Episode 178 SPECIAL: How this MSP can dominate his niche

We want to sit down with somebody to come up with a whole marketing plan or a marketing strategy that makes sense, that builds towards something.

How effective are the case studies?

I’ve never seen the numbers. I don’t have any data to go off of.

Good marketing actually doesn’t start with looking at you and your business and what you do. It starts with looking at the prospect.

This is pretty gold stuff here. Thank you very much. I really value and appreciate that.

Paul Green’s MSP Marketing podcast special.

So it’s really hard to believe that we have already made it round to Easter. I’m sure it was New Year’s Eve just a few days ago, but here we are. It’s Easter already. I hope you’ve enjoyed your Easter weekend and we have another special episode for you this week. Now it’s something we haven’t done on this podcast actually for a number of years ’cause I’m joined by a real life MSP who is going to talk us through what he’s doing for his marketing, how well that’s working for him, and then I’m going to give him a one-on-one marketing consult.

Now this was something I offered as a competition in my MSP Marketing Facebook group. So if you missed out on this, if you’re not yet a member of that group, and it is completely free, just get Facebook up on the app on your phone, just type in “MSP Marketing” at the top. Go to groups, and you’ll see there’s an MSP marketing Facebook group. It’s free to join and you are welcome to join me there if you are an MSP, but no one else because it is a vendor free zone. So let’s jump straight into our marketing consult. Welcome Tony Solars. You told me how to pronounce your name that it rhymes with dollars. So straightaway, Tony, we have a strapline for you. Tony Solars brings home the dollars. Is that what’s happening with your MSP right now?

Yeah, we’ve done really good in the last… My MSP merged and partnered with another MSP about five years ago and we’ve done double digit growth every year ever since then. We’re headquartered out of Honolulu, Hawaii; and we’re also in three other West coast cities.

Okay. Well, you’ve jumped straight into what my next question would’ve been, which is tell us a little bit about you and the business. So tell us how you got started, a little bit about that merger, and then what kind of client base do you have? What kind of size business are you?

So we are a six-person MSP. We’re headquartered out of, like I said, Honolulu, Hawaii. Telling everyone hears that, they’re like, “We’d love to go out there if you need anybody.” They think it’s always paradise. So we have two people out in our Hawaii office and we’re also based in Seattle where I’m at and we have two here, including myself. My business partner is in Oregon on the coast, and then we are also in Phoenix. And we have clients throughout the Phoenix and Flagstaff and Sedona areas. We manage clients throughout the country. So we do a lot of remote work that way.

So would you describe yourself as just a standard MSP, just looking for general clients within the areas that you’re in? Or do you have a specific vertical or a niche that you work in?

We don’t describe ourselves as a typical MSP. We try to avoid that word altogether, really. It’s an overarching theme of a peer group that I belong to of other MSP owners, I guess you could call them. Even though we use that term, but we try to say, “We’re not MSPs,” just because that term has become so loosely used nowadays. We’re definitely an IT solutions provider that focuses on cybersecurity.

We don’t call ourselves experts for sure, but we do have several niches that we work in, and [inaudible 00:03:38] of those is law firms. That’s a place we came from. We know how law firms work; we know how they talk; and we know the tools they use and the problems that exist within their firms. Another one is financial wealth, the finance vertical. So that’s financial wealth advisors, CPAs, bookkeepers, and then the insurance game. So mostly we have quite a few brokers. But we also work heavily in construction. We have a lot of large construction firms. And then just two years ago, we broke into manufacturing, which is something that I’ve always had a love for. Manufacturing people, they’re my people. They’re real salt to the earth. They’re not great with technology, but they need it to run their business, and they’re just super down to earth.

Yes. So I guess one of the downsides of working with manufacturing people is that you’ve got lots of different systems. And I’ve heard some horror stories over the years about the most important machine in the manufacturing plant running on XP and it’s been stable and up for eight, eight and a half years, and no one wants to take it down or update it or tweak with it. But I guess if you love a challenge like that, why not?

Those first three sectors that you mentioned, those first three niches, which was law firm’s, financial wealth, and insurance; they’re beautiful verticals to be in because of course they’re regulated. And anyone that is regulated has a regulator breathing down their neck, which means they’re going to be a lot more open to buying more cybersecurity. They’re going to be just generally a lot more compliant because once they trust you and understand that you’re there to help keep them safe and to keep them out of the regulator’s bad books, then that can be a very good thing. Just a general question for you, Tony. If you could wave a magic wand and land the perfect client tomorrow? What exactly would that client look like? Would it sit within one of those niches for you? How many users would it be? Whereabouts would they be based? What does the perfect new client look like?

Our perfect new client, and this is the one that we are targeting as far as our marketing goes and our conversations and we talk to people is in that 25 to 75 user employee range. If I had to give you an exact number, 50 employees is where is that sweet spot. Because what I find is, they have budgets. They have enough employees to give the leadership time to sit down and actually have meetings with us and do strategic planning and to build out those three month, one year, three year, and five year plans. But they’re not so big that they have IT or that they’ve actually said they usually don’t have standardization. That’s why I love manufacturing because they understand standards, but it doesn’t mean anything to them when it comes to IT. So there’s usually a lot. There’s a big game plan to be had there when it comes to teaching them standardization when it comes to IT.

