Episode 123: The marketing advantage of an IT dispatcher

Episode 123: The marketing advantage of an IT dispatcher

Paul Green

Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast
Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast
Episode 123: The marketing advantage of an IT dispatcher
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In this week’s episode

  • Have you seen the idea of having a dispatcher on your helpdesk to answer all calls and triage them? Paul believes this isn’t just a great role for greater efficiency and enhanced customer service – it can give you a marketing advantage too
  • Also on the show this week, a lead generation expert joins Paul to share some simple LinkedIn tactics to improve your return on time spent
  • Plus, it’s the final stage of creating your one-page marketing plan – this week it’s all about the platforms you use to share your message

Featured guest

Mark Firth is a featured guest on Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast

Thank you to lead generation expert Mark Firth for joining Paul to talk about how best to use LinkedIn advertising, instead of messages.

Mark spent a large portion of his life working a corporate job in London, he worked for companies like IBM and Siemens but he was left feeling unfulfilled. He went in search of answers and an 11 year journey from the UK to Colombia for a decade, fell in love and started a family and then a business. He finally made it into Florida on an investment visa supported by his business.

He runs High Profit Consulting which has helped hundreds of B2B consultants to land clients through a mix of organic and paid business strategies. Connect with Mark on LinkedIn:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/markfirthonline

Show notes

Episode transcription

Voiceover:
Fresh every Tuesday for MSPs around the world. This is Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast.

Paul Green:
Hello. And here we are at episode 123 of the podcast. Here’s what we got coming up for you in this week’s show.

Mark Firth:
If you were to get 10% of that, or even 1%, you’re looking at a decent return. We’re going to show you how to eliminate horrible chasing LinkedIn messages and replace them with LinkedIn advertising.

Paul Green:
That’s Mark Firth. He is a lead generation expert working with lots of service providers, including many MSPs. He’s going to be here later on in the show, talking about how to generate more leads for your business. Mark’s also in our extended interview this week on YouTube, which I’ll tell you about later as well. We’re also going to be finishing off a marketing series this week, over the last four or five episodes we’ve been putting together a one page marketing plan for you. This week, we’re going to talk about the different channels you should use to generate leads.

Voiceover:
Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast.

Paul Green:
Summer last year, my daughter did something very stupid. She was on a swing with a friend, they were swinging together and they decided to have a little competition to see how far they could jump from the apex, the top of the swing. Now, this was a big swing, this wasn’t some little kiddy swing. This was a great big adult swing. So my daughter, at the top of that apex, was probably around about 10 foot off the ground. And that was the point at which she jumped off. And she did really well, she went really far. It was a wee moment. And when she landed on her wrist, it snapped into three different places, which was a pretty dumb thing to do.

Paul Green:
And of course being, what was she at the time? She was 10 at the time. Being a 10 year old, she tried to hide that injury. But because I wasn’t there at the time, I was somewhere else and she was on a play date with a friend. But when the mum saw how her wrist and her hand were at a slightly weird angle and there was something poking up into the skin. Plus of course the distress on her face, it was straight down to hospital for them. And I met them there at hospital and they went to what we in the UK called A&E, so it’s accident and emergency. It’s the same as the emergency room in the US.

Paul Green:
And of course just like any emergency room, when you go in, you initially go through something called triage and triage is the process where they figure out which patients need to be seen most urgently, because someone who’s had a heart attack or has unfortunately been quite badly injured in a car crash or something like that, of course they should have more urgent medical attention and have more resources put into them faster than should my daughter with her stupidity injury, or someone who’s just come in with a bleed or something like that. So you probably have this, if you’ve ever been to an emergency room near you, the first thing is you go through triage. And almost the longer you have to wait the less serious your injury, in a way. It’s kind of how it works like that, isn’t it?

Paul Green:
Well, you probably do the same thing for tickets when they come in or when someone calls up and there’s a problem, I’m sure you ask them questions like. is this affecting just you? Or is this affecting everyone in the business? Is this stopping you from doing your work? Or is it just annoying you or slowing you down? These are your equivalent of the triage questions.

