Ethical Marketing for Next Gen MSPs - Megan Killion's Talk at RejectionCon

Hey everyone, my name is Gene Rich, uh, coming here from Traceless. Uh, first I just wanted to thank RejectionCon for having us as a sponsor. Um, thanks everyone for coming today, and I'm also really looking forward to our speaker that we have on deck here, Megan Killion. So a little bit about Traceless, um, and, and I think just the year as we look to close 2023, um, there are 3 real main, really like large breaches that happened this year, and I think it's good to talk a little bit about that to phrase what we're trying to do at Traceless. Um, the first one is MOVEit. Um, not a lot of people in the MSP space were really affected by MOVEit, um, but MOVEit is probably the largest data exfiltration breach of the year, if not in the past few years. And, you know, all of those people, their data would have been much safer if it wasn't sitting around, if it wasn't there. The next one was MGM. MGM is one that everyone is aware of. My mom is aware of it. And That one started with a help desk phishing call, and that's what ended up creating about $100 million worth of damage for MGM, that one call. So from that, we know that attackers are really starting to think about critically and exploit help desk phishing calls. This is going to increase with voice AI. as it starts moving downmarket. And then the last one is Okta. You know, Okta started with a stolen credential, but they— the attackers focused on the support system, which is a ticketing system. The ticketing system had sensitive information sitting at rest that was exfiltrated for about 134 Okta customers. And then they also got all the Okta support email. customer information. So now attackers know every single Okta customer that exists, which is pretty crazy. So why did I, you know, start with all that stuff? Mainly because at Traceless, we're trying to protect MSPs and communication patterns. So currently, we're helping MSPs with help desk phishing prevention by providing identity verification with help desk calling. We do this through SMS, email, Duo, and soon Microsoft Authenticator and passkeys. So we're really excited, and we think that everybody in the space should have a process at least where they're verifying their callers or their help desk. And the second is a way to send and receive sensitive information securely. So we have an easy tool within ticketing systems, uh, and soon chat tools to move sensitive information without letting it sit at rest. We think that that's a critical element of security and the reason why the damages of breaches are so great. So if you want to check us out, it's traceless.com, and you can always get a hold of me through anyone in this group or the website or my LinkedIn. Happy to chat and appreciate you guys giving me a few minutes to talk about my passion here at Traceless. That being said, I wanted to bring Megan Killian back to the stage here to present ethical marketing for next-gen MSPs. I'll let you take it, Megan.

Hey guys, it's good to see everybody in the chat going strong already. Um, please feel free to drop your questions as we go. Um, I do way better in Q&A sessions than actually presenting. Um, so with that, I'm just going to kick it off. My topic is Harnessing the Power of Diversity: Ethical Marketing for Next Generation MSPs. Topic is highly relevant for MSPs because if you go check the People tab here in Crowdcast, you're gonna see a lot of people who look an awful lot alike. And every time I go to an MSP event, I'm struck by this over and over and over again, that while the MSP community is very welcoming, We have a serious case of white dude problems. You're everywhere. I'm sorry. And it's not an attack. There's nothing wrong with being born a white dude, just like there's nothing wrong for me being born an autistic woman. We are who we were born as. We have to make space for people that are different from us, or we just hear the same opinions over and over and over again. So if you're finding that everyone in the room agrees with you and your point of view, Find a new room. So I'm Megan Killian. I'm an autistic, ADHD, bisexual female leader and the owner of a successful marketing agency. Why should you listen to me about this topic? I've done $500 million in new B2B tech revenue in the last 10 years, and I've never lied to a client to close a deal. So what's ethical marketing? My slides are messed up. I apologize. Hopefully you can still read them. I'll send everybody a copy of the deck so that you can see it in its original context. Ethical marketing is just the transparent approach to promotion of goods and services. I think most of you have probably seen this term thrown around on the internet. It all kind of comes back down to what is ethics? What does it mean to be ethical? You need to be aware of your impact. You need to generate consumer trust. You need to take responsibility for the social impact of the things that you say and do and focus on long-term.

success.

