Marketing Lessons Learned From an MSP

[00:00:02] Welcome to the Powered Services Podcast, your one-stop shop for all the information, strategies, and insights you need to supercharge your MSP. Get ready to hear from other MSPs and industry experts in the trenches and behind the scenes to help you change the future of your MSP and increase your MRR. Now, here's your host, Dan Tomaszewski.

[00:00:33] Greetings, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Powered Services Podcast. Excited to have you all with us today. As always, co-host Will Bishop. Will, how are you? Doing great, Dan. How are you today? Living the dream, man. We saw our first round of snow in Michigan, so winter is, I guess, officially here. Yeah, keep all that up there. We don't want it. Let's rock and roll. Let's have some fun. So today, it's a fun topic for me. I absolutely love when we talk about marketing.

[00:01:02] And nothing better than to bring MSPs on to discuss marketing. So I'll let you kind of walk us down where we're going today. Yeah, absolutely. I have two people with us as a guest today, Dan. We've got Brian Curtis and Gabriela Barnier from Dominion Tech in Vermont. And I happened to run into Brian at an event about a month ago, I would say. And we were having breakfast for a minute talking about marketing. And Brian had a lot of really interesting things to share.

[00:01:29] And I said, hey, man, it'd be great if we could get you on the podcast. And that's how we find ourselves here today. So Brian and Gabriela, welcome to the podcast. Hey, thanks for having us. Yeah, thanks for having us. Yeah, absolutely. And I would do a little bit of introduction for your company, but I know you'll do a much better job than I would. So Brian, give us just a thumbnail overview of kind of Dominion Tech. Yeah, so we're a 25-person MSP up in Burlington, Vermont area.

[00:01:59] We're a true methods focused MSP, so we do a lot of proactive, preventative IT support. Our customers range from 10 employees up to about 200 employees. A lot of small businesses across many different industries, mostly geographically ranged around Vermont at this point. Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, one of the things we wanted to talk about today or I think, you know, would be very interesting to the audience we have is, you know,

[00:02:27] Brian, you're the president at Dominion Tech and Gabriela, you're the marketing manager. You know, and that's, we talk to a lot of MSPs weekly that they're kind of at that tipping point. Do I need someone full-time on staff to help with marketing? Do I not? I was wondering if you could talk for just a minute kind of about what that looked like for you guys as you made that decision and brought a person on, Gabriela, in the role. Yeah, so it goes back probably about seven years or so.

[00:02:56] So we were just then getting involved into Robin Robbins circles. And we first started with trying to get my wife to do some stuff. And we have four daughters and we were homeschooling them at the time. And so that was hard or impossible, maybe, to her credit. She had a lot on her plate. And then, so then we said, well, we can't afford a marketing person, of course, because we were about a million dollars a year in revenue at the time.

[00:03:22] And so we picked up someone from university as an intern. And she was great until she wasn't there anymore. So that was a frustrating experience to end a cycle where we actually got some momentum. And then we had to go out and find someone new just based on their school schedule. And then, so that was our chance there to say, you know, are we going to take marketing seriously or not and make an investment?

[00:03:51] And then, so that's the point we made it a full-time role. I had watched a few of my friends kind of do similar things with interns and part-time people and just kind of watch the door rotate and never become an expert at marketing. And so we decided that we were going to make the investment. And so we did at that time. I showed up kind of add to that story before my career started Dominion Tech in 2001. At the time, I actually worked for an advertising agency.

[00:04:20] So I actually thought I knew something. I was totally wrong, but like I was kind of cocky about it. I kind of thought I, you know, I knew what good design looked like maybe or what to advert wear and how to advertise and all of that. Turns out none of that stuff worked in a B2B world. That agency knew a lot and I love them. They're actually still clients today. They do lots of great marketing, but in a B2C world and it's just, it's different and takes a different skill set. Yeah.

[00:04:47] So, so Brian, one of the questions I would have for you is, is so you made the investment. You said you're hiring a marketing manager. You said like the interns worked until they weren't there, but you know, what have the results been for you and your company since you've hired that role in that position? Because I think a lot of people are afraid, like, is, am I going to see immediate results when I start doing the marketing? Is it a long-term play? Like, you know, what has it been for you and your company before we start to dive into like kind of what you're doing specifically?

