612: Strategies for MSPs to Win Clients and Generate Profits | Paul Green

In our latest episode, we welcome Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert based in the UK. Paul is the founder of Paul Green’s MSP Marketing, where he assists over 700 MSPs to succeed in today’s business landscape.

Paul helps MSPs improve their marketing and generate more leads with his MSP Marketing Edge program. He is a former journalist and radio presenter and has worked with MSPs since 2016. And Paul is also the host of the world’s most popular podcast on MSP marketing – search for “Paul Green’s MSP Marketing podcast” in your favourite podcast platform.

Tune in to learn more about Paul Green’s strategy as we explore steps and gain valuable insights to unlock success for your local business.

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Strategies for MSPs to Win Clients and Generate Profits

Introduction

George: This is the Conquer Local podcast, A show about billion-dollar sales leaders, marketers leading local economic growth, and entrepreneurs that have created their dream organizations. They wanna share their secrets, giving you the distilled version of their extraordinary feats. Our hope is, with the tangible takeaways from each episode, you can rewire, rework, and reimagine your business. I’m George Leith. On this episode, we welcome Paul Green. Paul is a managed service provider marketing expert. Based in the UK, he’s worked with over 700 managed service providers all over the world. He helps MSPs improve their marketing and generate more leads with his Managed Service Provider Marketing Edge Program. Paul’s a former journalist and radio presenter and has been working with MSPs since 2016. He’s also the host of the world’s most popular podcast on MSP marketing. Search for “Paul Green’s MSP Marketing” podcast on your preferred podcast platform. Get ready, conquerors. Paul Green is coming up next on this week’s episode of the Conquer Local podcast. 

George: Paul Green joining us from England. Hello, Paul, how are you?

Paul: Good evening. Thank you very much for having me on the show. I’m good, how are you doing today?

George: I’m doing quite well. We’re excited to learn from you today. You are in the managed service provider business and your business is Managed Service Providers’ Marketing Edge and you’ve got it right there on the wind sock. I should also note, Paul is a former radio broadcaster, like myself.

Paul: So, what stations did you work on, George?

George: Well, you wouldn’t know them because it was in small-market Canada radio. But how about you?

Paul: You wouldn’t know them ’cause it was in small-market England radio.

The Evolution of MSP Marketing Edge 

George: Well, there you go. See, we’re lined up, we’re lined up. High expectations on this show. We got two former radio broadcasters. We’re big fans of the managed service provider space. I began to get educated on that space four or five years back. But you know, when you look at it, since technology started to invade our lives, we’ve needed a professional to help us. It didn’t quite work out very well for individuals or businesses in putting all this together. And the one thing we know about managed service providers, they’re great at what they do and marketing might not be the main component of what they do. So, you’re there to help them, is what I’m reading into the name of your business. Tell us a little bit about how MSP Marketing Edge started. And we have your background, you were in the media business. But give us the evolution of your company.

