The average MSP does not need a full time salesperson, here’s what you really need. Also this week, five cool marketing ideas from other sectors, and how to outsource operations without making mistakes.

Welcome to Episode 341 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

Why you shouldn’t hire a salesperson, even if you hate selling

Can I be honest with you about something that might be just a little bit uncomfortable? If you hate selling, hiring a salesperson feels like the obvious answer. You get someone else to do the bits you hate, right? Problem solved, except it’s really not. And I’ve seen enough MSPs go down this road to know that for most of them it ends in frustration, wasted money, and a salesperson who quietly stops hunting for new business within about three months. Let me explain why.

The average MSP does no more than about two sales meetings a month. Two. And before you think that sounds shockingly low, it actually makes complete sense when you understand the business model of MSPs. MSPs don’t generate enormous volumes of leads because most of them don’t do a lot of marketing and that’s a kind of obvious thing to say. But more importantly, when you do win a client, that client pays you all the monthly recurring revenue for years and years and years, sometimes a decade or more.

So you don’t need to win clients every week to run a very healthy, profitable MSP. In fact, you might not be able to onboard them. You might not have the capacity to onboard a new client every week. You just need to win the right new clients, at the right time, consistently. And that might be for you one every month or two every month or something like that. But here’s what that means for hiring a salesperson.

If you’re only doing two sales meetings a month, what exactly is a full-time salesperson going to do with the other 150 odd hours?

Because new logo sales in an MSP is not a full-time job, not unless you’re a reasonably large business and you have a lot of sales activity going on. And a good salesperson who’s sitting around not selling is going to get bored, demotivated and expensive very quickly.

So MSPs think, I’ll get them to do lead generation as well. But asking a salesperson to generate leads is like asking, I don’t know, a network specialist to build a PC. And sure, they may be able to have a go at it, but it’s not what they’re good at. Lead generation and going out and meeting people and closing sales are two completely different skillsets. With all of the marketing jobs that need to be done within your MSP, you need different people to do each of those jobs.

Bearing that in mind, MSPs then think, okay, if they can’t do lead generation, then I’ll get them to do account management as well. That seems to fit. They can look after the existing clients and hunt for new ones. And yes, that kind of sounds logical, but 95 times out of a hundred, it’ll end in disaster. And here’s why. Account management is a genuinely enjoyable job. You’re talking to people who already like you, they’re already giving you money, you’re already solving problems for them and they already trust you. These are nice conversations, sorting out little small problems, conversations about the future of their business. Everyone enjoys an account management conversation.

New logo sales is the complete opposite. Until you get into the process with someone, a lot of it can be rejection, cold audiences, long sales cycles. It’s having to build trust from scratch over and over and over again. So if you give someone both of those jobs, of course they’re always going to drift towards the easier one, which is account management every single time and not because they’re lazy, because they’re human. And that means that your existing clients get lots of love...

MSPs, there’s a danger lurking inside my marketing advice… platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram are actually “borrowed audiences”. Here’s how to build an “owned audience”. Also this week, how to turn boring compliance updates into lead gen on LinkedIn, and how to sell more cyber security by telling stories.

Welcome to Episode 340 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

The danger of building your MSP’s marketing on borrowed platforms

Can I be honest about something? There’s a danger lurking inside the marketing advice that I give to you every single week in this podcast and I want to address it head on.

If you’ve been listening to or watching this podcast for a while, you’ll know that I tell you to build your audience on LinkedIn to make connections, post every day, send messages, and just grow your network. And of course, I stand by all of that. LinkedIn is still the number one place for MSPs to go farming for new business.

But here’s the thing… LinkedIn is not yours.

Your connections, your content, your years of relationship building. All of it lives on a platform that belongs to someone else.

Well, it’s Microsoft, I mean, they own LinkedIn. So that means that someone, some vice president of Microsoft hidden away in a building somewhere can change the rules at any point without warning, without apology, and without any obligation to protect what you’ve spent years building.

We have a name for platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook and Instagram within marketing. They’re called “borrowed audiences”. And borrowed audiences are really cool right up until the moment that they’re not. So let me give you two examples from my world that really bring this to life. And the first one involves my own MSP Marketing Edge Facebook group, which we use for member support.

