LinkedIn & Marketing, With Paul Green of MSP Marketing Edge

Hello, I'm Dan Thomas Shefsky and this is the connecting it podcast.

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Welcome to the connecting it podcast. I'm your host, Dan Thomas Chesky and joining me today is Paul greens, MSP marketing expert of the MSP marketing edge. Paul, I'm really excited to have you on this episode with me talking about marketing and MSPs,

Literally my favorite subject in the world to talk about let's, let's do a six hour special just talking about marketing for MSPs, right? Right.

I feel like we could, I feel like me and you could go into this for six hours and, uh, but in the next 30 minutes, I think we're going to give everybody, uh, some great tips, great practices they should be doing in their MSP. You're just a wealth of knowledge. So, um, let's jump in. Um, so I'd like to have a conversation around you that kind of maybe started off and saying, Hey, the three marketing steps strategy, every MSP could and should be using.

Yeah. Yeah. That's kind of one of the fundamentals that I'm, and I'm trying to spread the world across the world, really, because most MSPs and you'll agree with this, Dan, most MSPs by their own admission are rubbish at marketing, really, truly rubbish. And it's, it's no wonder that the kind of the, the MSP business model allows it and almost encourages it because you think your average MSP they're really good at retaining clients. And of course there's loads and loads of monthly recurring revenue. So you might have good retention, a monthly recurring revenue, and it is very, very possible to be bad at winning new clients and still have a business 10 years down the line because the money just keeps rolling in. And this is what I think encourages most MSPs to be pretty rotten marketing, virtually every other sector. You've got to get good at marketing. Otherwise you fall over. Could you imagine, you know, shops or restaurants that weren't good at marketing in some ways? Well, you can't, they don't exist. They need to be as good at marketing as they are at doing the work that they do. But for MSPs, you know, insane client retention, lots of recurring revenue, it's almost a recipe for disaster. And when MSPs do think about marketing, often, their thoughts are very short term. It's a case of, Hey, let's do a bit of Facebook or let's throw some money at Google ads, or maybe I should go on LinkedIn for half an hour. And it's very, short-term thinking. So the three-step marketing strategy you were talking about is what I recommend every single MSP does. And it's, I'll tell you what the three steps are and then we'll go back over them. So the three steps are this number one, you go and build multiple audiences. Number two, you build a relationship with those audiences. And then number three, you commercialize that relationship. So let's go back up to the top. Number one, you build multiple audiences. All I mean by that is you find people who are willing to listen to what it is. You've got to say. Now there are dozens of different places. You could do this for the vast majority of MSPs. I mean two audiences. I mean, you build up your email list. So literally the people in your CRM that you can email on a weekly basis. That's your first one. And then secondly, you build up your LinkedIn and those are arguably of equal importance to each other. Now, the other audiences you could build, I know a growing number of MSPs are building an audience on YouTube, which is hard work, but it's worth it. I know a couple of MSPs who are building a podcast audiences. So that's exactly what we're doing here. Again, it's hard work. It's a long-term thing, but you can build up a great audience. You can build up an audience on Twitter. If you're a Twitter fan, you can do it on Instagram. If you're targeting consumer facing businesses, because you know your retail, your restaurants, they use Instagram to reach their potential customers. So it's a great way to reach them. So there are lots of different audiences, but I would say for most MSPs focus on your email first, your LinkedIn second. And that's probably enough audiences. So once you've got those audiences going and we can talk, if you want down about how you build those audiences, but once you've got those going, what you've got to do then is you've got to build a relationship with them. And this is about pure education and entertainment, or let's put the two together and call it edutainment educational entertainment. You've got to assume that the average business owner or manager that you're speaking to doesn't know what they do no about technology. They think they know about technology because they've got an iPhone, but the reality is they don't, and they're not in our world. They're not know listening to great podcasts like that. This they're not reading stuff. They're not having conversations with company like a Sayer. They're not just not in this world. They don't understand encryption. They don't understand the cybersecurity. They just don't get it. Right. And so what we've got to do is we've got to come down to their level, which is not patronizing them. It's it's us coming down to the level of understanding they're at. And we've got to teach them about stuff. The real basics, we've got to teach them about return on investment. We've got to teach them about the security side of things we've got to teach them about, or, you know, can you work anywhere? Can