What your MSP can learn from Iron Man

Episode 30: What your MSP can learn from Iron Man

Paul Green

Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast
Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast
Episode 30: What your MSP can learn from Iron Man
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In this week’s episode

  • Did you know there’s a link between Iron Man and your MSP? Paul explains why embracing the ‘Iron Man protocol’ could really make your MSP stand out in the crowd and boost your business
  • These days when it comes to marketing your MSP, two things have changed everything. Special guest Heather Harlos from Bitdefender joins Paul to discuss how the shift to digital marketing has combined with the global pandemic to create new opportunities for MSPs
  • Also this week, a listener to the show may not have a problem with recruiting 1st line technicians, but asks Paul for some advice on attracting those with greater experience

Show notes

Episode transcription

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

Paul Green:
Hello, here’s what’s coming up in this week’s show.

Heather Harlos:
It’s not always the right time to ask somebody to buy something, I think that’s something that salespeople miss. You probably shouldn’t ask them to buy something yet.

Paul Green:
We’re also going to be talking about email subject lines that get opens, because email marketing is still a powerful thing to do. And, how to recruit second and third line techs.

Voiceover:
Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast.

Paul Green:
So our family, along with around about 50 million other families around the world, have now got Disney Plus. I have to say, it’s a pretty good package, isn’t it? You’ve got your Star Wars in there, you’ve got all your classic Disney stuff, you’ve got The Simpsons. And, you’ve got Marvel, and I absolutely adore Marvel. Find me a 45 year old man, with the beating heart of a 14 year old boy inside him who doesn’t love Marvel. I think what Marvel have done over the last 10, 11 years, building up that cinematic universe, is just amazing.

Paul Green:
Of course, one of my favourite characters is Iron Man, played by Robert Downey Jr., Tony Stark. I was chatting to my nine year old daughter about Robert Downey Jr., she’s really, surprisingly, into the Marvel movies, which is great, sitting watching them together. We were talking about Robert Downey Jr., and I was telling her he’d had some troubles in his life, and now he’s one of the highest paid actors in the world. In fact, for End Game alone, he made $20 million as a base salary, that was just to do the acting. And then, because he has a bit of backend, he takes a percentage of the backend profits. He’s made, so far, an additional $55 million, because of course, End Game getting on for $3 billion worldwide, or something like that. It’s an immense amount of cash.

Paul Green:
I think Robert Downey Jr., I don’t know, can anyone justify owning $75 million for one piece of work? Maybe. But, I think he’s worth every penny. From everything that I’ve read, all the directors think he’s worth every penny, as well. One of the reasons for that is when you hire Robert Downey Jr., you don’t just hire him and his star power, his ability to attract people into theatres, you also get a pretty unique process from him, which leads to more interesting scripting for your film.

Paul Green:
What he does is, when you hire Robert Downey Jr., he will get the script, and obviously he’ll turn up on set, and he’ll deliver the script as it’s been written. But what he also does is he has his own script writer, and his own script writer rewrites his dialogue, three or four times. So they look at what it is he’s supposed to be saying in a scene, or his character’s supposed to be saying in a scene, and they’ll do three or four different versions of it. He, when he’s on set, constantly wears an earpiece.

Paul Green:
So they’ll do the first take, and that will be the scripted version. And then, in between the takes, in between take one and take two, an assistant will read him his lines for the second take. So he’s not doing the original lines that were written by the movie script writer, he’s now doing his own script writer’s lines. And then, he’ll do the same thing for the third, and the fourth, and the fifth. So essentially, you’re getting him acting, and playing it out, and his character doing lots and lots of different lines, every single time you do a script.