Yeah. I can see why you’re going for these niches, these verticals. You clearly, as a business, have a lot to offer them. Right. Let’s talk about the marketing. So what are you doing right now? And when I say what are you doing, I don’t mean, “What are you intending to do?” or, “What initiatives and programs have you got coming up?” Right now, as we record this, here in April, 2023, what is the business doing right now? What’s the marketing that you’re doing to attract attention, to generate leads, to turn those leads into prospects, and to actually get yourself sales meetings?

Well, I’ll be a hundred percent honest, not enough. That’s for sure. I’ve been listening to you for a couple of years, and I haven’t been able to get your services because your markets in my areas are all locked. And they have been from the beginning. Otherwise, I would be using you. But we have a company that handles our social media and is pushing out content through social media.

And we have another company that is doing some basic SEO work for our website on a very minimal basis. But we don’t do any ads, don’t do any kind of that kind of work just because we just have never seen any validity for that yet. So we do get leads. Our website does work. We don’t get enough. For me and my business partner, it’s like doing a little here, a little there, punching that just doesn’t seem to be cost effective. It’s like, we want to sit down with somebody to come up with a whole marketing plan or a marketing strategy that makes sense that builds towards something. And if that’s something that we could find and makes sense, then that’s something we would dump money into.

Okay. Well let’s see if… I’m not going to give you an entire marketing strategy in a 15, 20 minutes consult on a podcast.

No.

But I’m going to have a good bash at it, that’s for sure. And it’s interesting you mentioned about our services being locked. I know our clients in Honolulu and I’m sorry that that’s locked. So we’re talking about the MSP Marketing edge by the way. Go and have a look. Get my little blatant plugin. Go and have a look at mspmarketingedge.com to see if one of your competitors is beating you to your area. You just put your zip code or your postcode in, and it tells you if we can work with you or whether or not it is locked. So you’ve actually made my job really, really easy because you’ve got all of these niches that you want to reach. And in fact, we’re going to pick manufacturing because that’s clearly the one you’ve got the most passion for.

And we’re going to explore… We’re just going to take a few minutes to explore a really interesting question which is, why would a manufacturer want to work with you? Because good marketing actually doesn’t start with looking at you and your business and what you do. It starts with looking at the prospect and looking at them and answering that question of why would they pick you when there’s actually a thousand other MSPs that they could pick. So Tony, let’s forget lawyers ’cause no one likes lawyers. Let’s forget financial people, insurances. Let’s go for that manufacturing one. The people that you most like and that you most want to do business with. Just as an aside, pretty much everything we’re about to talk about can be used in all those other verticals as well. But I just want to go for the one that you’ve got the most passion for.

So be a manufacturer now. Let’s call you… You’re not Tony anymore. Let’s call you Bob. You’re Bob. You’re the owner of a manufacturing business. Actually, rather than me saying this, you should be saying this because you know these people. Tell us what Bob is. So tell us a little bit about his business. If you want to amalgamate a couple of manufacturing clients in your mind, that’s fine. But tell us about Bob. What’s it like to own a manufacturing plant? Is it fun? Is it hassle? Is it all just cash flow crises? Is it lurching from one big order to another? What kind of a business do these guys have?

For the ones that I’ve had exposure to, it is, most of them do import, export because they’re bringing in materials from out of country. So it’s a lot of legal and embargo tax stuff. They have in-house councils or that kind of thing. So they do have compliance stuff that they have to worry about. They’re not poor. There’s a lot of money flowing through these, but they are frugal with where they spend it. I would say the biggest thing that I find from owners of these manufacturing companies is they are not technical and they hate computers. I would say I have three of them, two of them directly just curse words every third word, F this and all sorts of tertiary words of, “I don’t like these things. I would like to throw them out a window, but I need them for my business. And every IT company I’ve ever worked with has screwed me.

And I don’t believe what you’re telling me, but this guy’s telling me that you’re the real deal, and if you can make it work, then you’ll bring a smile to my face. And we shook on it. And I said, “Yeah, this is not the way it should work, and give me three months. I can’t fix it overnight.” And yeah, we did it. He was having outages at two, three times a week. Some of them like half day outages. So that’s probably what I would explain that these people is they have production plants that need… I’ve got one that just added a second shift and they’ve got these machines that cut, that manufacture things, and they cost anywhere from a quarter to three quarters of a million dollars for these machines, sometimes more. And workers that run them sometimes two 8-hour shifts a day, three 8-hour shifts a day, and maintenance people. And when they call, the important thing is to set expectations of when you’re available because sometimes they think you’re available at two in the morning to come in and fix stuff.

So would these guys typically have this kind of Heath Robinson haphazard technical set up where things often go wrong and they’re losing money? Or do you find more often that they have an incumbent MSP or some kind of break fix IT support, but they’ve outgrown it and perhaps haven’t realized they’ve outgrown it?

