Paul, welcome to the Evolved Radio podcast. Thank you for having me back on. It's
a pleasure to be here. Absolutely. Always great to chat with you. We'll
dive straight into things. I read through your book,
MSP Marketing Start Here, which is fantastic. It's a quick, easy
read, with, like, lots of dense topics and,
actionable things for people to get started. So I think this is perfect for,
the attention and time starved audience in the MSP ecosystem.
One of the things I think that's great about your approach here is
is really focusing on simplicity and boiling things down
to here are the nuts and bolts to really get you started and moving in
the right direction. And I'm a huge fan of this being a huge,
lean practitioner and looking for efficiency and everything. I'm a
bit of a nut about it. So I think that's a great place to start
is let's talk about the complexity and actually
the simplicity of marketing. Yeah. So the problem with marketing
and I've I've been in the channel for nine years now. That's the quickest nine
years of my life. I swear it is. And and if you look at
the the the marketing, the MSPs or the that's being banded around
in lots of different places, it's more complex in 2025 than it was
in 2016 when I first arrived. And it's gonna get more and more complex. And
there's more new things. You know, we've got AI has come into the fray in
the last couple of years. And AI is a great tool for marketing. It's not
the the wonder tool. It's not the wonder drug that everyone hoped it would be,
but it still has its uses. And there's there's all new tools coming in. There's
new shiny things. There's there's new new new more things. Let's do this. Let's
try this strategy. LinkedIn this, LinkedIn that. And just
like you, I know you talk to MSPs all the time. I talk to MSPs
all the time. And what what you notice quite quickly is that everyone gets
excited by a new shiny thing. Oh, I should try this. Should, you know, should
I go off on there? But when it boils down to it, the vast majority
of MSPs let's let's make them a figure. Let's say 80% of MSPs. The
vast majority of them, they're not doing the basics. Right?
Their website really bad, really too technical, doesn't
really connect with anyone at emotional level. Their LinkedIn, they're just
they're doing the basics if that. They're they're doing couple of things a week and
just doing really boring posts. Their profile isn't right. Their photo's out of
date. And then their actual marketing, they're not doing they're not building audiences.
They're not, you know, building relationships with people. They're not doing any of this stuff.
So when I sat down to write this book and I, this book took
me eight hours to write. I actually did it on a flight. I did it
on a flight from London to Vegas last year. It took eight
hours to write, but it it took sort of five years of before
thinking, and then it it took about four months of editing afterwards. So,
the book is is it's like I've got it here in in front of me.
How many pages is it? 51 50 52 pages. Right? And
and it's big big text. In fact, I read the whole thing. I've just finished
recording it for Audible, and it was, like, forty six minutes. That's that's that's how
long it's supposed to be. And that was by design. I wanted a book that
any any technical focused person could could read. I actually
set myself the brief, Todd, you'll love this, that someone could read it on the
John in two in two sessions. Right? Over two nights. That
was genuinely my brief to myself. And and
actually getting cutting marketing down to being super
simple, and here are 11 things that you should do. And if you do these
11 things, your marketing will be better than 80, you know, than
80% of your competition. That was actually really hard because
you have to ignore AI. You have to ignore new shiny things. You have to
ignore this strategy and that strategy and this thing that's popped up there.
But the reality is, you you you take any marketplace and you've
got 50 MSPs and they all look the same. To to the prospect, to the
decision maker, or the the the the business owner or manager, you you got
50 MSPs. They all look the same. All the websites look the same. They say
the same things. Everyone talks about, oh, cybersecurity. They talk about
productivity. They're all talking about the same things. And, in in that
and and yet none of them are doing any proactive marketing. They'll go out to
the old networking meeting. They'll do a bit of email marketing, but there's no consistent
and persistent effort to do marketing. For you
to win in that marketplace, right, if we if we exclude a couple of big
MSPs that will just rise above because they've got sales structure, they've
got marketing resources, all of that. Ignore all of that. You you assume you've got
40 left. All you gotta do to rise above all of those other
MSPs, you put in place a marketing sys And a marketing
system is where you have a small number that happen on a regular
basis. As with any other system, it's it's like to happen on this
day, this to happen on this day, this to happen. And then you keep every
day, every week, every month for the next ten years until you sell the
business or you die or whatever happens to you. And the MSPs that
do that, they always rise up to near the top, and they always
win more new clients. And and, you know, the goal for most MSPs would be
something like to win a new client a month. One new client a month, which
would really change the lives of most MSPs. So that
that's why I wrote such a short book. I simplified everything
down. I've got another 10 books in my head. In fact, almost half of what
we took out of this book is gonna go into few books. But but do
you do you see how making it simple and making it as small as
possible for MSPs is is is the right thing to do.
A %. I agree because, you know, your your point about systems
is very close to my heart as an operations person. Because if you want something
to happen and produce predictable results, you need to build a system around it. Right?
To just do things ad hoc and just constantly throwing spaghetti at the
wall and trying and tinkering. Like, that's that's not a system, and it
won't produce results. Like, you may get a a winner every once in a while,
but it's not reliable. It's not consistent, and you're probably not gonna show up and
do those things. And interestingly, the other part of
this, we'll get into is I I like the approach that you took
around this of being social selling. Right? So, like, let let's talk a bit about
that, and then we'll come back to sort of my experience around the simplicity of
this. But what was your thinking around focusing around social selling? Yeah.
Yeah. Well, it's it's it's even smaller than social selling. It's just LinkedIn. We've we've
gone all in on on LinkedIn. And the the reason that that
the, I'll I'll I'll very quickly talk about the system we built. It's a it's
a it's a it's a six word strategy. There's three steps in a in a
lead generation system. I recommend six words. You build audiences, you
grow relationships, and you convert relationships. That's it. Those six words.
And the the first, the first of those build audiences
is you go and find people to listen to you and you systematically
grow those audiences. So I say to most MSPs and and it's in the book
is is go build up your LinkedIn connections and build up your
email database. And that's it. Now there are there's about 26 other
audiences you could build. And there's there's other social media platforms, there's offline
audiences, there's podcasts, there's YouTube, all of that kind of stuff. But
again, for most MSPs, it's overwhelm, it's too much. Let's just bring it down.
