In this episode of the MSP Business School, host Brian Doyle is joined by Ian Richardson of Fox and Crow to discuss the critical topic of growth for Managed Service Providers (MSPs) and common sales pitfalls. Ian shares his journey from the founding to the eventual sale of his MSP and highlights key lessons learned from mistakes in outbound sales practices. The conversation delves into the scientific approach and data-driven insights that can help MSPs overcome the stagnation typically faced once initial networks and referrals are exhausted.
The discussion focuses on the importance of consistent outbound activity and effective communication with prospects to maintain growth momentum. Ian emphasizes personal interactions over relying solely on technology and automation, advocating for a "dial the phone" strategy to reach potential clients and gather valuable insights. Additionally, Ian introduces Instinct, a software solution developed at Fox and Crow that leverages data from millions of outbound dials to provide MSPs with competitive intelligence and performance diagnostics. The episode concludes with strategic advice for MSPs to shape their sales.
Key Takeaways:
- Understand MSP Sales Challenges: Ian Richardson shares his insights on the common missteps and challenges faced by MSPs when it comes to sales and growth.
- Embrace Outbound Consistency: The importance of consistent and targeted outbound calling is stressed as a crucial component to generating new leads and appointments.
- Leverage Competitive Intelligence: Using competitive insights and data analytics can help MSPs position themselves favorably in the market and respond proactively to competitors' actions.
- Invest in Training and Systems: Effective sales processes require dedicated time, training, and the right tools to support sales reps and optimize outcomes.
- Utilize Technology Wisely: While technology and analytics are useful, Ian stresses the need to prioritize personal interactions and relationships in business development.
Show Website: https://mspbusinessschool.com/
Guest
Name: Ian Richardson
LinkedIn page: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ianalexanderrichardson/
Company: Fox & Crow
Website: https://www.foxcrowgroup.com/
Host
Brian Doyle: https://www.linkedin.com/in/briandoylevciotoolbox/
Sponsor vCIOToolbox: https://vciotoolbox.com
Listen to MSP Business School on the Fox and Crow Group Your IT Podcasts Network!
00:00:18
Hey everyone, welcome to the latest installment of MSP Business School.
00:00:23
I am Brian Doyle, your host.
00:00:25
Welcome today, as always.
00:00:28
With me today I have Ian Richardson from Fox and Crow.
00:00:31
Many of you may know him, but with that said, we're gonna ask Ian to tell us a little bit
about himself and kind of kick things off that way.
00:00:38
Ian, how are you today?
00:00:39
Welcome.
00:00:40
Hey, I'm great Brian happy, happy.
00:00:45
Well, December for those of you who are watching.
00:00:48
ah There's a there's snow on the ground here in Michigan.
00:00:51
I'm doing awesome man.
00:00:52
How are you?
00:00:53
I'm sorry to hear you got snow on the ground, that's something we're avoiding.
00:00:56
I actually head down to the Southeast offices a couple days after we record this, because
I don't like the cold.
00:01:02
Yeah, yeah, it's it's the time of year where I am cold from now through May living in
Michigan.
00:01:09
So.
00:01:10
uh
00:01:12
But anyhow, what I'm excited about is you talk about what is usually the MSP's biggest
topic, the biggest questions that come up at conferences, the biggest questions that come
00:01:23
up here on this show.
00:01:25
How do we grow?
00:01:27
And you've really found a very scientific way to get there.
00:01:31
um Maybe talk a little bit about your journey into the MSP world and what you're all about
today.
00:01:37
Yeah, yeah, no, be happy to.
00:01:39
uh I got started.
00:01:41
I've been in the game for 20 years now and I started my MSP such as it was when I was a 21
year old punk and it was a nights and weekend thing.
00:01:54
was I was uh I was going to uh night school and working at a college and then doing this
small business and a lot of residential stuff on the side and hung there for.
00:02:06
five years till I had graduated and quit a job at a college and said, you know, don't want
to do this with the rest of my life, decided to do the MSP full time.
00:02:14
And that was back in 2010.