Paul Green:
Apparently, directors find this incredibly useful because he’s not being disrupted offset, he’s got an earpiece in his ear, he’s got an assistant feeding these lines to him, and he’s paying for all of this. I mean, $75 million for a film, I’m sure he can afford an assistant, and a script writer, and a wireless earpiece. But, he’s doing all of this off his own back, so that his character can come up with more interesting things. A lot of the iconic lines, the things that we know from Marvel, such as, “I am Iron Man.” You remember, it was the big reveal at the end of the very first Iron Man film, the one that really kicked it all off. That was, essentially, an ad-libbed line. This is what makes Robert Downey Jr. so, so powerful to movie directors.

Paul Green:
Now, what could Iron Man possibly have to teach at MSP? Very simply, Robert Downey Jr. goes the extra mile. And he doesn’t just go the extra mile a little bit, he studied, in some detail, what would make me more valuable to these people. “They’re paying me a lot of money for these films, I want to be a very, very wealthy mega-star. I also want to have the best lines in the film.”

Paul Green:
Because you know, Iron Man was never guaranteed to be the big star of Marvel, he’s worked hard, over 10 years, to make Iron Man incredibly successful, to the extent that, no spoilers, but when things happen in End Game … and, come on, it’s been out a year now, we’ve all seen it, surely. But, when things happen in End Game, it has the most incredible emotional impact because we’ve invested 10 years into a character that we absolutely adore. He’s done that off his own back, he’s hired his own script writer, he’s written his own process, it’s an incredible thing to do.

Paul Green:
Let’s flip that back to your MSP. What could you do, off your own back, that generates so much more value for your clients? I guess what we’re looking for here is what could you do for your client that, routinely and systematically, over services them? We’ve all heard the phrase before, that you should under promise and over deliver, but actually, this is a real thing. When you start working with a brand new client, and they’re expecting something from you, how amazing if, from day one, you’re constantly over delivering. Of course, yeah they’re going to get used to that, eventually, that stops being very special to them after a couple years, when you’re over delivering, over delivering, that becomes the new normal. But, what a great way to get a new client started.

Paul Green:
When the lockdown started, I spoke to many of the MSPs that I work with, clients, not clients, people that I just know, and the ones that seemed to do the best with their clients, and that certainly had fewer retention problems than others were the ones who constantly over service their clients. So they were ringing them up, they were saying, “What frustrations have you got? What can we do to make your life easier? How is that annoying you, what the best thing for us to do here?” And they were constantly over servicing them. They were finding out what their expectations where, and they were going the whole extra hog. Essentially, they were taking the Iron Man approach to it.

Paul Green:
So here’s a challenge for you, maybe this is something you and your team can jump on a Teams call, you can talk about later on this week. What can you do to over service your clients? When we say what can you do, we mean the easy things. We’re not talking, here, about massively upping your extra level of service, but something simple. For example, could you start doing training videos for them, tech tips just for your clients? Could you start doing a drop in, maybe it’s a Teams call once a week, and any of your users could just drop in? They haven’t got to log a support ticket, but if they’ve got a small, minor thing, an irritant, a thing they’d love to have fixed but they’ve never gotten around to raising a support ticket, could they just drop in, and it’s almost like a clinic?

Paul Green:
What if you could go through a process of ringing all of your clients once a month, say? So, someone in the office is responsible for ringing, yes the decision makers, but also the influencers as well, and maybe other key users in the business. People who are putting in lots of tickets, or people who seem to be influencing other people with their tech support. Yes, there’s a burden there, of calling people, but what great service! In fact, what kind of problems are you going to unearth, before they actually become a problem? Wouldn’t it be better to tackle stuff proactively, both from their point of view, but also to stop things getting worse, and to stop frustrations increasing? Let’s call this the Iron Man protocol. How can you put it in place in your business today?

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

Paul Green:
As much as email marketing is getting harder and harder, it’s getting harder to get people’s email address, to actually get your emails delivered to them, let alone getting them to open it. Email marketing is so important, it should still be at the cornerstone of your direct response marketing.

