Why is this so controversial for MSPs?

[00:00:02] Speaker A: You found it. If there was a podcast for MSPs hungry to grow beyond their wildest dreams, this is the show. Hello there and welcome back to the show. Here's what I've got coming up for you today. Marketing expert and best selling author Marcus Sheridan is here to tell you why you must put a pricing estimator on your MSP's website. Change your life and your MSP in daily 90 minute chunks. And my other special guest today reveals why email is still your number one marketing channel. Welcome to episode 324 powered by MSP marketingedge.com Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast. If you want more hot leads for your msp, put a price estimator on your website. For some reason this is one of the most controversial things in the channel, with many MSPs saying it's impossible to give an idea of price before you've spoken to a prospect and yet prospects don't want to talk to you in order to get a price. What to do? Well, I've got marketing expert and best selling author Marcus Sheridan here right now to give you what I believe is the definitive word on this. I like to think of myself as a bit of a marketing sponge. I read almost every single business and marketing book that I can get my hands on. Actually I listen to them more these days. But I'm also constantly reviewing different ideas and different ways of doing things to keep my mental model of the best way to market your MSP fully up to date. And there was something that I added to this model years back when I read a book called they ask you answer by Marcus Sheridan. Have you read this? One of the big ideas in the book is the idea of transparent pricing. Marcus in that book taught extensively about radical price transparency, which means that you talk very openly about your price, you explain what drives the cost up and down, you discuss cheap versus expensive options, and you compare yourself to alternatives. He essentially you're just trying to help people who want to buy from you, who want to switch MSPs. You're trying to help them to understand value. And then Marcus released a book called Endless Customers last year, which was a reinvention of they ask, you answer and kind of updated for the AI age. And he took the idea of radical price transparency and took it even further by suggesting that you put a price estimator onto your website. What's a price estimator? It's a tool for someone to get a rough idea of how much it costs to be a client of your msp. This to me was so obvious that I actually negotiated a partnership with Marcus Sheridan and his business partner Steve or Shetty, and we launched MSP Price Guide at the back end of last year. It's an AI driven price estimator tool that you can put onto your website and we've done all the hard work for you. So we've built templates, we've added in all the standard managed services, all of that kind of stuff. So you can just start your 30 day free trial and get an estimator onto your website within 10, 20 minutes or so. You can see [email protected] Anyway, I asked Marcus to pull together something to show you why all of this is so critical and so applicable to msps. Take it away, Marcus. [00:03:14] Speaker B: Hello, MSP community. Marcus Sheridan here. Let's have an honest conversation about whether or not you should be considering a pricing estimator for your website. First thing that we have to understand is that 75% of all buyers today say they would prefer to have what's known as a seller free sales experience. In other words, we don't hate salespeople as buyers. We just don't want to talk to them until we are good and ready. And that was a B2B study by Gartner, by the way, and I think you would agree with that. We don't want to talk to sales until we're confident, comfortable and we feel like we're not going to make a mistake. The answer to that is give the buyer more control through what is known as self service. Self service are interactive tools, mainly on your website, that allow a visitor to take an action or get an answer that previously they would have had to have done by speaking with a human. Now, what's so great about this is it drives a tremendous amount of trust and it also drives a tremendous amount of conversions. We know that the number one question a business has when they're looking at potentially hiring an msp, they are saying to themselves, all right, I need to outsource this, we can't do it anymore in house. Let's, let's find a provider for this, whatever it is. First question, you know what it is, Roughly how much is this going to cost? Or as they would ask you if you talk to them on the phone, is, could you give me a sense as to what we're looking at here? This is the fundamental question that everyone has when they start the buyer journey. And it is the gateway to the buyer's journey if they can't get any type of Answer for this. Oftentimes they'll stop at that point, but if they do get an answer, they can continue and they'll vet you further. They'll stay on your website longer and then eventually they'll watch maybe some of those videos and finally fill out that form that says, hey, I would like to talk to a salesperson. This is how you behave. This is how I behave in the realities your customers are no different. So we have to address the gateway question to making a purchase, which is roughly how much does it cost? You will increase on average a 300% lift in conversions on your website. If you as an MSP have a pricing estimator on your homepage that says the phrase get instant estimate. Keyword is instant. Get instant estimate. What