Are Your Sales Funnels Leaking? Fix It Now! | EP97

[00:00:07] Can you imagine if Emperor Palpatine was like, Luke, f*** you. Okay. You had to bring it up. You had to bring it up. Why? Because where in the world did they get the idea that it was going to be okay to cast Loki as a young Palpatine? What? Yeah. Wait, what are you talking about? So there's a new series. Skeleton?

[00:00:39] Star Wars series coming out on Disney Plus where the guy- Is it called Skeleton Crew? Huh? Is it Skeleton Crew? No. Okay, good. I was going to say no spoilers because I was literally watching that right before the show. No, it's actually called Palpatine. It's not out yet. And they have the guy who plays Loki in the- Tom Middleton. Yeah, Tom Middleton. Playing Palpatine. I mean, that's like Ghostbusters crossing stream s***.

[00:01:07] I think that's just because Hiddleston's really good at imitations. So you can probably imitate the guy who did Palpatine. Is it the guy who did Palpatine dead? I don't know, but he was way too old to play it anyway because it's young Palpatine. Well, that's true. And yes, Tom is great. Like he's an amazing actor. I love him. Right? But it's like, why is there a Loki in my Star Wars?

[00:01:35] Yeah. Yeah. That's going to be tough to get over. No, I get that. That makes sense. Oh, is Kelly MacDonald in my name? Uh, Palpat... Palpat... Pal... Palpatine... No. Pal... I can't spell. Palpatine. It's not an IMDb...

[00:02:04] Tom Hiddleston. I mean, I'm assuming it was just that... Yeah, so he doesn't... It's not on his IMDb credits. I'm wondering... Probably because it's not out yet. No, but it's not even in the upcoming. I'm wondering if it's just because like he had Disney, you know... I've been scammed. Oh, well, there you go.

[00:02:34] Damn it. Well, good, because it would have been a failure. Well, now that has to be added in because that means you can't believe everything you read on the internet, said Abraham Lincoln. Ben and Aaron Aaron in here. Movebot makes cloud migrations effortless for MSPs. Whether it's a small client or a large enterprise, Movebot provides fast, secure, and seamless data migrations.

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[00:03:31] Visit atmsp.link forward slash EasyDMARC to learn more and start offering DMARC as a service today. What's up, everybody? Welcome to the All Things MSP Podcast. I'm your host, Justin Esker, and with me always is the man who gets scammed, Eric Anthony. You know, usually I'm better at that.

[00:04:00] You literally, someone just phishing attempted you with Tom Hiddleston. Can you imagine? At least I didn't click on anything. Well, yeah, I was going to say, like, I've done phishing tests for clients before, and I've sent them, you know, things with logos that are close to the logos that they're working on, which I had a client. We have a client at Sixth Care Bank, and the chief designer at that office at the time was like, this is not their logo. I know their logo. I made their logo.

[00:04:30] I was like, all right, you got it. It's a phishing test. But, like, can you imagine if, like, the phishing test was like, dear Eric, want to see Tom Hiddleston play the new young Palpatine and the new Palpatine show? That's not real out. And you're like, yeah, I do. I'm a nerd. Eric, click. Boom. Nailed. Fishing test. You got a virus. Hey, Eric, want to see the cool new Lego sets that are coming out in 2025? Hell yeah, I do. Click. Boom. Fishing test. Fishing tests need to be more targeted for MSPs.

[00:05:02] Speaking of which, I bought the new Lego. Speaking of Legos, though. Well, I did buy the new Marvel sign, the Lego Marvel sign that has, like, a secret button that, like, pops out the Avengers minifigs. Really? Yeah, it came out on – so here's the funniest thing. I knew it was coming out, and I went to it on my laptop during Christmas break, and it said pre-order. And I was like, oh, cool. And then I realized I was on the British website. When I went to the U.S. website, it said available January 1st. So I just closed my laptop.

[00:05:30] And then January 1st rolled around, and my laptop was sitting on the dining room table. And I was like, oh, I guess I'll just check my email because I forgot all about it. And I opened it up, and right there was, like, Marvel sign pre-ordered – or ordered January 1st. I was like, reload. Add to cart. Bye. Quickest four seconds of my life. Didn't even question it. Did you see what I got for Christmas? You got the film one, right?

