Episode 38: How MSPs can offer killer deals without looking cheap

Episode 38: How MSPs can offer killer deals without looking cheap

Paul Green

Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast
Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast
Episode 38: How MSPs can offer killer deals without looking cheap
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In this week’s episode

  • Have you got the tattoo? Have you got ‘we don’t do discounts’ tattooed across your forehead? You should have! This week Paul explains why it’s important not to discount – and what you can offer instead as a sales incentive
  • Also this week Paul chats to the owner of an MSP based in the States with 85 staff. He’s developed a great system to help you feel more like their boss and less like their babysitter!
  • Paul’s also going to be looking at how you can run a marketing audit on your competitors, find out exactly what kind of marketing they’re doing and exactly what you can do to make sure you’re a step ahead

Show notes

Episode transcription

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

Paul Green:
What do you mean it’s already August? How did that happen? Here’s what’s coming up on today’s show.

Peter Melby:
Google has always been regarded as having a great culture. Their average employee tenure was only 1.9 years. I look at it and say, “Well, wait. If I have a business that needs my employees to stay longer than Google’s business, how do I do that?”

Paul Green:
We’re also going to look at how you can do a marketing audit on your competitors, see if they’re doing more marketing than you’re doing, and we’ll answer the question of whether or not you should be using something like Customer Thermometer to see how happy your clients are.

Voiceover:
Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast.

Paul Green:
I’m quite unusual for a business owner in that I don’t lease a brand new car. Most of the business owners I know, and many of the MSPs, not all, but many of them, they lease brand new cars through the business. And especially if you’re doing it electric. An electric car, it can be quite a tax efficient way to do it. But for some reason, I’m still a bit grounded in 2005 with my car purchasing.

Paul Green:
So, I bought my last car. It was a BMW five series. It’s still sat on the drive outside my house right now. Absolutely adore it. It was only a couple of years old when I bought it. But for me in my head, I’m getting around that massive depreciation. Leasing to me is like renting a house. It just seems like throwing away good money. And if you buy a brand new car, you seem to lose all that value when you first drive it off the forecourt.

Paul Green:
No. So, that’s the way I think and I know I’ll get feedback from people telling me I’m wrong and I should be leasing a Tesla cause I want a Tesla and all of that kind of stuff. But I’m quite happy with my car choice. And what I liked about when I bought this car was I got to play the game with the salesperson. Obviously, this is all pre-COVID. This is back when you could just waltz into a car dealership and just take a car out for a test drive and smile internally and think, “This is the one, this is the one.” And try and hide it from the salesperson so you can negotiate. And that’s what the game is, isn’t it? It’s a negotiation. And I remember sitting, I went to one of those car supermarket places, and I took this one out for a drive.

Paul Green:
It was lovely. It got all the toys, all the bells and whistles. It was exactly what I wanted. I knew it, he knew it. It was a done deal. But then we went back inside and I sat opposite him at a desk and I tried to play cool. I crossed my arms, I crossed my legs, sat back in my chair. And he said to me, “So what do you think?” And I said, “Yeah, it’s okay. It’s all right. I’m going to need a deal.”

Paul Green:
That was my exact words. God, I sound like such an idiot hearing myself say that. “I’m going to need a deal.” That’s what I said to him. Now, obviously this is the game. All people play this at car show rooms. And one of the first things that the car sales guy had said to me that morning when I went in was, “We don’t discount our cars.” Which is a very sensible thing and I do not recommend you discount your services in any way.

Paul Green:
But even though he’d said, “We don’t do discounts.” I said to him, “I want a deal.” And we thrashed out a deal. It was a couple of years ago now, I can’t remember exactly what the deal was. But I think, I’m pretty sure, that they threw in a year’s worth of servicing, I seem to remember I didn’t pay for that. A full tank of fuel, which was quite important for me. Because often you’ll pick up a new car and it’s got no fuel in it and that’s just annoying. I think they threw in something called Guard X, which is that special chemical that they put on the seats so when your kids pour their fizzy drinks all over it, it doesn’t actually damage the seats.

Paul Green:
They put something on the outside as well. I think they did an alloy wheel polish for me. Obviously, new mats. I think I asked for a bottle of champagne and he laughed at that one. He said, “No, that’s not going to happen.”

