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Eric Anthony:
Let's do this though, because one of the things that I don't know, we've just kind of gotten away from it in the last couple, is not doing that kind of funny bit in the beginning.
Justin Esgar:
You mean the part before the Yeah. Whatcha talking about We do funny shit all the time. This is it right now. You're going to take this part and you're going to stick it in the beginning and then there's going to be the music. And then I'm going to go, what's up everybody? Welcome to the All Things MSP podcast.
Eric Anthony:
Yeah. Yeah. Except for the fact that we can't talk about yet.
Justin Esgar:
No, you take the part where you're going to cut it to the part where I go, what are you talking about? We do funny stuff all the time. There is your cut line. I gave you the line to run with. Lemme get comfortable. I broke my chair. I'm very upset about that. If anyone's listening and wants to buy me a new chair, what's up everybody? Welcome to the All Things MSP podcast. I'm your host Justin Esgar, and with me always is OG host and apparently Wizard Extraordinaire. Mr. Eric Anthony. Eric, how are you today my friend?
Eric Anthony:
I'm doing well, and yes, I got the chance to be a wizard over the last week. By the time you guys see this, it's probably a month ago now, but for your viewing enjoyment, if you're watching this on YouTube, I will be kind and post the picture here. Most of you will probably recognize a few of those characters in the photo with me. The tech degenerates, we had them on the live stream, I don't know, back in July. I think just a bunch of, a great bunch of MSPs that I get the favor of hanging out with from time to time. So it was great to see them and great to participate in their theme.
Justin Esgar:
And if you want to be a wizard and you have an iPhone, just tell Siri Lumos and it will turn your camera on. Actually, there's an article, you could Google this. Look up Harry Potter spells for your iPhone. There's like 15 different commands you can tell your iPhone and it will do different things. New two can feel like a wizard. You're a wizard Eric? Let's talk about some stuff that wizards talk about and it's marketing. Don't ask me how that works, but it works. And today we're going to talk a little bit about marketing, about sales funnel. We're going to lead into some things. We're going to talk about what has worked for me. More importantly, we're going to talk about what hasn't worked for me, which is pretty much everything and how we get business. Now, keep in mind obviously my thoughts, my opinions are my own. Your mileage may vary. And also we're an Apple consultant, so things are different in our world. So everybody wants more clients. Everybody who's a growing business, everybody who has a growing MSP, everybody wants more clients or if not more clients. You want the right clients. You want to attract the right clients to you.
Eric Anthony:
Well, hopefully they're doing that
Justin Esgar:
Well, hopefully, right? Otherwise you're just helping everybody. Everybody and then some. So the question comes down to is how are you getting these people? And we've talked about this a little bit before. Eric calls it the sales funnel. So why don't you tell everybody what a sales funnel is for those who don't know, and then I'll get into what it isn't.
Eric Anthony:
Okay? So I have a more simplistic view because I think that especially running an MSP business, it's a technical business, but it doesn't have to be complicated. And I just presented this topic at channel a couple of weeks ago, well, a month or so ago now that you're probably watching this podcast, but I break it down into three very simple segments, get, do and keep, right? That's what you got to do. You got to get 'em, you got to do the work, and you got to keep 'em very simple. Now, yes, it's a little more complicated than that. And so what I do is I break down the get piece into awareness. Oh, see, I'm losing it now because it's been like three weeks since I did it.
Justin Esgar:
Well, for those who are listening at home, it's been six weeks. We'll cut
Eric Anthony:
It, something like that. But anyway, awareness. Oh, awareness, evaluation and conversion. Okay, that's what it's, sorry, just I'm old. These things happen. So awareness, evaluation and conversion, that's your sales funnel in very basic terms. It can have more levels than that. It can be extremely complex. But to me, that's where you start. You have some kind of marketing that goes out there that tells people you exist and what you do, okay? It's not designed to sell them, it's just designed to consistently be in front of them, let you know that you're there and what you do so bad.
Justin Esgar:
Take a pause real quick because you said something, and I want to make sure people understand this. You said it's not to sell them. I want everyone who's listening to grasp this because this is very important. What Eric's talking about right now is awareness. You are to get them to know who you are. You are not selling them out of the gate, right? I'm sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt. Please continue.
