The Roadmap To Hiring Your First Salesperson

What is up, everybody? Hope you guys are having a great, great day. So you got Chris and Michelle here. We are both in the same hotel, different floors, different makeshift backgrounds, which is kind of fun, right? So we got all kinds of stuff going on here. We are in Indianapolis getting ready for our live event, which is going to be live here. We got double your MRR live here in Indianapolis. So starting tomorrow morning. So if anybody that's. We got a massive crowd joining us today. It's great to see you guys. If anybody wants to still come to Indianapolis, you guys can. Oh, look at that. You just threw a link up there on. I love. I did. You guys can still. We have the ability for you to live stream. Watch this. You'd have to buy a virtual ticket if you want to do that. We also, if you're in the Midwest or our board and want to fly into Indianapolis tonight or even tomorrow, you could still join us live. We got. We're gonna have kind of a smaller venue actually here in Indianapolis, but it's kind of nice because, you know, we were in Phoenix last quarter at a big casino. We're kind of a number there, right? So where there's like, what? There's, I think, two or three different events happening at the same time. This place, we're the show. So it's kind of cool and kind of fun. So really excited to bring today's broadcast to you guys. Today we have a road map to hiring your first salesperson. Now, Michelle, this is something I'm going to give you a little bit of intro to. Actually, why don't you just do your own little intro? I would love this. And I don't know why your name is there, but.

And yeah, because I'm sharing the link.

That's exactly what it is. Actually. Let me just type this link in the chat really quick for everybody here. MSP, dot, was it just Q2? Q2, I think. Yep. There we go. There you go, guys. There's that link in the chat for you. There you go. That should go out to everybody. Okay. There you go. Yeah, so now we got names up there too. So. Okay, Michelle, take it away.

Hello, everyone. I'm Michelle Terpstrand. I'm the Chief Revenue Officer over here at Seven Figure msp. And I am extremely excited to talk about what it looks like to bring on your first salesperson into your MSP in the chat right now. I would love to know who is excited to stop selling themselves. Like, what CEOs in the room listening right now are like, yep, get me out of here. Like I want to go enjoy CEO life. I want someone to sell for me. I would love to know in the comments section right now, now, the reason why I wanted to do this presentation with Chris is because it is one of the biggest things a CEO has to tackle in their business in order to scale efficiently. And if you ever want to exit your business, you have to have a sales system built in. And my experience in building high performing sales teams, I even have wrote a workbook on it on Amazon as well. Like this is what my core background is in. And I am very excited to share the secrets and the mistakes that I've seen a lot of CEOs make that I don't really want everyone in this room to be making. So we're going to help you prevent some common mistakes. I'm going to give you an action plan of exactly to know when you're ready and also how to do it efficiently. And as the Chief Revenue officer over here at Figure, I have helped Chris build a team of eight right now. And so what I'm sharing with you is actually what we're doing too.

Yeah, you know what, I will tell you guys, Michelle doesn't know MSP until she came here, actually. I mean, which is kind of cool. I make a point of hiring people on my team. We do have a couple of msp. What do you, I guess, would you say people that have been through the trenches? Right. I was almost gonna say victims, but I, I kind of, I comply. I kind of align with that. So we got me, who had, that had an MSP for 10 years. We got Cindy Phillips who worked on the MSP side, but more on the franchise side. And we got Ryan o' Hara that works here. But for the most part, most of our team is from outside MSP land, which is to me a major, major strength. And it's purposeful from my side because we want things, you know, what is, what does the MSP industry do a lot? It's very cannibalistic. It pulls from inside and that's both on the vendor side and on the MSP side to where we're pulling from Internal all the time. And we're taking a lot of ideas from Internal all the time. One of the reasons that my MSP was successful, also one of the reasons that seven Figure MSP is successful is because I've pulled pulled from outside of that a lot. Now. I definitely went to sales coaching and sales trainings and peer group events and networking events and big shows in the MSP industry. But most of what I did has been directly related. The most successful stuff I've done has come from outside of the MSP industry, especially in the last five years. But it still applies down like all the same stuff that Michelle's doing here also applies down to you guys as msps. And a couple things that I want to quick say and then we're going to get into our presentation for today. I want you guys to keep an open mind. I know I, I specifically know that MSPs are technical. MSP owners are very technical. They are very wanting to focus on service and wanting to focus on client delivery and service delivery. Just because we're talking about sales and cash flow and revenue and lead gen and all these things being the focus, that does not mean we're telling you to neglect service. Service is still critical. Delivering a top tier, high quality MSP and cyber security service level is critical. But sales and marketing is the oxygen that your business needs to survive. Guys, so many MSPs grow by accident. It's referrals only or it's, you know, it's legitimately growth by accident. Yes, it feels a little bit purposeful when you get referrals, but you can't control it. I love referrals just like everyone else. But you cannot control that, that income stream. You can control that sales stream. And if you're going to build a real sales team, you better your job and Michelle, Michelle's job. Michelle and me, our main role right now is driving leads to our sales team's calendars. It is not on them. Now granted we have an SDR and BDR team. Sales development rep, Business development rep. That's what that means. MSPs are like BDR business disaster and recover, Backup, disaster and recovery. That's what they think that means, right? Whereas in my world now my job as the owner, as the CEO, as the executive, along with my executives on our VP team, our job is to drive leads to my team to close. And it's not just and, and Michelle, where most of this is, I'm not sure how much experience you have in this but, but in most MSPs world they hire a salesperson and they're like, oh, go bring me your book of business or go book appointments. And there's no structure and they just like throw them to the wolves and expect them to do that. So okay, and if you guys got questions as we go today, we got about probably anywhere from 60 to 90 minutes depending on how many questions we have that we're going to be talking. So Michelle and I are here till we're done. Excited about that. We're both in a hotel, so you guys, you guys, we have crappy Internet by any point. We're sitting on WI Fi. It is what it is. We'll do our best.

That's what it is. I'm really impressed with my beautiful background right now. Like, I think I kind of pulled it off.

I think we're in a similar room. She's a floor below me. Is that your kitchen?

Yeah, it's my kitchenette. Yeah. And I like, prop everything together so.

I'm like, you know, and I'm in front of the big window. So I had natural lights. I didn't have any great lighting here, so I didn't, you know, we'll make it. Okay, I'm going to share my screen, guys, and let me just get this up here and make sure that we are good to go. And if the seven figure MSP live cuts off with a couple people say that to us earlier, it's because it's the background. And as I bring up the slide deck, which you'll see, oops, I screwed that. I got the wrong screen up here. Hold up. There we go. Got that. We're good to go. You'll see how it cuts off that little seven figure MSP live. So. All right, I'm gonna get rolling. And Michelle, anything you want to say before we start?

No, I just can't wait to talk about this. And I can't wait to challenge everybody who shows up and listens to this replay on making sure that their business is actually ready for this. So let's rock and roll.

I'm pumped about it too. So, okay, so to get rolling. So I got a couple things before we get started. A little housekeeping items for you guys today. First of all, my promise to you. Michelle and I are going to show you how to hire your first or next. Or maybe you went through this and screwed up and you're like, oh, I've been going back to doing sales, which one of the things that I definitely recommend if you're struggling in this. I hire slow and I fire fast. It's kind of a rule that I have. Michelle and I are, you know, very much on the same alignment on that. Go back to basics. When you make mistakes, just rip it down. 0. Go back to basics. If that's your case, we can help you get started. And we're going to make sure you know how to hire that person or that next person and you know how to manage them. We're going to share real skills. This is stuff that we put inside of seven figure MSP and we're going to talk about that. Like I brought on my head of revenue to work with you guys. So Michelle runs sales and marketing for my whole company. I manage her. Well, I kind of half ass manage you, I'd say. But she more like tells me what to do and I'm like, you check.

In on me, you make sure I have a pulse.

Mostly it. But make sure you guys get ready to take notes today. Make sure. And this is really the differentiator in business. You're going to take some stuff and you're going to put it into, into use. Not just come on the webinar today and spend an hour and a half and be like okay, that was cool. And then you move on. What, what are like maybe your top three actionables that you're going to take from today. And that's really key. If you guys stay until the end. I got a couple prizes for you. I got first of all, one winner is going to get a 100Amazon gift card that's with us today. A second winner is going to get a 75Amazon gift card. And everyone on the webcast that's live with us today is going to get the opportunity to get a 50Amazon gift card. But you have to stay until the end. And actually Michelle, I don't know if you saw I worked with Anne Marie and put in a new platform called tremendous.com we now give them the option to have not just Amazon, but any type of gift card from any type of different place. So it's kind of cool. Like I'm pretty excited. I love that we our first foray into that. But you can have a debit card, you can have Starbucks, you can have whatever you want. So you basically we give you a link and you can choose whatever kind of card you want. So that's kind of cool.

What a great business. Oh my gosh. That is so smart.

Pretty cool idea. I like it as well. I like it as well. So couple quick things here. Please pay attention guys. I know we got a lot of distractions in today's world, right? We got all these, these things that are hitting us. You got chat teams, text messages, tickets, all this stuff coming in. So please be a play. Please pay attention for us today. That means no tickets, no client calls, no distractions. If you guys are serious about changing your MSP series, about changing your life, then please just give us 60 to 90 minutes. We're going to give you some really good stuff. You heard me mention that Michelle and I are live in Indianapolis right now. We have our Q2 live event. This is part of our MSP M RR tour for all of 2024. So we've been, we've been in Phoenix, we've been in various. In fact I was in. Where was. We were in Boston last week and a half ago. We're in Indianapolis right now. So we've got a lot of stuff going on. On May 28th this month we're going to be in up in Canada in Ottawa, Ontario. Uh, then uh, June 20th, Oklahoma City, July 18th we're going to be all across the pond in the. The London in the uk. That's my best attempt at a shitty English accent.

That was not.