Paul Green:
Because you see, all those items that he gave me as part of the deal and I just put the word deal there into inverted commerce. All those items were just things that their preparation guys would do. They were selling 10 to 20 cars a day, I seem to remember. Quite a high number of cars. So they just got a whole load of guys, constantly chucking these cars out. I wasn’t really asking for anything that difficult. But I wanted to feel like I’d got a deal because I was ready to spend my money there and then. I was very happy to do it. And I did go on and actually buy some extra stuff from them.

Paul Green:
I bought the gap insurance, which pays off your debt if you write your car off when you’ve still got outstanding debt on it, or certainly the gap between the debt and the value of the car. And I bought something else from them as well. It might’ve been an extended servicing pack or something like that. I can’t remember. But I enjoyed that process. And part of that process, is I wanted to feel like I’d got a deal.

Paul Green:
Now, when someone buys from you, it’s exactly the same. Because there’s something very key to remember. And that is that people hate being sold to, but they love to buy. In fact, they love to buy so much that even when they’re buying something for their business, even when it’s a B2B purchase, they still adore buying it. And this is something that you can leverage because when you’re talking to a prospect and you’re talking about the service levels and you’re talking about what’s in their monthly package and you’re talking about the projects, you’ve got to hold something back to offer them a deal.

Paul Green:
Not everyone is going to need a deal. But you know what? Everyone’s going to want a deal. What if you could say to one of your top prospects, “Look, here’s what we’ve put together for you. This is the right package. This is what we do. We do not discount.” Which absolutely should be tattooed on your head. “We do not discount.” Because you do not want to be the MSP that discounts. By discounting, you devalue the relationship before it’s even started.

Paul Green:
But you can be the MSP that offers deals. What could you throw in that’s extra for their monthly subscription that it really costs you very little and yet for them it feels like a deal. Maybe, just maybe, you could upgrade them to a new security pack, which is what? A couple of pounds, a couple of dollars a month worth of subscriptions for you to add in some safety tools, but for them they protected.

Paul Green:
Maybe you could up them. So, instead of just daily backups, they’re on continuous backups, which again is just a setting for you, isn’t it? What are those settings in all those different subscription packages that you’ve got, that really the setting could be it has no financial impact on you if you use setting A over setting B, but there is a perceived deal for the client. What if they perceive that they’re getting something better?

Paul Green:
What if universally, and you make sure that this doesn’t become known, but universally for your clients, if they choose the middle package, you upgrade them to the top package. If they choose the top package, you throw in some extra stuff. If they choose the bottom package, you upgrade them for free, in inverted commerce, to the middle package. So, basically right from the get go, they’re getting more than they signed up for.

Paul Green:
Whenever I’m selling one of my training programs, we always bundle in bonuses. Always. Always do that. Because it’s something which makes people feel like they’re getting a good deal. Or if we don’t do a bonus upfront, they will do a bonus in the background. At the time of recording, I’ve just started a brand new live training program. It’s a five week program on my website called the MSP marketing accelerator. And I’ve just done my first live call today, took about two hours to talk to the 27 MSPs on board with that training and the first thing I did was I dropped a value bomb for them. Love that saying, dropped a value bomb.

Paul Green:
The first thing I did was I said to them, “Look, you didn’t know you were going to get this when you signed up for this program, but you’re going to have direct access to me on email. Please don’t send me an essay or ask me to do a 20 minute website review of your website. That’s not going to happen, but here’s my email address and you can send me short questions and I will happily answer those questions and send me as many as you like.”

Paul Green:
And the reason I did that, and I was always planning to do that, was because I wanted the people who just committed to joining me on a training program, it wasn’t massively expensive, but I wanted them to feel that instantly they got good value. And we debated, my team and I, whether or not we put that into the sales literature or whether or not we offer that just as a bonus for people when they started on day one. And I’m glad we did it that way, because it makes people feel like they’ve got a really good deal. So then they relax. They enjoy the training, they implement it, and they end up with better marketing for their MSP.

Paul Green:
So what have you got them? What can you do to create the feeling of a deal? Because people buy emotionally. They do not buy with their head. They’re not making cognitive buying decisions. They’re making emotional buying decisions. That deal could really seal the brand new client that you could then keep for 10 years. Have a chat to your team, identify what you’ve got. Don’t cheapen your product in any way, but how can you put together an absolutely killer deal which will just seal it for you?

