The best way for MSPs to delight existing clients dosen’t actually cost money… here’s 5 ways to do it. Also this week, how to turn your MSP’s success stories into 3 BIG marketing assets, and what if you sold your MSP to your employees?

Welcome to Episode 332 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

5 ways to delight your existing clients without spending a penny

One of the easiest ways to grow your MSP is also one of the least talked about. And it’s this… delighting the clients you already have. And before your brain jumps to discounts and gifts and free stuff or doing more work for nothing, let me stop you right there.

The best ways to delight your existing clients don’t cost money. They cost attention, they cost intention, and they cost you thinking a little bit differently about how clients experience working with you.

So let me give you five examples…

The first is proactively explaining what’s happening before clients feel the need to ask. So most client frustration isn’t caused by things breaking, it’s caused by uncertainty. To them, silence creates worry and worry creates friction, not good, right? So a simple update that says something like, “Hey, here’s what we’re working on for you right now, or here’s why we’re making this change and what you might notice.” Well, that can completely change how a client feels about you. They stop wondering, stop guessing, and just feel really reassured. And reassurance is hugely underrated in the channel, it really, really is.

The second way to delight clients is to remember what matters to them beyond just their IT and their technology. Clients feel delighted when they feel known, not remembered as just an account number or a contract size, but they’re known as a business and especially as people. So referencing things like previous conversations or remembering a big business priority for them or acknowledging a stressful period that they’ve mentioned. None of that costs you money, but it really builds emotional loyalty between you and them. In fact, you can make clients feel like they’re in a very safe pair of hands.

The third way to delight clients is to remove small annoyances that they’ve quietly learned to tolerate. Delight really comes from removing friction, not adding features. So give them clearer instructions, remove the need for them to ask follow-up questions, do better handovers, send cleaner emails, make the next steps more obvious for them. When something suddenly feels easier, clients really do notice, and they might not send you a thank you email, but if they feel it, then those feelings really add up over time.

The fourth way is to tell your clients what you’ve prevented, not just what you’ve fixed. MSPs are brilliant at quietly stopping bad things from happening, but terrible at talking about it. Clients rarely know what didn’t go wrong because of you. So when you explain the risks that you’ve reduced and the issues that you’ve headed off, the problems that never really became problems, then you reinforce the immense value of what you do. You remind them why they chose you in the first place.

The fifth way to delight clients without spending a penny is to make it safe for them to bring you bad news. This one is bigger than it sounds. Clients are delighted when they’re not judged, lectured, or made to feel stupid. You understand that, right? I do. Absolutely. When they feel psychologically safe and it is all about their feelings, they’re going to come to you earlier and not later. They’re going to be more honest and tell you the stupid things that they’ve done, which is good, right? They’re going to be more collaborative. In fact, they’re going to trust you more deeply. That’s exactly what we want from them. That’s the partnership that you wan...

In this podcast special we’ve joined thousands of other podcasters around the world to take part in something called Podcasthon. I’ve chosen a charity called 404 Stress Not Found, that’s aimed at helping MSPs to cope better, and here’s my guest to tell you all about it…

Welcome to Episode 331 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

MSPs: How to get help if you’re struggling

Featured guest: Paul Croker is an award-winning Cyber Security person with a rich background in IT that span the years and sectors. In his last corporate role was heading up the IT for a pan-European space company where Paul led the way for the UK entity spanning two sites, managing complex needs of IT for space projects with budgets and an aggressive headcount to take into account too as the business was ramping up.

Hello and welcome to this special episode of the podcast. This week, we’ve joined together with thousands of other podcasters around the world to take part in something called Podcasthon. We’re giving up this episode to promote a charity of our choice, and you’re going to love the charity that we’ve picked. It’s called 404 Stress Not Found. It’s a new organisation that’s aimed at helping MSPs to cope better. And here’s my special guest to tell you all about it.

Hello, I’m the founder of 404 Stress Not Found. My name is Paul Croker.

And thanks so much for joining me on the podcast, Paul. You and I have known each other for, it must be 9, 10 years something like that, it’s been a long time. And bizarrely, and what has sort of created this special episode today is I bumped into you and your wife, Gemma, at Barcelona Airport like back in autumn/fall last year. Now we had actually both been to MSP Global, so it’s not like we were just randomly flying into Barcelona, but we had a great chat outside the airport. I was very hungover, I remember that. And you were a bit more bright-eyed and bushy-tailed than I was.

I think I just had a coffee as well, which probably helped.