you have to understand is what you're not doing here is you're not actually giving a quote. There's a difference between an estimate and a quote. The quote comes after they speak to you and then you give them the quote. I can tell you right now that over 90% of the industry, as you well know, doesn't address pricing on their website. Many of them, sadly, have a pricing tab in their navigation bar. And then when you go to that tab, there's a form that the person can fill out, essentially saying, call for quote, get a quote. It's like someone has walked into the bar, which is your website, they sat down next to you and you immediately said, would you like to go home with me? I mean, that's not how it works. That's not what you should say in that moment. There has to be a process by which you earn their trust. And they say, you know what? I think this is the type of company that I would potentially like to do business with. When someone adds an estimator to their website, they don't take it off. Did you know the average SaaS product software as a service has a churn rate of 30 to 50%? What we have seen with this tool, we have a churn rate of 0.7%. Why is that? Because lo and behold, when someone puts a pricing estimator on their website, they get way more leads and your quality of sales conversations go up. So there isn't shock and all, there isn't big surprise when you're having these conversations. So not only are you having more sales conversations, but they're better sales conversations, which means you close more deals. But there's another benefit to this, because long term, you're planting a lot more seeds. So because you're going to get 3 to 500% more leads. You're going to build your database. And as you build your database, you can remarket those leads. And as you remarket those leads, even if they're not ready today, as they continue to experience pain, which we all know because of where technology is going to, people are going to experience more and more pain in the future and they're going to need to outsource these services where they're going to be thinking about you, because you're going to be front of mind. And that's the idea. And that's a circle of life. And that's the power of business. That's the power too, of MSP Price Guide. It is my hope that you say, you know what, just because the industry isn't doing this doesn't mean we shouldn't. In fact, because they're not doing it, maybe we should be doing it. That's my challenge to you. Run in the opposite direction. Give the buyer what the buyer wants. Follow the golden rule. Put a pricing estimator on your website and use it often. Watch what happens with your leads. Test it, test it. You will immediately see the impact that it has. Obviously it's contingent on the traffic that you get, but again, you're going to see 3 to 500% on average increase in leads. Hopefully that was helpful to you. If you have any questions, reach out. Give Price Guide a try today. [00:08:26] Speaker A: Paul Green's MSP Marketing podcast. Still to come. Tell me you do have an email database of prospects, right? Not clients, but prospects. And you do send them an email at least once a week. You know, something educational, something entertaining to grow your relationship with them. So at the point they're ready to switch msps, you're the first name they think of. Wait, you don't do this? Well, email marketing is still one of the top marketing channels for MSPs, even though email has been around since the 1870s. My special guest today has dedicated her career to email marketing and she's going to be here later to tell you how you can do it more effectively with less work. She'll be here in the next few minutes. What if there was a daily habit which if you adopted, it would change your MSP forever? It would allow you to do everything you need to do to win new clients, get those clients to buy more from you, and get those clients to spend more. And of course, in changing your business in this way, you change your life. You could potentially spend more time with the people you love doing the things you enjoy, and less time doing work. You don't enjoy. You fancy that. One of the best business habits I've ever adopted is working all on my business for 90 minutes every weekday. And I've been doing this for about 20 years now. And yes, I know it's shocking that I'm that old. I'd say, in fact, it's one of my secret weapons. Because no matter what happens in my workday, so long as I've completed my 90 minutes working on the business, I can guarantee I'll get things done. Now, when I tell MSPs about this, I'm often hit with a series of common questions. So let me answer them for you right now. The first is, why do you do this, Paul? Well, because like you, I'm a busy business owner with big dreams and big goals and I know how easily your day can be lost to a problem or just life. When I started my first business back in 2005, I spent the first 90 minutes of every weekday working on the business. And apart from a short break over lockdown, kind of like what, six years ago now, I've kept that habit going for the last two decades. Paul, how do you find and protect 90 minutes every day? That's another question I get. Well, you can take a kind of sci fi approach to this as you need to find and protect two things, time and space. Time to get this important work done and space or a place to do it. Now these two have changed a lot for me over the years, but currently I get up at 6am, six in the morning and I work on the business till 7.30am don't laugh. I actually do this in bed. My alarm goes off at 6am, I grab