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

Paul Green:
Whenever my clients ask me about how they can track their competitors and their competitors marketing, nine times out of 10, I say, “I wouldn’t bother with that.” Just focus on your own marketing, because the problem with looking at what your competitors are doing all the time is you take your eye off the real ball and the real ball is what you’re doing with your marketing. At the same time, I know sometimes you just want to know what your competitors are doing. So, here’s how to do a very simple competitor marketing audit, is to find out what it is that your competitors are doing.

Paul Green:
Just almost, if you like, establish a baseline. You almost want to establish, are these people doing something or not? Are they active marketers or people that we can just ignore? Because remember, in any marketplace, there’s only really a tiny handful of MSPs who are actually doing any marketing. The vast majority of them aren’t doing anything particularly significant. Now there are all sorts of clever tools that you can use and I’m going to list a couple of tools at the end. If you Google how to do a marketing audit on your competitors or how to see your competitors marketing, you’ll see a whole load of paid tools.

Paul Green:
My gut feel is unless you’re in a very, very big market with a lot of very aggressive competitors who are throwing a significant amount of money at marketing, you’re just not going to see any results from these tools. These tools are for the big boys. The guys who are spending 20, $30,000 a day on marketing. They want to know what their competitors are doing and what keywords they’re using and all of that kind of stuff. I honestly think for your average MSP, you’re just kind of wasting time and money with stuff like that. But you can do the basics and here are the basics.

Paul Green:
The very first thing you can do is you can look at their website, go in and find the site map for their website. And that way you can see every single page that they’ve got available. Because of course not all of us linked to every single page in our navigation.

Paul Green:
I have hundreds of pages on my website, which no are longer linked from the navigation, because they’re just not relevant, but they’re still there. You look at the site map, you’d still be able to find them if you really want to spend your life looking for those. But for your competitors, go and have a look. You can see what kind of marketing offers they’ve maybe done in the past. You can see all sorts of things.

Paul Green:
How do you find someone’s site map? It’s simple. First of all, you can try just looking for it directly. So, if you go to their website.com/sitemap.xml or even maybe just /sitemap, that might do it. Now, if that doesn’t work, then just Google this search term and we’ll put this in the show notes, “site: theirwebsite.com, and then a space, and then filetype: xml”

Paul Green:
Because all the site map is it’s an XML document which is fed into Google, which tells Google all of the pages on that website. And once you’ve found that, it’s very easy to go and see where all the pages are. By the way, if your competitor has a lot of pages or a really big site map, or you’ve just got a lot of competitors you want to do this for, then there are some paid services. There’s one called visualsitemaps.com. And I only know this because I’m looking at the advert for it. And it says free site map generator. Know your competitor’s website. Thing is, that’s an ad. And if someone’s paying a number of dollars for me to see that ad, then the chances are it’s a premium service in some way.

Paul Green:
But I think for most of your competitors, just go looking for that site map extension. That’s the easiest way to do it. So, find all their pages, have a good look through it, go and look at all their blog pages, look at everything. The other thing that you can do is you can look to see how their website has changed over the years. Have you heard of the way back machine? If you just Google the phrase “way back machine,” it’s an internet archive. It’s actually a website that takes screenshots of websites on a reasonably regular basis so there is a historical record. It’s like a museum for how websites used to look.

Paul Green:
And by the way, you’ll inevitably at some point think, “Oh, I wonder what Amazon looked like in 2004.” And you will lose an evening so easily looking at popular websites from back then. But you can go and see old versions of your own website and more importantly, old versions, of your competitor’s website.

Paul Green:
What kind of stuff were they doing back in the day? And how has that changed now? Because stuff that’s not on the website is almost as informative as what is on the website right now. The other thing that you can do as part of your marketing audit is you can just Google your competitor’s name and what you get to see from this is their overall digital footprint. So, you will see their website of course, that will come up.

Paul Green:
You will see potentially listings in public directories like here in the UK, we have something called Companies House, which is a register of all limited companies and that company names should come up when you Google their name and you can have a look at the listings there. You’ll see reviews. In fact, you’ll see all sorts of stuff. If you’ve never Googled your own company name and not just looked at the first page, but the second page and the third page and the fourth page, you find stuff that people have said about your company online and you had no idea. Really, really is quite a scary thing to do.

Paul Green:
And this is your digital footprint. And this, by the way, is what some of your prospects and some of your leads are doing before they’re thinking of buying from you. So, you should definitely do it for your business and you should do it for your competitors as well. While you’re doing this, something else you should do is set up a Google alert for your competitors’ names.