And if if you were to build up, imagine this, if you were to have
10,000 connections on LinkedIn, say, which could take you five years to
get there, but let's say you had 10,000 connections on LinkedIn. Every
and if you're trying to win one new client a month max, and actually for
most MSPs that could be a little overwhelmed. Right? Nine, ten new
clients a month, that's it. That's all I need. If you if you're connected to
10,000 people and they're all business owners or business managers or, you
know, they they work within the kind of clients that you'd like to do business
with, All of all of the prospects you ever need are there on LinkedIn.
And and, you know, assuming that Microsoft keeps LinkedIn going in the trajectory
it's going, I would say LinkedIn is one of their most successful products. They've managed
not to ruin it yet and let's not tempt fate by, by saying that. And
I say this is it took me twenty seven minutes to get Word to be
stable today. Twenty seven minutes and four reboots of my Mac for Word.
Word? Word's like five hundred years old. It should be as stable as anything
anyway. But if you got 10,000 connections on
LinkedIn, that's all you need. And then then other steps in my system, I
recommend that you then get those get those connections and you get them into your
CRM so you can email them. You then build a relationship with them. You
put content in front of them. There's a number of different ways of doing that
on LinkedIn. You can put posts, you can put PDFs up which are called carousel
PDFs which are really good. You can send LinkedIn newsletters which is where
you send articles and you get people to subscribe to your LinkedIn newsletters. You can
do videos. On LinkedIn, you can do technology stuff, you can do productivity
stuff, you can do personal stuff. You can do a video of you saying, hey,
I'm having a great weekend. We're having a barbecue with some friends, a couple of
business owning friends. What are you doing this weekend? Which by the way would be
will become your highest rated post of the year because it's got nothing to do
with tech and business. Yeah. That's just the way it goes. But you have to
have all all of that balance. And so everything you need is there within
LinkedIn. And and that's why I went all in on that system. And and
that's not based off me sort of making this up or just
thinking, oh, let's just go in on LinkedIn. It's based on working with 700
MSPs and looking at the people who are working a system and doing
really well. What are they doing? They're not doing it on Facebook. They're not doing
it on they're definitely not doing it on Instagram. They're not doing it on TikTok.
They're not doing it on BeReal or any of these other platforms. They're doing it
on LinkedIn. And LinkedIn has its faults, but Link LinkedIn
and social media is it's just the reflection of where people
are. If you look at a core strategy that that build audiences, grow
relationships, convert relationships, What that that could work in
a hundred years time. It's just in a hundred years time, I mean, you and
I won't be here to to know whether this is correct or not. But in
a hundred years time, it will be hologram somethings. Right? We'll all be hanging out
in holograms, in chips, in in, you know, Elon
Musk will just be a brain in a in a in a jar by then.
And he'll still he'll be running the world still. So we'll just be holograms in
Elon Musk's brain. Where am I going with that? But you get the idea. The
concept is still the same of where do people hang out? Go and find that
those people and and and then then build relationships with them. In fact, you could
use that same marketing strategy in the nineteen sixties. It's just that in the
nineteen sixties, you had to physically go into buildings and go to meetings and go
to associations and clubs or advertising newspapers or whatever
because that was how you reach people. So the core concept doesn't change, but I
believe that LinkedIn and I and I see this not changing for the next five
to ten years. LinkedIn is just absolutely the best place to go.
I agree. And I've I've, sort of painfully come to this real
realization. I've been on LinkedIn for a long time. I've I've used it sort
of as a an outreach and and a connection strategy in the past.
But this year, I am absolutely going all in because I've spent the
last two years, I think, in sort of traditional marketing hell where I was
trying to build lead magnets and drive traffic and looking
at paid ads and all of these strategies. And the first thing I felt
like I realized is most of the marketing advice that you see on the Internet
is directly tuned to b to c marketing. Like, most of those
strategies don't tend to work in a b to b world. So I think that
was sort of my first frustration. And then recognizing, like, how hard all
of that stuff was, like, the the number of systems, the number of
tools, the number of, you know, people and horsepower it takes to develop
all those assets. And the result that you get from it is pretty weak. You
know, like, you spend a few hours building up some content
and and building a landing page, and you get four people that sign up for
it. It's like, well, great. I mean, that didn't really move the needle. That that's
not helpful for me. Whereas, you know, you can have a banger post on
LinkedIn that brings a ton of attention. It actually leads to
conversations. And I think that this like, the distinction for me is that
that is the place where b to b conversations happen. Right? Like, as
much as we've somewhat deride the fact that LinkedIn is
becoming a more traditional social media platform, as you
said, like, the non business related, posts sometimes
are your highest engagers, but there's still a lot of gold in the data
that you get in who engages with you, who's in those ecosystems. Right? Like,
there's a ton of information, I think, in LinkedIn that people are not really
aware of how to leverage. Right? Yeah. A %. And and there's so
many things that you can plug into LinkedIn. So we're we're just migrating as a
business from, Keep, which is our CRM. It used to be called Infusionsoft.
We're migrating to HubSpot. So expensive. I have to send them my
kidneys every month. But it's worth it because there's all sorts of integrations to
LinkedIn. There's there's plugins for Chrome. I can do this with it. I can do
that with it. It's it's it's insane. And and, you know, there's just a growing
number of of e growing ecosystem around LinkedIn. Let me tell
you the the the big mistake that most MSPs make with LinkedIn.
Well, the two mistakes really. Number one is they're they're connected to
more MSPs than they are people they wanna do business with. So that's that's the
first mistake. So they'll put a post out, and they'll get three other MSPs
liking it and commenting it. And they'll say, oh, well, we we we're just not
reaching normal business owners. And it's like, well, you've got to connect with normal business
owners. You know, if you've if you've got a LinkedIn that you've had for fifteen
years and you're connected to everyone you met at IT nation, then then but
but not the local business owners, of course, you're not gonna reach those people. And
in that instance, you might have two LinkedIns. You might have your professional one that's
your network, and then you have a second one which is your prospecting LinkedIn. And
that's and that's okay. You know, you have you have different photos, different logins.
