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Welcome to Episode 313 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…
People are so skeptical these days and when they’re looking at your MSP’s reviews, if they see certain words and phrases they might not believe the reviews are true. I know this sounds crazy because it’s not like you’re selling a product on Amazon and paying for fake reviews, but the reality is not all social proof is equal. You’ve got to make sure that people say the right things about your MSP. Let’s explore how to do that, how to collect social proof that always works, and the best way to guide people on what to say without your reviews ever seeming fake.
Social proof is one of the most powerful tools in your marketing toolkit. People trust what other people say about you more than what you say about yourself. But here’s the catch, if your reviews all sound the same, they lose their power. Think about it, how many times have you seen a review that says great service or would recommend or very professional, and that’s all it says? I mean, there’s nothing wrong with those comments, but when every review looks like that, they stop feeling real.
“Samey” kills sales and it’s the same as social proof, because these sound like copy and paste praise and prospects just ignore them.
That’s what I mean by cliches in social proof. It’s those generic lines that don’t give your potential future clients any real reason to trust you. So what works better? Detailed, story-driven reviews. And I’m going to give you an example. Instead of great IT support five stars, you want something more like, Our server went down late on a Friday afternoon. We thought the whole weekend would be lost, but within 30 minutes the IT team had us back online and they even followed up on Monday morning to make sure everything was stable. That level of care is why we’ll never use anyone else. Do you see the difference between those two reviews?
The second review tells a story. It shows the problem, it shows what you did to save your client and the end result, and that’s what makes it believable and therefore powerful. So how do you actually get this kind of social proof? Well, the trick is to guide your clients. Don’t just say to them, please, can you leave us a review. Instead ask them specific questions and I’m going to give you a few examples that you can use:
Number 1: What was going on in your business before you came to us?
Number 2: What made you decide to reach out to us instead of someone else?
Number 3: Can you tell me about a specific problem that we’ve solved for you?
Number 4: How did that make a difference to your business? How did it make a difference to your stress levels?
Number 5: What’s the biggest benefit you’ve seen since working with us?
Number 6: If a friend asked you why they should work with us, what would you say?
Now, those prompts which you might use in real life, if you are videoing them or interviewing them, or you might just send across to them on email and ask them to answer those questions, they give you reviews that are rich in detail and importantly in emotion. It’s exactly what new prospects want to read. Oh, and one more tip for you, mix up your formats. Written testimonials are great, but video reviews are even stronger because people can see and hear the genuine emotion. A 30 second video clip of a client saying how you saved their bacon is worth 10 generic five star reviews.
So avoid the cliches, go deeper and get your clients to tell their stories. That’s the kind of social proof that stands out and convinces prospects that you are the right MSP for them.
I know that this is one of the most frustrating things for MSPs. When your technician is talking to a client on the phone and the answer to all of that client’s problems is a specific service that you already sell, but the technician won’t even mention it, let alone tell them the details of it and the benefits of it. Why does this happen? Is it that your technicians don’t care? Are they scared? Could you incentivise them to sell? Well, maybe, but I believe the actual answer here is to look at things not from your point of view, but to look at things from the client’s point of view and especially from the technician’s point of view, here’s how to do that.
So here’s a question which comes up now and again when I’m talking to MSPs, how do we get our technicians to sell? Because they’ve got all of the selling opportunities right there in front of them. They’re sitting there every day speaking to people on the phone and dealing with tickets. And often they’re fixing problems that could be dealt with more proactively if the client bought a higher level of service or a different flavour of an existing solution.
Yet as we know, many technicians just don’t want to sell. I know there’s always the odd one who’s very good at selling and just gets on with it, but how do you motivate the majority who hate selling? How do you motivate them to actually sell? Well, I believe that we coming at this from the wrong point of view. As the owners of the business, we all want more monthly recurring revenue, right? Because this is the lifeblood of any MSP business, and so that becomes the thing that we’re focused on generating when dealing with existing clients.
