MSPs: How to influence what John Smith buys

Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge

Welcome to Episode 252 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• Get the right message in front of the right person at the right time: To attract new clients you need consistent, well-timed marketing to ensure they choose your MSP when they’re ready to switch.
• Do you employ any Sales Prevention Officers?: That’s anyone who avoids suggesting beneficial services to clients so they don’t appear salesy, but they’re unintentionally hurting your business by missing opportunities to improve client satisfaction and increase revenue.
• The common service mistakes that can damage client retention: My guest this week, Michelle Coombs, highlights the common service mistakes that can damage long-term client retention and how to stop them from happening in your MSP.
• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Alec, who has an MSP in Nashville, would like to hire a virtual assistant to take on his admin tasks but doesn’t know how to hire one that he can trust.

Get the right message in front of the right person at the right time

There’s a reason that getting new clients for your MSP takes so long. It’s because of what’s happening to the ordinary business are owners and managers that you are trying to reach. And when you understand what’s going on in their heads and their hearts, you can figure out why they’re so slow switching from one MSP to another. Let’s talk about the importance of getting the right message in front of the right person at the right time.

Now, one of the most critical marketing skills that you can develop is the ability to look at your MSP and what you sell from the point of view of the people that you are trying to sell it to or put another way. If you can get in their heads and their hearts, you can better understand what’s driving them to make a decision. Or maybe more importantly, what’s holding them back from making a decision. The best phrase that I ever heard to describe this is…

To influence what John Smith buys, you must see through John Smith’s eyes.

When you really look at why a business owner or manager switches from one MSP to another, you suddenly get a startling insight into why switching MSPs is a distress activity for most people. You see, they don’t really understand technology at all. In fact, compared to you, they are literally the other end of the scale. You have such in-depth technology and abilities and that makes you an incredibly talented technology person, but the client you’re selling to, well, they’re more like me. I’m not a tech I never have been. That by the way means it’s easy for me to represent the ordinary people that you sell to. And sure, I understand a bit about technology and I love it. And actually I probably know a lot more about technology these days because of course I’ve been working with MSPs for eight years, but I can’t set up a server, I can’t configure a cloud service and I bet you a rather large amount of money that I’d be the guy that would get the setting wrong and I would take down the entire business. So please, no one ever give me the settings of anything important, I beg you.

Anyway, because they don’t understand technology, but they do know it’s incredibly important. They are less willing to muck about with it. So something major has to change at their incumbent MSP for them to want to switch to someone new. And we do see this, don’t we. We see small businesses being sold and kind of merged into super MSPs and maybe customer service goes down and maybe prices go up and the dissatisfaction creeps in very, very slowly for the clients. But there does inevitably come a day where the client wakes up and thinks, I’m not happy with my MSP anymore, and it’s time to change. Or they feel that they have outgrown their MSP or there’s just change. Change in their business or your business is often what drives people to pick a new MSP.

So, your marketing challenge then, is to consistently get the right message in front of the right people at the right time. And that should be your core marketing driver. It’s why I’m always recommending both in this podcast here on YouTube and across everything I do, both for my MSP marketing edge members and just all MSPs out there. I recommend that you have a very easy but powerful three-step lead generation strategy. You build multiple audiences of people to listen to you. You grow your relationship with them using content marketing, and then you convert the relationship normally by sending out marketing campaigns and getting people on the phone and just chatting to them about their business.

Now you chose to start a business in the most wonderful sector in the world, but it is cursed by very, very slow sales because someone will stay with an MSP that they’re unhappy with for a number of years until that day comes when it’s time to switch. That day when they’re ready to switch, that day is perfect for you to get your marketing message in front of them. Now, based on what I’ve just said here, this is why your MSP needs a marketing machine, not just a set of random marketing activities that happen now and again when someone remembers, but a machine where marketing happens on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. And that’s the only way that you can truly drive new business into your MSP in a systematic way.

Do you employ any Sales Prevention Officers?

