If your MSP is looking for a vertical that ticks almost every box, then financial services might be the one… here’s why. Also this week, the “trust transfer” trick of borrowing credibility from people prospects already trust, and my guest built an MSP to $143m exit and understands why MSP founders get stuck.

Welcome to Episode 355 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

Deep dive into winning financial services clients

If you’re looking for a vertical that ticks almost every box – recurring revenue, long-term loyalty, genuine willingness to pay for good IT, and a compliance pressure that never goes away – then financial services might be the one.

Right now, I want to do a deep dive into winning wealth managers, independent financial advisors, mortgage brokers, and insurance brokers as clients for your MSP, because this is a sector that is genuinely crying out for MSPs who understand their world. Let me show you how to become one of them.

Let’s break this down into six easy parts…

1. Why is this vertical so attractive?

Well it’s pretty simple really, it’s very stable, very profitable, long-term businesses. These kind of financial services clients don’t tend to disappear overnight, and they also have a very high dependency on technology. You think about it, everything they do involves data, communications and client records. So they are genuinely willing to pay for high quality IT because for them, the cost of getting it wrong is huge, just huge. It isn’t just that the technology is needed by them, it is absolutely mission critical. That ticks a big box for us.

But also, and this is huge as well, compliance pressure. For these people, we have no idea what the compliance pressure must be like for them because they have to operate under an increasingly complex and burdensome set of rules. There’s always new rules coming in. It’s very rare that someone comes in and says, “Let’s have fewer rules for financial services.” That just doesn’t happen. So the norm for them is all this compliance. And of course, a lot of the technology is there to make sure that they stay compliant. I’ve been digging around for some stats and I found that 96% of financial firms now allocate more than 5% of their total spending budget to IT and cyber security, and that’s going up. They take technology really, really seriously. And that means that once you’re in, you’re in. Because as we know, for an ordinary B2B company, switching an IT provider is highly disruptive for them. And for a regulated company, that’s just too much risk. You’ve got to be really bad to lose a financial services client or someone that’s related to that. So retention is very, very high in this sector.

On top of this, and this just keeps getting better and better, these people talk to each other. The IFAs, the mortgage brokers, the insurance brokers, they tend to operate in very tight networks, either because they’re all part of the same actual selling network or buying network or something like that, or just because they tend to hang out with each other. They meet each other at training and compliance sessions and stuff like that. So they are talking about the suppliers that they use. Once you are in with one and you do a good job, the good news is you’re likely to pick up other clients as well.

1. The psychology of the buyer.

For these people that we want to reach, it’s almost always that the decision maker is the owner or the senior partner. And of course, there are influencers as well. In most B2B buying decisions, you’ve got a decision maker and an influencer. So you might have the CEO is the actual decision maker, but the operations manager might be an influencer. The operations manager will pretty much tell them who to p...

For MSP’s, winning back past clients is actually one of the easiest and cheapest opportunities… are you overlooking this? Also this week, the horrendous truth of how MSPs are losing sales opportunities and annoying existing clients on the phone, and the MSP who thinks you should sell Google Workspace, not Microsoft.

Welcome to Episode 354 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

How to win back a client who dared to leave you for another MSP

I want to talk about a type of prospect that almost no MSP ever follows up with.

The prospect is a client who left you in the past.

Let me make the case right now for why winning back these kind of people is actually one of the easiest, cheapest, and maybe even most overlooked opportunities in your entire marketing.

Winning back a client who left you is up to five times more cost-effective than winning a brand new client.

If you think about it, they already know your name, your reputation, they know roughly what working with you is like, even if you’ve changed in the year since they left. And yet research consistently shows that most B2B businesses do not do this. Almost three quarters of companies have no win-back process at all. They lose a client and that’s the end of the story. So why does this happen? And specifically, why does it happen with MSPs?

I wonder, is it down to pride and discomfort? Because I don’t know about you, but I know for me, it feels a little bit awkward to go back to someone who chose a competitor over you. It’s one thing if you pitch to someone and they choose a competitor in the first place, but if you’ve worked with someone for a couple of years and then they leave you for a competitor, that’s where it almost feels slightly personal, doesn’t it? And it can feel a lot more awkward. It almost feels like you’re admitting weakness or you’re chasing them and you don’t want to be. I guess if you put it in ex-boyfriend/ex-girlfriend terms, you don’t want to be the ex that reaches out because that’s uncomfortable.