Yes, you had. Which is a dangerous thing at two in the afternoon, but there we go. And we started talking about what you’re doing with 404 Stress Not Found, and I realised this is the perfect thing for this special episode. So let’s start right at the beginning. So just first of all, let’s find out about you. Just give us the brief version of your story in terms of the MSP that you run here in the UK.

Sure, so I started a company called 18iT about five years ago now or thereabouts, off the back of exiting a pan-European space company, which is all very cool. So when we talk about rocket science, I know what that used to look like. And what we do now over here is very different. But I take those lessons and basically curate them for MSPs and people in the tech space.

That’s really cool. And you can actually say it’s not rocket science because that’s what you used to do.

And I do use that quote when I talk on stages. Yes.

So you should, I would. I mean, I couldn’t even get into a rocket facility, let alone be a rocket scientist, but that’s pretty cool. And you founded this thing called 404 Stress Not Found. So how long has that been in your life? And we’ll exp...

Price shopping often doesn’t start with the prospect, it starts with the MSP… find out why. Also this week, why MSPs feel overwhelmed even when things are good, and clever marketing ideas from outside the channel.

Welcome to Episode 330 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

Why prospects price shop MSPs (& how to end it forever)

Have you ever had a prospect say no to you because they believed your MSP was just too expensive? Lots of MSPs think that prospects default to price shopping because they’re cheap, difficult, or just not serious buyers. And it’s so easy to blame the economy or your competition or how the market is right now. But here’s the uncomfortable truth… prospects usually aren’t born price shoppers… they’re trained. And more often than not, they’re trained by the MSP itself through marketing and sales behaviour that’s well-intentioned, but hits in the totally wrong way.

Let me give you some examples so you can see if you are doing this by accident. I believe the problem of price shopping doesn’t start with the prospect, it starts with the MSP. In fact, it starts with the signals that you send through your marketing and your sales process, often without even realising it. Every interaction either trains a prospect to compare or it trains them to trust. And most MSPs accidentally train comparison, price comparison especially. Let me show you how.

One of the biggest ways that MSPs create price shoppers is by leading with services instead of leading with outcomes.

So when you talk about monitoring, patching, backups, antivirus, response times and tickets and stuff like that, you’re just listing features and that makes you look identical to every other MSP. And when things look identical, you’re just making it too difficult for the prospect to differentiate you from all the other MSPs. So the only logical way to choose is price from their point of view. You’ve taught the prospect that MSPs are interchangeable, bad, bad, bad.

Another big one is quoting too early. MSPs do rush in sometimes to give a price because they want to be helpful or they want to keep momentum or they want to avoid awkward conversations. But when you give a big number before establishing value, context, and fit, you’re effectively saying this decision is mostly about cost. So the prospect does exactly what you’d expect a rational human to do… they shop around. And by the way, that’s not a reason to not have a price estimator on your website. A price estimator that gives them a rough price in seconds is good, but jumping straight from initial conversation to quote, that’s bad. You’ve got to give them a specific quote at the very end of the process when you’ve got to know them and what they’re looking for and their outcomes and whether or not you guys are a good fit.

Then there’s the problem of treating every lead the same. If you have the same proposal template, the same pitch, you’re using the same language, it’s the same packages for everyone. If there’s no sense of personalisation, how can it feel relevant to your prospect? There’s no emotional anchor there. And when there’s no emotional anchor, again, price just floats to the top.

MSPs also train price shoppers by apologising for their pricing. People say phrases like, “Oh, I know we’re not the cheapest…” or, “Oh, we might be a bit more expensive, but…” why would you do that? ” In fact, the moment that you say that, you have framed price as the objection, you’ve invited the prospect to challenge it, which is crazy.

Another subtle one is overexplaining and justifying. When you feel the need to defend your price, line by line, then you kind of signal uncertainty and that encourages comparison.

And then there’s websites. So if your web...

Most MSP owners are drowning in marketing tasks, telling themselves they’re saving money or keeping control, when in reality they’re just burning through their time. Let’s discuss how to change that. Also this week, many MSPs use AI badly for marketing, and it costs MSPs 5 figures to win a new client.

Welcome to Episode 329 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

Marketing tasks MSP owners should NEVER touch

You’d be mad to do all of your MSPs marketing yourself, and if that sentence annoys you a little, there’s a good chance that you are exactly the person who needs to hear it. Because most MSP owners are drowning in marketing tasks, telling themselves they’re saving money or keeping control, when in reality they’re burning the one resource they can never replace… their time. Right now, I want to talk about which marketing jobs you absolutely should outsource, which ones you must keep ownership of, and how to focus your limited time on the activities that deliver the biggest return.