00:02:17
And if you flash forward 11 years after that, 2021 is when I sold it, over those 11 years,
if you name a sales mistake, I can guarantee you I've made it at least twice.
00:02:29
I'm the type of guy who likes to...
00:02:32
run into a wall full speed, touch the stove twice.
00:02:35
I don't believe that it's I don't believe that it's hot enough.
00:02:38
Maybe it'll hurt less this time and just blew a million dollars, probably over a million,
really.
00:02:46
But at least a million on bad outbound, bad decision, bad process, bad hires, bad data.
00:02:53
And uh it really taught me a lot uh running running that MSP, a lot of what not to do.
00:03:02
And near the end of the journey, I met a few different people who poured an immense amount
of time, effort, resources, and money into helping me see the mistakes and giving me the
00:03:14
tools and resources and knowledge to help fix them.
00:03:17
And when I sold, I'd gone from hating sales and viewing it as this necessary evil to kind
of liking sales.
00:03:26
And these days, I tell people I have an entirely inappropriate
00:03:30
relationship with how much I love everything about sales.
00:03:32
ah And uh on the other end of uh Fox and Crow is Carrie, my wife and business partner, and
she ran for 10 years a premier lead generation agency for both MSPs and the vendors that
00:03:49
sell to and through them.
00:03:51
And through doing over 5 million outbound dials across hundreds of campaigns coast to
coast across the US and Canada,
00:03:58
as well as sourcing over 100 billion in managed service opportunity, she learned a lot
about what to do.
00:04:06
And we sold the MSP in 21, we sold the call center in 22 and took a lot of those lessons
learned on both ends and said, all right, where's the overlay?
00:04:16
Where's the patterns?
00:04:18
A lot of the problems I had, she saw again and again and again with founder led sales.
00:04:24
You get a...
00:04:26
Relatively smart in my case or really smart in a lot of others cases technical guy who's
got an engineering mindset has some some business knowledge right some from hard knocks
00:04:37
some from formal training and zero formal training when it comes to sales and revenue and
growth and They're able to just by pulling the rope with their teeth Pushing the boulder
00:04:50
up the hill grow the MSP to a million two million five million and then they cap out
00:04:56
and they try to hire someone and salespeople are pretty good at interviewing because
you're selling yourself, but there's not a tool, there's not a process, there's not
00:05:06
coaching and support and they crash and burn and then they try again.
00:05:09
Hopefully the best sale you're making is not the one to get this job, man.
00:05:12
Yeah, right.
00:05:14
Yeah.
00:05:14
And it's like that's the thing is, is we try and we fail.
00:05:18
We try and we fail.
00:05:19
We outsource and that fails.
00:05:20
We go to marketing and that fails and we get burned and touch the stove, touch the stove,
touch the stove.
00:05:27
And we see again and again, again, man, this just doesn't work.
00:05:31
And that's that's kind of where where most of my conversations start these days is I'm
talking with guys who are like, yeah, well, I tried this and I tried that and I tried
00:05:40
this.
00:05:41
None of this is working and I feel like I'm stuck.
00:05:45
And that's really the like what where I'm at today is, uh know, we, and I both after we
sold the company, as we said, okay, well, we could go like sit on a beach and, you know,
00:05:59
hang out under the umbrella all day.
00:06:01
But we're, we're really, really passionate about growth.
00:06:05
We're passionate about sales.
00:06:06
We're passionate about the channel.
00:06:08
I truly think that an MSP makes its community healthier.
00:06:12
Right?
00:06:14
There's not a business on the planet that doesn't need IT and we're all the ones who make
that stuff work, keep it safe, fix it when it breaks.
00:06:24
Like that's critical.
00:06:25
It's critical infrastructure.
00:06:27
And uh I think that helping MSPs grow is a way for us to help make America a
00:06:35
healthier and stronger country for all of us.
00:06:38
And so that's why we like to do it.
00:06:42
for protecting ourselves and our friends in our communities data, right?
00:06:47
And that's really where the MSP comes into play.
00:06:50
There's a lot of sensitive information that we are put in charge of that we need to make
sure that doesn't get out there.