Eric Anthony:
No, but that is probably the most important point of that stage. And this can take any number of forms. How you do it doesn't matter. Now, some will be more effective than others, and that's for you to figure out why. Because it depends on where you are. It depends on your target market. It depends on a lot of different things that I can't tell you exactly which one's going to work for me. An example of this, when I was an MSP, my best awareness marketing was two things. And you're going to laugh. Everybody's going to laugh at this, but I swear to God it worked. I had a bench outside of the local sports bar. Nice. That was probably my best. It
Justin Esgar:
Acted like a billboard, like the real estate one with a picture of your face with a,
Eric Anthony:
Exactly like the real estate ones. I did not have my face on it. I had a little computer with arms and a face. But yes, but
Justin Esgar:
For those who were listening and aren't watching on YouTube, Eric's face is not a computer with arms and a face.
Eric Anthony:
And I really wish, and maybe I should, okay?
Justin Esgar:
Oh, we're going off script.
Eric Anthony:
I'm going off script, and this is going to be so bad. I actually still have the laptop that I was using when I sold my MSP.
Justin Esgar:
If you want to win Eric's laptop, I'm kidding. I'm kidding.
Eric Anthony:
But now I'm interested. Now I want to go back and I want to look and see if I still have the proof of the design for that bench so that I can use it in future things. That was number one. Number two was one of the trash cans out in front of Walmart. You know how they have the ones with the ads on each side? Maybe they don't have 'em now, but they used to. I haven't
Justin Esgar:
Been to a Walmart in forever, so I'll just say yes for the sake of argument.
Eric Anthony:
And keep in mind, this was pre-social media,
Justin Esgar:
Okay? Yeah.
Eric Anthony:
Okay. That's the caveat here. I would probably not do those things today because social media is easier and cheaper.
Justin Esgar:
See, I would though, you know why? Because everyone's doing social media and no one's doing the benches in the Walmart garbage cans,
Eric Anthony:
But so many people are doing social media wrong. But this is not an episode on social media.
Justin Esgar:
We're not getting into that yet.
Eric Anthony:
But wherever the point here is, wherever your ideal customer profile is, walks by, drives by, reads their morning coffee with whatever, drinks their morning coffee while they read. I don't know. This is going way off the rails. But anyway, and we've had actually, who did we have on that covered I C P? Ideal customer profile.
Justin Esgar:
Oh, it's in Fit, Patrick.
Eric Anthony:
Yes, yes. So go back and watch that episode about building your ideal customer profile. Once you know where they hang out, that's where you hang out. That's where you create content. That's where you put up billboards, that's where you put a bench. I happen to know that most of the, and realtors and business people in town did lunch at the sports bar at least once a week. So I was in front of my target audience being there. So that's awareness, just being where your customers hang out and providing helpful content so that they know you exist and they know what you do. Then there's evaluation. Evaluation kicks in when they are looking for somebody who does what you do, hopefully you've caught them in advance with awareness. But the second step is if they start looking for IT services, they can find you. And if they can't find you, then you need to work on your evaluation piece.
Second part of the evaluation piece is you have to have relevant content and social proof that you are the solution that they're looking for, or at least you fall in the top three so that when they evaluate three options, you're one of the options that they're going to contact and evaluate, right? Okay. So that's the second part for me is that evaluation piece have to be findable, and you have to have the relevant content to convince them that you are the right solution or at least one of the right solutions. And then third is conversion. Conversion is you actually have to have a process for once they call you. What do you do after that point? Do you have a presentation? Do you have something really a cookbook or a playbook that you follow that walks from having the first meeting to having follow-up meetings, follow-up conversations, whatever it is, all the way up to the point where they sign the contract? And by the way, conversion includes having the right contract. So that's kind of my basic beginning sales funnel.
Justin Esgar:
Let's get into a little bit about this, because what's funny to me is how what you're laying out is, I don't mean this, it's very rudimentary. It's very easy to do. It's very easy to follow, right? That's the point. That's the point. That's exactly the point. Every MSP marketing firm is going to tell you some variance of what you're talking about. Know who your target profile is, hit them up in certain ways, get in front of them, give 'em the content they want, and then close 'em. Basically, I can talk from straight experience about what works and what doesn't work, but my experience, again, your mileage may vary. So one, being an Apple consultant has given us a leg up because we're already hitting the target market where we need to hit them because people who have maxed will call Apple, and Apple sends them to the consultant's locator website.
They type in their zip code, and they'll find us. And there's filters and there's badges, and there's things to do, and we have enough locations where we show up in enough areas. If you search la, you're not going to find a virtual computers, but we have zip codes in Miami, Des Moines, Columbia, New York, New Jersey, whatever. So that's been helpful, and that gives us our awareness because then comes down to the can we provide the relevant information when there's three potential evaluators? So when the Apple stores get involved, the business teams, the Apple store, they're not supposed to play favorites, and they're supposed to introduce the client to three potential Apple consultants. You have to be able to provide the relevant information to them. Now, one thing I love to do is tell the client that the Apple store was wrong in whatever they told you, because most of the time they don't know what they're talking about, but get that information across in that way, and then you can close.