There's a couple of things to be aware of from from a LinkedIn point of
view just so the algorithm doesn't trip you up. But that's the first mistake. It's
it's been connected to more MSPs than, than real people. And the second
mistake is just not having the numbers. You know, if you're connected to 50 people
and and you put a a a post out, you could have the best post
on the planet, but if you're connected to 50 people then no more than a
hundred people are gonna see it. And I and I say more because LinkedIn shows
the best performing content to more people, but it's gotta be really good performing
content. It's the same amount of work to create a post for 50 people as
it is for 50,000 people if you got 50,000 followers. You can only be
connected to 10,000 people on LinkedIn, which very few MSPs ever get near, but
you can have an unlimited number of followers who are seeing your content. You can
have an unlimited number of subscribers to your LinkedIn newsletter. So, yeah. I
I agree with you. And and, I'm sure at some point in the
next few years, LinkedIn will go on a it'll take a right
turn. It'll it'll go the wrong direction. But as we speak, right now in
2025, it's a good place to go. So take advantage while you
can, basically, at this point. Exactly. Alright. So, a couple of, like,
maybe some tactical suggestions here. You know, the first things that I
I started getting into was, like, understanding how to do targeted searches. Right? Like, even
without getting sales navigator, which is maybe a a sort of a separate piece of
this again, like, that's not attached to tools or get more fancy than we need
to be. But there are there are some basic searches that you can do to
start to find some connections. And I think for MSPs, like, looking at
even if you're not a niche MSP, there's probably some,
like, ideal client profiles that you really like, like companies that you work with
already. If you could find peers of those, fantastic. Right? Like, you can snoop around
on who they're connected with in their ecosystem. You can use some of those targeted
searches. What's your suggestion on the person that's like, okay. Great
idea. I'm gonna start leveraging LinkedIn. You know, how do I go and
find those clients that are not in the MSP ecosystem to start
with? Yeah. That's a really good question. There's there's two two different ways to do
it. So well, actually three if I think about it. The the the first way
is to do it within LinkedIn. I'll tell you about that in a second. The
second way is to do it within Google, and the third way is to cheat.
So let me tell you about the first way, which is to use it within
LinkedIn. You you mentioned ideal clients and, in
marketing terms, you'll have heard of this, Todd, but not many of other people may
have done. But in pure marketing terms, the very first job you're supposed to do
is put together something called a buyer persona, where you figure out who do
I most want to reach. And most MSPs know this in their head or their
heart. They just have never actually written it down. So for example, you you
you probably want, the business owner or the business manager. You want them to
have at least five staff, but ideally, they'd have 10 or 20 staff. Right?
Ideally, they would it would be a business where technology is mission critical.
So, legal legal firms are great. CPAs are great. You
know, financial services are great. Some some MSPs like manufacturers
because they like the complexity of of the XP machine that's never
been switched off for forty years and is still running the most critical machine that
Â£10,000,000 million dollars a year of revenue comes from. That's fine. Whatever it is that
you're into to some MSPs before. It is. It does feel like that, doesn't it?
Perhaps you should put an uninterruptible power supply on that at
some point. But it doesn't matter what you want. The point is you've gotta know
what you what you want. Right? And and the and marketing
agencies will charge you $10,000 to figure that out for you, or you can just
spend five minutes talking with your business partner or your life partner or your staff
and say, what what don't we want? Right? Well, we don't want one man bands.
We don't want lawyers. We don't want this. We don't want that. So that that
leaves this. So that's the first thing is just being aware of what you want.
And then just kind of like, let's say CPAs. Let's say you want CPAs but
you want you want CPAs where there's they've got infrastructure. So it's not just the
CPA one one person band. They've got a practice manager. They've got a couple of
other CPAs. They've got some some some people there. Because where there's people, there's
infrastructure. There's there's seats. There's licenses. So it's like, right. Well, let's
say we're in I don't know. I I'm in Milton Keynes, which is a city
in The UK. So it's a small city. And, so so just go
into LinkedIn and I just type in accountants. We we don't say CPA here in
The UK. We say accountants. Accountants Milton Keynes and what comes up. And there's
some filters at the top and, and and I can just sort of
plow through those. So that's the first way is just doing that on LinkedIn. So
I don't have to go and look for the names, I search for accountants. But
I'll quickly run out because the LinkedIn search functionality is just
awful. So that's when you go to number two which is Google. Now on Google
they already have a list of all the accountants in your city and it's in
Google Maps or it's in show me a list of or or you go to
chat g p t or or or your AI of choice. You bet you maybe
do it on both because you're gonna get different results on on Google as you
will on on an AI. But you'd go on to both of those. Tell tell
me about all the accountants in this city. Show all of them.
Google Maps, accountants in this city, widen that out, see them on the map. You
could even go on to, if you wanted to, you could go on to like
Fiverr or Upwork and pay a guy offshore to scrape
to illegally scrape Google Maps for you just to give you a list. Just, you
know, it's it's gonna cost you $20. You're not gonna do anything with it, so
it's fine. You're just using it to find people in LinkedIn. And
and that's the the sort of second method is where you're
directly going for the people. So you say, here's Smith
Jenkins accountants in Milton Keynes. It's mister
Smith is the partner. Mister Jenkins is the senior partner. Cheryl
is the practice manager. Let's go in now and connect to those people on or
attempt to connect to those people on LinkedIn. Which reminds me, by the way, you
don't just want the decision makers. There's two groups of people to connect to. There's
decision makers and there's influencers. So, like, if you're trying to sell to me,
I'm the decision maker in my business. I own the business, but I've got a
staff of 12. You need to influence A and Christelle. Because Amy and
Christelle are my most trusted influencers. And if I'm about to buy anything, I'll
just pick up the phone to them and say, I've been talking to this, this
and this and this. What do you think? And if they say, oh, actually, yeah.
