed services here where you may only take on one or maybe two new clients a month at the most, right? So you want to pre qualify them and make sure they're right for you. This was a service that should be taking on two to three new clients a day. And then to add insult to injury, they had no availability in their live calendar for the next two weeks. Anyway, let me cut to the end of this story. I did eventually manage to book a call for the following week after I'd gone back to them and we'd done a bit of back and forthing over availability. And then I realized, oh, I've got another week, I've got to sit for a week. And I started to get a bit annoyed about the lack of progress because the lack of progress in buying from this supplier was holding back the whole marketing initiative. And it's a marketing initiative that I'm driving, and I try to make myself accountable to my own team for anything that I'm working on, which I think is the boss. You have to do right. It's much better for productivity when you're accountable to someone, even if that's your own team. So I didn't want to have to tell my team that I'd failed again, and this project was going to have to be pushed back another couple of weeks. So I just started googling and I actually just typed in alternatives to this service. And guess what happened 30 minutes later? I'd done some research. I'd found a competitor that looks similar, not as perfect to match as the one I was going to buy from. But I got my questions answered. I looked at the price, I pressed the button, I entered my card details, and I was a client. And you know what's really weird is no one from the original supplier that I picked, no one followed me up when I canceled the live meeting. And remember, we've had email conversations. I've asked them to free up some availability, and then I cancel that meeting without giving them a reason why. And they never asked why. This is crazy. Now, I appreciate that this is perhaps an outlier example, but the amount of friction that was there in that buying experience was nuts. And it's a great reminder to you to figure out if there's any friction in your buying experience. For example, can someone book a 15 minutes meeting with you in the next 24 hours? Is your live calendar on the website? Do you answer all possible questions or maybe even have a live chat that's manned 24 hours a day because you use an outsourced service. As we asked earlier, do you have prices on your website? Here's a good one. If I phoned your MSP today, would the person who answered the phone be able to answer my sales questions immediately? Or would I find myself frustrated by being passed around on the phone or being told that someone, you, I guess, is going to call me back at some point? Let me make this as clear as I can for you. So you put urgency and priority on this. Any friction in sales will put off new clients and they will go and look elsewhere. It's a priority for you as the owner or manager of the MSP to make sure the process of vetting you and picking you is as easy for prospects as it can possibly be. Paul Green's MSP Marketing podcast still to come my special guest today has a great subject to talk about. He believes you can live a really great life and be a highly successful business owner at the same time. And it's not just about getting work life balance right. He's got a lot to say about the situation that busy business owners find themselves in, and he'll be here to say it in the next five minutes. Do you ever look at your PSA and wonder how efficient your technicians are compared to other MSP's? Well let me give you some guidelines as to how many tickets each of your technicians at all three levels should be able to handle. Hey, I'm Paul Green from the MSP marketing edge, the leading white label content marketing system that's trusted by over 700 MSP's around the world. Check if your area is available now at mspmarketingedge. One of the hardest things about running your own MSP is that its too easy to feel youre operating in a silo in a little bubble cut off from everyone else. The hell of staff, marketing, finances and everything else that we have to deal with single handedly is what can make us business owners feel really lonely. And this is weird but its also perfectly normal. And actually MSP's have some of the greatest support communities ive ever seen, such as the tech Tribe and my MSP marketing Facebook group. The good news is you are not alone, which means virtually every challenge that you have to deal with. Theres someone out there with guidance. Now lets take your technicians. Have you ever wondered how efficient are they? Last year I interviewed the awesome Jason Kemsley from Uptime Solutions, an outsourced help desk. At that point they had 37 helpdesk staff handling 3000 tickets a month on behalf of 180 MSP's, which sounds like a big headache to me and im sure those numbers are much, much larger today. But it does mean that Jason and his team are able to assess what good performance looks like for all three levels of technician. They also know what extra ticket load every extra user brings to them and because they're growing so fast they need this information. It's critical to help them recruit ahead of demand. So here are the stats that Jason told me and you can compare them to your technicians. So first line technicians should be able to handle between ten and 14 tickets a day. And if they're not achieving this, it probably means that they're not bought into your MSP's culture or their base knowledge just isn't there. Second line technicians should be able to handle eight to twelve tickets a day. Now this includes escalations that may have happened too quickly, and third line technicians should be able to handle somewhere between none and four tickets a day. Why none? Well, third line techs can potentially deal with such complicated issues that there are days where they don't complete a ticket. It's taken perhaps two or three days to resolve. Now let's have a look at ticket burden from clients. Jason told me that the average client submits 1.4 tickets per person or per user per month. Did you write all of those down? If you didn't wind it