Paul: Yeah, sure, thank you. I did my 10 years as a radio presenter, which, as you’ll remember, George, is great fun while you’re in it, but it gets tiring eventually, doesn’t it? And you look for something else. So, in 2005, I had an entrepreneurial seizure. And if you’ve ever read, oh, what’s the book? Michael Gerber’s book, “The E-Myth Revisited”, he talks about the entrepreneurial seizure where once you’ve got this idea in your head and your heart that you should be your own boss, you have to act on that. So, I did in 2005, and I started a public relations company, which was terrible. And then we were a general marketing company, which was awful. And then I discovered the power of niching and I discovered that if you focus all of your efforts on a very, very, very thin vertical, then what happens is your own marketing gets multiplied. You can reach more people with less effort and you can charge more money. And you may have heard the phrase that the riches are in the niches, and they absolutely are. So, I built a business based in the UK. We were a marketing agency. We were working with optometrists, veterinarians, and dentists and we were doing around about a million pounds a year. Which is not massive, but for something that I’d started in my bedroom, I was quite happy with. And then I sold that in 2016. Now, I got bored really quickly, so my plan was to take a year off. But within about three months, I started this business, and I was prevented by my contract from working with the veterinarians and the opticians for five years. So, I thought back to my general marketing days, and I was like, “Well, I wonder who’s the good vertical that I could work with?” And I remembered that I used to enjoy working with IT people, ’cause as you said, they’re great technicians. They love their technology, they’re genuinely, genuinely nice people to work with, and I thought that would be a great niche. And in the years in between me working with them, they’d evolved from just being IT people to being this thing called managed service providers. Now, let me tell you, managed service providers have the best business model in the world because all, everything they do is about monthly recurring revenue. And as any business owner knows, the more recurring revenue you can get into your business, the safer the business is, the easier it is to run, and ultimately, the more profitable it is. So, managed service providers, it’s all about monthly recurring revenue. They also have insane retention because ordinary people like you and me, George, we don’t understand technology. The MSPs benefit from something called inertia loyalty, where it’s easier to stay with a supplier than it is to move over to a new supplier. Add in the final thing that makes their business model great, which is technology is changing all the time. Just look at the last two to three years at what’s happened with COVID, work from home, hybrid working, cybersecurity, all these huge things. This is a constant in their world, is that things change, and that’s what makes them a great bunch of people to work with. And yeah, we help them with their marketing.

Problem-Solving for MSPs

George: We’ve told this story a number of times on this show as we’ve started to learn more about managed service providers. And that is when I was a radio sales rep, we were in very competitive markets selling against other formats. So, you got the country station, you got the rock station, you got the top 40 station, and you would sell that audience. So, there were multiple people in there selling an advertising solution. But there’s only one IT provider, and actually, that IT provider probably had the business’s passwords. And I just don’t think you get more trust than that, if you have somebody that you actually give your passwords and usernames to, especially in today’s day and age. And that’s what we’re seeing in the managed service provider space is that level of trust is so high. Are you seeing in the UK what we’re seeing in North America where MSPs are starting to not just put in the routers and set up the networks, but they’re also starting to enable e-commerce and connect inventory systems and stepping a little bit outside of that comfort zone of the pipes and roads and the hardware and starting to get into more of the software components and really trying to solve more problems?

Paul: Yeah, great question. I actually work with managed service providers all over the world. In fact, I have more clients in the US than I do anywhere else, and they’re all going through exactly this transition. You see, what some of them have started to spot over the years is that all the hardware things they used to do, if you think about 10 years ago, 20 years ago, you went to your IT guys and they sold you the laptops. And when the laptop broke, they took it apart and they fixed it and they were soldering in circuits. All of that’s gone. And a lot of the stuff from over the last few years is going as well, because our devices are getting easier, they’re getting cheaper, everything’s faster, and everything’s more connected. It’s all in the cloud now, so we don’t need to have servers, which are those massive, expensive computers set in our offices. And what’s happening is that the core IT stuff is becoming commoditized. And no one wants to be in an industry where something is commoditized, ’cause the second you commoditize it, someone will go somewhere else and buy something cheaper just because they can get it cheaper elsewhere. So, you are absolutely right. The switched-on managed service providers realize that they’ve got this immense trust relationship with their clients. ‘Cause yeah, if someone trusts you not just with all the passwords, but all the data, and they trust you with stopping the cybercriminals from getting in and stealing that data, then they also trust them with other things, like other computer things. And I put computer things in speech marks there, but things like their website, things like other sides of their marketing, and all the switched-on managed service providers I’m working with, they’re constantly adding new services and looking for great providers who can provide marketing services, who can provide other services that they can sell on to their clients.