Paul Green:
Put their names in inverted commerce over at Google alerts and then set it up so that you get alerted every single time that name is mentioned in a new place on the web. So, you’ll get a new alert every time they get a new review or they appear somewhere else on the web and it goes without saying that you should be doing that for your business name as well. So, you’re alerted when someone’s talking about you.

Paul Green:
Now, these are just the basics. You’re not going to get a lot of strategic stuff off here, but I’m pretty sure that you’ll find something of value about your competitors in there. Something that maybe has been sitting in plain view for years, but you just didn’t know about it.

Paul Green:
Then we get onto the clever tools and there is a tool in particular, which will allow you to see what Facebook adverts your competitors are running. And it’s actually a Facebook tool. You go to facebook.com/ads/library, this is the Facebook ads library. And you can actually look up your competitors adverts just by searching for their brand name. So, you type in the brand name the top and if they have a Facebook page, Facebook will tell you about it and then if they are running any ads, it will show you their ads. Only the ones that they’re currently running. Sadly, it won’t show you any historical ads. It will just show you what they’re currently running.

Paul Green:
That reminds me, I don’t think I’ve told you yet to go and check out their Facebook. Those were some basics, weren’t they? Go and check out their Facebook, go and check out their LinkedIn, go and check them out on Twitter. All of these things should probably have come up in their digital footprint. But having a look at their adverts in the Facebook ads library can be a fascinating insight into what they’re doing as well.

Paul Green:
Can you do exactly the same thing when it comes to looking at Google ads? Yes. I think you possibly can. There’s a website called spyfu, S-P-Y-F-U, dot com. And that will allow you to search for any competitor and actually download there keywords. Again, it looks like a paid for service. You might not be bothered to look at that. Or maybe, maybe, if there’s a particular MSP in your area that’s really dominant all over Google ads, maybe this is your way of finding out which keywords they’re using and then going to have a look at their specific adverts.

Paul Green:
Either way, whatever you do with all of this, you’ve got to remember not to obsess over what your competitors are doing. That wasn’t a particularly strategic series of ideas there. I could have suggested a SWOT analysis, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats. If you Google, “How to do a competitors’ marketing analysis,” you’ll find all sorts of strategic advice online.

Paul Green:
Me, I think you’re just, unless you’re a marketing manager for an MSP and it’s a big MSP and you really should know all of this stuff, I think for your average MSP owner that listens to a podcast like this, I honestly don’t think your time is well spent obsessing over your competitors in this way. Find out what they’re doing, sure, but make sure you don’t obsess over it.

Paul Green:
If you’re going to obsess over one thing, obsess over your own marketing.

Voiceover:
Paul’s blatant plug.

Paul Green:
So while you’re checking out your competitor’s marketing and looking at your own, perhaps I can just slot in here a service that I’ve got which may help you. It’s called the MSP Marketing Edge. And we deliver content every single month to more than 220 MSPs around the world. In fact, we only sell it to one MSP per area so you never clash, your marketing doesn’t clash with anyone else in your area. And what we do is we have four elements to this program.

Paul Green:
The stuff that you get monthly, stuff that you get weekly, there’s tools that are available to you, and then there’s a whole bunch of support. So the biggest part of this and that the crowning jewel, as it were, is what we deliver to you every month. There is so much stuff. There’s an educational guide, samples adverts in a pack, there’s a video, there are emails to prospects and clients, a month’s worth of social media, a sales letter, and a newsletter that you can print off and send to prospects. There’s a press release to send to your local media and campaign in a box, which you can use to commercialise all of this.

Paul Green:
And then we send you more stuff every week. We send you more up to date social media content and we send you more videos. And then we’ve got tools on offer to you. There’s a book called Email Hijack about email security, which you can put your name on the front and use as if you’d written it yourself.

Paul Green:
There’s a plugin to the website. Have I Been Pwned, which you can use so the people can go onto your website and check whether or not their email address has been breached and we’ve set it up in a way you can use it for data capture as well. And there’s a massive coronavirus 30 day campaign in a box, which is one of the many tools available to you.