anyone work anywhere from, from at any time on any device all the time, these things are things to educate them. So practically, how do we do that? Well, uh, it comes down to doing stuff daily, weekly, and monthly daily. You need to be posting stuff onto social media. I primarily mean LinkedIn, maybe Facebook, if you're on that as well on a weekly basis, you need to send out an educational email. So that email audience that you built at step one, you send them an educational e-mail week in, week out, and you do this 52 weeks a year. And then monthly, if you've got a bunch of people who are listening to you, why not send them something in the post? And I'm a massive fan of printed newsletters, sending those out on a re on a monthly basis. So you can physically get something in their hands. And the power of a printed newsletter is that, you know, stuff in the post stuff that's printed, transcends it cuts through everything else. Three years ago, we had too much post and hardly any email. And now it's the other way around. We have too many emails and virtually nothing in the post. So that kind of daily, weekly, monthly building a relationship is very, very powerful. You see, there's a core principle at work here, which is that people only buy when they're ready to buy. So you've got to get the right message in front of the right person at exactly the right moment. The thing is, these people you're talking to, it could be next week. It could be next month. It could be next year when they're finally sick to death of their incumbent MSP, and they're ready to have a conversation. So if you've built a relationship up with them, you know, imagine a prospect who has opened five or 10 of your emails. Who's seen some of your posts on LinkedIn. Who's perhaps had some of your messages on LinkedIn. Who's read three or four of your newsletters that you've posted through to them. Imagine that person that you're on the phone to them, you've already touched pointed them five, 10, 15, 20 times in the time that they've been listening to you, the chances of you actually getting a sales meeting with them is really high at the point at which they're ready to switch MSPs, the P the chances of them becoming a client of yours is really high because these people who don't know what they don't know, because they can't tell a good MSP from a butter MSP, they can't cognitively decide who is the right person to go for. I mean, I've been working with MSPs for five years. I'm not attack. I'm a marketing guy. I've been working with MSPs for five years. And even, I can't tell a good MSP from a bad MSP in terms of the technical work. So myself and all of the prospects out there, they don't make cognitive decisions. They default down to emotional decisions. Essentially, they're picking an MSP based on whether or not they like them. So if you built a relationship with someone over a number of weeks, months, and years, that's why your chances of winning the sale go up dramatically. And that's what makes this a powerful long-term thing. So just to recap, on our three-step strategy, we've got build multiple audiences was the first step. Second step was build a relationship. The third step is commercializing it. And the two things that you need to do here, uh, one of them is you need to hit someone with a multi-step marketing campaign, big fan of multiset marketing campaigns. So this is where you send a specific commercial message to someone. You send them a letter in the post, you send them something on email that reiterates what's sort of the post. It's all the same message it's just delivered across different delivery channels. You might even target them with some remarketing adverts on Facebook, uh, but then critically. And this is the most critical thing somebody phones them. So all of that stuff you do with, with, you know, all across the whole relationship, all the posts or the emails or the LinkedIn stuff, none of that is as powerful as someone picking up the phone and actually having a conversation with them. And the outcome that they're looking for is to book a 15 minute phone call with you, with the owner of the MSP, or whoever does the selling within the MSP. Now you could look at that and say, Hey, Paul, right? So if the most important thing is phoning people, why don't we just not bother with all the rest of it and just cold call people. But here's the thing. This isn't cold calling. This is warm calling. These are people we have a relationship with. And there's a famous professor of psychology professor who focuses on marketing. His name is Dr. Robert Cialdini. He's been doing this for 30, 40 years. And he wrote a book a couple of years ago called Pre-Suasion, which is, I gotta be honest. It's a stinker of a book. Don't bother reading it, but I can sum it up in one sentence, which is what goes before affects what comes after. So all of that stuff that you've been sending to people, all of those communications, all that relationship building, it pays off at the right moment. At that moment, they're ready to switch when your colleague phones them up and has a chat with them. And if at that point they're ready to buy. That's the point that you get the conversation and you go on to get the sale. Now, that's it. That's your three step structure. And I appreciate I've skimmed over a billion details there, but if you can implement that strategy, that is, if I owned an MSP, that is all I would do. I would, I would focus on exactly. Yeah,