[00:05:15] Yeah. So I, from an overall perspective and I think Gabby, you've been with us five years, right? Five and a half. Five and a half. So in that five and a half years, we, we've grown from a million dollars a year in revenue to we'll probably close this year at five, maybe a little over. So we've seen some good growth kind of as we've expected or as we've wanted.

[00:05:41] And, and I will say marketing is a lot of trial and error, a lot of split testing. Like, so like what message, you know, if we tweak the message, what does that mean? And it took us a long time to figure some of that stuff out. But, you know, like a new campaign might take six to 12 months to actually turn into money in our pocket. So you definitely have to be, you have to be willing to invest some upfront effort to see a return because the sales cycle isn't fast in this industry either.

[00:06:12] And, and I say that there's different kinds of MSPs. An MSP like ours, where we consider ourselves a premium offering, a white glove offering, our sales cycles are longer. We're typically selling for 20 to 30% higher than our competition. And it takes us time to work a prospect through that cycle. Whereas if we were just selling, you know, not that this is wrong, it's a different business model.

[00:06:37] But if we were selling BDRs with a 20% markup or support desk at $30 an end user, the sales cycle is much shorter in my experience. And so we're selling a different product than that. So it takes some time to build up credibility and, and then also get that lead into the sales pipeline to go, if that makes sense. Yeah. You know, one of the things we hear a lot, we talk to MSPs and they, they're, they're interested in potentially making the move.

[00:07:06] You know, let me, let me bring somebody on. Let me invest that money. And Gabriella, maybe this is a question we can throw out to you, but, you know, a lot of them, they don't know where to go look. Or if I, if I do find somebody and I interview them, what am I looking for? What are the questions that I ask? What are the skill sets that we're looking for? So, you know, maybe throw that over to you, Gabriella, from, in your experience and kind of, you know, what you've, you've done at Dominion Tech. What are, what are the skills they're looking for? And kind of, you know, how do you, how do you evaluate those potentially?

[00:07:35] So I was in a little bit of a unique situation. I was in New Jersey at the time and working in Manhattan at a B2B event planning, like corporate event planning company. And my boyfriend, now husband at the time, and I were looking to kind of find more of a life, work-life balance. And we, I was looking for jobs in Vermont at that point. We had family up here and I noticed the job posting on Indeed for this position.

[00:08:04] And it had mentioned some, you know, lunch and learn planning events, webinars. And that's all stuff I have experience in doing. That's what I was doing for, you know, X amount of months at this other company. And that seemed to be a really good fit for us, even though I didn't have much experience in the MSP industry at all, really. I mean, some of our clients were IT companies, but I really only focused on getting, you know, butts in the seats and things like that.

[00:08:32] So I think that was a unique situation for me, but it also aligned with, you know, drip marketing, nurturing. So there were definitely some commonalities there. So I'll pose this to both of you and see where this, where we want to go with this. But, you know, so MSPs and you're doing your marketing and all that. I mean, are you creating the content on your own? Are you doing a mix of leveraging other platforms? Like Brian, I heard you mention like Robin Robbins and other things.

[00:08:59] Like, I think it'd be interesting for you guys to talk about like, what's your strategy? How are you guys, you know, leveraging the different platforms to your advantage and really kind of expand on that a little bit. So to kind of touch on what Brian was saying, when it comes to building credibility, it's building credibility and it's building trust. And we need to position ourselves as more than just an IT person. We're consultants. We're your partner. Hence the price markup there as well.

[00:09:29] And it matches with our business model, too. We're preventative and we're proactive. And you have to trust someone in order to do that. So we utilize not only some original content of our own, where Brian will maybe see something or as a business owner, he knows that this is what's trending in the market. And we should write a blog post about it or send out an email broadcast to clients or prospects. Or we utilize our partners.

[00:09:54] So we utilize Kaseya Powered Pro Services, Robin Robbins teams and see what other materials are out there for us to customize and get information out to people. Because at the end of the day, that's our goal. Yeah. So I would add to that. Like, so a lot of content that we get from Powered Services or Robin Robbins or our website hosting company, it's all pretty generic.

[00:10:19] And so something that we've endeavored on over the last few months is to just take a few minutes and adjust the headings, adjust the topics so that we're targeting specific prospects. So taking, you know, maybe something benign in the message, you know, your business could be more efficient in making it your law practice could be more efficient if it did X, Y, and Z.