Changes in the IT Landscape 

George: If I know one thing about technical folks, though, they’ve gotta make sure that it works. They’re not going to adopt something new, put it in front of their best customers if it doesn’t work. And I have a really good friend from the radio engineering days that I’m still friends with and I’ll phone him for advice, and he’ll be like, “Oh, I’ve been using this thing for 18 months. “I’ve tested it, it works, “that’s the one that I’m gonna recommend.” How’s that working out for managed service providers in a space that changes so dramatically as digital marketing? That’s an adjacency that we all see. Managed service providers are trying to jump in, there. But I’ve found that they really have to have a high level of trust to be able to offer a new solution to a customer. Do you see the same thing? 

Paul: Completely. And of course, their world is full of change. There’s more change happening in technology than there is in digital marketing. So, I think their mindset towards change is quite different to normal business owners because they’re used to things changing and moving on and accelerating and a better solution coming around. But you’re absolutely right. What most managed service providers will do is throw themselves into a solution, literally get hands-on with it, and try it out themselves before they’re comfortable with it, before they’re ready to recommend it. The managed service providers are really like all other business owners. They are technicians first and business owners second. And when I say technicians, I don’t mean technicians in the sense of using screwdrivers to fix things. If I think about the veterinarians that I used to work with, they were technicians first. They would do their technical work, which in their case was fixing animals before they were business owners. It was exactly the same with the dentists. I’ve worked with dozens and dozens of different sectors and most business owners get into it and start their business or buy their business because they love doing the work that they’re doing and they want to do more of it but also have more control over it. I think the managed service providers are exactly the same. They’re happy to get in and jump in. The problem they have when they’re, let’s say if they were to resell digital marketing services to their clients. It’s a relatively easy sell for them. The problem they have is understanding, is this good marketing? One of the reasons my business exists and we work with 700 managed service providers around the world is because most managed service providers don’t understand marketing. They don’t do a lot of marketing, and therefore, it’s very hard for them to judge, is this good marketing or is this not?

A 3-step Strategy for MSPs to Win Clients and Generate Profits.

George: So, when you’re working with these managed service providers, I remember when I was getting introduced to the space, we went to some conferences, we met some people that, like, “Oh, managed service providers are horrible at marketing!” And I’m like, “Yeah, everybody’s horrible at marketing.” I’ve been in this business for 35 years. It’s not like there’s one industry that’s really good at, maybe auto dealers are probably on the cutting edge of marketing of all businesses. So, when you’re working with managed service providers, you teach a three-step program. Could you walk through those three steps that you’ve determined through, you’re working with 700 of them all around the world. You are a leading expert. I’d love to get those three steps in your methodology.

Paul: Yeah, sure. And the exciting thing is these three steps are perfectly valid to most B2B service businesses. You wouldn’t use these for e-commerce, you certainly wouldn’t use it for B2C, business to consumer, but any B2B service business can use this strategy. Now, you mentioned cutting-edge there, George. This is not cutting-edge. This is good, solid, basic marketing, ’cause my experience is for businesses that don’t really do any marketing other than a bit of networking and a few referrals now and again, they need to get the basics right first. Let me tell you what the three steps are, and then I’ll just dive into some detail. The first step is you build yourself multiple audiences of people to listen to you. The second step is you then build a relationship with those audiences. And the third step is you commercialize that relationship. So, let’s go back up to the top, build multiple audiences. This is about, well, when you and I were in radio, and I’m looking at you now, George and I’m thinking you must be, what, the mid-40s, something like that, so-

George: Oh, you are amazing. You’re my favourite guest ever, thank you.