No, that's some great advice. And I think you, you hit the nail on the head on a couple of things. And I had that experience as an MSP as well, where look, we send out a newsletter. We were doing the social media graphics. We were on Facebook. We did community events. We sent direct mail. We did all those things. And some of them, we got in three months, some were a year later and people were like, it was your newsletter. And all of a sudden, you know, we realized we had a major security issue and you'd were top of mind. So I love your point, but I have a question that I hear all the time. Now I'm an MSP. I wasn't doing any marketing. I don't really have a list. Um, cause we were doing, like you said before, COVID it was more, we had really good customers. We were getting some good referrals. We were retaining them. We had a good business. Um, now it's I can't go and do the networking. Like I used to, I can't go out and do some of the things on how I was growing my business and I don't have a list. How do I, how do I start a list?

Sure. That's that's I hear, I hear exactly that as well. So the, um, for most MSPs that have been going two, three years, you have got a list. It's just, you haven't pulled it together into a CRM. So I call this the hands down the back of the couch thing, where you go looking for data that you've got in the business that you didn't know that you'd got, just like you go diving for coins down the, down the back of the couch. You've got, if you look in your email, you look in Excel sheets, you look anywhere where anyone has ever had any kind of interaction. You look in the drawers of your desk for business cards. You look back over all the years, you've been in business and you say, right, all those people I've spoken to. Where's their data. Where's all the business cards are the people I met in the past. Oh, they're in this box here. That's brilliant. Everyone that's ever filled in a form on the website. Where's that data, anyone who's ever emailed in or phoned us in and we've scrabbled their details down. Where's all that data gather all that data together and they can go and it into a CRM. Now CRM is different to a PSA. PSA is the tool you use to deliver your work, to do your work. Your CRM is something like MailChimp or mailer lights or active campaign or honey CRM, or one of the many, many CRMs out there. And you pulled together all of your data. So Mo most MSPs, if you've been going three years or more, you have got data, it's just, it's it everywhere. And you need to bring it together and put it in one place. And I appreciate there are some quite serious data protection laws that a lot of people are worried about here in the UK. We have something called general data protection, racket, or something like that. GDPR, obviously you've got laws in the States. Is it the can spam act? I think is one of them, uh, in Canada, there is some laws which are so strict that you actually get shot. If you email someone without permission that strict, you know, with all of these things, I think you can just relax. The, these laws are aimed at the big, big spammers that are sending out a million emails a day, pushing whatever the modern equivalent of Viagra is, uh, for a small business like ours, that just wants to email 50 or a hundred people that we want spoke to a couple of years ago. She'll we'll get the old complaint. We'll get the old unsubscription. But really we, we, mustn't not email people because of those laws. We've got to be a bit more relaxed about that. So the first step then is pulled together. All of the data you've got. The second thing you've got is you need to actively build that. And actually you're having conversations with people all the time. There are people you're speaking to every single conversation you, you say, well, systematically and consistently, how can I add this person to my database? You know, every conversation, let me ask at the end of it. Hey, how are you guys? Okay. If I just pop your email on our, on our email newsletter, we'll send you out an email once a week at most people will say yes to that. You know, every single conversation you can go on to platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook, where you're having interactions with people and just drop them a message and say, it was really good to talk to you. How would you feel if I added you to my email newsletter? Um, you wouldn't see email database, but how would you feel if I added you to my email distribution list and sent you my weekly newsletter? And how would you feel is a great way to ask anyone any kind of question when you don't know what their answer will be, you can and should also do formal data capture on your website. I mean, we could spend hours just talking about that. Um, but I think that the big, big database that everyone always forgets they've got is LinkedIn. So email is a very important database, but you've probably already got a bigger and more important database on LinkedIn. And LinkedIn is amazing. You know, if I'd said to you 20 years ago, there's one day there's going to be this free database full of every single lead you could possibly ever want to speak to you where you can target and connect to anybody and you can actually message them and it's completely free. No, you know, you'd be so excited 20 years ago. And now we're all a bit apathetic about LinkedIn, but LinkedIn, if you, if you look at it as it's not just noise, it's not just other people talking about the amazing lives they've got business lives. They've got, it's the world's greatest most up to date, free perspecting database. So you're connected to a couple of thousand people or a couple of hundred people on LinkedIn. That's your database as well. You can message those people. You can call those people. You can engage with them, you can send them stuff. It's actually really easy to do. Now. You don't own that data. Unlike your email database, you own that LinkedIn, you don't own it. Microsoft owns it, but it's as long as you, you know, stick and be a reasonably good LinkedIn user and you're not spamming people, you'll be just fine use that as your database.

