EP294 - The Real Reason your MSP Marketing Didn't Work with Ian Luckett

IAN: In this episode of The IT Experts Podcast, we help you understand the real reason why your MSP marketing didn't work.

INTRO: Welcome to The IT Experts Podcast, the only podcast to help MSPs scale to 1 million, and if already there, get to five and go faster. At the end of the day, isn't it all about building a business that works for you rather than you for it? I hope you enjoy the show.

IAN: So good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Welcome back to The IT Experts Podcast. Hope you are doing good today. I'm doing amazing. Why? Because I'm talking about my favourite subject. Yes. And I know that many of you will be moaning and groaning and twisting and whining and probably even swearing at your speakers right now going, oh my God, it's going to talk about marketing again. The reason I'm talking about marketing again is because we're always talking about marketing in the MSP Growth hub, we're always talking about marketing in the MSP space because most people moan that it doesn't work because they're approaching it the wrong way. Okay? We hear all the time. Literally, I'm on a call with an MSP every single day of the week saying, I've tried a marketing agency, it didn't work. I've tried my best friend who knows all about social media, it didn't work. We tried some pay per click. It didn't work. We did some Facebook ads, it didn't work. We did some Google ads. It didn't work. And the reason why all of these things don't work in isolation, and I want you to be very care careful while you are listening to today's podcast, is because you're not embedding it into a system, which we're going to help you get kick started off the ground.

So the problem is that we have these beliefs. You've tried marketing before, it didn't work well, what didn't actually work? What did you do around that? Did you actually get somebody who knows how to market an MSP or is absolute minimum knows how to market a professional services business? You spent the money and you got nothing back. You might be spending, some people are paying three, 4,000 pounds a month for a marketing agency. And I say what they actually doing for you? And they go they're redo my website and they're working on my USP. And it's oh, come on. That is like elementary stuff that we teach in our new client runway framework.

Like on day one, when you come into the Growth Hub, it's this is like the brilliant basics as they say. Marketing agencies generally don't understand the MSP model. They think that we're going to put out some staff at the top of the funnel. We'll put a few blogs out and people will come and buy.

And I'll ask you now, if you are involved in a marketing agency and some marketing agencies do get you some results, I want you to ask them one question. And the question is this, how doing what you are doing for us is going to help me book more calls? That's the only metrics in marketing, the only metrics for agencies, how what you are doing, connect it. Give me a logical path, the things you are going to do, the steps you are going to take, the activities, the content, the things that you're going to stick together. And I want you to see there's this absolute line between what they're doing, the activity that they're doing, and your call booking system. Because that's the only thing that matters.

Otherwise they're just going to fluff around and do some stuff and not get you some results. And maybe charge you 20 or 30,000 pound. In the meantime, they've got to understand the business model. Okay?

The other thing, referrals. Every, virtually every MSP is built on referrals, and they're nice and steady. And if you're okay, plodding along, and if you're okay doing what you're doing, then that's fine. But some of the other conversations that we're having is, do you know what? I want to be out of here in three to five years. I need to make sure that the business is worth something and has the sales and marketing engine so that whoever comes along and buys it is actually going to get something that they need. Or, here's the other thing we hear a lot of my biggest client is just about to leave, or my biggest client has left or, they're a bit wobbly. We're not quite sure what they're going to hang around for. And then you go into panic mode. You go into panic mode because you haven't got a backup plan. You just lost sometimes a quarter or even half of your, monthly recurring revenue because you haven't had an eye on your account management. That's why there's nine accelerators in the MSP scale system. That's why there's not just one thing that just works all the time. That's why Paperclip might work one week and Facebook ads might work the next.

It's not a case of just like picking up the little bits that you need to, it needs to be part of a system. Account management system will help you make sure that you know when your clients are leaving, and if they are you'll know what you're going to do to make sure that you can then replace that income rather than panic. Because here's the thing, sales and marketing takes a long time, but when you stay consistent, when you've got a process and when you follow that process and you get people who love what they're doing and their ears and eyes all over the world, listening to what people are doing and looking at what people are doing and coming back to you and telling you how you can do things even better, it becomes fun.

Yes. I said it fun, right? You started off crying at the beginning of this podcast. Now I'm telling you it's fun. You must just think I'm absolutely bonkers. Okay? But the thing is that stop start marketing never gains momentum. You'll do a bit you'll realise you're focused in January. We haven't got many leads in the pipeline.