Paul Green:
Now, a few MSPs that I’ve worked with over the years have actually employed someone specifically to do that true triage and then to dispatch the work, essentially to plan how urgent that work is and who’s going to do it. And this role is known as a dispatcher role. So all of the tickets and all of the phone calls come in to this dispatcher and they ask the standard questions and they essentially try to ascertain, how urgent is this? Do we need to throw all of our resources on this quickly? Or can it be scheduled for later on? And of course they’re monitoring other things that are being fixed right now, other problems that are being dealt with. It’s quite an exciting job, actually, isn’t it? You are coordinating things and you are making things happen based on how urgent they are.

Paul Green:
I’d like to do a job like that, that utterly ticks every box in my skillset that does. Now your business may not be big enough to have a dispatcher at the point it is. Or even if you just have a member of your team who’s particularly good at doing that kind of planning. To me, a dispatching role isn’t just an advantage for you from a service desk point of view, it can be a great marketing advantage as well. Because you’ve got to remember that one of the core purposes of the dispatcher is to communicate really well with the person who’s got a problem. Someone rings up because they can’t print a document right now. To you, that’s a fairly low level problem. It’s something that’s going to be a bit of a pain to fix, might take 10, 20 minutes. And actually you’ve got this urgent crisis over here at this other business you are supporting and you need to get that fixed first.

Paul Green:
But here’s the thing. To the person that can’t print that document, if that’s the end of the job that they’re currently doing, that finishes off that task, that’s a really big deal to them. It’s a bigger deal in their head than it actually is in real life. And this is where the marketing power of the dispatcher comes in, because the dispatcher’s role here is not just to triage the problem and ascertain how urgently it needs to be fixed, but also to communicate back to the client really clearly when this can be fixed. If it’s something that genuinely as a business, you are just not able to look at it for the next three to four hours, then the dispatcher has to plicate your client. They need to be able to empathise with them while at the same time explaining to them that a slightly broken printer, unfortunately, isn’t a priority. So he is going to have to wait a couple of hours.

Paul Green:
And you’ll have different ways to do this within your business, different phrases that you use different ways of doing it. But the key word that I used earlier was empathy. Empathising, always looking at things from the other person’s point of view. And I think this is one of most important things for a dispatcher. In fact, the greatest dispatchers in the world are the ones, not just in hospital emergency rooms, but are the ones that you phone in emergencies. I had to call 999 here in the UK, back at the end of last year. So 999 is our equivalent of 911. It’s the emergency line that you call. And I needed to get the police to something, don’t worry everything was is fine, don’t worry about what it was.

Paul Green:
But the person that I was speaking to on the end of the phone was essentially a dispatcher. And at that moment, at that exact moment, in my mind, this was the greatest priority. Getting the police out to deal with this incident. Whereas, of course I had no idea what else the police force was doing. They could have been dealing with 10 or 20 other things. The dispatcher I spoke to was of course aware of what resource they’d gotten, how long it would take to get the police out to that incident. But they were great, they were so reassuring. They were asking me questions, essentially they were empathising. They were empathising with me. They were putting themselves into the situation that I was in. That empathy helped me feel as though they were doing the very best they could. They said to me, “We have finite resources. We are helping with other emergencies right now. Let’s set some expectations of what we can do to help.” Right down to, “How about I phone you back in the next half an hour to check things are going?”

Paul Green:
Because obviously it wasn’t a massive priority for them to actually get people out, to get the police out to us at that point. But this is the cool thing, that dispatcher made me feel as though my problem had been acknowledged properly and someone was going to do something about it as soon as they could. And I think that’s the goal of your dispatcher. Your dispatcher, it’s a unique role, and I would argue it’s almost not a technician’s role. We’ll talk about recruitment in a second. That unique role is someone who is good at coordinating resources, which is very much a brain task, isn’t it? But it’s also someone who has the ability to empathise with someone else and to talk to them at their emotional level, and that is an incredibly difficult thing to teach.

Paul Green:
This is why I don’t think this is a technician’s role. I think the dispatcher role is more of a customer service role, really. You want someone who is uniquely placed to empathise and to be warm and friendly and to understand people’s frustrations when they’re talking on the phone. Because the number one job that dispatcher can do from a marketing point of view, and a marketing retention point of view, is to empathise with them and to make them feel as though someone somewhere cares about their problem and is going to do something about it. Even though they know, looking at the resources in front of them, that it’s going to be two to three hours before a technician even gets anywhere near it.