I know all about Todd. We we, you know, we've seen his stuff. We
think you should go with that. Then I'm much more likely to go with the
decision because the people I trust have have, you know, are also aware. So you
need to connect to decision makers and influencers as well. So those are the first
two methods. Do it on LinkedIn, and then secondly do it on Google and and
going back into LinkedIn. And it occurs to me the other thing you could could
do on Google is you could type in accountants your city LinkedIn, and
it will actually show you results on LinkedIn as well. There's sort of two or
three different ways of doing it, but you're using essentially think of it as
using two or three different databases to find the people you want within
LinkedIn. The third way, the cheat way, this is the coolest thing
ever. You find someone who's already connected
to all the people that you want to be connected with,
and then you borrow their connections. So I'll give you an
example. Here in my home city, there's a guy called Mark
Orr. I'm hoping he's never gonna listen to this podcast
or watch this because I've met him a few times and he's not a pleasant
guy. But he is the most connected human being to other
business owners in in this city. Right? And and I'll give him that. He's connected
to thousands and thousands of people. Now I only work with MSPs, but if
I set up another business and I wanted to reach local business owners to me,
I would connect to Mark on LinkedIn, and then he's got like
8,000 connections, and they're all local business owners or or important
people locally. I would then just every day just go in and start connecting to
some of his connections. Now there is a setting in LinkedIn where you can turn
that off so people cannot see your connections. So don't don't no,
Todd, you wouldn't do this, but for anyone else, consuming this podcast, don't
think you can do that to my LinkedIn connections because I've stopped you. I've blocked
you from doing that. But most people don't know about that setting. So there's so
you know, who are the Uber connected people in your city? And the way to
find those people is go go networking. Go for a month's networking, go to all
the different events. Who's the one person that turns up to like three
quarters of the events? Get to know that person, connect to them on LinkedIn, have
a look at their connections. If you if you wouldn't sleep at night doing
this, then obviously don't do that. But it it it is the shortcut method of
doing it. Yep. Okay. That's fantastic.
So, now we've connected. We've built up some, some people
to connect with. Another sort of tactical piece on this, I've gone back and
forth on this. So anyone who's maybe received some messages
from me on LinkedIn, don't hate me. What
about connecting with a message versus an open connection? Because
there's this thing in the industry called a pitch slap where, you know, you get
connected with someone and then they immediately pounce all over you trying to sell you
something. Yeah. And, you know, as a as a person, I find
maybe you like, you're probably a good person to to sort of ask this of
because, I don't know about you, but I find MSP
ecosystem is highly allergic to what they sense as marketing.
And maybe you've seen this, but, like, what what's your feeling
on, you know, either you send a message in the connection
request saying like, kind of outlining why you'd like to connect and maybe
potentially how you could help. But maybe, you know, the part of me feels like
then if they don't read that, they're not interested, then they ignore that, and you
never get connected. Versus, like, you can connect with them and then send
them the message, and maybe that pisses them off because they feel like now that
I just got pitch slapped, and and now I've deleted this connection,
or they just leave that connection open. And now at least they're in their your
ecosystem, and now they might see some of your posts. What your Yeah. What's your
feeling on this? Such a great question. Before I directly answer the question, I
wanna just go back a step and and and address a couple of things which
are important context. So first of all, you mentioned
earlier sales navigator, and we mentioned about connecting with people. First of all,
if you assume for every 10 connection requests that you make, two
people are gonna actually accept. Right? Just just set the bar that low because
it is that low. And that's not you that's not down to you. That's down
to the fact that, we might be on LinkedIn two, three times a week. For
me, it's five days a week. Right? But but a lot of other people have
a better, more balanced life than us. And they they take their dogs to
walk and stuff. Their businesses to run now. So especially especially
lawyers, accountants, those kind of professional services, they just don't go on LinkedIn
as often as they do. And then when they do, there's they've got a 3,000
connection requests and it's like, oh, ignore. It's the same as like the there's no
one in the MSP world that has 60,000 unread emails. Right? That
just doesn't because that's that's us. My girlfriend has she showed me the other
night. She has 60,000 unread emails. And, obviously, she's a consumer. She's not a a
business owner. I know. That was exactly the reaction I had was how can you
operate your life? See screenshots like that. Exactly. Yeah. I'll I'll have to
I'll have to screenshot on her phone. It's hilarious to see. I don't have anxiety.
Yeah. I know. I know. Right? And if I don't end the day clearing down
my inbox, I don't I don't sleep well at night. Anyway, so that that's the
context. We mentioned Sales Navigator that link LinkedIn has been reducing
the number of free connections you can make. It it depends
on how active you are, how many connections you already have, how much content
you post. There's there's all of that's become algorithmic. If you're
going up after making LinkedIn connections seriously, and we talked earlier about making
it a system, which means doing it daily. I recommend to MSPs and it's in
the book, MSP Marketing Start Here. You go every day, you
attempt 10 connections. Because if you're only gonna get two of those to be successful
and we, you know, we wanna add 10 connections a week, we've gotta attempt,
what's that, 50 connections a week. Right? So, you will quickly run out of
free connection requests. So you are going to need to give LinkedIn money for this.
I'm afraid. I'm that wasn't the case a year or so ago, but it is
the case now. So that's some some context with that. The the second bit
of context is, the answer I'm about to give is every you
will find different answers to this online. So every single person
on the planet who's a LinkedIn expert, and I put that in in speech
marks, I'm not a LinkedIn expert, but I use it every day. I work with
MSPs that use it every day. So I found a pattern of things that work.
There are probably other things that work better. There are definitely other ways of looking
at it. The way I see it is whenever you're sent a connection request to
someone, you well, first of all, you you must put a
message in because the message sets context. So at the
connection request stage, you you explain why you want to be connected. Do
you remember back in the day, by default, it would say, I want to add
you to my network. And then they they got rid of that a couple of
years ago. And now, you can send it as blank. Whenever I get a blank
one, I don't I don't bother. I don't even bother looking at it. Well, actually,
I'll tell a lie. I'll look at the headline of the person that's trying to
connect to me. So the headline is when you when you have a connection request,
you've got, here here is Todd came and then it says and I don't know
what your headline is, Todd, but it's it's that is that sets the context, but
then you can also put a message in. And I I highly recommend you put
a message in for both. And what you've got to do, and this is this
is marketing one zero one, is you've got to look at this from the point
of view of the person you're trying to connect to and say, why would this
person want to connect to me? You know, if if you leave it blank, you
might as well write, I want to add you to my network so I can
spam you, so I can try and sell you my stuff, you know, so I
can so I can be generally annoying to you. Versus, you
know, hi Dave. I work with other
accountants in in this area like you and I thought it'd be worth us
connecting, worth us connecting. Or or, I've I've
recently solved a massive Sage server problem for
an accountant that I'm working with. I thought it'd be worth us connecting in case
you have a similar problem. Right? Some something as simple as that. So an accountant
who's looking at that would and and I assume Sage service is still a thing
somewhere because otherwise, Sage would have gone out of business much, you know, years ago.