But from the technician’s point of view, they’re not really interested in helping you to grow your monthly recurring revenue. Many of your staff look at you and the clothes you wear and the car you drive and the house you live in, and they already believe that you rich enough. I know that sounds crazy, but that might be how some of your staff really do think because all they see is the rewards. They don’t see the years of risk, the hard work and all of the sleepless nights. They don’t see the amount of business related debt that you carry and the personal guarantees that you might be burdened with. And they don’t even see that for every pound or dollar that comes into the business, only a small proportion of that actually reaches your pocket.
So you need to stop looking at this from your point of view and instead try to reposition it from one of two other different points of view. The first being your client’s point of view. Most technicians most of the time want to do a good job for clients. Would you agree? They want to stop them from having problems, they want to fix their issues. They want their clients to be happy and to say, thanks so much for that, you did a great job. Because we are driven as people to seek that kind of feedback. If your technician can recommend something to a client that makes their life easier, then they’re much more likely to do this, especially when they can start to understand that unlike consumers, business decision makers don’t have to make all decisions based on cost alone.
You owe it to your technicians to do some kind of weekly training with them. Perhaps just get them together as a group for Pizza Tuesdays to teach them about a specific service that you’re offering and what symptoms to look out for. In fact, if you did this every single Tuesday for the next year, that alone would help your technicians to sell more, because they’ll learn how to spot more symptoms of more problems, and they’ll learn how to understand that there is a solution ready for those problems.
Position it from the Tech’s point of view and answer their question – “what’s in this for me?” Whether we like it or not, people operate in a selfish manner.
It may not seem that way on the outside, but in the inside they’re asking themselves at some kind of level, what’s in this for me? why should I do that for you? So perhaps the right thing to do is to offer your technicians a little slice of the pie, if they can contribute to the business in a way that helps the clients. The client gets help, the business gets extra revenue and they get a top up to their Xbox fund, everyone wins. You could put in place a very simple scheme such as they get 10% of anything that they sell. If it’s a one-off project, they get 10% of the revenue. If it’s a monthly recurring revenue thing, then they get 10% of the first year’s value. And of course, they only get this cash when you’ve received the cash, so there’s no risk to you.
Perhaps the most robust way to do this is a combination of the two – weekly awareness training for your technicians, with a simple reward scheme for those that feel comfortable advising the clients. And in fact, they don’t even have to do the selling, they could just tell the clients about it and then just send you an email saying, Hey, we’ve just told X, Y, Z client about this, could you please give them a call and see if it’s something they want to do? So you do the actual closing, but they’ve done all the hard work of educating and persuading the client.
Tell me, do you think this is something that would work for your technicians?
Featured guest: John Bambenek began his journey with artificial intelligence through an unconventional path: a background in theoretical astrophysics paired with a deep frustration at the barriers of academic research. As a working professional and father of a blended family of eleven, he pursued a PhD in informatics while leading teams of data scientists. There, he recognised a critical gap between elegant theoretical models and the messy realities of practical application. This perspective drove him to develop a pioneering system for identifying criminal domain registrations, now relied upon by security companies around the world. With more than 20 years of experience in cyber security, Bambenek has built a reputation for making complex technical ideas accessible without losing their nuance. His work pushes past popular AI hype, focusing instead on how these technologies quietly reshape human behaviour and decision-making in an increasingly automated world.
Do you know that compared to the average business owner or manager, you and I are somewhat experts in AI. Even just being aware of what’s happening week to week makes us ahead of the curve compared to them. In fact, you’ll know that there’s a huge opportunity right now for MSPs to advise their clients in a consultative capacity about how to roll out AI in the best way within their business. And right now, I’ve got a secret weapon for you.
My special guest today is an expert in AI, a true authority, and he’s going to tell you how ordinary business owners and managers feel about it. The more you understand, the easier you’ll find it to sell them your AI consulting services.
My name is John Bambenek. I’m a cyber security professional with my own firm and author of Lies, Damn Lies, and AI, based on my PhD work at the University of Illinois.
