Marketing an MSP is like boiling water

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Welcome to Episode 299 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• Marketing an MSP is like boiling water: Marketing your MSP is difficult. It requires a long-term strategy, not a series of one-off activities. But it will pay off for you very well with clients that stay with you for years and years.
• MSPs: Get a better understanding of your prospects’ pain points: You can get a better understanding of your prospects by using the five why’s framework. It’s a problem solving method developed by the founder of Toyota and I believe that you can use it in your MSP sales.
• How MSPs build trust, authority and credibility in the AI age: In this new world of AI some marketing tactics don’t work anymore and some are way more important than they’ve ever been. My guests reveal how you can use PR to your advantage in this new landscape.
• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Do you struggle with content creation? I have a brainstorm of really great ideas for you to try.

Marketing an MSP is like boiling water

You must get so frustrated at how long it takes to generate leads and new clients for your MSP. And you’re not on your own there, lots of other MSPs feel the same. But imagine if there was a quick and amazing fix for this frustratingly long drawn out problem. Well, there is, and even better news, while this painful long wait for new clients will be driving your competitors insane, you can train yourself to think differently.

I think one of the things that MSPs find the hardest when they really start taking their marketing seriously is just how long it takes to win a new client. Because you read stuff on the internet, don’t you, about people who set up a funnel or they have a special offer or they do this new shiny tactic and there’s always a promise that you launch something at 9 in the morning and you have your first sale by 9:30, but that’s not really how it works for managed services.

Managed services are a double-edged sword in that you both benefit from and you are punished by them. Let me explain what I mean by that. On one side of the sword, it takes a very long time to win a new client, but on the other side of the sword, they pay you money every month in monthly recurring revenue and they stay for years and years and years. And it’s that lifetime value, the revenue that the client contributes to your business over the decade they stay with you, that is what you’ve got to stay focused on with your marketing.

So if you are measuring your marketing by doing a little piece of activity today, like sending an email or posting a blog post or putting something on LinkedIn and you expect that is going to generate a hot lead who turns into a client tomorrow, it just doesn’t work that way. You haven’t got the right marketing mindset and that’s always going to lead to you being frustrated with your marketing.

The right marketing mindset is about having a great strategy and implementing that day to day, but sticking with it until you are sick to death of it.

Because at the point that you are sick to death of it, that means it’s actually just starting to cut through to the people you’re talking to. So you keep doing it and keep doing it and keep doing it, and it really does work like that.

The strategy that I always recommend to MSPs is super simple. Three steps, six words: build audiences, grow relationships, convert relationships. Which means finding people to listen to you, for most MSPs that’s LinkedIn and your email li...