No, that that's great information. And I think that's the important thing that a lot of MSPs struggle with is just getting the list. Uh, and then following, like you said, getting the communication out to them, getting that constant communication. And I think the one thing that you hit on was consistency. I think a lot of times we hear MSPs. Uh, I know I did four social posts and nothing happened and I stopped, you know, I didn't, you know, didn't get a deal or, you know, I hear that a lot. You know, we tried social media for a month, but we didn't get any appointments or nobody came back through. I think you hit it though. It's all about consistency. You have to do this time and time again, you have to have a plan and you have to execute on it. Um, and it takes time because like you said, it could be a month. It could be a year, uh, wherever it is, but do your marketing, but do it consistently. So your customers and your prospects, you know, know what's going on.

Exactly. The goal is to put together a machine where you've got all the different cogs, all these different bits and bobs that need to happen. And as a business, as an MSP, you're taking action daily, weekly, monthly, and all of these actions add up. So that systematically and consistently you've got a marketing machine. Let me tell you, Dan, there are so few MSPs that do this and you know what I've been saying this for years that in any marketplace, anywhere in the world, there is a massive opportunity for two or three MSPs to get really good at marketing because you take any kind of marketplace and you'll typically have one big player. And they're normally a big player through sheer force either. They've got a big work, a big sales team out on the, on the ground, or they're good at marketing or, you know, they've acquired three or four other businesses and that they're just dominant through sheer size. But even when you've got that in any marketplace, there's still an opportunity for any size MSP to rise to the top. And it's nothing to do with your technology stack. It's nothing to do with which PSA you've got. It's nothing to do with your systemization. Those things affect the quality of what you do. And I don't know those things. I know that when you get your marketing happening consistently and systematically every single day, and you make a five-year commitment to it too, it's a long day. It becomes the culture of the business to market. It changes everything, absolutely everything. You know, I do this in my business. We, we sell to MSPs. So we're still B2B when we're not an MSP, but we sell to MSPs. It's still B to B and we're doing marketing seven days a week. You know, we spend every single month, four to$6,000 a month on driving traffic to our website. Because if I turn that spend off, um, don't get me wrong. I'd rather put$6,000 in my pocket in the next month. And I would enter in, in Facebook and Google's pocket and LinkedIn's pockets. But I know if I turn that tap off, if I don't get traffic, then, then my marketing won't be as effective. And I won't get as many new clones. Even over Thanksgiving and Christmas, we cap the marketing spend on, we kept the marketing tap on because it was critical. Cause I know it's all about longterm. It's about getting those people in building those audiences and building that relationship. And I think this is, this is what literally virtually all of MSPs don't do. And that's why that's one of the opportunities. Then you don't have to spend$6,000 a month. You can start really small and you can work up. But if, if you know, if, if you're listening to this and you're thinking I'm, I'm serious about this, I want to really grow my MSP. I want to massively have a big impact on my bottom line and my net profit over the long term. The only way to do it is to build a marketing machine. And I've literally laid out the ingredients for you. There. Marketing is not an art. It's not an art tool. It's a science notice. We haven't been talking there about messages or what campaigns to do or whatsoever because that's kind of irrelevant, just doing regular activity where you've got a good strategy of building audiences and building a relationship with them. That in itself is, is enough because the vast majority of your marketplace is very marketing unaware. You're not up against Coke and Pepsi here. You're not up against sophisticated marketing players. You're up against other players who understand marketing as little as you do. So just by doing some on a systematic, consistent basis, you really can rise to the top in any marketplace.

Paul, I mean, one of the questions that I would say is like a lot of our, I might be a one man MSP, or I could be a five man. You know, whatever it might be. The question they're going to say is, well, how much time is this going to take away from me as the owner? Um, you know, because I got fires, I'm putting out, I've got all these different things. I mean, you're saying, you know, daily, monthly, weekly, daily, weekly, monthly, like, what should I plan on as if I'm the owner? How much time is it going to take? When you say daily? I mean, what is, how much time do I have to put into marketing?

