An MSP marketing tactic guaranteed to grab attention

Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge

Welcome to Episode 272 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• An MSP marketing tactic guaranteed to grab attention: Doing this means you can reach more people and persuade them to talk to you with much less work.
• Want a new client? You can afford to spend this much: Don’t be distracted by the short-term costs of getting a new client. Instead, focus on the long-term revenue and profit they will bring you.
• Compliance isn’t a headache. For MSPs it should be a profit centre: It’s very powerful to send a message to a business owner talking about a specific problem they have because of a regulation, and exactly how they can fix it.
• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Could gamification be what you need to motivate your team?

An MSP marketing tactic guaranteed to grab attention

Imagine doing some marketing for your MSP that’s so relevant to the person who sees it, they immediately stop what they’re doing just to listen to you. And yes, it is possible for your marketing to be this powerful. It means you can reach more people and persuade them to talk to you with much less work.

Let me tell you the surprising secret to this kind of marketing and you won’t believe what I’m going to ask you to Google. Now, I should start by admitting that this isn’t really a marketing tactic that you can use for a general audience. It only works when you use it for a vertical. Your MSP doesn’t have to only work in this vertical.

You can have lots of different clients doing lots of different things in lots of different sectors, but this specific marketing idea only works for a vertical audience, and you can’t just reuse it across different verticals. You have to do some research for each vertical that you are using this tactic to target people in. But the payoff is immense because targeting to a vertical is already a beautiful thing to do.

It’s so much easier to send a message that’s highly relevant to an audience within a vertical.

So for example, if you’re targeting lawyers and you use the phrase legal practice, the part of their brain that filters information, which is called the reticular activating system, it decides that what you are saying is relevant to them. So they ignore stuff that’s aimed at general business owners and managers, and they listen to stuff that seems to be targeted at lawyers. And that works across all verticals.

Now, this new marketing idea that I have for you right now is even more specific. Okay, enough teasing. Let me tell you what it is. So you pick a vertical that you want to win more business in, and then you do some Googling. And what you’re looking for on Google is specific regulations regarding cyber security or data retention, or in fact, anything that you touch. Specific regulations that affect that vertical. So for example, let’s say you work with healthcare, there’s going to be tons of regulations or laws specifically aimed at healthcare businesses. Lawyers will have them, CPAs/accountants will definitely have them. Manufacturers will probably have them as well. So go and find that regulation.

In an ideal world, you would then talk to someone who runs a business in that vertical to ask them what pain that regulation causes for them. Because don’t forget, these are not technical people. So some kind of regulation around data retention for example, it’s easy for you to think, oh yeah, I know how I’d fix that, I know how I deal with that. But for them it’s a pain. And that’s what we’re looking for here. We are looking for regulations that create pain and are annoying to specific verticals. Because then you are going to target that pain with your marketing.

Imagine how powerful it would be to send a message to a business owner in a very specific vertical, talking about a specific problem that’s caused by a specific law that only relates to them and exactly how they can fix it. And we’re not trying to use fear marketing here, we’re just educating them about a problem they already have and how you have got some possible solutions. Because you know that almost any technology headache can be made easier or taken away, and that’s what you want to talk about.

So how would you actually use this in practice? Well, it will definitely be content on your website. You might do a report or a guide on it, you might put that on LinkedIn. You might even just send it out to people or people who work in that vertical. You may even turn it into a piece of direct mail. Imagine how powerful it would be reaching out to someone, everyone in the vertical in your area to say, Hey, you know that headache that you’ve got, which is explained here, I know how to solve that headache. Can I send you some information about this in the post? Can I mail it to you? And I know that that sounds very old school, but old school physical stuff works very, very well in our modern digital age.

So some research for you then. What’s the vertical you most want to win new clients in? What’s the regulatory headache that they have that you can solve? And what’s going to stop you taking action on this right away?

Want a new client? You can afford to spend this much

With what I’m about to tell you in the next 60 seconds, you might think I’ve lost the plot. But what if there’s a marketing move so daring it could completely reshape your MSP’s future? Let’s talk about the surprising way top MSPs outsmart their competition and the bold strategy that could change how you grow forever.