If I was a client of your MSP and I was on the phone with one of your technicians telling them about a common frustration that I’m having, it’s actually something they could help with, but it would involve me spending money – I’d have to upgrade something or buy some new software or something – in that situation, would they suggest that solution to me or would they not? Because like many technicians, they don’t ever want to be seen as doing any kind of sales. They don’t want to be seen as a salesperson despite the fact that selling me this software or this service would make my life better.

Would that happen in your MSP? I’m asking this because I’m wondering if in your business you employ any sales prevention officers, let’s find out.

An extraordinary event happened to me a few years back and it was before I upgraded to an EV, to a Tesla. So my car was low on diesel and I popped into my local petrol station on the way home. Now the woman behind the counter was acting in the most peculiar way. “You’re the last customer”, she practically spat at me and she was actually pointing at me with her finger. And then, “I need to shut the forecourt and stop selling petrol”. “Well, what’s going on?” I ask because perhaps there’d been a big fuel spillage or an accident of some kind. And I couldn’t believe her answer.

“I’ve run out of till rolls,” she replied. It was such a bizarre answer that I didn’t understand at first. So I said, “Sorry, you’re shutting the whole petrol station because you’ve run out of till rolls?” It’s the little receipt thing that comes out of the till. “It’s the law,” she screamed at me; something to do with having to give a receipt to someone when you sell them something. Some bizarre UK law.

But by this time there were other drivers standing at the pumps. They’ve got the nozzle in their car, they’re waiting for her to press the button to authorise the fuel. And she’s tapping at the window, waving at them, pulling a finger across the neck like in a classic dead motion. I tried to help her out and said to her, “Look, even if the law says you can’t sell fuel without a receipt, you could always do handwritten receipts for those who want them because most people probably aren’t bothered.” That’s what I suggested. “They just want fuel.” I said to her. But she was having none of it. And once I paid, she went outside to cone off the entrance to the petrol station. I mean, the whole thing was completely shut down. It was a nightmare. This woman was the most successful Sales Prevention Officer that I’d ever met, and I have met quite a few as you probably have as well. She took a small detail of her job quite literally, and rather than work flexibly around it, decided it would just be easier to shut the whole business down for a few hours. Can you imagine how incandescent with rage her boss would’ve been when he found out?

Now, I bumped into another sales prevention officer a few weeks ago. I was taking a long walk around one of the lovely lakes near where I live in Milton Keynes here in the UK. And it’s a habit of mine to pick up a takeaway coffee from a pub on the lake. It’s always busy with a flurry of walkers doing the same thing on a Sunday morning. This week though, as soon as I walked through the doors, a bored looking girl shouted, “No coffee, we ain’t got no takeaway cups.” and then looked down at her Instagram again, I kid you not this is exactly what happened. Her attitude and that welcome pretty much shut down the alternative of staying in for a coffee or maybe even having breakfast as a treat. And I’m sure by this point she was sick of having to tell walkers there were no coffee cups. To her, this was hassle whereas you and I would see this as an opportunity. So here’s a scary question for you, how do the sales prevention officers act in your MSP?

What makes Sales Prevention Officers terrifying is they think they’re doing the right thing. It’s rarely malicious. It’s just having the wrong thinking and the wrong behaviour.

Here are some ways it may be happening in your business. Maybe when a first line tech is talking to a client who wants an extra service, maybe they say to them, oh, you don’t really need that, which of course damages your relationship with the client because when someone wants something, they will just go elsewhere to get it. Maybe your help desk team only ever offers basic versions of new kit or services based on the absurd idea of saving the client money. Maybe when a potential new client phones in to talk to someone, that call or message doesn’t receive urgent prioritisation above all other activity because it doesn’t happen very often. What else happens in your MSP? And it probably happens without you being fully aware.