[00:05:55] I got the 100th anniversary Disney movie camera set. And it's really cool. They actually have – there's an add-on piece to it that shows you how they did the layered screen. Oh, with the layered glass. Yeah. You get the 3D effect. Yeah. So that was kind of cool. I got the giant piranha plant from Mario, which I think is awesome.

[00:06:24] And I had enough pieces left over to make, like, a one-by-one miniature piranha plant. Like, it's just because I have, like, a green two-by-one brick, one round yellow brick, and two round red bricks. So I just put those – because the piranha plant actually has a secret that if you push down on it, coins come out the bottom of it. Like, a group of coins. So I did that. This is now yet another cold intro. We've already done the show. Let's reset. See what I did there? Because we're going to talk about a sales reset today.

[00:06:54] Selling Lego is such an easy thing to do, right? Like, there's something about the Lego process from a sales perspective, not just building and stepping on them, that people – that whole process is super easy to do. So sales, just in general, usually pretty easy. Sales in our industry, not so easy, despite what everybody wants to sell you on.

[00:07:22] I'm looking at you, groups. I agree, because the product is completely different. However, there is one takeaway that I think everybody should think about when they think about Lego when it comes to sales. And that is you do not – listen to me. You do not need to compromise on price.

[00:07:50] You need to set your price for what you need your price to be, and you need to not discount it every time somebody asks for a discount. Thanks for coming, everybody. No, I'm just kidding. Yeah, because, like, the Lego Avengers Tower is, like, 600 bucks or something like that. Well, and they just announced their first $1,000 Lego set. Oh, really? What is it? It's a new Death Star. Of course it is.

[00:08:20] Continuing on with the Star Wars theme. Bringing it back to Palpatine. Okay. So, Luke, join the Lego family. All right. We're way off track here. Way off track. Way off track. Okay. So, yes, you don't have to discount. But let's start from the beginning, now that we're 15 minutes into an episode. People need a pipeline. Yes. Bloop, bloop, bloop. That's my Mario. Mario.

[00:08:52] Should we just start this episode over again? No, no, no. I loved how you brought Mario back into it as well. It's all about coming full circle. All right. People need a pipeline. I don't have a pipeline. But I don't have a pipeline. That's something I want to work on in 2025. I'll admit it. I'll admit it. So, you be the wise Jedi and I will be your Padawan in this journey amongst building a pipeline.

[00:09:20] I don't think it's Jedi so much. It's just my love. It's just my love of process. Right? Because that's what a sales funnel is. Sales funnel is nothing more than a process. The problem is most people think of it ambiguously and they don't actually put it on paper and put numbers to it. Right?

[00:09:46] The idea of a sales funnel is that if you put X number of prospects in the top of that funnel, you are going to get Y number of new customers out of the bottom of that funnel. And so, if you don't start filling out the middle with how you get from X to Y, you're not going to have an effective sales funnel.

[00:10:10] And more importantly, one of the things that happens, especially with MSPs, is because we are technicians turned entrepreneurs most of the time, is that we are the ones doing the selling, at least in the beginning. Yeah. And so, we're like, well, just do it the way I've been doing it and this is the way I've been doing it. But you're not handing them a process book. And they probably can't do the marketing down to the closing.

[00:10:41] And so, it allows you, once you've defined that sales funnel, to go, okay, these are the marketing tasks that are going to get me from X to, and I should not have started with X and Y because I didn't leave myself. You did this, hold on. You've done this before because you did this before in another episode. I know, I know. You call yourself again. This is what happens when we just record on the fly. I'm on the ground. Where are you?

[00:11:10] Yeah, yeah, yeah. Can't you tell I'm using a virtual background? I'm actually on a plane. No. I'm not even real. This episode is so good. I'm going to go from A to, I don't know, let's just call it F to give myself enough room. Right? So, to go from A to B, I've got to do certain things. I've got to do, I've got to get prospects in the top of the funnel.