So an accountant who's got Sage would look at that and say, well, we haven't
got a problem right now, but here's here's someone who deals with issues
that I might have a problem with. I'll I'll connect with them. No. But no
one overthinks a connection request in in in the way that we think they do.
But something like that is basically, can you make it relevant to that
person? The the the I I give my MSP marketing edge members, we've got
about seven different connection requests. And off the top of my head, I can't remember
what they are because I wrote them like two years ago. But, I know that
the last one is jokes, and they're they're vertical based
jokes. So, for example, if you were an accountant and
you had a connection request that said, hi hi hi Dave. How many
how many accountants or how many how many what is it? Something about counting
sheep. How many sheep did the accountant need to to count before he went to
sleep or something like that. And you put you put something like that in a
connection request and all being well, you're the only person who ever
told a joke, an accountancy based joke to an
accountant in a connection request. So in terms of stand out ability, you you you
kind of ticked that box. And this is this is the goal with all of
it is is actually just standing out of it and and and appearing to be
relevant, and that's it. Now just on your final point, which you said about some
people connect, and then they message, and then they do this and this, and that
is annoying. We've got to remember that selling managed services is
the hardest, most complex, longest sale
ever. It is unbelievably difficult to sell managed
services. It is unbelievably long. It's unbelievably difficult. The payoff
for that is you keep the client for five years, all monthly recurring
revenue. There is no other sector in the world that benefits from clients
that that keeps clients that long, that has recurring revenue for that long. You can
sell someone today, it takes you six months to sell them and you're almost guaranteed
a hundred thousand dollars of lifetime revenue. That does not happen and and
and, you know, with routine sales, that does not happen in any other sector in
the world. But if if managed services is a very long, very
complex sale, why would we want to be stupid and spam someone and send them
messages and try and set up meetings today before we've built a relationship with
them? So if you think back to that strategy I was talking about earlier, my
three step system is, build, build connection, build
audiences, grow relationships, and then convert relationships. That grow
relationships, that's the big job. That's the thing you're doing every day,
every week, every month for ten years. And it is all about content.
Using content to build trust. It's putting posts on LinkedIn, sending out LinkedIn
newsletters. I I do recommend emails as well. I do recommend physical
things in the mail, like sending a a newsletter once a month. You pick and
choose the the things that work best for you, but it's all about content. And
what you're looking for is every business owner or manager
comes to a a small window of time where they are ready,
willing, and able to talk to another MSP about switching.
So people stay with their incumbent years past the point they're meant
to leave. Right? Years and years. We call this inertia loyalty. It's actually what's kept
me with my accountant for fifteen years. It's I've had the same bank account
since I was 14, which is nuts. Right? That's thirty six years
with the same bank and I have no particular loyalty to them. It just seems
easier to stay than to move somewhere else. And that's what keeps people with their
MSP. So there's a tiny window of two or three months where someone
wakes up one morning and they're like, right I've had it. The the the call
I had yesterday with the 12 year old technician, was awful. The
guy that sold me the contract, I haven't spoken to him for five years. In
fact, I don't even know if he owns the business anymore. You know, it's I'm
fed up with with slow response times. Nothing ever seems to happen. The prices keep
going up. The service is getting worse. I'm done. I'm not signing another contract, but
I know it's up in three months, I need to do some work. And and
the goal of all of the marketing is to get you in front of that
person at that time. And if actually they can be like, oh, here's here's
this Todd guy, I've been connected to him for, or you know, I've I've seen
a couple of his things. I've I've seen a couple of his posts on LinkedIn.
I've opened a couple of his LinkedIn newsletters. I've seen a few of his emails.
I've had a brief chat with with that lady in his office who phoned me
a couple of times. You know, I've I remember he sent me a physical thing,
and I've read that. I've got his book. I've whatever it is. If if you've
we use a phrase calling touch points. If you had all these touch points to
this person over the two or three or four years that he wasn't ready to
buy from you, the day that he is ready to think about buying from
you, the chances of you getting that sale have just gone up dramatically. So essentially,
I'm saying you've got to be patient. You've got to see LinkedIn as one of
the tools for the it's a long game. And you put in place a very
simple system, tiny number of things that happen really
often, that's the system. So you're there on the day that they're ready to have
a conversation. Alright. Excellent. So the next you you kinda
keyed up the the next stages is the content matters. Right? And the
thing that drives me crazy, like, the content that I see from MSPs
on LinkedIn is so generic and
uninteresting to their customers. And a lot of this, like, I'll maybe knock
on, Lenovo, because I see a lot of people
just reposting sort of this this this content trash from from
vendors like Lenovo where it's like, you know, here's this super
awesome new, new laptop. It
does all of these things. And it's like, I don't know. Like like, who
edit let's say an accounting firm really cares about the brand new
laptop. Right? Like, I just don't see that as appealing content. So I think
people need to be a lot more thoughtful of, like, just putting
stuff out there on LinkedIn is not a strategy because you have
to be thoughtful about what is actually going to appeal to your
buyer persona. And I think this probably, wedges
well against AI too. Like, a lot of people are just, like, have the
AI feed a ton of garbage into the machine and, there are
now I have a content strategy on LinkedIn. I should be winning. Right?
Yeah. Exactly. And, AI has its place, but content generation is
not is not its place. In fact, if you use AI to
generate content, you need you need a human at the beginning to come up with
a really good idea and something that makes it unusual, and then you need a
human at the other end to to fix it and to make it less generic.
You're absolutely right. No one cares about Lenovo. Do you know what? Outside the channel,
no one knows what Lenovo is. They really don't. You know, it's it's,
I I would actually see an MSP writing about the other day. It was a
Datto product. And I thought, but but no normal person has ever heard of
Datto. They don't they don't know what's, they they don't know the names
of, you know, apart from Microsoft. They've heard of Microsoft and they swear at it.
Just as I was swearing at it, you know, twenty minutes ago because word isn't
stable. It it's it's nuts. You're
absolutely right. And again, it's that putting yourself in the point of view of of
the ordinary business owner or manager that you're trying to reach. What do they really
care about? Let me tell you what they care about. They care about, does my
technology just work? They care about, can myself be productive?
They care about, why are my team just moaning
and whinging about the computers? They care about, the
court they do care about data security and care about not losing data. And they
do care about cyber security, but at a fraction of the level that MSPs care
about it. MSPs care about it. It's like it's it's all consuming
because the whole channel is cyber security. That's what it seems like these days,
isn't it? It's and and quite rightly so. I wouldn't want to be an MSP
these days. It's terrifying and I certainly wouldn't want to be responsible for other people.