We've got to do some marketing. Let's do some marketing. Let's dial up our energy and let's crack on and do some marketing. Middle of February, you'll come along. You'd have done a few blogs. You might have gone to an event or thought about going to an event, plucked up the courage to speak at an event and then a referral comes in. Yeah, great. I could stop doing that. Sales and marketing now, been waiting for this for raises. Right? Stick that to the back line. Let's deliver some amazing work for this client. Onboard that client. Couple of months later, guess what? Groundhog Day, you're back where you were before. Looking at the pipeline going, oh my God, it's bare as a barrel.

We need to do that marketing. What were we doing again? Oh, someone now says we should do some Facebook marketing. So it just goes round and there's this panic that the shoes every three to six months, as I said, there is the over reliance on referrals, and that's just luck marketing, right?

That's just luck marketing, that you just hope that somebody comes towards and passes your, you don't even do anything deliberately around nurturing your existing client base by asking for referrals or having a scheme or anything like that. You just hope that they come in. But if you're lucky and you're a successful MSP, then you probably won't even worry about cash flow.

But if you're not in that position, then your cash flow is going to swing like a pendulum. And one day you're going to be in a good mood, and the next day you're going to be in a bad mood. And then it's going to go like that. And you then again, get into this panic about how do we actually get this volume? I'm in sales and marketing up road. How do we start getting that trickle of leads? And this is also one of the reasons that we see why 95.8% of MSPs are stuck under a million pound turnover because the visibility kind of never compounds. They never get to be known as that expert in their niche, in their area, in their sector. Because it never gets that it just never gets that traction where you're moving things forwards. So here's the thing, here's what you need to do about it. Okay? It's going to be a short, sharp blast, quick little jab in the ribs, and away we go. Number one, I've got five tips for you. Write these down.

Number one, I want you to commit to a 12 month runway, not a three month test. Tests are great because you can't fail a test, particularly if you set it yourself because you set the parameters in a way that you go, but it's a runway. You need to invest in marketing. You need to remember that when people come towards you and look at the mirror is, they need to know and trust you.

And if they don't know and trust you, then they're not going to think you're going to be able to help them. You need to identify what that target market looks like, who your ideal customer is. Yeah. If you can get it into a business sector in a niche in one way, you've got some great case studies and you can talk about it with authority, then that's brilliant but if you haven't, you need to create one. Okay. So let's commit to a 12 month runway, break that down into quarters, okay. And then break that down into months of activity so that you know exactly what you are doing on that place.

Number two is I want you to set some leading indicators. So I want to know how much visibility you are making out there, how many conversations that you are having, what type of engagement you are getting. And it's not just the closing deals. Every day I'm sitting here listening either to our clients or I'm sitting to prospects that they're having problems around their business. I'll pick a sheet up. Let me just pick a sheet up that I've got in the office here. Here's a guy, spoke to him the other week, tried lots of different things, tried lots of different systems, didn't work. Number one thing, need fresh new leads. Needs to understand is numbers better and needs to adopt a profit first mentality. That's because they're panicking around what they need to be doing and where the business is going. So all about making sure we've got those KPIs in place. We go all the way back up to what we call the scale system. It's the KPIs that are in place. So leading indicators, make sure we've got KPIs tracked. Not crazy KPIs, but if you've got an agency or you've got a marketing resource, make sure you know that what they're doing is connecting all the way down to the phone calls, the strategy, intro calls, whatever you want to call them, the proposals and then the closed deals, because the whole sales thing is a whole another thing.

STUART INTERRUPT: Hey, Stuart here. Got a quick message for everyone that's listening. If you've decided that you want to grow your MSP, but you're not sure what support you need, then you must check out our Ultimate MSP Growth Guide. It's designed to help you compare all of the support that's out there in the channel for you and help you shortcut your decision-making so you get the right support to help you get the right results to grow your MSP. But alternatively, if you'd like to come and see us in action, then why not come to one of our events? Simply click on the link in the show notes and we'll see you very soon. Now back to the show.

IAN: Cheers, Stuart!