Building something just to burn it down does not usually align well with ethical marketing. So how do we focus on ethical marketing at MKC Agency and help our clients focus on it? We start with values-based marketing, which is about embracing your core values in your marketing strategies, connecting authentically with the customers who share your values, building a brand that resonates deeply Fostering loyalty and trust. Values-based marketing sets you apart. It creates a unique brand identity. There's no one out there who's more you than you. Okay, so when you're trying to differentiate yourself from thousands of other MSPs that essentially provide the same exact service, it's not about who has the best cybersecurity stack or who can respond to a ticket faster. Like, yes, those statistics matter, and it's important that your product stack lines up, but at the end of the day, it's about who you are, what you value, and how you align with your clients. It's going to help you attract and retain customers who are aligned with your brand's ethics and beliefs. I think we all know that a bad client can ruin your business, and you attract them when you don't market well. Ethical marketing is going to help you attract more clients That you're going to have more long-term success with. It all starts with discovering your why. You need to dive into the heart of your business. What motivates and drives you? If you're at the stage of MSP where you have a team, also what motivates and drives your team? Your why is going to be the foundation of your brand story and mission. People are most attracted to brands that have a story, and typically if you're the founder, the story is about you. Why did you start your business? Why did you leave your IT director job or leave the MSP that you were working for and decide to start your own business? There was something happening that you didn't agree with. How are you messaging that to your clients, that you decided to start your own business with your own processes and operations and tech stack because that's how you think you can do it best? This is gonna inform your decision strategies and how you connect with your audience. You're gonna reflect on what inspired you to start and what keeps you going. Like, why do you keep getting up and coming to work every day? And I think a lot of us get really focused on the money, and don't get me wrong, I wouldn't work for free. I need to feed my kids and pay my bills as much as the next person. But if you're an entrepreneur, there's more to why you're doing it than just wanting to make money. Because I mean, I for one left a $300,000 a year B2B tech sales job to start my own business because I didn't agree with what was happening there. And your why should be the guiding star for all of your business endeavors, especially your marketing. So what are the 6 traits of authentic B2B marketing? Transparency, which can also be worded as honesty, authenticity. Consistency, maintaining that steady brand image over and over and over again. Remaining relevant, so don't just throw everyone into an email campaign. Try and clean your lists, make sure that people are opted in and you're relevant to them. Holding moral values, having integrity. The biggest one for me is empathy. Just, you have to understand where people are coming from. And when we unpack who you are, the next step is going to be, who are my customers? And having true empathy for them, like, what pain points are they suffering from? Why is that bothering them? How can you help them? And then engagement, actively interacting and listening to your audience to build relationships and gain insights. I think so many of us We want marketing to be as simple as scheduling some social media posts or sending some emails. But the reality is you have to actually interact with your audience if you want them to be engaged and want to do business with you. It's not as simple as just writing a post once, letting it go. You have to be willing to engage in a conversation. The 4 smart habits of building brand trust. Consistent quality delivery. Let people know what to expect from you. Now, I think everyone here knows that there's a huge difference between your ability to market yourself and your ability to deliver IT services. We know those things aren't the same, but at the end of the day, your clients, your prospects, they're assuming that the very first experience they have with you, how that felt to them, is how every single ticket will feel for them. And over time, the more they engage with your brand, the more they're building an idea of what it feels like to be your client. If you leave them with a bad taste in their mouth through your sales and marketing efforts, they're going to have that same bad taste in their mouth when it comes to buying from you and becoming your client and putting in tickets. Responsive and open communication. You need to quickly and effectively address customer inquiries and feedback. I think you all know that. Authentic storytelling. Every single person who's sitting here has a unique story, and most of you— I'm familiar with a lot of the names here. Haven't started to tap into that in your brand building and telling that personal story in relation to your brand. When you get good at that and you get your employees to be good at that, your brand becomes this kind of living, breathing thing that evolves with all of you. And this also relates to case studies and use cases and how you can tell that storytelling for your clients and customers as well. creating a customer-centric approach. If you listen to your clients, that's the first step to good marketing, is not worrying about what the outside world is saying, but instead listening to why your clients bought from you, why they continue to be your client, and, and what you guys are regularly talking about and their fears. That's what you should be marketing, not what every single seller at a conference is trying to tell you is the most relevant pain points in the industry right now. What are your clients telling you that they're scared of? What are they telling you that they want to accomplish? If you focus on that, your marketing is going to skyrocket because you're just looking to go replicate your current clients with more of them, right? Especially the good ones that pay their bills on time, make referrals, leave you reviews. You want more of those. So take them, listen to them, elevate that in your marketing. The data and research, right? So Businesses that are investing in ethical marketing see increased customer loyalty, higher brand attraction, and greater employee engagement, as well as faster financial growth. The sources are in there. Again, I'll share this deck with everybody at the end so you can look more closely. I swear it doesn't look like that in PowerPoint. You're gonna see more emotional connection and profitable growth. I think frequently when we get down into the trenches of tech, we start thinking in ones and zeros. And that's great when it comes to solving technical problems, coding something on the edge. It's wonderful that you can do that, but at the end of the day, most people are driven by emotions in their decision-making. And if you can connect with them emotionally, that's where you're going to see the most growth for your business. Trust and company reputation. I think we all know once you burn your brand, it's incredibly difficult to get back. The things that we consider to be kind of small mistakes can be amplified and look really bad for us. So it's important to really maintain our company's reputation. I think it is 1,000 times better to let go of an unhappy client than it is to try to hold them and have