[00:11:37] And then to get from B to C, I have to have some type of nurturing campaign to reach out to those prospects to get a meeting with them. And meetings is level D. Okay? Have a meeting with them. What's the follow-up with that? Well, that's E. And every place through this funnel, I'm going to be losing people because they're not all going to go to the next level. Right?

[00:12:04] Where I finally get to F and I get the chance to close them or not. And you need to specify what that looks like from A, B, C, D, E, and F in order to know how to measure it. And actually have the processes, the emails, the communications, the slide deck to go over in the meeting. All of those different things to get from A to F.

[00:12:35] All right. Teach me. Let's do it this way. You're now the marketing sales funnel expert, right? You are a marketing. You're my AI. You are a marketing sales funnel expert. So you're prompting me is what we're saying. No, that's not the way I would start it though. I would start it with podcast prompts. What are you doing today for sales? Cool. Not a whole hell of a lot, right? Right.

[00:13:03] So we are on the Apple Consultants locator and we are restarting our newsletter that really only goes into customers already. And we're going to probably put that newsletter on LinkedIn as well. That's right now where all we have. Okay. And I would imagine you probably do also get some referrals.

[00:13:31] Not as many as you would think, truthfully, especially in New York City. I've always kind of felt that people in New York City don't refer others that often because we're such a fast town that you'd be afraid I wouldn't be there for you. But we have been looking to, we've gotten a couple referrals in our time. Not enough to say the least, but definitely have gotten some. Okay.

[00:13:57] So your top of funnel right now consists of referrals from ACN or people clicking and finding you on ACN and existing customers buying new products that they don't already consume via the newsletter. Correct. Correct. Okay. Okay.

[00:14:19] So you've already identified one thing that you're going to do to start getting more views of that newsletter and that's to put the newsletter on LinkedIn. Totally great because it's basically free, right? And you've already created the content so you might as well share that content to other places. But here's a step that I think you're probably missing.

[00:14:46] And this is the part that we always talk about. I think Paul Green's talked about it. Tim Fitzpatrick. I think every marketing person we've ever had on All Things MSP has talked about this. And that's having your ideal client profile and then going out and finding, getting lists, actually creating lists of people that match that ideal client profile. So we definitely have our ideal client profile.

[00:15:11] It might not be as detailed as one would expect just because of the niche that we're already in, right? So we're looking for a company that's 5 to 50, that's primarily Apple, that is in a design or design adjacent arena. We don't care about location because we are a national brand. But for a lot of people, it would be locale specific.

[00:15:39] And we're looking for companies that do not have an IT person at all or are disgruntled with their current IT solution. And I would suspect that that's probably more of an ICP than most people have. So kudos, you've got that piece. What are you doing? What's the next piece?

[00:15:59] What are you doing to actually assemble a list in a CRM, most likely, to start targeting more and more of those types of clients? So that's a solid question, I think. And again, just for everyone who's listening, like we're legit doing this for real right now. Like I'm not making up our answers.

[00:16:22] One of the things that we have thought about doing is kind of just looking on LinkedIn for people who match those profiles. We're looking for design companies who have that. And we're not really sure how to do that. We just know that that's what we want to do because we want to invite them to our newsletter. That would be our initial goal for that. But there's also the whole how do we know who's using Mac and who's not?

[00:16:52] And we've done this in the past. And I don't know how well we can continue to do this. Was that we had hired some company to do cold email outreach for us. And we used their software at the time, was able to tell what tool the recipient was opening their email with. Right? So if it shows up as OSX Safari, because that's how it reads, even though it's not what it's called anymore. Or OSX Mail or iOS.

[00:17:22] We're like, okay, that's someone we can add to our list. But we don't have access to that tool anymore. So I'm not really sure how we can target those Apple customers. But we can assume that if they're a design company, they're a Macs somewhere in that company. So one of the things I really liked about that is that your next step is your newsletter. Okay.

[00:17:47] Once you find somebody, the next thing that you're trying to get them to do is fill out a form to subscribe to that newsletter. Now, one of the things that may solve your problem very easily is that I assume that that newsletter is very Mac forward. Yeah. Okay. So chances are if they sign up for that newsletter, they're a Mac user. Most likely.