That's a great question. The short, the short term answer is you've got to do everything yourself once or twice until it's at a point where you're happy with it. So for example, take a scheduling content onto LinkedIn. The owner has to do it the first. Let's say the first week to get an idea for how the, how the scheduler works, what kind of content they want on there, what messages they want out. But after they've done the same thing with the email, you know, the first couple of times you send the email, you do it as the owner, but after you've done it once, then you get someone else to do it for you. There's a, there's a saying that a very good friend of mine said to me, 10 years or so. And I've tried to live my life by this. And I recommend you to live your life by this. And this is the same. You should only do what only you can do. Let me say it again because it's such a critical one. You can own, you should only do what only you can do now as the owner of the MSP, the only things that you can, excuse me, the things that you do in the business that only you can do are driving the business, leading the business. Probably that third line, really difficult support, but absolutely everything else can be done by someone else. So even if you're a one man band, you get other people to do this stuff for you. And because you've done it yourself already for a week or for a couple of weeks, you know exactly what it is that you want. I'm a big fan of the, of the acronym, DOA DOA, of course traditionally. Well, if you're watching Dan, if you were watching CSI Miami and someone said, Hey, he was DOA. What would that mean? That on arrival, dead on arrival, which is what most business owners will be. If they keep trying to do everything themselves. So instead let's change the acronym into delegate, outsource, automate. And this is the trick to running a business without working 17, as a day, seven days a week, you delegate stuff, you outsource stuff and you automate stuff. So you take something like scheduling social media content and sending out weekly emails and putting together newsletters. You, you, yourself, you do it once or twice. So you know what you want to do? You know what you want to be done? You oversee it so that it's done the way you want it done, but ultimately you get someone else to do it. Hire a virtual assistant, go on fiverr.com or people per hour or upwork.com. There are tons of people out there. In fact, the lockdown and all that, the pandemic has been great, really great for generating more resources of people who does do stuff for you. As people have lost their jobs and they can no longer go and work in the restaurant or whatever they were working in before they're going and putting their skills online. And they're selling them for, you know, five,$10 an hour or whatever they're selling it for. This is the world economy we're there right now. I use 20 to 30 people a month through Fiverr and Upwork to do little jobs for me. I've got a guy in, I'm trying to think where he is now. And someone like Venezuela, who does a very, very specific job for me, once a month, he takes a whole bunch of files and he turns them into a canvas format. If you've heard of it was we design stuff in InDesign, Adobe and Canberra is increasingly becoming more and more important. And he turns those InDesign files into Canva. And we pay him about 50, maybe$60 a month to do that. It's not a huge amount, but it's a critical job. And if I got a guy I'm based in the UK, if I've got a guy in the U S or the UK to do that, that would cost me three or four times the amount. So there are people out there that can do all these sort of jobs for you. You've just got to find the right people. And we have a very, very healthy and mature economy now of outsourcing and outsourcing as it has. It has a bad connotation. It has bad words, has bad feelings associated with it, but we're not talking about outsourcing all of the marketing and saying, here you go, marketing agency, here's all the marketing. Do it for me, please. I don't mean that. I mean, you figure out what you want to do. And then you put together a bunch of small suppliers across the world who will go and do it for you. And in fact, you were talking about one man bands, that's the only way that one man bands can do it because the reality is, and I worked with loads of, well, I worked with one man bands right up to$2 million turnover, MSPs, and one man bands don't get anything done until the tech work is done. But the tech work is never done. So one mum bands literally never, ever have time to, to do it. It's it's so it's the, it's the only way that one man bands can do it is to get help him. Um, virtual assistants are a great resource for this, that they're great for doing stuff. Um, but as I say that there's, there's all sorts of people out there and you've got to learn to trust these people and accept your kiss, a few frogs to, to, to meet the right kind of people. But once you've got them, you you'll build up a great bunch of people. And they'll just, they'll just do this stuff for you.