back, go and write them down because you now have all the stats you need to assess the efficiency of your team and also whether your clients are creating more noise than the average client should be. Paul Green's MSP Marketing podcast still to come sure, its important to have meetings with your team, but how often should you do this? Is a daily meeting with your technicians too much? How often should you be meeting with the people who are helping you to run and grow the business? Another MSP had this exact question, and im going to answer it both for him and for you in the next five minutes. Theres an inherent conflict between being a successful business owner and also a supportive parent and partner. Anyone whos ever run their own business will understand this. And its especially hard in your first few years when youre working more hours than youve ever worked before for less money than youve ever earned. Its a very traumatic and highly emotional time. And my guest today helps lead business owners just like you through these kind of problems. Todays guests will not only tell you how to live a great life while still achieving everything you want with your business. He's also a bit random, but he's also a great singer and he's got a little tune lined up for us at the end of today's interview. [00:11:36] Speaker B: Hey, my name is David Osk and I live in Nashville, Tennessee, and I might be the best encourager in the world. [00:11:43] Speaker A: Oh, what a great introduction. And not only do you have a great intro, a self intro for this podcast, but as a little tease for what's coming up in the next eight minutes or so. David, you are about to become the first ever guest in nearly five years of this podcast who sings on the podcast that's coming up in the next eight minutes. It's worth waiting for. It really is. So thank you very much for coming on, David. We're going to talk about an amazing subject today. How do you live an amazing life and still grow the business of your dreams? That's what we're going to talk about. Let's first of all find out who you are, man. [00:12:17] Speaker B: Thank you so much for having me. What an honor. And yeah, you know, it's interesting you mentioned the music. I was actually a vocal major at Belmont University here in Nashville back in the early nineties. And, you know, even now I do a lot of, a lot of music along with running. My main kind of book of business, as it were, is I'm an inventor and kind of product developer. So I have a product, my mainstay is a product that's in 3700 retail stores and it's a first in the world. A thermostat guard that has a combination lock so you prevent tampering of thermostats by just simply putting a box on it. And I solved the lost key problem. [00:12:56] Speaker A: I love that. So it stops someone else from just going in and fiddling with it and changing it. [00:13:00] Speaker B: Exactly. Yeah, it can get pretty costly. And of course, you know, I mean, it's the old thermostat wars. You know, people kind of understand that whether it's your home or office, you know, everybody kind of wants a different temperature so it can solve that problem as well. [00:13:14] Speaker A: I love that. So just as a side note, I have a 14 year old daughter. So if you could come up with a refrigerator lock, a food cupboard lock, an everything lock, something that turns off the Wi Fi for her, but not for me, at about ten at night, that would be amazing. I'd be amazing. It really was. So I know you spend your days inspiring business owners as well and talking to them about how they can improve their lives and their businesses. And it is the conundrum. And anyone who's been in business for more than a couple of years reaches that point. And I remember doing this myself. I've been in business since 2005. And I remember about 2008, 2009, still doing 60 hours weeks. You know, my relationship with my wife at the time was suffering and it was, it was a really, really difficult thing. I think every business owner goes through this, where you realize that these are two completely conflicting things. To grow a business requires your time and your attention. To keep a relationship healthy, and especially when you've got kids, requires your time and your attention. But also you need to sleep and exercise and eat and not drink too much and all of that stuff. And these two things are kind of bashing completely. Is this just me and some of the business owners I talked to, or is this something that most business owners go through? [00:14:25] Speaker B: No, I don't think there's any question that if you're going to do something that, you know, like start a small business. Right. Bring a product or service to market that people not only value, but know about. Right. The old marketing piece, it's going to take sacrifice. And people often use that phrase, you know, work life balance, and I don't like that. I think that this idea of work life integration is really, you know, kind of the. The actualization of it. I think balance, in some ways, is desired. You know, we think, yeah, we would like some. Some balance. I want to kind of have a certain number of hours, you know, at home and at work and things like that, and for sleeping, like you mentioned. But guess what? On the front end of any, you know, great endeavor, as it were, there's going to be some things that are maybe wildly out of balance for a while, and I think that's okay. I think that's normal. You know, it's like if I'm going to climb a. A mountain, well, guess what? I'm going to be preparing well in advance for that climb, as it were, by spending a lot of hours not only investigating the equipment that I need, getting out in the field and using it and figuring out what works and what doesn't. So I think that there's definitely some wild swings on the front end, for sure. [00:15:45] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. And I have to say, I've worked with lots of different businesses over my career. I've been working with MSP's since 2016, and I do think MSP owners have it even harder than other business owners, because the very nature of being an MSP is you don't know what's going to happen. You