[00:18:15] So you're already filtering them at that point, which I think is the actual ideal point to filter them at. So I'm still going to come back to the question, though, of yes, and you can use LinkedIn to identify these. But it really comes down to two things. You're either going to buy a list or you're going to build a list. I think you can do it off of LinkedIn. I think you can do it off of maybe some industry websites, maybe even just some Google searches. Right.

[00:18:44] Because then you can limit it to area. But decide what you're going to do, whether you're going to buy a list or build a list. Obviously, buying is faster. It's going to cost you more, but it's going to be faster. Building it is probably going to be a little more accurate in addition to the benefits of it being cheaper, although it's going to take you more time. So again. Good, fast or cheap. Can't be all three. Exactly.

[00:19:10] But I also want to point out the important thing here is that even if you don't have money to spend, you can spend the time. Because chances are you either have time or you have money. You don't have both. And unless you're really good at this and you're using your money. Ideally, both lists, whether you buy one or make one, is good. The question is now fast or cheap. And cheap is not going to be fast. And fast is not going to be cheap. Right. Right.

[00:19:38] My overall point there, though, is that chances are if you're just starting out and you don't have the money, you can work for it. You can work for that list. But if you do have the money, save yourself the time. Go ahead and buy a list. Okay. Then use that call to action exactly like you are, Justin, for getting them to sign up for something that's very low commit. Right. You are exchanging a monthly newsletter, which they want. Right.

[00:20:08] Because they're a Mac user. They're interested in the topics that are in the newsletter. Things like that. And obviously presenting teasers from the newsletter, pieces of content from the newsletter, whether it's on LinkedIn or whatever. Good way to get that to happen. But now you've limited from the prospects down to actual leads because they've subscribed to your newsletter.

[00:20:33] Now, what are you going to do with that email address now that they're subscribed to the newsletter? That's where you've already lost me because I don't know. Like I never knew what that next step. It's definitely not like a, hey, I'm Justin. Can we talk? That's not, I feel like that's a little aggressive. And that's fair. Right. And some people are going to be okay with being that aggressive and some people aren't.

[00:21:01] And so I think it is okay to reach out to those people periodically and say, hey, thanks for reading the newsletter. We just wanted to reach out. And, you know, there's this new stuff happening, blah, blah, blah. If it's something you're interested, I'd love to book a meeting with you. Right. That's a soft pitch, right? It's not the, hi, I'm Justin. We can take care of all of your stuff. It's, hey, this might be something of interest. If you would like to talk about it, I'm here to talk about it.

[00:21:31] Okay. But to be fair, that's me being aggressive. So North Carolina aggressive versus New York aggressive. Versus, yes. Got it. I get it. But it's going out and directly trying to get the meeting. Right. Right. Versus warming them up over a period of time first. And possibly giving them links within the newsletter to respond to. The links in the newsletter would be the less aggressive method.

[00:22:01] A contact us button, a link to our website to read more on our blog, things like that. Exactly. Exactly. And what you're doing there is, you know, and if you have a complex system and you can track these things, like an enterprise level product like Marketo, right? It'll actually start adding up a score. Everything that they do to engage with you keeps adding to a score until they get to a

[00:22:29] score that you've defined that says, okay, they're warmed up enough. Now it's time to reach out and try and get that meeting and get in front of them. Right. So that's literally what you're trying to do is you're trying to find out who they are, get them to give you their contact information, use that contact information to warm them up.

[00:22:53] And when they hit a certain temperature, let's call it, that's when you reach out and you try and book a meeting. And then that meeting gives you the opportunity to pitch. And then, you know, that can go in a lot of different directions. But again, those directions kind of need to be defined in your funnel. They may say no, and they just go back to getting the newsletter. And I just nailed my microphone with my hand talking. If you're not watching the video, you need to be.