What I always come in and tell them… And this is what I find with especially manufacturing companies, is, they’re being handled in a reactive IT manner. Because these companies don’t know what to do. They don’t know that, “Hey, all your production machines out here on the plant floor have wireless cards in them, and they’re being provided wireless with Google Nest devices that your program manager put in three years ago. And your connection is bad because you put in consumer grade wireless with consumer grade wireless cards. And that’s why it’s going down all the time. So you need to spend $10,000 and put in proper wiring and have a wired infrastructure put into your production environment. And this is what it’s going to cost. This is how long it’s going to take. And you need to plan for that and budget it.” And they don’t have anybody talking to them like that. And saying, and if you don’t do this, this is why you’re having outages. And so they don’t have that proactive saying, people coming in and telling them things like that. Or, “Hey, you need fiber at these locations.”

So you’re having more proactive strategic conversations with them.

Correct.

Is it a case that they’re just not having those conversations with any IT resource they’ve got right now? So let me ask that question another way. What’s the trigger for them to start a conversation with you typically? Is it a, there’s a recurring problem that they’ve perhaps been putting up with for some time, such as, as you said, a really bad connection or using consumer? Or is it that there’s an emergency, that something’s down and we need to get it back up?

Yeah, it’s usually multiple problems, bad relationship with their current provider. That’s how the two of the three that I’ve gotten have come my way. I got referred in. There was an overheard conversation that they were thinking about looking for other IT because they were unhappy with their current one because of all the problems.

Essentially then, there is a level of distress. So we’ve got these people. And just to recap some of the stuff you said earlier. There’s lots of compliance for them. They’ve got in-house council. There’s a lot of hassle in their world. There’s loads of money going through, but they’re frugal. So they don’t like to splash the cash, but they do see the… Well, they have to invest in the business because of course, they’ve got these big manufacturing equipment that they’ve invested in. And essentially, they get ground down. They get to a point where there’s so many problems to fix and it may be a series of things stacked up on top of each other that eventually they come to a point where they will actually listen to someone strategic. And you are clearly well positioned as a strategic expert for manufacturers. Okay. This is going to be beautifully easy for me. Thank you for making this easy, Tony.

We didn’t talk before this recording. But I’m so glad you won the draw now. I really am. I’m going to ask you just a couple of quick [inaudible 00:15:22] questions and then I’m just going to jump into prescriptive mode. And obviously for all the MSPs listening to this, you can take exactly what we’re going to talk about here. And this is a great way to target any niche or niche as we call it in the UK, or any vertical. Now you can do this alongside your general business. And I advised to most MSPs that, yeah, you have your general business. People in your town, your state, your city, whatever it is. But you also, if you can, you have a vertical. And some MSPs go marry their vertical and marry the market where they pick the vertical and the vertical becomes the business.

And that’s great if you have utter confidence in the market. In fact I’m working with three or four MSPs who have completely married their market and they’re slowly reducing the general clients as they bring on more of their vertical clients. That’s great. But most MSPs don’t do that. Most MSPs just have a bit of vertical business that sits alongside their general business or do what you are doing Tony, where you’ve got three or four different markets and you’re using those as marketing opportunities to win more of the clients that you know how to serve well. So couple of questions for you. On your website, and we’re not going to go and have a look at the website ’cause obviously we’re recording this both for YouTube but also for audio-only podcast platforms. But just briefly on your website, how much of that website… If I’m Bob the manufacturer, and I go and have a look at it, how much of that is relevant to me versus relevant to lawyers, to financial people, insurance companies, et cetera?

We haven’t done a good job of that. So it’s very general, 10,000 foot view. We haven’t made anything specific to those industries. It’s on the to-do list.

Yeah. Well and do you know what? it’s a big to-do one. So one of the beautiful things of marketing to a niche or a vertical is that you can paint a picture, you can come across with a perception that you are the experts at technology for their business. If we take manufacturers, if you’ve got a manufacturer who has got that cascading set of problems. And they’ve finally one morning, it’s a Tuesday morning and they’ve got their head in their hands and they’re saying, “Right. That’s it. I’ve had enough. We need to do something about this.” So they go on to Google and they type in, “IT support manufacturing,” or “IT support,” whatever they type in. And they have a look at three businesses. And the first two of them are generalists. So they’re general IT support companies. They’ve got lots of social proofs. So they’ve got lots of case studies and testimonials, lots of other businesses around here.

They’re clearly well admired, well trusted businesses in the area. And those are of interest to [inaudible 00:17:59]. And then they come across the third one and this third one, without using these exact words, but it essentially says, we do technology support for manufacturing companies in, let’s say, in Hawaii. I appreciate you’ve got three different locations, but we’ll just go with Hawaii. So we look after manufacturers in Hawaii, or even better… In fact, there’s an actual headline forming in my head now, which is, Hawaii manufacturers trust us to make sure production never stops, which is the start of a great headline. I’m normally better typing these headlines than saying them, but that’s a start of something there which can be developed with a writer or with a freelance marketing expert. Hawaii, Hawaiian, Hawaii business, Hawaii businesses, Honolulu businesses, manufacturers trust us to make sure production never stops or never stops unexpectedly or something along those lines.