know, you can come in on a regular Tuesday morning, and the whole world could have gone mad. An update could have gone wrong overnight, or you could have had a ransomware attack on one of your clients computers, and suddenly everything you plan to do that day, by necessity, has to go. And that happens to MSP's even when they've got, you know, 510, 1520 staff. So let's talk more about what you mean by integration. So I think we're all comfortable with work life balance, but what do you mean by work life integration? Is that about making sure that the two of them are coming together in the right way, or does it mean something different? [00:16:32] Speaker B: You know, I guess the way I kind of internalize that is just this idea of, you know, who's showing up, meaning if I'm going to participate or say that I value certain things in my life, you know, I have to. I've had to have done a little bit of pre work, as it were, to understand, you know, what are those things that are on that list? You can't be everything to everybody. You can't, I mean, you can't participate in everything, all that kind of stuff. So you have to have kind of a hierarchy of, these are the things that I think are really important right now and be willing to say no to some stuff, you know, even for a while. And at the same time, I think that, you know, we often, those of us who are kind of entrepreneurial minded, we get this idea that, you know, the business is everything. And I'll show some grace here. I think on some level, for a short time, it might be because money, you know, I heard somebody say, money is kind of close to air. Try to live without it. You know, it's really important. And at the same time, you know, we've got, you know, our families, right, the people that we love, and we sure don't want to send, you know, the message, you know, to those closest to us that, you know, you don't matter right now. So I think largely it's expectations and communication on the front end. I remember when I was starting my business about ten years ago, a lot of it was, I didn't really realize that I really should have communicated to Lisa and my kids, for that matter. Hey, I'm gonna have to spend a bit more time on this today or the next three days, or maybe, guess what? I'm having to work this weekend on something or things like that. So I think I learned, you know, maybe the hard way on the front end about even just communicating what that looks like. And the communication, by the way, goes a long way. [00:18:16] Speaker A: Yeah, I think it really does. And I guess that's when you take your. Your life partner and your kids and your friends and everything else. And as you say, using that communication, you form a partnership with them. I have a similar thing with my daughter, so I'm a sole parent. There's just me and her here. And as much as I joke about her raiding the refrigerator, actually, we have a great partnership. For example, you and I are recording this. I just checked my clock. It's 07:15 in the evening on a Monday evening, right in the school, summer holidays back in August, because we work a few months ahead on the podcast. But she's really happy with me doing this because actually, she's in her room. She's doing some stuff. This is a regular thing, and she knows that. The flip side of some days I work late doing podcast interviews. But the flip side of that is like tomorrow we're going to London all day. We're seeing two shows, two theater shows tomorrow. So it's swings and roundabouts, right? And I get a great podcast, which is important. Important to me. She gets a great day. Let me ask you a question about that. A lot of business owners struggle with that balance, that integration because there's just too much to do. So I'm in a lucky position where I've got a great team. They do the heavy lifting, right. I just talk a bit on camera. Everyone else does all the other hard work, right. But there are many MSP owners who are not in that position because actually, if they don't do 10 hours of work today and 10 hours tomorrow, and you know what, I've got to get up at six on Saturday, then actually, as we were saying, money's important and the clients stop paying because the work's not getting done. How do you advise people to break out of that trap without just throwing more hours into it? [00:19:47] Speaker B: Well, I think that, like anything, you better count the cost of starting a business before you start the business. Meaning, you know, if you don't have a bit of an exit strategy from, you know, from that, you know, really head down mentality and rhythm in your life that can get really old really fast even if the money starts pouring in. Right. Money only goes so far. I think you can't sustain that, that level of, you know, of effort, really. It's not a life. You become a human doing and not a human being. And so I think that largely on the front end, you need to define, you know, what are those steps necessary to build a business that doesn't, that I don't have to serve. That serves me, you know, again, on the front end, I get it. Right. You might have a year or two where you're really, you know, head down, going for it. But I would say that if you are in that situation right now and you don't know what your exit strategy is, and I'm not talking about selling your business. I'm talking about getting out of the, you know, the day to day and into the driver's seat, working on your business and not in it, you need to, you need to surround yourself with some people who can help you, you know, manage those steps because you're going to get burned out really, really quickly. [00:21:03] Speaker A: Yeah, I completely agree. So let me ask you this then, David. What do you do to help business owners free themselves from this trap? Because that's really what it is, you. [00:21:12] Speaker B: Know, I do a couple of different things. So I'm a coach, but I do it from a values based perspective, meaning we really help the person build self awareness. You know, what are my values, my convictions, my virtues? Those are different things. And quite often, when we don't have clarity on, you know, those things that really light us up, I'm talking