[00:10:42] And then using our, we use Keep in the background for managing our database, you know, and being able to send a broadcast email. That's what they call it in Keep, but an email out to those prospects and making that message tailored to them without spending dozens of hours handwriting emails or having our salesperson, you know, address them uniquely.

[00:11:06] And then, so now we can change up maybe some of the, whatever they're called, white papers to include stuff, you know, now here's a white paper specific for law practices or specific to accountants that will help them. The content doesn't have to change a lot, in our opinion, right? We could go down the rabbit trail of making a very unique multi-hour effort into some content. But I don't, I think if we're honest with ourselves, most of these prospects aren't reading all of the content.

[00:11:35] They're seeing the information and they're getting an immediate feel that we're an authority in that industry. And the idea here is not to, not always to sell them online, but really to get them to the next step, which is maybe just getting them to give us their email address and permission to drip market to them. Or the next step might be now book an appointment for a consultation. And then once we can get it into a one-on-one conversation, I think marketing has done its job at that point for that part of the process.

[00:12:03] There's marketing related to keeping customers happy and all that kinds of stuff. I don't want to discount that, but at the end of the day, this business grows by adding new MRR. That's really all we're focused on, if that makes sense. You know, quality experience for the customer and new MRR, they both go hand in hand. And if we can get someone who we didn't know about to raise their hand and get into our database or have a conversation with our sales rep, that's what we want.

[00:12:30] I think, you know, you mentioned one thing is that you guys, you know, you're not spending a ton of time. And I think that's one of the things MSPs that we hear all the time is like, you can't take the vendor content or you can't take the powered services or the different things that are out there and easily brand them. But it sounds like you guys are taking it, putting it into your own language. I mean, Gabrielle, is that an extensive lift on your end or do you feel like it's fairly easy? You know, I'm curious as to the lift side of it because so many people talk about that.

[00:12:59] Yeah, so I would say it really is not that hard. It can take some time. I wouldn't say it consumes me. I'm able to do, you know, rewriting simply by replacing words to be industry specific, put them on our blog in under, you know, half an hour. And that's for like multiple different industries, perhaps. And because we manage our database well, we're able to just send out a broadcast email to anyone who's in X industry.

[00:13:28] Right. So it can take some time. But it really. It's not the only thing I'm focusing on, and I'm able to focus on other areas of my job as well. And it really doesn't have to be that hard. Maybe if you focus specifically, like if you only focus on dental practices, of course, be more detailed with that. But a lot of this information, it is pretty broad and it's meant to spark a conversation. Or like Brian said, see us as authority figures who are there to guide you.

[00:13:55] So it doesn't have to be this all time consuming feat. And Dan, if I could just throw in, I think that's the difference between having a dedicated marketing person versus not. And I don't know if I would start with a marketing manager as your first hire. It might be a marketing assistant. Right. And give them some things to do and grow them into a marketing manager role.

[00:14:17] But if you had to ask me if I'm going to sit and write, spend a half an hour on tuning marketing content or go help a client or go help sell something, I'm probably not going to tweak the marketing. Right. So that's when I hear the excuse, I don't have time or it's too much work.

[00:14:37] I think we all are learning in this business, no matter what size, if you can have someone dedicated to a seat to do a certain function, it's infinitely more efficient, more productive in the business moves forward. If you try to be a jack of all trades and do a little bit of everything and be the chief everything officer. Right. It's hard to grow a business that way. And so you have to you have to put some you have to put some money at risk. And that might mean a salary. The other thing I like to tell people, too, is like, you think of a salary is X thousands of dollars a year.

[00:15:07] Well, maybe it's just two thousand dollars a month or three thousand dollars a month. Like you can work towards it. You don't have to like don't break your brain over how am I going to pay this 50, 60 thousand dollar salary every year? You might say, you know what, I'm going to just spend three grand this month and next month and get some work done, get some reward. And then eventually it starts to pay for itself. But I've always felt strongly sales and marketing are two roles that you pay for themselves.

[00:15:35] They don't pay for themselves in the first month, obviously, but eventually they should pay for themselves. Yeah. Gabriela, I know just from from working with you some over the over the past couple of years that you guys do some webinars. I think you do some other type events. You know, it's a question we get a lot from MSPs that we're working with. Which type of event do you find that's working for you guys? To be completely transparent, we haven't done an event in quite some time. And I'm sure a lot of people are just starting to dip their toes in.