00:06:56
But I want to pivot back to something you kind of talked about, you know, as you were
going into that introduction and really about the owner led sales process, right?
00:07:05
One of the things that I always say is this is a community largely built by tech founders.
00:07:10
folks that were never expecting to be in a sales position.
00:07:13
And it's also mostly accidental entrepreneurs.
00:07:16
When you talk to most people's journey to becoming an MSP, it came out of not a desire to,
hey, I want to own a business someday, but hey, I was laid off or hey, I was working with
00:07:27
a few side customers.
00:07:28
The next thing I knew, I was able to do it full time or I just thought I could do it a
better way.
00:07:33
And that's great.
00:07:34
But to your point.
00:07:36
It seems to cap out once you exhaust your friends and family network, if you will.
00:07:40
And referrals, while wonderful, are not the accelerator because referrals are not
predictable, right?
00:07:46
So what are some of the things that you guys are really focusing in on to make these folks
more empowered and better salespeople?
00:07:53
Yeah, that's a great question.
00:07:55
so you're exactly right.
00:07:58
We tap out our friends and family network and you go through this period when you're
growing where revenue is doubling, revenue is doubling, revenue is doubling, and you're
00:08:07
shooting up and you blow past a million dollars and you knock on two and you get to three
or four and then it starts to stagnate.
00:08:17
And when you look at the growth, you're
00:08:20
You know, maybe you are getting that referral once a month, once every other month, you're
getting a customer a month, but you're starting to go through some natural attrition,
00:08:28
right?
00:08:29
10 years in, 15 years out.
00:08:32
Churn becomes real.
00:08:33
It's not your fault.
00:08:33
Like those business owners sold their business.
00:08:35
It's everyone's dream.
00:08:37
They're getting acquired.
00:08:38
They're going to PE, whatever.
00:08:39
And that churn cycle starts to slow the growth down.
00:08:44
And you'll go through service lulls where you'll...
00:08:47
you'll lose someone because of egg on your face.
00:08:51
that's hard because the amount you're bringing in is equaling out maybe the amount you're
churning and you start to stagnate.
00:08:59
And then when you look at growth, even if you are growing 10 or 15%, most of that growth
is because your customers are growing and you're being piggybacked along, which you're
00:09:09
enabling that growth, but that's not new logo.
00:09:13
And that's when it starts to get risky.
00:09:16
especially since a lot of that growth needs to be spent just in raises, cost of living
increases, inflationary components that, know, chew into that every year, right?
00:09:29
Every year it's more costly than the year before.
00:09:31
that 10 and you're adding in things, right?
00:09:33
What didn't work now, what worked before doesn't work now.
00:09:38
The security posture, everything, is real drain because you're having to put this more
stuff in.
00:09:45
And so what we find when we have the conversation is, okay, who's in charge of outbound?
00:09:53
well, it's still kind of me, all right?
00:09:55
How much time do you dedicate to that every week?
00:09:56
What do mean every week?
00:09:58
Okay, so there's no real focused outbound activity.
00:10:01
Maybe there's some networking or a BNI or something like that.
00:10:05
But even with those, there's not a lot of follow up.
00:10:11
There's no prospecting happening.
00:10:14
And when you look at marketing, maybe there's some marketing, maybe there's an agency,
either industry specific or a local agency and they're doing some stuff, but the content
00:10:24
isn't necessarily optimized.
00:10:26
towards the buyer, it's talking tech versus outcomes.
00:10:30
The social media posts are kind of talking tech versus outcomes.
00:10:33
We're speaking Greek to a lot of people and so the inbound isn't working.
00:10:39
And when we see that, we say, know, mean, marketing, all the marketing in the world is
fantastic, but marketing does not have the ability to migrate itself out of a cost center
00:10:50
without sales to chase the leads down and convert them.
00:10:55
And if you're not dedicating time week over week, then there's not anyone to chase down
those leads and convert them.
00:11:03
And the conversation generally starts with like, let's put a body in the place.
00:11:08
Let's get them dial on the phone and let's start to tweak the way you're messaging and
approaching the market to be more buyer centric so that you start getting a bit more
00:11:18
inbound leads from your website from.