So it's similar but different, right? Because we're not doing traditional marketing. So let's talk about traditional marketing that we have done at Virtua that has not worked. Now, I know a lot of people like to send postcards with aspirins attached to it, and it has worked. For some of you, it does not work when you're in a multimillion metro area like New York City when there's an MSP every other block and they're all sending postcards with aspirin on it. So part one of this is not only know your target market, but know your demographic, know of where you are, know what you're up against, know who your competition is. So there's that. We've never done that because I'm in our base is New York City, and the Apple Base doesn't respond to the same type of content that the PC base does,
Eric Anthony:
Right? Because your personas are different. And that's ideal customer profile is where you have to start with your audience. Yes. If you want to dig into it deeper and get more psychological with it, that's when you create, okay, what personas are going to be at my ideal customer profile that are going to be making the decisions about making me their next MSP,
Justin Esgar:
Right?
Eric Anthony:
And your persona as an Apple consultant is very different than your typical IT services consumer.
Justin Esgar:
Well, my persona personally is very different than everybody, but that's another episode. You know
Eric Anthony:
What I meant?
Justin Esgar:
I know what you meant. No, but you're right. Because the thing is, and I say this a lot whenever I get proposition by the MSP marketing people, oh, we've helped. Can virtual computers deal with 45 more new calls? I'm like, you ever worked with an Apple consultant before? And I was like, no, but it shouldn't be any different than the PC side. If you tell every PC M SS P to market to their clients going, your data's on the dark web Mac, people don't care about that, man. They want to smoke weeded and draw pictures. So not that that's our ideal client, but I'm just saying that doesn't fly. So that doesn't work. The postcard thing work. So we tried the LinkedIn thing where we connected with a bunch of people we thought would be good customers based on their LinkedIn profile. We sent them four separate LinkedIn messages.
We tracked everything we did. And the first one was like, Hey, Eric, so glad to connect. And the second one was like, Hey, Eric, we're an Apple consultant. You are doing computer stuff. Is there anything we can do to help? And then the third one was like, Hey, Eric, do you know that we can help you be? And this is where it went off the rails, 486% more effective or more productive just by hiring Virtua. Do you know how many FU I got for that? Oh, yeah. Prove that you could do 486% productivity. You know what I mean? So I was like, this doesn't seem right. And I went to the person who was running the program for us and I was like, oh, no. So then we went and we did the cold call thing. So I found a company that had college students making cold calls and they couldn't figure out how to track who had Mac versus who had pc.
They had all of these businesses to call, and I actually had to show them from their own internal sales force, had to look at where the message was being read and showing that it's like OSS 10 or an iOS device or whatever. It's to limit those then. And we worked with 'em for three months and didn't get a single bite. And they even changed tactics for us and went to let's set up a webinar and we did one webinar, three people showed up. So that didn't work either. So part of this is wrong tactic. Part of this is not the ideal customer. Part of this is we didn't put enough money into it. Part of this is we didn't put enough time into it, and you need all four to be correct in order for this to work. Now, people who do marketing for a living, especially for big companies, spend millions of dollars on advertising their products to everyone. If you watch Hulu with your spouse or your kids, there's going to be commercials that are targeted towards the kids, your spouse or you, not your entire family most of the time, unless it's like a Disney World vacation thing.
So you have to think about it that they're taking a loss when they're hitting one at a four every commercial. And so they play the long game. And that's a lot of what marketing is also is playing this long game. So when we do, and in all fairness, we only did three month stints on all of these because they just didn't return anything and they were costing us so much money. And so I've personally become weary of, and keep in mind, I'm very good friends with people like Paul Green and Mark Copeman, but I have very weary of those companies who straight up will be like, we do marketing for MSPs. We can help you get a hundred new leads because neither Paul nor Mark say that, right? But the companies who come to you and say, we'll get you a hundred new leads in a month, I feel a little bit of smoke being blown up in my butt.
Eric Anthony:
So
Justin Esgar:
It depends. It's got to be organic. It's got to be organic. That's my point. It's got to be organic.
Eric Anthony:
And here's my theory on why that's true. Okay? My theory on why that's true is because you, the business owner, not you Justin, but although this applies to you because you are an M Ss P owner, need to know what marketing looks like and what marketing works for your business. Because if you don't, you can't hire somebody to do it for you because they don't know about your business. And because you're a service business, not just a product, they have to know your business. You know it. And if you don't know how to tell them how to message it, they're not going to do it, right? So it has to come from you. That's why the organic works. That's why I believe you should always start out doing it yourself. It could be a massive failure, but fail on your time instead of your dime. See what I did there?