them leave you a bad review. The impact on consumer purchasing decisions, specifically as more and more millennials are becoming decision makers in the business industry, you're seeing about 63% of B2B decision makers becoming millennials. They make their decisions based on who they think aligns with their values and their ethics, not necessarily the hottest tech trend or the best price. Transparency and consumer loyalty. At the end of the day, people are most loyal to those they feel are being honest with them. So if you're authentic, if you're transparent, if you're honest, your clients are way more likely to remain your clients and refer more clients to you. So what happens when you tell the truth, right? I think we all become kind of afraid that when we tell the truth, something bad is going to happen, right? And, and that can be true if you've made a mistake and you have to go tell the truth about it. But the reality is, when you tell the truth to your employees, you're going to see improved productivity, retention, employee happiness, increased alignment and understanding. It's going to lead to more success for both individuals and the company as a whole. What's the worst case? Okay. Employees that aren't a good fit for your company are going to leave. And while that can create some friction and be difficult, you're creating space and resources to hire people who are a better fit. If you're familiar with EOS, you've probably heard right person, right seat. Someone is not the right person for your business if they don't align with your values. It is okay to be honest with them. And I'm not saying fire them on Friday, they have no job on Monday. Oh well, who's gonna feed your kids? Not me. I'm saying let them know there's not alignment and they should look for another job. What happens when you tell the truth to your customers? Increased customer loyalty, trust, engagement. When they feel that you're being honest and transparent with them, they're more likely to remain loyal and become advocates for the brand. Worst case, okay, some customers might not agree with every aspect of your operations or principles. You might lose them. But those that are gonna remain with you are gonna be more aligned with your company's values, and there's— those relationships are gonna be more sustainable. And again, you are freeing up resources for more good customers and client acquisition. Everybody here, I hope, has fired a bad client. I've fired bad clients. I also had to very early on when developing my agency, Decide if I was gonna be myself and show up authentically as me every day, or if I was gonna try to show up as who other people wanted me to be. By showing up as myself, I have attracted more clients who align with me and care about the things that I care about than ever before. When I was masking 100% of the time and trying to be who they wanted me to be, what ended up happening was I would have a bad day eventually. And it would come out and I couldn't hold it back anymore and I would lose those clients anyways, but it would feel so much worse. So what happens when you tell the truth to your prospects? I will say that honesty in my experience has given a way, way better pull-through rate. We have like a 60%, 67% close rate from our very first meeting to the end, which is pretty good in this industry. And we try to be honest. We try to get people out as soon as possible if we feel like they're not a good fit for us. Get to know them after. The worst case is you scare some people off. I think it's better to do that early than later on. If you think of the cost of sales and sales cycles, it's very expensive for you to continue to chase someone who's not gonna buy from you anyways. They're not aligned with your values and your brand. They're probably not gonna buy from you. Diversity in marketing, right? How does that impact ethics and how does it impact marketing? It helps enrich creativity, it expands audience reach, it reflects the market, it drives business growth, increases trust and authenticity, and gives you better ideas. When I talk diversity, I'm not just talking about the color of someone's skin or how old they are. I also just mean diversity in thought. People with different kinds of backgrounds who've grown up in different areas, geographic diversity, neurodiversity. Just getting— honestly, you should have people in your company arguing, not in a toxic fighting way, but they should be arguing about the best ideas because they should care. They should be bought in and they should feel like their voice is heard. And when you do that, you get the absolute best ideas floating to the top and the bad ideas at the bottom. What does that look like at MTC? We actually no longer have 100% female full-time staff, but that is an extremely new thing for us. We're down to like 95% female. We're cross-cultural. Our team is spread out all over the place. We have 100% neurodivergent crew. I honestly don't think it would be very easy for neurotypical people to work with me full-time all day every day. And we're 80% LGBTQIA, so the team identifies that way. I myself am bisexual. We just kind of have diversity across everything. People range in age from 19 to like 46-ish. So it's a good time is probably the best way to put that. How do we make that happen? How do we embrace diversity every single day at work? We embrace remote work. We're 100% remote. This allows some flexibility for work-life balance. If you wanna hire moms, which most women are after a certain age, you want more moms on the team, consider offering remote work. It's really, really hard for those of us with kids, especially multiple kids, to be butt in seat 40 hours a week. Encourage time off. We have unlimited PTO. We actually have a bare minimum of 2 weeks a year that I expect everybody to take. If they don't, I will literally turn off their Slack access and make them take that time off. So, you know, take it when you want to or take it when I want to, but you're gonna take some time for yourself. We prioritize autonomy. Work where and how you want. It varies from company to company. You know, like, if you have someone that's a tech and they're manning the help desk, they probably need to be somewhere quiet and like, When my salespeople are calling, they need to be somewhere quiet. But when the role allows for it, let people work where they want. We offer flexible office spending. That just means that we're investing in our team's success with funds for tools and stuff, and they get to decide how they want to spend it. And we respect boundaries. Everybody's boundaries are different. I have people on my team who can work a 60-hour work week. And feel fine. I also have people on my team who, after about 20 hours, they need a break, like a whole day, or they can't keep working. So it's really important to support that burnout prevention and understand what it looks like for different people on your team. No one is the same. So what does diversity do for your cash flow, right? 2.3x higher cash flow. On my more diverse teams, 35% better performance, 87% better decisions, and 19% higher revenue. Everybody on this call want more revenue? Yeah, I hope so. You can get that by encouraging more diversity on your team in pretty much every avenue. This is just real-life impact on my team internally, right? We have better problem-solving. We have more cultural sensitivity. We have increased creativity. This manifests in a variety of ways. But what I find is that the most valuable people on my team are the ones that call me out the most. So not the yes-men or women, but the people who are like, Megan, that's a terrible idea. Why would we spend time and money pursuing that right now?