Then we have our next live event. I know. Yeah. Well we. Part of our team is British so it's, it's kind of fun. We. I think we got what, three guys that are British on our team now. It's fun giving these guys a hard time because they try and do cowboy American and I try and do UK guy also. So then we got August, uh, is our Denver, Colorado our Q3 event. Then we move over to my hometown. My MSP was in Milwaukee. I was actually a rural guy so I grew up in southeastern Wisconsin. Go pack. Go. Gonna be up there also. Then we got Minneapolis right after that. So we got a lot of stuff coming up. And then we go up again to Calgary in, in Alberta. So all over North America and even in the UK this year. So a lot of cool stuff. Also got a free registration for our double your your w your mrr live event that is August 13th through the 15th. You can sign up at 7Figuremspevents.com again got the rest of our year here so we got a lot of stuff coming on our quick, quick last couple things before I get started. Our coaching team. You guys, this is your first foray into meeting Michelle, which is really cool. I don't often bring my executive team out to the public but this gave us a chance to really share some really good I'm going to say non MSP content but what we're doing on the MSP vendor side, which then applies directly down to you, is going to give you some different things to think. You know, we got eight people on our sales team, another chunk of people on our marketing team. So we are. And I called this. Said this about my MSP also. We were a sales and marketing firm that delivered IT services. That's what I called my MSP we are. And so what seven figure MSP is, we are a sales and marketing firm that delivers high value MSP coaching. So it's very similar things. And speaking of our coaches, we got me, we got Lindsay Badillo and Ryan o' Hara here with us. We also have Cindy Phillips. Cindy is based in Canyon Lake, Texas, just south of Austin, north of San Antonio. We have an amazing, amazing coaching team that I'm so proud of and they are so such great people, actually such great coaches and even better people is what I'll say with that, which is really cool. And I kind of have a theme that I try and hire. Not high value people, which comes with the territory, but really good human beings and that brings the high value to you. So. Okay, so I'm gonna get into my stuff. Michelle, why don't you manage the kind of watch the chat for me. Yep. Somebody said they're having some connectivity issues here, but chant guys, we will be sharing the recording for today. So we got all that stuff going on. Absolutely no problem there. If you're having any connectivity issues, you can watch this on YouTube right now. You can also watch this. Looks like my YouTube share died on me. So that not sure what happened back there. I had a little screen share going, but now we got a mountain. So that's cool. But you can watch this on YouTube. We also got this streaming across various Facebook groups and pages. And then this is also side note streaming live inside of the Streamyard webinar as well. So you guys are welcome to join us. So let's talk about kind of the landscape that MSPs are facing now. First of all, things have changed and I want, I kind of start out all of our main webinars with this message because it's really critical, especially if you're seeing me for the first time meeting seven figure MSP for the first time. You have to understand that 5, 8, 10, 15 years ago, MSPs were exclusively commoditized. When I talk about that, we think about how we delivered services and how we sold services and more importantly how the clients consumed the services. It was almost exclusively. In fact, there was a guy posting on our inner circle clients Facebook. Actually I think he was in the big group this morning in the IT and MSP business owners group this morning talking specifically about how he's selling antivirus as a single product and selling spam protection as a single product and the clients don't care about anything and. And they're trying to nickel dime him and a bunch of what's really Cool to me is I watch our clients chime in on that conversation and say, well, you've completely commoditized your offering. We're selling at 300 plus a seat for a complete, all inclusive seat. And you're letting your clients nickel dime you down because it's, what happens is when you sell a single product, you become only that product guys. And they have to understand things differently. So when I talk about that, what's different between MSP now and what's different about MSP from three, five years ago and how was it commoditized and why is it different now? The bottom line is everyone is going to get hacked. I stand in front of rooms. I was on our onboarding call this morning and I asked the question, can you guys in this room prevent all hacks? And everybody's shaking their head no, cannot prevent all hacks. Msps, we know that, right? We get it, we understand that we can't prevent all hacks. But what do your clients think? They've been operating under the mindset that they can function with antivirus, they can function with spam protection, and we're using words like prevention and we'll manage your IT so you can manage your business. They're managing, they're stating all those things. But the bottom line of this is businesses are not prepared. And I want you to be mindful of that. The MSP industry has almost been enabling this, they've almost been enabling this behavior to let clients dictate the path of support when in reality of it, your clients will get hacked. And you have to understand if your clients are coming to you and thinking this and if you're commoditizing your offering, they still treat IT support in their business, in their world, like a bargain basement service. And this is a really, really important thing I want you to be mindful of. These are critical pieces that you have to get and you have to understand. Because the problem is, because of the way we sold, because of the way that we condition things, your clients think that you're already doing everything. You're the IT guys, you're the experts. My experts are telling me this is all I need. So they're relying on that. Just imagine, dentist, doctor, lawyer, cpa, wealth manager. All these industries are completely telling the clients, here's what you need to do, and they're experts and they listen to them. But meanwhile, the IT professional, and I don't think you should be concerned about calling yourself an expert because if you're in this industry, you surely better be an expert. As far as I'm concerned, at least better and smarter than your clients. It is your job to inform them of all the risk they are going to get hacked. You have to have that conversation. But because of the way that we've sold for 5, 10, 15, 20, 25 years, we've allowed the client to dictate the path because we're so worried about losing a client because of pricing. It's a race to the bottom, guys. So you have to change. Let's go all the way back to that first slide. Things have changed, times have changed. You have to do things differently. So bottom line with this, you have to sell and more importantly, your number one conversation with them. With every single client you have, every single prospect you talk to should be, you're gonna get hacked. What's your plan? You're my IT guy. I thought you had a plan. We have to do more, guys.

Mr.

Client, we have to do more. How do we answer this? So my suggestion to you, and this is a good takeaway for today, first thing that you're going to write down in your notebook. No more good, better, best, no more minimal plan. Now, I'm not saying you can't actively sell them less after you've presented, but always. Let's go back a couple slides here or one slide. You have to lead with cybersecurity, you have to lead with risk, you have to lead with the best. If I ask any I T guy in the world, if you had unlimited budget at every client, would you put in the good, the better, or the best? Every I T person was, I'd put in the best, obviously. What is the best? The best should be what should they have to properly protect and manage their network. So when people msps, we often talk about how much we sell per seat and all these different things. MSPs come back, what's in the stack? What's in the stack? Here's the answer. First of all, the best. Second of all, what should you be putting in as their cyber security expert, partner, professional, whatever you want to call yourself, what should you put in to properly protect and manage their network? It's going to vary absolutely based on the type of client, but what should it be? That is what you should be presenting to them. That is your job. Now. Now, whether you think that or not, I've msps argue up and down the hills with this on with me, guys. The bottom line is, if you think about it, just take away all the, all the crap and just narrow it down to simple. We should be providing that, that's our job, that's our role and that's our duty. Why? Period? Liability. You have to be able to say, I did everything I could for them. I told them they were going to get hacked. I ran a cyber security risk assessment on them, I presented offerings, I gave them a proposal, they declined it. I gave them a letter stating that they needed more. Yes, I still provided them service, but at their discretion, I informed them of everything. Think about this in the medical world, think about this in the legal world, think about this in pretty much any professional services industry, that's what you get. Because I'm going to ask you this next question. How will you. Let's say you present them only that minimal offering and they get breached. Let's say it's. In fact, I was on a call this morning talking about one of the bank hacks with one of our brand new clients. And the only way that there was a prevented $15 million wire transfer was because the bank actually called on the client and said, are you sure you really want to send this wire? So they're going to get breached, guys, you can't stop this stuff. There's, there's software that's connected to their network every single day that you can't control. And it's called a human being can't fix. Stupid. Right? So how will you, let's say you do that minimal plan. How will you, or also on top of that, your client refute a charge of gross negligence? Because that's what we're going to come to if you allow them to dictate the path of support. Keep in mind, if you allow them to dictate the path of support. So that's step one. Eliminate your small, medium, large, your silver, gold, platinum, your good, better, best, put in what the best. What should you put in to protect and manage their network properly? That's step one. Step two, every single existing client, every single new prospect gets what we call a CSRA Cybersecurity Risk Assessment. Every single one. Start with your existing clients, run through them all. We do that, we help you manage that and help you run that inside of our seven figure MSP coaching program, we call it running the play. That's what we do. Why a full risk assessment? There's a couple things. Now, first of all, absolutely, we want to gather data, pain points and tech issues. This is the assessment or the, the network assessment that most MSPs do now. They just gather data, find some basic pain points and then find some tech issues. So yes, we want to still do that, but we Also need to find specifically emotional ties to that flip the switch in their head. Asking them how much revenue they have, asking them if they have MFA on their bank account. Finding plain text passwords in their browsers. Like, things like this are like, whoa. Leaders freak out when they see their bank information on the dark web. That's the kind of stuff you want to find. You also need to make sure that you know their network better than the hackers do. The hackers. And that's honestly, that's a big ask, especially in a one to four week period that we're going to run a csrm. But we gotta do our best, guys. It's way better than a plug in your old USB drive, basic scan, right? So you gotta do that. And also on top of that, we have, and this is probably your most important thing as you're flipping the mental switch, we call it the risk light bulb internally is you have to show that client and that prospect what a hack will really do. How many of you are actually running tabletop exercises? How many of you are actually running maybe even a fire drill to show them? Okay, we're going to unplug your server today and see what happens. Or we're going to change the firewall password or we're going to do like, we're going to do some stuff to make it look like you've been hacked. What's our actual fire drill plan? What's our tabletop exercise to get there? These are the kind of things you should be doing because you have to move the needle in the decision maker's brain. They're used to doing business the old way, guys. They're used. Think about their behavior with it. Think about their history with it, with msp, with any of this stuff. They're used to doing things the same way for the last. Like what? Basically since they bought their first computer. Think about it. That's the deal. I got a little deliverable for you guys. Get your phone ready or maybe your screenshot are ready. This is our run the play worksheet. This is going to give you the baseline of exactly what we do to go through our existing clients and how we run the play on them. You can snapshot that real quick for you. I'm gonna give it, give it a couple seconds here. Michelle. I know I muted you. You had a bunch of background noise going on, so I'm gonna unmute you for a second. Sorry about that. Oh, really? Yeah, yeah. You were typing like crazy and I could, I could hear it. It was distracting.

Oh, that's so interesting. I didn't even realize you could hear that. I'm like, yeah, I'm pumping people up in the chat over here.

Yeah, I know I put the mute button on you. So what's any thoughts from you on that while we just let people take a snapshot?

Yeah. So one of the comments I made while you were talking got a lot of thumbs up. So I thought I would review and talk about that. So what I said was if you lead with the product, you will always be valued at a commodity level, lead with the value and enjoy clients at $300 per seat. And I think that is a completely. That is a massive mindset shift for mindset shift for a lot of people listening right now. And I wanted to repeat it again here because it goes for anything you're selling. Anything you're selling. And so specifically, reframing the way that you approach these conversations is absolutely critical to achieve the $300 profit per seat. And I wanted to repeat this. And another example I could give to you is like the old school sales example of selling a vacuum. Right. And this is old school dates me a little bit, but I'm going to say it right. So if I said, oh, would you like to buy this vacuum? It actually is has a hypoallergenic filter and a high speed. So that's why it's three times as much as this other vacuum. Do you know what that person's going to say, well, I'm not going to pay $300 more or 300 times the same amount for some hypoallergenic filter. But if I had asked during discovery the right questions, I would know that their daughter has asthma. And I would say, you know what, I recommend this vacuum because what it will do is it'll really clear the air for your daughter and the studies shown that can reduce asthmatic symptoms in the home by 30%. Would you like to explore this vacuum? Do you see the difference? And it is the same thing we're talking about right now. And I give that really, really clear, simple example because I think that it is easy to digest and to apply into your business. And so I just wanted to reiterate that that is why people will pay the 300 per seat.

Yeah. And I'll get into pricing a little bit more as we go here. I'm keep going. So I'll give you guys a chance and if you guys have any comments, feel free to throw it in the webinar chat with us if you're on any of the other platforms. Feel Free to do that as well. But I'm going to keep going. So step one, we have no more good, better, best. Step two, you have to make sure that we are doing a cyber security risk assessment for every single existing client, every single new prospect. That should be step one. No more. Think about what we used to do in the past. We'd allow people to break past that. That is a liability killer, which is great about that. That's why we do that. And then step three, as we go to sit down and meet with them, we have to present our full risk findings. Not giving them a report, educate them on the front side, why cyber security is key, why they need to plan for this, why it's no longer about the tools. It's no longer about how long their backup retention is. It's no longer about how big their backups are. It's now about doing your best, proving that we cared. So when I say this, think about how critical it is when you go to the insurance company after there's a breach and you're like, hey, guys, we're about to file a claim. And they're like, okay, show that you cared. And you're like, huh? Prove to us, Mr. End User Client and Mr. IT Company, Mr. Managed Service Provider. Prove to us that you weren't negligent. Show us your pattern of behavior. Does that mean show us that you put MFA in. Show us that you did risk assessments. Show us that you did tabletop exercises. Show us that you actually did fire drills. Show us that you cared about more than being completely negligent and being like, it won't happen to us. Because what is the insurance company trying to do? They're trying to get away from paying you. More importantly, they're trying to get away from, from trying to totally ditch responsibility on paying the client. And they're trying to put it on everybody in the vendor supply chain. So your job as an MSP is to convince your decision makers at your table they need to do more. Not to prevent. We, we can't prevent. Guys, it's doing the best you can to show that you could, that you tried. We did our best. That's what matters here. Which means we have to get away from talking tech. Look at how Michelle just broke down. Literally selling a high priced, expensive vacuum with an emotional tie because your daughter has allergies or has asthma or has whatever issues, we have to do these things. And that's how you get past the price barrier. So you highlight the pain points that affect that specific business. And I'm Going to tell you, usually tied to money, every executive in the world. I don't care if it's a nonprofit. I don't care if it's a small business. I don't care if it's a mom and pop shop. I don't care if it's a publicly traded billion dollar a year company. Money moves the needle. It always does. And making sure they realize they are going to get hacked because if you do not turn on, you heard me mention the risk light bulb earlier. If you do not turn on that risk light bulb bulb, you'll never create that need and that's mission critical. I say the risk light bulb because you think about cartoons or anything growing up, that light bulb goes on. Oh, so you want that, that decision maker across the table to have that. Aha. Oh wow. Wait, so this. And they're probably going to say to you, so all this service we've been doing for years is a scam. No, it has nothing to do with that, guys. It has everything to do with. You have to be prepared because the hacks have advanced things like everybody's getting hacked. The billion dollar companies, the multi billion dollar year companies, the governments. Everybody's getting hacked because they're going after low hanging fruit. And I'm only as strong as my strongest tool. I'm only as strong as my strongest system. So we have to fall back on policy and we have to fall back on procedure and we have to be ready when it happens. It's kind of like blaming the construction company for a hurricane flood. Think about that. It's not the construction company's fault because the house floated away. But somebody's got to pay the bills on recovery. So we eliminate that price objection by highlighting and showing them all of their needs. That's the difference here, guys. That's what makes the difference. All right, I'm going to come over to Michelle. Michelle, you ready to fly here?