But anyway, so the next thing I want you to do is step three is build weekly consistency. I want you to be posting content. Not one person in this world is going to ring you up and say, Hey, I saw that blog or that video or that little instruction that you put out on LinkedIn. If you're not putting anything out on LinkedIn, it's like pretty basic so you need to be posting out on LinkedIn. Update your Google My Business page. People will Google your business and guess what they'll find, treat it like a social media. An outlet start posted on there on what's going on. Minimum on LinkedIn is three times a week from your personal page and at least a couple of times a week from your company page. People buy from people. Remember, they're going to come and buy from you because you are the technical expert in their space. Okay? So we're going to put some stuff out so that people are going to look at us, they're going to look at our updated LinkedIn profile and they're going to go, hey, these people, this guy girl seems to know what they're talking about. Let's connect, let's have a chat. Let's get into the dms, let's do some conversations. So that's all great. That's people moving towards you. I want you then to work out who you are going to reach to, who you going to outreach to. Starts off with your customer avatar, which can be a bit of a difficult thing and your model. And that can be a difficult thing on how to work that out. Every single, every two weeks we are sitting down with our clients, going through their sales and marketing clinics, working with their marketing teams, working with their apprentices on how to build a consistent plan so that they can get visible. And the outreach then becomes even more powerful, because it's putting stuff out there. It's one thing, right? But when you then go out and then you start connecting with people deliberately on LinkedIn, you can find them through various routes then it's going to start to get a bit more a bit more relevant for them.

The final part of step three, which is so important, and the one that always gets fed, always gets forgotten, is the money is in the follow up. All the money's in the follow up. Don't get upset, please, that you've put a post out on LinkedIn and no one came and bought managed services from you. Please also don't get upset if you send a message to somebody on LinkedIn and they ignore you. But please get very excited when someone comes towards you as a new lead, which we get coming through to our clients every single week in the Growth Hub. And the number one question I ask for them is, what journey did they take to get to where they went to when they were talking to you? And the first time I ask the question, they say, I don't know. The second time I ask the question, they say, oh, they went onto our website and then they had a little look at this page and that page looked interesting. And then they downloaded a guide. Then they went on LinkedIn and checked me out and they saw the same guide in the video. And then they sent me a DM message and I go, fantastic. Reinforces that the process works reinforces that activity proves and gives results. So the money is in the follow-up. Don't just send out one message and just see what happens. Send it out, follow it up. Make sure that you are being professional. Make sure that you're being purposeful and make sure that you are being persistent at the same time. But all in all incorrect time. So weekly consistency is number three.

Number four is around tracking pipeline momentum. This is not just about an instant ROI. This can take 12 to 18 months to get this up and running, but when it's up and running and you keep it consistent, it's a gift. It's the golden goose that keeps on giving. When you taper that or when you bolt that onto your account management as well, guess what happens? You've got some really great opportunities to really start growing the business to get some great accelerated growth. Not just lucky referrals. Odd few projects and Hey look, I think we've been good because something's happened in the economy that's happened to help the tech businesses. So I want to track that pipeline momentum, track how many clients you need. Now we have a framework called ONCAM- it stands for "One New Client a Month", which is what most MSPs need. Okay, so one new client a month, how many conversations, what's your conversion rate? And I'm going to guess it's going to be probably north of 50%. So we're going to be having two really good conversations. Yes, I said two really good conversations a month and maybe you want to have five to maybe 10 bubbling along in the background. So if we got this on a rolling basis, I'm not talking about 20,000 leads that you've bought from a cold list that you thrown into HubSpot and you're spamming with some generic emails that don't, actually, no one opens up or the best thing I heard the other day was a client had done not far off that, but there was no call to action. He wasn't asking them to do anything. So everyone was getting his emails thinking, Hey, he's giving me some great information here. Got some really great stuff. But he wasn't actually telling them to do anything. He wasn't saying Come and download this guy. Come to an event, book a call. There was no call to action in there, no follow up as we were just talking about in stage three. So let's make sure that pipeline's tracked and let's make sure that we're, we are not hunting the instant ROI, but we can see, because number one was all about having that 12 month plan, wasn't it?

And number five, everybody should have a budget for marketing. It's a cost of growth. It's like buying the latest tools for your help desk. It's like getting everybody a funky chair and a clunky keyboard and all of those kind of things. It's all adding to how you build that business, how you build, you know that toolkit to treat, to support your customers. And it's an educational thing as well. You can use all the marketing. We have a framework where we do marketing, inside account management. Marketing is part of account management. How do you keep those clients alive when you're not talking to them every day and every week? How do you keep them interested in technology? How do you keep them up to date with what's going on? How do you keep them safe and secure so they don't get hacked? It's all part of marketing, whether it be outbound or whether it be within your existing client base.