They're invaluable.

And most frequently, they're the people who are most different from myself, right? So we have this guy Max on our team who's highly technical. He focuses on SEO, backend, high tech, and he does a lot of development for us. He is the one most frequently to call me out on the practicality of any project that I put on the table. And he's older than me and white and male. So when I say that there's nothing wrong with that, I really mean there's nothing wrong with that. He helps balance me out because we are so different. We also see better employee engagement. Realistically, most MSPs are pretty small, but as you scale up and you have a larger organization and you have to sit somebody into like an HR role or a team lead or management, people are a lot more comfortable coming to somebody and sharing something that's vulnerable about them if that person is at least a little bit similar to them. It would be very hard for me particularly when I was a younger woman, to walk into a man's office and say something like, I feel like I'm being sexually harassed at work. I just, I couldn't do it. It would feel uncomfortable. And so it's really important that you have representation in the upper levels of your org too, because that's going to encourage employees to just be more honest, bring things to you, engage authentically. Ethical leadership. This is, it seems like a no-brainer, but like, if you empower people to abuse other people at your organization, the problems are going to be far-reaching and very difficult to solve. So you need to make sure that you're, you're elevating people who have ethical alignment with the business and yourself. And lastly, just community impact. I love the fact that we are empowered to go out and hire people who are less privileged and elevate them, and in that way give back to our local community and also involve ourselves in charities and philanthropy. It's, it's a real life thing to watch people who couldn't afford to put groceries in the fridge for their kids able to buy their first brand new car. And that means more to me than the numbers in the profit column every month matter to me, because it's, it's hugely impactful to be able to change somebody's life in this way. And I think MSPs have equal opportunity to do that, to hire people, um, from diverse backgrounds and take a chance on somebody, put them in a T1 role, or just have them help desk answering phones. Um, you could hire people from lower levels and give them opportunities they wouldn't get elsewhere. Um, and the, the long-reaching effects of that are extremely powerful. And that's what Rural Technology group is all about as well. So another shout out to them, the Rural Technology Fund. What are the common MSP challenges in relation to this, right? Talent acquisition and retention. MSPs come to me especially to hire sales and marketing people. And sometimes I see the same MSP 3, 4 times in a year where they couldn't retain talent, whether it was because of performance or just a disalignment on values and goals. You see technological advances and competition, marketing and client acquisition. Not every MSP is great at acquiring new clients. Scalability and growth management. How does ethics and diversity help solve for these? When you're navigating talent acquisition and retention, you wanna emphasize diversity in your job description. You wanna leverage diverse recruitment channels. Telling your buddies you're hiring is not a diverse recruitment channel. I'm sorry. Just telling the community that you're already in that you're hiring isn't enough. Post at your local colleges, post at the local job boards, as well as putting it online, whether it's on LinkedIn or any of the online job boards. Try and implement a fair selection process. This is one of the ones that's been the most hard for me. In case you couldn't guess, I'm not the most process-oriented person. I'm a big picture thinker. And so for me, I always used to hire on like gut instinct. Am I gonna like this person? Do I feel like they're aligned? And I realized I needed to be asking people all the same questions and recording my interviews so that my personal bias wasn't getting in the way. And we all have biases, biases, whether they're like super harmful or not. We all just have things that we like and don't like about people, their mannerisms. We don't always think about where those things come from. Offering competitive benefits, especially tailoring your benefits package to diverse needs of your employees. We do a poll every year and ask people to prioritize what they want to see added as benefits. And then we make goals around those things because everybody's different. Not everyone actually cares if there's pizza in the break room. Maybe they'd just rather have more money in their paycheck, or maybe they need better health insurance. Your options just aren't cutting it. Maybe they need a flexible spending account or an IRA. You don't know unless you ask, especially as your company grows and you're bringing on more and more people that you aren't interacting with day to day. It's best to just ask them what they'd like to see. Promoting a positive, inclusive, and diverse company culture. Regularly reiterate your company values. Put them everywhere. Everyone at your company should just be able to say them off the top of their head. In your Notion, in your Slack, in your Basecamp, in your Teams, pin them everywhere. And encourage open dialogue, foster an environment where your employees are comfortable sharing their thoughts. You have to make space for people to be wrong a little bit of the time, especially if you wanna elevate talent. Recognize and celebrate diversity. I'm big on sitting back and shutting up when I'm not relevant. So like for the entire month of Black History Month, Kai and Diamond write all of our content. They are both women of color. I cannot speak to the challenges of being a woman of color because I'm not one, which means the best thing I can do is just give them space to talk. And then addressing microaggressions. It can create a really hostile work environment, these small things that they might feel like a drop in the ocean to you. For someone who is struggling to feel welcome at work, it can be the deal breaker that makes them quit. Flexible working arrangements. I touched on this, but embrace remote work, implement flexible hours, offer personalized work arrangements. I don't think anybody here is part of some huge thousand thousand-person corporate work environment. So maybe your process, your policy doesn't have to be so stringent that you have to let people go just because