And the way to get round sales prevention officers is to systemise all aspects of sales, both for new clients and upselling existing clients. For example, if you have three versions of a package or a service, so like a good choice, a better choice, and a best choice, this allows the client to pick the option that’s best for them. And sales prevention officers can’t screw that up for you. So long as they offer all three versions in every single opportunity. If you have annual strategic reviews, you can create an opportunity to tell the client what else you can do to make their lives easier. Some will choose to buy it and some won’t. Oh, and by the way, if you think you really don’t have a sales prevention officer somewhere in your business, I’m sorry, but you’re probably wrong. In fact, sometimes you know who the worst offender can be. I’m pointing a finger at you, Mr. or Mrs. Business owner, because business owners like you and me, we have no accountability. It means that sometimes we act in ways that we just wouldn’t accept from our staff.

The common service mistakes that can damage client retention

Featured guest: Michelle Coombs has 25+ years in service management and operations. She’s led a 70-member service team working around the clock, managing over 10,000 tickets a month for MSPs; and heading up IT for their customers and managing the MSPs performance, so she’s seen the challenges of both sides of the fence.

Michelle is now at the point where she want to give back and has set a crazy goal: to help 350,000 MSPs and IT Teams improve their service maturity, delivery, and operations by 2032.

Michelle offers a wide range of ‘knowledge services’ (advisory, coaching, consulting, mentoring, and training) across most areas of an MSP’s business. The only things she doesn’t touch are sales, marketing, HR, and legal.

She also loves speaking at industry events and hosting peer-groups and educational sessions.

Of course, good marketing isn’t just about winning new clients, it’s also about making sure that you are doing everything you can to retain your existing clients. And one area that many MSPs ignore is how they communicate with their clients. My guest today is an expert at improving and increasing client retention through really simple communications, the kind that all your technicians can do.

Today’s interview is about the common service mistakes that can damage long-term client retention and how to stop them from happening in your MSP.

Hi, I’m Michelle Coombs from the Tech Leader Network, and I work with MSPs to improve their operational efficiency.

And thank you so much for joining me on the show, Michelle, because we’re going to talk about ways that MSPs inadvertently accidentally damage client’s retention, customer retention with their operations. It’s something that happens really easily. You see it all the time, and we are going to explore that and hopefully improve retention for lots of our listeners and lots of people watching this on YouTube. So tell us a little bit about you. How long have you been working with MSPs? What’s your background and what fun do you have on a day-to-day basis?

Oh, crikey. Good question Paul. So my background has been IT for 25 years, either in-house, IT heading up their departments, managing those MSP contracts, the relationships, the performance or on the MSP side, heading up service, delivery and operations, heading up some big teams, 70 odd people, 24 7 ops handling tens of thousands of tickets a month.

And what made you jump into working with MSPs to actually help them with their operations?

It seemed a natural progression. It was, well, when I first started out working for myself as it were, and I was looking for a way that I could make a difference for people and almost paying back what I’d learned over the years to help those that were coming into the role. And at first I was thinking it was more around the leadership aspect, but actually service ops is where my heart is. And I thought, how can I make this easier for people and help people improve what they do on a day-to-day basis. And it’s something I really enjoy is getting to the bottom and doing that root cause analysis of what’s going wrong in a service and finding ways to improve it.

And I can imagine that’s just fun because you, very nature of what you do is helping MSPs just improve essentially the quality of the service and the quality of the product they’re offering. And as we all know, it’s so much easier to look at something that someone else is doing than to look at what you’re doing yourself. So I imagine a lot of the people you work with that the faults or the problems and the issues are right there in front of them. It’s just they can’t see the woods for the trees, to use a cliche for that. So let’s talk about how with your operations you can inadvertently push your clients away and damage that all important bond with them. What are some of the most common mistakes that you see MSPs making?

If I was to pick three, the first it would be the communications, the level of communications that go out and treating people as you expect to be treated yourself. The second would be not following through on what you say you’re going to do. And the third would be not acting on feedback that you’ve been given by your customers.

So let’s look at each of those and we’ll start with the communications one. So just so we are both talking about the same thing. We are talking about an MSP, who’s got the client, they’re in a monthly contract, they’re monthly recurring revenue clients and presumably they’ve been a client for some time. What kind of communication issues do you see? Are you talking about mass communications of change or are you talking about literally technician to user communication or is it that and everything?