So let’s talk about time, because for MSP owners and managers, time is the real bottleneck. You don’t have a lack of ideas, you don’t have a lack of tools, you don’t even have a lack of willingness. What you have is too many things competing for your attention. And marketing is often the thing that’s squeezed into the cracks between the tickets, the meetings, and the client fires.

The goal of marketing isn’t for you to do more, it’s for you to do less of the wrong things and more of the right things.

And here’s the core principle that I want you to adopt. You should outsource anything that someone else could be trained to do well, and you should keep ownership of anything that requires judgement, direction and deep understanding of your business. Most MSPs get this completely backwards. They clinging very tightly to low value tasks and then outsource high level thinking, which is absolute madness, right?

Let’s start with what you should almost always outsource. Anything repetitive. Anything admin heavy. Anything that’s process driven, things like loading social media posts, scheduling blogs, uploading videos, formatting newsletters, whether that’s email or print making, LinkedIn connection requests, cleaning lists, basic CRM updates, repurposing content, chasing webinar registrations, creating transcripts and pulling simple reports. None of those tasks that I was just mentioning require you. They just require instructions. They require an SOP. If someone can be trained to do it once, they can be trained to do it again and again and again.

And every hour you spend doing those things is an hour you are not spending on strategy, leadership, relationships or growth. Now let’s talk about what you absolutely should not outsource. You should never outsource ownership of your marketing direction. You should never outsource deciding who you are targeting, what you stand for, what message you want to be known for or what success looks like. You shouldn’t outsource thinking, you shouldn’t outsource high level decision making, and you definitely should not outsource responsibility. Strategy for your marketing lives with you, direction lives with you, and accountability lives with you. Even if you have a marketing agency, a virtual assistant, a marketing assistant, or even if you have a content team, they should be executing your thinking and not replacing it. Because trust me on this, no one else in the entire world understands your MSP, your clients, your ambition, your risk tolerance, the way that you do.

Many MSPs say, Oh, I haven’t got time for marketing, and what they really mean is, I don’t have time to do admin marketing tasks. But the high ROI marketing doesn’t look like admin, it looks like deciding where you want to focus. I...

People do not buy features, they buy benefits… many MSP’s know this but very few actually live it in their marketing, here’s how to change that. Also this week, is your MSP’s expertise hiding in plain sight? And how much is your MSP really worth?

Welcome to Episode 328 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

The most common MSP marketing mistake

There’s a basic marketing mistake that the vast majority of MSPs make. In fact, once you know what it is, you’re going to see it everywhere. It’s going to drive you crazy, you’ll see it on your website, on your LinkedIn, on your other marketing channels. But the good news is I can help you to spot it and fix it in the next five minutes.

We are diving into one of the most fundamental principles in all of marketing. People do not buy features, they buy benefits. Now, every MSP has heard this, but very few actually live it in their marketing. And the reason this matters so much is because features and benefits land completely differently in our brains.

A feature is normally processed logically, it engages the analytical part of the mind that loves detail but really doesn’t like to make decisions. Whereas a benefit is processed emotionally and hits the part of our heart and also the brain that drives action, that imagines outcomes, that feels relief, confidence and safety. And here’s the uncomfortable truth…

All buying decisions made by ordinary business owners and managers start emotionally. People only use logic afterwards to justify what they already wanted.

So features live in the logical world. Benefits live in the emotional world. When you talk about features, you are speaking to the wrong part of the brain… you’re speaking to the part of the brain that doesn’t buy. But when you talk about benefits, you’re speaking directly to the part of the brain that says yes. And this is why when MSPs proudly list their features – 24/7 monitoring, remote support, patching, ticket automation, all of that stuff – prospects kind of nod politely, but they’re kind of glazing over and they feel nothing. It’s like listing ingredients instead of actually showing the finished meal, it’s like describing the different parts of the engine rather than describing the feeling of driving the car.

So benefits create pictures in people’s minds and they let the prospect imagine what life will be like when they’re working with you. And you do know that imagination is one of the strongest decision-making tools that humans possess, right? Let’s make this real. When you say “24/7 monitoring”, that’s just a mechanism, it doesn’t actually mean anything to a normal business owner. But if you say to them, Hey, we spot problems early which means fewer business disruptions, then suddenly that becomes something tangible that they can feel.