maybe they need to let the plumber in once every couple of months. And being as flexible as you can with work arrangements goes a long way in making people feel like you care. Ongoing learning and development. Train your people and give them money to spend on making themselves better every single day. I think especially when we're talking about people who are underprivileged and maybe weren't served as many opportunities as we were, they recognize and feel so seen when you pay for them to get what they need to elevate their career. I really pride myself on saying that no one has ever left MKC worth— worse than when they started. I've helped place every single person who has left me in a role that pays more with a better title than what they had here at MKC. And that's really important to me. And it helps foster an environment where people wanna come work with you because they know it's a stepping stone for the next place they're trying to go. Marketing and client acquisition obstacles. We talked about this in the ethical marketing part, right? Your prospects are more likely to buy from you if they feel connected to you. And the best way to connect is just be authentic. You would be surprised how many people will love you if you just put yourself out there. And I know it's harder for people who are a little bit more shy, introverted, but at the end of the day, if you don't give people the opportunity to see you, you don't give them the opportunity to like you and therefore buy from you. Jeb Blount has a really great quote from his book People Buy You where he says, People don't necessarily buy from people they like, but they don't buy from people they don't like. Getting people to like you is not the end-all be-all of sales. However, if they don't like you, they're not gonna buy from you. And if you're only introducing yourself to someone when you get to like that qualifying or discovery call, you're late to the game because other brands are meeting them where they are and introducing themselves before they get on a call. Focus on relationship building and trust, and leverage the power of social media and digital platforms. It is easier than ever for you to put your face out there, say hi, let people get to know you, than it ever was before. You don't actually have to go into the office and shake their hand, although I still really recommend that, because there's nothing like face-to-face. But if you just kind of post to social, post a video, I think there's a lot of really good examples of what this can look like. In the MSP community, how like Empath is a great example of how many people have followed these 3 guys purely because we like them at this point. We're just we're here to follow them and support them because we like them, and that's gonna go somewhere. Not moving anymore. All right, real world examples. Oh, my slides went a little funky there for a minute. All right, managing your scalability and growth. You want to plan for scalability from the onset. Always be one step ahead of where you are today. Automating and streamlining processes. I'm a big fan of human work for human people. Do not automate the parts of your process that people need to do. Like, I don't know, cold calling, cold emailing, messaging people, all those things, like the actual sales effort, in my opinion, should be manual as heck. But you can automate parts of your process that are just like tasks that need to get done through forms, spit it out into some type of sheet, use that sheet to automate with AI, put it into your CRM, do your onboarding call that way. There's a million different things you can automate and do well. And streamline those processes. And then implementing effective project and team management practices. Use project management tools, keep track of tasks, deadlines. This is especially important if you want to be able to empower a neurodivergent team. People with ADHD don't function super well in constant chaos. We need outlines, variables, we need due dates. The more pressure you put on us, the more likely we are to perform. But if you leave us in a vacuum, we might just stare at a wall for a couple hours. Or be hyperfunctional, who knows? Unpredictable. Real-world examples. Managed Services Group, when we came in, they felt like their website said nothing about them, and they were right. It read like every other MSP website under the sun. And then what we did was we uncovered their secret sauce and who they were, and we built their website. And I wanna say they quadrupled revenue. In the year that we were with them. They also implemented this practice, which I highly recommend for MSPs, of vendor management, where they were hiring people out of the local community slightly above minimum wage who were underprivileged, giving them a role where they're just like calling Comcast or, you know, like local ISPs and telcos and stuff to negotiate those contracts. save them a little bit of money because we all know, like, if you call them, they'll give you a discount, but you got to get on the phone and sit on hold, threaten to leave. And then they would nurture that talent up into like T1, T2, T3, into HR, into payroll. So they were creating kind of a funnel of internal talent while also adding this extra benefit of vendor management to their clients, which made them feel like they were heard because their big pain points were like, I really hate sitting on hold with so-and-so vendor, waiting to get an answer about why my bill went up. Case study number 2, at SurfIQ, we really focused on capturing unique company outlook, their value proposition, and ethical marketing allowed us to dive deep into who they really were. And that actually resulted in them having a pretty great acquisition from Service Express. And then last but not least, Tailorworks, When I came in with them, they were just like really disorganized and weren't sure who they were or who they wanted to be. Lucky for me, I had worked for them directly like 6 or 7 years ago. So I already knew the CEO really well and was just like, listen, if you're ready to be done, step back and you want to hand the reins over to your son, then we need to start positioning him as a thought leader in the space. Get him out here, get him speaking. And with that, I think we got like 5x the leads that they were getting before, where they were paying like 3 different agencies to go out and get leads for them. And now they're doing 5x as many leads overall with only one agency working for them, plus internal. So pretty big impact on those ones. Those slides are before— they're from like 6 months ago, so the numbers I probably need to update.