So instantly, if I’m Bob the manufacturer, and I’ve just come onto this website; instantly, just like that, that seems more relevant to me. Because even though those other two companies, those other two MSPs I was looking at were clearly well-respected and of interest, suddenly I found someone who I perceive as an expert at manufacturers like me. Now, when we can make something relevant to someone, which is so easy with vertical, it literally talks directly to their heart. Now Tony, if you’ve been a listener to the podcast for a while, and thank you so much for listening, you’ll have heard me say many, many times that the ordinary business owners and managers we want to reach, they don’t make buying decisions with their brain because they don’t have… They don’t know what they don’t know about technology. So they don’t have the brain skills to decide whether or not you are any good at what you do. So they delegate the decision down to their heart.

So Bob the manufacturer and 95% of people who are buying from MSPs, they’re literally picking you based on how they feel about you. And if from the very first word on your website, they are feeling, these guys are safe. This is the safe choice. Because they understand my business. They understand businesses like mine. The chances of you winning that business right from that very first headline has just gone up by a factor of X, which is just literally sexy. And that’s why vertical marketing is so much easier. So I think job number one for you, Tony… And this may require investing a few dollars into this. Go and start a second website. So you keep your general website as it is now. You’ve clearly put some work into it. You said you’ve got an SEO, a search engine optimization company, so that’s great.

Don’t do anything with that. Don’t make any rash decisions. You just leave that there. But start a second one. In fact, you’ve got three locations, Honolulu, Seattle, and I think you said Phoenix, was the third location. So maybe that would… Well, you could either have three sites and your SEO company will advise you on this. You might have a specialist site for manufacturers in Honolulu and another one for manufacturers in Seattle, et cetera, et cetera. You might end up… You can see that you’d end up with 15 websites if you went down that route, which may be too much. So you might just have one manufacturer’s website for those three locations that the question is always of how do I get traffic onto this site. Although traffic is, again, in a vertical is an easy thing to do. But I would certainly move that way up the task list of let’s have a specialist website that seems to talk directly just to manufacturers and to show that we are the technology expert.

By the way, you can’t just do this as a page on your existing website. They will see through that because they will see that you’ve got a page for manufacturers, a page for lawyers, and a page for insurance companies. So instantly, that perceived specialty just goes out the window. That’s why you need to have a standalone site. Now that site can just be a one-page website. So a one-page website still has a navigation at the top, but it has what we call anchor links. So when you click on the navigation, it just jumps down the page. Essentially, you have a very, very long page. And a specialist vertical site doesn’t need to have a huge amount of content in it. All it needs to do is talk to Bob the manufacturer about his business or her business, if it’s Roberta. It talks to them about their business.

And so you throw in lines like, “Manufacturers in this town trust us to keep their production running,” or whatever it was I said earlier. You’d then have a photo of a manufacturing business. In fact, ideally, it would be a photo of you standing next to a complicated piece of machinery, which is clearly manufacturing. It doesn’t matter what the manufacturing is, but it is manufacturing. And then you would have, in an ideal world, you would then have a video case study. And that video case study would be a manufacturing client of yours. Now this is the beautiful thing. For MSPs listening right now that are not in a vertical, getting into a vertical can be as simple as having one client. So Tony, you’ve got three or four manufacturers, but even if you only had one and you got on well with that client and you had a good relationship and you could persuade them to do a video case study with you, that’s all you need for better marketing.

That’s what makes this beautiful. So one short video case study with one manufacturer. And I’ll give you the format for that case study video as well because it’s so beautiful. You get them to talk about the problem that they had, which is whatever it was that drove them to you in the first place. So they talk about that problem. Then you poke the pain of that problem. So the problem itself is never really the actual pain. So let’s say their problem was that their machine, their core machine, manufacturing machine, went up and down three times a day. And that in itself is a problem. But what does that problem mean. If we poke the pain, imagine I’ve hurt my hand and I literally poke the wound on my hand, what’s the pain that that causes? Well, if the machine goes down three times a day, that means manufacturing goes down three times a day, which then comes into lost hours, lost productivity, damaged raw materials, all of that kind of stuff.

I imagine that recycling the power on a machine will shorten the life of the machine. You can take this to… You know more about this stuff than I do. But you say, what’s the pain of that problem? So the client talks about the problem they’ve got. They talk about the pain. Then we introduce the solution. The solution is of course what you did. And when I say what you did, it’s not the technicals. So you don’t start to talk about the, “Oh, we came in with the UPS and we put in an RS232 connector with a blue wire sticking out of the beta port.” I don’t mean that kind of what you did. I mean where you come in and you do a strategic review of the whole site and you recommend a power upgrade or a fiber upgrade. And you replace consumer grade equipment with military grade equipment, et cetera, et cetera.

So you talk in big business terms about the technology, not the specifics of what you do. And then the final part of that case study is, we talk about, it’s what we call the happy ending. And it’s where the client talks about what they’ve been able to achieve because of their partnership with you. So the happy ending is not the resolution of the problem they had. It’s the bigger picture.