I am. I'm totally ready to fly. Okay, let's rock and roll. Okay, so I think that's an incredible lead in to what we're going to be talking about today. And one thing I want to 1 thought I want to close before I jump into defining a closer for today's training. Is that so I'm from California and there's two major title companies in Orange County. Home Title. Home and Commercial Title. And it was First American and First American and Fidelity. And towards the end of last year both of them got hacked during year end closings. And it was, I'm sure if we googled it we could find all of the details that I can't remember which one got up faster, But I would like for everyone to think about that, like, can you get them up faster? Who's going to get up faster? So both were competing to close out all of the sales for the year. And I'm willing to bet the company that got up up faster was able to close more, more title transactions before the end of the year, which is going to make them look really, really good. And I wanted to remind everybody listening right now, like, you get to be a piece of that. So if you can get people up faster, if you can, if you're ready to run your drill, then you cannot. You not only protect your clients in a certain way, right, from more things happening, but you also get them back to making money. And I thought that that would be a really fantastic story to share here to motivate everyone and to think about how they're tied to helping their clients make more money in some circumstances as well. Right. Because when a business is down, a business is down. I think that's a really, really critical piece. So I wanted to share that with everybody. All right, so now we can go ahead and jump in. So let's go ahead and define a closer for today's training. So the title of this training today is how to hire your first salesperson. But what is really, really critical, and Chris spoke a little bit to it in the very, very beginning in our opening, is defining the separation between marketing and sales and what the marketing team is responsible for and what the sales team is responsible for. And if you are one of our frequent flyers and you attend a lot of these trainings, which I would love to know in the comments section right now, if this is not your first training from seven figure msp, is that our head of marketing coaching, Lindsey, she's incredible. And she has been programming some great trainings for our community, talking about the responsibilities that the marketing team has to get opportunities for the sales team to sell to. So I really encourage you, if you haven't watched any of Lindsay's trainings, to make sure that you do as well. There's another one coming up in two weeks. So let's just go ahead and jump into what closers do. Now, when it comes to what do closers do, I want you to think of closers equals salesperson. Okay. And I'm using the word closer because it's a great visual and a lot of people do use that word. It means they take the opportunity that is available. The lead that is available within the company and they close them. Okay, so thumbs up if everybody's following me on this. So what does a closer do? What a closer do does is run first time appointments. So, Chris, do you want to expand a little bit specifically on our model for first time appointments so that everybody understands exactly what that means and there's no miscommunication here.

Yeah. And you know, the bottom line is as you bring a prospect into your sales funnel, you want to determine whether or not they are a good fit for you. Now, typically, what I will tell you, Michelle, I'm not sure how much you know about this, but most MSPs take anything they can get their hands on because they don't have a whole lot of a marketing strategy. So any lead that comes in the pipeline, they're almost scrambling all over themselves to talk with them, which means they're desperate and they don't have. And don't take any of this offense, guys. It's just the reality of it. They're desperate, they don't follow process, they rarely have a process and they usually are the owner or the tech and they kind of just do whatever they can to try and start working on the problem because they want to try and fix the problem immediately because it's a tech issue. So you need to slow that down and have a true first time. That's what FTA means, first time appointment process. And the whole point of the sea of the FTA is to determine if they're a fit for you and to attempt to sell them a CSRA notice that says actually crsa. It's backwards on your.

Whoops, I made a typo.

That's okay, that happened. But it's cyber security with cyber risk security assessment. How about. There we go. Hey, how about cyber security risk assessment? But so notice I said that we're going to sell a CSRA. Most MSPs are again, so desperate, they they're like giving away stuff out of the box. If your first engagement is somebody at the FTA is, oh, we'll give you a bunch of free stuff. You're not a commoditized company, guys. You should be selling, actually selling a csra. Our recommendation on pricing for a CSRA ft, obviously free. We're interviewing each other. Fine. Even lawyers do that. And the lawyers bill for everything.

Right.

But as you get into retainer discussion, which is your csra, our recommendation is having a get out of bed number of $1500. That's my recommendation. $1500 covers zero to 10 employees and then $100, an employee up there. Easy, simple, now you don't have to.

And you know what? I know. I love it. It was so clear. And what I love about the paid. Yes, the paid CSRA is that it really empowers the salesperson who's going to be delivering. And I wanted to articulate on that. The tech is not delivering these results. The tech does the work. The salesperson's delivering the results in order to sell into the retainer. And that is the contract process. I think that's a really key distinction. I want to make sure everybody hears here. It puts the right people in the right seats to do the right type of work, which helps you sell more.

Yep, yep. Okay.

All right, so what else did.

And really quick, if anybody has any questions, feel free to drop it in the chat. We're going to be asking Q and A at the end. We'll be working with you guys. We'll probably try and highlight a couple comments as we go here. But if you have any questions, Michelle and I will be doing a live Q and A as soon as our presentation is over.

Yes, yes. So what else do Closers do? Closers also do your QBR process. And this is really, really important because there are. They're managing these accounts, they're ensuring they're happy and they're renewing them, doing moves, ads and changes. And what I would love right now to know in the chat is that how much time do you spend on all of the things I've already brought up, regardless if you're doing a two step sales process right now or a paid risk assessment or first time appointment, just up to this point where whatever your sales process looks like, like how many hours per week is spent doing this. And I think that's a really huge opportunity to reflect on the amount of time as the CEO and the business owner that is dedicated to selling. And sometimes it can be a major light bulb because all of these things add up so quickly. Wouldn't you agree, Chris?

Yeah, well, depending on the size of the msp also, you're juggling a lot of hats. And what I think so many MSP owners are doing is they're so focused on the technical side. They're so focused on clients, client management and so focused on service delivery that they sometimes don't have any sales problem. Most times don't have any sales process. And most times just think it's like, oh, we'll just figure it out because the business will grow itself. Times have changed, guys. You have to do things differently.

100 and that closer, as time permits, can also do professional networking, which I love and I think is really, really valuable. Local bnis other opportunities that are available. All right, but now I want to talk about what they don't do, which is equally as important as what they do do. So what they don't do is generate traffic. So what does that mean? It means their job is not to get eyeballs onto your website or, you know, for people to raise their hand saying, yes, I would like some more information about how to work with you. They are not sending cold emails, they are not doing outreach, they are not doing your email marketing, they are not doing your social media marketing.

But.

And what they do do, so it should say they do do this is they book FTAs for the salespeople. Okay, so that is a really, really important key element here is that they're driving all of the traffic, creating the new leads, the outreach, and then booking the calendar for your salesperson to take over. This is a really, really big part of a proven sales process that works for msps and it also works for us or any other business type. Okay, so any questions before I move on? I'm going to just check the chat real quick. Do we have anything here?

No, not nothing. Nothing. Life shattering, nothing big. One slide. Let me just, let me just kind of. Oh, sure. Back up one. One.

Yep. Give me one second. Here we go.

Michelle's only operating on a single screen and I got two. So I had a little advantage today. I just want to make sure it's clear that early stages you're going to be hiring a closer. You're going to be working on this, my recommend. And I know Michelle's going to get into this. We're going to talk a little bit about when you're ready to hire a closer. But I want it to be critical that you understand that this stuff on this list is not stuff that they're doing now. I understand. Michelle also talked about maybe professional networking going to be in. Okay, that stuff's a little bit different. They are the face of your company, etc, so it's not bad for you and maybe that closer. And I'll give you a great example. I ran all of my sales for from 2004 when I opened up until about 2008. I had enough MRR, I had enough process, I had enough systems that I could then hire a person and I then had two clients. Over the course of about a year and a half, I hired two people and I had two people actively closing deals and managing accounts. Once you get to that point, then you could start to do it and you could start to. But you have to make sure that you know how to run a business. We're not just going to bring them in to generate traffic and go cold call or more importantly, go door to door and door knock. It's not the same. And a big, big factor on this. The personality type of the closer is dramatically different than the personality type of, type of the lead generator. Dramatically different people. And if you expect a closer to be a good closer, they're not going to be good at door knocking. I'm gonna, they're gonna have, I mean, that's, I'm basically a closer mindset. Michelle's basically a closer mindset. Neither of us are mindset geared to go door knock. We get insanely bored insanely fast. It's not challenging enough.

Even though I did do it and I proved my, I proved my strength so that in all days. Right. You know, we have a really great question here in the chat. So should we outsource this process from, from Dawn? And my recommendation is not to outsource. Now, that might be contrary to what you have heard in the past, but I believe that you build it internally, you prove it works, and then you go and recruit the talent that can support the infrastructure within your organization. And that's actually part of the conversation we're going to have here shortly. So I'm going to hold off on any more, more details with that. But Don, that's a fantastic question and also a shout out to dawn because he is really engaged in the comments right now and I am appreciating that. So thank you, Dawn.

For one thing I'll add on, there is, there's no easy button, guys, a lot of these. And I'm not going to say that you can't have agencies that help. We definitely have agencies that work with us. But here's the deal. In fact, I think I was working with Anne Marie this morning and we figured out we have 23 different agency partners working with us right now. That includes people and companies and all this different stuff. In fact, both of our people that came on with us in our green room today, both agency partners working with us doing different things, different scenarios, but they follow our system.

Yes. And that is the key part.

That's the key because if most of this, most of this is done, if you go into another firm and say, oh, I'm going to outsource all my sales, you're probably going to follow their system. And nine times out of 10, it's probably not going to work. All right, Michelle, let's keep going.

Yeah, you don't want other people building your strategy. You want to build it, and then some other people can, of course, then operate it. Okay. All right, so how do you know you're ready to hire a closer? This is the biggest question that I usually get. Because, listen, at the end of the day, if I walked into your office and I said, hey, let's get you. Let's get you a closer. Closer and get out of the sales seat. I know very few people who would object to that right now. There are some people who love sales, like me and Chris, but we also are great business people and understand that if we stay in that seat, there is a certain limitation on our growth, so we eventually need to exit. But most people would love to not be responsible for sales anymore. And so what happens is a lot of time people. A lot of times people get over. Over eager and hire too soon before their business or themselves are ready to do so. So we're going to talk about that here. All right, so these are the key readiness areas. Now, first, I'm going to go through all of this on my slides and then verbally, of course, explain everything. But my gift to everyone here is going to be a checklist. And this checklist is something you can print off. You can put it on your desk, put it on your refrigerator, put it in your office, whatever you want. So we'll get that here just in a few minutes. So stay. Really pay attention to what I'm saying. Absorb as much as you can, and the checklist will really help reinforce this. So the first thing is a scalable offer. Okay. Your team needs to be able to deliver. When you hire a salesperson, that's going to close for you. Now, I think everybody understands when you hire a salesperson, you want your sales to go up. So when your sales goes up, you need to be able to deliver on fulfillment and service. So whatever your stack looks like, whatever your fulfillment looks like, can you take on 10 clients tomorrow or tomorrow or whatever your scalable number is? This is really, really, really critical. Okay, so that is number one thing. Okay. Number two is to be profitable enough to pay a closer. Okay. I'm going to say this. I'm a pretty direct person, so I hope everybody enjoys this. Okay. Cheap salespeople are a red flag. I'm going to let everyone absorb that. Okay.

Cheap sales also really quick on that. Spot on.

Yeah.

Second thing, you being a cheap owner in trying to hire somebody Commission only. Also a red flag.

Yes, 100%. So thank you for adding that in there. You do not. You want to be able to pay someone. And if you're holding, hopefully you're asking, great, Michelle, how much do I need to pay them? We're going to talk about that. Okay, so that's coming in a little bit here. So the next thing that is so super critical is you must have a proven sales process that works inside your business right now so that a closer can come in, take it, go and close. They are not responsible for building your sales process. And if you ask them to build your sales process, you are going to get frustrated. Your sales potentially would dip and you're going to fire them so fast, or at least hopefully you do. Okay. That is not the job of the closer. It holds people back from being successful. So it is absolutely critical that you have the sales process proven and operating in your business right now. All right, the next thing. Chris, I love that you helped me out this and I'm not quite sure why it's cutting off with my slides here.

It's called a Mac. You're on a Mac.

It's. No, it's not my Mac. It's not always the max vault. So anyway, 50% of.50% of your calendar is dedicated to sales. Do you want to expand on that a little bit?