Excuse me.

How do you implement this in your MSP? Okay, first step, figure out who you are, right? So the first 2 steps about who you are today, identifying and embracing your core values and soliciting employee feedback. So what I recommend is sit down as a leadership team, write down top 10 reasons you like working where you work. Narrow those down into values. Then send those values out to employees in some type of feedback form. Google Forms works great. Ask them, you know, which of these would you say you relate to a little bit, none, whatever. Encourage diversity in your leadership. Try and find people at the company who aren't exactly like you to balance yourself out. Implement a diversity inclusion training program if you can. Adopt ethical marketing practices, be transparent and authentic in your communications, and then overcome obstacles as they come up. None of this stuff is easy. It's, it's really, really hard to look at yourself in the mirror and say, where am I being unethical? Where am I showing bias in my day-to-day? I regularly have to check myself on these things. So just Continue to hold yourself accountable. Implementation timeline. This can be stretched out quite a lot, but core values and weaknesses review, employee feedback, leadership team planning, and then company rollout. We say it takes about three months to do all the planning, and in month four you actually get to take some action. So just to recap, we talked ethical marketing. We talked the power of diversity. We talked about the real life impact on my team. We talked about overcoming some MSP specific. specific challenges and implementing ethical marketing and diversity in MSPs. And we focused a lot on the importance of truth-telling. So here's where you can learn a little bit more about DEI. Check out Women in Tech, anitabee.org. My girl Jenny Frazier lives there. Follow her. She's amazing. Natives in Tech, Black Girls Code, BIT, LGBTQ Tech Opportunity Hub, Tech Girls, and the Rural Tech Fund, of course. We're gonna open up for Q&A, but I'm gonna leave this tab up for you. So if anybody wants to scan and see where they can connect with me, they can. And with that, welcome back, Gene. Nope, he got put back in the wing. It wasn't me that did it.