So I started that in 2017 and for years that group has been a buzzing community with members sharing ideas and asking questions and getting answers and just helping each other out. It’s been great. But over the last couple of years, I’ve noticed something. The engagement has dropped significantly and it’s not because our members stopped caring or because the content within the Facebook group got worse. It’s because Facebook changed its algorithm. It stopped showing content from the groups that you’re in, in your feed. And you might have noticed this yourself if you still use Facebook.

You’re probably still a member of 10 or 20 groups and they’re all things that you’re really interested in. But the content from those groups never really appears in your feed anymore. You have to remember to go to those groups. And instead in your feed, you just see content from other places and other people trying to sell you stuff. And Facebook, for whatever reason, has prioritised that. So I’ve still got great content in my group, there’s great help there and great conversations, but some of my members never see it because they don’t remember to go and look at it. And the algorithm has decided without asking anybody that group content wasn’t worth promoting anymore. Thank you, Mark Zuckerberg.

I didn’t get the memo on that. Well, actually there was no memo on that, there was no announcement, the rug just got pulled slowly and silently. And that was a risk. It crept up on me. And obviously we’ve now actually gone and we’ve started other communities for our members on other platforms. Technically, we’re going to face the same problems again, but at least we can get around the Facebook algorithm problem with our other places that we can build communities.

Now the second example involves a friend of mine, Matt Solomon of Better Tracker, who’s very, very well known in the channel. A couple of Christmases ago, Matt got what I can only described as L...

Hello and welcome to a very special edition of the podcast. For the first time ever, we’re doing a complete deep dive into one of the biggest growth opportunities available to your MSP right now… co-managed IT.

Welcome to Episode 339 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

Grow Your MSP 10x Faster With Co-managed IT

Before I get into it, I want to tell you something about how we prepared for this episode, because I think that’s going to matter. So some background… we’re launching a new co-managed IT marketing membership, and I’ll tell you more about that at the end of the podcast, although if you do want to sneak peek, it’s on my website right now at mspmarketingedge.com/membership.

Anyway, to help us get this right from day one, over the last six months, my team and I have done hundreds and hundreds of hours of research into this topic. We’ve interviewed IT directors, real ones who actually buy co-managed IT, so people who sit in the role that your MSP will be trying to reach if you did this. And we’ve also interviewed MSPs who already have co-managed clients and are winning more of them. And all of that work has helped us to build a new membership. And of course, it’s also got into this podcast episode.

So what you’re going to hear or see today isn’t just my opinion about marketing to IT directors, it’s grounded in what they actually told us. In their own words about how they think, what they fear and what they want, and crucially, how they make buying decisions. In fact, throughout this episode, I’m going to play you some clips from one of those research conversations. It was an interview I did with an IT director who was very open with us, and I’m operating here on the principle that it’s better to seek forgiveness than it is to ask permission so he doesn’t know I’m playing these clips. Let’s keep this a secret, shall we?

To protect his privacy, his voice has been filtered, and I’m going to call him Dave. Obviously, that’s not his real name, but these are his real words, completely unscripted. And remember, the call that I did with him was a research call six months ago. It wasn’t an interview. I’ve picked Dave for this because he really gave us insight into the emotions that an IT director goes through when they think about partnering with an MSP. And I think when you hear him speak, it’s going to change how you think about this massive opportunity.

So, four things we’re going to cover today. First of all, what co-managed IT actually is, and just as importantly, what it isn’t. Number two, who makes the buying decision. Number three, why businesses choose co-managed. Number four, how you need to position and market yourself differently if you want to win this kind of work. Let’s go.

What co-managed IT is and what it isn’t

The single biggest mistake that MSPs make when they try to enter the co-managed market is assuming that it’s just a variation of what they already do. They take the same messaging that they use for business owners and bolt the words co-managed onto the front. And then they wonder why the conversation dies. Well, it dies because the buyer is completely different and a different buyer needs completely different language.

In traditional B2B sales, you’re usually talking to a business owner or a senior manager who doesn’t live inside technology every day like you do. They don’t really want to understand it. They don’t want to talk about governance, architecture, service tiers, all of that stuff. What they want is relief. They just want someone to take all of the technology away from them. And that’s why phrases like, “We handle everything” or “Leave your IT to us”, they work so well in B2B marketing because you’re selling peace of mind to someone who just wants...