Justin Esgar:
What's so funny, I'm going to pull away from the here. I wrote a note the other day, I wrote this actually on this piece of paper you can see right here. And it says, failure is the cost of entry.
Eric Anthony:
And it's very
Justin Esgar:
Tricky the last week. And for you to say that is kind like on point,
Eric Anthony:
You'll learn more by failing through a couple months of doing your own marketing than you will ever by hiring somebody else and having them fail.
Justin Esgar:
So Eric, where can people learn about doing their own marketing AlleyOOP
Eric Anthony:
At the ACEs conference, but actually see, you teed me up and I actually had something else in mind that I was going to reach for first, and then we can talk about ACEs. So hold on, hold on.
Justin Esgar:
We're both, this is going to be great YouTube content, just watching us scroll through our desks.
Eric Anthony:
So the one page marketing plan, see by Al, my hands are in the way by Alan Dibb. This is my favorite. If you don't know where to start with marketing, start here. I don't read it all the time, but I do probably listen to it every couple of years just to remind me. And if you don't know where to start with marketing, that's where you start. But to Justin,
Justin Esgar:
We'll put an Amazon affiliate link in the show notes.
Eric Anthony:
Yeah, yeah. If only I had set up an Amazon affiliate account, but I will put the link in the show notes. Okay, so
Justin Esgar:
Hey Eric, where can people learn how to do marketing themselves?
Eric Anthony:
I'm so glad you asked Justin, because it's go time.
Justin Esgar:
Yes, ace's conference. We're doing our 10 year anniversary this year to be live back in person for the first time in five years in Salt Lake City, Utah, May 15th and 16th. Now, ace's conference is traditionally made. It's all about the business side of IT consulting, and traditionally it has been for Apple consultants, but it is not Apple consultant specific. You can be a PC consultant if you wish to attend. We have topics like marketing management, sales, just general business. This is not a vendor-driven conference. This is a learning conference. This is people who are coming, are both in and out of our industry. Last year's keynote speakers were Dave Sobel and Brian. Oh,
Eric Anthony:
No, yeah, Brian Morris.
Justin Esgar:
Brian Morris. Yeah. Sorry. Sorry, Brian. We have speakers who are in the industry last year we have Brian Bass, Ryan Grimes, Jared from Ruda Consulting, a couple others. And then we had people who are outside our industry. Brad Gross, who a lot of people know. MSP lawyer. We had Stephanie Hilfer who's talking about marketing. We had Melanie Curtis, we had Christina Langdon both talking about bringing your best in the c e O game. We had, oh, I'm skipping. We had so many other speakers. I can't even think about we so many speakers over the last 10 years. I'm trying to remember everybody at one time. But ACE conference happening May 15th and 16th, salt Lake City, Utah. Tickets are available@acescomp.com, and Eric is going to be speaking. And the only reason I know that is cause I'm putting 'em on the spot. And so we literally, before we started recording this episode, and it may make it the bumper before or after where I said, Hey, Eric, what are you going to be talking about at ACEs this year?
And he said, oh, we should talk about that on this episode. And so here we are. But yeah, come join us there. I'm super excited to be back in person and I'll be hosting. So if you like listening to my voice for two and a half days or two days, two days, one, three quarters, two days, I do have about five minutes. And then I introduce, people come and go, but it's a lot of fun. It'll be a good time. And we're kicking off. And if you're thinking about if you want to be in front of a hundred consultants, call for speakers, they're up. We're taking the sponsors, just go to the website. You'll find all you need to find. But in terms of marketing in general, I think that a lot of people are just scared because here's the thing, right? As an MSP owner, whether you consider yourself a business owner or an entrepreneur, whether you're an MSP or break fix or lifestyle business, whatever you want to call it, right? The problem is we're all in technology and as technologists, we look at things very logically. Point A to point B, I know how to get from a broken device to a fixed device in five seconds. Flat
Marketing is one of those creative, spiraly, wibbly, wobbly timey, wimy kind of concepts. And I feel like a lot of people are just afraid to do it because it's not logical. It's not a straight through progression. Now, there are parts that are, which is kind of what Eric was talking about earlier. You can follow your steps, you can lay out your plan, you can project manage it, you can organize it, whatever it is. But because there's so many variables, I feel like a lot of people are just scared. And here, I'm going to tell you live right now, don't be scared.