No, I think that's awesome advice. And, uh, you know, I want to get into a topic while we have time, because I think you started to get into it. And LinkedIn, um, is it is a secret weapon right now that a lot of people, uh, are going to, I mean, I'm hearing MSPs come to me saying, look, I don't even have a LinkedIn profile. Um, COVID hit and it's made me realize I need to be on LinkedIn. Um, you know, and they're like, how do I start? Where do I go? What should I be doing? Um, and then there's people that are like, you know, I've made connections over the years. And again, it all comes back to it's. It's really interesting. And how COVID has changed a couple of things that I've heard, and maybe you're seeing this too. I'm seeing more MSPs have better conversations with their current customers doing QPRs, uh, than ever before. And COVID has really changed that communication, uh, to allow the MSP, to have that we're seeing more and more MSPs put focus on marketing, uh, because like, you know, we've talked about earlier, it's just, you got to have that consistency. They didn't have it before. Uh, and now they're saying LinkedIn, I got to go connect with people. I got to go, you know, my top 50 customers, top 100 people I want to do business with. I'm not seeing them at meetings anymore. I need to connect to see where they're at. Uh, so we're seeing a huge growth in LinkedIn. I'd love to hear what your thoughts are on LinkedIn and how it's a really good marketing weapon.

No, I agree. And, and the pandemic has been good for people focusing back in on the things that matter. And you mentioned QBL is there keep yells a critical QBL is a great for retention and upselling. And it's, it's wonderful to see so many MSPs doing that. Um, LinkedIn is just an incredible tool. I think everyone, every MSP should be spending 30 to 60 minutes a day on LinkedIn. And remember with that caveat that I don't mean you yourself doing it. I mean, get someone to do it for you. I think that with LinkedIn, you've got, first of all, you got to get the basics, right? So the basics are, you don't worry about your business page. Your business page is irrelevant. Pick a profile, preferably the owner's profile and work that profile. So it's a personal profile that you work on. And the reason I say that is if you look in your linked feed, LinkedIn feed, you'll see that, you know, you don't see many updates from pages from businesses. You see mostly updates from people with some adverts sort of in between some sponsored messages. So the reason you'd pick the owner's LinkedIn profile to build up is because the owner is the last person to leave the business. They are literally the final person out when they sell the business or when the business goes under or whatever is the case. Never let your salespeople build up, uh, something on LinkedIn on their own profile, because then in two years time, when they leave you for the MSP across the road, they're going to take that LinkedIn with them. So as the owner, you, you know, you get your profile rights, you might, uh, you might give access to a member of your team or even your sales person to work your LinkedIn profile to, you know, on, on, on your behalf, because of course all your connections stay with you. Um, the basics are very, very simple. It's going through all the things that LinkedIn asks you to do and doing them. So if LinkedIn asked you to, you know, put a good headline and to do a summary of you and to fill in all of your work experience, working experience, and to put a decent photo, then you, you do that. Do what LinkedIn works is algorithmically there's there's, it's believed to be a benefit of that. A really good, nice photo. I think you should get your, I mean, we've all had experiences of looking at someone's photo on LinkedIn, and then we meet them in real life. And it's a fatter older gray version of the person that's on LinkedIn. So I have my photo taken every year, which sounds extreme, but it costs me, I don't know, a hundred,$150 a year. I wait until the summer to look got a bit of a tan we'd go outside. You can do it even in COVID. And, and, you know, I have a photo taken up year and put every year and put that across all of my channels. So I'm always up to date as, as my body ages. Uh, and, and, you know, that's, that's important a really decent photo on LinkedIn spending a little bit of money on design, getting a good graphic for your, for your profile. So basically treating it like a proper channel, you know, treating it like, like a decent, um, piece of, of marketing collateral. Once you've done those basics, there's then three things that you need to focus on on a, on ideally on a daily basis. And they're the three CS, the three CS are connect content and contact, and I'll just briefly go through those. So the first thing is to connect on the free version of LinkedIn. You can attempt to connect to up to 20 people a day, and that's what you should do. You should try to connect to it to 20 people a day, cause you're trying to grow your LinkedIn. Now you remember earlier, I mentioned DOA delegate, outsource, automate the, the a automated, there are loads of tools around that will help you to automate LinkedIn. The one that I use is called ducks soup, which is D U X hyphen soup. As in soup that you drink, there are others out there. There's one called I think it's called meet Alfred. There's another one called I believe it's octopus CRM. If you just Google alternatives to duck suit, you'll see them. But all of these are very, very clever. They sit as a plugin to your Chrome and they automate your actions on LinkedIn. So you don't have to do them. So I like built my link, my own personal LinkedIn from 400, about 15 months ago, up to we're over four and a half thousand, doing exactly this. So every day my duck soup sits in a tab in Chrome

And we tell it who to go and, and, uh, connect yeah.

