Episode 85: MSPs: Avoid commission-only sales people

Episode 85: MSPs: Avoid commission-only sales people

Paul Green

Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast
Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast
Episode 85: MSPs: Avoid commission-only sales people
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In this week’s episode

  • Few MSP owners enjoy selling. And so inevitably at some point, everyone considers getting in a sales person to replace themselves. This is the right way of thinking for the long-term… but you absolutely never ever want to hire a commission-only sales person. Paul explains why in today’s podcast
  • Also on the show this week, how do you go about getting free publicity and what do you do with it when you get it? Listen as Paul (a former journalist) helps you get the most out of the traditional ‘press release’
  • There’s also a fascinating conversation with an E-Learning expert – it’s an area of huge growth and you’ll discover how your MSP can benefit

Show notes

Episode transcription

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

Paul Green:
Thank you so much for giving me your ears for the next 20, 25 minutes or so. Here’s what we’ve got coming up in today’s show.

Derek Morgan:
Users can actually go onto that platform and easily search and find the answers to the questions that they’re after.

Paul Green:
We’re also going to be talking about why your MSP should be sending out regular press releases to your local media and to news blogs. Plus we’ve got another book suggestion at the end of the show, and we’re going to be telling you about a competition we’re doing next week to win an incredible prize.

Voiceover:
Paul Green’s MSP Marketing podcast.

Paul Green:
There’s a question that about two or three separate people have asked me over the last couple of months, and my answer has always been an emphatic 100% no. What’s the question? It’s should I get a commission only sales person for my MSP? And the commission only sales person varies from someone that’s physically out there doing the selling to someone that’s bashing phones trying to book appointments for you. I truly believe that commission only sales people are utterly not the right route for your business no matter how tight your resources.

Paul Green:
Let me explain why. Now, the theory goes that if someone is that good at sales then a commission only deal, particularly where there’s no cap on that commission, should be highly attractive to them. And I guess on paper it does work that way. But here’s the thing, in real life anyone that’s actually any good at selling at all can very quickly get themselves a proper sales job where they get a good basic and some good perks on top of a great commission structure. Let me put that another way, the best sales people wouldn’t work on a commission only basis because they know that they have a greater worth than that.

Paul Green:
It’s not just about them committing to the company, the company has to be committed to them, and paying them a good salary is the way that the company commits to them as well as training and terms of work and all of that kind of stuff. Commission only sales people, in my limited experience because I haven’t worked with a lot of commission only sales people, but I’ve seen it go wrong for lots of people. Commission only sales people tend to be very, very motivated to achieve whatever it takes to get them commission, even if actually that doesn’t help you to achieve your overall goals.

Paul Green:
Let me give you an example. Supposing you had someone on commission only who’s job was to book you 15 minute video calls. So they’re phoning, they’re literally making outbound phone calls to your databases, your email list, your LinkedIn connections, any other followings you’ve got. And their job is to book 15 minute phone calls with you, or video calls with you. That’s actually a pretty good strategy by the way, to get someone doing that kind of outbound phoning for you. But if you pay someone on a commission only basis, so you pay them for the 15 minute phone call, guess what, they’re going to do everything in their power to book 15 minute phone calls, even if that’s with the wrong people.

Paul Green:
In fact, what you’ll find is you’ll end up doing a whole series of video calls with highly unqualified prospects. There’ll be influencers within the business, not decision makers. There’ll be people who aren’t even either. There’ll be people who are completely outside of your normal parameters of success. You’ve asked for a minimum of five or ten users, and you’re talking to a one-man band. There’s nothing wrong with that, but you don’t necessarily want to try and support a one-man band because the profit just isn’t there.

Paul Green:
Commission only sales people are very, very driven just to earn commission. They don’t care about the business long-term. They don’t care that the reason you want a 15 minute phone call is so that you can actually get yourself a proper brand new client. They don’t care about that. So maybe then you’d think, “Okay, perhaps I should then do the commission only basis based on us getting a new client.” Well the problem with that is you getting a new client is very much out of the hands of the commission only sales person.

Paul Green:
If they’re booking phone calls for you or video calls, then all they’re doing is setting up for you to talk to a potential client. Again, they’ll just set up anyone because it’s a numbers game to them. Now you and I don’t really want to waste our time on 15 minute phone calls with people unless they’ve been qualified in some way. That’s certainly the case most of the time. But your commission only sales person is just going to throw the numbers game at it, get you on a video call with as many people as they can.

