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Welcome to Episode 273 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…
Have you got a cold, sinking feeling because no matter what marketing you seem to attempt, none of it seems to be working? You’re not alone. Many MSPs get the chills about this. When nothing seems to be working, it’s hard to know where to begin fixing it. But here is the good news. Right now, you are going to discover how to pinpoint what’s holding your marketing back, how to turn it into a system that works, and why this approach could unlock new growth for your business.
One of the most common complaints I hear from MSPs is that their marketing just isn’t working. It doesn’t help that what you’re trying to sell has one of the most complex and longest sales cycles around. Managed services is very difficult to market and sell compared to many other things. For example, if you were running a business that sells widgets, it would be a lot easier for you to get traffic to your site, to get leads, to get inquiries and of course sales and get those widgets out the door. But you don’t. You sell managed services. And by the way, the flip side of this is that you keep your clients longer and they spend a lot more money with you. You have the kind of stats that widget manufacturers would be very, very jealous of. But why does an MSP’s marketing typically not work? And if you feel like you are doing lots of marketing, but you’re seeing little return, where do you start fixing it?
You have to break all of your marketing down into its component parts and examine each one. And ask yourself two very big questions…
The first of those is whether or not you are using the right marketing strategy? Let’s look at strategy. Sometimes I’ll be talking to an MSP who says they’re doing loads of marketing, but what they’re actually doing is creating a lot of disjointed noise. Just because you’re posting regularly on LinkedIn, that has no power unless it’s guided by a marketing strategy. Now my favourite strategy, which I talk about all the time, is very, very simple to communicate. It is just six words, but it’s the most powerful marketing strategy that any MSP can use. In fact, any B2B business, because I use this for my own marketing as well. The strategy is – build audiences, grow relationships, convert relationships. It’s a three step strategy, which you can also use as a three-step marketing system. In fact, we built our entire MSP Marketing Edge service around this. So you build up audiences of people to listen to you, then you grow a relationship with them using content marketing, and then you convert that relationship into them having a sales meeting with you. And that is typically done on the phone.
Let’s say you’re building an audience on LinkedIn, which I do recommend, and then you are growing relationships by posting content on LinkedIn. The difference between doing that with a strategy powering it, versus just doing it for the sake of doing something, is vast. If you know that your goal is to add connections every single day and post content several times a week, with the express goal of building a relationship with them, that makes the work you are doing on LinkedIn suddenly more powerful. Particularly when you remember that for managed services, people only buy when they’re ready to buy.
Also when you know that the strategy dictates that down the line, someone in your office is going to pick up the phone and call these people you are connected to, to talk about their business and see if they’re frustrated enough with their incumbent MSP to have a conversation with you. Does all of this make sense? When you’ve got a strategy, it makes all of the little things that you’re doing, even if they’re the same things you’re doing now, all of the little things you’re doing come together and work together to give you an outcome.
Now, I said earlier on that you need to ask yourself two big questions. The first was, do you have a marketing strategy or are you using the right marketing strategy? The second question to ask yourself is, are you using the right marketing tactics? Because the beauty of that six word strategy I was just telling you about is that you can use an almost unlimited number of tactics to implement it. So I mentioned LinkedIn because today LinkedIn is a very good place for MSPs to go farming for new leads, but that may change. We might be doing this in 2035, hello future Paul, and LinkedIn has gone off the boil because they broke it with some stupid decision somewhere. But if that happens, there’ll be a new place to go looking for leads. A good marketing strategy rarely changes, but the tactics do need to be updated now and again.
So in summary, if you’re doing a lot of marketing activity and it just doesn’t seem to be generating leads who turn into prospects, who turn into clients, then break it down into the component parts. And for everything you’re doing, check that you are A) being driven by the right marketing strategy and B) that you’re using the right marketing tactics. And by the way, I’d be delighted to help you with this. I have a free Facebook group, which is just for MSPs. It’s a vendor free zone, and it’s a place where you can ask me and 2000 other MSPs for help with your marketing. Just go onto Facebook and look for the MSP Marketing Facebook group.
Ready to rip up the rule book? When wanting to make more money for your MSP, they say you can’t take shortcuts. They say shortcuts come with downsides. They say you’ve got to do things properly.