Anyone who’s ever made a serious attempt to grow their MSP organically knows that it’s an expensive process. It’s not uncommon to find a business that’s winning loads of new clients and at the same time experiencing a cash flow crisis, because of the cash cost of attracting, winning and onboarding those new clients.

Now, typically we learn this as business owners the hard way. Normally at four in the morning lying awake in bed wondering how are we going to make payroll. And this is why when I’m advising MSPs on their growth, I teach them to get their cashflow sorted or any funding in place before they embark on a serious round of new client acquisition. I believe it’s the cost of acquiring new clients that encourages MSP owners to do it on the cheap.

Most people are always looking for ways to reduce their marketing spend, and yet that is completely the wrong approach in my opinion.

Of course, you should always look for value for money, but rather than looking at ways to reduce the amount you spend on acquiring new clients, you should be willing to spend more than your competitors to win the right kind of new clients.

And here’s the secret, don’t be distracted by the short-term costs of getting a new client. Instead, focus on the long-term revenue and profit that they are going to bring you.

Let me ask you some questions about this. When you win a new client, on average, how many users do they have and how much do they pay per user per month? And how long does a client stay with your MSP on average? Now, let’s say your average new client has 10 users, and just to keep the numbers easy, let’s say you charge them a $100 per user per month, and your retention will be excellent because of course it is for most MSPs most of the time. So let’s say you keep a client on average for three years, I realise it’s probably going to be a lot longer than that, but we’ll just go with three years. So 10 users times $100 a month equals a $1,000 a month. A 1,000 times 12 months equals $12,000 a year, and $12,000 times three years equals $36,000. You with me so far. So without doing any projects, without selling any hardware or licenses, that new client that you’ve just signed is going to be worth $36,000 to your business over the next few years – $36,000 of brand new revenue. And if you wanted to get even more excited about that figure, now work out the gross profit of that new client. Let’s say you had a 75% gross profit margin. Well, 75% of $36,000 is $27,000, so that’s 27 grand of gross profit. And you can take this a step further. What’s your net profit margin? Let’s say it’s 15%, so 15% of $27,000, and I know we’re doing lots of figures here, but 15% of $27,000 is $4,050. $4,050, you pay tax on that and that’s your personal money to spend.

Can you see the power of thinking this way? Because while most of your competitors are thinking about the $1,000 that they get from the client in the first month, you are focused on the revenue, the gross profit, and the net profit that you can collect from your client over the next few years. That $36,000 revenue figure is known as Average Lifetime Value, and it’s the value of the average client over their lifetime with your MSP. When you know this figure inside out, it allows you to make some very, very sensible spending decisions. Spend $50 a day on quality traffic, a $1,000 on a powerful piece of direct mail, $30,000 on a high quality salesperson. These are all costs your competitors will not be willing to spend because they’re not thinking the right way.

One caveat with this, and it goes back to what I was saying right at the start. To make this way of thinking work, you need to make sure you have adequate cashflow or funding in place to spend this money today, and then of course to reap the benefits down the line. Never ever do marketing that puts your business’ cashflow at any risk.

Compliance isn’t a headache. For MSPs it should be a profit centre

Featured guest: Cam Roberson is Vice President, Channel, at Beachhead Solutions, a provider of cloud-managed PC & mobile device encryption, security, and data access control for MSPs. He has spent 18 years in the MSP cyber security space, after launching his career as a product manager at Apple. He lives in the Bay Area, where Beachhead is headquartered.

Tell me what’s the dirtiest and most disgusting word your MSP knows? For many it’s compliance. However, while most MSP see compliance as a hassle, it could be your ticket to standing out, scaling up, and even buying a new Porsche. So let’s get into it. My special guest today is going to tell you how to turn compliance into a marketing edge, why it’s a gold mine for profit and the key to unlocking its full potential for your MSP’s growth.