Paul Green:
And of course, you and I know that booking those kind of wrong calls, it’s not going to result in great clients. And in fact, your commission only sales person just isn’t going to see any commission off the back of that. They’ll do a huge amount of activity and they will burn out or move on to do something else very, very quickly. I think it’s exactly the same if you use a commission only sales person to do all of your selling. I’ll tell you exactly what will happen there, they won’t sell what you want them to sell, they will go and sit in front of a prospect and the prospect will say they want X, Y, Z. And your commission only sales person will go, “Yeah, we can do that. No problem whatsoever.” And then come back and talk to the technical people.

Paul Green:
Why? Because they only get paid when they make a sale. It’s absolutely the wrong kind of person you should have out there representing the company. Do you know what as well, they’ll do anything to get someone to sign, not caring what happens in the long-term. But the real net profits in running an MSP come from looking after the client in the long-term. The longer you look after someone, the more revenue they contribute and typically the more net profit they contribute. Your relationship gets stronger and stronger and stronger, and it’s how you build your business. A commission only sales person is basically wham, bam, thank you Mr. Or Mrs. New Client because they just want to get that person through the door and get some money out of them because that’s the way they’re going to get their commission.

Paul Green:
So what’s the answer then? What’s the answer if you cannot afford to have sales people because you just don’t have the cash resource? Well, I’d steer well clear of commission only. I would go for starting small. So for example, you look at the outbound marketing. Most MSPs don’t do any kind of outbound telephoning at all. You don’t have to take on someone full-time. We spoke back in episode 72 of the podcast about why you should hire a proactive phone person to work a couple of hours a day, couple of days a week, probably from home, probably in school hours just making outbound phone calls for you.

Paul Green:
Because in most MSPs the hard selling function, the actually sitting in front of a prospect and selling is something that you should probably retain anyway. You’re only probably doing one or two of these a week, at the most. And even with an outbound phoner doing this for you, you’re not going to get a massive, massive number of new appointments, you’re going to get a small number, hopefully, of high quality appointments. So I think you should retain the sales function yourself and you should just hire someone to do the difficult work, which is actually picking up the phone, calling your audiences and booking your 15 minute video calls in the first place.

Paul Green:
And how do you recompense that person? How do you pay them? Pay them for their time. Pay them an hourly rate. In fact, I would take the commission structure completely out of it. It’s really tempting to pay someone a commission structure and to try and work out a complicated deal which pays them some commission on day one and some commission six months down the line, or rewards them with monthly recurring revenue or something like that. Do you know what, for someone that’s just making outbound phone calls for you, just pay them for their time, pay them well for their time.

Paul Green:
Pick someone who’s got skills, someone who’s warm and friendly on the phone and then pay them for their time. Pay them for making those calls and setting up those video appointments for you, because then if they win it’s brilliant, they feel good and that’s their reward. If they don’t win, doesn’t matter, they still get paid, there’s always tomorrow. Because you know, you have good days and you have bad days when you’re doing that kind of prospecting. I think you can find a really, really good person, a quality person and reward them in so many different ways than giving them cash commission. Give them training, give them development, give them an interesting job to do working with adults and give them a good hourly rate. This is so much better than trying to pay someone commission only.

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

Paul Green:
Let me take you back to the year 1994. James the producer, could you put some kind of special effect in there? Yeah, that’s it. We’re going back in time, back in time. It’s 1994. I mean, fresh faced, skinny, slightly geeky looking 19 year old newspaper reporter. I’ve just got my first job. It’s a journalism apprenticeship on the Daventry Express newspaper in the small town of Daventry in Northamptonshire here in the UK. One of my core jobs every day is to read the press releases. And oh my goodness, we had a lot of press releases. They would turn up literally 20, 30, 40 of them would turn up in the post every day, because of course this is ’94 isn’t it, it’s pre-email, pre-internet and all that stuff.

Paul Green:
We’d have even more turning up by fax. I used to hear, I was based on the first floor and I could hear the fax whirring away on the ground floor and I’d go down and there would be pages and pages and pages of fax. And by the way, if you don’t know what a fax machine is, it’s kind of like email but with paper. I miss fax machines in a way. Do I? No, I don’t. No. They seemed quite cool at the time. Anyway, you get the idea. We had hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of press releases coming into this newspaper every week, and this was a tiny little inconsequential newspaper in the middle of nowhere. Imagine what national and international newspaper must have had back then in terms of the amount of press releases coming in.