[00:16:05] I know some other marketing managers in my group are starting to just start up now or have been in recent months. But we've been favoring more towards webinars recently. Lunch and Learns are something we'd love to explore in 2023. We really feel like people are much more comfortable with doing that. But the webinars are great because it's so easy to just reach out to one of the vendors that you work with. And you already have a list of people in your database or you should that are your, you know, farm list.

[00:16:32] You have your top prospects and you can send materials out to them. Maybe that partner, that vendor has materials you can send to them. You can work with them. And it helps take off some of the workload. And you can record it. You can reuse that content too. It doesn't have to just be a one-time thing. Never look at something that you're doing in marketing as a one-time thing. It should be repeated and shown in different media forms.

[00:16:59] So if we do a webinar that went over great and some people missed it or we found that there was a really good clip from it and we recorded it, we can utilize that on social media. We can create blog posts out of it. We can really continue to use it outside of more than just a one-time webinar. Yeah, but I've heard you say it. I'm sorry. Go ahead, Brian. Well, I was going to say before the pandemic, Lunch and Learns were probably one of our best producing things.

[00:17:26] And honestly, all we did was coordinate lunch delivery and a schedule. Otherwise, we would ask one of our vendors to come and present the content and teach our prospects and some of our customers. To get prospects and customers in the same room was, I think, the piece that really worked well. We don't get that as much in a webinar, but a webinar is much easier to put on.

[00:17:53] We can do them in a high volume and quite literally just show up. We send out. I say that. Gabby does all the work, right? But getting the marketing going around the webinar and having the list segmented and sending out these invites and getting a sign-up process. She's done a pretty great job in Keep to automate that. Not that it's not a lot of work for her to do. She's pretty great at it. Maybe it's easier for me because she does it.

[00:18:18] But at the end of the day, as a CEO, I have to just be there at lunchtime, five minutes before, make a kind introduction, and then shake some hands and smile at people. And it works pretty well. But that's one of the advantages of having dedicated marketing resources. Yep. So, Gabrielle, I've heard you mention several times your list. You guys have your list segmented. You're growing it. I assume you're looking to add people to it. But I'll throw this out to either of you.

[00:18:48] What are you guys actively doing to keep that list growing with qualified prospects? So, we have a couple of different ways that we're doing it. We have our salesperson who's in a leads group. So, that's one way that he's trying to find new leads for us to be in there. We reach out to our local chambers and look to see what lists they have. They put out a book of lists or they'll have lists available for purchase. Things like that.

[00:19:15] In terms of inbound, that's where we're really utilizing a lot of these free resources. So, it's not just blog posts. Sometimes there's like report styles. So, I would create like a LinkedIn ad to try and generate leads based on that. So, we've really been dipping our toes into paid search and paid advertising on like LinkedIn specifically recently in order to try and generate those inbound leads, get people to download reports because that's a much smaller ask than asking for them to book an appointment with us.

[00:19:46] Yeah. I mean, look guys, I've been sitting here for like listening to this conversation and I'm just thoroughly impressed with how you guys are going to market, how you're marketing, how you've got processes in place, your systems are going. I mean, really, it's something that you, I mean, Brian is the owner. You said if you're not seeing the reward or the business or whatever coming in that the position pays for itself. But I think the effort you guys put into it, it sounds like you're not just posting once and hoping to get a bunch of business.

[00:20:16] You have a strategy you're putting into place. You're allowing that strategy to play its course. It's not an overnight success. Sometimes you can get lucky and you get those, but for the, it's a long-term play. So, like, I want to wrap it up, you know, kind of in this question with you guys is you have a strategy. Obviously, now you have a marketing, it's going, you guys got your list, you've got all these different things going. How far in advanced, like if I'm an MSP that gets to this level, how far down the road are you thinking?

[00:20:44] Are you guys a quarter down the road, six months, a year, like, you know, trying to figure out, like, what's that map look like in terms of if I'm an MSP, like getting ready to go into 2023? You know, how far out do I need to have strategy in place for? I'll kick it off by saying Brian is very transparent about our five-year, one-year goals, and we're very metrics-driven. So we use our numbers to make decisions. We've, since I've been here for five years, I have numbers to support what works and what doesn't.