Well, so my mindset. So. So most MSPs, and this is kind of how I did it. And this is how we recommend our elite members in our community coaching program do this as well. So most of you don't have a salesperson coming out of the box, right? You don't have a closer. We've had lead generators and we've tried to hire somebody. We've tried, blah, blah, blah. We've all made those mistakes. And I see this mistake happen a lot, a lot with msps. So our answer is, okay, let's teach you how to run the strategy. Michelle just talked about the strategy a few minutes ago here. So let's teach you how to run the strategy, how to do it the right way. Let's get you actively running the play. You heard me talking about the best offering running the play during my little open, right? So we get you as a, as the owner, as the executive team, whatever it is, running the play on your existing client base. Keep in mind, we are going to do a cyber security risk assessment on every client in your stable. So we just gave you that many sales meetings and you're going to close probably 60% of them using our method. All the stuff that Michelle just talked about a minute ago, we're going to have you do. When you get to the point where you have 50% of your owner calendar, calendar maxed. Doing specifically sales activities, we now have something we can give to a closer. We can hire, train, manage that person using our process, our strategy, our system, our repeatable scalable offer. And we can give them something to actually close versus think about the way that you've done it in the past. Let's just throw them to the wolves and say go close some. This is a totally different animal. This is why the seven figure MSP program works, guys. We're trying to give you as much as you can so you don't have to invest in us unless you really feel the need, which that's what we're here for. But that's the kind of concept that we have here, Michelle's.

That.

That clarify anything.

Yes, I think that's great. I just like you to chime in and add your expertise. You know, I mean, I have a hard time sitting here too.

That said, what does the sales compensation look like? We're going to come around to that in just a minute. Okay, Nathan? So just keep paying attention. And we got you on that.

All right, awesome. Okay, let's keep moving on. All right, so now we're gonna jump into a couple of secrets that I have seen in my experience that always prove themselves to be true. And the design of these secrets, these things that I'm going to share with everyone right now is so that you don't make the same mistakes that I have seen countless CEOs make when they transition to exit the sales seat. I don't want you to make those mistakes. I'm just going to tell you what they are and you can avoid them and you can thank me later. I would love a thank you card. Okay, no problem. I also love Starbucks. No, but no big deal. Okay, so I'm going to break these all down. I have three of them and we're going to go through each of them and we're going to talk about compensation. We're going to talk about all the things that are coming up in the chat. Chat. And I'm really, really excited about this. Okay. So the number one thing is that when most CEOs actually fail when handing off sales. And the reason why I see this is they're hiring for the wrong reasons. And I'm. This is a little bit of a humor slide. Okay. But this in it's including hiring your cousin because your aunt begged you I know this might sound totally ridiculous, but I will tell you, so many people say, I know it's not. Oh, my cousin Joe just, like, lost his job, so he's gonna help me with sales. Or my cousin.

I have a pretty specific rule. I don't hire family or friends.

Yep. I mean, that's a. It's a really good, specific role.

I can't have a. Like, I will hire somebody that I met through business that I became friendly with. You're a great example of that. But I already knew the level of work that you did before I hired you. And you think about most family, most friends, we know them casually. Somebody's fun to go drinking with, talks a good game. That doesn't Us. That does not necessarily make sure that they're going to be a good worker or a good. Like, it's a very steadfast rule that I have, and I really. I. I violated it in the past, and I will never. I do not violate it now.

Yes. And I have. I mean, I've heard this story maybe 20 times or I review sales call calls, and I see that the new salesperson's popping in and that person has zero sales experience. And it's a family member like this. So.

That's hilarious. Don. That's hilarious. Don just said, that's why I didn't do mlm.

I want Don on all. I want on all of our presentations. Okay. Awesome. All right, so we're gonna move on from there. Now this. And you want to hire for the right reasons. Okay. Not the wrong reasons because the aunt asked you to do it. Not because you don't know how to do it yourself. Because, remember, we're building the sales process internally. It's important that you're hiring for the right reason. So a proven track track record, a cultural fit. This is a huge one that's often overlooked. Excels at role play, Hungry and interviews you. So I'm going to expand on all of these things. So. So first of all, proven track record. That's pretty explanatory. Right. So they can show up and they can say, hey, I've had this job, this job, this job. This is what I was able to achieve. And it doesn't need to be. Like, Chris said that. That they've worked in the MSP space before. It doesn't need to be that.

I don't need it. If it is. Notice my stuff. What I said in the beginning, most of my team, they're more there. I look at. I look at the history, look at. Look at all Those and I, I didn't. These are Michelle's slides, not mine. For the record, like, I didn't say, like, she built all this. This is the first time I'm seeing this. So let's just look at Michelle and most of our people that we have that work with us. Proven track record, culture fit. Like, look at Michelle and I have known each other for a couple years, but we met on an entrepreneur cruise. Really. We had met prior to that, but we got to know each other really well in there and saw each other's stories and we just clicked hanging out and saw each. How we worked really well. Excels at role play. I'm a great naughty nurse. I don't know if you know that, but I am. Oh, different role play. Never mind.

Different role play. Rockwood.

Very hungry. Also. This stuff matters so much. Not, oh, this guy can, you know, shotgun a beer really well. Like, I. There's people laughing at that, but that's such a factor. Oh, they're really fun out at the bar. That shit don't matter, guys, at all. This is what matters.

Because I will tell you right now, sales is one of the hardest jobs in the world. It is why it's compensated to such a high degree. Okay? It is across the board. Salespeople make more money than most. General rules. There is a reason for that. So if they are not hungry and they are not committed to your company and a cultural fit, they will burn out and they will quit. And it is also the easiest job for somebody to recruit someone who's actually doing sales for somebody else. Like, every single time I've gotten a sales job, somebody came after me when I was still working at another organization. So if they're hungry and they're a culture fit and they are committed to staying with you and they are aligned, it is extremely critical. And one piece here underneath interviews you that I want to bring up is if you. You're interviewing a salesperson and they're like, oh, yes, perfect. Can't wait to work for you. And they ask you no questions about your current sales process, what your roadblocks are, what your successes are like, what it looks like in an everyday, you know, occurrence in your organization. They are desperate and that is a red flag. They need to interview you want them to ask you the hard questions. And that is a alert to you that this is a very talented professional salesperson. And that is often overlooked in the interview process. And I want to share that gold nugget with everybody right now. Okay, Any questions on that before we Move on. Let's see her last week. Cracking me up. Okay, perfect.

The naughty nurse is tracking you.

Oh, no, the MLM joke. It's like so funny. I've already moved on past the naughty nurse. Okay, all right.

So.

So thinking that a closer is a CRO or a cso, this is a really, really critical piece. Okay? So first of all, it's a cheap revenue officer or chief sales officer that is an executive level strategic person that comes into with an organization to help optimize the sales process. Okay. It's a part of my role as the CRO is to optimize the sales process. Right. I'm sorry, but not sorry. It is your job to create a proven sales process before handing it off to a closer. This is a very, very, very key piece. Like when I walked into 7 figure MSP like Chris has so much already done. It is a proven process. It is scaling. I am here to optimize it. Right? And he was clearly already making sales way before I got here. This is a critical piece to it. Right? So. And you know, the level that we're at right now, hiring, you know, another executive level at a CRO or CSO level is a different part of the game. But I'm talking about right now for your closer. Do not expect them to do something, something that I could do or the CEO could do. It is really, really critical. And we're going to talk about what that looks like for your MSP here. Okay? And the thing is, is that CEOs don't, don't that don't love or excel at sales often jump ahead and try to hire a closer to build the sales process and sell at the same time. And I just want to say this again, this will absolutely disappoint both parties. And I highly recommend you figure out your sales process before. And it's why that we are that we're obsessed in concept, committed as an organization at 7 figure MSP to provide our clients and anyone who consumes our free training, which we really do. Tell you exactly what to do is to have one proven sales process and the CEO once, one proven sales process and allow the CEO to plug and play that exact process to prove it. To prove it. And then train a closer to take over. It is absolutely critical that you follow this sales process, one proven sales process. The CEO plugs and plays it and then you prove and train to a closer. You prove the process and then you bring in and train a closer to take over. This is absolutely critical to your success. And if you follow My recommendation right now, you will love being able to hire a closer. Okay, so let's see if we can get the animation working here because my slides are not doing what I put on here. Chris, I don't know how. This is not happening. Oh my God. It's not a Mac. What is happening? All right, here we go. Oh my goodness. But you know what? This goes to show you you don't have to be perfect to deliver a great presentation. So this is a lesson for everybody right now that when you go deliver your cyber, your cyber security risk assessment, if you're not perfect, it's okay because people will still learn and buy from you. So there is our alternate lesson for the day. Okay. But this is the proven sales process that we teach within seven figure msp. And I thought this would be a really appropriate visual for everyone here. And on the checklist that we have that's coming to you, this is there as well. What's important about this is this is what Lindsay talks about too. This is what Cindy will talk about. This is what we, we all preach, is that you have a cold lead, you have to nurture them. They get their first time appointment, you have your discovery call, you deliver the risk assessment and there is your client. This is, this is the proven sales process that we have had nearly a thousand people use and go through. Chris, do you want to add anything to this? Because I love this visual.

Yeah, it's, I mean it's pretty self explanatory and it works.

Works.

And if you're going to do this on your own, probably the biggest piece that I can tell you is you have to, you have to run your own strategy and you can't skip steps. And those two, those two things are going to lead to some success on your own. And what being in our program does, whether it's our zero to 10k program, which is for people under 10k of MRR, or our elite program, which is 10 can over, it gives you an accelerant. You're going to come in here. It was cool. We had some, some new members that joined on Friday in onboarding this morning and they had come in, studied a bunch of stuff and we're like, man, we should have done this two years ago. Because we've literally been tripping over our own feet, realizing that we needed like trying to do all this stuff. And then we come in here and we see the stuff and I learned so much in three days of watching videos that just saved me weeks to months to maybe even years. So whatever you can do. Keep it as simple as you can and execute like crazy. Like that's the stuff that I'm going to tell you.

Yes, simple and execute. I absolutely love that. Okay, so the next thing we're going to talk about. So we talked about a really important piece of the puzzle of why CEOs mostly fail. Hiring for the wrong reasons and not being ready. Correct. So now we're going to jump into the second thing is the sales team hiring order absolutely matters. Okay, so I think, and this is where I want to bring up all of Lindsey's content that she's been delivering. Now, just so everyone's aware, we don't just come up with these titles and then deliver free training just for the heck of it. They are programmed to help you benefit each and every time and stack on top of each other. We give you everything you need in these presentations, if you're attending and you're listening. So up to this point, Lindsay has been talking about what it looks like to get that lead, to get that lead into your world, to nurture it and to book that first time appointment. And often that is a role of a BDR or an sdr. That is booking onto that calendar. That's cold calls, emails, direct outreach, depending on what all of your different methods are. It is so incredibly important. If you don't have leads, don't hire a closer. Okay? You are not ready for that. And that is part of the distinct order. The hiring order is to make sure you have leads for your closer before you go and hire them. Because they are not going to do that.

One caveat, one caveat I'll throw on that, that, yes, you're a big enough. If you're a big enough MSP that you have 50 plus clients that you have to. Remember I mentioned earlier that you were gonna, you know, if you're gonna do this whole thing, if you're gonna run the play and try and do it on your own, you need to go back through your existing stable of clients. So if you got 50 plus, could you do 10 on your own, do CSRAs on them, present all this and then, you know, close. I think you're going to close 6 out of 10, maybe even more than that. I'm not going to say you're going to fire people because we have reasons, you know, we, we just want you to establish liability and talk about these things. But then maybe you could hire a closer. But for the most part, what Michelle's saying is very accurate. Like you can't even think about doing this until you have enough lead flow to justify a human being at this kind of spend. And what I promise you they're not going to be is they're like anybody that's a closer worth anything is not going to be a lead generation, you know, door knocker. So be very careful on that.

Well, thank you. I appreciate that. That was a great, great place to chime in. And to clarify, that's amazing. What we call it internally is a marketing machine. So the thing then, that's what we're talking about is once you have a marketing machine created where you have leads coming into your business, that is the goal. So this is the thing, is that salespeople, people want to make money. And just like Chris was talking about, yes, if you are a larger MSP with 50 plus clients, they can go on and make money by, you know, working the current database. Absolutely. But if that's not the case, and then salespeople are going to get frustrated because they're not making enough money and they're going to leave. And because being great at sales is a very desirable skill, they are very marketable at any given time. So it is incredibly critical that you are paying attention to this. The salesperson has the opportunity, opportunity to make money. Okay, now, and if you want to learn more about building a marketing machine, this is your opportunity right now in the comments section. And we can make sure that you can get the link to sign up for all of our future webinars, not just led by me, but also led by, by Lindsay. So she has two coming up here. She has another one coming up here in two weeks, which I would absolutely love for everyone here on the webinar to go ahead and register for so we can get that link dropped here pretty quickly. Okay. All right, so now let's talk about compensation. Assuming that you meet the criteria to hire. And I know that was a big part of the conversation that the comments that had already come up and I love talking about money, so let's go ahead and jump right into that. Okay. All right, so I'm just going to cut straight to it. This is what our recommendation, Chris and I sat down together and we talked about what we, we wanted to put on this slide. So some of my slides are surprised, but this one we talked about. Okay. And the reason why we, I talked with Chris about this is I wanted to make sure that this was extremely realistic for an MSP to, to pay, but also in alignment for what great salespeople in general will expect to make in an organization. So all salespeople expect to make six figures like that is why they go into sales. So you have to to build a compensation plan that will get them to that level. So what we recommend is a modest base of 60k.

Okay.

There are some organizations out there that are going to pay $100,000 for a base. Right. But in something we're going to go in here shortly, there is an appeal to working with an SP that has recurring revenue. So before I move on from this slide, I would love to know in the comment section here if anybody is surprised or. Oh yeah, this is Michelle. This is what I thought it was gonna be. Thanks for reaffirming that. Like I would love to know in the comment section right now.

Yeah, and one thing I'll tell you. In 2008 I was paying 50K base. So 2008 through 2015 is what, you know, I was paying 50 to 60K base in Milwaukee. So in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in the Midwest at a, you know, 30% MSP. In fact I was as much size as about 10 or 12 people back in 2008, maybe even less than that. We were paying that then. Didn't always get to that 150k. OTE means on target earnings is what that means, guys. But this is typically what you should see for your anywhere in the United States, probably Canada, probably the uk, probably Australia. This is roughly in your currency. I know we got the dollar sign, everything. Think about your currency. If you're watching from overseas, anywhere in your currency it's roughly shoot. And here's a couple reasons why. Number one, if you have a high performer, they need a livable wage. They need a livable wage to start with, period. 60Ks probably, you know, depending on the level of, of where they live and some of these other things. And note, if you're going to be in a big city like New York or Austin, Texas where I live or Chicago, it's probably going to have to be more than that. If you can't afford that, then you better go back to the things that we talked about earlier and get your button gear and get rolling on building a real sales corporation. A real sales company. If you're going to think that you're going to hire a commission only salesperson and they're going to last more than two to three weeks. You're just making all the mistakes everybody makes all the time. And I cannot state enough, loud enough, often enough. Do not hire a commission only closer. Do not hire a commission only lead gen guy. You're going to get pitched on this no do not do it. It is a mistake. Do not hire an agency to run this for you. It is a mistake. You are going to blow through cash because all the things that we talked about earlier you have to have in place. It has to be scalable. It has to be a system that works, that actually sells that, that you can act. If you can't, go sell your services at a premium. And no, I get a lot of heat, a massive amount of heat for saying go sell at 300 per seat. Mr. MSP for the best. Like I talked about earlier, you're ripping people off. You need to have enough profit margin to run a company properly. The 300 proceed isn't some pipe dream number that Weiser picked out of the air. This is based on an 80 gross profit margin. We have 500 plus MSPs in our elite coaching program. 600 plus 700 plus MSPs in our, in our elite coaching program. Actively selling at this number and actually saying wow, when I pitch it this way, nobody argues with me. Yeah, it's not about how much you charge, it's about how you're selling and actually running your business the right way. And trust me, you can deliver a product and a service as an msp, a cyber security shop better when you have more profit than if you are a cheapo and don't charge anything. I promise you you are a better company and you deliver a better service 100%.

You have to have the money to hire the people to deliver the service, to pay the people to sell. Like there's. So it just has to happen and if you don't have any money to do that, your clients are the ones who actually are going to be, are going to be feeling it faster than you sometimes. Okay, so let's talk about, let's break that number down because I really liked Chris how you shared this with me of you know, what you were able to do in your MSP and some base model numbers that are available for everyone here today. So first of all make sure that There is a 90 day training period for when you hire a closer and how they can get to their on target earnings which is ote. So they have their base but they'll also get paid for the recurring revenue at 2 to 5% plus they will get the project and hardware commissions. This allows them to make money at the same at the rate that the company is making money. Right. And this helps you pay them at a higher rate in order to hit those on target earnings. And the training period is really, really, really critical. You want to be able to give them all the pieces to the puzzle to be successful. And one thing that I love about what we've built here at Seven Figure MSP is that our sales training program that our CEOs and business owners go through, guess what? When you hire that closer, they can go through it too and learn the exact same process. That is enormous value to anyone within our company because that means that you don't have to be doing all of those little tiny details of training. Your job is to say send them through that, mentor them through it and allows you to spend less time managing. And it is a huge value. But if you are not one of our clients, you still need to set up a 90 day training plan so that you can hand off the sales process to your closer to be successful. And I think this is a really, really critical part because you cannot expect people to be successful without a training period. Kris, did you want to add anything to this?

I mean, here's what I will tell you. This is not gospel. This is your mileage may vary. Common sense applies. I state this as a kind, basically as a disclaimer on pretty much anything I train because all situations are different. We're giving you baselines and guidelines and use the right stuff to make it work. You can easily, like if you're making enough money on this stuff, it's easy to compensate somebody differently. Differently. Like I compensated differently in my MSP and then actually tried to mimic. Here's what I'll tell you. Full disclosure, I mimicked this in seven figure MSP and it just became hard to track it because our products are different. So we completely changed up how we do it now. Like Viani, who's our, one of our sales managers, Vianney and I a year ago ripped it all down to zero and rebuilt it all. And it just. Sometimes that's what it takes. So look at your own company, but don't be. Here's what I'll tell you as a former MSP owner. Be obsessed with sales and cash flow and deliver tech services. Don't do the opposite. Don't be obsessed with tech services and then sales and cash flows. Oh, we. That's neat. That should be your obsession. That's my record.

Yes, 100. So I'm gonna throw in that link. They're asking for the link for the, for marketing, for the webinar. So I'm gonna throw that in here real quick and yay. I love it. Okay. And I hope I'm surprised you can hear me typing. That's so Weird.

I can't now. Actually, I can't now. But it was. But it was before for sure. So here's what I'll tell you guys too. We got a couple questions that are coming up here. Don Joseph, a couple of rest of you guys. We're gonna answer some questions in the Q A at the end. I just want to make sure Michelle keeps flowing here. We're. That we're having good back and forth. So we'll get. We're gonna have a Q A time back. My slides already queued up over here, so we'll get to that.

Okay, awesome. All right, so that is the baseline for compensation. Now I want to talk about the role of management. So great. Salespeople still need management. That is it. Period. They need you to still be involved. So you may exit the day to day sales activities. But now you're stepping into that leadership role for the them and helping them be successful. Especially when it's just the closer and the. And the closer is reporting directly to the CEO. You are responsible for that. So things that, like I do, that Chris doesn't have to do anymore. Right. Is to run our start of the days. That is a really key part. Part of it, like we have the team of eight. Everyone's there every single morning. We set our goals, we talk about what worked well, what didn't work well the day before. And we rock and roll. Right? But in the beginning, you know, Chris would have to do that with his first sales salesperson. So it's a gradual progress.

I will tell you, like, I'm shitty at that stuff, guys. Like, I. This is why I hired people. Like, my whole thing is have enough cash flow so you can afford to do the stuff that you either don't want to do or you suck at. I am not good at detail. Own it.

I love me some detail.

100 on it. I hire people that are superstars at it because I suck at it. You know what I like doing? I'm a golfer. I like golfing. I don't like detail in the sales people. That's what I don't like. But I'm fine paying them. Like that's just part of the deal. It's how it works.

Oh my gosh. I love it. Like, I don't think I love anything more than looking at the KTI dashboard.

Yeah, I'm getting a migraine just thinking about it.

The beautiful thing I built out. Okay, all right, so this is your leadership checklist. Now. Although Chris, Chris didn't run startup days, he should have in the beginning. Okay, but that's okay. But everybody listening right now. When you hire your first salesperson, regardless if it's a closer, if it's someone working in the marketing to get people onto your calendar, it is so important that you have that touch point every single morning, especially if you're not coming to an office. So my sales team is in like four different time zones and like three different countries. Okay. So it is really, really critical that we come together every morning to, to connect and ensure that we are going to have the type of day that we all intend to. Okay, over here, these are some leadership checklist steps that I put together here. So first of all, discovery call reviews. So depending on how you execute your discovery calls, if they're recorded or not, it's really incredibly critical for you to role play recorded.

By the way, guys like the amount of value that you find by having a. And recording every single call. It's unbelievable.

It's huge. It's huge. Like, I use a. I use a product internally that actually helps me with the coaching. So I put a scorecard in there. It allows me to rank the call so I know where to prioritize my time. It is really, really.

That's me record, right?

That's meet record, correct? Yes, it is. Yep. And it is a really, really helpful tool. And I don't know what I would do without it because before then I was just listening to really long monologues. It was very difficult. Okay.

So you need one thing that's really going to help these guys. Just so you guys know, AI is going to help a lot of this kind of stuff because it's going to summarize calls and give you talking points. So instead of like, Michelle, when we first started working together, was it two years ago, a year and a half ago, it was so much about listening to entire zoom sessions. So you'd spend, you know, 40 minutes listening to somebody's call. Fast forward, fast forward. Like you're just dealing with the stuff, pause, take notes, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So AI is really going to help with that. But you just got to be careful because knowing that stuff and managing it is so key.

Yes. And the AI helps you know where to focus. That's the way I would like everybody to. To hear that. Right. It's not going to replace you. It's going to help you where to focus. If you're using any type of AI coaching or analysis or anything helping you in your business. Okay. When it comes to this type of stuff, the next thing is either daily or weekly huddles, I'll share exactly the way I have my team set up. So we have our daily start of days, and I already explained that, but we also have a weekly sales skills huddle. And I designed that specifically to something that internally we are working towards as a team. And so we might have a book of the month. And each week we're going to cover a couple of chapters and actually integr integrated into our role play for either our cold calling or our closing. It's really, really critical. We're always improving our sales skills. And one thing about salespeople is they are lifelong learners. The right people want to always be learning. So if you can feed that energy and they're progressively getting better, 1, 2, 3%, then that is something that encourages them to not only perform better for you, but to want to stay. So this is a really, really critical piece of the puzzle. And you need to share numbers. Like, you need to have a way to track. Okay? And that's a really, really big piece of the puzzle, which I'll go into here in just one. One moment. The next thing is role play, like role play is so key. So I want to explain to you what role play is. So for us, we have multiple different scripts and syntaxes that we use in different scenarios so we can guide our conversation. So I will. Our closer, Jose, I'll be like, okay, let's take this portion of the syntax and let's roleplay it. So either I'll be the salesperson or he will be. We'll build a Persona and we go back and forth, and I'll provide feedback for him. He's a great, great salesperson. But it. You can never be perfect at sales. That is impossible. So what we can do is just make him a little bit better each and every time. And that becomes a really powerful thing, not only for our organization, but for his personal development, which is a huge attraction to a company. Okay? So role playing is really, really important. And listen, this is the thing, because you've built that proven process like we talked about inside your business. You know how it goes. So you are able to role play. You are able to review calls, you are able to host huddles, because you did it yourself already and you proved it worked. So you do not need to be like me in order to be effective at this. And I want you to really, really, really hear that and understand it. Okay? The next thing here is deal. Review. Pipe is life. Okay? So what I love to do, and pipe means pipeline. So one Thing I love to do is say, hey, who's somebody in the pipeline that hasn't moved in a while? So what does that mean? I mean, someone is stuck. Someone is stuck at one part of our journey. Like, for example, maybe they're stuck after you've delivered the cybersecurity report, right? And they're stuck and they haven't moved. Like, why? Why haven't they moved? So you get together with your salesperson and you workshop it. You research the company a little bit, you review the calls, you decide how you're going to move them forward. Right? But I'm the worst at manage. I feel like in a sales manager for you, for sales, right? No, Alberto, I'm going to tell you right now, if you can sell for your own business, you can support this person. This is a mindset change shift, right? Perhaps it's a goal for you to then eventually not have to manage. Right? But I want to ask. I want to ask you a really direct question, okay? And there is no right or wrong answer here. Alberto, would you like to stay in the sales seat for the rest of your life, or would you like to have a proven process that is easy for a salesperson to adapt and you learn a few new skill sets that.

Are listed here well and understand for most MSPs. And I get it, guys, this is really, really uncomfortable for you. This is like fish out of water. So uncomfortable. You're like, I can't do that. This is where you have to reframe your to. I am going to be an MSP leader versus an MSP tech guy. And this is, I promise you, if you. Now, hey, if you want to stay in that tech role, that's fine. But you better have enough cash flow to hire a CEO. You better have enough cash flow to hire a CRO. You better not have enough cash flow to hire a sales manager. Like all these things. So if you want to stay in that tech role, somebody's got to do those things. But what most MSPs do is they're like, oh, I just like doing tech. So I'm just going to neglect this whole side of the company. And then it's growth by accident. So there's no maturation, there's no growth. It just. It's like this stagnant thing that just casually kind of just happens. And, okay, I got a company. But then all of a sudden you're 50 years old or 60 years old, and you're like, oh, I just built myself a job and I have something that nobody wants to buy now.

Alberto, thank you for making me feel good. He just told me I was right. That felt good.

I've never told her that, guys. So that's a win.

You know, And I also overdo. I want you to maybe remember a time in your life where you didn't have the current skill sets or you didn't think you could do something and you proved yourself wrong. I am willing to bet, because you're on this webinar, you own a business. There's been a few times you've had to do things that were hugely out of your comfortable level. Right. And I argue to say unqualified for. But how did you overcome that? And how did you all of a sudden become great at what you're doing? This is a huge part of the puzzle. So I want you to remember, if you could just take a memory of something that you accomplished in your life, personally or professionally, that you were totally unqualified for, didn't know how to do it, but you did it. Because I guarantee you've had that experience. Because that's the type of people who show up for these sessions. That's the type of people that build businesses. Yeah. Okay.

And one thing, you know, Michelle, I'm talking about this during my keynote tomorrow. If you guys joined us late. Michelle and I are both on webinar. We're actually one. She's directly one floor below me, and we're in the same hotel in Indianapolis because we're here for our live event. But my keynote tomorrow afternoon is all about the mindset of growing your business and scaling to hire a salesperson. So this is similar stuff that we're going to be talking about. So if you want to join us live tomorrow, comment here or shoot me a damn, or you can go, go to one of our event pages. But it's all really, really relevant stuff.

Yes, yes. And, Albert, thank you so much for saying that in the chat. I'm going to address that at the end. Don't go anywhere. Okay. Because those are really, really important things that we need to be talking about. So I'm just going to finish this thought over here. Okay. So first of all, is month to date and year to date. KPIs beyond just what happened that week or that day. Okay. If you only gauge your success by a day or by a week, you're going to spin yourself out of control. So it is really important that you see a bigger vision, too, of month to date and year to date numbers as well. Everybody has a bad day, so make sure you're tracking at those levels as well.

Yeah. And one thing I'll tell you guys, you notice that Michelle's talking about the daily weekly huddles and the role play. Some of the stuff. It feels a little weird when it's just you and another person. Okay, we got two people in a room and we're doing role play. Have a vision, have a goal. We were struggling in my sales team about a year and a half ago. I ripped it all down to zero. And it was me alone doing my closes for a little while because I ripped her down to zero. And I was like, I got to figure out what's going on because we're kind of like not closing at the numbers we want. I come back in and we're closing at 45%. And okay. And then I plug in a person. Well, it was the manager. The manager is an idiot. That was me, for the record. So I said, okay, I have enough cash flow that I can start to hire some people on my team. We started to build it out and that's where Michelle came into play. We analyzed it, we looked at all this stuff and we're like, okay, the people that you have closing for you, Chris, they don't have enough strategy, they don't have enough structure. And there's, you know, all the stuff she had on the list. I really wasn't doing very well. So I said, okay, let's put this in play. And I just had basically effectively order takers versus closers. And I still remember you said that to me. You said, this person is an order taker, not a closer. And that is a mission critical thing. So unless somebody came on the call completely ready to buy, the closer wasn't analyzing this and actually closing them. So, you know, that's a hard thing because you go back to that five step process, process that Michelle had. We basically had to nurture a lot of people and yet we were still doing okay. But we were closing about 20% with their outside people, meaning not me. They were still inside staff. But it came all the way down. And when we're in our normal months, we're closing at 40 to 45% with our team. So that's the big factor, guys.

Yes, absolutely. And a couple of people asked about how to join us here in Indy and that was going to be what my next thing is talk about. Anyway, so I put the link below back into the chat as well. It's going to be incredible. It's a three packed. It's a three day packed event and you'll be able to stream in for all of it. Okay? So the next thing I want to talk about, and I know that we going a little bit long, so I'm going to wrap this up pretty quickly here is it's really important that marketing and sales talk to each other, okay? So if you're a smaller shop and that's the same person, great. You've just made your life easier, right? But as you grow and you have someone in marketing and someone in sales. Sales. And then you have the. You're the CEO and you have somebody in fulfillment. Get everybody together, for the love of God, okay? Because this is the number one thing that happens, is that the departments are not talking to each other. Then it becomes really difficult to optimize and to increase sales, okay? And as you progress your job as the CEO, if you're not the one actually doing the sales anymore, eliminate the obstacles your salespeople are coming across. That becomes your job. So if there is a sticking point, go fix it. All right? This is a really, really critical piece of the puzzle, and I want to make sure everybody really hears it. The last part is making sure that you and your sales team always have continuing education, okay? This is a huge piece of it. And continuing ed comes in lots of different formats. But I'm inviting you to join us virtually in Indianapolis for the next three days. And what that's going to do for you, that is your continuing ed. If you have people that currently help you in your business for sales, bring them. If it's just you, you come, it will be incredible. You can't stop learning, friends. Okay? You cannot stop learning. All right, so most of all, this is what I'm going to close this thought with. Is that your tude tone and timing impact selling success of your closer more than anything, your communication as a leader is incredibly important. And I really love this slide. I love how I made attitude into tude. I just really think it's cute. Okay?

So this is really important, too. So she's like, dude, is that a tude? And I'm like, yeah, that's a dude.

That's a dude. So your attitude, your tone, and your timing, because like I said before, sales is one of the most difficult jobs out there. So they need to be recognized. They need to be given constructive feedback, and you need to show them a path to be more successful. If you're constantly coming down on them or you're not communicating in a way that makes people feel motivated and excited, that's going to become really, really hard for people to want to Stay in your company and work hard for you. So please be mindful of this as a leader and as you're stepping into everything. Okay, real quickly we're going to recap. Okay. Scalable offer be profitable enough to pay a closer a proven sales process. Okay. And 50% of your calendar is dedicated to sales. And one day I'm going to figure out why that cutoff my slide. Okay? So now I am never giving up my back. Okay? Three choices. I wouldn't even know how to use a non Mac. All right, three choices is one, you figure it out on your own. Two, you can hire a CSO or a CRO. What I'm telling you right now is pretty darn expensive. Okay. Or three, you find a plug and play proven process to put into your business so that you can take the first step towards being able to be to be able to hire that salesperson. Okay? This is your three choices and you get to pick and there is no right or wrong answer but I do have a couple of opinions on it. Okay, so as we close that up right now, we're going to walk into the Q and A time and I'm really excited for this. I love questions. Chris, do you have an order order of operations that you like at this point or should we just start bringing up some of the questions?

So, so first of all, if anybody's got a question live with us on the webinar side, post in the chat, we'll bring it up. I got a couple that we're going to come back to here really quick that I, that I brought up here. Got one from Don that I want to bring up here. So my company only does cyber security. I found it difficult to explain to my potential customers the need for some the of my services. How should I tweak this process for an mssp? So Michelle, MSSP means Managed Security Service Provider. Just so you know. So it's a little bit different than an msp but they, they're basically the co managed version that we sell that we recommend MSPs do. So for here's what I would tell you, Don. Doesn't change much because every single situation should still start with the csra. As far as I'm concerned, if you're going to work with a client, I know that they're going to come into you wanting very specific processes. Again, your mileage may vary if you have. If you're going into a company that let's just say has crowdstrike or something like this and they're looking for a replacement or they're looking for a replacement vendor. I think you just got to be careful because those bigger companies, they already know the product and they're very commoditized and they're only wanting to buy products. So you got to kind of look at the system and the solution and what you could put potentially offer to them. My suggestion would be all roads, start with a csra. You know, FTA leads to a csra. And then you recommend what they should have. Should they have a fully managed sock with an EDR and. And a sock and a SIM and all those things? They probably should, more than likely. Right. So as allow, you know, the client is going to probably coming in saying, I just want this one edr. That's all I want. Because that's what we've always had. What should they have? And some of this comes down to the sales process. But I'm not a super, like, overly intelligent guy. So for me, I want to keep stuff as simple as possible. And in my world, simple means what should they have? That's my recommendation on that. Let's just see if Don had any. I know we had a comment here. Nope. Okay, so Don, if you got any comments on that, feel free to comment here in the chat on. I'll grab it. I got a couple other things here that I'm going to bring up next. One, I also want to say this. Don said he was surprised at the compensation for the salesperson. I think most smaller MSPs think that's way too much money. For the record, I'm going to tell you guys, I was again, I was hiring my salesperson. His base was 50 to 60k in 2008 in Milwaukee. So you can totally do this. Next question from Joseph. May I ask, are there any specific red flags or warning signs to watch out for during the hiring process? Now, I'm gonna let Michelle talk on this. One thing that I will say is if they are interviewing with you and they talk more than they listen, they're probably not a good fit. That's my recommendation. That's specifically for me, the. The best closers are listeners. That's my recommendation. Michelle, I want your feedback too.

Yeah, I love that one. That is a great one. I have a saying like, instead of always be closing, my saying is always be curious because those are the people that will close. And so it's my little spin on the ABCs of selling. But beyond that, another red flag is when you ask a question, which you should ask this question. Okay, everybody, tell me about a time that you struggled to Hit your quota and what you did in order to make the situation right or to achieve your quote, your achieve your quota. Okay? The red flag with that is that they immediately go to blaming the company instead of taking responsibility themselves to hit quota. Okay? That is a really, really big piece of the puzzle. So if they start and they say, well, you know, the company changed my comp plan, changed my territory, and then I got all these leads taken away from me, and I was just had the rug pulled out from underneath me, and that's how they start, that is a red flag. Okay? That means that it's someone who cannot take radical responsibility in their role in order to be successful. Now, sometimes. Is it the company's fault? Heck yes. Right. Of course it is. That happens. However, what you want to hear in the interview is someone who's more concerned with sharing their story of how they overcame adversity and challenges and what they did themselves in order to be successful. Okay? So that is a really, really big, giant red flag. So be careful with that because that happens a lot in the sales world. Comp plans get changed, territory change. I mean, I remember in big Fortune 500 sales, we would all be there at Christmas with our families being like, are we getting our comp plan for the next year? Like, what's changing? Like, so frustrated, Right? So that does happen, especially in big businesses. However, what's important is that they are attuned enough to that the fact that know that they're in an interview to know they shouldn't really be talking about that. They should be sharing their grit, resilience, and ability to overcome. So that is one of my biggest things that I can share that I think will help you really actually interview anyone, but specifically with sales. And so that's one that I would like to share. I could probably share a couple more, but based on time. Chris, do you want me to stop there or keep going?

No, no, no. We can. We can. Well, I think that's good on that one. Okay. Not so worried about time as I. I want to make sure we have good, good answers for everybody. So. Okay. A couple other things going on. I think those are. Those are really good baseline talking points. Here's the other last thing I'll tell you on. On the red flags. If it doesn't feel right, don't force it. Yeah. Because there's a. Oh, like if you're sitting down and you, like, you just like, like, it doesn't feel great. It's okay. There's always more prospects, guys. There's always more People to hire. And also don't race into this. Have a process. You better have. It should be at least three. Three step interview, like three actual steps, three separate interviews is what I'd recommend. Obviously you don't want to string it out over months, but respond to this whole thing, don't react. We can talk about it forever. So.

Yeah, forever. There is so many things.

Yeah, yeah.

So true.

Okay, got just a couple comments here. Albert said I need help with the sales process and how to get cash to hire the people Chris is talking about. I'm going to go over that here in a minute here because we do have our 0 to 10k offer which is more of a little mini course that you can, you can go through if you're under 10k. We also have our elite coaching program which I'm going to talk about in a minute. And then Albert said I'm stuck in the small client area, always paying catch up. Part of the problem with that is you're probably not charging enough. I will tell you, the average MSP comes into this discussion averaging around $68 a seat. Take your MRR, your contracted MRR, you know, whatever your monthly regular revenue is, whether it's contracted or not, divided by how many seats you manage, that's roughly the number you're looking at. The average we see coming in is 68 bucks. Our recommendation, let's go back to all those seats and sell them at 300. That's our recommendation. We have a process for that in the system. For that we manage it, we call it running the play. I'm going to walk you through what our program is on that. But overall you're probably not charging enough. So you're literally. You look at that scenario. I'm stuck in your going after nickel diamond clients. You can't afford anything and you're playing catch up with bills because you're. It's like this vicious MSP cycle. I call it the MSP Wheel of death. So I get it. I've been there. That's why I made the changes I made and where seven figure MSP came from after I sold. So all stuff Chris said, I'm at the same point Albert. So Chris, same thing to you. One question from Andre. Can we have access to the slide deck? We're going to give you access to the replay. I'm not going to give you access to the slide deck because it's a lot of proprietary stuff. But you can go back and have the replay which everybody that's registered for today, Andre, you are on the webinar with us, you're going to get the replay. We also have for you guys here. You can actually join our school community if you want to do that. It's school.com seven figure inner circle. All these replays are there as well. And, and a lot of our other content is there. So if you want to do that, Michelle, if you want to throw that in the chat too, that'd be great. But that's there as well for you guys. It's a pretty cool little platform on the school platform. And also, Mark, that's where that recording is going to be as well. And then. Okay, here's another good question from Andre. How do you fit a sales farmer and Hunter in this model? So Hunter is going to be your SDR or your bdr, your sales development rep, your business development rep. That should be, as far as I'm concerned, step two to this whole thing. Maybe even step three. I'm going to get Michelle's take on this as well. But from my standpoint, let's go back to what I said earlier in the webinar. If you're an MSP that has 10k or more of MRR, you should be going back and running the play. Kind of what we talk about, Cindy and I talk about on our regular sales webinars. What we do inside of the Seven Figure Elite program is we manage, basically help you run the play on all your clients. You do that, fill up half your calendar. Then we can hire somebody to pick that off and hand that to them as you get to that point. Then you start to hire a sales team. That's your sales development reps. Sales development rep is Spanish for cold caller or cold emailer or cross lead generator. Like all door to door knocker. Like there's all these different things that you can do with those people now. They have to be managed and structured. But that closer, which is your farmer is not going to be the same person as the Hunter. They're different people and you need different strategies and different concepts to manage them. Really good question, Andre. Michelle, I'm gonna let you.

Yeah, and I'd like to add a little bit to that. So there is. There are different stages to building a sales team. So you're not gonna open up the gates unless you get, get a bunch of funding from somewhere and fill every single role individually and have something that is reflective of a Fortune 500 or big business. Right. So you have to start and then you can build. So what you're talking about right here. So the Hunter is The one who's cold calling, cold emailing, booking calls. Exactly what Chris just said. The farmer is typically associated with someone who is the account manager who's farming within your current client base in order to upgrade, upgrade or renew contracts. What we're actually recommending right now for most MSPs is to become, is to combine the closer role with the account management role. So they do the contract reviews, they do the, they do the quarterly reviews. The reason why is because that's step one, friends. Okay? Like you can't just go hire five people. It's going to be too hard. All right? So if you have someone who's booking the first time appointments and someone who is closing and managing the accounts and doing renewals, that is amazing, right? And then as you grow, if that means you're adding in a third person or another role as account manager like 7 figure MSP, we if you're here at Live in India, you're going to meet Paul, he's our new account manager. So we grew to too big for one person to manage it. All right? So we evolved and we added more roles. So this, this is just the evolution of business. But what's really important for you to understand is the farmer is not the person who's going to go knock on doors or do cold calling. The hunter is right now. When you build your organizational structure that can look a little bit different in terms of filling each sales seat. But I want you to remember it's a gradual process that you're building.

Yeah. And one other thing I'll tell you, do not. And I'm going to sit here and yell at you, do not have your tech do your QBRs. This is not a ticket review. This is not a backup report review. You like there's a reason your decision makers and your key performance people at your clients don't give a about your QBRs. It's because you're giving them things that don't move the needle. So talk about money, talk about security, talk about next steps. Your account manager maybe same person as your closer in the early stages. And this is exactly what we did Michelle before, you know, year, 10 years before we even knew each other. I was doing this in my msp. I had my closer doing my account management. In fact, he didn't get paid commission unless he managed the account. Guys, this is part of how this stuff all works. You notice Michelle, this is similar stuff that we do now is they don't like if they're not managing the account in some capacity, they don't like they don't get paid. Now we have hired an account manager now. So things move as that gradual steps of business as we go. I got a pretty big company now here at seven figures. So it's stuff that you just have to be mindful of and you got to work on. Okay, really great question. Last question from Don. Really good question, Don, because this is actually something I can speak very much to. What about hiring people not in your home country? How do you navigate the cultural differences? I live in Austin, Texas. I'm from the Midwest. I'm from Milwaukee. I live in Austin, Texas. I'm the only one in Austin. So I built myself a completely virtual, completely remote, completely manageable from anywhere. I can work from anywhere. I can have people work for me from anywhere. And I can have clients from anywhere company. This is by design. Good people are everywhere. It's literally that Find the right good people. If you're looking for cheap, crappy, shitty employees, you're going to get creep. Cheap, crappy, shitty employees. And I'm not saying you're necessarily looking for that, but usually good person works for nothing. Shows up all the time. They don't all work. Right. It's kind of like that pick one that, that quiz that's on the Internet. Like it's only one of choose your.

Choose your adventure.

Yeah, yeah. It's like, you know, good, cheap, fast, right? It's that thing like you only get one of them. So you know, if you find, if you find the right person, you're probably going to be like the right personality, the right culture fit. Like Michelle and I, we don't see each, we see each other once a quarter, like legitimately, doesn't matter. Good people find good people. We have. And we all see each other here, come here to live. And we see and everybody just like flows everybody. Because we're all good people. We see each other on teams. We, we're all on video. We're all working together. Everybody just clicks and flows. And we have people from all over the world. Guys. Our whole, our whole management team is in the Philippines. Our whole dev team is in Australia. A bunch of our salespeople are in the uk. Our sales team, we got a bunch of people in Canada. Doesn't matter. Good people are everywhere, have core values and that stuff matters. And also don't be a cheap sob is what I'm going to tell you. Pay properly. Michelle knows this is like important to me. I pay properly and it makes a huge difference.

It absolutely does. So I think that the takeaway There is just to align anyone, regardless of where they are in the globe, with the core values of your company and pay them a nice wage. And you will not have any cultural differences to navigate because everyone's going to come together to the company, to the company core values. And you might just get a bonus like a couple people with accents. It makes calls better. So you know. Yeah.

Okay. Got a couple more questions here that I'm hit really quick. You guys are giving us great questions today. That means I think we're doing a moderately decent job on what we're doing. So here's a question from Chris Kirk and Chris, I really appreciate you being so transparent by the way and congratulations on starting your company. I love it. I don't care how big or small you are, this is a good thing. So to expand on my statement around the struggle to start start. I'm the only member of my company with 800 of monthly recurring revenue. It is part time for me. I work full time for a non profit to pay my actual bills. What should I focus on to move. To move to my next level? Okay, so first of all you need an actual real true offering. Not saying you don't have that, but I'm going to kind of talk about that. I'm also going to get it give you a webinar. I want you to go watch. Michelle, if you could maybe throw a link for me and Cindy's replay in the the chat somewhere for Chris, that would be great. But Cindy Phillips is our head sales coach, our VP of sales coaching and her and I do a webinar on basically running the plan, building an offering. So I'd start there. I also would look for a niche who's somebody that you can work with. You work for a non profit. Not a bad one, man. We my msp, we work worked with a ton of non profits. We had a singular offering. All roads start with the FTA, lead to a CSRA and move into a singular static offering at 300 per seat. I want you to watch that webinar and that's where I'd recommend you go. Also, our zero to 10k program that I'm going to talk about in A second is $147 a month. It is a 12 month agreement. 147amonth. You should be able to afford that. It's going to give you a really good baseline, might be a really good fit for you and that's probably where I'd go also. Michelle, any comments on that? I think I got it.

Yes. No, I Think that's perfect. And I just want to celebrate Chris for being transparent and showing up with great questions like this. So you're gonna do great. Like, if you're coming here like this, then you've got this. You just need the right tools.

Yeah. Okay. Nathan Archer said, what do you think about having the tech bringing in upsell opportunities and how do they get compensated? Refer your sales team or you in only text. Shouldn't be in the field selling. They're people pleasers. They say yes to everything is what a people pleaser does. So they can definitely. Hey, so and so is looking for this. Great. Don't touch them. I got it. Compensate them. You can give them a small percentage. You can give them a flat rate. I like flat rate bonuses. Works really well. And people like cash, so that probably would work pretty well. But there's more than one way to figure stuff out. But I would not let them sell in the field. That's my recommendation.

Yeah. Let them identify the opportunity, clearly communicate it to you or your sales team and let that person take over. That is the key part of it. And you can absolutely compensate them. And I like the flat rate.

Yep, yep. I think that's. I like the flat rate too. I think it's simple. It's definitely similar to a referral program if you have that. Like, for example, if. If one of our members refers another MSP into our elite program, they get a thousand dollars. Yeah. Simple easy, right? Boom. They like cash. Nobody about that. I've never had anybody be like, oh, stop giving me a thousand dollars because you're a jerk. Like, nobody complains about that. And I give them like, I'm like, literally, send me a Venmo request. Cash out the door. I don't have Venmo. Okay. Send me a Zel request. All right, then send me PayPal. I don't care. Here's your. Here's your money.

Send me something.

Last thing I got in the. In this from George. I don't talk a lot, but, man, I've definitely learned a lot. Thank you, George. I appreciate you commenting. Michelle. This is our first time client facing with us, and I brought her out here specifically because I want you guys. I kind of want to show you what we do behind the scenes here, and it definitely applies downhill. It's the same stuff I did. I said cash app. That's funny, man. That's hilarious. I think only. Only fans girls do cash App, but I could be wrong on that, Don, so whatever.

Oh, my goodness.

Okay, I'm gonna take my Banner down here. All right, I'm gonna move on with my slides here. If you guys got any other comments, feel free to hit it. I got a couple other things for you guys today and then we're gonna do our prizes as well. So let me just get my slides back up here. I lost my screen. There we go. Okay, I'm gonna talk a little bit about our seven figure MSP inner circle program. I got two different things I'm going to talk about today. First thing I want to talk about is a great example of what a small MSP has done in our program. Here's a great example from Brian Wooster. Brian Wooster is a three person MSP in Bakersfield, California. He went back into his existing. When we say the nose, that's I talked about earlier in the, in the webcast about how we have our existing client. Our, our new members go back to their existing client base. So that's what Brian's talking about I found. And basically the first no is we want you to identify your first three clients that will say no to anything you ask. They were an hourly client. Sixteen computers signed to a three year deal. Two thousand dollar onboarding and 3,500amonth. I want you to do some math on that one. I'm going to pull out my, my trusty keli you later here. I got my phone in my hand. So we're going to say 3500 divided by 16. Even at wasn't at 300 a seat but it was 21875 for an existing client that was an hourly client. So he turned them into a three year deal. Recurring revenue, that's the stuff that matters. And Brian joined our elite program last August 1st. Closed deal was in 20 days. 21 days, 5 presentations in 4 weeks, 4 contracts signed in a grand total of 7,800 new MRR in his first 30 days in the program. Now that's not, that's a little bit outrageous and he did a great job. I'm gonna say outrageous is probably the wrong term but it's not normal. Usually takes 30, 60, 90 days for some of these guys to do that. So I just want to give you an idea. That's the kind of results that you can see. That's, that's a great answer. Great result. There was another question about our 0-10K program. Here's where some offerings are on that. It's 0-10K dot com. It is a phenomenal program. But this is a course. If you are below 10k this is where you should go and then your goal is to work with our community. We have a monthly coaching call but it is a course meaning you go in that there's chat, support and some other stuff but you get no live coaching other than a once a month coaching call. If you're above $10,000 a month, you should not be here and it is not something you should be buying. In fact, we probably will kick you out and refresh refund your money if you try and sign up for it. I will tell you that because you should be in our elite program which is the next thing I'm going to talk about. That is our elite coaching program. It's our complete sales and marketing program to build that sales process for you which includes sales and marketing coaching. That starts with our double your MRR sales coaching system. That's with Chris, Cindy Phillips and Ryan o'. Hara. Ryan's our VP of member services. That includes our complete sales on onboarding process live. We do every single week onboarding on Mondays. You heard me talk about that earlier. That's with Chris on Mondays, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday are with Cindy Phillips. And we also have on top of that our weekly sales open office hours. So every week three calls that are sorry, four calls that are onboarding and three calls that are open office hours. You'll never work a sales deal alone again. That's our concept around here and our goal for, for this. On top of that, once you graduate out of our sales coaching program, that's going to take you anywhere from 30 to 90 days roughly. Assuming you run the play on and do the stuff, follow the steps. Side note, Chris, Cindy, Ryan, Lindsay, we could be the best sales coaches, marketing coaches in the world. And if you don't execute, it's not going to matter. So you can come into the program. If you don't actually do the work, it's you know, this we work. It's not easy to do this stuff. But reframing your brain and changing your life is not easy, right? You want to be in the best shape of your life. You got to hire a trainer and do the whole work. If you don't work out and eat right, not going to get real thin. That's the stuff that matters too. So after you graduate from sales coaching, we also have you work with our VP of marketing coaching. That's Lindsay Badillo. Lindsay has also monthly she does this marketing's a much bigger play, takes a lot longer. I had some guys this morning that came into onboard and we're talking about hey, we want to get into marketing right away because we need leads fast. I'm like, let's go back to your existing client base first because that's where we're going to get our quickest wins. Because it takes anywhere from 30, 60, 90, 180, 365 days to get marketing rolling. So every month Lindsay, VP of marketing coaching has all this onboarding that she does. She also has three different weekly marketing open office hours that she does. So that's our coaching side. Right. We also have our legal counsel and we have. I'll talk about that in a minute. But we have weekly legal calls as well on top of that. But we also include proposals, presentation and agreement templates. You get our full cyber security sales, PowerPoint included. Our full cyber security sales word doc included. Our full risk acceptance letter template is also included. We've proposed our best offering. You said no, you're good with that, fine, that's okay. You, you can stay on as an hourly client. But here's what's going to happen when you have a breach. We told you you needed this. We're establishing this path of support behind us. Also you get our full MSA template, our full sow, our statement of work template. On top of that, our full cyber security IR plan template included, our full discounted access to our MSP contract kit and weekly legal advice call with Paige Taylor, our in house counsel. So those things are critical. You also get this process structure and tools kit, our full risk assessment system, how to do it. You get some tools included, a bunch of other things on top of that, along with our hiring machine for hiring your next level of techs and, and sales team as well. On top of that you get all these job descriptions and all the stuff included. We also include our full MSP CRM called wisetrack included. With that, full training, full coaching, full support. On top of that, full weekly onboarding calls, 100 plus marketing campaigns. And we just added this is a brand new dot in here. Is that a dot? It's a check mark. Brand new check mark in here that we have now hired Nabilaziz to write a full 52 week professionally copywritten email nurture sequence along with an MSP website that's all included on the marketing side at launch. Okay, Chris, so what's the next step? You guys saw all the stuff that's included? We got all this different stuff that's included. About 17, almost $18,000 a month in value. My special offer for you today, obviously 0 to 10k is there at 147amonth on a 12 month deal. If you're under 10k, you can take a look at that 0 to 10k.com Z-E-R-O-T-O-10k.com also on top of that, with elite 12 months of our elite coaching program for only $2,000 a month. But actually you're with me live right now. So I have a little bit of a fast action bonus for you guys. If you decide to book with us, you can scan that QR code in the bottom. If you're watching live with us right now on the webcast or any of our streamings, you can scan that code and do that live. I will take off 250 per month. You can also do this if you're watching the replay and book that code anytime you want. It's also how you get your 50 gift card if you book you your call and complete your call. Now keep in mind, you got to complete your call. You'll get a 50Amazon or tremendous.com gift card as well. But you gotta book a call. And if you do that right now and we're literally live, it's 6pm Eastern Time here in the States on May 6, 2024. If you booked your call in the next 90 minutes, you will count towards this fast action bonus. So you gotta be book your call right now, all that elite included in stuff. Again, last chance, $18,000. Here's how you can book your call. That's the QR code on the right. Oh, but Chris has got some guarantees for you guys. Chris, I don't know if this program will work. I'm nervous. I think it's a scam. Rochelle is a liar. Chris is an idiot. That last part is true. For the record, I am an idiot. Is there a guarantee? I got a couple guarantees for you guys. First guarantee, I believe so much in what I sell. Michelle believes so much in what we sell that she's like, I'm gonna come join this company because it's pretty damn cool. Just because I believe so much in what we sell and how great our program is, I have a 90 day money back guarantee. Now, key word with this caveat on this is you have to actually do the work. So if you come into the program, follow the steps, which we have a pretty specific onboarding process, we have a very specific plan that you have to follow, which means going back to your clients, booking a meeting with them, running a csra, following through on that, running the play top to bottom. If you think you're going to see no roi. It's not worth it. It's not going to work in my market. Keep in mind, I have never given this out. There's been people that don't succeed, but it's as soon as they're like, oh, I guess I didn't do anything, and they. They don't want it, I'll refund your money, no questions asked. Guarantee number one. So much so that I've added a second guarantee. Continuing in how much. I believe so much in this program. If you participate in the work, do all the stuff, and you still want to stay in the program, but hey, I didn't make at least my investment back. So that 2000amonth or that 1750amonth that we talked about, I'll write you a check for that amount. Also never been requested. Because here's what I'm going to tell you. If you come into this program and do the work, you will succeed. That simple. So here's how you can book your strategy. Call. Hit that QR code. Also, there is the URL in the chat. Michelle, if you want to throw that in the chat, you're welcome to. That's kind of the deal, guys. Michelle, you got anything you want to add on there?

Yeah, I think that it's really important that we talk about, I think, the elephant in the room for a lot of people, US Election year, inflation, we have interest rates and going up. Like, there's a lot of that type of pressure out there. But I want to tell everyone right now, I just looked at our report. Remember, I'm the one. I'm the KPI person. Remember, I love numbers over here. Right. Our clients reported 40% more in new sales April of 2024 versus April 2023. Holy. My goodness gracious. Right. A 40% increase.

Insane stuff. Come out of May already, which is awesome.

Yeah. So I have the final numbers for April, which is why I'm reporting April. But yes, May is rocking and rolling as well. But I want you to know that there are people being very successful right now that are growing and scaling regardless of what is happening. And you either get to get in it with us in one of the two programs and be part of that story, or you may have an alternate story. And I think it's really important that if you don't end up working with us, you at least get some type of support because people are having success. And I want everyone here to have success as well.

Y. I agree. Okay. So I'm gonna leave that up right there for a second, actually. The QR code is on this, on this next screen as well if you want to still book with us if you're watching live. But I think it's time to do some prizes. So here's what we're gonna do. I'm gonna make Michelle pick two answers out of this. But we are going to take two minutes. Right now. I'm going to set my timer for two minutes.

Feel so much pressure.

Here's my two minute timer right there. Okay. I'm going to set this and I'm going to run this. What is the one thing that you learned in today's webinar that you're going to take and actually implement in your business or you find the most value on. And I'm going to start the timer right now. Here we go. Two minutes. Michelle. I'm going to name some of these off as we go here. Awesome. You guys throw, you got to throw that in the chat for me. And the only way you can win this, guys is if you are live with us on the webinar. We are live streaming around the world right now and we're going to go through some of these. So here's one from George. I will do a client discovery risk assessment and present my full risk findings while ensuring not to talk tech again. I'll be watchful of my tone and timing. Man, that's a good answer, dude.

Wow.

Phenomenal.

Holy moly, George.

I like that. Here's another one from Nancy. See, I'll highlight my pain points as this creates emotion and need. I'll do this whilst eliminating the price objection by highlighting and showing clients their needs. I love it. Albert said raise my per seat amount. Had a guy on onboarding this morning. Albert say we went on our. We put our price on our website. We went and took the 150 off and replaced it with 350. I'm like, I love that alone. I don't know if I'd put my price on my website, but I like that. Here's a question. Her comment from Mason. I'll hire for for the right reasons by checking qualifications instead of relationships. And I won't hire a closer thinking they'll also create my marketing machine. I like that too. Here's one from Emily. I will lead with the product as this will make me be always valued at a commodity level. I will also control the path of my support. My clients won't. Period. I will not be a cheap sob. Somebody was listening. Emily, thank you for that. That's, that's, that's Chris words Right there. Here's another one from don.50 of calendar for sales. Narrow down to simple CSR and most importantly, run the play. I love it. Here's Chris Kirk. Raise my per seat amount and do a. And do a Pre. Do a CSRA. I love that. Chris. We are down to 20 seconds. This one from Joseph. Michelle Terpsler, you have a gift of gab. Trust me, man, I can't get her to shut up.

Oh, Joseph, you totally made my day.

What's stood out to me in this webinar that I'm finally feeling at ease knowing that managing a sales team isn't complicated. With the right process in place, I feel confident in a hiring plan that will help double my MRR while leveraging a sales team. There's my timer going off. I love that without sacrificing profit. Man, you guys got good stuff. Hey, there's my buddy Jeff Brody. What's up, my friend? I've known Jeff for man. Jeff and I were in networking stuff years ago. Jeff's watching on YouTube. I will meet with my SDR every single morning. I love that, Jeff. Just be careful to not let that SDR be the one that's closing deals. You should be close, Jeff. You are a good enough closer. And Jeff, man, last time he hung out with me, I think was at one of our live events. The previous time we hung out, he was just coming. I could barely walk. And I think he had a hip replacement. So super happy to see you doing so well, my friend. It's good to see him again. Here's Another comment from Mark50 of Calendar for sales and run the play especially on existing clients. And we're going to cut this off right now because here's our last couple. Michelle, I want you to pick one to do your. Your 75 gift card, one to do the 100. And I'm going to read these last ones here. Peter said that Louise said a lot of good ideas to apply. Jeff said, thanks, buddy. Yeah. That was 2020 February pre Covid. Man, I still. That was in Phoenix, if I remember right. Right, Jeff. Right. So long time ago. And then seen him since then. So that's cool. Okay, Michelle, who is your 75 gift card winner for today?

I don't like this role. I don't want this job. They were all so good.

Anytime you.

I did not. I. I did not opt in. This is not a consensual assignment. Okay. All right. So I would feel so like, I just. I. Joseph is going to get the hundred dollars. Joseph Jones. Okay. Like such A thoughtful comment, Joseph.

Got $300. Okay, you screwed up on my whole path here. Somebody was supposed to get the 75 first. Sorry, I start with the backwards. That's okay. She's backwards, if you know what I'm saying. Okay, so Joseph Jones, here's what I need from you, Joseph. I need you to get. Put your in the chat for me in the webinar chat. I need you to put me your corporate email address you need. This is for your msp and if you do not have. If you have a Gmail, like Gmails don't work. Yahoos don't work. None of that stuff works. I need your MSP email address. Put that in the chat and we will get you a request for your 100 gift card. Michelle, you got to pick your 75.

Okay, well I really have two though that I want for the 75.

Okay, well you can pay for it then. That's fine. It's not my problem.

I'm gonna give two people and fine, I'll pay for it because I just can't. I can't pick. It makes me uncomfortable. Okay. George Perry and Nancy White.

Okay, so George Perry, Nancy White. Michelle has donated 275 gift cards to you out of her commission today. Yeah. Okay, so George Perry, Nancy White. Here's what I need from you guys. Along with Joseph Jones. I need you to put your corporate email address that you registered with again, Gmails, Yahoos, aol. I saw an AOL address the other day. I need you to put that in the chat so we can get you your input.

That's still a thing. People still have an aol.

There is George Perry's. George, congratulations, my friend. Got that. George has put his email in there. I'm gonna write that down. So we got that. And then what I need. And that's. That's private behind the scenes, George. Don't worry about that. I need Joseph and Nancy to put your email in the chat for us, please. There's Joseph's. There we go. And then there's Nancy's. Congratulations, guys. Appreciate all you guys. I'm gonna screenshot that really quick. And Anne Marie from our team will be sending you on information. So I got that screenshotted for the rest of you guys. Super happy that you're with us today. Hopefully you learned a lot. We have other events coming up here. I'm gonna go throw this up really quick here on the screen. Take a look at our school platform at school.com forward slash, seven figure inner circle. And if you want to join us on any of our seven figure MSP events, you can just. That's our. Oh, hold on. Let me fix that really quick. That should just be seven figure MSP events dot com. There we go. Seven figure MSP events. Com. For any of our other ones, please do not forget to book a call if you want to do that. Otherwise, we'll see you guys soon. Thank you so much for being with us today. For Michelle Terpstrom, my name is Chris Weiser. Guys, have a great day, stay out of trouble, and we'll see you soon. Bye. Bye.

Run the play. Bye.

Run the play.