The ideal world, it would be, “Oh, I had this problem with my machine. It was going down three times a day. It was causing a real nightmare. The machine’s life was shortening; we were losing raw materials; our staff were having three hours a day of unproductive time; we were slipping back on our production schedules; we weren’t going to be able to fulfill our contract. Then I met Tony. And Tony came in and he did a strategic review of the entire site and he upgraded some systems and put in place a three year technology strategy for us to help us upgrade all of our systems when cashflow allowed. And thanks to our partnership with Tony, we have grown our turnover by 126% over the last three years.” And that’s what I mean by that happy ending.

Their business will probably have grown that 126% regardless. It’s just that you’re now their partner. You’re their technology partner. So you get to take credit for that. So we’re talking about your website, your new website. You’ve got your cool headline. You’ve got your picture of you. You’ve got the relevance to manufacturing. You’ve got a case study video. I would then embed your live calendar. So get calendarly.com or use Microsoft 365 bookings. Your live calendar there, right there on the website for them to book a 15 minute Zoom call or video call with you. And then I would go into some more testimonials, or I would go into talking about what you do for manufacturers.

The whole thing about this is not to talk about your business. You’ve got to talk about their business, about manufacturing businesses. And in fact, what you could do is, a lot of what we’ve just been talking about in the last 10, 15 minutes would be perfect. What are the problems they face? How do they overcome those problems? And then again, a call to action, your live calendar embedded there in that page. Now that’s only a five minute website design. But that there will give you the basis of something that a manufacturer would look at and they didn’t instantly think, “Yeah, I get that. These guys understand me. I feel like these guys would understand me.” And is that something that you think you would be quite easy to put together, or do you think you’re going to have to divert quite a considerable amount of resource to make that happen?

It’s actually something that I’ve talked to our web folks and SEO folks about, because we’ve talked about landing pages, and can we just do it with the landing pages with a separate domain, and we’ve purchased a few other domains and of course, it wasn’t this much detail with this much marketing like strategic strategy behind it. This is this is pretty gold stuff here. Thank you very much. I really value and appreciate that.

No, it’s an absolute pleasure. And I have to say, I’ve only got started because I do have a second step for you. So the reason you need the websites is so that you’ve got credibility. Well, first of all, you’ll get more referrals because it’s easier for your existing clients to refer you. Because they’ll look at your general website now and the people don’t refer because there’s a perceived social risk. So if I refer you to my friend and you don’t live up to the promise that I made on your behalf, I’m taking on board the social risk. Whereas if you’re existing manufacturing clients, who by the way will love seeing the fact that you are specializing in manufacturing now. They will love that. If they see that you’ve got a specialist manufacturing site, it gives them more confidence. So they will actually start to spread the word for you. Not all of them, but some of them.

And the other thing is, I’m going to suggest as well, you put in place what we call an evergreen marketing campaign. So most people when they hear about marketing campaigns, they get something from a big vendor, and a big vendor produces a big box of stuff and says, “Here you go. It’s an amazing marketing campaign to sell routers, routers,” whatever it is we’re selling. And those one-off marketing campaigns have a small amount of value, but nowhere near the amount of value as an evergreen marketing campaign. So I’m going to just literally run through the steps of that campaign, what you would do. But I’m going to suggest that you target like 20 or 30 different manufacturers a week. That’s what makes this an evergreen. It’s not something that you do as a one-off exercise. You actually put it in place as a system and that system happens every week. And with, I think you said there was six of you within the business, so you’re probably going to need someone else to run this for you.

Don’t go and hire a marketing agency to do that because they will over complicate it and try and get you to redesign your logo and do all sorts of things. You can do this with a marketing freelancer. You could do this with a virtual assistant. If you get it set up once and you can use resources on fivver.com or upwork.com to find freelance resources to get this set up for you. You then basically need admin staff to just run this for you on a weekly basis. And I would highly recommend you run it for 48, 49 weeks of the year. It’s just essentially preps Thanksgiving and Christmas that you wouldn’t bother with this. But the rest of the year, you would go with it. Here’s what you do. First of all, you start with something physical that you can ship out to people in the mail. You know that video we were talking about earlier? The reason for doing a case study video with a client is that once you start with a video, you can then downgrade that video down into other versions.

So you could take that video and get a writer from Fivver or Upwork to turn that video into a booklet, literally a physical print booklet. So you’d need to get it designed. You’d need to get it rewritten. But once you’ve got… You obviously can’t turn a written case study into a video. But you can do it the other way around. So we’re repurposing some content you’ve already created for the website. But get that turned into a booklet. In an ideal world, that would be using American paper sizes that would be tabloid, folded into letter size. For the UK and Europe, that’s A3 folded into A4. So it’s essentially… I’m just going to hold up my pad here if you’re watching this on YouTube. It’s that size. We’ll know what we mean by that size.

So it’s letter size, but you’re opening it up. Really thick paper, really high quality, really good quality print. Don’t skimp and do cheap nasty paper or anything. This is your shop front. And if you had a physical shop, you wouldn’t skimp on the shop front. So you get that made. That might be four pages or eight pages because the thing about having a tabloid is, when you fold it, you have a minimum of four pages. And each piece of paper you add in, it’s another four pages. So let’s say you could somehow space that out to eight pages. And that’s not eight pages of text. You’ve got in there images. You might have some other testimonials. You might have a bit of information about you guys; but essentially, you’ve got something that you can post down. And the critical thing is that right from the page one on the first page, it is relevant to Bob the manufacturer.