Paul: Maybe I’ve got some smear on the screen or something, I don’t know. I’ll check that later. But when you and I were in the radio back in the day, one of the reasons that radio station owners got so rich and all those groups built up and there was so much money, and it was the same with newspapers and directories, was because they controlled access to the audiences. And that was the case up ’til around about the turn of the century, when this little thing called Google came along and suddenly opened up access for everyone. And these days, a business owner takes its standard that you have complete access to your audiences, but most business owners don’t really know how to go and get those audiences. So, we recommend you build up audiences of people to listen to you. That might be, for example, on social media. For managed service providers, it’s LinkedIn. In fact, for all B2B, it’s LinkedIn. You might use Facebook because Facebook is the everything or is the everyone app. I say everyone until you get to about 30, obviously. The under-30s are not using Facebook so much. You might use Instagram if you were targeting people who use Instagram for their own marketing. So, restaurant owners, retailers, they’re using Instagram to reach consumers. You might use, I mean, a podcast is a great example of an audience. A YouTube channel is a great example. Email marketing, having an email database, that’s a great example. There are dozens of different audiences that you can build up. For most businesses, if they’re just putting in their early basic marketing building blocks, just go for one or two. And that would certainly be your email database, ’cause you have control over that, complete control. And then maybe you do LinkedIn or maybe Facebook or the social media network where most of your prospects are hanging out. That’s that first step, build multiple audiences. The second step is to build a relationship with them and that’s just done through great content. You take content that’s both educational and entertaining. We put these two together and we call it edutainment. We don’t try and sell to people, we just teach them. We teach them about our specialist subjects. That’s what I’m doing here. I’m edutaining, or I’m attempting to edutain the wonderful audience of this podcast about marketing, and that’s my way of starting to build a relationship. Now, it’s a tiny, tiny, tiny relationship. This isn’t the kind of relationship where people are gonna be clapping you in the street and going, “Woo, woo, woo, you’re the man!” But what happens is, at the point they’re ready to buy or they’re nearly ready to buy, they are slightly more aware of you than all of your competitors. If someone, for example, has followed you on LinkedIn, commented on one of your posts, perhaps had a message from you on LinkedIn, perhaps they’ve seen your LinkedIn newsletter, maybe they’ve watched your podcast, or they’ve seen a couple of your YouTube videos, they’ve opened two or three emails from you, maybe even you sent them a printed newsletter in the post. We call these multiple touchpoints. And if someone has been touchpointed by you a number of different times across a number of different platforms, at the point they’re ready to buy, you are pretty much guaranteed a place at the table. You’re not guaranteed a sale, but you are pretty much guaranteed a place at that table. And that leads me on to the final step, which is to commercialize your audiences. That is about making sure you get the timing right. Now, this is key to remember. People only buy when they’re ready to buy. Doesn’t matter what you sell. You cannot make someone buy when they are not ready to buy. Now, for managed service providers, that’s a window of about two weeks every five to seven years, ’cause people stick with their managed service provider for years and years and years. But in other industries, it’ll be a much shorter window. For example, when I worked with veterinarians, there were so many more opportunities to grab new pet owners. For example, anyone that’s getting a kitten or a puppy in the next three, or four months, that’s a great window to go and grab that person. And again, you’d keep them for five to seven years. But there were more of those opportunities than the managed service providers would have. The difference is, the managed service providers will take six figures of lifetime revenue from one customer, whereas a veterinarian may only take four figures of lifetime revenue. So, it’s swings and roundabouts. But you cannot get someone to buy until they’re ready to buy, so what you’ve gotta do is commercialize your audiences. For the managed service providers, and this would work for lots of B2B businesses, I say you have to have someone in your business picking up the phone and making outbound phone calls. Now, let’s not call this cold calling, ’cause it’s not. It’s slightly warm calling ’cause they’re calling the people who you’re connected to on LinkedIn, they are calling your email database, they’re calling people in your audiences. This is a great job, by the way, for a back-to-work mom. This is not really a sales job at all. This is a relationship-building job. So, back-to-work mom, her kids have gone to school, she’s looking for something two to three hours a day, two to three days a week, This is the perfect job for her. Work from home, use your VoIP system and just call your audiences. And the goal for this back-to-work mom is not to sell, it’s not to do anything. It’s just to find out, is this the right time? And she does that by asking open questions. In fact, she asks the people she’s calling about their favourite subject. George, what’s everyone’s favourite subject?

George: Of course, Paul, it’s themselves!