Paul Green:
Let me back step a second and tell you what a press release actually is. A press release is a communication between a company or an organisation or a council or something like that, and it’s a communication to a media outlet. It’s, if you like, a story suggestion. They’re telling them a piece of news or something that they want to release. And back in the day, back in the ’90s and through really much of the ’00s, probably up to about 2010, that was the standard way that companies communicated. They didn’t really put stuff on their own websites or communicate with their own audiences until it was something special like a shareholder’s meeting.

Paul Green:
Nine times out of ten they issued a press release, and issuing a press release was a formal, official thing to do. As a news outlet, and this was the same when I was in the newspaper and then when I went on to have a decade long radio career, as media outlets that was a source of stories. It wasn’t our only source, but it was a big source of stories for us because we’d sometimes just pick up press releases and just run that story as a piece of news. Or sometimes it would give us an idea for a different kind of story and we’d go and put something together.

Paul Green:
I’ll tell you a little bit of a secret about those press releases though, probably nine out of ten of them just went in the bin. Yeah, we didn’t have recycling back then, they went straight in the bin. So probably, and maybe it was less than one in ten, one in ten feels generous. But less than one in ten press releases ever actually made it into the newspaper or onto the radio stations that I worked at. That often surprises PR people, it often surprises business owners and managers like you. But the reality is that media outlets are so swamped with press releases and story ideas, and that’s still the case today it’s just they all turn up by email or by some other means.

Paul Green:
They’re still so swamped that they don’t need to use all of the things that come in. And actually, half of the things, many of the things that come in just aren’t news worthy at all. By news worthy I mean they’re just not of interest to the end audience. Now, why am I telling you all of this, and why did I take you back to 1994? In fact, James the producer, let’s have the music to come back to 2021. Oh yes, I love it. I love this music. The reason I’m telling you all of this is that even though press releases were a tool of the past, they’re still very much valid today.

Paul Green:
In fact, I give a press release to my clients every month and I say to them, “Just send this out to your local media. Just send this out because it’s a story suggestion.” You never know when a media outlet is going to be looking for a piece of news and they will potentially pick you, pick your story. It doesn’t happen most of the time. As I said, nine out of ten press releases, story suggestions, go in the bin. But it does happen more often than you think.

Paul Green:
Now, what kind of story suggestions do you send out? Well, let me give you the actual headlines of three of the most recent press releases that we’ve written for our MSP Marketing Edge clients. The one from June said, “Who’s watching your cameras? New scary hacking threats for town name businesses.” This was us taking a story about the internet of things being hacked. You may have heard that there was a fish tank of a casino in Las Vegas that was hacked at some point. I think that was a couple of years ago, but it’s only just come out and we did the story about that.

Paul Green:
Because you have to remember when you’re doing a press release is the journalists and the ultimate end audience that you’re speaking to, they really aren’t on top of our world at all, they’re really not. They’re just the same as ordinary business owners and managers that you’re looking to reach. They don’t have the knowledge of what’s happening in our world. Here’s the May press release, “Warning to town name bosses…” I say town name by the way because we give this to all of our clients and then they just very quickly personalise it with their town name and their company name. “Warning to town name bosses, average ransomware payment now £225,000.” And I forget what that is in dollars, I think that’s around about $300,000, because we have a version for the UK and a version for the US as well.

Paul Green:
And then we’ve got the April press release and this was a good one this was. This one the headline is, “Email overload, a third of town name staff spend a day every week managing email.” Now, you can see what we’re trying to do with these, we’re trying to put forward a story suggestion that we think the journalists will find of interest. This is a really important thing to do because ultimately they don’t care about you and your business. All they care about is finding good content for their audiences. That’s why nine out of ten suggestions go in the bin, but it doesn’t mean we should stop suggesting. You keep sending out the press release every single month because you never know when someone is going to pick it up.

Paul Green:
Now, how do you actually send out that press release? Well, the simplest way is just to put together an email list. So you’d look at the traditional media in your town, the newspapers, the radio stations, but you’d also look at the blogs. What are the news blogs, what are the general local area blogs, what are the magazines for your area, what are the podcasts? Does your town have any video channels, any YouTube channels or any podcasts about it? All of these will have email addresses that are very easy to find on the website because they want you to send your press releases through to the right person. They don’t wan them going through to just about everyone.

Paul Green:
So I would literally put an email list together, and the way you send a press release out is you put the headline in the email subject line. So you don’t have to put press release, those words aren’t needed. You literally just take the headline, put that in the subject line and then the rest of the press release, the actual body of it you copy and paste that into the body of the email. So you don’t send press releases as attachments, that’s not best practice at all. You send it all within the body of the email.