Well, what if they are wrong… what if there are some shortcuts to finding new clients and making more money?
For the next few minutes let’s ignore them as you find out about the marketing shortcut being used right now by thousands of MSPs around the world. You’ll find out how to use this shortcut safely and why it’ll enhance your marketing and not damage it.
There are lots of different ways to get new blog content onto your MSP’s website. Let me give you the answers to the most frequent questions that I get…
Why do I need blog content? Up-to-date blog content on your website shows your MSP is active. It can also be great for demonstrating expertise and authority in technology. Blog content can also sit at the heart of a regular marketing system. For example, you can send out emails and post things on social media driving traffic back to your blogs. Another question is, how often should I post new blog content? And the best cadence for this, I believe is at least once a week, more if you can do it but never less than once a week.
What is syndicated content? This is content written by a business such as my own MSP Marketing Edge where one piece of content is used on many different websites. What you do is the producer, that’s us, we add a little bit of code onto the blog, which tells Google it’s an authorised copy of the original blog, and that means that Google doesn’t penalise you for using duplicate content. The flip side of this is that there’s very little SEO (search engine optimisation) benefit for you, but at least you get regular content going onto your website.
Which is better, syndicated blogs or original content? I see it like this, original content is always better than syndicated content, which is always better than no content.
What’s the best way to get original content written? Write it yourself of course. Or if that’s a distress activity for you, find a writer on Fiverr or Upwork and get them to interview you over Zoom about a specific subject. They can record it, they can suck the knowledge out of your head, and then they can write that for you. And of course, ChatGPT can also do the same thing. It can interview you on a specific subject. Just remember, you do need to double, triple, quadruple check and edit what it outputs before you put it anywhere near your website.
Where do I get content ideas from? The answer to this is simple. It’s your clients and prospects. Listen to the questions that they most frequently ask you and then just write answers to those questions. That’s how I write all the content for my own blog. Anytime an MSP asks me a question, I write it down in a massive file of questions I’ve been asked. And at some point it becomes a new blog article.
Featured guest: Chris Abdey is a seasoned Procrastination Coach, podcast host, and productivity strategist with over 20 years of experience helping individuals and businesses conquer procrastination and achieve their goals.
Based in Canada, Chris combines mindfulness, positive psychology, and actionable strategies to empower clients to break free from limiting beliefs, overcome burnout, and unlock their potential.
As the creator of “Procrastination Station” and host of Procrastinator’s Pitstop, Chris inspires others to transform hesitation into action and dreams into accomplishments.
Don’t you find that tech tasks are a bit like household chores? When we’re at home, why do we sometimes choose to do something else like rewiring a plug or moving a table, something that isn’t urgent, when actually the dishwasher really needs to be unloaded and dinner needs to go on? It’s the same with technicians. When there’s a big project waiting, they can suddenly find they need to focus on checking the backups or other routine tasks, which just don’t need to be done right now, they’re not urgent. Well, my special guest today is a procrastination coach here to explain why we do stuff like that, the surprising way to focus on important tasks and the positive impact on your MSP when you get company-wide procrastination under control.
Hello everybody. I’m Chris Abdey and I’m a procrastination coach.
And I can tell our audience that getting you on the show was the easiest, easiest interview I’ve ever set up because I emailed you and four seconds later you emailed me back, which you would expect from a procrastination coach. I imagine, Chris, that you have to live your life using all the techniques that you’re going to tell us about in this interview and managing your own procrastination. And I suspect we’re about to hear that your story is one of huge procrastination, which is why you’ve become a coach and you’re actually helping other people to overcome that.
Now, I know thousands of MSPs or I’ve spoken to thousands of MSPs and many of them are massive procrastinators. Some of them are aware of it, some of them aren’t. Let’s explore why that is, why people procrastinate, what we can do to stop ourselves procrastinating and the damage it does when we don’t address that problem. Let’s first of all just hear about you. So you are the first person I’ve ever met who’s called themselves a procrastination coach. Let’s hear that story. So what was it that got you to this position of actually helping people to stop procrastinating?