00:11:21
from events, trade shows, or master classes, webinars, whatever you wanna call them, so
that there's funnel.
00:11:28
But it's no rocket science.
00:11:31
If someone's watching and you wanna take away one key lesson, just dial the phone.
00:11:37
That's it.
00:11:39
There's no secret sauce, there's no magic, there's no like silver bullet, magic beanstalk
pill, anything like that.
00:11:46
It's straight up dialing the phone.
00:11:49
And if you do enough dials, you get enough at bats, you get enough at bats, it all flows
through down into revenue there.
00:11:55
And it's a math game.
00:11:57
that's, you mentioned the science.
00:12:00
We have the data across the whole nation where we've been able to find and say like, this
is how many dials you got to do.
00:12:09
This is, this is what it takes to do that.
00:12:13
That's just a math problem at that point.
00:12:15
So let's stay on that for a moment.
00:12:17
The dial piece has obviously been sales 101 since the day I walked into it, right?
00:12:23
But I think we can all say that the dial game has also changed, right?
00:12:28
And there's this forced nature out there where people say, oh, it doesn't work anymore.
00:12:32
But I think we all know it's contrary.
00:12:34
It's just you've got to make more dials per contact.
00:12:38
And I think you've got to throw out the fallacy of the old numbers that don't work
anymore.
00:12:43
But by the same token,
00:12:45
It doesn't take very long to dial a number to get those increased at-bats.
00:12:51
How are you seeing that starting to scale out now?
00:12:54
Obviously, I don't need you to divulge the actual numbers, I'm seeing it's when I talk to
most customers, it takes about twice as many dials to get to the same amount of people
00:13:04
that you use.
00:13:05
I use the Core 100 when I first started in sales.
00:13:08
I was fortunate enough when I started in sales, you could make 100 calls in a day and
probably make three or four appointments off those 100 calls because you were going to get
00:13:15
30 people on the other end of the line.
00:13:18
But now it probably takes 200, 250 calls to get 30 people to actually pick up their phone.
00:13:24
So I'm always happy to share the numbers.
00:13:28
That's one of the things we're doing right now is building out a little bit of a report
for the industry based off of some of the data.
00:13:38
But there's some core truths.
00:13:40
100 dials a day is enough to move the needle.
00:13:43
Off of a well-qualified list, meaning industry, geography, size, kind of the three things
you can find from a list service.
00:13:50
Off of a well-qualified MSP list.
00:13:54
three to 400 dials and it's ticking up closer to four to 500, will land you a first time
appointment.
00:14:00
So that's a big amount of volume.
00:14:02
And we're not talking anything clever, just dial in the phone and saying, who can I speak
with to provide a quote for IT support?
00:14:10
And there's a difference between a qualified lead and unqualified lead.
00:14:14
And this is an interesting thing and I won't make friends with any of my AI compatriots
out there.
00:14:21
because there is no database and no LLM that can tell you what a qualified MSP lead is.
00:14:27
And I'll tell you that the magic of qualified, it's their relationship to IT, the
psychographic.
00:14:33
Because everything can find the size, the industry, all that stuff.
00:14:38
You can find the decision maker, you can get their cell phone, you can get their email.
00:14:41
You can blast all this sequence, but you could be taking a meeting generated by software
and someone is paying $300 a month to their kid's neighbor.
00:14:51
And they think that's an appropriate IT budget until you know that someone's actively in
2025 using an MSP, outsourcing, paying an appropriate budget.
00:15:02
It's not a real lead.
00:15:05
And you can find that out only by talking to a human.
00:15:09
And that means that that means you dial in the phone.
00:15:12
we teach that dial the main office number, don't get cute, dial the office number.
00:15:20
use a line like, who can I talk to provide a quote for IT support to get an objection?
00:15:25
And you want someone to say, I already have IT support, because that's a data point.
00:15:31
And then you just map three to five questions to get the rest of your qualifiers out of
them.
00:15:36
You'll generally walk away with how they're doing IT, how long it's been that way, how
happy are they, and what would make them happy.