So there's five tips, right? Commit to a number one. Number one, commit to a 12 month marketing plan.

Number two, let's set some leading indicators. Three is building consistency. Four is tracking that pipeline. And five is budgeting for your marketing. And make sure you've got a cost of growth, because if you've got measurements around it, guess what's going to happen? It's not just going to be one of those costs that gets left behind. You're going to be reporting on it on a weekly basis or a monthly basis at least. And then you'll be building it, part of your KPI, your board meetings and your performance reports. Okay?

So we get this right? You trust the process. We say this every single week. You just trust and follow the process. There's no panic, there's no kind of like quiet months. It's just nice steady flow that will build up and it takes time to get it going. You'll have a stronger brand presence that compounds over time. You'll become more and more relevant, more of an expert. The more and more speaking you do, the more and more blogs you do, the more presence that you've got out there, and that will turn round and that will come back and that will reap your rewards. You'll have a healthier, more predictable pipeline. You won't be desperate about selling it. Oh my God, I hope I get a lead this month because otherwise I'm in trouble because I've lost that big client, or this thing's going on, or that disaster's happened in the world and that's going to put all the prices and the costs up, because you got to keep moving forwards, right? If you are owning a UK business, whether it's an MSP or not, and you are not putting at least 10, I'm going to say 10 to 15% on your business every year, you're losing, right, because the government's fixing the rest of this stuff. And all the costs are going to be going up everybody else's costs, employment costs are going up. I don't need to bleed on about that. But we don't want to be in a position of desperation selling. You want to be in a position of when you open up a conversation with a prospect, it's, are you a right fit for us? And is it the right time for us to partner together and work together? Because I want you to buy from me. I don't want to sell to you if I've got to sell it, I've done something wrong. You need to be educating through your marketing as well. And you're going to have a much more confident positioning piece in terms of your culture, your vision, your values. When people would come across your brand, when they come across you, and they're going to think that you are not the person racing to the bottom on price. You're a serious technology partner, that if they want to overcome their challenges that they've got, keeping safe, secure, and using AI automation, all of those kind of great things to grow their businesses. They need someone who's going to match up with that as well.

Sustainable growth is built on visibility. It's not built on luck. Please, let's step outside your comfort zone. Let's stop blaming everyone else about why our marketing doesn't work. I'm going to show my age. Rewind this podcast, listen to it again, make some notes, share it with your team, and let's make marketing fun again. There you go. So you're going to get some hats. Let's make it fun again. Let's start getting some results out of it, because honestly, it can work for your business. You've got to believe it's going to work. You've got to put a place, you've got to put a process in place. You've got to put the structure and the measures in place pretty much like everything else in your business. And the only thing I want you to do, let me know how you get on that, is a short, sharp blast all about marketing today. Thoroughly enjoyed it. Hope you did too. I look forward to catching up with you on the next show. Take care. Be good. Have a great day.

NEXT WEEK TEASER: And in next week's episode of the IT Experts Podcast, we're going to answer the question about how to smash down invisible ceilings in your MSP to make sure you recruit the right people, the people that are going to lift your business up. If you found recruitment hard, it might be because you are fishing in the wrong pond. We've got Yvonne Matzk on the podcast. She is the founder of Co-chair and also the channel community, an incredible force to be reckoned with when it comes to finding different people, finding people who are going to lift your business up, finding the most diverse people out there who are going to help you grow and scale the most profitable MSP you can, so don't miss this one next week. It's around your people. It's around building great teams. There's also a bit of leadership vulnerability thrown in for good luck as well. I'll catch up with you next week.

OUTRO: Hang on a minute, just before you go. And if you're curious about how this episode links with the ability to scale your MSP to a million or, or if you're already there, accelerate to five, then we want to invite you to come and take the MSP Mastery quiz. And in just three minutes, you're going to get a 360 degree scan of your business where you can identify the one or two tactics that can help you find more time, engage and align your people, and help generate more leads in your MSP. It's really simple. Just click on the link in the show notes. And if you have enjoyed this episode, we'd love to get some feedback from you by means of a rating review on Spotify or iTunes or your podcast platform of choice. We really appreciate every single one of them. Now you can go and enjoy the rest of your day, and we look forward to catching up and connecting with you soon. All the best now.