my laptop, I adjust my pillows so I can sit upright and I get working. And yes, I know that creates a kind of a weird vision for you. In fact, in years gone by, I've done it in my home office or I've gone out to an external office space. I did that when my daughter was very young and sometimes disruptive. Other places that other MSPs do this are local coffee shops, restaurants or hotels. Basically anywhere where you won't be interrupted. Now, this question leads on to another question. Wait, sorry. Paul, you get up at 6 every day? Are you mad? Well, maybe. You know, when I first started this habit in 2005, I actually got up at 5 in the morning every single workday and worked for 90 minutes. And the reason I did that was because in my previous employed existence when I had a job, I'd been a radio presenter and I used to get up at 4 every morning to do the breakfast show, that was a 10 year habit for me. So getting up at 5 in the morning kind of felt a bit like a lion. From a practical point of view, the reason that I now get up at six in the morning are numerous. So it's a time of the day where people don't normally work. No one's really expecting to get an email reply from you at six in the morning. In fact, they're not even really expecting to get hold of you on email, on Slack or teams or on the phone. It's kind of a dead time. So I've turned that dead time into productive time. The payoff for this is by the time my working day starts about 9am, I've already done the most important tasks of the day and that makes me feel great every single weekday. Now, MSPs do sometimes struggle to do this early in the morning, but then they find they can protect time over lunch or in the afternoon, or for some it's the evenings. In fact, I do know MSPs that do this in the very early hours of the morning. The specific time that you do this doesn't matter. What's important is that you pick a time you can repeat every single day. If you're moving around the calendar, it's really hard to make sure you do it same time. Every day works best. Now this leads on to a question of Paul. How do you keep this habit going? And actually I've just given you the answer. Because it happens at the same time every day, you've probably read the same stuff that I have about how you have to repeat something multiple times to turn it into a habit. If you try and move your 90 minutes around the clock, it's going to be really hard to fix it as a habit. At the same time, every day is simple and it's beautiful. And I promise you it works. Now the next question I get is, Paul, what kind of work do you do? Well, the answer to that is anything that's working on the business rather than in the business. So typically these are tasks that fall into one of three categories. Things that win new clients, things that get those clients to buy more, and things that get those clients to spend more. Almost every other task is working in the business. Now sometimes I then get the question, Paul, could I just do 60 minutes rather than 90 minutes? And the answer is yes, you could. But you'll find that you get almost twice the amount of work done in 90 minutes compared to 60 minutes. Why? Because it takes Time to kind of build up a bit of momentum to get started and then get going. And I often find that I'm in a full flow of work by the end of the first 60 minutes. So working that extra 30 minutes just gives you a huge boost in output. And because you're already in the flow, you really do achieve more in that final 30 minutes than you do in the first 60 minutes. I promise you, that's how it goes most days. Which leads on to a question then. Right, okay, Paul, could I do this as one day a week rather than doing it in small chunks every day? And you could, but I promise you, you won't get anywhere near the results you'll get by doing a little bit of time every day. On the surface, dedicating a day a week to working on the business kind of seems like a really good idea. But in reality, by the time you get to that day, and most people pick Fridays, it'll be interrupted by all sorts of stuff from all the other days that you haven't yet got done. The beautiful thing about doing 90 minutes every day is that even if you do have an unusual day where you lose that time, it doesn't matter. You just get back into the habit the next day. Whereas if you've put it all into one day a week, such as Friday, and you lose that Friday to a client emergency or something else, you've lost the whole week. Next question, then. How do I get started? And how about you commit to just doing this every day, starting, I don't know, like tomorrow, maybe next week, next Monday? Just do it as an experiment. You're going to try it for a week. If at the end it works, then keep doing it. If it really doesn't work for you, just dump it. So don't think of this as something you've got to lock in for yourself. Just think of it as a trial. And how about you give yourself a reward every day that you do this? We all respond differently to different rewards. For me, the thought of a Snickers is pretty much enough to get me to do almost anything now. Interestingly, I just calculated that in the 20 years of doing this, I. I've worked on my business for 7200 hours, which is more than 300 days. That's kind of getting near a year. A year of solid work just working on my business. If I'd known that going into it 20 years ago, maybe it would have put me off, because that does seem like an enormous amount of time and work. But of course, I've done this in tiny little inconsequential 90 minute chunks and the last 20 years has gone really quickly. But