Hi, my name is Cam Roberson and I’m vice president of sales and marketing with Beachhead Solutions.

And thank you so much for joining us from the beautiful San Jose, in California. Where for you it’s sunny and light and here in the UK where I’m based, it’s wet, it’s raining, it’s dark, and it’s miserable. And why don’t I live in California?

Anyway, we’re not here to talk about California and the UK. We’re here to talk about growing monthly recurring revenue through compliance. Which is something that many MSPs have looked at and maybe they’ve been put off a little bit because even just the word compliance is a horrible word, but we’re going to talk about how we do that. Before we do Cam, let’s explore your career a little bit because you have quite an impressive track record in using compliance and helping businesses with compliance and particularly helping MSPs to turn that into a profit centre. So give us a brief overview of how you’ve got to where you are today.

Okay. How much time do we have? I’ll make it brief. I started my career with Apple Computer in the early days. We were involved with imaging, so I was in product management developing products for our imaging space. I’ve had just three careers essentially. I started then an ad agency, which I grew to become one of the top agencies in the San Francisco Bay area. One of my clients was Beachhead Solutions. And just about the time I was prepared to sell the business, my colleagues then at Beachhead asked me to come and join the company to run marketing for them. And so we were already doing a lot of the collateral and the positioning and branding and so forth for the company. It was very appealing to me. And of course then coincidence had it that the business was sold successfully and I went to work for Beachhead and I’ve been there ever since.

Amazing. That’s a really great story. And this company, Apple, that you say you worked for, what do they do?

Well then we did computers, personal computers to compete with the monolith, which was IBM at that time. And now of course more known for phones and tablets.

Yeah, I’ll have to Google them later and see what they do. So let’s talk about compliance. I work in marketing, so I’m not a tech person. Obviously I work with MSPs, but marketing is the least regulated space on the planet. And you’ll know this because you used to run an ad agency. So apart from the few basic rules you must stick to, and here in the UK we have the advertising standards authority. So if I put an advert out and I put it on TV and it’s factually incorrect, I’m in trouble. But the reality is there’s so many checks and balances to stop that happening, you wouldn’t do it. But in most other marketing, there’s very few rules, and I’m sure this is exactly the same for you with your ad agency. And I know there’s talk now and again, of what if MSPs become regulated and that fear. Well, some fear that’s unwelcome and that kind of goes around now and again.

But the reality is, compared to real compliance, we as marketers and as MSPs, we don’t have that compliance burden at all. So you can understand why a lot of MSPs would see the word compliance and think, yeah, I’m not going near that, even though there are plenty of software solutions and other ways that we could do it. When you talk to MSPs about turning compliance into a revenue stream and a profit centre, how do you overcome that natural reluctance to get involved in the client’s compliance?

Yeah, that’s a great question. Fortunately, that’s becoming less of an issue over time because it’s coming from the MSP’s clients. They’re getting more and more learning that they are in fact regulated by one mandate or another, or they’re seeing it as evidenced by things like supply chain questionnaires from those that are in their space. Hey, what are you guys doing from a compliance perspective? What are you building your security stack against? Or with insurance questionnaires. Good security is good security and compliance demands good security. And as a result, the insurance companies, they’re not stupid, they’re formulating their requirements based on certain frameworks, certain security standards, much of which mirror exactly these compliance mandates. So it is in fact a fear factor. I know HIPAA was the bellwether years ago, that’s for the medical industry primarily. A lot of them didn’t want to hear about it, we’ll just push this down the road and not think about it because it is daunting. And I think that’s a backward approach.

Instead of looking at compliance as something that’s onerous and going to make it tough on you, instead look at it as an opportunity.

Yeah, I love that. I think that’s the perfect approach. And I guess we all deal with enforced change in different ways, don’t we? Some people embrace it early on, some people have to be pushed into it, but hey, let’s be honest, it’s managed services… it’s not IT support anymore, those days have gone. And so what do you do to help MSPs take that compliance and take it from being a burden to becoming a profit centre?