Paul Green:
And at the end of the email you have your contact details, in fact you put that in a little section called notes for editors. And by putting it in notes for editors that says to the editors, “Please don’t publish this contact information.” Because if you’re handing out your personal mobile number and your personal email address, you don’t really want to see that appearing on a blog or in a newspaper. So you put that in, anything that goes in notes to editors basically says, “Don’t publish this,” but it’s some context for them to help that.

Paul Green:
So you send out a story every month, you email that out. The question I always get is how do I know when the media has published my story? And the reality is you don’t. They won’t tell you. They really won’t. They have no obligation to tell you whatsoever. They’ll just publish it if they think it’s interesting or just chuck it in the recycling if they think it’s not. How do you know when you’ve been published? Well, there are formal services that you can subscribe to. These are quite expensive services because they’re monitoring all the media all the time. I mean, we’re talking a couple of thousand a year for these kind of services and that’s overkill for most MSPs that are just sending out one press release a month. That’s what big businesses use.

Paul Green:
No. The simplest way to monitor whether or not a media publication is using your content or not, and of course they may only use one or two things a year. The simplest thing to do, just set up a Google alert for your company name in inverted commas, in speech marks, because then whenever your company name is mentioned anywhere online Google will send you an instant email to that link. And nine times out of ten that will pick up what’s been said about your business in a media publication that sent a press release to.

Voiceover:
Paul Green’s MSP Marketing podcast.

Paul Green:
So that press release I was just talking about is one of the many things that we give to our MSP Marketing Edge members ever single month. The whole goal is that we’ve done all of your marketing for you, and all you have to do is personalise it. I mean, that press release for example, literally the whole thing is written and it’s been written by me. As you know, I’m a former journalist, and in fact I had a PR company for a few years as well. So I write that, you literally swap out your town name, your company name. Of course you can tweak it if you want to, but then you pop it into the email as I just suggested and you send that off to your local media, or preferably you get a virtual assistant to do this for you because really you shouldn’t be doing, physically doing, your marketing yourself, you should get other people to do it for you.

Paul Green:
But everything in the MSP Marketing Edge has deliberately made easier. I want it to be easy for my clients. In fact, we don’t just give them those tools, we then provide a ton of support. I’ve actually done an entire video about press releases. Much of what I was just talking about there I cover off in a little more detail in that video. We have then support articles on it in our knowledge centre. My team are trained up on this and can offer one-on-one advice about how to send out a press release or indeed any of the other marketing things that we do. We don’t just give you all of this content, we give you massive amounts of advice and direct support about how to implement it. Because I know the MSPs I’m working with will only succeed if they actually see results from these marketing materials, but I also know the only way to get results is to actually use them. We have a ton, a ton of advice and direct support available.

Paul Green:
Listen, the first thing for you to do is to see whether another MSP has beaten you to your area, because we only supply this to one MSP per area and I made it very easy for you to check. You can literally put your postcode, if you’re in the UK, or your zip code, if you’re in the States, into my website and it will tell you instantly if your area is available or if it’s not available. And by the way, if it’s not available please do join the waiting list. We have probably around twice as many people as are members are on the waiting list. So we’re getting near 500 members now, active members and we’re somewhere near 1000 people on the waiting list just waiting for some of those areas to become available. Check to see if your area is still available at mspmarketingedge.com.

Voiceover:
The big interview.

Derek Morgan:
Hi. I’m Derek Morgan from Nexon Asia Pacific. I work within our channel business supporting our partners, our MSP partners to grow their business. My background is not a traditional technician background. I’ve basically come out of consultative sales and spent 10 years working with SAS startups to help them grow their networks, develop their products and take their products to market. And now we’re actually using, I’m using those sort of skills and experience to help our MSP partners grow their business.

Paul Green:
It’s great to have you on the show, Derek. I’ve been following you on LinkedIn for some time. I think you and I have very similar opinions about selling, that selling shouldn’t really be about selling, it should be more about educating people.

Derek Morgan:
Exactly. There’s only two things that you can do for a client. You can either solve a problem for them or create a new opportunity. And one of the challenges for MSPs is to how do they differentiate themselves, how do they take an offer to the marketplace that really stands out and resonates with their target audience. That’s my role is to help our partners create those offers and find their voice and help them grow their business that way.