It’s got to be because you want Bob to get that in the mail, to open it and to look at it and instantly to see that this is relevant to him. And then he’s going to either flick through it or put it on his desk to read later or take it home or read it on the toilet or give it to his operations manager. The point being, it’s in his hands. And it almost doesn’t matter whether he reads it or not. In an ideal world, he would read it. But if he doesn’t read it or not, that doesn’t really matter. You send out, let’s say, 30 of those a week. So there are 30 manufacturers, never heard of you before. They’ve had this piece of mail that turns up. Now the next thing that you would do, is you would then send them a digital message to coincide with them getting that in the mail.

And that might be an email because obviously, it’s fairly easy to find out someone’s email address. Mostly, it’s on the website, or you can use software to find it. The great thing about manufacturers is there’s only a tiny number of people that have emails. And it might be that the owner or the manager is the person who responds to the sales at general email address. Because it’s not like they’re inundated with sales inquiries, right? So it’s probably quite easy to message that person. The alternative is that you connect to them on LinkedIn, let’s say, a couple of weeks before. And once you’re connected on LinkedIn, you can send them a message on LinkedIn, again, to coincide on the day it arrives. Now the reality is, not everyone will open their email or will look at their LinkedIn messaging on that day. But it’s something we just try and do. We try to hit them with the same message delivered via two or three different platforms.

So if I’ve received something in the post, and I’ve had a LinkedIn message, and I’ve had an email, and they all have different words but they’re about the same thing. So the message might be, “If you have problems like Bob did in his manufacturing business, read this now.” And instantly, I’m going to be much more likely to read that. If I get the email, I will go and have a look in the post to see if it’s arrived. If I open that LinkedIn message… And in fact, you might even do it as a link to a PDF version of that on LinkedIn. Don’t take that as an excuse to cut out the print. The print is absolute TNT. It’s the thing that drives the whole campaign because the power of getting something in someone’s hands is huge. But there are lots of different ways that you can get that same message over to them.

What we’re trying to do is we’re trying to just open them up. We’re trying to get them to have a look at this, to read it, just to get their mind to open slightly to, there’s a company that does IT. There’s a company that does technology that partners with manufacturers. Because then the final part of the campaign is, you’re going to get someone to phone these manufacturers. And remember, we’re only targeting like 25 or 30 a week or whatever number is doable. Now I always recommend a back to work mom for this. You get someone who wants to do some adult work. They’ve perhaps come out of a professional career, had a six or seven year career break. Kids have done school. They’re now ready to go back to work, but it’s just not right for them to return to their old career.

They want something interesting but something that can be flexible and arranged around schoolwork and when one of the kids is off sick, they don’t have to worry about it. And this is the perfect job for a back to work mom. So you can actually hire in a very high level skill set person, someone who’s very comfortable on the phone, at actually quite a low hourly wage. And you’re just paying them to make follow-up phone calls. Now this isn’t cold calling. This is slightly warm calling. Because they’re calling people that you’ve already sent stuff to. In fact, we call the mail piece and the messaging, we call that opening the door. Because you are pushing the door open for your phone person to call them. Now you’re back to work mom who’s doing the calls, she doesn’t need to know anything about selling. She doesn’t need to know anything about technology. She doesn’t need to know much about your business.

Because her job is literally to ring them up and the conversation may go like this: “Oh hi, is that Bob?” “Yes, hi. It is.” “Oh, hi Bob. My name’s Sandra. I’m calling from,” so-and-so, “computers. Hey, we sent you guys like a case study book through. We shipped it to you and it should have arrived with you a couple of days ago.” Because she’s making this follow up call a few days after it’s arrived. “Hey, did you guys get that? Have you had that?” And let’s say Bob says yes. If he says no, you don’t worry. You just plow on regardless and you promised to send him another one. Because he probably did get it. It’s just, he forgot about it. So he says, “Yeah, yeah, I got that. Yeah, that was kind of interesting.” And then Sandra then asks him… And this is why she doesn’t need to know anything about technology or your business. Sandra then asks him a series of open questions. And she asks him about his favorite subject. And everyone’s favorite subject… Tony, can you tell me what everyone’s favorite subject is?

It is. It’s exactly that. It’s themselves. So she gets Bob engaged in talking by saying… And in fact, with the manufacturer, it’s the easiest thing in the world. “What do you guys manufacture there?” That’s her opening question once she’s introduced herself. “What do you guys manufacture there?” And suddenly he’ll start talking about whatever it is they’re manufacturing. And then she can jump in with, “So how’s business going right now?” And then, “So do you guys export a lot or do you sell internally?” And she can have a five minute conversation here. In fact, she will end up having the same five minute conversation with a ton of manufacturers, which is great. This is exactly what we want. Then she can jump to a qualifying question. So you could be as crass as to say, “So do you guys have technology issues that are holding you back or that give you a headache?”

