The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge

Welcome to Episode 265 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• Successful MSP owners exercise: Our bodies are amazing, but they’re even better when we use them on a regular basis. Even just a 20 minute walk every single day keeps your body sharp – and also your mind.
• How one client question can turn into 7 pieces of content for your MSP: To do great marketing for your MSP, you need great content. There’s tons of it around and there’s a simple way to extract it from everyday conversations with clients and prospects.
• This guy phoned 1,000 decision makers… and learned these hard lessons: Making more outbound calls is essential to win new business for your MSP. If you HATE picking up the phone, this interview is going to blow your mind.
• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Steven, from as MSP in London, UK, is looking forward to getting organised in 2025 – his question is: Which project management software do you recommend?

Successful MSP owners exercise

MSP Running Shoes on. Have you ever felt that owning an MSP business is like running a marathon in more ways than one? And if you prioritise looking after your clients and their technology ahead of looking after your own body and health, then you have a very low chance of completing the marathon that is being a business owner for the next 20 years. Let’s find out why successful business owners exercise, how they do it when they have zero time, and the benefits of doing it to you, your clients and your staff.

A few months back, I had my dad come and stay with us for a couple of nights. Now he lives about 150 miles away and we don’t really see him more than a couple of times a year. So it was lovely having him stay. My daughter and I, we took him to London for a full day being tourists in our own capital city, and we went to see a theatre show and we went to some museums and it was great fun. But we walked about 20,000 steps, which is about 10 miles, and we do a lot of walking because London is a walking city. It’s so much easier to walk around and just catch the tube. You wouldn’t drive around London. No one does that.

My dad is in his early seventies, so he’s not really that old and he’s kind of fit and kind of healthy as he has been throughout his life. But he has let his fitness slip in recent years and he was really struggling. So at the end of that day, he just looked ill. He was sitting down, his back was hurting, his knee was hurting, his hip was hurting, and he won’t go and see the doctor about his dicky hip. And I got him to admit that he doesn’t really do any regular exercise. He’ll have a walk now and again. Now all the medical advice from all the doctors everywhere is that someone of his age, in fact, someone of every age should be going out for at least a 20 minute walk every day. And I told him that even last year when I couldn’t exercise much because I’d injured my knee and I needed surgery on it. I couldn’t go running or anything like that, but I still exercised every single day. I’d go for a 20, 30 minute walk or go on the treadmill for a mile, or I actually bought an exercise bike, which I’ve since sold. But you get the idea.

I was telling him how the most successful business owners and MSP owners I know, they always make time for exercise regardless of how busy they are. Do you do this? Do you make time no matter how busy you are and force yourself to do exercise on a regular basis? Maybe you prioritise looking after your clients, you prioritise your partner if you’ve got one, your kids, if you have them, your staff, you prioritise all of this stuff. And it’s very easy...

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge

Welcome to Episode 264 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• Why MSPs procrastinate (and how to cure it): Don’t confuse busyness with business. Keeping yourself busy doing things that you really shouldn’t be doing, at the expense of the things that matter is a form of procrastination.
• What technicians write in tickets can damage your brand: Your brand is YOU, and your team, and the way you communicate. And critically… how that makes people feel.
• Why successful MSPs use PowerPoint to tell stories: Eliminate death by PowerPoint using story telling to simplify complex information and help your presentations come to life.
• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Want to fire a problematic client but don’t know how? I have the answer…

Why MSPs procrastinate (and how to cure it)

One of the dangers of doing a podcast every week and appearing in lots of YouTube videos is that at some point your friends and family stumble across your content. And every now and then I get a message from a friend saying, Hey, I just watched your latest video on YouTube, I’ve no idea what you were talking about Paul, but it seemed okay. Now, the reason that this is a risk is because I do try and put a lot of my life into my content, because as a working parent and a business owner myself, that helps you and me to relate to each other. So the story I want to tell you today is about a friend who I hope never stumbles across this recording because I know he will recognise himself immediately and no one likes to be talked about in a negative way.