So I understand why cybersecurity is so big. To business owners, it's a
small thing. It's it's like them locking the door at night of of
the factory or locking the door of the offices. It's like I mustn't forget to
lock the door and put the alarm. But but you know it's it's not like
they're spending all night sitting up thinking oh I hope we're not being burglarized.
You know? That's that's not how they they didn't sit there thinking oh I hope
we haven't got any ransomware. It just simply doesn't occur to them. MSPs know this
because you see the stupid things that people do. I often tell MSPs that your
job is to protect business owners from themselves when it comes to cyber
security. And actually, get them on board, build a trust relationship with them,
and then educate them and upsell and upsell and upsell them onto the better and
better and better cyber security stuff. But no, the the the best content pieces I've
seen have nothing to do with technology. They're they're in the context of
technology. They're about productivity, they're about business, they're about,
you know, when when two business owners meet at a networking meeting, it doesn't
matter what they do. What do they talk about? They don't talk about the specifics
of their job. You don't get accountants saying, oh, yes. I was reviewing the
latest tax laws today and I noticed that section 31
c under paragraph 42, is very interesting that
they've changed the meaning of the word cheese. They don't they don't do
that because they know that the well, actually some accountants do do that at network
meetings and you see people glaze over and slip into a coma. But the the
successful ones don't do it because they know they gotta go and talk about what
all business owners like talking about. What are we not talking about? Ourselves? Our
business? How's business? What's happening for you? What kind of goals have you got? What
are your what are your what are your staff doing that's annoying you right now?
So we have as business owners, we have things in common with other business owners,
and that's the stuff we should be talking about. We should be talking about how
awesome it is that we're in business. Right? We're in business. This is amazing. Because
actually there's a whole load of other people who started businesses and and
they've never got as far as we did. Let's talk about what's
cool in tech. A Lenovo is not cool. What's cool in tech is
AI and all MSPs are so far ahead of the curve on AI compared to
ordinary business owners. You know, they do not know what ChatGPT can do.
ChatGPT launched deep research a few months back. Right? I don't know if you've had
a play with it. I've had a play with it. Anyone that's got a $20
a month subscription has had a play with it and then never used it, which
is pretty much how it goes with ChatGPT. So use that as a
thing of not in terms of, oh, here's a tool, but what can you do
with it? Deep research. It's a it's a brand new concept. You know,
let that's the kind of stuff that we can talk about. It's interesting you mentioned
about laptops. I'll tell you what is cool with with hardware, unboxing.
Right? My daughter will sit and watch unboxing videos. I sit and watch
videos when I'm really tired of of of a guy
who buys returns from Amazon here in The UK and fixes
them. And I'll sit and watch and I'm not a technical person, but I'll sit
and watch a thirty minute video of a guy fault finding a
fan and then fixing the fan so he can sell it on eBay. Right? Because
he makes it interesting because of the way he talks and he explains it and
whatsoever. So unbox, do an unboxing video of hard if you've got to do hardware
do an unboxing or take a do a video of you on a site
saying, right, it's the final plug. You know, imagine this is a joke. You could
do a joke of it. I've got the final plug here. We spent twelve days
wiring up this office. We've got $360,000 worth of kit. Let's plug
it in, and someone switches the lights off just as you plug it in. And
you say, obviously, that was a gag, that was a gag. That would get more
attention than anything else. That's not the best piece of content I've ever thought of.
But you you get the idea. It's it be you, be interesting,
but do talk to other business owners about the stuff that all business owners find
interesting. Yeah. I think that's bang on. And I I I think the
maybe the point to underline here is video performs really well in
general and particularly on LinkedIn. I've heard this recently from a bunch of
people that, like, LinkedIn is absolutely where it's gonna be at,
or a video on LinkedIn because they're moving to having,
more sort of real style. Right? So video is gonna be very
early. Yeah. Yeah. So that's starting to show up in a lot more places, and
that that's just sort of how people consume the stuff. Love or hate
TikTok, it has absolutely changed kind of the video ecosystem. And I I
think to your point, like, making it sort of unique and interesting and adding some
personality to those things, like, if you just do some text posts, that's fine.
Like, again, figure out your system. You know, like, two text posts a week, a
witty a video a week, that kind of stuff. And, like, some fun things, like,
you can actually use, like, use case cases and case studies with your
clients of, you know, here's how we do, you know, maybe not
it's sort of related to unboxing, but, like, here's how we do desktop
deployments at, at x y z computer company. And we use
the system called autopilot that makes all of this super seamless and
simple. Right? Like like, it's engaging and actually sort of shows,
like, we're doing something different that makes the lives of our customers so much
easier. Right? I think that that's great stuff of of just figuring out some quick
ways to do simple videos that show you inaction producing
good value. Well, let let me tell you the easiest video for for
anybody, and that is a video of you being yourself.
So I I know because I've had so many conversations with MSPs who are
terrified of doing videos because without them realizing it,
they're trying to be like Todd, trying to be like Paul, trying to be
like this guy, that guy, whatever they've seen. And you know, me
being here with you now, this is me. This is the real me. If we
were in real life, I'd be this animated. I'd I'd in fact, I'd I'd be
more animated. Right? I'm I'm calming it down for the for the video.
But this is the real me, and I know I'm talking to the real you
because we chatted before this and you're exactly the same before as you as you
are now. But that's because you've been doing videos for like two hundred years. So
so you've got comfortable and familiar with you with with you doing
it. For an MSP getting started, they're they're overthinking it. They're overthinking the
tech, the camera, the lighting, the the audio, the content,
and the actual answer is just be you. And some people will see your
videos and they'll be turned off by those videos. Some people will see
them and they'll be, I won't say turned on, but they'll they'll like Engaged. They'll
like what they engage. Yeah. That's a much better way of putting it. In in
The UK, we call that Marmite marketing. So we have, we have a
a a spread. It's, it's known as Vegemite in the in the,
in Australia. I can't remember what it's called in The US. It's not huge in
The US, and and in Canada. But but Marmite had a has had an advertising
campaign for twenty years. It's like a beef extract. And their advertising
campaign is you either love it or you hate it. I love it so much
that just the mention of me saying Marmite, it's it's dinner time here. I'm gonna
go have Marmite with my dinner tonight because that's all I can think about now.