Paul Green:
Now, we also have a Facebook group for this. It’s an exclusive Facebook group, only for my clients. If you’re not one of my clients, you won’t be in there and we’re just about to launch enhanced support, where we are offering hundreds of how to videos. Literally videos to show you how to do every possible marketing function that you could ever need to do as part of your marketing and there’s a handholding service as well.

Paul Green:
You can jump on a one-to-one zoom call with a member of my team and they will talk you through any part of your marketing that you or your team are stuck on. This is literally a no excuses service now. We are removing for you all the excuses that have stopped you from implementing your marketing and we’re making it easy and it’s so affordable as well. In the UK, it’s just £99 plus VAT per month. In the US and around the world it’s $129 per month and you know what? There’s no contract. Cancel any time. MSPmarketingedge.com.

Voiceover:
The big interview.

Peter Melby:
Hi, I’m Peter Melby, CEO of Greystone Technology and creator of the Boss or Babysitter framework around how to connect with and manage employees.

Paul Green:
So, it’s one of the most common questions that comes up really is how to get the most out of your team. Whether it’s through difficult times, like now, where we can’t physically sit in an office with our team in the way that we could a few months ago, or just in normal times. Tell us more about your boss or Babysitter concept.

Peter Melby:
It’s rooted in the idea that most managers, and myself included, do more babysitting than we intend to and than we want to. We want to trust our team members and we like it when we feel like we can trust our team members, but we don’t do it very well and our team members don’t do very well, at times, of being trustworthy.

Peter Melby:
And so we spend a lot of our time still doing very basic management tasks instead of really leading an organisation forward. And my view of that is that we just really don’t understand how humans work very well, and really incorporate that into our culture.

Peter Melby:
I reference a study done a few years ago that talked about the fact that Uber has a terrible company culture and terrible employee retention. Their average employee tenure is 1.23 years, which is pretty bad. That means they have to refill every position every 15 months. But the same study said that Google, who’s always been regarded as having a great culture, their average employee tenure was only 1.9 years. So it wasn’t that dramatic and so I looked at it and said, “Well, wait. If I have a business that needs my employees to stay longer than Google’s business, how do I do that?” And for us, it came with a very stark realisation of how people actually work, what they actually want, and be able to align those things culturally within our organisation.

Paul Green:
So you have an MSP with roundabout 100 staff. This isn’t just some theory you’ve come up with. You’re actually out there doing it with quite a scary number of staff and the most I’ve ever had was 15 and that was bad enough. I can’t imagine having 100. But what do you actually do? You must obviously have junior managers underneath you. You can’t physically coach and mentor 100 in one go. So, how do you do it?

Peter Melby:
There’s no just magic wand. One thing that we need to do. But the culture that we’ve built is around a few different ideas. And the first idea is that on a long enough timeline, every company culture succumbs to the laws of human nature. The number one thing that we need to understand is that people by nature are focused on themselves. I am. You are. And even when we’re doing things that seem like we’re going above and beyond for somebody else, in many cases it’s because it makes us feel good, because we like the achievement and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Peter Melby:
So when I say selfishness, I don’t use it in a negative frame. It’s more just how we’re wired to think about things. So what we talk about is the fact that if my selfishness and our company’s focus on achievement aligned with our employee’s focus on their achievement, then we create lasting culture.

Peter Melby:
It’s when I pretend that my employees are going to care more about my company than they do about themselves, that’s never going to happen. And so rather than try that, we’ve recognised that we can align our company culture and be very connected in reality. And so we have two monthly meetings. We have one monthly meeting within each four to seven person team and then we have one monthly meeting that’s a one on one between each employee and their supervisor that are very, very specific in the ways that we ask questions and prepare for those meetings so that we can get very efficient information moving in our company, but still very truthful information.

Paul Green:
Can you give us an example of the kind of information that you’d get out of a meeting like that?

Peter Melby:
We say often that the employment process is all based on lies, and we say that jokingly, but it’s relatively true. When someone shows up for a job interview, they’re not coming in as their true self. They’re coming in and showing the side of themselves that they want you to see so that you hire them. And when we come into a job interview, and even when we write up a job posting, we are saying we’re the best company to work for. So we’re only showing the best side of things. That’s something that the humans are often incentivised to do.

Peter Melby:
When we go to work, “I’m only going to show what I succeed at, because that will help me get that promotion or that raise. As long as they think I’m doing things well.”

