In this episode you will learn;
- Pitfalls of diving into marketing tactics without a solid strategy.
- About Targeting and Niching Down can drastically simplify and enhance your marketing efforts.
- How to avoid wasting time and resources on ineffective practices.
Tune in to pick up these valuable insights that can help you navigate the complexities of marketing for MSPs!
Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts
Connect with Tim Fitzpatrick on LinkedIn by clicking here – https://www.linkedin.com/in/timpfitzpatrick/
Connect with Daniel Welling on LinkedIn by clicking here – https://www.linkedin.com/in/daniel-welling-54659715/
Connect with Adam Morris on LinkedIn by clicking here – linkedin.com/in/adamcmorris
Visit The MSP Finance Team website, simply click here – https://www.mspfinanceteam.com/
We created It’s a Numbers Game Podcast to help MSP owners learn and understand how to build and maintain a financially healthy MSP business. In this podcast series, MSP business owners like you will learn the fundamental steps, the tips and tricks, the dos and don’ts to achieve MSP financial growth.
We look forward to catching up with you on the next one. Stay tuned!
Transcript:
Dan: Welcome along to the show, Tim. And as is, as is customary, for our, for our recordings, we, we had a little chat in the green room beforehand and surprising to hear that, there really is very little difference, between US and UK MSPs, certainly in the million dollars or pounds and below, perhaps you could just tell us a little bit about your experience.
Tim: Yeah, absolutely. And thanks for having me guys. I’m excited to be here. So, so you want to know about my experience personally or my experience working with MSPs?
Dan: Well, we’ve,with MSPs and in particular,how you, how you find the sort of sub million pounds, sub million dollar. and then hopefully we can go on to talk about, you know, what happens when you sort of punch through those, those imaginary ceilings in the million, the two, the three, the four, and the five, et cetera.
Dan: But, yeah, really just starting at that sort of sub million pound,
Tim: So, I, from a marketing standpoint, I don’t think the problems shift all that much. they do change, but in general, MSPs struggle with a few aspects of marketing. One, the biggest one that I see is differentiating. Right. If you go to five MSP websites, pull the logos off, they say the same flavor of message and what happens when we don’t differentiate people default to price, which is a horrible place to be.
Tim: and we don’t want to be marketing or selling in that environment. So, you know, the, we got to differentiate, from our competition. the other big. Mistake. I see is MSP jump right into the tactics of marketing, right? There’s, it’s easy to do right. And most marketers are pitching all the tactics.
Tim: And, you know, but we’re, what happens is we’re battling information overload. There’s so many different marketing channels. There’s so many different tactics. And, you know, as business owners, right? most MSPs are, you know, Have a bent towards taking action, right? And there’s nothing wrong with that. But when we jump into the marketing tactics without having strategy in place, the analogy I use is we’ve got these marketing vehicles, but we don’t have fuel for the vehicles. Strategy is the fuel. And what ends up happening is they waste time and money on things that aren’t working. And then they get discouraged, you know, marketing doesn’t work. And a lot of them end up just stopping. So, not a good place to be.
Dan: I like the,the. The vehicle for which I’m a car nut. So I’m going to assume it’s a car and,and you can imagine, someone that’s gone out and bought like a, I guess for our US audience, a gas guzzler and a big,big thirsty, thirsty car and can afford the car, but not afford the petrol for it.
Dan: so I guess,in some ways there is a, yeah. there’s a tactic strategy overlap and blend where you want to make sure you’re picking a vehicle that you can afford to put, sufficient fuel in to get where you’re going. and,and equally,not the other way around.
Dan: so, So yeah,talk to me a little bit about then,what,what the mistakes are, like, do, do MSP owners think right? Email marketing. That’s what I’m going to do. maybe because they, well, in fact, I’ll come on to perhaps the position of the MSP after this, but, you know, generally wanting to avoid anything to do with sales and marketing, because it’s not something they’re comfortable with, and therefore picking the ones that seem perhaps to be the most compatible with that position.