everything from, you know, what gives our goosebumps goosebumps to, you know, what do I believe is true about me and everybody around me, and how can I affect the world? So that self awareness piece is huge. I'm also a part of the Iron Sharpens iron mastermind, and I facilitate two groups within that mastermind of, you know, business owners. And so, of course, as a collective, right, we got a virtual board of directors, you know, for our business, and we talk about personal things as well. So we call it a band of brothers for our personal lives. And it's. It's life changing, right? We become like the people we spend the most time with, period. And how do we know that's true? Like gravity. It's because those of us who have children, we do not want our kids getting caught up in the wrong crowd, period. Right. We know that, like, instinctively, but we don't often think about that for ourselves. So the coaching piece is one side of my. My life that I'm really passionate about. And then, you know, the masterminding is another. That's been life changing for me as well. [00:22:30] Speaker A: Yeah, 100%. I'm a massive fan of mastermind groups. I'm a massive. I've run some previously in the UK for MSP's. I don't do that anymore. It's not something I personally enjoy facilitating. I enjoyed it for a few years, and then once it stopped being fun, I stopped doing it, which I think is a sensible way to run any kind of business. But the concept of it, of you sitting with other people with exactly the same problems as you and you figuring it out. And I love that approach of the values based thing. Think of my values of, you know, being a great dad. The best possible dad, is a very strong value, but also being a successful business owner is also a strong value. And I can see how many people would feel exactly the same way. And mastermind groups help those two things integrate, as we were talking about earlier. Okay, David, just briefly, before you sing, and we are going to get a few notes out of you, just tell us, how can we get in touch with you and learn more about what you do? [00:23:24] Speaker B: Sure. So my main business, if you go to statguardplus.com. you can check out my thermostat guard line. And as well, just my personal page is David Osk. David a s k.com. [00:23:37] Speaker A: Okay. And for the first time since the 5 November 2019, when we launched this podcast, thinking it was going to be just a sort of a ten week experiment, and here we are nearly five years later. David, I can almost do a drum roll. Maybe our producer, Simon can insert a drum roll at this point. There we go. There's the drum roll. David, would you like to prove to us that you are also not just a great guest, but a great singer as well? [00:24:01] Speaker B: Hey, by the way, before I do that, I recorded my last record in England. My mother, the producer, is british. He has a home here in Nashville. But so being that I'm. [00:24:12] Speaker A: Hang on a second. You're in one of the greatest musical towns in the world, which is Nashville, and you came to England to record a record that doesn't. [00:24:19] Speaker B: I know. Oh, isn't that funny? [00:24:20] Speaker A: That's crazy. [00:24:22] Speaker B: All right, I'm gonna actually sing something that I don't think I've ever sung, but I heard it this morning. My daughter was playing it, so I'm gonna just give it a try here. So somewhere over the rainbow way up high. All right. How about that? [00:24:43] Speaker A: There we go. Very good. Thank you very much. And you helped us immensely by picking an out of copyright piece of music as well. So thank you very much, David, thanks for being on the show. [00:24:52] Speaker B: Hey, my pleasure. Thanks for having me. [00:24:54] Speaker A: Paul Green's MSP marketing podcast. Paul's personal peer group. Well, will you look at that. We have reached the end of another show, and it's time to finish with one of your questions. Producer James, what have we got this week? Meetings, meetings, meetings. This week's question is to do with meetings from Chris, whose MSP is fairly new in San Francisco, although he has a small but growing team already. So his question is, in terms of team and meetings, what's a good meeting rhythm to grow the business? A meeting rhythm helps to take away the haphazard nature of growing the business. If you have a management team you work with, you need to figure out how often you should meet and why. I've got to be honest, less is definitely better than more. Here's a good structure that you can start with, and of course, you can take this, try it out, and adapt it to suit you and your team. So I think once a year, you should have two days off site away somewhere, stay over in a nice hotel, and that's time to bond. It's time to think big and to set the vision for the next few years. Then once a month you should have a formal management meeting, ideally physically meeting up and no more than a couple of hours. The agenda should be 100% on subjects that grow the business. And then once a week you should have a short video call with a progress update on the actions from the management meetings and make this the same day each week. Mondays are good as they can set up the whole week's work and then finally you've got operations meetings and these should be as needed, perhaps to discuss technical issues and clients. If you do them once a week, make sure that they're on a different day to those growth calls that you were doing. Otherwise they'll just merge into each other and the growth meeting will become less effective. A quick side note on this if you've never read it, traction is a really great book to read around this subject. Now, if you want to submit your own question, go to mspmarketingedge.com comma go to contact us. And on that same site you can see why we're the leading white label content marketing system trusted by over 700 MSP's around the world. So check if your area is available right [email protected]. coming up, coming up next week. Thank you so much for listening this week. Next week, what the yellow car game can teach us about marketing for MSP's around the world around the world the MSP Marketing podcast with Paul Green.