Paul: It is, it is themselves. We are all inherently more interested in ourselves and our own businesses than anything else. So, if you ask someone open questions about something like that, they will engage with you. You can start to move that relationship forward and find out, “Hey, yeah, actually, “in April, my contract is up. “Why don’t you guys give me a buzz back then?” And then the back-to-work mom, her job is to book two to three quality appointments for you every week. As the business owner, this is great. You’re generating appointments of people who know you a little bit, who’ve got a slight relationship with you, and the chances of you winning the business from them is a lot higher.

The Importance of Marketing

George: Well, I love the way that you articulated those three steps because I find a lot of organizations, they’re focused on the bottom line or the top line revenue and they say, “We need sales training.” And I’m like, “Okay, you might need some sales training, but actually, you need to build a funnel.” You need to build a pipeline, you need to really look at your customer journey. And you identified that top-of-funnel component, building out the audience, multiple touchpoints, meet the audience where they are, educate, not sell. But then, I love that idea of the back-to-work mom. There is an opportunity there to book an appointment and when you introduce that to an organization, how hard is it to sell that concept to them? Because it seems, I don’t see a lot of that when we’re out talking to businesses where they’ve figured that one out.

Paul: No, it is a hard sell. But to be fair, everything I talk about with my clients is a hard sell because they’re not doing marketing. If they were good at marketing, they wouldn’t need someone like me, or indeed, any of the other great marketing providers out there. The thing that I’ve seen, and I’ve been a business owner for 17 years across a couple of different businesses. The thing I’ve seen again and again and again is the business, whatever the sector, wherever you are in the world, the business that gets good at marketing first will dominate that marketplace. Let me say that again because it’s so important. The business that gets good at marketing first will dominate that marketplace. And it doesn’t matter if you’ve got bigger, richer competitors. It doesn’t matter if you’re in Los Angeles or whether you’re in small-town Nebraska. None of that matters. It’s exactly the same wherever you are. You’ve got to get good at marketing before someone else. When I say getting good at marketing, I don’t mean all the super clever digital cutting-edge stuff. You’ve just got to get the basics right. Don’t get me wrong, the cutting-edge digital stuff and all the good services that you can buy, those things make your life a lot easier. But it’s about getting those fundamentals right. I see this with managed service providers. There was a veterinarian I once worked with in a tiny market town near Oxford in England, and this was a few years back. And he literally, it was a two-veterinarian practice, so there were two of them that worked there. And they dominated, literally dominated their area just by getting good at marketing. And there was one particular tactic they used. I don’t know if it would work anymore because it’s about five, or seven years on, but he got good at Facebook Groups. He set up a Facebook group, which was Ask a Banbury Vet. The town was called Banbury, Ask a Banbury Vet. And he had something like 5,000 pet owners in his area, many of whom weren’t his clients. And they joined that group and they could ask the vet a question. Now, in the UK, there are laws, actual laws that stop veterinarians from doing certain things. But he found a way to operate within the laws and what he did was he built an immense amount of trust with these thousands and thousands of pet owners. And then what he did, and this was the smartest thing, this was the commercializing the audience thing. Every two months, he would announce that his practice, his veterinary practice was now open for new clients and they only had 20 places for new clients. Guess how many new clients they signed up in a month?

George: They sold out every time.

Paul: Every time, and it wasn’t 20. They would take on two, three, 400 every single time. So, there was literally a waiting list, there was a queue. Then he went a step even further and he said, “You cannot join our practice unless you do these five things.” I forget what they were, but one of them was joining their monthly recurring revenue scheme. Another one was you had to have insurance. And it was essentially, he was getting rid of the bottom 20% of the market that he didn’t want to be a client. He put the prices up, he insisted that they spend this much money, and they had to operate to his rules and not their rules. And it has a happy ending because he then sold his business and went on to work for the company that bought that business, helping them to do that in other places around the UK. Now, there was nothing, John was the name of the veterinarian that did this. Nothing special about John. He’s a great veterinarian, he’s a great business owner. But what he did was he got good at marketing before all of his competitors did and he literally wiped the floor with them. And you’re right, George, you don’t see that a lot. And that’s the opportunity.