00:15:44
And when you get that insight from them,
00:15:47
You can then use any arrow in the modern sales quiver to get the decision maker on the
phone.
00:15:52
You can call the office, you can call their cell phone, you can straight up go to their
door.
00:15:56
You can send direct mail, you can do social media, you can do a referral, you can do a
webinar, you can like any number.
00:16:02
Take out a billboard outside their office, whatever you gotta do to get that meeting.
00:16:07
But until they're qualified, don't be doing anything else.
00:16:10
Just dial the receptionist, because the receptionist knows all that stuff.
00:16:13
And that's where like,
00:16:15
one of the key things on our method is we turn it all on the head.
00:16:18
Everyone's trying to do everything else and it's like, why are you doing that?
00:16:21
Because you're burning all these cycles, trying to do all this stuff when your core market
probably has a list of 500, maybe a thousand things that are really worth anything.
00:16:30
Find those 500 and work them to exhaustion.
00:16:34
And you know, that's a great point.
00:16:35
Like I used to always feel that way when I was a, you know, a younger sales rep, that
first call was the fact-finding call.
00:16:41
I was not expecting a meeting out of it.
00:16:44
It was almost worse if I got a meeting because that meant there was some desperation on
the other customer side too.
00:16:49
And you could be walking into a very negative situation, you know, and, but, you know, but
in truth, you know, getting those simple four or five data points that you need now allows
00:17:00
you to go after that contact.
00:17:03
educated, right?
00:17:05
Now you're hitting them where they really are in the fields, right?
00:17:07
And that's really when you know that good things happen.
00:17:10
That's right, you know, because Mary told you that, well, yeah, I mean, my phone's been
down or my webcam hasn't worked for three days.
00:17:19
And well, if that's happening, then what other things are taking three days and how's that
impacting your business?
00:17:24
And what's what's the presentation that these people are giving to your customers or
things like that when stuff doesn't work?
00:17:33
How's that impacting your brand?
00:17:34
And those are real risks that a CEO is going to care about.
00:17:38
I'm now in an MSP, I'm struggling with sales, I know I need to make some changes, but I've
done, as you said, 15 different ways, banging my head against the wall to try to get it
00:17:48
done.
00:17:48
And now I'm going to go engage Fox and Crow group.
00:17:51
Maybe you can go into just kind of high level.
00:17:53
What does that feel like for somebody coming in?
00:17:55
What's the expectation you have of the partner?
00:17:58
Because I think that's important too, for them to have the level of commitment that's
going to ensure they have the success that you want and encourage for them.
00:18:06
Yeah, so first and foremost, it's all around recognizing there's a problem and saying I
gotta change this.
00:18:16
So if someone's not willing to invest, and that's more than money, it's about time.
00:18:25
Exactly.
00:18:27
If someone's not willing to invest that time and be focused on change, there's nothing I
can do.
00:18:33
Because we have...
00:18:34
I could like I have a process and I know it works.
00:18:39
But my fatal flaw, right?
00:18:41
For us comic book heroes, my kryptonite is that we can't do the work for someone.
00:18:46
Like the process works.
00:18:48
you plan the work and we have that work plan done and then work the plan, the plan will
always work.
00:18:57
But it's the working the plan part that's hard, right?
00:19:00
Execution, as we all know, is super difficult.
00:19:04
So we have an honest conversation about who the MSP is, where they're at, where they've
been struggling, where, like, how those struggles have been impacting them, their team,
00:19:15
their business, their clients, and then put together a plan custom to them saying, okay,
here's how we can fix top of funnel.
00:19:23
Here's how we can make sales outcomes more predictable.
00:19:25
Here's how we could lean in and help you with coaching or maintaining if someone's never
hired a rep successfully.
00:19:31
All right, how can we help you?
00:19:33
hire the right type of person.
00:19:35
Who are you looking for?
00:19:36
What's the psychographic profile of that person?
00:19:40
And putting all those things in place, it forms remarkably similar to a managed service
agreement for someone.
00:19:48
Where we're coming in, we put in some software, we put in the methodology, we train their
team, either new or existing.