Actually, it’s an interesting story because it leads right into MSPs and MSP owners actually. So when I was in high school, and I’m sure we can all relate on some level to this, I just took it to an extreme. The last two years, we had two years to do 12 art projects. And guess who decided that they could do all 12 art projects in about eight hours the day before they were supposed to be not only due, they were in a mock art exhibition that was open to the public while it was being reviewed. And let me ask you, so it was 8pm on Sunday night, and I was just running around like a chicken with my head cut off in the garage. I was using bottles, I was using cans, I was using caution tape, I was using styrofoam bits that were left over and I just slapped it all together. I even used toilet paper, if you can believe that. I made a little figurine out of it and hung it on a piece of wood too. What do you think was the outcome of that?
Well, either you got a really good mark and that encouraged you to be a procrastinator throughout the rest of your adult life or you completely failed and that’s what set you down this course. So go on. Which was it?
No, you’re absolutely right on the first account. My saving grace was the proctor for the mock art exhibition came from a different school. And what happened was he came in and he said, oh wow, I love how you used all these. I love how you didn’t go over the top with your materials, but you used stuff that was untraditional. And he started explaining what it was, what he thought it was. I’m like, you’re absolutely right. And then he says, it’s very reminiscent of pathetic art. And I said, pathetic art. I’d never heard of it. It was like, okay, quick, let’s Google it… back in 2004, trying on those flip phones. And anyway, I said, you know what? You’re absolutely right. It is exactly that, pathetic art, because it is a commentary on how our society, how everybody’s looking for perfection. So does perfection, therefore become the new mediocrity. And boom A+.
And that actually gave me a better grade than the poor friend of mine who spent two years busting his hump. He had extra help from these famous stained glass artists and all that sort of thing. So fast forward a bit that did give me a little bit of a God complex. I can just leave everything to the last minute and I’ll just pull a rabbit out of my hat at the end. So what happened was, it only works as long as it works. I know that my abilities are good. Here’s a specific example with an MSP… I was working with one provider and we had a bunch of projects that were due and we had a bottleneck, I had only allowed for two weeks. So we hit the bottlenecks, now the first project is two weeks late, the second project is a week late, the third project is five days late. And it just sort of cascaded from there. That’s really why I got into being a procrastination coach.
This is an interview I’m never going to be able to show to my 14-year-old daughter who is at the start of her two year art, what we call GCSE in the UK. It’s a similar thing. And if she thinks she can leave her 10 art projects until the night before and get an A, then I’m doomed. And in fact, that’s setting her up for not such a great life. So what was the point in your adult life, Chris, where you realised that procrastination was actually more damaging and that you needed to address it? And how did you address it?
The point I really realised where it was most damaging was when I was actually at a high point in my career. My procrastination actually led to high functioning alcoholism because I would put things off and I’d get bored, I didn’t think they were important, and therefore to fill the time, I would sometimes drink at work… not a good combination. And it really hit home when I almost had an accident with my daughter because I used to work from home a lot too. And at that point, that’s when I said, okay you know what, I’m going to stop this, I’m going to start doing my projects on time. And when I actually started doing the projects the way they were supposed to be being done, I didn’t have the time to be bored. So that’s really how I dealt with it, which is not how a lot of people deal with it, but that’s how it is.
And we all procrastinate in many different ways. And obviously that’s a fairly extreme form of procrastination there where you’re using alcohol. I have people I know who use TV in a similar way, they’ll think, oh, I’ve got that important project, but I’m just going to catch up on the latest episode of Superman or whatever. But there’s also, I find, and certainly with MSPs, there is procrastination through doing unimportant tasks. If they’ve got a big project to do and it’s scary, then they will jump on the help desk for an hour or pick up some tickets or just respond, something anyone can do is responding to unimportant emails. So do you find with the MSPs and all the other clients that you work with, that procrastination is a very personal thing, that we all have different ways in which we sort of output or create that procrastination?
Oh, for sure. I mean, everybody’s fairly unique in that sense. There are a few common denominators obviously, you mentioned a couple of them, especially in MSPs. I mean, you’re around technology all day, so you’ve got Instagram scrolling, you’ve got TVs in the background maybe, you’ve got chatting on your phone or like you said, you’re chatting to support desks about things that are more interesting than the project you’re working on. This is especially true when you have very talented team members working for you and you assign them to do very mundane things, which occasionally happens.