George: That’s the opportunity.

Paul: For every single business owner listening to this right now, this is the opportunity. Get good at marketing before someone else does.

Building Engagement 

George: Paul, you have a wealth of knowledge. What advice would you give to someone that is looking to pursue a career in marketing or sales?

Paul: That’s really, I don’t think anyone’s ever asked me that question before. I’m completely self-taught. My background is obviously in radio. I was running the radio stations as well as being on air and we had zero, we had, like, $3 a year budget for marketing. So, I learnt through experiments and the hard way back in the ’90s and the ’00s how to do marketing, how to reach people, and how to get things done. And then I skipped the formal training and just experimented. I think if you, the reason I say that is that’s given me a good, a very good grounding in practical marketing. In fact, just today as I speak to you today, I’m in the middle of a massive launch sequence for a new product in our company and we made a major mistake last week which has affected us this week. I won’t go into the details of it because it doesn’t matter, but I’m still making mistakes and learning and trying new things, and I actually find that more exciting than anything else. So, I guess my advice to, it’s the same as my advice if you said to me, “How do I get into radio?” My advice would be to start a YouTube channel, start a radio show. If someone wants to be a writer, it’s like, write. There are no barriers to writing anymore. You can publish everywhere. There are platforms everywhere to publish. So, if you wanna get into marketing, market. If I was gonna hire a marketer tomorrow and I was looking at a 21-year-old’s resume, I’d look at it and say, “Well, what marketing have you done?” My daughter, my daughter is 12 and listens to me bang on about marketing all the time. And three months ago, she started her own shop on Etsy. And doesn’t matter what she sells, but the point is, we now sit and have, we sit and talk about doing split testing experiments on Etsy. We sit and talk about changing headlines and changing pictures and we talk about upsells and bumps and all these marketing concepts that I’ve learned by reading a thousand marketing books, and I’m talking to a 12-year-old about them. How exciting is that? Now, I don’t know if she’s gonna get into marketing or whether she’ll go off and do musical theatre, which is what she wants to do, but could you imagine her going for a marketing job in eight years’ time and saying, “Here’s my resume. “I ran my own shop. “I increased my orders 167% by doing this, this, and this.” Instantly, she is a practical marketer and that takes a value into a job. So, I think my advice is, just do it. Get going. There’s a thousand books to read on it. There’s a thousand great blogs and resources out there. The only thing that’s holding you back would be yourself.

George: Yeah, it’s never been easier to educate ourselves. Paul, it’s absolute pleasure having you on the show. You were a wealth of knowledge. Congratulations on all the success. If someone listening is saying, “I want Paul, I want MSP Marketing Edge,” how do they reach out to you?

Paul: Yeah, sure, thank you. I have a website, which is paulgreens, so that’s with an S on the end, paulgreensmspmarketing.com. And you can also find me on LinkedIn if you just go and look for Paul Green MSP Marketing.

George: Absolute pleasure having you on the show. Thank you for your time today, Paul, and all the best.

Paul: Thank you, thanks for having me on, George.

Conclusion

George: As you can tell, Paul Green has a wealth of knowledge and experience and he highlighted that three-step strategy for helping managed service provider owners win clients and generate profits. Step number one, build multiple audiences. Step number two, build a relation with the audience. Step number three, commercialize that relationship. And I love this line, “People buy when they’re ready.” If you liked Paul Green’s episode discussing strategies to win clients, let’s continue the conversation. Check out these episodes. 360, “MSP Marketing Troubles” with Ayan Adam, or episode 415, “Analyzing the IT Channel”, with our very own Andrew Down. Please subscribe and leave us a review wherever you listen to the podcast. And thanks for joining us this week on the “Conquer Local” podcast. My name is George Leith. I’ll see you when I see you.