And that’s such a great title of a book. Thank you so much for joining us on the podcast, John. We’re going to talk about AI attitudes of ordinary business owners and managers, so the people that MSPs want to reach. Are they using AI as much as we’re using AI? Is AI really a big thing for ordinary businesses out there? Or is it just something that in the channel, because we’re talking about Copilot and ChatGPT and Perplexity and Claude every single day, is it a bigger thing for us than it is for them? That’s what I hope that you’re going to be able to answer for us, John. But first of all, just tell us a little bit about your work as a cyber security expert. So what do you actually do and what kind of research have you done on AI?
So for 26 odd years as threat researcher, how criminals abuse technology and how they go about doing the work of extracting dollars from our wallets, whether it’s personal wallets or business wallets, I tend to focus on financial fraud. Every time there’s a new evolution of technology, there’s new ways that people steal money. A few years ago we were talking about cryptocurrency. There’s a whole class of frauds and malicious activity that was enabled by that on top of the benefits of decentralised currency, right? Everything comes with its cost and benefits and human beings being what human beings are, there’s always a subset of people that’s finding new and innovative ways to extract people from their money.
Yes, of course, and as we know, MSPs are there to help build up that cushion between those criminals and their end targets. By the by, I’m reading a book at the moment which I can almost guarantee you’ve read. It’s called This is How They Tell Me The World Ends By Nicole Perlroth. What a terrifying book. I think every MSP should read it. It’s a very long read, it’s taken me quite a few weeks to get through, but it’s essentially about state-sponsored cyber hacking. It’s a terrifying book and I’m sure you’ve hoovered that and many of them up. There was another one I read a few years ago by Kevin Mitnick, it was his book of how he got started hacking back in the seventies, which is a really entertaining read, especially when he became a pen tester. I’ll go and look that up after the interview, but great book.
So let’s talk about ordinary people then. So ordinary business owners and managers who are out there running dentists, veterinarians, they’re running manufacturing plants, they’re CPAs, they’re lawyers… to them, is AI as big for them as it is for us? Obviously they must have heard about ChatGPT and everything because it’s been three, four years since it exploded. But is it as big to them as it is to us?
I think it’s kind of a mixed bag, and really it’s kind of polarised now that you ask that question. You’ve got some who are well deep in it and think it’s going to revolutionise everything. You’ve got others who are thinking the Matrix and the Terminator will become reality. The truth is somewhere in the middle, but we’re kind of in a societal time where people are really passionate and energetic either to the positive or the negative. So I think for lawyers, for example, there’s a couple of lawyers who went off to the races and thought, you know what, I’m going to automate the tedium of writing pleadings, and got in trouble because they cited cases that didn’t exist. But other lawyers are risk averse by nature, and there are many that are like, I’m not going to touch this stuff ever because it’s too risky, but there’s no one in the middle. It’s either you’re really hot or you’re really cold about AI. There’s very few people who are like, Hey, it might work well here, might not work well there. There’s not a lot of balance.
And do you know what, I see that with MSPs as well. For every MSP I meet who’s so into AI that they’re vibe coding their own PSA, I’ve met people that have done that, which explodes my mind, because you couldn’t have done that two years ago, but I also meet those who hate the fact, for example, that Microsoft is baking Copilot into everything, right down to, as you and I know, it’s on the keyboard, on the Copilot plus PCs. Just before the interview you and I were chatting and we were saying it’s in PowerPoint, it’s appearing within applications. For those business owners who are perhaps on that I don’t like AI side, do you think the fact that it’s being forced into the tools they use every day, do you think that’s going to change their attitudes? Or do you think that’s just going to make them cross their arms and almost push it away a little bit harder?