Or maybe she might say something like, “Do you guys have recurring technology issues?” That might be too much too soon? In which case she might just say something as simple as, “So do you guys have a technology company, like an IT company you use?” And if they do, she can then ask the world’s best question about your opponent, because that’s who they are. The incumbent is the opponent. She could ask them, “On a scale of one to ten, where one is awful and ten is world class, how would you rank your current IT support company?” And if they answer seven or below, then there’s an opportunity there for you to have a conversation with them. Because eight, nine and ten is pretty happy. But seven or below means there is some level of dissatisfaction there. And then Sandra moves to the kill. Sandra’s goal is to book them a 15 minute Zoom call with you. Not Teams.

I know MSPs love Teams, but Teams is just a horrible piece of software for ordinary people to use unless they’re in the Team’s ecosystem. And of course not everyone is. So I would just go with Zoom, which is the universal thing. And her job is just book a 15 minute video call. So she almost says it as if it’s just occurred to her. So let’s say she’s on the phone to Bob. His current IT support company is seven. She goes, “Seven.” She goes, “That’s quite a low score. I’ve got to be honest, I don’t hear scores that low very often. So what is it that these guys do that…” Or, “What is it that these guys do or don’t do that gave them such a low score?”

And he may say something or may not. And then she can say, “Well, do you know what I think we should do, Bob? If you can spare 15 minutes, why don’t I set you up on a 15 minute Zoom with my boss. His name is Tony Solars. He’s an expert at technology and IT for manufacturers. And it would just be an introductory call. So there’s no obligation to buy anything ever. Literally 15 minutes on a Zoom. Because I’m not a technical person, you could tell him more about the problems you’ve been having. Maybe he could suggest some things to look at, maybe not.” And some people are going to say yes, more people are going to say no. But that’s okay. Because if she’s hitting 25 people a week, in fact, you send that out to 25 people, she will attempt to… Or she’ll dial 25 people. She might get hold of 10 to 15 of them. She might book one, one, maybe two zooms.

Well, wouldn’t you be delighted with a Zoom every single week with a manufacturer? Well God, yes you would. Because let’s say two in three of those Zooms are going to turn into a proper sales meeting. And let’s say one in three of those Zooms will turn into a new client. Which basically means, you could potentially be onboarding a new client once every month or once every six weeks or so. And most MSPs would be delighted. And I know your sweet spot was 50. Maybe you wouldn’t get those 50 users with a manufacturer. But remember what we said that you can roll this out to all of those other verticals that you’ve been looking at. My final point on this, and then we’re going to wrap this up, Tony. I’m just going to give you an opportunity to ask me any sort of questions about this.

I did mention where are you going to get the data for this. How are you going to target these people? Again, with a vertical, with a niche, it’s the easiest thing in the world. You either buy the data or you pay someone to go scrape that data or you look at associations. What are the associations they belong to? Where you’ve got a group of people who all do the same thing or a similar thing, getting the data is the easiest thing in the world. And to be honest, Google is probably the first place that I would look for that. When you’ve run out of Google data or you’ve run out of the low hanging fruit, that’s the point I’d go off and buy data or look at other exciting things like that. But literally, can you see why I got so excited when you started talking about niches? And nothing we’ve talked about here is actually particularly sophisticated.

It’s not hard to do. The difficulty is getting someone to build that website because that’s a time suck and a money suck. It’s putting in place that… Getting that video case study done. Again, it’s time suck and a bit of a money suck. And putting all the bits in place. That’s the difficult thing to do. I think actually, ’cause we’re talking here about a marketing machine, turning the crank of that marketing machine on a weekly basis, it becomes the easy thing to do. Particularly when you get other people to do it for you like virtual assistants. It’s actually putting the pieces together in the first place that’s hard. Right. I’m going to shut up now. Tony, hit me with any questions you’ve got. Anything very specific or confidential, we’ll do that on email afterwards. But have you got general questions for me about what we were just talking about there?

How effective are the case studies? I’ve seen other, you know, other companies in our industry use them, and I’ve always wanted to do them, and I have a good video guy that I’ve been got in my back pocket and he does case studies, that’s what he does, and, but I’ve never seen the numbers. Like I don’t have any data to go off of.

I’ve read upon the psychology of case studies quite extensively. There’s a book; you’re never going to read it, Tony, because it’s a hardcore psychology marketing book. It’s called Influence by Dr. Robert Cialdini, written in 1984. He’s a professor of psychology who, based in New York I think, who focuses on marketing. And he actually coined the term “social proof.” So social proof is about case studies. It’s about testimonials. It’s reviews. What it comes down to, if you look at it at a deep psychological level, is that most people most of the time prefer to do what other people like them are doing. Let me say that again. Most people most of the time prefer to do to take action to act in the way that other people like them are acting. And this is because we’ve still got the same programming in our heads today that we had a hundred thousand years ago when we lived in caves. And we were in the middle of the food chain back then.

So sabertooth tigers and things like that, they ate us. So if we were in a cave with 30 other cave people and they all started running that way, we didn’t sit there and think, “We wonder if tiger is coming.” We just ran. And you think we’re whatever, however many thousand generations on from that, and we’ve just evolved and got stronger and stronger. That’s why we’re here because our ancestors learnt to avoid predators better than the guys that got eaten. And hence, we’re the result of that.