With. And it literally goes to visit someone's profile. You'll see it scrolling down the page. It will sort of look at that as if it was a human looking at a profile. It will go back up, it'll press the connect button. It'll paste in the message that you've told it to put in. It'll personalize it and it'll send it off. And because it's plugged into your Chrome, it's very hard for LinkedIn to detect this because technically, uh, these kinds of automation tools are against LinkedIn's terms and conditions, many MSPs row this on a virtual machine. Uh, and, and as long as you follow the rules of the automation software. So for example, with duck suit, they just say things like don't use LinkedIn on your cell phone while we are using it on your, on your laptop for fairly obvious reasons. Cause that's a way for LinkedIn to detect. There are multiple people using it. So if you followed the rules, generally, you're okay with that. And that's lovely because that will save you, you know, 60 minutes a day, trying to connect to people. But if you connect and requested 20 people a day, you might get even if only 10%, uh, uh, uh, uh, do that. You know, you get two, three people joining your network a day. Well that the compound effect says over a year, over two years, that's a massive number of people you're building up your network. So connect is the first thing. Content is the second thing we've already mentioned. There's daily content going on there. Now you may look at the content in LinkedIn and think, Oh my goodness, everyone, everyone is posting content. And actually it's fewer than half a percent of LinkedIn's user base, less than half a percent actually post content on a weekly basis. So I would go and post content on there on a daily basis. It kind of sounds like overkill, but you have to remember that social media is disposable. It's really difficult to go and look at the content that someone's previously posted on LinkedIn. It's not a particularly easy thing to do. And you have to remember as well that people just flick onto LinkedIn, LinkedIn, maybe once a week, twice a week. They not only everyday like, like I'm recommending you are. So therefore they're not seeing your content on a regular basis, post content regularly. What kinds of content people always ask? Well that the easiest kind of content you've got is answering people's questions. Look at your tickets, look at what co what prospects ask you in meetings. Just just have them. I'll always carry a pad with me. And anytime I'm talking to an MSP and they asked me a question, I write that down and think, yeah, that's a bit of content. Thank you very much. And you can do exactly the same thing that all the content you possibly need for your LinkedIn comes from your customers, from your prospects and from the tickets that sat in your PSA. So connect is the first one. Content is the second one. And then finally is contact. Now, this is where LinkedIn gets really awesome because you have built in to the free version of LinkedIn, the ability to message your database and people are not using this enough. You can literally go and message everyone. Now, I do not recommend that you do blanket messaging. That's just spam and it's, it's a pain. It really is. But what I do recommend that you do is that you do do clever, clever messaging. So let me give you an example. Let's say you work with CPAs accountants and, uh, you, you let's say there's three or four that you work with, but you're connected to another hundred on LinkedIn and you have to forgive him

If I make a technical error here. Cause I don't know the technicalities

Is, I assume Sage is still software. I hate Sage is awful software, but let's assume Sage is still some software that accountants use. And let's say two of your clients, you've discovered a setting in Sage, which, which speeds it up on this, on their Sage server. So don't worry about the technical of, but imagine it's something like that, you could then message the other hundred accountants that you're connected to on LinkedIn. So you don't put this in your content. You message them directly and you'd say, hi, Dave, um, hope you don't mind me sending this to you. I work with a growing number of accountants in city name, and we've just discovered an amazing setting in Sage, which we'll do whatever the outcome is. Um, and I've written a blog article to tell you all about it, to see that, to see this blog to a good go-to and then you send them to a link on your website. So do you send that to a hundred accountants? Okay. 50 of them will never open that message. Maybe, maybe the other 50 that do perhaps 20 or 30 of them will click through. But that's amazing because now we've got something really relevant that 20 or 30 highly qualified prospects have clicked through to read on the website. And if you've done a really good job of that blog post on your website, and there's a good clear call to action on that maybe one or two of them will have booked a 15 minute appointment with you, which is just amazing. But here's the thing that you could do next. And this is where we bring our phone person back into play. We send that message to a hundred people. Then we ring all of those hundred people. And this is where LinkedIn is a wonderful way of setting up. Remember I said earlier, what goes before effect? What comes after? You've got to look at it from the prospect's point of view, they get a message with someone adding value to their life. Here's something that helps you completely free thoughts to just send it to you from their point of view, there's like, Oh, that's nice. They clicked through, they look at it. Maybe whether they implement it or not is irrelevant. And then three days later they get a phone call from someone from your office and it's just, Hey, we sent you a message on LinkedIn. Just wants to check that you got that.