All. So it can be all the way down from, we’ve got things like you service desk technicians that are just not communicating in a timely manner or putting statements like “it’s done” or “resolved” or something in the text and sending that to a customer, not paying attention to the way that that communication can be received. Or it could be the hiding behind a keyboard when actually picking up the phone would be a better option. That’s a big one actually. Not picking up the phone and just hiding behind the keyboard, but it can also be from the service desk managers and the service delivery manager’s point of view where they’re facing complaints and they also don’t want to acknowledge it head on because they feel like they’re going to get a bit of a kick in. And rather than just approach it and take it as a fact finding mission and it’s not personal kind of basis, they can’t proceed without gathering that information, but they avoid it at all costs because they just don’t like the outcome that they’re going to get or the feeling that they’re going to get when they get that kick.

And that’s human nature of course, because you’d have to be some kind of masochist to put yourself deliberately in for a kicking. Where you’ve got a specific issue, let’s take the one where the technician doesn’t pick up the phone, it would be easy to just pick up the phone and call the user and talk to them, but the technician doesn’t. Do you tend to find that’s a problem across the entire business. So would you find almost like it’s the culture of the business and no one picks up the phone, maybe because the owner doesn’t like picking up the phone? Or is it more likely to be just one or two techs that have that issue?

It’s interesting because as soon as you’re starting to say that point, I was thinking it would depend on the MSP themselves and what the culture of the MSP is. So you usually find it’s an all or nothing. You will get some people though where they have transitioned or moved from one MSP to another as a technician and they’ll have a very different way of working, but they’ll soon embed themselves in that new way and whatever the behaviour is in that MSP will be how they start to behave.

Yes, absolutely. And you can almost imagine a new technician joining an MSP, it’s their first day, they’re halfway through and they’re typing something to the user and thinking, I’m just going to pick up the phone, it’d be easier. And they go to pick up the phone and someone says to them, what are you doing? We don’t phone people here. That’s not what we do. And I think we as owners, we forget how much we set the culture of the business just by our action or inaction. Let’s look at the second of those things that you mentioned and second of those was failing to follow through on what it is that you said that you would do. Can you give us an example of an MSP and obviously don’t name them, but an example of how that would manifest in an MSP?

Yes, it would be something along the lines of saying, “Customer, I will deal with that by tomorrow.” And then as you know, working in an MSP, something hits the fan and you don’t get round to doing it tomorrow.

It’s about setting those realistic expectations and saying, actually customer, I will ring you by the end of the week and I’ll have an update for you.

Because if you go sooner than that or you deliver sooner on that response, then it’s a bit of a bonus really.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we all talked, don’t we, about under-promising and over-delivering. I think it’s more about setting really clear expectations, and I’d be interested to hear what your thoughts are on when you’ve got someone who’s on the phone or has submitted a ticket and it’s actually a low priority item. Let’s say it’s my printer doesn’t work, I’m not the owner, it’s a low level thing. It’s not affecting everyone, it’s just me. So you and I know that that’s a very low level ticket and on a very busy day, it might be some time before someone gets round to that. And yet to that person who’s got that problem, they can’t work. Right? That’s the highest level of problem that they’ve got right now. How do you normally advise service desk managers and technicians to manage situations like that in terms of setting expectations?

Within SLA. So it’d be a case of first I’d be looking for that workaround. It’d be like saying, “Have you got any other printers that you can print to?” If they have, they can put a workaround in place and they’ll be fine. If not, it’d be a case of, right, “Just bear with me. We’ll need to investigate this and I can expect to get back to you within X time.” That’s how I would handle that one.

Yeah, and I put you on the spot there. You had to go straight back to your service desk days. I did.

You could see me thinking about what would I do.

Exactly. Yeah.

And how would I want, it was more about how I would want my teams to respond because like you say, it’s a burning issue for that client at the time. And the thing is, is that client or that customer is going to be potentially not in a very good place when they ring. So you need to empathise. You really need to listen to what they’re saying and empathise and put yourself in those shoes and let your customer know that you understand that it’s a big issue for them and that you are going to deal with it and you just need to get them to trust in you that you are going to do what you say you’re going to.