One of the ways around that is to, well, one, don’t assign them work that is beneath their level of interest. But the other way to really stay on track, is to get them to incorporate their ideas, ask for their feedback, even if they don’t have any. Just by the simple act of you asking for their feedback, it all of a sudden becomes a little bit more important to them. Let’s say you have to put out an application and this developer is only doing the wireframes, but he’s way above that. And so you’ve already done all this research, you’ve already done everything, but you’re throwing them a bone. You’re saying, oh, how would you do this? And then by them giving the feedback, it’s not necessarily you’re going to implement it, but you’re now giving them sort of so to speak, skin in the game.
And what’s the consequence of giving them that skin in the game?
So when you give them that skin in the game, you automatically raise that importance level. Because a lot of procrastination, especially in MSPs, can definitely come at the junior level, mid to junior level, and sometimes the senior level too, because what happens is they sometimes know a better way of doing it than maybe what production has said they should do. And so they think it’s juvenile or they think that it’s not a good way to do it, or they don’t see the importance in doing it that way, which can lead to a lot of procrastination. I mean, you were just mentioning that they might jump off into support tickets for an hour. It’s because they can see more importance in those support tickets than they can in the task that you assign.
Yeah, that makes perfect sense. But honestly, as the business owner, is it easier for us to procrastinate than our team because no one’s watching what we’re doing? I’ve always said that being a business owner is a double-edged sword in that we don’t get fired, we don’t have bosses. You are a business owner, I’m a business owner, most people listening to this or watching on YouTube are MSP business owners, and no one fires us except the clients. And typically that doesn’t happen because we surround ourselves with people to do the work. So it is very easy to be an ineffectual boss once you get your business up to a certain level and never actually developing something else. Compared to when you worked for someone and you had a boss who was actually watching what you were doing or not doing. Do you find that, do a lot of your clients tend to be those business owners? And as a secondary question, if the business owner procrastinates, do you tend to find that that goes down throughout the organisation as well, because it almost becomes a cultural thing?
Oh, for sure. Definitely. Let me break that down into a couple of parts. So in terms of business owners procrastinating, especially MSPs, it can be fairly easy as well to get lost in some of the more technical aspects. We talk about overwhelm as a big source of procrastination, which is essentially either – what I like to call not my circus, not my monkey, because they tend to try and take on way too much that isn’t even in their wheelhouse. And then there’s a knowledge aspect – they’ve not only taken on all these things, but maybe they don’t necessarily know how to do these things, and so that causes them to procrastinate and they don’t want to look bad. I mean, I’ve been in this position, I didn’t know something and I was telling my team do it. They said, oh, I’ll just do it and then it’s like, oh, well, I don’t know how to do that, and then I’ll just sit there. And rather than admit that, I’ll just sit there and say, yes, I will do that tomorrow. You’ll have that report on those KPIs and those TLSTs and those PIPs tomorrow.
Just using gobbledygook as a form of procrastination. Many of us, not everyone, but many of us have that problem. I certainly have a procrastination problem, and I’ve dealt with it over the years by setting myself deadlines using public accountability. Things like telling my team, I will get this done by Friday, and once that’s out your mouth, you’re very committed to doing it. My favourite technique is to go on a train journey. So I live about 45 minutes from London, and I have many times got on a train to go to London knowing I’ve got 45 minutes to get that job done, and then I’m at the station, then I’ll have lunch and I’ll come back and I’ll do the same thing. So those are just some of my own self-taught methods. But what do you recommend to business owners, to MSP owners? Is the first problem acknowledging that you have a procrastination problem or is that the first step? And then secondly, give us an idea of some of the techniques and strategies that you suggest to MSPs.
First and foremost, you need to understand the why you procrastinate. And you need to understand what drives you.
So from what you just explained to me, you tend to fall into what they call a crisis maker. The crisis maker is where you have those deadlines. It’s sort of not important until it’s important, or you get that extra boost of energy or extra boost of creativity knowing that you have to get it done before that train ride ends. So for crisis makers, yes, having deadlines, having urgency to things, understanding the importance of things.