00:19:55
And if they need a whole new team, we'll help them, we'll walk alongside them and help
them hire them.
00:20:01
We're not staffing agency, it's not a recruiting thing.
00:20:04
And we help them find those people and then when they're up and ready, get them on the
phones and coach them into success.
00:20:12
And all the while, the system supports and diagnoses and course corrects because no one's
perfect.
00:20:20
Everybody kind of falls off or maybe falls into an old habit, a bad habit.
00:20:25
And being able to find that quickly and say, help us understand what this is.
00:20:30
Here's how it's impacting things and steer someone back onto the plan.
00:20:34
That's where the magic really drops out.
00:20:39
Numbers don't lie, right?
00:20:41
When I put on my sales manager's hat back in the day, I had one rep that was about as
consistent as a human being I had ever seen in my life.
00:20:48
And I used to be able to look at him and go, in three months from now, your checks are to
be less.
00:20:51
And he'd be like, why?
00:20:52
go, because you've had so much success.
00:20:55
Your prospecting is going down, and you're such a machine.
00:20:58
It's just obvious that you're going to run into that in three months later.
00:21:01
And when it would happen, he'd be like, all right, lesson learned, never happened again
kind of thing, right?
00:21:05
you know, you really can look at those numbers and to that end, you guys have really built
a very cool software to kind of help with that as well.
00:21:14
Share with folks a little bit about what you call instinct, if I recall correctly.
00:21:18
Yeah, yeah.
00:21:19
So at the core of at the core of the sales process, there's there's two components.
00:21:24
There's the methodology that both Carrie and I had refined over the course of previous
businesses all laid out in a scalable, trainable, transferable way.
00:21:33
And then instinct.
00:21:36
One of the things I mentioned, Carrie had a call center.
00:21:38
And when we sold that, we kept the intellectual property rights.
00:21:42
So all the data and Carrie did a
00:21:46
of dialing for MSPs and the other side of her business was partner recruitment for the
vendors that sell to and through MSPs.
00:21:54
And throughout that, throughout those contracts, we collected a immensely powerful,
matured, hand curated database of North American MSPs.
00:22:06
And uh I've always liked data.
00:22:09
I moonlight a little bit in data analysis, but I went to school with a guy who's um
00:22:14
immensely talented and One of his recent projects was working with open AI to train chat
GPT to take him past the bar exam So this very deep data scientist friend of mine who
00:22:27
lives in my hometown is right up the road and I were talking about her and he was like
Hey, why don't you let me look at that data for a second?
00:22:33
Let's let's poke it and he said, know, you could Really kind of do some stuff with this
00:22:39
And so what we did was we took the core of our, of our data and we've been able to map out
some key functions through instinct that support MSPs.
00:22:48
So for one, like all of us know that we're in a local market and there's some competition
around and everybody I've yet to meet an MSP that doesn't have some sort of strong opinion
00:23:02
around competition.
00:23:04
Well, because we have that database that knows all the MSPs around the region, we're able
to pipe that data into our clients system and say, hey, here's your competitive dashboard
00:23:17
of your local competitors.
00:23:19
Here's what they're doing.
00:23:20
Here's what they're offering.
00:23:21
Here's how they're talking to the market.
00:23:23
Here's how you stack up against them.
00:23:25
And if that changes, our software is always constantly monitoring everyone.
00:23:31
and it pulls in those changes and then the MSP knows about it.
00:23:34
So if they suddenly launch an AI consulting practice and are now optimizing around these
whatever five keywords, well, our customer knows about it and can pivot and shift
00:23:45
resources and also adapt or proactively identify.
00:23:50
Here's something we might want to message on, market on.
00:23:52
Here's a battle card where this customer, you know, I know these guys don't offer X and we
do.
00:23:59
bring that into the room and wedge at that.
00:24:03
And that uh competitive targeting, might call it, use of battle cards is very common in
the SaaS space and very uncommon in the services space.
00:24:12
So, uh then, uh you know, that functionality is live today.
00:24:19
uh Within six months, we'll be able to let MSPs know exactly down to the activity.