Paul Green:
Can you see how exciting that dispatcher role would be? Because it’s not really a technical role, even if your business is too small right now to have a full time dispatcher, is there an advantage to you, maybe with your next hire, perhaps making your next level one technician someone who is essentially going to be a dispatcher? So yeah, they’re a level one technician and they can deal with small stuff on the phone there and then. But what if you hire them primarily for those empathy skills, for their ability to warmly communicate with the clients and to make them feel as though someone cares about their problem. It’s certainly worth thinking about the next time that you have a level one vacancy.

Voiceover:
Here’s this week’s clever idea.

Paul Green:
So we are in the fifth and final week of a small series we’ve been running here on the podcast and it’s about pulling together a one page marketing plan for your MSP. We started five weeks ago, helping you to understand your market and the competitors that you are up against. Then we looked at understanding your client, how to pick a niche, or a vertical, and essentially make your audience smaller, because it’s easier and more power for to get a very consistent, targeted message to a smaller group of people. And then last week we looked at pretty much the most important part of your one page marketing plan, which is developing a marketing message.

Paul Green:
It’s the final week today. And we are looking at the mediums. So you remember last week I talked about the marketing triangle, the three sides of the triangle. Message, market, medium. You’ve got to get the right message to the right market, using the correct medium. And I’ll tell you what the mediums are, what the channels are that you should be using to talk to your target market. Number one is LinkedIn. That is the must use social media platform for B2B businesses right now. And I can’t see that changing for a number of years.

Paul Green:
It is of course, your website and your website in itself. Isn’t a channel, it’s a communication device. It’s an engagement device. But the channels you can use to get traffic to it include LinkedIn. They include other social media platforms. They include of course Google. In fact, Google is probably your greatest source of traffic to your website. Maybe you will invest in some search engine optimisation, some SEO to drive traffic to your website. Maybe you’ll invest in original content to try and drive organic traffic. But your website absolutely is a big marketing channel for you.

Paul Green:
Those are the two who most basic ones, being on LinkedIn, making sure that you are actively driving traffic to your website. They’re, I would say, the two most important marketing mediums for MSPs in 2022. But there are lots and lots of other ones. For example, media coverage. Good old fashioned media coverage in newspapers, radio stations, magazines, local TV stations. You can achieve that by sending out press releases or just building relationships with journalists and presenters and producers and pitching your story ideas to them. What about seminars? What about talks? What about presentations? Webinars? You can put these on and you can promote them. There are lots of different platforms to do them. You could do your own. You could do joint venture ones with partners. You can leverage other people’s audiences using some of these tactics. These are smart distribution channels for your marketing message.

Paul Green:
I think trade shows are worth looking at, any kind of event where you go out and there is your audience. Maybe you’d exhibit, or maybe you’d just go and hang out there with your potential future clients. And of course networking, I’m a big fan of using BNI and other networking groups to grow your MSP, because it just cuts straight through. Yes, it’s a cash and time investment. But if you pick the right group, you can really get a lot out of it.

Paul Green:
Then you’ve got things such as telephone. The telephone is an amazing distribution channel for your marketing message. It’s difficult to do. It’s really hard to find the right person to make outbound calls for you. It’s difficult to know who they should call. It’s difficult to get it right at what they should say. But the fact that it’s difficult, means that most MSPs don’t do it. And when most MSPs aren’t doing something, well actually that means you should do it because it’s an opportunity. The MSPs I work with who pick up the phone a lot and make a lot of outbound calls, typically have more conversations with more prospects, which lead to more sales meetings and more new clients. The phone is difficult, but it is a potential channel for you.

Paul Green:
Then you’ve got things like email marketing. Email marketing, you should be building a database of people who are willing to receive your emails and then send them out educational content. In fact, send them out educational and entertaining content. We call this edutainment. And you can get ideas for marketing content from our service MSP Marketing Edge, if you go to mspmarketingedge.com. Other things you could do is you could send out stuff in the post, direct mail. You could send out postcards or sales letters. Or of course, there are other digital distribution platforms. You are listening to a podcast right now. Could you do a podcast for your audience? If you’re just in a geographical area, you might struggle to get traction on a podcast, but if you serve any kind of vertical, or niche, a podcast can be a very smart way to read each people.