Now, this friend of mine runs his own business. Don’t worry, he’s not an MSP. In fact, what he does is almost irrelevant, but times sadly are not very good for him right now. He’s lost a lot of clients over the last few years and his business is not in great shape. We do occasionally talk about marketing. Of course, I give him as much advice as I can, but he rarely takes action on it. I think the problem is that he hasn’t yet emotionally dealt with the fact that a business that he’s been building up for decades has flattened out. In fact, it’s in decline now. He needs to do things differently to rescue it and turn it around.

If you were in a situation like this where you’re actually struggling to meet payroll in some months, you’d think that your full attention would be on the rescue and the recovery, right? I mean, that would certainly be the case for me, but not for my friend because the other day when we were chatting and I asked what he was doing that day, he said he was going on a training course. Not a training course on anything that would be useful to him in terms of turning his business around or improving the service. It was a very low level training course around some minor changes to regulations regarding the service that he sells. So really, he could have just sent one of his staff or just skipped it altogether. It really wasn’t an important training course, but it was an entire day of his time.

I was utterly gobsmacked when he told me about this because just a few days before, he was telling me that he didn’t have any time to implement all of the new marketing ideas that we discussed to help him win new clients. And then I had an epiphany. Him going on a training course was a form of procrastination. My friend had confused busyness with business. To him going on a training course, was doing some work, but the reality is it wasn’t productive work. It was just him passing the time and maybe not even having to think about his problems for a few hours. Maybe that was the appeal.

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge

Welcome to Episode 263 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• How to create the perfect MSP about us page: An about us page must be about the people and the core values of your business. But it’s not really about us, it’s about the prospect. It’s a selling page.
• It takes 50+ touchpoints to get a new client for your MSP: Don’t run marketing campaigns – set up a marketing system. Long-term a system will outperform any campaign you could run, I promise you.
• A Google ads strategy for MSPs: If you want to try Google ads, don’t try to be all things to all people. You need to be very specific to stand out in a competitive market.
• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Christine from an MSP in Portland wants to know why I’m so insistent that MSPs hire a phone person to contact prospects.

How to create the perfect MSP about us page

The two most important pages on your website are the homepage and the about us page. Why? Because those are the pages that most people are going to look at, the ones they’re most going to be influenced by because they’re most likely to land on your website on the homepage. And then of course they want to know what you’re about. They want to know who the people are behind the business, so they’ll head over to the about us page.

Let’s have a look at some of the elements that you should have on your MSPs about us page to make sure it delivers the most value to your business. Now, where a homepage is almost like a summary of the whole business, the about us page is about the people and the core values of the business. So of course you still have an attention grabbing headline, although a different one to the one that you have on the homepage. And of course you’d still have your social proof, data capture maybe, and certainly a call to action, plus of course videos and photographs of real people. It’s just that you present those in different ways than you would do on your homepage.

The most important thing on your about us page is your story. But it needs to be presented in a way that’s relevant to the reader.

And actually it’s not really about you – you can talk a little bit about you and how you are really into tech, and as a child and you are obsessed with computers, and as a teenager and you’ve been doing it now for 800 years and then 20 years ago you had an entrepreneurial seizure and you decided you’ve got to do your own things, your own way, etc, etc.

I mean, all of that is good. In fact, actually you can take that backstory, you can embellish it, you can enhance it, but you have to tell it in a way that makes it interesting to the reader. Because you being obsessed with computers, that’s not really of interest to them until they realise or you tell them that it means that you are across every technology detail in your business, and you only hire people who are incredibly attention focused, very good technology people, and they’re very good at following systems and documenting success, and all of that kind of thing.

So, you take your story and you keep flipping it round and looking at it from a different angle so that actually your story is about the reader. Even an about us page is not really an about us page, it’s about the prospect. It’s a selling page. That’s what it really is. So of course something else you’d do on there is you’d put some case studies on there. Now, if you’ve got case studies on your homepage, you can repeat those, and video case studies are absolutely fine, you can repeat those across the site. You can also repeat just sort of normal prin...