Well, I think it depends. AI right now is in search for business models is what it comes down to. And part of the baking it into everything is to see how people use it. I mean, it’s a pervasive sucking up data because AI needs to be constantly fed and it needs to be constantly fed more. So, I mean, there’s kind of a symbiosis there in the sense of Microsoft wants Copilot on everything because they need all the data to make their models better. But I think like MSPs, Microsoft, Google, all the companies, they like taking it 99% of the way. The final mile is for various service providers. And that’s what you’re seeing with the explosion of AI firms out there where they’re wrap us around ChatGPT or Claude or what have you, to create services like Canva or Motion or whatever, to go figure out what the business models are that really will sell and be the next big thing to make people’s lives better. So I think for the innovative MSPs out there, it’s a green field. If you can come up with an idea that you think you can sell to your customers, you can make a lot of money. But the people who are like, Hey, no, we’re not going to do this. There’s a handful of CEOs and small business owners out there who will want to say, how do I get this stuff out of my organisation and keep my data processes companies safe from it?
Yeah, well, I guess actually if you look at that, there’s money to be made keeping AI out of a business isn’t there? There’s money to be made in blocking access to AI tools, and I don’t know if you can actually physically extract it out to the 365 ecosystem, probably not.
The problem with totally disabling AI is that essentially you’re dealing with monopoly companies who are telling you what you can and can’t do. I’m sure there’s a way to do it, one is don’t buy a Copilot enabled laptop or PC. I mean, I’m talking to you on a MacBook, but I’m sure Apple has their own AI place as well, and there’s plenty of AI in phones now, so I’m not entirely sure that there’s much of a market to be a curmudgeon, but you can still buy dumb phones out there for people who really don’t want a smartphone, it’s just a little bit harder.
Yeah, those old Nokia phones are selling pretty well I hear. If you were an MSP, John, if you ran a managed service provider and you are looking at AI as it stands, and as we know we’re on minute one of hour one of day one, and as you say it’s a greenfield and there’s just opportunity because we haven’t yet really settled into exactly what the AI business models will be, what would you do right now to make money from AI? So would you sell AI consulting because you know more than the people that you’re consulting with? Would you offer to build applications? What would you do?
Well, I don’t know that I would offer applications. My personal expertise is cyber security, so I focus around cyber security use cases. If you’re just saying, Hey, I’m going to do AI to do something I really don’t know. That’s where things probably will fail over the long term because just in life and in business, there are no shortcuts. On a long enough time scale, I’m going to beat an uneducated person on cyber security even if they’re enabled by AI, because these tools will fail and I’m smart enough to be able to figure out when they fail.
So I think it’s a question of if you’re an MSP, do what you know and do what your customers need and solve problems. All business is about solving problems. And I mentioned tedium, one use case is ChatGPT or all these tools are great for automating away tedium. Managing your calendar, I just don’t know that you’re going to make a billion dollar company for managing your calendar. But outsourcing, that’s where I got to figure out, do I meet with this person at 9 or 2pm? and managing that. I have customers all over the world, just managing meetings and time zones is a pain in the hind. So I certainly think there’s plenty of automating tedium that can be done.
MSPs are there to solve a businesses – Hey, a dentist wants to be a dentist – they don’t want to maintain Office 365. If you could solve that problem for them at a price point they’re willing to pay for, great. If it’s a dentist who wants to say, How can I make better crowns using artificial intelligence? I don’t know enough about dentistry to speak to that. And if you know enough about that maybe you can create something that somebody will buy, but with technology, technology is so painful and the last mile is left to the end user, whether it’s a business owner or a consumer, I think there’s always money to be made helping make technology less painful.
Yeah, no, I agree with you there. And ironically, my partner is a dental nurse and we were talking about change in business. She’s been doing it a long time, 20 odd years, and she was saying in her business what’s changed is the technology’s got smaller, but it’s still the same. The drills are the same. They’ve got a bit smaller and a bit more powerful and cheaper, but they’re the same. And when I described to her the amount of change, I mean just take something like cyber security, even in the nine years I’ve been in the channel, cyber security is unrecognisable today to what it was in 2016, obviously, and that pace of change, I think ordinary business owners don’t realise how much change and the pace of change in the channel, not just cyber security, but now AI and who knows what the next thing will be.