[00:23:23] YouTube.com slash at all things MSP. Exactly. Because there's a natural progression to this. It's not rocket science, but it is kind of tedious, right? But if you do it right, nobody's going to slip out of your funnel, which is the problem that most people have if they don't formalize their funnel. Or you're not going to be consistent enough to stay top of mind.

[00:23:51] I love the newsletter idea because it keeps you top of mind. It either needs to be a newsletter or some type of regular email talking about, you know, just some useful information. Right. Right. There was something you had said about the – once they're warmed up, they should be – you should be able to get them into your process for a meeting and trying to close.

[00:24:16] I think there's also something to be said about having a process for how those meetings should go. Because I've noticed – oh, yeah. I've noticed for myself the last couple of phone calls I've had with clients, I have – this will come as a shock to you – talked their ear off to the point where they don't want to even be bothered with me because they came in with one thing and I shot them with a thousand different things.

[00:24:42] And I – even in my head, like a mid-conversation coming in my head, I'm like, what are you babbling at? Shut up, Justin. Shut up. But like – and nothing – you know, I'm upset about it. It wasn't – there weren't very big potentials anyway. But like that process of like how many phone calls should you have? How many Zoom meetings? What should the calls be like and what you should be saying on them should be part of that process?

[00:25:08] Yeah, you should absolutely – because this is probably the most important part of the process, right? Because now you've gotten them from prospect to lead and now they've gone from a lead to a lot of times what we'll call an MQL, a marketing qualified lead. And then you look at it and go, yeah, they're now a sales qualified lead because now it's worth – everything up to that point is marketing. Now sales is going to take over.

[00:25:38] Whether it's a different person or not, it's a different process. Once they're a sales qualified lead, there's a whole separate subsection of the funnel that has to be tightly defined. And that usually starts with some type of outreach, right? Somebody making a phone call, sending an email to try and get a meeting. Then that first meeting is all about discovery, right? It's unfortunately – and you're right, you identified it.

[00:26:05] It's all about listening to them rather than talking about what you do and how well you do it. Because you have to identify their pain points before you can talk about a solution. And the other thing about discovery, it's just as much when you're talking about a service-related offering, like what an MSP is offering, is whether or not they're the right client for you and whether or not they have a problem that you want to solve.

[00:26:36] This is a mutually beneficial discovery process. It's do they want to do business with you and do you want to do business with them? Because there's always going to be that person who wants to get your newsletter, but they're a complete PC shopper because there's one person who uses a Mac. They're like, oh, this could be interesting for me. And then they want to talk to you and you're like, you're not the right audience for me.

[00:27:00] But you wouldn't have any idea until you have a meeting with them or get into some of their pain points or things like that. Right. And if you don't ask the right questions. That's why the most important thing on a discovery call is having a checklist. You're basically interviewing the client. Yeah. At this point. And allowing them to interview you.

[00:27:22] What do you think would be like the top three questions on that checklist that somebody, that an MSP should be asking on that first discovery call? Well, I think it's going to be unique to most MSPs. Like you, they're all going to have the different things that they specialize in. Right. I would say size has a lot to do with it. Okay.

[00:27:48] Because a lot of MSPs just can't handle clients of a certain size without extra resources. Verticals. Because a lot of MSPs, even though they may not specialize in verticals, they're good at a handful. Mm-hmm. And they're not good at the others. There's some generic businesses that don't fall on with that.

[00:28:13] And then the other one that I would say is if they have any compliance needs. Because that today is so important. And the MSP has to be prepared to support whatever type of compliance that is, whether it's HIPAA, GDPR. That's what's been getting me in trouble lately. Is that like I'll get on the phone with somebody and I'll ask them what their compliancy needs are. And they don't even know.

[00:28:44] And then I barrel roll them with all this stuff. That is something that like I personally need to work on to say like, okay, it's cool that you don't know it. We're going to work with you and figure that out. You don't need to know anything else at that point. I tend to – because I get – for whatever reason, I'm like really into compliancy. So like I get excited to talk to them about what does it mean to be a NIST or SOC 2 or CMMC or all these things. And at that point, the person on the other phone is like, I don't want to talk to you anymore.