So it’s a very strong thing within us to be sheep, to follow the herd. We all logically think we’re not sheep and that we make very, very distinct decisions. But if you’ve ever seen an illusionist, a mentalist on TV or you’ve gone to Vegas or something and you’ve seen a show, and you see how easily those guys read their audience and how easily they influence people and persuade them and force them to make choices, which is kind of magic 101, it’s because the vast majority of people most of the time follow this. So case studies, as I say, I can refer you to several books if you want to read up on it. And there is some data in there. But I’d just go with that case study. Put it like this, it cannot do you any harm to show a prospect someone else like them who has trusted you. That literally cannot do any harm at all.

I’m a third of the way through that book. You’ve mentioned it in your podcasts, a month ago or two. I double minored in psychology and sociology, so that doesn’t quite put me to sleep anymore.

Okay. I think you are the only MSP then who’s possibly read that book. But yeah, it’s a great book. So you will understand then that how our behavior is influenced by things we have very little control over. And that’s what social proof is. People look at case studies and say, “Well isn’t that manipulation?” Or, this is my favorite. People say, “Well I wouldn’t be influenced by that.” And I say, “Well you wouldn’t be influenced by that because you are looking at a technical case study, and you’re a technical person, and you’re in a technical world.” But if you pick something that you don’t understand how to buy… I’ll give you an example. I’m in month 10 of the hell of my house remodeling. It just feels like it’s never going to end. We are 80% done, but the builder’s just so slow getting the finished bit done. I know nothing about construction and building.

And I picked my builder because he had great case studies. And I looked at it and I thought, “Oh, I know her. She lives in the village. I trust her. If she’s used Andy, then Andy must be safe.” Right? People who don’t know what they don’t know about the thing they would need to buy are going to lean more heavily on social proof and case studies than… If you were swapping PSA, for example, social proof would be a big part of it because you’d want to know what your peers were doing. But actually, you have the ability to assess one PSA against another because you understand what… You understand it. You can get into it, and you can assess it. So the social proof is less relevant in that situation. But for the kind of people you want to reach, it’s incredibly relevant.

But I still rely on on the values or the input of my peer group when it comes to things like that and the platforms I choose in my own industry.

Yeah. So that’s a very specialist form of social proof. That’s an elevated session, isn’t it? Because you have trust with a bunch… There are a bunch of people like you, but also, you’ve built trust with each other. So we won’t name names on PSAs. But if everyone in that group suddenly ditched their PSA and went over to new shiny PSA, it would be very hard for you to act against that because you trust… In fact, what you’ve got, Tony, is you’ve got the classic mastermind. I don’t know if you’ve ever read a book called Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill, which again has been recommended a number of times in the podcast. And in fact, we had a guest on a few months ago who had written an enhanced version of it. ‘Cause it’s out of copyright now. It’s a 1920s book. And one of the things he talks about is exactly what you talked about there, a peer group.

And we’re talking the likes of Henry Ford from back in the ’20s sitting down with… I’m going to get the names wrong. But imagine Henry Ford and Edison and… Oh, I can’t remember the names of the other ’20s. Sort of Robert Barrons, all of these people sitting around in a group advising each other, that’s exactly… That happened. Maybe not those names because they didn’t all live at the same time. But that’s what you’ve got with your peer group. And it’s a very powerful thing to try and work against. Okay. Any final questions for us, Tony? And then we will wrap this up.

No, thank you very much. Appreciate the the insight and the time.

No, thank you. You’ve been very, very generous with your time. Now you have my private email address. Please don’t say what it is or I will be inundated with emails. But anything to follow up on this for any year… The next couple of years as you’re implementing this, please do email me and if I can answer any of your questions. ‘Cause I really want you to implement this and it’ll be awesome to get you back on the podcast in a year or so’s time for you to say, “Well, I implemented some of this. Look at what we’ve done. And we’ve won four more manufacturers.” And that would be an epic way of finishing that. So Tony, thank you so much for your time and good luck. I say good luck. You don’t really need it because you’ve got some great markets. You clearly are switched on action taking individual. But I’m going to wish you good luck anyway and good luck mopping up all those manufacturers’ lawyers and all of those other clients.

Thank you very much. Appreciate it.

Coming up. Coming up next week.

Hi, I’m Simon Severino, and if you are in sales, you know that the sales cycles, they’re becoming longer and longer. How can we shorten the sales cycle and close more deals in the same time? This is what we’re going to cover in this episode. So join us.

On top of that interview with Simon next week then, we are talking about hiring A team players. If you really, really want to get the maximum performance out of your MSP, you cannot do it with B team players. And yes, that probably means that you’re going to be paying a little bit more. But I promise you, it will be worth every penny. We’ll talk about that next week. Don’t forget, we have a ton of extra content on YouTube as well at youtube.com/mspmarketing. Join me next Tuesday and have a very profitable week in your MSP.

Made in the UK for MSPs around the world. Paul Greens MSP Marketing podcast.