Paul Green:
Give us some examples of the best kind of education materials that MSPs can use, both with their existing clients and also with new prospects.

Derek Morgan:
There’s a number of different things that partners could do. One of the biggest advantages that they have is their experience and knowledge within different markets, different industries and different verticals. I know you were talking about that recently, Paul. It’s about how do they package up that knowledge and then deliver that knowledge into the marketplace or their client base? One of the big growth areas at the moment is Teams. I mean, there’s so much happening in and around Teams, the growth rate of engagement, the number of features and functionality and capability coming into Teams.

Derek Morgan:
The MSP’s experience there can be invaluable to their clients because there’s a whole lot of shadow IT that can be eliminated, there’s a whole lot of third party applications that they’re currently subscribing to that they don’t realise that they have. Functionality and capability that they’ve already paid for in Teams that could eliminate those third party licenses. One of the big challenges for MSPs is being able to go back to their clients and actually keep them informed of what’s going on, all the new applications that are coming into a product, say like Teams, and then how to use it.

Derek Morgan:
So that digital adoption and engagement is a real focus for Microsoft at the moment, and we saw that announced with Viva recently as well. Having a smooth way to scale education within your business so that on demand learning can take care of a lot of that heavy lifting around basically that digital adoption and change management process that comes with a complex and powerful product like the 365 suite.

Paul Green:
Let’s talk practical terms, and we’ll look first of all at existing clients. You mentioned on demand learning there. What would be the smartest and easiest way to give your existing clients the ability to learn more about something like Teams?

Derek Morgan:
Forester recently had a projection that the learning and development or e-learning space was going to be a $375 billion industry by 2026. And if memory serves me correctly, those projections came out pre-COVID. We know what’s happened with that whole move to digital adoption, new processes, a shift away from centralised office space. That industry is going to be a lot bigger and that growth rate is going to be accelerated. So having a platform with curated content that users can actually go onto that platform and easily search and find the answers to the questions that they’re after.

Derek Morgan:
Not just around technology but this whole concept can be applied to workflows and processes and operations or a business around any aspect of how they operate. So it could be a digital replication of the dusty old operations manual that sits in somebody’s… the bottom of their bookcase or the bottom of their filing cabinet. Or a replacement of the 200 page SharePoint operations manual that sits buried that nobody ever references on SharePoint.

Derek Morgan:
There’s a whole lot of tools out there around the learning and development platforms that MSPs can access. They can then roll out to clients and generate new revenue streams, new conversations with clients around how they’re working, workflows, processes, which leads to a whole range of additional consultative and project services conversations around things like Power Automate and Power apps.

Paul Green:
And in your experience do the end users, do the end clients, do they embrace that kind of technology, that ability to look stuff up, or is it like you just said, like another SharePoint that’s just sat there and no one actually ever looks at it?

Derek Morgan:
Nobody likes change, Paul, so there’s typically always the carrot and the stick. So it’s about these platforms being engaging and then it’s about the changing of habits and the mentoring processes that go on with that. That’s probably where the big opportunity lies for MSPs in actually using these tools. As an example, we’re seeing partners reducing level one how to support tickets by anywhere between 36 and 62% because over time they’re teaching their clients to fish for themselves. They’re showing them where and how to find the answers themselves as opposed to just coming to support desks for mundane, routine how to inquiries.

Derek Morgan:
If MSPs, as an example, just as in internal operating opportunity, if they can reduce their support desk tickets by 36 to 62% then that’s obviously allowing them an opportunity to scale their managed services by that amount without having to increase any headcount. I think that was a bit of a long-winded way to answer your question, but at the end of the day the platforms need to be user friendly. People are going somewhere for these answers now, they’re either going to the abyss that is Google and searching there and trying to find those answers, or they’re coming to help desk which is incurring a cost and probably frustrating the support team dealing with those low level tickets. Or they’re going and tapping Betty on the shoulder multiple times a week because Betty’s the internal font of all knowledge, and that’s not an efficient way to disseminate information in a business.

Derek Morgan:
If we can eliminate and solve those three problems for a client we’re adding a lot of value. And knowledge retention and dissemination is a real problem for a lot of businesses. Their peak performance within a business. They don’t capture the IP of those individuals very efficiently so often when those individuals, those peak performers or subject matter experts within their business leave, that information and knowledge that’s been built up over time leaves with that person, it’s not retained by the business. So having a well-structured learning and development platform within a business really allows a business to retain that IP, and then actually cross-train everybody within that business on demand.