They can imagine a calmer working day, systems just running and fewer surprises, and that is a benefit. When you say “remote support”, again, that’s just a mechanism. But if you say, Hey, we can fix issues really quickly without downtime and you don’t even need to wait for us to arrive, that becomes a benefit because that sends a message of speed and convenience and continuity. When you say “regular patching and updates”, they’re yawning because you’re naming a process. But if you say, Hey, look, so your security stays strong with zero effort from your team, you guys don’t have to do anything, that’s a benefit and it speaks of safety and ease and peace of mind.

So features describe what something is, whereas benefits describe what something does. That’s the big difference between the two. Features force the prospect to translate what you’ve said in their brain into some kind of emotional meaning, whereas benefits you’ve alre...

Breaking into a new vertical is one of the smartest marketing decisions you can make for your MSP, here’s how to get started. Also this week, why MSPs are terrified of guarantees, and the huge AI revenue opportunity for MSPs.

Welcome to Episode 327 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

No vertical for your MSP? That’s a mistake

One of the smartest marketing decisions you can make for your MSP, is choosing to break into a new vertical. Because marketing to a vertical is easier, more effective, and ultimately more profitable. A lot more profitable. And a lot of MSPs want this, but they don’t know where to get started. So let’s talk right now about how to enter any vertical you like and get traction quickly and easily.

Choosing to work in a vertical is like switching from a megaphone over to a sniper rifle. Most MSPs marketing sends a pretty generic message, something like, We help businesses of all sizes, any kind of business, with their IT, which is very lovely and friendly but also utterly forgettable. Vertical focus marketing says, We help dental practices eliminate downtime, secure patient records, and keep imaging systems running smoothly, and suddenly with a message like that you are relevant, you are specific, and you sound like someone who understands that exact person that you are talking to. The thing is that humans, we respond to familiarity. Prospects respond to relevance. Marketing responds to focus.

When you pick a vertical, your story becomes sharper, your audience becomes easier to find, your content becomes dramatically better, your conversion rates jump, and you instantly differentiate from every generalist MSP around you.

This is especially true in professions like accountants, lawyers, dentists (like I was just saying), medical clinics and manufacturers. These groups all share similar software compliance concerns, workflows, frustrations, and even buying psychology. This is marketing heaven, but how do you actually break into one? Let’s get into the practical stuff. There are three phases to entering a vertical. First, understand the vertical. Next, build the assets and the messaging. And then thirdly, build the audience.

So let’s do phase one, understanding the vertical. This is kind of like the homework phase and it’s also where most MSPs skip straight ahead to the marketing and you kind of miss out on all the prep work. So please do do this bit. To break into a new vertical, you must first understand the software that they use, the regulations that they’re bound by and maybe even that they fear, and the workflows that frustrate them. You’ve got to understand the downtime disasters that could ruin their day, the KPIs that they care about, the conferences they attend, the associations that they belong to, the influencers they listen to and the language they use. If you talk their language, even just 70% of it, you instantly feel to them like your one of them. And no, you don’t need decades of experience in their vertical. You just need curiosity, a bit of research, a handful of conversations, and the ability to turn what you’ve learned, your insight, into content for them and to adapt your conversations to take all of it into account.

Once you understand their world, you are ready for phase two, which is building up your assets and your messaging. And the question I always get from MSPs on this is, Paul, should I have a page on my website or should I have a whole separate website? Well, my recommendation for this is to start simple. So yes, you begin with a single vertical specific page on your main website. Don’t go building 17 new websites before you even know whether or not the vertical is going to respond to you. So your vertical page on your existing site should inc...

LinkedIn is the number one place for MSPs to build relationships with potential clients, and here’s how. Also this week, how your MSP can excite ANY prospect, and the Disney lesson your MSP mustn’t ignore.

Welcome to Episode 326 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

MSPs: Never be ignored on LinkedIn, again

For MSPs, LinkedIn is the number one place to go farming, never hunting, but farming. Slow, steady, reliable relationship building with the exact people that you want to do business with. And that means adding new connections, ideally on a daily basis. Let me give you five super smart LinkedIn connection request messages that you can swipe and use today.

Farming on LinkedIn is about slow, steady, reliable relationship building with the exact people that you want to do business with. And the good news is that LinkedIn makes this incredibly easy, if you approach it the right way. Most MSPs massively underuse it. They log in every now and again, maybe post something, maybe like something, and then they wonder why nothing really changes. They get nothing out of LinkedIn. But the real power of LinkedIn is in building your network, your connections.