00:24:29
when they step off process, where their problems are and deliver automated coaching and
diagnostics to them so that as people are doing the act of selling, there's an automated
00:24:41
coach with them at all times, letting them know, here's one thing you can change this week
that's gonna make you more effective.
00:24:49
And if we make reps 1 % better over the course of the year, 50 % improvement on
everything, that's a huge win for people.
00:24:58
It's the core of what we do and it's all because of that call center data that we kept and
collected and matured.
00:25:06
Yeah, I mean, obviously, if you can identify the indicators and you can act on the
indicators, anything will change.
00:25:11
do that with, you know, think about it from service delivery, right?
00:25:14
It's all about monitoring.
00:25:15
It's all about trending in that regard.
00:25:18
And if we do the same thing for our sales teams, it only makes sense that we can improve
the health of what we're doing very easily.
00:25:24
So kudos and get put together.
00:25:27
You know, Ian, we're getting near the end of our time.
00:25:29
I definitely want to give you a moment to, you know, to share any closing thoughts you
have.
00:25:33
But while you're doing that, I'm putting up for those that are watching on YouTube, I'm
putting up fox and crow group.com right here.
00:25:39
For those of you that are listening, you know, on podcasts, these URLs will be in the show
notes as well.
00:25:44
So please, you know, get engaged with Fox and Crow.
00:25:47
If you're looking to get some support.
00:25:48
And certainly if you want to connect with Ian, I'll have his LinkedIn up in just a moment
as well.
00:25:53
And, you know, I'm sure he'll be more than happy to answer any questions that you have.
00:25:57
But with that said, I pass the baton back to you, Ian, for any closing thoughts you might
have.
00:26:02
Yeah, yeah, I mean, we're we're we're closing out 2025.
00:26:07
So the I always heard that threes are a good thing.
00:26:12
So three key things.
00:26:13
If you don't have a plan for 2026, there is no fast, immediate anything.
00:26:21
Even if you hired a sales rep tomorrow, it's going to be 90 days before you start to see
any sort of top of funnel traction, meaning appointments.
00:26:31
start to routinely getting booked.
00:26:34
Marketing, SEO, advertising, anything takes a long time to spin up.
00:26:40
So if you want it working next year, when did you want it working by?
00:26:46
And roll it back 90 days to say, I probably need to start here or earlier.
00:26:50
That's lesson one.
00:26:53
Lesson two, um sales effectiveness, like the number one math problem is consistency of
effort.
00:27:00
multiplied by volume of effort.
00:27:01
It's a numbers game.
00:27:03
So if you do a level of activity and you do that level of activity consistently, you will
win more than you lose.
00:27:09
But it's one of those two things is always where the problem lies.
00:27:14
And the third one is that we don't have to get clever at all.
00:27:17
And I say this as a data guy, as someone who has built software, et cetera, at the end of
the day, dial the phone.
00:27:27
This is the key.
00:27:28
has been the key since it was invented and it will continue to be the key because people
buy from people.
00:27:34
They don't buy from AI.
00:27:35
They don't buy from software.
00:27:36
They don't buy from websites.
00:27:38
In a business to business complex human based sale, we buy from people.
00:27:43
So just dial the phone and talk to people and everything will be okay.
00:27:48
Yep.
00:27:49
It all comes back to that listener.
00:27:51
You know, that's the least fun part of sales, but it's the most critical part of sales.
00:27:55
There's no doubt.
00:27:56
Ian, really appreciate everything that you shared today.
00:27:59
Thank you for this.
00:28:00
Again, listeners, if you want to connect with Ian, I've got his LinkedIn up on the screen
one last time for those that are watching and we'll put that down in the show notes.
00:28:08
If you want to get to Fox and Crow Group, please reach out to them at foxandcrowgroup.com.
00:28:14
Ian will probably check back with you in about six months and see what's going on with
Instinct and what new metrics might be available to the MSP community at that point in
00:28:23
time as well.
00:28:24
But I want to thank you for joining us today and we'll talk again soon.
00:28:28
Hey, thanks, Brian.
00:28:29
It was my pleasure.
00:28:30
I appreciate it.