Well, I think that it’s incumbent upon vendors in the space to provide tools that assist the MSP with providing the service and to be able to demonstrate compliance. And so we are, I don’t mean this to be a plug, and I don’t think we’re like other vendors, but we are providing the mapping from our services, our controls to the control numbers that are required of the various mandates. I think that that is a trend that will continue to see that and provide tools that will assist the MSP with providing compliance and to be able to demonstrate compliance in the event of an audit or a breach or whatever.

So we are recognising that this is something that’s coming. It has come in some respects, but I think more and more, just like anything, it filters from large enterprise and it works its way down such that everybody is going to be held to the similar standards. And so getting ahead of things for us is to help our MSPs, but for the MSP is to start thinking about these things. Understanding where their stack stacks up, pardon the expression there, but where there might be gaps and how we fill those gaps, so that we can provide the service appropriate for the regulated client.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. And we will come on to just a brief look at the exact services you offer. We’ll do that towards the end of the interview. In terms of we’ve got this compliance, then the clients need to do this compliance, let’s be honest, regulation is not getting less. There’s more and more regulation, so the need is going up. Do you recommend to MSPs to try and get ahead of the curve? To actually get to grips with it, put in place compliance solutions, and then be the one that can proactively go out to their clients and say, Hey, what regulations do you guys have to comply with because we now can help with X, Y, Z? Do you recommend that? And is that the route that most MSPs go down or do they tend to come to you when they’re already a little bit behind the curve because a client has already asked them something they don’t know how to deliver?

Yeah, absolutely. The best case scenario, if your client comes to you, and they will come to you, is for you not to have the answers. Being compliant is not rocket science. It is a bit tedious. It requires research. What tools in my stack address these requirements of the mandate? And I don’t intend to scare MSPs, because most MSPs have a terrific stack. They have tools in place that secure data and prevent compromise. But they’re not exactly sure how those map to the specific numbers. So most will find when they go through this exercise, and my recommendation is to start with a framework 801-171, it’s a NIST publication or CSF cyber security framework. Go through that, map your products to those control numbers and get a start on this whole process. Because once you are able to identify that, you’ll know where you may have holes, you’ll know the answers for the various mandates.

The good news is it’s becoming more formalised. Most are now referring to most compliance mandates and you’re aware of them – CMMC 2.0 which goes into place in several days now, FTC safeguards, HIPAA. They’re more and more referencing frameworks so that instead of having all these different mandates and numbers, they’re sort of focusing on and getting more homogeneous. As I mentioned earlier, good security is good security. Have MFA in place, have encryption in place, have data segmentation and those sorts of things. And then you’re going to be much better prepared to answer that question when the MSP says to you, Hey, I just learned that I’m regulated by the FTC safeguards rule, are we in position yet to…? yes/no, you’ll have those answers. As I said, being embarrassed is the best case scenario, but those clients that are regulated are going to be looking for a more comprehensive service. If you’re not an expert or have no answers, chances are they may go to someone who is.

That makes perfect sense. So actually as the MSP, you can jump in and you can say, Hey, I don’t know about that specific regulation, but I do understand that most are on a framework and we are set up to help with X, Y, Z framework. I must just mention Cam, you just mentioned something which goes live in a few days. We recorded this back in December last year, and obviously we are listening to it on the podcast or seeing it on YouTube today. So whatever that regulation was you mentioned that’s been live for a few months now. But yeah, essentially what you are saying is be prepared. Understand that the regulations tend to sit on top of frameworks and then obviously know where to go to get the solution from that.

Let’s swing that round and finish this interview off by looking at what it is that you and your business specifically does to help MSPs. So let’s take that exact scenario that you’ve got an MSP. They know that their clients are regulated, they perhaps don’t know exactly what it is, what it means. They know it might be a framework. How does your business fit in there? Tell us what you do and how it helps.