Dan: So I don’t mind sending emails because I don’t have to, you know, no one’s going to, no one’s going to say anything bad to me. but equally,they probably don’t want to get emails themselves. and,but is that the sort of mistake you’re seeing then,people are buying the dream rather than reality.
Tim: Well, and it’s, you know, it’s not so much that they’re picking the wrong tactics. Right? Because any of the marketing tactics that are out there, in my opinion, can work. It’s that the sequencing is out of whack, right? they’re picking the vehicles, but they don’t have the strategy in place.
Tim: And when I talk about strategy, what I’m thinking of a few main things, one, I’m thinking of. Your target market, what’s the market you’re you wanna work with, and who are your ideal clients within that market? you know, not everybody in a market is a great fit for us, and we need to understand that clearly understanding your target market and your ideal clients.
Tim: Is where everything from a marketing standpoint is built from. So if we just start picking vehicles, we’re just, it’s like hope, right? we’re throwing stuff up against a wall, hoping something’s going to stick. And that’s not a great strategy. You know, we’ve got to identify those clients that we intend to work with.
Tim: And then, and only then can we start taking the next steps. And, you know, look, we don’t need to reinvent the wheel here. Okay. Most MSPs who have been in business for a while, I mean, they got existing clients. The best place to try to start honing in on your ideal clients is with your existing client base.
Tim: And I, I call them the three power questions. You know, who do you love working with? Who are your most profitable clients? And when I say profit, you guys will like this, coming from where you do, a lot of people default on. to a top line revenue, but it’s our top line revenue clients are not always the most profitable clients.
Tim: So to me, we want to look at gross profit, who are our most profitable clients and then who are we getting great results for the clients that check all three of those boxes. Those are the people that we want to dig a little bit deeper to say, Hey, what are their other commonalities here. Are there any similarities here? And as you start to dig into that, usually things start to come to the surface, you know, like I’m, I’m working with the client right now that we just went through this with. And, you know, he’s like, gosh, I have a fair amount of clients that are attorneys. And they’re checking these boxes. So, you know, he wasn’t quite ready.
Tim: I think one of the easiest ways for MSPs to differentiate is to hone in on a specific vertical market. It’s not the only way, but I think it’s one of the simplest ways. and so with this particular client, that’s what we decided to do is focus their marketing efforts on attorneys. they weren’t quite ready to Shift all of their messaging to attorney specifically, but they’re, you know, they’re going to update a lot of their messaging towards attorneys and with their outgoing marketing efforts, they’re targeting law firms, right?
Tim: That’s what I mean about honing in because it becomes much, much easier. It’s much simpler when you can hone in on, Hey, we’re going to target attorneys. You can start to speak their language. You understand the challenges and the problems that they have specifically. And you can, from there it becomes much easier to, I call it an ideal client GPS.
Tim: It’s a list of where are all these ideal clients. When you know that you want to target attorneys, it becomes much easier to create that list. But when you have that list, now you can also be very targeted with where you go and what you do with your marketing efforts. It’s not like you’re going to some small business conference, hoping you’re going to talk to some small business owner who needs IT services.
Tim: You’re getting in front of attorneys. You know them. If you’ve already worked with them, you’ve got testimonials, you’ve got case studies that you can build upon, and you’re fishing where the fish are. That’s where everything should start, in my opinion. Otherwise, the sequencing of your marketing activities is out of whack.
Adam: and, Tim, I absolutely completely agree with everything you just said. and I would, you’d probably agree with going deeper still, wouldn’t you? So if you can go, a further layer, so what type of attorneys in what geography and do they specialize in a certain type of law, perhaps?because you’ll probably still find in your geographic area, if you are restricting yourself to that, which of course you don’t have to, you’re going to be more than enough business in that particular vertical. And of course, you’re going to naturally meet and build relationships with others that kind of hang around that community.
Adam: Aren’t you? So you’re going to end up being a specialist for specific types of attorneys and the community, those attorneys hang around in. So. So for me, this is a kind of marketing kind of 101 that, that anybody just needs to get their head around that the challenge is.