But they’re not an ex-boyfriend or an ex-girlfriend, they’re an ex-client, and that discomfort is costing you easy revenue that’s sat there to be collected. Let’s be clear about the kind of clients we’re talking about here… We’re not talking about the ones that have been acquired by another business, that business is gone. We’re not talking about the ones that have gone bust, obviously that business is gone as well. We’re talking about if they have switched from you to another MSP. So let’s talk this through and all the aspects of it.

Let’s deal with timing first, this matters more than you would think. If you reach out too soon, you are the needy ex and of course they’re still in the honeymoon period with their new provider. But if you reach out too late, you’ve completely missed the window where they realise that the grass wasn’t greener on the other side. Because that’s why someone switches, isn’t it? They leave you for another MSP thinking that with the other MSP the grass is going to be greener. And there does come a point where they realise that actually, some of the things are going to be different with that other MSP, but some things will be worse, some things will be better because every MSP operates and delivers in quite a different way.

We did a little bit of research on this and the research broadly supports a timing window somewhere between two to six months after they leave. And my gut feel would be towards the back of that. So if they leave you in January, you should be reaching out in June… April, May, June kind of time. And most attempts to win back a client happen far too early. They happen at the point that someone cancels or the point that the client says they’re not going to sign another contract. That’s the wo...

Let’s discuss how MSPs can talk about AI without sounding like everyone else to win more consulting opportunities. Also this week, the pricing page no MSP dares to build, and what are the hot opportunities in the channel right now?

Welcome to Episode 353 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

How to talk about AI without sounding like everyone else

AI is probably the single biggest consulting opportunity sitting in front of your MSP right now. But of course there’s a problem. Almost every MSP talking about AI sounds exactly the same as all of the other MSPs who are also talking about AI. So today I want to show you why that’s happening and how to fix it. Let’s talk about how to talk about AI without sounding like everyone else.

If we’re honest, most MSPs are not true experts in AI. I know that you’re very capable users and you probably use Copilot or Claude or ChatGPT. I mean, you probably use all of them, right? You’ve probably had to play with all of the major tools available. But when I say that most MSPs are not AI experts, typically you are just a few steps ahead of the average person, depending on the kind of clients that you deal with.

These days, being an AI expert does only mean being a few pages ahead of everyone else because of course it’s changing so quickly.

I do think there is a big difference between being a capable user and being a credible advisor. They’re two completely different things. And the trap is, for most MSPs, if you are just a few pages ahead of your clients and your prospects that you’ve read a little bit more, you’ve watched a little bit more on YouTube, then you have to be careful not to turn that into genuine expertise. But what you have as an opportunity is the ability to talk to them about AI and how they can roll it out and protect themselves and protect their business. That’s something that they don’t know. And that’s something that even if you are only a few pages ahead of them in the book you still have the ability to talk to them about that.

For example, they might be looking at “How can we use Claude? How can we use ChatGPT within the business?” But they don’t know the questions to ask themselves. So they don’t know the concept of shadow AI, that their business’s data is being loaded into everyone’s personal Claude accounts right across the business. And of course that could be happening right now and they have no idea that this is happening. They don’t know that Copilot has those guardrails that you don’t necessarily get with Claude and with ChatGPT and with the others.

It’s almost a case of because they don’t know what they don’t know, and they don’t know what questions to ask, that’s why you can consult with them about their AI. So you’re not consulting with them about AI capabilities as much as the best way to roll it out across their business. And actually, isn’t that what you do already? You are already a consultant about the best ways that they can roll out technology and max technology in their business, and AI is just another strand of that. But when you are communicating that, you’ve got to be careful not to use generic AI messaging. And this is the issue with general MSP messaging anyway.

You’ve got to be careful not to use generic phrases because when ordinary business owners see the same phrases from all MSPs, it makes all MSPs look the same. And samey kills sales. So it’s exactly the same in AI. Here are some specific phrases that you might inadvertently use which make you sound the same. You might say phrases like “AI is transforming business” or “Unlock the power of AI” or “Stay ahead of the AI curve.” Those by the way, are all phrases which came out of an AI tool. And unfortunately they say nothing because all MSPs could easily put those on their...