Paul Green:
And it certainly makes sense for you as an MSP to sit there and to do that with your clients and to make that easy for your clients. In fact, it becomes another retention strategy in a way, particularly if they’re using your platform to keep that information available within their business. But here’s my next question, Derek. How do we use this kind of educational approach to selling to win new clients?

Derek Morgan:
It comes down to the deep conversations that you just spoke about. Learning and development can fit into the four phases of a selling cycle, from engaging in conversations with new prospects to converting in the sales process, and also upselling and cross-selling different products. That helps with your retention as well. So when you’re having deeper conversations with clients around all of their workflows and processes, not just their technology, you’re building deeper relationships.

Derek Morgan:
And learning and development, because a lot of MSPs are not actually using it and promoting it, it allows you to have a different conversation in the marketplace with new prospects. And you’re not typically competing with existing contracts that might be in place where you’ve got to wait for licensing their expiry or their contract with their current managed service contract might be 12 to 24 months before that expires. You can add client or a prospect with a learning and development process and shorten that buying cycle so that you’re building relationships so you’re better positioned to transition that client come contract negotiation time with their incumbents.

Paul Green:
I think it’s fair to say most MSPs just aren’t set up for this kind of educational marketing. I mean, most MSPs aren’t really set up for any kind of consistent systematic marketing. If you were running an MSP today, Derek, what’s the first thing that you would do to get started on this?

Derek Morgan:
The first thing that you would do is actually look at how it fits into the existing sales processes that you have. Because one of the biggest challenges is trying to campaign a new initiative can be really challenging for any business, not just an MSP. Looking at how learning and development fits into your current sales cycle because then that allows you to add value to your existing customers, your existing conversations.

Derek Morgan:
It’s generally accepted that it’s 80% easier to sell something new to your existing clients than it is to go and acquire a new client. So having a look at how does this add value to your core business, your core sales process right now? And the core products that you’re currently selling into a client, how is it adding value to that? That then makes those sales conversations so much easier to go about looking at how would you start to introduce learning and development into an MSP practice. One place to start would be cliptraining.com/partner and having a look at how a learning management system has been specifically adapted to support Microsoft partners and MSPs. That would probably be the first place I would start.

Paul Green:
Okay. Thank you, Derek. Tell us a little bit more about you and the business and how we can get in touch with you.

Derek Morgan:
Nexonasiapacific.com.au is our website, or you can find out more about e-learning and how it can support you as an MSP you could go to cliptraining.com/partner.

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

Bob Layton:
Hello. This is Bob Layton, CRO for Digital Defense. I’m here to recommend a book to you. Smarter Faster Better and it is by Charles Duhigg. It really talks about transformation, communication and teams and focus. And while there are many, many books out there in business that are bores to read, this one is quite interesting and I would highly recommend chapter two on teams. It’s all about how they formed psychological safety when they were forming the Saturday Night Live crew for television. It’s just such a pleasure. So the book again, Smarter Faster Better by Charles Duhigg.

Voiceover:
Coming up next week.

Joey Donovan Guido:
Hi, this is Joey Donovan Guido and I am very excited for next week’s episode where I will share with you how to get more traffic to your website. And more importantly, how to look at your online marketing holistically.

Paul Green:
We’re also going to be looking at whether or not you should use something called exit intent popups on your website. Now, you’ve seen these, it’s as your mouse cursor moves up to go back a page or to move onto something else, this popup suddenly appears. The website has figured out that you’re intending to exit and it shows you a popup message to try to get you to do something. Now, many people find these annoying, but they have a surprisingly high conversion rate. Next week we’ll examine whether or not you should have one of those on your website.

Paul Green:
We’re also going to look at your business through some different eyes. We’re going to look at your business through the eyes of your potential future acquirer. Now, you may not be ready to exit your business for a very long time yet, but if you could start to look at the business through the eyes of the person that will one day acquire it, you could make some very smart long-term strategic decisions. We’ll examine exactly what those are next week. We’ve also got another big give away next week with a cool prize that you could win.

James Lett:
Hey, it’s producer James and thanks to Nigel Moore and our buddies at The Tech Tribe. I’ll be telling you how to win not just a month’s membership, not 12 months’ member, but a lifetime membership to The Tech Tribe and a load of merch as well. It’s a great community, it’s a powerful resource to help your MSP and you can win and kick off your July in style next week with Paul’s podcast.

Paul Green:
That sounds great. Listen, I hope you have a profitable week over the next few days and I’ll see you next week.

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