Paul Green:
And the same with a YouTube channel. YouTube is difficult work to do, it’s exactly the same as the podcast. In fact, I’d argue it’s even more difficult doing YouTube content. And both of these platforms, you’re going to have to do a lot of work on a regular basis until it pays off. But it will pay off. If you turn up consistently and you put out high quality content consistently and persistently, both of these will pay off. Eventually, people will start talking to you about it.

Paul Green:
This podcast is one of the biggest drivers of new MSPs into our business. I’ve been doing this over two years, the first six months, it was like no one was listening. It really was. I feel like I could’ve said anything in those early episodes and no one would’ve noticed. But actually what happened is there was a small audience and that small audience built over time and they told their peers and words started to spread, and now we have a podcast that two years on it’s got such momentum. It’s absolutely beautiful. You wouldn’t stop me. In fact, you couldn’t stop me from doing this podcast because it’s got massive amounts of momentum. But we had to get through that first six months where it felt like there was no return on it at all.

Paul Green:
It’ll be exactly the same with YouTube. We’re just beefing up our YouTube channel right now with things like our show about this show called Another Byte and our extended interviews that we’re doing with guests off this podcast. And it’s going to take, I don’t know, three, six, maybe nine months to start to see a return from that YouTube investment. And that’s okay because I know that’s going to come one day. The trick for you with your MSPs is to keep going consistently and persistently, long enough to actually start to see that return.

Paul Green:
So those are pretty much the main distribution channels for your marketing message. If you go back now over the last five weeks of this podcast, you should be able to pull together a one page marketing plan for your MSP. The trick really is to keep it very simple. You don’t want a page that’s absolutely crammed with text and diagrams and complicated stuff. You want something very simple. A simple sheet of paper, here it is. A sheet of paper that you can look at. In fact, you can keep it on your desk and you can keep looking at it and it will remind you of the most important things that you need to do to drive new leads into your MSP.

Paul Green:
Now listen, what we’ve been doing over the last five weeks is a bit of an experiment for us. We’ve not really done a series like that on the podcast before. So have you found this useful? Has this been helpful for you? Be honest with me, is this something that you’ve kind of skipped over to get onto the next part of the podcast? Really let me know. I always love getting your feedback. My email address is hello@paulgreensmspmarketing.com. And I will reply to every single email that I get, whether it’s good news or bad news.

Paul Green:
hello@paulgreensmspmarketing.com.

Voiceover:
Paul’s blatant plug.

Paul Green:
So I briefly mentioned the MSP Marketing Edge back then. This is our primary service. All of my effort and attention, when I’m not doing things like the podcast, it goes into helping our 600 plus members of this service. They’re all over the world. And what’s unique about this is we only sell it to one MSP per area. That is a very strict rule for us.

Paul Green:
So it’s all the marketing tools and content that you need to generate leads for your business. It’s just £99 a month, if you’re in the UK, or $129 a month, anywhere else in the world. And your first month is free. So you can try it out, completely risk free. In fact, the beauty is there’s also no contract and you can cancel any time. The first thing to do then is to go and see whether or not a competitor in your area has beaten you to your area. Go to mspmarketingedge.com. You can click on either the UK, US or Canada sites, enter in your post code or your zip code to see if your area is still available. And if you’re anywhere else in the world, we’re in about 20 plus countries, I think. So you just have to drop us an email and we’ll email you straight back and let you know if your area is available. It’s all at mspmarketingedge.com.

Voiceover:
The big interview.

Mark Firth:
Hello everybody. My name is Mark Firth from High Profit Consulting. We help manage service companies, professional service companies and consulting businesses to raise their prices and generate more inbound leads, so they don’t have to chase clients on LinkedIn.