Adam: and so maybe this is one of my challenging questions, but how do you approach, how do you approach the MSP that has built a fairly generic, client base, you know, 40 clients that spread across all verticals, there’s not one dominant, and the thing that kind of stands out amongst them is the type of individual.
Adam: Or the culture of the client rather than say the vertical, because that makes it much harder, doesn’t it, to kind of pinpoint that. And I’ll be honest with you, Tim, I’ve racked my brain around really trying to get to grips with, the MSP that lives in this world. what thoughts or ideas do you have perhaps around how to take that further?
Tim: Yeah, you know what? I’m going to sound like a broken record. Because that you’re absolutely right that is a very challenging place to be because again, you’re targeting broadly.and you can’t target broadly with your marketing. It’s just gonna, it’s gonna drive you crazy and it’s not going to work well.
Tim: And so what I would challenge that MSP to do, there’s got to be clients within that base that they want to actively target and do more business with. It’s those clients that they need to hone in on and target their marketing towards. Because if you, again, if it’s like, I just, if you can’t get in front of them and identify them, right.how are you going to market to
Adam: and maybe it could be as simple as which relationships are the strongest. Therefore, which are you most likely to develop, you know, or be invited into their community, if you ask. and so perhaps, you know, you just literally start there. but you’ve got to start somewhere, haven’t you?
Adam: That’s the point. And you’ve got to start to think the nicher you go, the better.
Tim: Yep. You can also target, you know, like, let’s say they, they realize that within their clients, their main buyer is whatever the COO, right. Or the CFO, they could target that way, right. As long as there are places where those people go and congregate, right. Are there organizations? Are there groups? Specifically for those types of people, if there are, then they can get in front of those people and they can speak specifically to how it relates and solves the challenges of the C. O. or the C. F. O. or whoever that person is. That’s another way to do it. But we got to be able to target them. And get in front of them right in a way that the group is niched because most MSPs are doing now is going to a, you know, if they’re targeting geographically, you know, they’re going to a local networking event where there’s just a bunch of small businesses.
Tim: It’s just. The message falls flat. You know, like one of my, one of my mentors said specificity sells. And so when we hone in on who we intend to work with, we can get much more specific with our message, which means it’s going to attract and engage those people much more effectively.
Adam: the other, angle I sometimes use is the hobbies or communities that you as the MSP owner are, you know, active in, the golf club, the yacht club, you know, tennis club, whatever it is. And, because it’s what you’ve gotta go, you’ve gotta go where some people are, haven’t you, and where you can,and build some relationships.
Adam: And from those relationships, other relationships emerge. So, that, that’s just another approach. But I like the idea of looking at the individual role within that business. the IT manager, the CFO, the COO.et cetera, and using that as a,as a different angle,
Tim: Yeah. the challenge, here’s the challenge. If you’re working with different clients every time. For an MSP, it becomes very difficult to standardize the tools and the resources that you’re using within your tech stack. And that’s not efficient in my opinion. You know, so if you want to get more efficient in your onboarding, in your fulfillment, And as a result, increased profit, you have to have a way to standardize your delivery.
Tim: And one of the easiest ways to do that is if you’re working with similar clients over and over again,
Dan: great point that leads me into,we were talking about role based niching and, let’s say it managers were the role you picked and you went and hung out where. IT managers were, then that’s probably going to lead you into co managed, and therefore that is going to lead to a standardization of what you do.
Dan: And, and co managed,suddenly is a thing that everyone’s talking about, but I’m pretty sure we were supporting IT managers for many,many years and decades before, but, but now it’s been sort of re redefined as,as a topic. So, I’d love to, to just, go a little bit deeper.
Dan: I know there’s a couple of other topics we want to cover, but having established the fact that we need,a list, we want it to be as, and I can’t use the word that you, I can’t even pronounce it. Spec specificity.
Tim: Specificity. Yeah.
Dan: we want that list presumably to be, as small as we can make it.
Dan: in order to be able to manage it and, and, and,and use the list,question one, question two, how do we actually go about making that? do we build it ourselves? Can we go and buy it from somewhere? where do we get started?