I've also achieved some pretty cool things along the way, all thanks to to those 90 minutes. So are you going to try this Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast still to Come hey, do you want to discover which areas of your MSPs marketing don't work and how to fix them? All you have to do is fill in my marketing scorecard. You can discover where you're going wrong and you'll get an instant score for your MSP's marketing. Plus, I will actually send you a personalized report telling you how to fix your biggest marketing challenges. You can do all this@msp marketingedge.com Scorecard One of the most important marketing channels any MSP can use is email marketing. Even though it's pretty much the oldest digital channel, email marketing works in 2026. It's a very reliable way to build an audience, grow a relationship with that audience, and then find out who the most active prospects are. But don't take my word for it. I've lined up a true email marketing expert to tell you how you can make email perform better for your msp. [00:17:16] Speaker C: Hi, I'm Perri Shira. I'm the owner and CEO of Duma Marketing and I am an email marketing expert. I've been working in email marketing since the beginning of the 2000s and looking forward to talking with you today. [00:17:32] Speaker A: And not as much as I'm looking forward to diving into email, because despite email having been invented in 1876, it is still a very, very valid marketing channel for MSPS today. And you know, on this, on this podcast and in my YouTube videos, I'm always saying to MSPs, look, you need to work on your LinkedIn, but that's a borrowed audience. Someone else owns that. Microsoft owns that. Your second audience you need to work on is your email list, because that's an owned audience. That data is always going to be yours and you have to do both those things. So we're going to do quite a rapid fire interview today. We're going to look at how you can build your email list. We're going to look at email list hygiene, which I know is a massive thing. We're going to talk about the platforms that you think are hot right now and the ones that MSP should be using. We'll look at automation as well and we'll talk about what you do to help MSPs. That's a lot to do in 15 minutes. But I know that we can do it. So just give us a potted history of your history, as it were. So give us the sort of the 10 second overview of how you came to be in this position as one of the leaders in email marketing. [00:18:36] Speaker C: Yes. Well, I started years ago with a mergers and acquisitions firm after my early career in print journalism and so came to it as a writer, ultimately worked my way up into the C suite of a mergers and acquisitions firm where I managed information technology and marketing. And so I was the executive vice president of those. And I pretty much frankensteined a CRM that could coordinate with outbound email marketing and started to really delve into database marketing back in the day. [00:19:14] Speaker A: I love it, I love it. And of course the tools today are so much better than the tools were back then. So I've been doing email marketing pretty much about 20 years and I started off with something that was once called infusionsoft, is now called Keep a P. We migrated away from that last year in 2025 and we migrated over to HubSpot, which I know that you're a gold partner of HubSpot and we'll talk about how beautiful but expensive HubSpot is later in the interview. So let's start at the beginning, which is building an email list. So the average MSP that I speak to, they either they kind of got a CRM, but they're not really using it. They've kind of got some people in there that it's a mix of clients and a few leads and prospects. They're not doing a lot of segmenting and there's no strategy, there's no specific focus on building the email list. But where would you recommend you in a situation like that, where it's a mature business, you've been going five plus years, you haven't really ever got started with it. What would you say is the right way to get started and start to systematically build an email list? [00:20:12] Speaker C: Yes. Well, I mean you definitely need to ensure you have a form on your website. You also, if you're doing things like attending trade shows, anything that you're doing where you could possibly be capturing email lists, make sure that you're capturing them. If you're doing any kind of advertising and you're driving them to just an empty page without a form, rethink that and add the form. Whether it's a pop up form or just a first name email form on the website, ideally you're going to get a little bit more than that on the form. But starting with first name and email is a great place to begin. [00:20:48] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. And as you and I know as users of HubSpot, when you, when you're using an advanced tool like HubSpot, you've got data enrichment plugins such as the HubSpot one is called Breeze. So we, you know, say we've, we've migrated in the last year and found, to our delight, we only need a business email address now. And Breeze will go and enrich that and discover everything else that's out there in various databases, which completely changes the game because as we all know, the more fields you ask people to fill in, the less likely they are to fill in the form. So we just get an email address now. And Breeze does. In most situations, it does the rest. On the subject of getting people to fill in forms, you know, go back 10 years, it was really easy, used to offer a PDF guide and people