[00:21:14] And so this time of year, we'd usually draft up a yearly plan. So we have a general idea of would this, in theory, get us to the numbers we need to make? But we refine it down by each quarter. So at the end of it, in our essence, are very quarterly driven. But I know what numbers, how many leads I need to be hitting and how many leads our sales guy needs to be making as well. Appointments, all of those numbers we know. So if you don't know your numbers, I think it would be pretty hard to be strategic.

[00:21:45] Yeah, I'll add to that. Yeah, knowing, you know, what your close ratios are from not just when the sales guy meets them, but when we do a marketing piece, right? So if we get a 2.5% response on a direct mail campaign, which we haven't talked about much, but we do a lot of direct mail. But like, so if we get a 2.5% response and we send out 1,000 of those and then we got 25 leads we can work with.

[00:22:10] And like being able to, how many direct mail pieces do we have to deliver to get enough leads to make the pipeline full so that we can hit our sales targets for the year? So, and Gabby's right, we do an annual marketing plan that we spend, you know, usually several weeks preparing and improving over the previous year, what worked, what didn't work. And then, and then we execute that broadly, but then quarterly, we make sure it's right.

[00:22:37] And I think the key, again, I think I said this early is being constantly improving and looking for ways to tweak to get more out of the dollars that we spend on marketing. And so for me, like being able to adjust it quarterly, but to be able to say, here's the goal for the quarter and be able to release that to Gabriela. That's, that's great for me and the great for the business. And then she can run with it. I love all the detail and the planning that goes into it.

[00:23:06] And I noticed the sign over your shoulder there in the background, Brian, it says harder to work, harder you work, the luckier you get. Sure. Yeah. I think, I think, you know, to Dan's point earlier, a lot of people maybe want to run something one time and get 50 leads. They can, can work out of it, but it is work. It's a numbers game and you have to put some time into it. If you're only going to run at one, save your money. You're, you're not gonna, it's not gonna, you might get lucky, but it's really just about luck.

[00:23:33] And I think I used to get drawn into this and maybe still sometimes can like something works the first time. And now we think we've gotten the silver, silver bullet. Right. And then we just keep doing the same thing over and over again. And we turn around and we say, wait, we only got that one first lead and now we've spent, you know, $20,000 in Google AdWords spend and we don't have another one. Right. And the truth is you got to know the difference between the process worked or if you got lucky. I love getting lucky and you'll get lucky the more places you are.

[00:24:03] But I said, yeah, that's something I live by. You got to be in the right spot at the right time. And marketing is an example of that. But you have to, you have to spend that money wisely, right? So, you know, there's not just labor costs to do more good marketing. There's hard costs. There's services you got to pay for. There's content you got to buy. There's lists you got to buy. And you have to be able to control that in a way and track what your cost per lead is so that, you know, when you sell a deal that you're not losing money on it.

[00:24:32] You can't spend more to get a customer than you make on the customer. I think you guys have brought so much information to this podcast today about the marketing and just the whole operations. I want to thank you both for being on. If there's one thing you want to leave our listeners with, is there any last word of advice that you both want to give real quick before we wrap up?

[00:24:52] For all the marketers out there, I would say focus on the numbers and do not be afraid to try new things and constantly just be refining and tweaking things because it may be it didn't work the first time. But maybe if you change one phrase on that landing page, it might make a world of difference. So keep at it. Be consistent. And don't be afraid to try new things.

[00:25:18] And I think from my side, once you find someone competent and capable to do the job, get out of their way. So spend the extra effort to do what you need to do to get that right person in that seat. But then don't second guess them. Let them do their job. Let them learn. Let them split test. And otherwise, someone dedicated in the role that's confident will make the difference. It's great advice.

[00:25:48] And again, thank you both for taking the time to come on and share. And we look forward to having you guys back. We'd love to have you guys back in 2023 and see how marketing has progressed for you guys and what's going on. But again, thanks for being on and sharing all your insight with all of the listeners out there in the channel. You're welcome. And we'd love it. Absolutely. All right. Thanks, guys. That's it for this episode of the Powered Services Podcast. Thanks, everybody, for listening. And until next time, have a great week.

[00:26:16] Thank you for listening to the Powered Services Podcast with Dan Tomaszewski. We're dedicated to giving you practical information, tactics, and strategies that you can use to supercharge your MSP. If you liked today's episode, leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcast. And be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. Until next time, this is the Powered Services Podcast signing off.