Paul Green:
Tick. You tick all the boxes there, Mark. But what I want to specifically talk to you about today is LinkedIn advertising. And I am going to pick your brains just in general about LinkedIn, because I know a lot of the rules have changed over the last four or five months or so. But let’s talk about LinkedIn adverts. I have a confession to make and I don’t mind going on record, putting my hands up to this and admitting it. Bearing in mind, I’m in a B2B space, the same as the MSPs I work with, I have really struggled in the last couple of years to make LinkedIn Ads work for us. So we struggle to get the ads in front of the right people, so we struggle with targeting. We struggle to get them to click them. We struggle to get a return on investment for the money we spend. Is this a common problem? Do many businesses have this problem with LinkedIn?

Mark Firth:
A lot of businesses have this problem with LinkedIn. And just before I jump into explaining why, could you just talk about is it part of an overall strategy of various traffic sources? Or are you literally going from, I’ve got some LinkedIn messages, LinkedIn content, and now I want to add paid ads onto it? Because that really makes a difference as to where I’m going to go with this.

Paul Green:
Am I getting a free consult here?

Mark Firth:
It just gives me the context because a lot of businesses, they’re sending some messages, they’re posting some content and then I want to run ads, and it doesn’t work like that.

Paul Green:
So, at the risk of talking about our own business, we have a service called the MSP Marketing Edge. We’re trying to reach MSPs around the world and it’s one of many messages. So the marketing strategy I teach MSPs, which I also use myself, is it’s a three step strategy. Build multiple audiences, build a relationship with those audiences, and then commercialise that relationship.

Mark Firth:
So, the reason a lot of people have an issue with LinkedIn Ads is quite simply because people don’t spend enough time on the platform. Now, you can Google all the statistics I’m about to say. Some of them vary, and don’t worry they’re not going to be boring statistics. I’ll bring them to life. But the long story short, the average LinkedIn user spends 28 minutes on the platform per week, statistically. That’s not even enough time for a cup of coffee to get cold. Whereas Facebook, the average user, you’re talking over 12 hours, which is probably enough time to fight from San Francisco to London and clear passport control. Even if there’s some sort of something in the world making travel a little bit more difficult. It’s still possible.

Mark Firth:
Now what that means is when you talk about cold advertising on LinkedIn, it’s very difficult to get it going from the ground up because the advertising platforms, the pricing, the cost per lead, the cost of your reach is going to be dictated by supply and demand. And if LinkedIn doesn’t have many people to a go at, because they’re not spending much time on the platform, that spikes the pricing. And when you add into that, that platform is not that sophisticated compared to somebody like Facebook. That is why people have an issue with LinkedIn.

Mark Firth:
Now you’re probably thinking, well, what do I do? So the first thing to do is instead of using LinkedIn for cold advertising, what are your traffic sources? A lot of MSPs and consult companies that I talk to, I ask them, how many visitors do you get per month to your WordPress website or your normal website? Don’t know. How many visitors read the average blog post? How much are you focusing on driving traffic from an asset you don’t own, i.e. LinkedIn or social media onto an asset you do own, i.e. your podcast? I don’t know.

Mark Firth:
Because the first thing they that they should do is really understand how much traffic you’re getting. I think we had 200 last month, we didn’t put much up there. But let’s say 200 leads per month, 200 people visiting your website. So times 12, that’s 2,400 per year. My question is if you were to re-market, which means just instead of targeting people you don’t know, target people that already visited your website. Do you believe in 12 months you could get one client from that? Two clients, three clients from 2,400 visitors? Let’s say 400 found you by mistake. That’s still 2000. Let’s say a thousand haven’t got any money. That’s still 1000. If you were to get 10% that, or even 1%, you’re looking at a decent return.

Mark Firth:
So with LinkedIn Ads, the thing is not to start with cold LinkedIn Ads and jump from messaging and content. It’s to have a strategy of getting people onto your assets and then retargeting, building that list and then using that list as a base to inform LinkedIn and to then go cold, low budget. Does that make sense? I don’t want to go too technical.

Paul Green:
Yeah. That makes perfect sense. But could you explain, just because I never like to assume anyone listening understands anything we are talking about, can you explain what you mean by re-marketing, re-targeting?

Mark Firth:
Yeah. So, this is a good question. So Facebook what’s called a pixel, LinkedIn has what they call an insight tag. Here’s an example. Who’s looked for a sofa? As soon as you look at the sofa, your feed on any social media platform is covered with sofas.