Peter Melby:
Well, as a business owner, I need to know that things are being done well, or I need to know if they’re not being done well so that I can change our approach and make sure that we succeed. So, a couple of the things that we ask in a team meeting, everybody prepares a very simple sheet, we call it a story sheet. They talk about how they’re progressing in each aspect of their job, up to five things that can comprise their job description.

Peter Melby:
And then they answered the questions: What am I proud of in the past month? And what do I wish I had done better? And what am I stressed out about? What am I excited about?

Peter Melby:
Just getting that basic level of depth in human thinking and what we call psychological safety to be able to share openly and hear others share openly about their successes and their challenges. Those questions are at the root of that team meeting and then the one on one goes deeper. In each one on one, the employee and the manager each answer four questions and the employee answers the question, “How satisfied am I in my job and how engaged am I?”

Peter Melby:
We have a little red, yellow, green scale. It’s very simple. But we ask the employee, “What are you working to improve?” So, that we can understand how they’re viewing themselves. The manager will answer questions like, “What successes have you seen in the employee’s work?” But also, “What do you need the employee to adjust or to change or what actions do you do you need to correct?”

Peter Melby:
So, once a month we have employees saying, “Here’s what I’m working to improve.” And managers saying, “Here’s what we need you to improve.” And like clockwork, when you look at the piece of paper and you realise 80% of the time those things align. And so we’ve recognised that our people generally know where they’re failing and we don’t need to tell them that, we need to help them figure out solutions to that. And just by asking questions in a different way, rather than walking up to an employee randomly and saying, “You’re failing at this, you need to fix it.” And being very directive about that, we get a level of engagement and success at correcting action that we didn’t see before that.

Paul Green:
So this is very clever. It’s a constant nonstop feedback process between the team, between the individual, between the managers. So, I can see how that works and 20 odd years ago, I did a six month performance coaching diploma, which taught me some of those questions you were saying there, declaring something that you think has gone well and something that you think you could have done better, that’s almost exactly the same language that I learned on that course 20 years ago. So, that’s fascinating. Do you not find that when new people come into the team, they find this a really foreign and almost slightly scary process? Or do they tend to embrace it quite quickly?

Peter Melby:
It takes a little bit of time, for sure. We’ve been doing this now on some level for 10 years. What we’ve learned is that how we bring people into the company is very important. Even during the interview process, these are the types of things that we do in our company and then when we are very transparent about that, the first team meeting and the first one on one meeting, many of them come in quite nervous.

Peter Melby:
But the great thing about those meetings is that some of the other questions that we answer, they get to see all of their new peers talking about things that they wish they had done better. So, it’s incredibly encouraging and oftentimes disarming to see other people admitting their challenges, admitting their faults, and getting positive engagement with that.

Peter Melby:
And there’s a question on the one-on-one that is how can I support you better as a leader? And that’s a question that a new employee doesn’t necessarily know how to answer, because they haven’t had a lot of time. But even just knowing that once a month I’m going to be asking that question of them in a formalised way, tends to disarm things a little bit. So, people do engage relatively quickly once they get past those first couple of meetings,

Paul Green:
You said that Uber has an average tenure of about 1.2 years and Google was 1.9 years. You know I’m going to ask you for your business, for your MSP, what’s the average tenure?

Peter Melby:
Right now we’re at 2.8. It’s come up from, I think, 2.6 in the prior measurement. So, we’re obviously working to improve that. But the thing that we’ve also recognised is that employee retention is not the most important metric. It’s a very important metric to know. But there are times where employees outgrow their capacity or desire to be engaged with what we’re doing or that our company grows to the point that those jobs are not the right fit anymore.

Peter Melby:
And one of the most dangerous things that we can do is pretend that they are. But what our processes and our culture have allowed us to do is create an engagement where we can have those conversations as it’s happening instead of six months, 12 months, two years later, when we wonder why they’re not performing in their job.

Peter Melby:
So, we track a number of things. We track employee turnover, average employee tenure. But we also track things like regrettable turnover. Who’s an employee that left to go to a similar position? Who’s an employee that left where we didn’t get a chance to engage with them prior to that? Or who’s someone that we had to fire because we didn’t effectively coach and manage them along the way? And there are some nuances in there that have helped us a lot too.

Paul Green:
Peter, thank you. How can we get in touch with you and learn a little bit more about Boss or Babysitter?