Paul Green:
You’ll have heard me say before on the podcast how important it is to build audiences of people, build a relationship with them, and then obviously be there at the point they’re ready to switch from their incumbent MSP. Well, the number one audience that you should be building is your email list because it’s the only one that you completely control. No one can ever take your opt-in email list away from you. LinkedIn can snatch your audience away from you, if Microsoft falls out with you for whatever reason. And Mark Zuckerberg can definitely take your Facebook, or your Instagram, or your Messenger lists away from you, if Facebook changes its mind about how it’s algorithms should work, again. But, no one can ever remove your email list, it’s your data.

Paul Green:
So you should be focusing on building your email list using ethical bribes, which is something that you give to someone in return for their contact details, to build up your opt-in email lists. For an MSP, even just 500 prospects in an email list is enough. I mean, 1000, 2000 would be better, but 500 prospects is enough because it’s not like you need 50 new clients every single week. You need one new client a month, or every now and again, or whatever will fill the capacity that your MSP has got.

Paul Green:
So when it comes to email marketing, as I said, the challenge is getting it delivered to them. The challenge is, then, to get them to open it. And, what dictates whether or not someone opens an email versus deleting it, or just hitting the spam button, are two things. The first is the person or the company that sent it to them, and the second is the subject line.

Paul Green:
Now, I prefer to send emails that come from me, so if you’re on my email list, and if you’re not you can go and join up at paulgreensmspmarketing.com, and you’ll see that when I send out promotional emails, they just have my name, Paul Green, in the subject line. So what I’m looking to do is to build a relationship with my audience, and it’s based around my name. Company name is irrelevant to me, and you could do exactly the same with your MSP. You could base the name around you, so your MSP might be called XYZ IT, and your name might be Dave Smith but it’s much better to send it as Dave Smith. People who receive emails from other people are more likely to open them, more likely to build a bond. And ultimately, people buy from people anyway. People don’t buy from companies, they just buy from other people.

Paul Green:
I would send your promotional emails with a name, just make sure it’s a name of someone who isn’t going to leave. As the owner of the business, you’re the last person to leave. In fact, when you do leave, you care less about what happens to the business. You can always broker a deal to license your name for a year, for the new owners when they’re doing email marketing, if that’s important to them. So the sender name is easy, the hard thing is getting the email subject lines right.

Paul Green:
So I’ve got here three or four areas of subject lines, which I’ve always found work very, very well. And from what I’ve read in the newsletters that I’m subscribed to, because I’m subscribed to it feels like hundreds of different email marketing lists, these are the ones that tend to perform better.

Paul Green:
So in no particular order, we’ll start with social proof. Now, social proof is where most people prefer to do what most other people are doing. Social proof directly hooks into us as cave-dwelling animals, who are somewhere in the middle of the food chain, something’s going to eat us, so therefore, basically, if we stick together, there’s safety in numbers. We prefer to do what most other people are doing. A social proof email subject line is a very smart thing to do, something that, perhaps, highlights how other people are using your service.

Paul Green:
So you could say something like, “We’re humbled at this feedback from our client,” that would be a great piece of social proof. Or, if there is actually a short snippet of something they’ve actually written in a review, or a testimonial, you’d actually put that short line in the subject line, perhaps in inverted commas. Now, the concept of social proof was first coined by Dr. Robert Cialdini, in his 1980s, 1990s book Influence, and he calls it a weapon of influence.

Paul Green:
In fact, another one of his weapons of influence is scarcity, because when there’s only a short supply of something, we have to make a decision in our brains. Do we want this, or don’t we want it? So scarcity, or urgency, can be a great email subject line as well. In fact, I would say this is one of the most powerful types of subject line you have to use. The only issue you’ve got with scarcity for an MSP is, what’s your real scarcity? Because software licenses never run out, hardware, I know we’ve had supply issues, but hardware doesn’t really run out in normal times. The only thing you’ve got that really runs out is appointments, or slots, or project time, or something like that. So a great scarcity email subject line would be something like, “There are only three of these available.” Or, much better, maybe, is a deadline. “This ends on Sunday at six PM,” something like that.