[00:29:12] So like, yes, find out if they're – what kind of compliancy they need. But do not run that run out the gate on your first phone call. Well, right. Because again, you're listening, right? You're discovering you're not solution selling yet.

[00:29:33] As much as we want to believe that our solutions are fit all for everybody because as MSPs, we know that to be true. There is – you have your core offering that is fit for everybody and then you have these like outlier pieces. Some clients might need MDR. Some clients might need SIEM. Some clients might need email security that's different than your normal email security. Some clients are okay with malware bites. Some clients need endpoint detection.

[00:30:02] Like you in your head may look at all your customers and go, they all fit the bill. But you don't need to tell that to the customer that you're trying to get. You're not talking – you don't need to tell the prospect that because you want them also to feel special and taken care of and not just another client that you're just cranking through with your processes. Right.

[00:30:28] They don't need to know how you're going to make the peanut butter and jelly sandwich, right? They just need to know that you can make the peanut butter and jelly sandwich. You should also document how you make that peanut butter and jelly sandwich and there's more to that later. I'm getting hungry for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich now. I am too. But I'm tracking my calories today as we talked about earlier and I'm not going to do that.

[00:30:53] Well, look, I think this is a great start for people to do because as it's the beginning of the year, this is the time to start building out those processes. We've talked about that in the last episode, you know, about setting goals and keeping track of those. And now we're talking about it now with this. It's kind of the same thing. This is the time of the year that everyone, not just us, everyone is building out new processes for 2025.

[00:31:18] Our industry changes so quickly that you need to take this time to build out processes that can – they're not going to be infallible, right? And you're going to need wiggle room for them to update and change as things go on. But you should be building out some of those processes now. How are you going to get new leads? How are you going to talk to them? What are you going to say? What kind of voice you should have when you're talking to new prospects? And then all the way to how are you going to close them?

[00:31:48] Because if you want to set your goal to double your monthly recurring revenue, you better damn well have a way to do that as opposed to just saying, it's January 1, I'm going to double my monthly revenue and come December 31, 2025, go, well, where did I screw up? And the answer is you didn't write down how you were going to get there. And that's what this is all about.

[00:32:11] Figuring out that process, figuring out the details without going overboard because I know a lot of us tend to just like – we do nothing but process and then nothing gets done. That's the wrong direction, right? You go too far the other direction. There's a level. If you're not sure what that level is, reach out to Eric and I on Facebook or LinkedIn or whatever and find us and we'll work with you and help you out. Or maybe we'll bring you on as a guest of the show and see what you're doing and see how we can help you with your business.

[00:32:41] I think that's a great thing to do for 2025. And if you're not sure, like I said, ask. And I think that was a great point that you just made about not making it overly complicated, right? Because sales funnels work best, especially when you're starting out, as simple processes. You can get so mired down in building the process that you don't make it simple enough for it to work. You got to kiss it.

[00:33:11] Keep it simple, stupid. But I hope everybody has written up all of these things. If you haven't, pull over. Listen again. Take it home. Listen again. And write down what your goals are going to be. Let us know what some of your goals are by posting them at facebook.com slash group slash allthingsmsp. Check us all out in high-def glory at youtube.com slash allthingsmsp. You can watch Eric bang into his microphone. Follow us on all of your favorite podcasting tools.

[00:33:41] It's getting late, and I've run out of drink, so now my mouth is getting dry. Follow us on all of your favorite podcasting tools. We're on Apple, Google, iHeartRadio. I mean, you're listening to us, right? So we must be somewhere in your feed. Leave us a review. Check us out on LinkedIn. We've got a LinkedIn page now, apparently. We have Patreon. We have a lot of things going on. Our 2025 is going to be massive because Eric has written it all down and has a process for everything. That's Emperor Eric, and I am Padawan Justin.

[00:34:11] Bye! Thank you for listening or watching the All Things MSP podcast. If you liked this episode, go ahead and give us a thumbs up. Hit that like button, and consider subscribing to catch all our weekly episodes. And from your host extraordinaire, Justin Eskar, and myself, Eric Anthony, your humble producer and All Things MSP founder, thank you very much for spending your time with us.

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