Let me come onto my final question, John, which is I want you to look into the future. It’s the crystal ball question, and I always ask this of any AI expert I get onto YouTube or onto the podcast, just because your entire life is working around AI and looking at it, and I guess you’re reading the research papers and actually to have someone that has a cyber security view of AI is especially important. Where do you think this is going? And cast your eye years ahead into the future, I guess we can all see that the cyber criminals are going to use AI more and more because it is making their lives easier. But where do you think all of this is going in the next few years?
Well, I would say every evolution of technology, back to the printing press, it’s all had benefits, but we’ve been stealing and killing from each other since our earliest documented histories. It allows people to commit crime over larger distance, at greater scale with less accountability. Artificial intelligence won’t be any different. Accountability and transparency are real big problems in AI. And often some of the first biggest use cases of new technology are by criminals. And I’ll give an example, relevant to small medium businesses of authorising transactions.
A business owner will call into the office, I need to wire $50,000, whatever an appropriate dollar amount is. I can now impersonate a voice/video persona with credibility to sound like anybody else and assume an identity to cause transactions to occur. And the one that happens or the one that occurs, I think of it was in Hong Kong as a 25million US transaction because somebody impersonated not just the CFO of the organisation, but a couple of other people in a Zoom call. Because we’re all used to video messaging now and kind of a core security thing is authenticating is somebody who they say they are. And that’s been an unsolved problem, and it keeps getting worse because we keep putting more technology and abstracting away. I wouldn’t want to flash my driver’s license in this podcast, you wouldn’t either, because it slows things down. We want things to happen faster, but they also are a little bit riskier, certainly in the short term. Eventually we’ll solve those problems, but it usually takes us a good 10 years from a cyber security standpoint to go figure out where the problems are and at least be able to create products and services that people have to pay for. And the smaller you are or the thinner or the margins are, the less able you are to protect yourself.
Yes, and of course, and in the 10 years of solving that problem, those criminals have come up with new problems. It’s a never ending cycle, unfortunately. Thank you so much for coming onto this podcast. John, just briefly tell us about your book and for anyone that wants to talk to you, how can they get in touch with you?
The inspiration for the title is a book from 50 years ago – Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics. And AI is basically statistics at its core, and people do lie and deceive with data convincingly. So there’s a notion of AI being this great, hyperintelligent, always right thing, free of bias, which isn’t true because humanity is all throughout the AI process. It’s not an entirely critical look because there are great things that AI can do. There are great use cases for it, it’s been very successful in healthcare. But kind of a more sober minded assessment of where it can go well, where it goes wrong, what problems are still out there. For people who want to reach me, my firm is bambenekconsulting.com. You can find the book on Amazon. There’s a landing page, liesdamnliesandai.com as well.
Hi everyone, this is Dave Sutton of Wingman MSP Marketing, and I’ve got a quick tip that you can implement, well two tips potentially, that you could implement in around 60 seconds or less.
The first one is a no brainer. From firsthand experience, we’ve seen recently that many an MSP can fall foul of this, is to answer the phone. We’ve seen so many MSPs miss inbound sales leads that we’ve called them directly ourselves to have conversations with them or on behalf of vendor partners. And you go through the sales line and it either doesn’t get answered or it just rings out, or it goes to a voicemail, or it goes through to a tech that can’t actually ask the right questions and be able to steer the prospect. So I fear many of you are missing out on opportunities by just not considering what happens when you get an inbound sales call.
My second tip, we are seeing email security is running rampant in tightening up on spoofing and all these ransomware attacks and things like that that are coming through via malicious mail, but one of the victims of that is the submissions from your website contact forms. So just go and test your contact form to make sure that you’ve got the SMTP configured correctly so that you can actually receive the submissions that people are filing through your website contact forms.
We’d hate to see all this hard work go into generating new leads that MSPs desperately need, and you fail at the hurdles of being able to answer the phone and handle an inbound inquiry or even receive the contact form submission through your website.
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