Paul Green:
Another subject line that’s easy, and gets good open rates as well, is actually just relaying news. So you can take something that’s happening in our world, and let’s be honest, there’s plenty of places to go within the channel to do this, and then you can just rewrite it, and pop it in your email newsletter, and the subject line can be about something new. People do love reading about new devices, they do love reading about new services, so long as they’re relevant to them. The big challenge for you in doing this is not to be too techy. If you’re too techy, and you start using technical terms, you’re going to absolutely lose your audience, and they’re not going to open your emails. But, relaying news, rewriting news, can work very well.

Paul Green:
Two more for you, then. One of them is telling a story, or starting to tell a story in a subject line. For example, if you’re talking about someone who got hacked, and what a nightmare they went through, you might use, as your subject line, “This is the worst nightmare any business owner can face.” That, in itself, is compelling, it’s almost like a headline. You’ve got to think of email subjects as headlines to the story. “This is the worst nightmare any business owner could face,” that’s a very compelling subject line, a very compelling headline, and would make me want to open the email, to see what the nightmare is because it feels relevant to me, because I am business owner, and I would want to know what that is.

Paul Green:
The final one I’m going to suggest to you is just simply offers. Offering them free stuff, offering them sales on things, offering them not discounts, but value add, people love offers. Even intelligent B2B buyers are emotionally persuaded by offers, they really, really are. So, why not make offers to them, and offer them different things? It works incredibly well.

Paul Green:
With all of these, though, you have to make sure you use a variety of things. If you were to use scarcity in every single email you went out, it would lose its impact very quickly. If every single email you sent out was an offer, you would soon get people unsubscribing. Because there’s got to be a balance, a balance of subjects, a balance of content. That’s the trick to you, when you’re doing your email newsletters, your email marketing, is getting the balance right so people don’t get sick of what it is that you’re sending out.

Paul Green:
You will have people unsubscribing, but it’s going to be a very, very tiny percentage of people who’ve chosen to opt in. In fact, as you watch unsubscription rates go up, that’s your audience telling you that you haven’t quite got your content mix quite right. And you need to go back, and address the balance, and just put a bit more variety in there.

Voiceover:
Paul’s blatant plug.

Paul Green:
So since you’re staying, if you’re not on my email list, and you want to get my emails, just visit the website. I can actually go one further with that. Would you like a free copy of my book? It’s called Updating Servers Doesn’t Grow Your Business, and it’s the ultimate guide to marketing your MSPs. Not a very long read, it’s only about 44 pages, and it is a proper, physical print book. If you’re based either in the US, or the UK, we have copies sat in warehouses that we’re ready to ship to you. And, if you’re based anywhere else in the world, you can still get a copy of the book. Unfortunately, it’s just a PDF.

Paul Green:
Hey, to get your copy, all you got to do is go to my website, paulgreensmspmarketing.com. There on the homepage, the details of this book, just fill in your contact details. We’ll send you an immediate PDF, no matter where you are, and if you fill in your address in the US or the UK, we will post a copy to you, which should reach you in just a few days.

Voiceover:
The big interview.

Heather Harlos:
Hey, I am Heather Harlos, I’m from Greenville, South Carolina, in the states. I work at Bitdefender, and oversee their go-to-market strategy for all of cloud and MSP. And just a little bit about myself, I grew up on a farm, and I could actually ride a horse before I could walk.

Paul Green:
That’s amazing.

Heather Harlos:
That’s a little fun fact.

Paul Green:
It is, yeah. You hear things like that, and you never quite believe that people are brought up like that. But, that’s a pretty amazing fact.

Paul Green:
Now, we’re talking about marketing in the digital age, and of course, with everything that’s happened in the last three months or so, marketing has been quite severely disrupted. And I say disrupted, because it’s created some enormous opportunities for some people, and obviously stopped certain other marketing practices from working well.

Paul Green:
Now, you’ve been working remotely for some time with Bitdefender, and you’re used to this new digital age of marketing. What kind of marketing that you’re seeing, that works really well for MSPs right now?

Heather Harlos:
Yeah, it’s sort of interesting what I’m seeing now. I feel like people are more willing to connect now, than they ever were before. So if you really think about it, people just want to feel like they know somebody, whether it’s in person or digitally. There’s a different expectation from that digital experience, that it is more personal, and really just more of an engagement on a personal level versus always selling.

Heather Harlos:
So a lot of the things that I’ve seen that have worked is doing a little more around … you could do a virtual happy hour, or you could set up your website with some intelligence on the background, and we know all of your MSPs are really good with technology, but where it can actually create profiles, and customise that journey and that content for them. So they feel like they’re getting to what they need in a way that’s organic, and, they aren’t having to go through 20 pages to get there.

Heather Harlos:
One thing that I always tell people is it’s not always the right time to ask somebody to buy something, I think that’s something that salespeople miss, just in general, and some business people miss in general. If somebody’s just now figuring out about you, you probably shouldn’t ask them to buy something yet. It should be more about learning who they are, and who you are, and then wait for that right touchpoint to actually ask for the transaction.

Paul Green:
Completely agree with you, because it is about getting the right message in front of the right person, at exactly the right moment. As you say, people only buy when they’re ready to buy.

Paul Green:
So the MSPs that you see that are most successful with this, are they using specific types of software, such as HubSpot, or other kinds of software that allow them to track that relationship? Or, is it just being done almost a little bit more organically, using humans and spreadsheets, and stuff like that?

Heather Harlos:
I actually think it is a little more automated now. I think the average buyer is smarter with technology than they used to be, so in general, if people have to call you, I feel like it’s a problem a lot of times. Other than the off-handed meeting, and maybe a happy hour or something like that, but people don’t necessarily have to want to talk to people. But they want to feel like you know who they are.

Heather Harlos:
What I’m seeing is people that actually have a more robust website with some intelligence behind, so people who get that information faster, is actually working better than the ones that are doing the speed dialling for numbers.

Heather Harlos:
An interesting statistic I found was, if you actually look at digital devices, it’s around, I think, 127 devices are actually connected online per second, and that’s probably changed since the last time I actually looked this up. But, when you’re thinking about how to build out your websites, and build out your digital footprint, think mobile first because everybody’s working remote or they’re on the go. So you don’t have that person sitting there, next to their phone all the time, so you need to think about how to engage with them in a different way.

Paul Green:
So when you talk about things like having more assets available on your website so that people don’t have to pick up the phone, … Because again, I agree with you, I think people would prefer not to pick up the phone these days, unless they’re in a distress position. What kind of stuff do you think every MSP should have on their website?

Heather Harlos:
As a standard, you should always have an about section, some way of people to be able to reach out with you, contact forms on each page. That should be a standard in every template that you build.

Heather Harlos:
But, what I think people tend to do is they try to look like they are good at everything. So if you think about it, most people in … And, in general, you can do everything, but everybody can specialise in something. So the websites that really point out the verticals, or the solutions that they really specialise in, and build that first, they have more credibility. Especially with me, when I go search for somebody, if it’s somebody that says, “Hey, we can do it all,” nobody’s great at everything, and you shouldn’t position yourself that way.

Heather Harlos:
So I think that the most successful websites are built around a specialisation, and you separate your website in a way, from a navigation standpoint, that is easy to get to that. Always have the products, always have the services, but don’t forget about those solution pages or vertical pages, so that somebody that is in that area, they go there and they’re like, “Oh, they know who I am, they work with other people like me.”

Paul Green:
You mentioned a couple of times a happy hour. Can you tell me what a happy hour is? Obviously, I know what it is in a bar, but what is a happy hour on a website, or in digital marketing?

Heather Harlos:
Yeah, and this is something that, honestly, probably would have never came about if it wasn’t for the past couple months. So I have seen, and we’ve actually done, virtual happy hours. Normally you would go to a bar, but obviously, we weren’t able to do that.

Heather Harlos:
So what we did is we actually sent what I would call a care package, with our branding, to customers, and it had a bottle of wine in it, it had the glass in it, it had some snacks in it. We scheduled a time to meet “face to face,” over a virtual happy hour, using Zoom, or Ring Central, or Webex. Any of the above would work. But, it was a really cool way because people just wanted that personal touchpoint, and they didn’t want to talk about business. They just wanted to know people were going through the same things they were, and to really forget what was going on for a little while, so it was actually a pretty cool experience.

Heather Harlos:
I’ve also seen people do story times, I’ve seen people do virtual yoga classes, so you can find common interests. And, you don’t have to be in the same city, or even the same country, to share those experiences anymore, which is pretty cool, really, when you think about where technology’s taken us.

Paul Green:
It is pretty cool, because obviously MSPs can, theoretically, service any business, anywhere in the world. And, the fact that we are all working more remotely now, and digital marketing has taken a great big leap forward in the last few months, it certainly does open up all sorts of quite exciting opportunities.

Paul Green:
You mentioned verticals, I think vertical marketing is going to be a way forward for so many MSPs. So you have your general business, based in your local geographical area, but you also have a vertical that you super serve, and that could be anywhere in the country, or indeed, anywhere in the world.

Heather Harlos:
When you think about verticals, use that to actually expand your reach to areas you don’t touch. So I recommend for anybody to take time to do an exercise, figuring out what your social graph is.

Heather Harlos:
When I go into LinkedIn and I post something, I have a certain circle of people that I know are engaging with me, that would reshare that. But, when they reshare it, they have a circle of people that actually trust them, and reshare it from there. You can actually leverage those specialities, and those verticals, in building those virtual relationships to expand your reach to people that aren’t actually in that vertical.

Paul Green:
Heather, tell us a little bit about Bitdefender, and how we can get in touch with you?

Heather Harlos:
Yeah, definitely. Bitdefender is a cybersecurity company, we’re actually one of the leaders in the MSP space. We do everything from end point protection, virtual environments, email protection. Really, just insert name here, and we pretty much cover it. The easiest way to get in touch with us is to go to www.bitdefender.com, super simple.

Voiceover:
Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast, Ask Paul Anything.

Justin:
My name is Justin, from Press Start Limited. Can you suggest a good way to recruit second and third line technicians?

Paul Green:
Yes I can. Great question, Justin, thank you very much.

Paul Green:
We all know that recruitment can be one of the biggest headaches for MSPs right now. Your first line techs, not so difficult because, let’s be honest, you can hire good people with a great attitude, and you can teach them to be first line techs. There’s plenty of training around, there’s plenty of mentoring from you, and from your team. The issue you’ve got is people with that established knowledge base in their head, that skill, that ability, that second and third line techs bring. Many of the MSPs that I speak to do have issues recruiting second and third line techs.

Paul Green:
I think there’s a two-pronged approach that you can take to this. Now firstly, you could take a more proactive approach, and that’s to be actually recruiting second and third line techs, constantly. So you don’t just wait until you’ve got a vacancy, you already have people lined up. For example, you could get in contact with the second and third line techs, bigger competitors, perhaps in the next town, people that you don’t naturally come into competition with.

Paul Green:
But, the reason I say bigger competitors is often, second and third line techs get lost when there’s 20, 30, 40 people sat in a building, it’s so much easier for people to be lost, for no one really to know that they’re there. That can lead to a level of dissatisfaction for some, a little almost of disengagement with their job. So you could be constantly in touch with these people, or you could be in touch with second and third line techs who don’t work for MSPs, but they are in technical support roles, perhaps in your town. I guess what I’m saying here is don’t go and poach from your neighbours because if you poach from your neighbours, your neighbours are going to go and poach from you. There are other sources of second and third line techs, without you directly stealing from your direct competitors.