Paul Green:
It’s that thing where the adverts follow you around the web, isn’t it?

Mark Firth:
Yeah. Basically, if you were to put that piece of that pixel or that tag on your website, you can then tell the platform to send an advert to people that visited your website. And that’s much cheaper and a much smarter way to get going than just trying to go for people that don’t know you because there’s nothing more expensive than marketing to a cold audience, especially to get going on an ad platform which doesn’t help you anyway.

Paul Green:
Yeah. Absolutely. So, you are saying you should only really show the ads to your contacts, is that what you’re saying?

Mark Firth:
To begin with, you should show it to people who are already displaying intent. I call it active buyers, some people call it intent. But, again, basic marketing 101, only 1% to 3% of your market, depending on the statistics you look at, are actively looking to solve a problem. Have awareness of that problem and are in market to buy now. If they’re going to a website to look at managed services, I love managed services, I started at Siemens, but it’s not something people do for pleasure, is it? There’s got to be a reason they go there, right? It’s usually because something’s broken. So it’s a pretty good intent, a pretty good way to measure buyer intent. So, that’s what I recommend to get going.

Paul Green:
Yeah. So it’s either something’s broken or they’re deeply dissatisfied with their incumbent MSP, IT support company as they call it. So let’s go back to LinkedIn Ads. This makes perfect sense. So, to recap, you’re saying target your contacts first. So it’s a slightly warmer audience than cold people you were targeting. And then you drive them to your website, and in doing so you gain the ability to then re-market to them. So once they’ve visited your website, you can then follow them round the web with your own ads. And presumably you are then pushing them towards that call to action. The call to action we always recommend is a 15 minute video call. Is something that the very highest quality prospects will be quite happy to do. Mark, is that the kind of call to action you would recommend?

Mark Firth:
The best way we found it’s work… and by the way, if you look on your Facebook feed, you’ll see adverts from Harvard Business Review, you’ll see adverts for executives get promoted. You will see MSP marketers, marketing to MSP marketers consistently on Facebook. We actually run Facebook traffic and send them to a LinkedIn profile. That’s it. And then you’ve got inbound connect messages and messages. Because we looked at it and whilst my competition is saying, LinkedIn, know the connection limits. There’s so many more people on the platform, you just got to be personalised. No one has time to personalise messages. So just send them to your profile and then you’ve got inbound messages.

Mark Firth:
If you’re getting started, what you probably want to do is have something that’s almost foil proof. I run traffic right now and I get 10 to 20 inbound connects every day to my LinkedIn profile and they know who I am, because they’ve seen me my ad, and then that’s building the LinkedIn re-marketing audience. So just so that this is in clear terms. If I do what lots of people that marketing to MSP companies do, which is put an ad on Facebook and then they go to my landing page. I can then re-target them on LinkedIn, so I’m building up a huge LinkedIn retargeting audience. I don’t do many cold ads on LinkedIn. And I know you wanted me to talk about LinkedIn Ads and how to get them working. It’s to use it as retargeting, in my mind. And that might sound quite left field, but that’s what we’ve seen work.

Paul Green:
No, that’s what we want. We want new ideas and new ways of tackling things. One of the biggest challenges for MSPs is the sheer size and length of the sales cycle. And you’ll know this Mark because of your experience in this world.

Mark Firth:
That is the problem, but the problem’s caused by something else. And it’s what I call a central heating problem. I’ve just moved to Florida, so we don’t have central heating. But central heating in the UK is it’s a central system to heat our house. And when do you call a central heating engineer? You call a central heating engineer once every two or three years in the winter. It’s not an always on problem. It’s not an evergreen problem. It’s not a consistent problem. And that’s the issue that a lot of MSPs have. They are marketing like central heating engineers. They’re reliant on the client to think they want to leave. They’re reliant on the window of renewal coming up, they’re reliant to the client getting to the tipping point.