Tim: And you’re talking about the ideal client GPS list. I mentioned,
Dan: absolutely. So, Today I’m doing sales and marketing. I’m doing lead gen. I want to win new customers. Where’s my database? I guess is what I’m, is what I’m saying. Yep.
Tim: here, when I talk about the ideal client GPS list, Here’s let’s say, let’s just take the example of attorneys or law firms. Again, when you create an ideal client GPS list, what you are doing is looking at where those people congregate and get together offline and online. Soyou’re looking at, associations they might belong to, you know, conferences or events that they go to, websites they frequent, podcasts they listen to, YouTube channels they watch, influencers in the space.
Tim: You’re looking at, other providers that they might work with or manufacturers that they purchase. Supplies from vendors that they purchase supplies from those types of things. Now with the advent of AI and things like chat GPT, creating a list like this. is much simpler. It’s faster. you know, what we recommend clients do is they use chat GPT to create a base of this list. And then you can go in and do more searches to see and fill in some of those gaps. But when you’re done with this list, it actually is a pretty long list. It’s all the places that you could be to get in front of those ideal client. ideal clients, right? And then from there, what you’re doing, you’re not gonna, you can’t be all those places at once, but it gives you a list that you can pick from and say, Hey, you know what?
Tim: We’re going to, for the next 90 days or 180 days, we are going to work on getting in front of the America, the, you know, the, whatever the state bar association, you know, see if we can do some speaking events for the state bar. Right. or we’re going to get, there’s 20 podcasts we’ve identified for that are geared towards law firms.
Tim: We’re going to start doing outreach to get booked on those podcasts. Right. So it’s, the list just gives you a very targeted way of getting in front of those specific clients that you want. To reach right in the case of vendors or providers in the space, Adam, you touched on this man. if I’m going after attorneys, man, I want to connect with other providers that are working with attorneys, right?
Tim: And when I reach out to those people and connect with them, those people, you know, if I develop relationships with those people, they become good strategic or referral partners. Those conversations are much easier when you are reaching out to people that focus on the same type of client than somebody that’s just, again, targeting broadly.
Dan: And of course,
Tim: of the conversations are much more powerful that way,
Dan: and of course that is in,in action here. we all work with,with MSPs and therefore we’re,you know, we’ve come together to, hopefully, Add some value to our joint audience. And,and as you say, you never know,we, we may get asked about marketing,and, and then think, oh yeah, we’re gonna, we’re gonna introduce Tim and,and vice versa.
Dan: you on the finance topic. although absolutely that GPS list of the places they are, absolutely make sense fully agree. I’m actually talking about the actual list. the. you know, if we’re trying to add,a customer a, a month, so we, we are looking to sign 12 customers this year.
Dan: Therefore, do we need,a hundred, 200, 300 suspects, law firms,in the example you had, and. and, and identifying that, that, that target list, so that when we go to the bar, event, and, and we can say, Oh yeah, look, here’s, here’s, there’s five people here that are on my list and I already know something about them.
Dan: I’ve already connected to them on LinkedIn. They’ve already had a profile. Something from me in the post, maybe I’ve already called them at some point. is that the sort of process you’d be recommending and how do we build that list?
Tim: Well, you can, it depends, again, it depends on where the MSP is at and where their budget is, right? With an ideal client GPS list, what you’re really talking about is. You know, you’ve got, if you want to actually create a specific list of attorneys that you want to target, to me, what you’re starting to get into is more account based marketing, where you’re identifying specific client, specific prospects that you think are a good fit.
Tim: And you are going to actively Go after and get in front of those clients. That type of marketing is different than I’m going to go on a podcast, right? And create content. or I’m going to go to the bar and speak to the bar, right? That you’re is really more of an inbound approach when you’re creating a specific targeted list.
Tim: that’s more outbound, right? And how are you going to get in front of those specific people? And that can absolutely be effective. but it is, I mean, it’s a different type of marketing,
Dan: Got it.
Tim: right? And so if you’re going to create a list like that, certainly need to have a plan of, okay, how am I going to get in front of these people?