Yeah, absolutely. That word trust is absolutely key. And it’s so easy to forget, again, when you’re just doing this day in day, year in, year out, that of every single ticket, every single call that a technician has with a user or with a client or whoever it is, you’ve got to be building some trust. And that is done through expectation setting and through empathy. Some great advice there. Just remind us, Michelle, what was the third and final most common problem that you saw within MSPs?

Not acting on customer feedback.

Okay. And again, give us an example. How does this problem typically manifest itself?

It would be the customer provides some feedback as part of a meeting. So you’ve got some kind of delivery review. It could be through a QBR TBR service delivery review, whatever you title them, and the customer will give you some feedback that they’re not happy with something. Account manager will give them the nod of the head, yes, I’ve got it. They’ll take it away. They’ll mention it, but nothing ever changes because the ball’s rolling light, everything else is cracking on. They don’t have time to sit there and go, right, what’s the root cause of this issue and how can we prevent it from happening again to stop this annoying this customer?

Which of course would be incredibly frustrating. So Michelle, you’ve obviously have built an entire business that’s helping MSPs to avoid these kinds of problems. When you work with MSPs, do you go in and work at a cultural level or is it very much at leadership level and also down with technicians as well?

It’s that final section. So every MSP talks about people-process-technology. For me, it’s missing two pillars, which are leadership and customer. So looking at the drive and the direction that you’re going in and making sure the MSP gets its objectives covered. And then the customer side is making sure that the customer satisfaction is there and that you can retain your customers for the long haul. So I work across all of those five pillars.

Fantastic. And tell us a little bit more about your business and how anyone can get in touch with you.

Good question. In terms of getting in touch, the easiest option is either to go to the website, which is www.thetechleader.net, or you can just reach out to me on LinkedIn.

Paul’s Personal Peer Group

This week Alec, who has an MSP in Nashville, admits that he does have a ton of questions, but the one question that is burning the most is this – I’m so busy and have heard people say that a virtual assistant would help do admin and things for me, but how do I hire one that I can trust?

Yeah, virtual assistants or VAs are amazing because in the spirit of, you as the business owner should only do what only you can do, they represent a really easy way to get level jobs done and done well so that you can focus on the difficult things. Now, most VAs work on an hourly basis flexibly from home, and it’s important to find someone that you get on well with. Oh, and also look after them as well as any member of your team. I have monthly zooms with my VAs and sometimes send them gifts in the post whenever I do the same for my core team. Now, there are three primary ways to get a VA. The first of them is to hire a friend or a friend of a friend. My advice is to not even go there. You could get locked into working with someone you fire for the sake of offending someone else.

So the second way, and the one that I suggest you do is to hire a work-alone freelancer. Now, you’ll pay less for this person and they’ll look after you really well, but unless you are the dominant source of income for them, they will be distracted by the need to look for other clients and of course, service those other clients as well. And there’s also no backup plan if they take holidays, vacations, or become ill. And so your third option is to hire a VA through an agency. Now, a good agency will have hundreds of highly vetted VAs on its books, and they’ll take the time to match you up properly. So to find you a VA or VAs plural with the specific skill sets that you’re looking for, plus of course they can cover holidays or add more people as you need them. The other upside is if the match isn’t quite right, they will have the awkward conversation for you.

Plus the VAs aren’t distracted by the need to find more work that just sort of turns up from the agency. The big downside is the price and relationship. You will be paying more as the agency takes its cut, and it is a little bit harder to form a good solid relationship with a VA eight through an agency.

Mentioned links

• This podcast is in conjunction with the MSP Marketing Edge, the world’s leading white label content marketing and growth training subscription
• Join me in MSP Marketing Facebook group.
• Connect with me on LinkedIn
• Connect with my guest Michelle Coombs on LinkedIn and check out The Tech Leader website.
• Got a question about your MSP’s marketing? Submit one here for Paul’s Personal Peer Group.