Mark Firth:
What they actually need to do is look at their offer and look at adding something to their portfolio that covers something that needs dealing with right now that’s urgent, and what I call a Monday morning problem. A Monday morning problem is the opposite of a central heating problem. Because every Monday, it’s now Tuesday we’re doing this, but yesterday, every MSP owner or sales director would’ve sat down and gone, “Oh my God, I can’t believe I’ve got to do this week. I don’t want to be doing it. I need to get rid of this problem.” That’s what you need to be speaking to. And you may not have that capability. Well, add it because you’ve got a choice, add it or get frustrated and wait for them to call you. And I know which one I’d do if I was running an MSP.

Mark Firth:
And that’s what we used to do by the way, when we were selling MSP services, because I started in the UK, 2003, at Siemens Communications doing managed services. And I worked in the reseller channel and we would always have this thing in our back pocket to open the door, rather than waiting for them to knock on the door. That’s what I think it is. I think it’s an offer problem. I don’t think it’s a waiting for the customer problem.

Paul Green:
So could you give us a specific example of what a Monday morning problem might look like?

Mark Firth:
Well, it’s going to completely depend on which niche you’re doing with your managed services. And it’s going to completely depend what’s the topic of the month. Security was a big one, GDPR was a big one at its time. Right now, remote working was. We used to do it with telecoms audits. That’s 2003, so that’s how out a date now. It’s going to completely depend on your business, your client, the size of business your targeting, the nature of the services you do. But there’s always that problem. There’s always something they’re dealing with that they want to get rid of. And there’s always something there. Always.

Paul Green:
Mark, this is fascinating stuff. Now, you and I are going to continue this conversation on our YouTube channel. We’re going to do an extended interview. And by the way, I’ll tell you how to access that YouTube video later on in the show. But here for the podcast now, let’s finish off. Just tell us briefly a little bit about what kind of clients you work with, what you do and how can we get in touch with you.

Mark Firth:
We love, and by love I mean we only work quick because they’re where we get the results, we work with small businesses and individuals. I like to work up to about 15 people, one to 15 people, where people are looking to get to the point where they’ve got inbound leads coming. Once we go bigger than that, we do work with businesses that are bigger than that, but they usually have the in-house skills to do it. And we can also do that, but our sweet spot is one to 15.

Paul Green:
And what are your contact details Mark?

Mark Firth:
Go to Mark Firth Online. That’s M-A-R-K, Firth as in Colin Firth, F-I-R-T-H, online.com. And I am fully aware I need to get at a more phonetically friendly call to action. You can also go to www.clientsimpact.com/training1.

Voiceover:
Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. This week’s recommended book.

Sam:
Hi, I’m Sam from Sheridan Computers. And the book that I’d like to recommend is the Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni. It’s a great little book that tells the fictional story of a newly appointed CEO at a dysfunctioning tech company. She’s tasked with getting the company back on track. It’s all about leading and developing teams and how to work with your team to address common issues and to work to solve them.

Voiceover:
Coming up next week.

Jennifer Bleam:
Hey there, this is Jennifer Bleam, Cybersecurity Sherpa. I’ll be here next week to talk about how you can simplify your cybersecurity sales process. So you can close more deals easily and quickly and profitably.

Paul Green:
We’re also going to look at how you make ongoing business decisions for your MSP. When you make a decision, are you doing it with the very long term in mind? And by the very long term, I mean, one day you’re going to want to sell that business is the decision you are making today Going to help you to sell that business in 3, 5, 7, 10 years time? We’ll explore exactly what that means next week. And we’re also going to talk about LinkedIn creator tools. There’s a huge opportunity on LinkedIn right now for you to get in front of more of your audience by using the creator tools. LinkedIn is desperate for you to use them. And next week, we’re going to look at the big advantages for you and how you get started.

Paul Green:
Now, don’t forget, we’ve got the extended interview with Mark Firth. That’s going to be on YouTube. Plus of course, our show about the show, it’s called Another Byte. Presented by my friend, Sophie law, and I’m a guest on there of course. And that’s going to be on YouTube later on this week. So you just go to youtube.com/mspmarketing. Wherever you listen to us and consume our content, whichever podcast platform, and certainly on YouTube, please do subscribe to us. We really appreciate it. And for this podcast, join me next Tuesday and have a very profitable week in your MSP.

Voiceover:
Made in the UK for MSPs around the world. Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast.