MSP Sales mistakes | Stop doing these 2 things

A sales process is really, really key. And having a process and a structure around what you do, and most importantly, being very purposeful around sales. Now, when I say purposeful, if you think about your own behaviors and your own activities as an MSP, most MSPs are purposeful about tech. That's great. That should be a given in this industry. But what MSPs are not purposeful about sales. I created seven figure MSP because I saw that. So we're going to give you three secrets today. What is up, everybody? Welcome to another episode of the Building a Profitable MSP podcast. I'm your host, Chris Weiser, here with a very, very special guest today, my good friend, Cindy Phillips. How you doing, Cindy?

Hey, I'm doing great, Chris. Great to be with you here. What a fun thing to be on a podcast.

I'm never on podcasts, so what's cool about Cindy? So you guys that are watching. Cindy works with me every single day. She's our chief sales trainer here at Seven Figure msp. And man, what, What a journey it's been. It's been pretty cool. Cindy and I both lived in Austin, Texas. I still live in Austin, Texas. Cindy is now in New Braunfels, a little south.

I basically live in what I call burb. I live in the burbs of Austin. I'm not downtown anymore.

So she's about, I think about an hour south of me now. But she. She moved from pretty much like inside of Austin down a little bit south. And I remember meeting you.

Oh, yeah?

Yep. And I also remember both of us moving on from our roles that we were at when we met. And I remember sitting down in a little coffee shop.

Yep.

Four years ago coming up. Almost four years ago.

Yeah, it'll be four years in January, if you can believe that.

Yep. I remember down. And I kind of mapped out everything we were doing at Seven Figure msp. And you looked at me and you had this giant Cindy smile on your face, just like you got now. And you're like, man, I really want to be a part of this. And it's been. It's been an amazing journey.

Oh, it's. It's been so much fun. And what really makes working with you and working with the team at seven figures so much fun is that the system works.

Yeah, right. It's. It's so true.

It's fun to be on a winning team when people win, when you're around people that make change and it's a positive change and. And we help people, but they make the change they do it themselves or.

Changing lives and teaching them how to change their own lives. I think that's really key. So, so our episode today that we're going to walk through is three mistakes that MSPs often make when related to sales. And I think this is a really powerful episode where we basically have three bullet points and no script. So this is going to be pretty cool. It's an evening here for me in Austin. We're both in the Austin area, but we're central time, early evening for us. So it's a little bit dark. That's kind of why we both look like we're behind lights. But so just to give you guys a little background on me, I know we've been, you know, many of you been listening to the podcast for a while now. I owned an MSP for 10 plus years. I went from a single person owner all the way up to a 30 person company with a sales team. Now times in Cindy, we say this all the time in our seven figure MSP coaching process. Times have changed. Things are a lot different now than they were when I was in the marketplace. But the same basic principles of sales still apply. And I think a really important thing to remember as we get into our three secrets that we're going to kind of go through is a sales process is really, really key. And having a process and a structure around what you're doing and most importantly, being very purposeful around sales. Now when I say purposeful, if you think about your own behaviors and your own activities as an MSP or MSP owner, I don't care if you're one person, 15 people, whatever. Most MSPs are purposeful about tech. That's great, it's fine. And at no point does anything we're going to say today diminish your tech skills, your tech ability, your tech delivery, any of that stuff, because that should be a given in this industry. But what MSPs are not purposeful about is they are not purposeful about sales. And I created seven figure MSP because I saw that that's exactly why we created this platform. That's how Cindy and I ended up being together. And so we're going to give you three secrets today. But by no means does this like the end all be all because it takes consistency, it takes persistency, it takes structure, process. Actively being consistent. And consistent is kind of boring and consistent is kind of hard because the MSPs like the tech. That's what they gravitate to that. So all of that is a baseline. I'm Going to come over to Cindy and we'll kind of do a little talking back and forth here. And if you're watching on video, you get a chance to see us together. If you listen in on the audio portion, keep in mind and try and keep yourself notes on both sides. But Cindy, so what is our first secret? Sorry, the first mistake.

Yeah, I mean, the thing we really want to talk about was what's the one thing that everybody does that does not serve you well? What's the first thing that you can do in a sales opportunity with a new prospect that will put you behind the eight ball, Put you in a place where it's really tough to come back from? Okay, so the first thing you can do that will not serve you well is to shoot a price at somebody. Just, you know, look at them and say, okay, well let me just ask you, for example, how many locations do you have? How many employees do you have? And yeah, sure, we can help you out with your tech. And here's the price. Because what you do is you take some number in your head, whatever that number is, you multiply by the number of users and bang, there's the price.