Tim: Because it, look, it can’t just be cold calling you, you know, it’s like, cause look, you’re just going to churn through a list like that really fast. So with the count based marketing, you’re much more focused and you’re just, you’re going to stay in front of those. People calls, maybe direct mail, maybe you’re going to connect with them on LinkedIn and engage with them on social, but it’s this consistent activity over time, right?
Tim: Because the reality is when you create a list like that,all you have are the numbers about those businesses. You have no idea whether they need your service or not. And until you actually have a conversation with them, you’re not going to know. So what you’re really doing is creating that list based on data you can gather, but the data is, it’s only scratching the surface, right?
Dan: And so, are we talking about here,making a conscious decision about which of those, tactics and,and therefore leading from our, we’ve identified our niche, but, whether it’s account based or whether it’s inbound, generative, we are, we’re making a conscious decision about what we’re going to do.
Dan: presumably based on some of our own, resource limitations, of time or money and,and also perhaps some of our preferences about the things like I’ve only got an hour a day and if I’m only going to spend an hour a day doing this, what am I most likely to spend an hour a day doing, in order to make sure that I invest an hour every day consistently for, Months, quarters, years, and decades to come.
Tim: Yeah. you’re spot on. It’s, there is no one size fits all plan, right? Which is why when MSPs Go to somebody that’s just putting them in a box saying, Hey, we’re going to do X, Y, and Z.it’s really hard, right? Because when, in my opinion, when you look at what you’re going to put in to a marketing plan and what vehicles are going to be best for that MSP, you have to look at you know, where they’re at, where they want to get tothe resources they have.
Tim: And when you look at resources, you’ve got time, you have people, you have budget, all of those things impact what you choose to do. You know, like you could look at, you could look at two MSPs that are at a million dollars a year and top line revenue plans. Aren’t going to be the exact same. What if one wants to get to 5 million in three years and the other one wants to get to two and 10. Those are two totally different marketing plans.
Dan: is what’s going to work well for that particular MSP, right? Like we’re recording audio, we’re recording video, man. I love video content. But if I tell an MSP, man, you got to start getting on podcasts and you got to start speaking on stages and they’re terrified of that’s never going to work well, you know?
Tim: And so we have to take that into account as well because they’re not going to, they’re either going to start doing it and then they’re going to stop or they’re just not going to do it at all. So there’s a lot of different moving parts. pieces, you know, or pieces to the puzzle that we’ve got to take into account to, to make sure that we put everything together.
Tim: Like it
Adam: I think you just hit on something as well. And in fact, it related relates to a conversation I was having earlier today, with one of our clients, around, someone who’s struggling to move into that marketing and lead gen mindset because just not. What they’re used to doing is just not who they are.
Adam: It’s not their strength. They’re great guy, great at delivering solutions for clients. They’re not great at suddenly becoming a marketeer. And, so they’ve been looking at this for 18 months and still can’t get going with it because there’s, you know, they just, it’s just too far away from what they think they can do.
Adam: Get done. So, you know, any kind of thoughts around how you help someone in that position to start to shift their mindset and their belief system around how maybe they can move into a business development role and see the world slightly differently, any kind of thoughts generally on that?
Tim: You know, it’s, we, no matter what we do, we’re marketers and salespeople, first and foremost. Cause if we’re not, if we don’t have that generating leads that become clients, you know, you can be the greatest it person in the world and it’s not going to matter, you know? And so we, there has to, if you want to scale beyond just referrals, there has to be that shift in mindset, of.
Tim: Okay, I’ve got to start focusing on this and, you know, unless you’re in a position where you can just hire it out, I don’t think the MSP owner has a any other choice than to embrace fact that I’m going to have to spend a little bit of time leveling up my skillset here with marketing. And when I say that, there are a few things that I would highly recommend they think about because look, even I mean, I’m in this day in day out, I don’t know everything about marketing.
Tim: It is too broad. In my opinion, the most important place for an MSP owner to level up their marketing skills. Is on the strategic planning and the leadership side. I do not think they need to waste their time digging into all the tactics. They don’t need to know how to run a paid ad campaign. They don’t need to know how to create content, right?