would fill it. [00:21:30] Speaker C: Right. [00:21:31] Speaker A: And that's it. And obviously that does work today. It probably works more in consumer marketing than B2B marketing, but it's very hard and especially for MSPs whose subject matter is very technical and ordinary people don't really care. So, outside of PDF guides, what are the kind of lead magnets are you seeing that are working well right now? And just to define what a lead magnet is for everyone listening or watching, it's something that someone wants, so they're willing to fill in the form to get. [00:21:55] Speaker C: Absolutely. And free consultations still seem to rule the day when it comes to B2B form conversion. So you definitely want to continue to offer those. Keep the form short. Remember that you can use Breez or you can even use just progressive profile building as you work people through the customer journey. One thing to keep in mind is that there are some ways to be helpful with PDF downloads, whether they're a checklist for, you know, a remote worker, user setup, or some other things that maybe aren't exactly germane to something that you would provide to your client, but they could help them in the same realm. They're relevant and helpful. Just stay relevant and helpful. And those are the lead magnets that are succeeding. [00:22:44] Speaker A: Yeah, I love that. And in fact, there's something that we've been working on with an MSP just to trial it recently, and it was a quiz to build your perfect work from home setup. And they go through like a quiz, we use tally. So but you could use Typeform for this. And then at the end it generates a personalized PDF, which it's the same PDF, obviously, because there is one great at home setup, but that's getting so much more engaged engagement than just having, just having that download on its own. So I think I agree with you. Being creative with the way that we're looking at how, how do we deliver the information is the right way to do it. So once you've got that email list and you start building it, and as you and I know it's a never ending job, you can never stop building your email list because people unsubscribe and leave that list as much as almost as fast as you're adding them. We talked about very briefly earlier about email hygiene. Can you explain what that is and why that's so important? [00:23:35] Speaker C: Yeah. Email hygiene is making sure you have a healthy list that wants to receive your emails. Maybe they don't want to act on your emails every day or every time that you send email to them, but they want to receive the types of information that you're sending to them. And if they don't, then ideally they unsubscribe. And a lot of people in email are afraid of unsubscribes. Unsubscribes are just another way to keep things healthy. The other important thing about email hygiene is occasionally running sunset automation so you can actually remove people who just are non responsive. I know there are still studies out there that show that even though the longevity of people retaining email addresses is improving, at one point, you know, they were saying that people might create a new email address every six months. Of course that's not a business concern for the most part, but people do move businesses and you want to stay with them as long as possible. But you also don't want those types of unanswered, unengaged email addresses dragging down your list and sender reputation. [00:24:46] Speaker A: Yeah, I completely agree. And a lot of the MSPs I've been working with in the MSP marketing edge, just recently I've been recommending that they focus on getting more people to reply to those emails. So if they send a broadcast email out from their CRM, you know, it's that anything to hit reply and let me know you got this. Hit reply with your question because obviously every reply that comes in, it's sending a message, it's sending a positive signal to, to the email client, it's sending it to your, to your CRM. And also it's great for engagement because let's be honest, the ultimate goal of emailing is not just engagement and getting in their inbox. We want to find out who's nearly ready to talk who's entering the research phase of switching msp. So I love this, this is great advice. Let's talk about the tools. So we've mentioned HubSpot, we've mentioned Keep. There are obviously those are at the kind of the, the, the luxury end, aren't they? Of the, of the, of the CRM market. I found out today that Salesforce, which has always traditionally been an enterprise solution is now targeting small businesses. So we can now throw Salesforce in there. They have a small business package. I'm sure they're going to end up being as expensive as HubSpot and even for them that's going to be cheap. Right. Because Salesforce is a 50, $60,000 plus a year investment and small businesses where spend that. But then at the other end of the market we've got. Well I suppose we've got like Active Campaign in the middle at the bottom of the market you've got mailchimp mail alight. We can throw high level in there. I mean this, there's probably a thousand other CRMs that we haven't mentioned. What's your. Well what's your recommended CRM and what are the sort of the big factors to think about when you're picking a CRM? [00:26:17] Speaker C: Yeah, over the years I have leaned toward either HubSpot for folks who are in the where it's the appropriate budget. I was actually a beta user of HubSpot back in 2002 and I've grown with it and I really enjoy it. It offers a lot of the great things that Salesforce has always been able to do but they