Think of every connection as a tiny little seed. The more relevant seeds you plant, the more opportunities grow later.

Your job is simply to show up every day and plant a few more seeds. So how do you do that? Very simply, you search for the people you most want to do business with -business owners, managers, decision makers, in your target verticals and your target geographical areas. If you serve financial firms, go and look for accountants/CPAs, financial planners. If you specialise in manufacturing, look for operations managers, plant managers, supply chain directors. If you are local only and you just want local businesses, search by your town or your region.

And then, here’s the system… you send 10 personalised connection requests every day. Not 50, not 100, just 10. Because consistency beats volume every time. Doing something small every day is always more powerful than doing something big every now and again. So make it part of your daily routine, same time each day, same process, no emotion attached, it’s just a system. In fact, you can get other people to do this for you, maybe a member of your staff or a virtual assistant.

Now let’s talk about the connection request messages, and again, here’s where a lot of MSPs go wrong. They send the same bland, boring copy and paste connection requests that screams, I’m going to pitch you something here. But we’re not pitching remember, we’re farming, we’re starting a relationship. And that’s why you want a set of smart, simple human sounding messages that you can just rotate your way through. Today I’m going to give you five of the best, and these are the same ones that I give to my MSP Marketing Edge members. So let’s go through them.

1. The common ground message. This one is beautifully simple: Hi , it looks like we both, . I want to add you to my professional network. Now, maybe the thing that you insert is that you both live or work in the same area or maybe you’re in the same industry group or maybe you’re both fans of a particular business author or a local sports team or something like that. Humans connect through shared identity, so point out the common ground with them. They’re much more likely to accept your connection requests.

1. The local business owner message. If you target a geographic area, this one is gold: Hi , it looks like we’re both local business owners in . Should we connect to see if there’s anything we can do to help each other? People feel good supporting businesses on their do...

Delighting your clients is really important to retention, so it should be systemised in every single MSP. Also this week, AI prompts for MSPs to win new clients, and this is how MSPs lose revenue.

Welcome to Episode 325 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

MSPs who don’t do this, risk losing clients

Insane retention for your MSP isn’t just about doing a great job for your clients, it’s also about making sure they feel really positive about you. Most MSPs have great retention by default. Sure, you’re looking after people properly, but you must also remember that for ordinary business owners and managers, switching MSPs is a distress activity.

In fact, the perception is that moving to another MSP is difficult and dangerous and that’s what keeps people with you. It’s called inertia loyalty. But relying on it is a really bad strategy. Instead, here’s how to systemise going the extra mile so that your clients don’t just respect what you do. They love it.

We’re really talking here about delighting your clients, but not in a haphazard way. One of the great things about owning your own business is having complete control over the experience of the customers, right? If you and I could clone ourselves, then we’d have the perfect businesses because everyone in our team would behave like us.

But the reality is that no business is like that. We need other humans and other humans behave in different ways. So unless we put in place systems and train our people on the systems and then coach them to follow those systems and thrive within them day in, day out, we get haphazard performance.

I think that customer service is absolutely one of those areas that could and should be systemised in every single MSP.

And by customer service, I mean going the extra mile, the stuff that genuinely makes clients think, wow, these tech people are different. Because when you do that consistently and not just occasionally, you create loyalty, referrals, and a reputation that’s almost impossible for your competitors to touch. So let’s get into 10 simple but practical ways that you can go the extra mile and more importantly, how to turn each one into a repeatable system inside your business.

1. Proactive communication. I don’t just mean the usual emails that say your ticket has been updated, but actually I mean reaching out to someone before something becomes an issue. So like a quick monthly check-in call or a short video from a technician summarising what they’re working on for them. The magic here isn’t the contact, it’s the proactive nature of it. And yes, you can systemise this with a simple CRM task. Every client gets a check-in every 30 days, no exceptions. Now obviously if you’ve dealt with some tickets with them in those 30 days, you can skip that, but if you haven’t really dealt with your clients, you haven’t sorted anything big out for them in the last 30 days, then send them a proactive video just telling them some stuff you’re doing or just checking in to say, Hi, how are you? What’s happening right now within the business?

1. Personalised micro touches. Things like remembering their birthday. I mean, what if you got the birthday of every user at every client and you just sent them something? Just send them a card or just send them a video message from the team. I know that means a bit of work every week, but it’s a point that it really connects with them. What if you celebrated their business anniversary? What if you found out and congratulated them when they hired someone new? In fact, you are one of the first people to find out when they hire someone new, right? If they remember to tell you, although I realise most of your...