Okay. Yeah. So thank you for asking. Beachhead Secure is a platform for MSPs, specifically to provide the controls. We actually provide 150 of the controls necessary of the various mandates. Manage those controls, make sure they’re in place, be able to demonstrate that you are providing those controls for your clients and then be able to document it. And so, I know this is going to air later, by the time this airs we will be able to, within the product, be able to map all those controls that we provide – encryption, MFA, least access privilege, data sanitization – to the control numbers that are required of the various mandates. So if you have a client that is regulated by HIPAA for instance, you’ll be able to see the controls that are put in place so that you can document it for an audit or under circumstance of a breach or to provide that service to a client and say, look, we have the controls necessary in place for HIPAA in this instance. Here’s proof. Here’s what we’ll need to provide an auditor if and when we are somehow unfortunately audited.

Yeah, yeah, that makes perfect sense. So Cam, thank you for explaining that for us. Thank you for taking us through that. I think we’re almost talking about a mind shift here, aren’t we? About a mind shift from, oh no, the clients are asking for help on something I don’t want to be involved with to hey, it’s inevitable. It’s almost like cyber security 10 years ago, isn’t it? 10 years ago people were starting to ask about what’s this cyber security thing or why has my screen gone red? What can I do about that? And not a single MSP on the planet today would not not touch cyber security. It’s a standard thing. And I think what you are saying, I think reading the subtext, is that compliance is just going to become another one of those things. We don’t want them going anywhere else. We don’t want them forming a relationship with another MSP anywhere. We want them continuing and strengthening the relationship with you, which means you have to take a proactive approach to compliance. And it certainly sounds like you guys have put together a great solution for that. Let’s just finish off then, Cam, just tell us what’s the best way to get in touch with you. So what’s your website? How can we find you on LinkedIn?

We are at www.beachheadsolutions.com There’s two Hs in Beachhead, which often is overlooked. I’m Cam Roberson on LinkedIn. I’ve been around a while, so I’ve got that. Cam Roberson is me and I would be happy to answer any questions. Just one last point, Paul. I think that a lot of our community struggles to distinguish our practice, how to differentiate our offering from the guy in the next county or the large nationwide type guy. This is a great way to distinguish your practice – compliance – as opposed to having the lowest price out there. And unfortunately, many go that direction. I think this is an opportunity for MSPs to differentiate their offering from the competition.

Paul’s Personal Peer Group

A teamwork issue has been sent to me from SEB in Detroit where his MSP is based. Some of his technicians are bored doing routine work, and his question is: I’ve heard of the concept of gamification. However, how do I gamify work?

Gamification or gamifying something is easy. It’s about making mundane, boring jobs fun. And you see this a lot with vendors and with SaaS apps in particular, they gamify the onboarding to encourage you to finish it. In fact, I once signed up for something called ClickFunnels and completed the onboarding on a Saturday morning just to get my free t-shirt, which they did send to me.

Good gamification is simple to understand and it has a fun reward attached to it. It’s also highly visible what needs to be done and how much there is left to do. And the brain loves to complete tasks that it started where it can see the end in sight. Think how long computer games actually take to finish but you never think of it as a 60 hour challenge. You only think about each level at the time. So in your MSP, consider how you can gamify routine and boring jobs that your team need to do.

For example, you could turn them into a daily contest with a leaderboard. How many tickets can you get completed in a day? Something like that. Think about sales calls. There’s a great way to gamify this, putting paperclips in a glass and every time you pick up the phone to make a call, you move a paperclip into the other glass. Let’s say you want to do 50 calls today. You put 50 paperclips in the first glass. Don’t do that with M&Ms because the M&Ms get eaten. Think how you could do it for big tidy ups. You could set a deadline with a countdown on a massive screen and have cold beer ready as a reward. And think what you can do for completing projects on time. This could be as simple as every time a project is finished and if it happens on time and all the checklist has been ticked off, that there is a very simple reward for everyone who’s worked together on that project. And that reward could be as simple as everyone gets pizza today.

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, Cam Roberson, on LinkedIn, and visit the Beachhead Solutions website.
• Got a question about your MSP’s marketing? Submit one here for Paul’s Personal Peer Group.