make it much more intuitive than Salesforce usually when it comes to kind of smaller budgets I usually recommend ActiveCampaign. It has served many many clients well and it's scaled with them as their budget has grown. Even we've been able to use their robust automation interface to build out. I mean at one point I have 150 store retail establishment where I was able to build out individual flows for each of the stores and layer in so many, so much complexity there. But take it all the way back down to just trying to maintain communication with prospects and ActiveCampaign or HubSpot have been kind of my go to's. [00:27:28] Speaker A: Okay, so that is so cool. So you were actually a beta tester on HubSpot and how was that 23 years ago? Right. I remember reading a book about HubSpot called I Think it was called Disrupted and it was one of the early employees and it was like a warts and all expose of the culture of HubSpot. And you kind of, if you ever read that, you'd think, yeah, this company's not going anywhere. And obviously it hasn't done any damage at all because HubSpot is an amazing company and an amazing tool as well. So let's talk finally about automation. So you know those, some of, a lot of the CRMs we were just talking about do have automation. I know activecampaign is very good for automation at its price level. Obviously. HubSpot is insanely good. High level is very good as well. Would you say that you're kind of hobbling yourself if you don't get a platform that allows you to do auto, you know, some serious automation? And especially for MSPs, who obviously are very good at automating absolutely everything and integrating everything. [00:28:23] Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I feel like especially for MSPs, the market, your audience is expecting you to be cutting edge and they're expecting you to perform in very many similar ways as they're getting the, as they're receiving from marketing in the consumer space. That is something that study after study has recently shown that B2B marketing is, it has to evolve to mirror more of the consumer type marketing that people are used to receiving because this is just becoming a form of communication that it would be like you need to speak the language. And as an msp, you really, I believe, should be providing them the same types of responses to forms, the same types of prospecting communication that they're used to receiving from other types of companies. [00:29:22] Speaker A: Yeah, 100 agree. It's so funny when an MSP says to me, but I, I want my marketing to be more professional but you know, I want it to be more polished and more, more business like. And it's like, but the business people you're reaching here are going home and they're consumers and they're watching YouTube and watching Netflix and they're reading consumer emails. And I completely agree. You can, you can be polished and professional, but you, we all have a very high standard of marketing that we're used to in our consumer inboxes, as it were in our social media marketing. And the B2B marketing has to catch up with that. Perry, I could talk for literally hours with you about email marketing. Unfortunately, we don't have the time to do that right now. So just tell us a little bit what you actually do. What do you DO to help MSPs with their email and what's the best way to get in touch with, with you? [00:30:09] Speaker C: Yeah, what we do is we start out with a discovery. We really try and learn your tone, your voice. As you said, you know the polished professional kinds of messaging that you might want to send to your audience and then we dig in and if you don't already have a CRM, we help you build that, we help you identify. I've over the years I usually analyze around 30 different CRMs each year and update based on the functionality that they've added on. And of course there's usually a handful of new ones. So I test those out and so I'll help you identify the CRM that works best for you and the email marketing functionality that you require. Then we help develop things like a welcome series, abandon inquiries, try and save some of those folks who have landed on your site through advertising or other means and maybe not take an action. I help you identify ways to keep your list clean and then ultimately your overall sender reputation healthy. The best way to get in touch with me is to Visit my website, Duma D U M A C X.com and you can visit that site and check out the form that's available there, learn more about our business. There's also a phone number that you can use on that website to reach out to me. [00:31:38] Speaker A: Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast the Marketing. [00:31:42] Speaker B: Minute what's up everybody? Justin here from the Virtual Consulting Group. When was the last time you took a look at your website? The amount of MSP websites I see that have old information, bad graphics, copyright dates that are way off from what they are today. Seriously, go look at your website today and make sure it looks good because that is the first thing people are going to see and you want to start off on the right foot. [00:32:03] Speaker A: Coming up, coming up next week. Thanks for listening this week. Next week we're going to look at the concept of going the extra mile, doing loads of things that delight your clients and actually systemizing that within your MSP. In fact, I've got at least 10 different examples to give you and you'll hear what they are on next Week's show for MSPs around the world. Around the World, the MSP Marketing Podcast with Paul Green.