Tim: They need to have a general a full idea of how those things work, but there’s plenty of great implementers out there. If you have a firm understanding on the strategic side and how to plan and then how to make sure that those plans get implemented, you’re going to know how to ask the right questions to the people that are doing the implementation.
Tim: You’re going to be able to give them the tools they need to be successful in their job. But what most MSPs do is they go, they hire either an, a coordinator or a manager in house, or they hire an agency and they expect them to do everything. And that’s never going to work. Never.
Dan: And,
Tim: And when they do that, they don’t know how to, they don’t know how to manage and guide and lead the internal person.
Tim: And they don’t know what questions to ask and how to hold the agency accountable. That’s why those fundamentals I think are where they should be focusing their time and effort.
Dan: absolutely agree. And, and I guess, MSP owners being typically a technician originated, actually figuring out how something works,is where naturally they go to. So, yeah, I want to understand how,how SEO works. So I want to understand how to do X in WordPress or,or whatever the technical discipline is.
Dan: But actually, yeah, again, that’s the thing to resist. you’re a leader and a salesperson and a marketeer. you’re not an engineer or a technician, in, in, in whatever the discipline,we’re about to run out of, of our, time budget, today. There, I know you had some, and you’ve already given us some great insight and suggestions.
Dan: is there some low hanging fruits, that we can,that we can leave all our listeners with in terms of, things they should be doing, immediately after listening to this podcast episode.
Tim: Yeah, absolutely. So when we work with clients, the first place we look for low hanging fruit is what are you doing? That’s already working. What are you doing? That’s generating leads that are becoming clients. That’s the first place to look because oftentimes there are gaps in that and that’s not fully optimized.
Tim: Fully optimize that first and foremost. So for example, I’m generating referrals. Yeah. Great. Are they just happening or are you actually asking for them? Do you have a referral program? Do you have a referral process? If you don’t that’s low hanging fruit. The other low hanging fruit Is there something that you used to do that worked that you stopped doing?
Tim: Right. A lot of the times we, you know, we just get busy. Things change. You know, I was doing a bunch of speaking before the pandemic and then I stopped doing it and I just haven’t picked it back up again, but it was working. That’s another area of low hanging fruit. Okay. Most of the time, the best thing to do is not to jump into a new tactic.
Tim: It’s to look at what you’re already, what you’re already doing and what you have done to find the low hanging fruit there and jump on that. So those are the two places that we. Look first.
Adam: No, a hundred percent. And often what we see happening is You know, the owner taking the foot off the pedal, going back to our car analogy and they get busy with their existing clients and then all of a sudden the funnel dries up. and they forgot what they did originally, you know, to get those clients, which was getting out there, meeting lots of people, having lots of conversations, you know, Because they had to, because they had to put food on the table.
Adam: Right. So they had no choice. And so they’re energized and off they went and did this. And then they forgot that’s actually how they did it. So, lots of great advice there. just before we wrap up, Tim, is there any, is there a shameless plug, that you’d like to offer our listeners?
Tim: Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. I appreciate that. you know, if you want to connect with us, you can go over to rialtomarketing. com, which is R I A L T O marketing. com. The other resource I’ll make available to your listeners, you know, we help clients remove the roadblocks. That exist. there are nine of them that we focus on in marketing.
Tim: And if your audience wants to find out which of the nine are slowing down their growth, they can do that at revenue roadblock scorecard. com.
Dan: Very
Adam: fantastic. Dan, any last words?
Dan: no, I’m glad we, we added a road map, into our car analogy. hopefully we’ll be able to weave all of this into something really clever,when we, when we advertise this, this episode, but, but no, it’s been a real pleasure actually,talking and,we could have carried on for hours more.
Dan: And I guess that’s probably the final message really for our listeners is, and as you said earlier, Tim, you know, there’s so much to know about this topic, if you can find a way to continually educate and understand it, then, you know, that’s going to be, that’s going to be to your benefit in the longterm.
Dan: So, so yeah, thank you. Thank you very much for your time.
Tim: Thank you guys. I appreciate it.