Eric Anthony:
Well, you mentioned some things there that I think are really important, that it's not magic. It's also not entirely science. There's a lot of science and math to it, but there's a lot of people behavior psychology that makes it look like magic. Because when things click, they click and you don't understand why the purpose is not understand. Y the purpose is to try enough things to find the one that works, and you only know which ones work if you're measuring them. So it goes back to your failure is the cost of entry. You have to fail X number of times to find the one that works, but once you find the one that works, you can ride that wave for a period of time. The problem that a lot of people get into again, is they find the one that works and they're not trying other things while they're still executing the one that works. So they find the next one that works. It's just like waves. There's a new one always coming. The one that you're riding is eventually going to die on the beach, so you have to be looking out for the next one.
Justin Esgar:
Yeah, you got to be trying new things all the time. I think it was actually, we already mentioned, I think it was Tim Fitzpatrick and I were talking on a separate conversation. Companies should be putting something like 10% a month of their, or 10% of their monthly revenue towards marketing efforts. Now, I'll be the first to announce, first to say that we don't do that, and it's something that I'm working on and actively trying to change. But this for me is a marketing effort doing things like this, while it might not be 10% of our cash giving up 10% of my time.
Eric Anthony:
Exactly. That was the point that I wanted to make sure you made. Yep.
Justin Esgar:
Yeah. It doesn't always have to be 10% cash. It could be 10% of your time if it's writing blog articles, if it's making videos, if it's connecting with people who can help you get things, if it's doing podcasts, if it's guesting on the All Things MSP podcast at MSP link slash podcast, dude, I'm a professional. I got that. That's where it's at. The amount of subject matter expert content you can find@virtualconsulting.com on me. If you scroll down, you look at my sizzle reel, you see me on all the news articles and all these podcasts that I do, that I'm interviewed on, that's all subject matter expert material. That's not getting me customers, but that is getting me. But that at the same time, it's getting me the customers who are ready to go, who need that thing to tip them over to say, is Justin the person who we think he is? Or is he blowing smoke up our butts? And then I show them a video. It's awareness. Oh, it's awareness, right? It's getting it out there. And so that's what it's about. So it doesn't have to always be 10% of your cash, it can be 10% of your time, but you have to be doing something. If you do nothing all month, but answer tickets, you will not grow your business. Period. End of story.
Eric Anthony:
And I want to kind of stress the 10% time thing, because for most MSPs technicians turned business owners, they don't know marketing. They know how to network. They know how to build a pc, they know how to fix a Mac. All of those things that a technician needs to know they don't know is how to run a business. And so typically, they let the business thing slide because they just naturally gravitate to the technical. And by the way, we have a hero complex. We like to be the hero. We like to solve people's problems. In order to do that consistently and for more people, you need to spend time getting more people. So spend the time. Spend the time. You don't necessarily need to spend the dollars in the beginning, especially spend the time. It will pay off
Justin Esgar:
And spend the time going back through our past catalog and listen to our interviews with Paul Green and Tim Fitzpatrick talking about marketing and listen and follow along. We're all at youtube.com/at all things msp. Join the Facebook group, facebook.com/group/all things MSP and all of your podcast apps, apple Podcast, Stitcher, Google Play YA Mama's podcast. I think I've been trying to throw that one in every episode. And you'll find out because we're going to talk a little bit more about marketing. We're getting into more things as we continue on with this show in general. We want to hear from you, the audience. So leave a comment, leave a review, come on the show talk. Just we wonder what are you doing? What's your marketing efforts? Leave a comment in the Facebook group or on YouTube. Tell us what you are doing because we want to know and we want to talk about it. We want to talk about it with you. Atsp link slash podcast to wrap this up with a nice little bow as I try to do every episode, marketing is a long-term effort. There is science, there is math, there is creativity. But you need to try and like we've talked about before, failure is the cost of entry. I can tell you firsthand, I can tell you firsthand, the first couple episodes of the show were failures. But look at us now. Look at us now. Mom
Eric Anthony:
And I do, and this is probably a whole nother episode, but you mentioned it's time. It's a long-term thing with marketing. It comes down to eyeballs. It's all about eyeballs. The number of eyeballs and the right eyeballs and time gets you more eyeballs. Money gets you more eyeballs. Sometimes you have more of one than the other.
Justin Esgar:
Have that eye washing station nearby at all times. Wash your eyeballs. Alright, now we've lost it. Anyway, that's it for us at the All Things s P podcast. I'm your host Justin Ascar. With me always, Eric Anthony. That's it. Bye.
Speaker 3:
And now that you've watched that mess of a podcast, don't forget to watch one of these and go ahead and click that subscribe button so you get to watch more. Yeah, just go ahead and do it. Click the button and then watch one of the other videos I'm watching. I.