I think, you know, you think about the average MSP that's out there. That's what they're doing. That's what they've been doing for 5, 10, 15, 20 years. They've been like walk in, shooting out a price. Here you go.

Yeah. So now I want to break down why you might be saying, well, Cindy, I do that all the time. I built a million dollar business. That behavior served me well. That's like, not a problem. You're crazy if you think I should be doing something different. Yeah, well, here's why. Shooting a price by just talking to somebody over the phone unseen, you don't even know what's going on in their shop, does not serve you well. How can you quote something sight unseen? How can you quote something when you don't even know what's going on in their shop or how they do things or what's involved? Are you omniscient? I mean, really, seriously, you're not. You can't be. And what we want, what we preach all the time, is you want the right clients with the right scope at the right price. And the only way you get the right scope is by talking to people and understanding what their needs are, what's their situation, how are things going to evolve, grow and change over time? What are you going to do for them? So I'm going to take care of everything. And I'm going to shoot you a price with no due diligence. Sure, maybe you've built a big msp. Hats off to you if you have. How profitable is it? And that's really the ugly story that nobody talks about is how much profit are you delivering to? You know, what's your net profit? Are you getting the lifestyle you want? Are you working 18 hours a day because you can't afford to hire help? You can't pay yourself the wages you want to pay, even if you can pay yourself the wages. Maybe you can, but you can't hire help, so you can actually take vacation.

And I've actually had Cindy, I've had MSP owners out on the Internet. You know, we have a really large Facebook group, if you guys haven't seen it, it's called the IT and MSP Business Owners Group. I've had guys argue with me, this is what I want. And, and it's like they're trying to.

Convince themselves, well, maybe it is what you want. Okay, may. Maybe you do feel that in order to have this business, you got to be on a razor thin edge. Maybe you feel like you have to grind it. Really?

I think that some of that is like their personality style maybe. And that's.

Yeah, maybe their value set. Yeah, you know, I gotta be grinding it hard or I'm cheating. Right. Maybe there are people who think that.

So, so I have, I have a comment or question around that because one of the things that I'm seeing like how do you like, actually, number one, you can't scale that. Right? We. You can't scale that. But number two, how does that work? And I know we're getting a little bit off topic here, but it's just like something that entered my head. How does that relate into a world of cyber security? Because there's no amount of grind that can prevent it. In fact, I'd say the grind actually probably plays into the hacker's mindset because there's no tools, there's no systems, there's no, there's, there's no structure around it. And then the insurance company or whoever the remediation is going to be handling the, the breach isn't going to care how hard you worked. They care about the end result. Right. What's your thoughts around that?

So, so here's the thing. I was on a call I didn't tell you about this week. Chris was someone who told me that they got called into a situation with a client and they're replacing another msp. And that MSP was doing things the way people did it. Fifteen years ago, he went through a bunch of technical stuff, which is. Went right over my head. But the takeaway message was this. MSP had never tooled up. They had a process that worked for them at one point in time, and they never evolved, they never grew, they never changed. They just kept stamping out the same cookies. Right. Never upgraded the ingredients, never changed anything. I think that sadly, there are people out there that do that. But here's what's really happened. Things have changed dramatically. Cyber attacks are way up, and we're having to raise our standard of care across the board, and that means we have to do things differently. And probably the easiest example to give this is, Chris. You know, we go out to see the dentist every once in a while. And, you know, you can go to a dentist that's like, still scraping your teeth with that little iron thing, or you can go see somebody who's using, you know, an ultrasound machine, and you're in and out in five minutes.

Right. It's funny because I actually switched from one dentist to the next, and I'm like, oh, that's cool, because it was so much like. So I'm with you on that. Exactly on that.

Yeah. So. So the thing is, you know, maybe it served you well to just go in and say, how many people shoot a price, and boom. But things have changed so much that you really need to understand that every potential client you pick up is a real and material risk to your business. Because if that client gets hacked, who's the insurance company coming back on? Yeah, they're coming back on you. Right. And if that company gets hacked and. And they get hacked and they're able to do a lateral attack through your client to other people. Oh, man.

Now that's your supply chain. Maybe your supply chain attack. Just so everybody understands, you know, that lateral attack is going. Going sideways.

Yeah. Is a branch off as a launch point. Right.

And I. I actually was on a call with you earlier today, and I heard you mention the. The target breach from years ago. That's exactly where that came from. So that's. I mean, that's what, 2010, 11 was it that. Was it that late? It was 2015.

I thought it was. Yeah. I mean, I. I did a tabletop exercise at south by Southwest with the VP from Experian back at south by Southwest in that time frame. And, you know, everybody knew how it happened, but where did we become complacent enough to think that that wasn't going to become a dominant model and now it's a dominant model with eight to ten years of experience. And the question is, what are you doing to be able to slow that stuff down?

And they're getting better at it too, like, and they're pivoting. And the thing I think we're going to see with this and we're going to come around to our mistake number two here in a second. The thing I see is we're finally starting to see, and this is part of why the seven figure MSP coaching program really, really works. We are some regulation come into play. We are seeing, you heard Cindy mention the insurance company factor. We're seeing some accountability being handed down and, and for years the MSP industry was kind of at the mercy of what the client wanted because there was nobody to hold anybody account. Well, the accountability is finally starting to come down. We're starting to see some regulation. In fact, I think we're going to see regulation in Australia before we see it anywhere because they're just getting hammered right now. Breach after breach after breach and their government just because like, okay, fine, we're just going to do whatever because they're at their, they do, right. So I think we're going to see it there first. So coming around with that. So we've kind of established a mistake number one is shooting that price immediately. What's mistake number two? And I think it flows. If I, if I know where you're going to go on this, I think it just flow.

So here's the thing. I'm gonna, just gonna shoot you a price, right? Boom. Here you go, here's your price and I'll figure it all out later. Right? That's kind of the mindset, right? Well, okay, maybe I won't do that. You know what I'll do instead? I'll just give you a really quickie little network assessment or maybe I'll call it a security assessment, but I'll launch a couple tools, I'll gather a little bit of information and I'll just, I'll give you a report really quick. I really won't put any effort into it because I'm going to crank these things out so I can give them away for free. Yeah, right. I'm going to give you something for free. It's a little bit of what I would call it upscale lead magnet. Right?

Yeah.

You know what it's really like? It's like going to, it's like going to McDonald's for a hamburger and fries. Now there are times when we will do that, but if you're going to go eat a hamburger. Chris, do you really want the hamburger from McDonald's?

It's definitely not going to be my choice. Right. I want to go. I want to go to the best place that's. And I understand. Just like what Cindy said, I totally understand once in a while, but it shouldn't be the norm. Because what happens when you eat McDonald's every day?

Oh, man. It's like, gross, right?

Yep.

But, so here's the thing. If I'm going to give you something free that's meaningless to me to give to you, what kind of person might I. If. If I want you to attach meaning to that. I mean, so. So to give you just a quickie, freebie little thing. I don't want to start our relationship off that way. So here's the deal. If we're thinking about doing business together, we're going to have a bad day someday. I can't stop all attacks. There's going to be a time where we're basically in a foxhole in war. Right. And you know what I want to know? I want to know who's got my back and who's in the foxhole with me. I want to understand how you make decisions and whether or not you're somebody I want to have in my life. Right. Because, let's be real. Are most MSPs really big? No, we're still a service industry.

Yeah. I think. I think the majority, the overwhelming majority, like 90 plus, are still under 10 employees.

Right. And they have, on average, 40 clients. Right. So let's say you've got room. Let's. Let's go crazy, Chris. Let's go to crazy town for a minute. Let's say you got room to have 100 clients. Okay. You can have 100 clients. Okay. Don't you want to vet those people a little bit before you sign them up to be your client? Or are you just going to sign up everybody who winks at you? No, I want to vet them. So what's the easiest way for me to vet them? I take them through a process where I do a comprehensive professional services engagement that I call a cybersecurity risk assessment or a cyber security risk review, and I require that they pay for it. Because what I'm going to do is I'm going to go through 360 degrees, through their organization, through their infrastructure, through their people, through their policies, procedures, their behaviors, and I'm going to test them for 30 days. I'm going to test them for 30 days to see how they behave. And I'm going to take my observations and from my experience and these observations about how their business works. I'm going to craft findings and recommendations and I'm going to give them a beautiful report and I'm going to sit down with them at an executive level and I'm going to help them understand what the cyber threat landscape is like and I'm going to help them understand how their business operates from a security first perspective. Right. Really simple. But I'm going to charge them for that because I want them to show up to the meetings, I want them to have skin in the game, I want them to have managerial oversight and I want them to want the answers. Do you want the answers? If you get it for free, it's like doing the quiz in the Cosmopolitan magazine. Yeah, it's free.

And what you guys don't realize about giving away the free stuff is people look at it like, what's the catch? What's the. Like, their immediate response as a human is, what's the catch? Why is it free? If this is a vow, and I don't care if your competitors are doing this, and I want to get into the a little bit with you because I know people are out there listening, saying, okay, well, I don't know how to do it any other way, or my competitors are giving it away free, or everyone asks for it free because clients are starting to learn what MSPs are and they're starting to learn the strategies. So how do we play off that? How do we fight that objection of, oh, I want it free, or even the desire that, oh, all of the guys in the peer group I'm in or all the guys I see at these shows are, are giving it away free. I can't charge for this. How do I do that?

I'm really glad you asked for me to do this for free. Or you're asking why I'm going to charge you money? Okay, first of all, if you're the prospect and you say to me, hey, I got two more MSPs that will come here and they will do exactly what you just said and they'll do it for free, I'm going to look at you and I'm going to smile. The first thing I'm going to say is, are you sure it's exactly the same? Because what I'm doing is a professional evaluation of your business and I'm going to give you a report that points out what's wrong with this and I'm going to give you the benefit of my Experience so that you can know what kind of actions you, you might possibly want to entertain taking. Right? Yeah. And the reason I don't do it for free is because I'm putting my best people on it, I'm putting time into it, and I'm basically understanding where you strategically need to take your business and what's important and where the holes are and what do we need to shore up. And every business has different holes. So let me ask you this. And back to, back to a common example. I'm really on the dentist theme. I don't know why, but would you let a dentist drill in your mouth if they didn't do X rays? No, you wouldn't.

Well, it's funny because every single professional services industry that we deal with as end user clients, they all do an assessment first to give you diagnosis. You don't even know this, but we're, we're looking for a new bookkeeper internally to help us out here. Got hooked up with a couple of different people. I got referred to three. Three of these. Three different ones. It's very similar. Two were like, okay, here's what it's going to be. It's flat monthly. One said, well, we need to do an assessment first. It's $250. You know who? I. I immediately said, I'm gonna go with them first.

Right. And that assessment could have been 2, $500 and you still would have gone with them first.

And it really didn't matter that it was only 250 bucks. I mean, we're pretty large company and it's only 250. It's pretty cheap. Honestly. It's almost too.

In reality, you would have paid to 2500.

I would have paid. I would have paid that easy. I don't disagree with that. The more it is just the fact. So the fact that they were charging me got me to like, oh, they have a process.

This is really what it comes down to. The other thing that happens when I charge you a fee for a professional services engagement and I come in and I do an analysis of your business and how it works. I understand how you make decisions.

Yeah.

I understand whether you walk your talk or whether you just say something and then you do a total 180 and go a different direction. And back to that analogy I used at the beginning. When the boom happens and you're at a bad place, do you want to be in the foxhole with somebody who is going to throw you under the bus or do you want to be in the foxhole with somebody who's going to work the problem?

Yeah.

And how will you know? How do you know if they're going to pay their bills, pay their invoices on time? You do a small engagement, you charge them up front, they pay. Hey, we got a repeatable behavior here.

Really key stuff. Really key stuff.

So any other really key thing just. I can't leave this alone. I gotta say this. Everybody who's an MSP has been ghosted on meetings. You know who doesn't get ghosted? People who require people to pay for their time.

Yeah, you're so right on that.

You ghost your trainer. No, because you're paying for that session whether you're there or not.

At the very least, you cancel properly. With respect. At the very least.

Exactly. With respect. And I think we ought to put a big underscore on those words, with respect.

Respect.

Because that kind of takes us into the third thing we want to talk to.

Yeah.

And that's how do we talk to people? What do we talk about? Do we talk tech or do we talk English?

You want to get into that comfort space where the end user feels that you're on their level, speaking their language, not talking to them. Like, and I, I said this earlier on the same call that we were on as we were kind of talking about these things. I did a documentary back in 2010 and it was, I had, I had contracted to have it done and we had interviews done from some of my clients and we had three of my clients on there. All three of them stated like there was no script for this. They all stated, well, Chris comes and talks to us like we're real people, right? How big of a deal? Like, I didn't even realize it at the time. It was just who I am. Like, it's just, I'm not a big techie talker guy. But this industry as a whole, I understand that you guys like tech, but you have to get on your clients level and you have to speak to them in terms that they care about that run home to mama. Cindy and I call it run home to mama. When techs get lost, when they don't have a sales process, when they don't have structured stuff, they run home to mama, which is talking about backups and server sizes and all this other stuff that has no impact on the sale.

And, and more importantly, when we use words that people don't understand for any reason, there's a disconnect that develops and it's going to impact trust, it's going to impact rapport. And so when you make a choice on how you want to talk to somebody. You're making a choice whether you want to meet them where they live or whether you want to try to drag them to where you live. Which one do you think is easier?

Yeah, definitely don't want to be dragging. Right. And the other factor with the dragging piece is they're rarely. They're not going to go willingly because you're dragging them. So they're going to effectively be metaphorically kicking and screaming, which means they're not going to understand. They're going to be confused and lost.

In the wilderness, which means they're not. They're going to cancel five minutes before an appointment or they.

Or they don't buy, which is worse.

They're going to send you signals that they're not. They're not like. They're not like Kumbaya with you. You. Right. They're not connected to you.

Yeah.

And it all starts. It all starts with the first phone call. Building rapport starts with that first phone call. Being respectful about what people's situations, what their business is like, all starts with that first phone call. And when we do our sales process, we don't use a single technical word, and that's by design.

And I will tell you guys that are listening to this, we have to rip the tech out of the MSPs to get them to stop running home to mama. We have to, like, literally, like, kicking and screaming, rip it away from them. Because this is something that is just. It's become a part of their repertoire of things that they talk about to every single prospect, to every single client.

Yeah, absolutely. And it's. And the thing is, the more comfortable you get in just talking about this in plain, simple terms, the more powerful you are when you meet with people, the easier it is for them to understand the value that you truly bring to the situation. And. And we know that people don't want to manage their own computers.

Yeah.

And we know that people want to ignore security issues. We know that. So how do they get comfortable with letting you do it for them? They've got to feel that they're connected to you. For me, Kris, the way they establish those feelings, the way they develop that trust in you, comes right back to that first professional engagement where you put your best people on it and you help them understand at depth what's going on in their business. And you don't box check. You don't just say, let me throw this out there. You really put your heart and soul into it.

Yeah. So actually having a process Knowing what you're talking about. In fact, one of, in our coaching program, one of our most successful salespeople at an MSP didn't come from doing tech, didn't come from doing all this history in the MSP industry. She came from selling insurance at a small insurance firm in Dallas and just crushing it because she knows how to sell risk and she knows how to talk to the end user client.

Another one of our most successful people came from selling burial plots.

Who's that? I don't even know.

I'm not gonna mention who it is.

I don't even know who that is. I didn't know, I didn't know that one. So that's a great one.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's, it's the kind of thing, you know, if you can talk about it, something intangible and make people feel it here in their heart, makes a big difference. And you don't do that by having. What can I, how can I say this? You don't do it by having meaningless conversations.

Yeah, yeah.

You have to ask questions that matter and you really have to turn your, your ears up to like level 15 and really listen.

And I compare sales to dating so much. And if you guys think about when you were dating or maybe you're currently dating, if you're the person that talks nonstop and all you do is talk about yourself and your resume, how, how well do you do? But for some reason in sales, that's what most MSP owners, MSP salespeople do is they sit there and they talk about themselves. They don't listen, and they recite their resume, their tech stuff. It's really important to think about. All right, Cindy, so we're coming to bottom of the hour here. Great discussion. We talked about our three mistakes that MSPs make. One, shooting a price on the first visit. Two, giving away your network or cybersecurity risk assessment. And three, actively talking tech to your prospect to the point of ad nauseam. Right. Any, any parting words from you before we, we head out today?

I would say the biggest thing to be successful in sales, especially as an msp, is to be as thoughtful in every step of the sales process as you are in every step of resolving a ticket.

That's good.

It's the same kind of workflow, just in a slightly different domain. So when you commit to actually having a process, whatever it is for you, and you handle it like you handle tickets, all of a sudden things get really simple.

And I'm going to say also being very purposeful about sales I said that as I opened. Please. That does not mean that you don't care about tech. It doesn't mean that we aren't going to deliver a great service. Those things should happen anyway. But you need to be. If you want to grow your business and maybe you don't want to, that's fin. But if you want to grow your business, if you want to scale, you have to be purposeful about sales. And if you need help with that, we'd love to talk to you. Seven figure msp.com you get to meet me on day one. You get to meet Cindy on day two. So it's pretty cool. So, Cindy Phillips, great job today. So thankful for you being here. You are a legend in this industry. So honored to have you on our team and on my stages. It's. It's absolutely awesome.

Listen, we have a good time. We do real work. We get stuff done and we help people and we help businesses keep themselves safe, and that's what it's all about.

Yeah, absolutely. And keep a lot of people employed, too. It's really cool. So, yeah. All right, Cindy Phillips, again, thank you. Thanks, everybody, for listening on another episode of the Building a profitable MSP podcast. My name is Chris Weiser. We'll see you guys soon.

Bye.

Bye.