There’s five different archetypes that we like to talk about: There’s the perfectionist, they need to break time, it needs to be the right place, perfect for release. There’s the worriers. They’re always, like what if…, what if this happens? What if that happens? And then you’ve got the dreamers who are the visionaries, they have these big plans, but they get lost in the details, either because the details aren’t interesting, or they hit that knowledge block again where they don’t know how to do it. And then you have the crisis makers, and then you have the defiers, I mean, that’s actually the easiest one to change because the defier is more about autonomy, about how I don’t like being told what to do. Well, that was the easiest because all you have to do is say, well, no, I don’t have to do this. Only two things in life are not a choice. You can’t choose to be born and well, you really can’t choose not to die. But everything else in the middle is a choice. We just have to live with those consequences. And when you say, instead of saying, I have to do this, I’m choosing to do this because, I’m choosing to do this report because I need it for my taxes, or I need it to do this, I need it for my bottom line. And then that gives it importance, and you’re taking your power back to actually get things done.
So just in case my daughter is watching this or listening to this, there is one third choice which you don’t have, which is doing your art projects… I just want to throw that one in there in there, Chris. Just out of interest before we wrap this up, of those five archetypes, you said that the easiest of to work with are the defiers, which are the hardest to work with?
Definitely the hardest would be a combination between the worriers and the dreamers. Because the dreamers have the compounded effect of worry. They get lost in the details because every step along the way, they worry about, oh, what’s going to be the outcome of that step.
Yeah, that makes perfect sense. So Chris, for those people who are listening to this or watching this and they’re nodding their head and thinking, yes, that’s me. You’ve got me in one of those five archetypes there, and they’re ready to do something about it. Tell us what you do to help MSPs and what’s the best way to get in touch with you?
Well, what I do to help MSPs is I will actually sit down with you and we’ll dig a top level down. Look not only at what’s going on with you, but also what’s going on in your organisation. Because I do also have quite a strong background in business development, project management, PMP, and what it comes down to is either people or processes or a combination of both. What we do is we analyse, is it people, is it on the personal level either with yourself or with your team? Or is it in a process level, either with yourself or with your team? Then from there, we sit down and we work together.
The easiest way to get in touch with me is on LinkedIn. I am the only Chris Abdey on LinkedIn, so that’s the easiest way to get in touch with me. Or you can go to my website, www.procrastinationstation.ca, and there’s actually a tiny quiz at the top. It’s only eight questions takes you five minutes to do, and it’ll tell you which of those five types you might fall into.
Christian from an MSP in New Mexico, says when he is on the road he always notices advertising billboards. So his question is: As an MSP, should I advertise on billboards?
There’s a short version and a long version of this one. The short version is, no, don’t waste your money.
The longer version is that billboards, yeah, they look cool. And your competitors, if they see you on them, they might think that your MSP’s bigger than it actually is. But in reality, they are an expensive, old-fashioned solution to the problem of how do I get my message in front of the right people at exactly the moment they’re thinking of switching MSPs.
There’s a part of our brain called the reticular activating system, and it acts as a filter for all sensory information. It literally decides what you perceive based on whether or not it’s relevant to you. So if you’ve got toothache, then you see and perceive the big poster for emergency dental care. But if you don’t have toothache, your eyes flick over it. You see it, but you don’t perceive it because it’s not relevant to you.
Most people who see your billboard will not perceive it because it’s not relevant to them. The tiny number that do perceive it will think, ah, that’s a good idea. And then they promptly forget about it, unless of course they whip out their phone and visit your website immediately. And this is fine on something like Google where you do pay per click, because if they don’t click, you don’t pay. But the Billboard advertising companies, they want money just to put up your poster.
The other issue is that you can’t tweak your message all day every day like you can with digital stuff. You’re kind of committed to your message for the whole campaign. But if you want to go ahead anyway and you want to do billboards, here’s how to test what tiny response you would actually get from a billboard. Buy a vanity URL for the call to action… something like ITyourtown.com, and then point this URL at a hidden page on your normal website, and you only ever use this URL on billboard adverts. Therefore, you can look at how many people have visited that page to know exactly how many have responded to your advert, and it won’t be many.
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