But but it's that's what you want to be. You want to be a Marmite
figure. You want people to not like you
by being you. Right? And and that terrifies us as
humans because we're we're programmed to have everyone
like us. But the reality is not everyone can like you. So the more
you're you, the more you it's almost like the the more real you are, the
more authentic to yourself, the more you polarize and you become
more attractive to to the to the people that will be your fans and less
attractive to the people that that won't. And it's a tiny percentage of people that
that don't like you. Our brains get obsessed with those people and we we forget
the 90% of people that love us. But being you, being
authentic, and never ever trying to be someone else, that that's the
hardest, hardest thing. And yet, if you can crack that, videos are easy. And
it can be and should be a simple case of you're in your car, you're
about to go in and see a a 20 user business, it's a sales
pitch, you get your phone, and it's like, hey, good morning LinkedIn. So I'm
here out and so and so. I'm not gonna tell you where I am because
I'm about to go in and see someone that should become a new client of
ours, and and they've got twenty twenty staff, and what here are the
three things I'm gonna talk to them about today. We're gonna talk about this problem,
we're gonna talk about that problem we're gonna talk about, this opportunity. And that
that would be a great video. Right? Sixty seconds, it'll end up in the real
section of LinkedIn, and and as we know link as you just said, LinkedIn is
pushing short form video. The algorithm is all over that right now.
The TikTok effect, we can call it, and that would be it. If you if
you be yourself, that would be it. Do two of those a week. Perfect.
What's the expression, if you're everything to everyone, you're
nothing to everybody? Like, something like that? Exactly that. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Alright. So the other piece here I'm curious to get your input on
is, you know, LinkedIn, you can have your personal profile, and you
can also have a business profile. And they're usually kinda linked to a
particular, a particular account, and you can kinda flip back back
between them. Now with this being kind of social selling
and that you're, you know, people buy things from
people, obviously, you should be leveraging your personal profile, I think,
primarily. What is the role of a business profile on LinkedIn
then? That's a really good question. And, for most MSPs, I
recommend just ignore your business profile. So set it up. Maybe
maybe make a note to go and put a couple of pieces of content a
month on. But it's it's all about the the the person. You
know, people buy from people. When do you know
the real answer to this, Todd, is go and grab your grab your link grab
your phone, pull up your LinkedIn app, and scroll through 20
pieces of content. How many pieces of content do you see coming from a page?
And the reality is you're gonna see person update, person update,
advert, person update, person update, advert, person update, person update, advert.
That you you just don't see Adverts come from the company profiles,
basically. Yeah. But who who reads the adverts? Right? Link LinkedIn anyone that's
ever tried LinkedIn advertising will know it's it's really ineffective. Yeah.
They've done that. Yeah. Yeah. In fact, we're running a campaign at the
moment to to promote the book. And the the the one big trick that
LinkedIn is missing is you cannot, you cannot
target an advert at your own connections. You can target it at, people who've liked
your page, but actually people liking your page is is of no value to you
on LinkedIn. I've got like eight eight eight thousand five hundred
connections, maybe more. And, I would love to just put my
advert for the book in front because I haven't sold 8,000 books yet. Right? So,
but I can't do that. Anyway, we by the by. I I would say just
ignore the page. Get it set up. Put a bit of content on once a
month if if you must, if you want to. There are actually two audiences you
should be building on LinkedIn. Number one is your connections and and there's
there's a there's a difference between connections and followers. So a connection is where you
are actually connected to someone and then the other thing is they
can follow you. I recommend to MSPs go for connections rather than
followers. So if you're a massive celebrity, do
you remember I said earlier, you can only be connected to 10,000 people on LinkedIn.
If you're a massive celebrity and you're you're a big deal, you want followers. Right?
Because you can get 50,000, a hundred thousand followers. Like Bill Gates has millions,
millions and millions of followers, but I'd he's probably only connected to a few thousand
people. But for the average MSP connections, just focus on the
connections because, that that's more valuable to you. And you're
never gonna get or if if you ever get 10,000 connections, hey, that's a nice
problem to have. Right? Yeah. Yeah. The the second audience to build on LinkedIn
is your LinkedIn newsletter subscribers. So I have
I have eight and a half thousand connections. I think I've got about just under
4,000 LinkedIn newsletter subscribers. There's gonna be a crossover between those
two audiences. But a LinkedIn newsletter, which surprisingly
still carries a lot of algorithmic weight, it's been around for three years,
but it but it's still today is important. People think of a
newsletter as a collection of things. It's not. LinkedIn's version of a
newsletter is you write an article. And when you send the article, it
sits within an umbrella of a newsletter. So I've just done my third
I've just had my third year anniversary of doing a LinkedIn at,
newsletter every single Thursday. So every Thursday for what's that? Fifty two
hundred and hundred hundred and fifty four six, hundred and fifty six
weeks in a row including like at Christmas, including on vacations,
my staff post it. I've done a brand new piece of content on LinkedIn, and
that's why I've got so many subscribers. Because I've not put promoted it, but LinkedIn
has promoted it for me. So when you send out a a an art an
article, it's really cool. It goes into your feed,
it gets shown to all of your subscribers, and this is the thing that makes
it really cool. LinkedIn emails your article out to all of
your subscribers as well. So LinkedIn is doing the emailing, so it's like you're
hitting them two or three different ways. And I I look at the views I
get. So we're recording this on a Thursday. I sent my newsletter out today. And
in a week's time, I'll look at that, and I'll see that I've had, let's
say, 2,000 views of it or 2,000 whatsoever, and I'll have five or six
comments and a whole load of interactions. And that's great because that's an engaged
audience. And some of those will have come from they've got an email from
LinkedIn. And the reason the LinkedIn does this is they
will click on the button to go and see the article in LinkedIn. So there's
like a preview of of a I don't know what the limit is, but there's
a certain amount of content in the in the email, and then they have to
click the button. So they're using my content to get people back onto their
platform. To me, that's a symbiotic relationship. That's a that's a beautiful
symbiotic relationship, and I hope they don't screw it up, because it works really
well. But those are the two audiences that MSP should be should be focusing on.