Do you guys run inside your hundred? You do tell us more about you. How many accountants have you got?

Fact-find fact-find fact-find Hey, if you guys got an it support company at the moment, um, how how's everything going with that? You could even ask them that the best qualifying question in the world when you're talking about their current it company, which is on a scale of one to 10, where one is awful and 10 is so good, you want to hug them? How would you rank your current it support company? And if they answer 10, nine, eight, there's no opportunity there. Move on, come back in a couple of years, if they answer seven, six, five, there's a level of dissatisfaction there which should be explored and you should try and get a meeting with them. And if they answer four or under, they are deeply unhappy with their incumbent MSP and you should move to strike really, really quickly. Right? That one question alone, if you just ask people that's on the phone and you need to build up a bit of rapport with them first, but asking them that question can immediately qualify. How much attention should we put into these kinds of prospects? And you can do that off LinkedIn. It's absolutely wonderful.

Oh, that's, that's awesome. LinkedIn information. And I think a lot of the MSPs listening today are going to get a lot of great information. I mean, just the three-step marketing approach that we talked about, um, that, you know, the LinkedIn and your strategy around the connect, you know, content contact like that whole methodology is really good. Um, I think our MSPs are going to take this and go back and try to start implementing things. So I guess I would, you know, coming up here at close on our time, you know, I want to let you kinda take us out on, you know, on a, on a good, a last thought. I mean, what would be your advice for 2021? I'm an MSP listening today. What's like the, the last thought from you that would be your recommendation for us all.

Sure. I think my final thought would be, try not to be overwhelmed by marketing. I mean, I appreciate in, in trying to drop a whole load of value bombs in the last 30 minutes, what I may have done is given too much information, too many things to do too many options. So I think my final thought would be try not if it's too overwhelming, start small, do one small thing. In fact, if, if LinkedIn is a great place to start, if you were to do nothing else, but just work LinkedIn, even for 10 20, 30 minutes a day, every day, that in itself is consistent systematic marketing. And I think with, you know, because marketing is completely foreign and it's completely out to most MSP is don't be scared by it. It's not an art. As I said, it is so much, it's a science with a little bit of luck and timing built in, but start small. Just try not to do everything at once. Do do one thing, do it repeatedly next month, try adding in one of the thing the month after trying another thing after that and just building up that way. And I think going, as, as we've said, a couple of times during this podcast, systematic marketing that happens all the time is so much more powerful than that kind of boom and bust sporadic marketing, where you're doing a bit here and a bit there that simply doesn't work. You might get the old wean off it, but it doesn't work in the longterm. So start small and try and build up

Paul, if people want to follow you, uh, you know, they, they want to go out and learn more, uh, MSP marketing edge. Is that where they should go to find you or,

Well, that's, that's our core service, the MSP marketing edge, and we've got 371 MSPs that take that as a, as a time of recording. But I have a blog and a podcast actually free book on MSP marketing. And you can access all of these things at Paul greens, MSP marketing.com. And on there, you'll see, we've got tons of stuff in the blog. We've got the podcast. It's not as good as yours Dan, but it's, it's, it's getting there. We're working up towards that. And as I say, if you're in the U S or the UK, we will physically post a free copy of my book to you. Absolutely no cost. And now, you know, the reason why I'm doing that, that's because they starting a relationship with you. And, and you know, now why I want to start a relationship with you, cause maybe down the line, we'll do some work together or maybe won't we won't, it doesn't really matter. Uh, but the point is we can, I can entertain you and educate you. We can do some of that edutainment. Uh, and, and it's all there at Paul greens, MSP marketing.com.

Paul, I really appreciate you being on a, you're a phenomenal guest and I want to have you back. Um, I think, uh, I think we've given some people, some good things to start to start with, and I'd love to bring you back in a future time, uh, just to talk more and see what's changed and give our listeners some more advice. So thank you again for joining us today. And look, I want to thank everyone for listening to the connecting it podcast. Make sure you subscribe, rate us five stars on iTunes. And, uh, look, we'll be back here shortly with another episode until next time, have a great day.