Peter Melby:
Bossorbabysitter.com is a site that we have that has some resources about this. As you mentioned, my full time job is running my MSP, Greystonetech.com. LinkedIn is a great place to get in touch with me. I think that’s how we initially connected and I love connecting with other companies, other MSPs, other non-MSPs, around this people thing because at the end of the day, IT services is a people business whether we realise it or not. We’re people serving people and that is something that we’re all challenged by because people are difficult and feel free to reach out. Would love to chat and look forward to staying in touch with as many people as possible.

Voiceover:
Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. Ask Paul anything.

John Benson:
Hi, my name is John Benson from Yorkie Tech. Should I use something like Customer Thermometer to see how happy my clients are?

Paul Green:
Great question, John, thank you. And I think the short answer is yes. If you really care about knowing early on when your clients are starting to become dissatisfied. Because look, the way to go in MSP is really easy. I’ve mentioned before Jay Abraham’s three pillars of growing a business. You get more new clients, you get your existing clients to buy from you more often, and you get your existing clients to spend more every single time they buy. And there is a fourth one as well, which is you do everything in your power to retain your existing clients.

Paul Green:
Now, most MSPs are really good at this, which is why you’ve still got client number one, or number two, or number three from back in the day all those years ago. But still you need to keep a wary eye on all of your clients and just spot the levels of dissatisfaction when they creep in.

Paul Green:
Because there’s a percentage of your clients who are dissatisfied right now. It might only be a small percent, maybe five, maybe 10%. but unless you’ve got literally three clients and you’re over servicing those people, which is actually not a great long term strategy anyway, because it can only go down from there. Unless you’ve got three clients, if you’ve got more than that, there’s always going to be some level of dissatisfaction somewhere and it starts off small.

Paul Green:
And that level of dissatisfaction starts off small as well. But it grows over time. It’s often over the small things. It just seems to take longer for you to answer the phone these days. Nothing seems to be fixed as quickly as it used to be. I really liked it when Kevin was here and now Kevin seems to have gone. You see what I mean? All those kinds of small things.

Paul Green:
So I think using Customer Thermometer just gives you an overview. It allows you to know generally how satisfied are people because you probably hear about the big screw ups because you have to get involved and you have to go and fix it, implicate the clients. But does anyone ever tell you about the small screw ups? The simple fix ticket that took four hours because it got forgotten about? The tech who forgot to ring someone back? The fix that actually made things worse? Does anyone ever tell you about these things or are they just hoping that you won’t find out about them?

Paul Green:
So, something like Customer Thermometer or one of the other systems could actually be a very, very good way for you to know, if you’d like an early warning sign, the customers directly telling you with the press of a button at the end of a support ticket when there’s some kind of problem that actually they really would like you to get involved and placate. And if you can get involved before they become unhappy, then your chances of keeping that client long term have just gone up dramatically.

Voiceover:
How to contribute to the show.

Paul Green:
We are now open for new questions that I can answer on this podcast. What have you always wanted to ask me about marketing? It could be something really simple like John’s question there, or it could be something devilishly difficult that you think is going to get me. Whatever your question is, I will put it on this podcast and I will answer it.

Paul Green:
Two ways that you can get your question to me. You can either just do a simple voice recording on your phone and email it through to hello@PaulGreensMSPMarketing.com, or you can go onto this podcast page and you’ll see a little orange button just underneath the audio player and that’s something called speak drive. You can click that button and there and then in the browser send me a voicemail. It’s really simple to use and it just works. Go on. Submit your question to me either, email it over or stick it through that podcast page. I’ll really appreciate it and I’ll answer your question on the podcast as well.

Voiceover:
Coming up next week.

Michelle Mills-Porter:
I once booked an appointment, from a cold call, I booked an appointment with the marketing director at Microsoft. I had him in absolute hysterics within just a few minutes and he actually turned around to me and said, “Michelle, if your organisation has got half your personality, then I will give them a job.”

Paul Green:
That’s Michelle Mills-Porter. She’s an expert on using the phone to communicate better and be more persuasive and she’s going to be here on the show next week telling you how to use that phone as your best secret sales weapon. Even when you hate picking it up and dialling those numbers. We’re also going to be talking next week about making the transition from being just a supplier to actually being a trusted partner. It’s what we all want and yet how do we actually do it? We’ll talk about that next week and also we’ll look at how to upgrade your website to help you win more business. I’ve got a series of simple things you can do that will make quite a difference to your marketing. See you next week.

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