Okay. Great. One other piece, or run a little long here, but
this this is really helpful content, I think. What about
analytics? Because, like, I've really struggled to you to find useful
analytics in any like, without doing a lot of sort of,
like, research and digging on old posts and things like that, it's really
difficult to pull this stuff up. You noted, like, newsletters, I think, have probably some
pretty good analytics because at least it's contained, around a specific piece
of content. But is there any way that we can better leverage some of the
the analytics that LinkedIn must have but don't readily really share with
us, it seems? Yeah. I'm not really an analytics
kind of person. I'm in fact, even as you said the word, my
eyes glazed over. That's just I'm a dick. I
know. I know. You you are, and I'm not. I'm just being authentic.
I I have I have people in my team that worry about stuff like that
for me, so I don't have to. You're right. In newsletters, there's actually good
analytics. You can literally see, you can see who's who's
subscribed. You can see it's been a while since I've looked at it, but I
think you can see, like, who's looked at this newsletter. You can see all sorts
of analytics. In in LinkedIn, there's some analytics. I found a really
cool, third party plugin couple of about, four months
ago. I can't remember what it's called, but I plugged it into my LinkedIn and
I spent half an hour geeking out over, oh, wow. This is my best performing
post ever. And And this was my this, and this was that. And then I
got it, and then I disconnected it from my Chrome because I don't like to
have lots too many plug too many third party plugins I don't know in Chrome.
Because I talked to MSPs, and they tell me that's not a good thing. So,
you know, I think sometimes analytics get in the
way of just us doing the stuff that authentic?
Yeah. Being authentic. And, you know, I I've just chucked out, oh,
look at my numbers, Todd. I got this. This is great. That's that's like nine
years hard work. So, you know, nine years ago, I had I was there was
probably you. I was connected to you, and that was it. And and then, you
know, I I I I've just built that up the hard way and and the
slow way and the long way. But then there's an authentic database of people that
I've walked you know, I've I've connected with one by one by one. The the
subscribers to the LinkedIn newsletter that we had 50 subscribers in week one.
You know, we had 52 on week two. We had 54 on week three. But
I just kept going because I know that over a period of time, I'm building
up an audio another authentic audience that no one else is gonna be able to
beat me on that. Someone could have a hundred thousand subscribers because they've used some
clever little trick to build it up quickly, but that's not a truly engaged
authentic audience. So no, no, I don't. I do you know what? I don't even
look at analytics on my website. I I barely look at my email
stats. I'll look at it if I think there's a problem or now and again,
I'll have a bit of a deep dive, but I think and especially data
driven people, you can overthink what you're trying to do.
Do do you know that there's, there's one big thing to this whole system that
we've not talked about? All all these tasks which were in my book, it's on
Amazon, MSP marketing start here. Just go and get it. It's like $8. It's not
a huge amount of money. The the big thing in there is there's a whole
series of these tasks that we're talking about. My big thing is you don't do
them yourself. Right? As the MSP owner, you do them once or twice so
you can figure out exactly how you want them to be done Build your what
your preferences are, build your SOPs, hand it on someone else. Someone on your team
or a virtual assistant. Right? None of the tasks are so difficult that only you
can do them. In fact, I live my life and and I think all MSPs
should live their lives by this sentence. Write this one down in sharpie
on your head or get it tattooed on your head. You should only
do what only you can do. You should only do what
only you can do. And and believe me, creating content
on link creating content for LinkedIn is something only you can do, but posting
it is not something only you can do. I don't load my I don't actually
physically load my LinkedIn newsletter. One of my team does that. But I don't even
I don't even chat to most people on LinkedIn myself now. My VA, Christelle, she
does that. And she because 80% of the conversations on LinkedIn are the same
conversations. Right? It's the same things. People asking basic stuff. So I answer the
20% of stuff that she can't answer because it needs a poll answer. But for
all the rest of it, there's an SOP. She she knows exactly how to do
all of that. And that that's a little secret. If you've ever chatted to be
on LinkedIn, it may not have been me. If that say, hi, Christelle. If you
know me on LinkedIn, go on to LinkedIn and say, hi, Christelle in a message
because it freaks her out when that happens. That's always fun. But
yeah. So if you get too obsessed about the data, and
you've got other people doing this for you, it it gets in the way. It's
just like, right, here's a task. It's it's a small number of it's a couple
of hours a week. Someone else does this for me. I'm just gonna get that
out of my head. I'm building audiences. I'm growing relationships. I'm gonna convert those
relationships into prospects and clients down the line. Let's go and find other
audiences we can build now. Let's find other new content. Let's let's let's
take this system and make it bigger and just have have more more things involved
in it. Yeah. Delegation is absolutely a superpower, especially if you're
looking to scale something that you've built into a reliable system. So
going full circle, unless you build a system, you cannot scale this
and make it effective in the long term. So really good advice. So,
Paul, you've graciously offered to, send out some some of
the some books to to some listeners for free. So,
we I think we're gonna say first ten people that take you up on this
offer get a free copy of the book. What is the best way that they
could do that? Do should they email me, or is there a a page that
they should hit? What's the best method for the for the first ten lucky
listeners to grab a free copy? Let's keep it super simple. Email Todd. If
you if you give us the email address, Todd, and then you you know the
first ten people. And all you need to do is just email Todd your your,
your mailing address with your country. Doesn't matter where you are. It's on every Amazon
on the planet, we we will send one out to you. And Todd will pass
the addresses to us. We won't use your address for anything else, by the way.
We're not gonna we're gonna not gonna spam you with with may direct mails and
stuff. We'll literally we'll send you a copy of this. You'll get it within about
ten days, and that's it. So what's the what's the email address to send to,
Todd? Maybe this should be part of the
challenge. You can also DM me on LinkedIn. So find me on LinkedIn. Cool.
Maybe that's let's do that. First people to 10 people to DM you on LinkedIn.
There we go. That's a better idea. There we go. Yeah. I like that. Okay.
So, yeah, like, we're practicing what we're preaching. Get on LinkedIn. Find me. If you're
not not already connected, connect and send me a message, and Paul will
will graciously send you a free copy of the book. I won't. Christelle will do
it because because because you should only do what you can only do. Right?
There you go. K. Excellent. Well, this has been great, Paul. Really appreciate your
input and, all the work that you're doing to skill up and scale up
MSPs. You're welcome. And thanks so much for having me on the show again.