Paul Green:
You could just reach out to people, you could contact them on LinkedIn, you could send a piece of direct mail to them at their workplace, which is a pretty gutsy thing to do, but I still think it’s a good idea to do it sometimes. And you could just get in touch with them and say, “Hey, can we go for a coffee? Can we go for a beer? We’re not recruiting right now, but at least once a year we’re looking for a second or a third line tech. It would be great just to get to know you, to see if, perhaps, we could end up doing some work together, down the line.” Essentially, it’s a no commitment meeting. Some of those people will just want to meet with you, just because they can, and they’ll want to have a chat. It’s your way of getting to know, would I want to work with this person?

Paul Green:
In fact, what a great way to line up potential future employees. To have a coffee with them, every six months, or every year, just to keep in touch. Learn about them, see what’s happening in their life, and then when you do have a vacancy, all you’ve got to do is you’ve got to pick up the phone, and make two or three phone calls. And say, “Right, it’s time, we’ve got a vacancy. Is this the right time for you to actually formally start to talk about you coming to work here? If the timing’s not right, no problem, I’ve got someone else I can try.”

Paul Green:
Now, that would be the most proactive, and the most powerful way to do it. The reality is, very few of us have the time to sit and build up a recruitment pipeline like that, it almost becomes a specialist job in itself. In which case, you’ve got the reactive way to do it, which is to recruit people at the point you have a problem.

Paul Green:
Now here, we can bring into play something that we talked about back in episode 23, seven episodes ago, we talked about the world’s best recruitment advert. The goal here was to stand out from all the other second and third line tech adverts. Because you look at wherever you look for your adverts, and they’re all the same, everyone’s talking about, “Second line technician needed, must have this, must have that, must have this qualification,” and so it’s very hard to stand out.

Paul Green:
My recommendation for you, seven episodes ago, was to have a video advert. So you might even have an advert which says, “You don’t want this job. To find out why you don’t want this job, go to,” and you send them to a page on your website, and there’s a video of you and your staff. And you talk about how hard you work, you talk about all the training that they have to do, you talk about how great the clients are. Essentially, you show the attitude of your business in the video ad. Maybe even you get your existing staff to be in that video, and to talk about how, yes they love it, and they love the fact that it pays well, and it works well, but it is hard work.

Paul Green:
Because not only are we differentiating the business by showing how different it is to all the other adverts, but we’re also showing that look, this isn’t going to be an easy ride, you’re going to be worked hard here, but it’s going to be incredibly rewarding for you. That’s going to appeal to a very specific kind of person, the kind of person that we want. The person whose got a good work ethic, who doesn’t complain, who doesn’t whinge, and brings a great attitude. Because if you could hire that kind of person, you can work with that person every single day of the week.

Paul Green:
I guess, the key with your recruitment, like any other kind of marketing, because recruitment is just a marketing exercise, is to look at what everyone else is doing, and do something a little bit different. Because if you can stand out, that’s half the battle won.

Voiceover:
How to contribute to the show.

Paul Green:
Come on, let’s get your question on the show, it would be great to hear from you. Just record it on your phone, and you can email the audio file to me, hello@paulgreensmspmarketing.com.

Voiceover:
Coming up next week.

Jim Smith:
I can’t thank you enough for the time and the energy, and I’m sorry I didn’t find your podcast sooner. The quality is stellar.

Paul Green:
That’s Jim Smith, he’s an MSP owner from just outside Philadelphia. And next week, he’s the star of an MSP Marketing Podcast special. I did an hour long marketing consult with Jim, and he was kind enough to allow me to record it for you. We do a deep dive into how to get new clients for his MSP, and you can follow along, and copy the process as well.

Paul Green:
Now, this is unlike anything I’ve ever done before on this podcast, and I believe it’s going to be a very valuable episode for you. So I can’t wait for you to hear it next week, I’ll see you then.

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