And I'm now unmuted, so can you hear me okay? Yeah, great job. I mean, it's so cool that The information that you provided is something so useful to, as I said, like mainstream businesses, and there's so many ways to support diversity in our industry. So thanks for, for making a big call out on that and sharing all your experience and knowledge. So does anyone have questions in the audience? This is Or you can just put them in the chat there if you guys have any questions. I don't have the Jeopardy music handy here.

I'm scrolling because I knew there were some questions that came up, but I didn't—

Okay, this one just came in from Devin. Maybe we can start there. Could you please elaborate about how ethical considerations can have implications specifically for marketing tactics?

Yeah, so the best example I have of this one is completely not MSP related, but it really just bothered me. I saw Hooked on Phonics had an ad probably a couple of years ago now that was saying that they guaranteed that your child would learn to read in like this ridiculous amount of time. And so I dug into it and I took a look and there was literally no guarantee. They don't give you any money back. And it's a really unrealistic goal for people who are struggling to teach their children how to read because of real reasons, whether that's like a learning disability or maybe they're nonverbal or whatever. And so the implication there is Imagine like you see that type of messaging and you're a mom and you're really struggling and you're wondering like, why can't I teach my kid to read if they could do it in 3 weeks? Or worse yet, like they invest in that and it doesn't happen and they feel extremely let down. So the biggest thing about like ethical considerations and the implications is that when you lie or even mislead people, you can break them. Right. So in the MSP space, let's just say that you, you make some messaging around compliance because it's so hot right now. And you're like, you know, we're so good at CMMC compliance, especially ISO 27001 is coming down the pipeline and we can protect you. But you can't. And you're not capable of it. You don't have the cybersecurity stack or even the understanding to work well in that space. And then they lose all of their government contracting contracts because they're non-compliant. How many people now can't feed their family because you lied? The implications can be so much bigger than like what we're like, you know, when you're in it, sometimes you're like, I just need to close this client this month, or I'm going to lose my job, or I'm not going to be able to keep the business afloat. But I think you're much better off going out and taking a small business loan or finding a new job than you are potentially causing other people to lose their jobs through no fault of their own because they're trusting you.

Great. We got a few more questions within the last few minutes here. So I think this one speaks to me, so I'm going to read it out. What would you tell an MSP who's begging for more leads but has no marketing fundamentals in place. So I have a lot of thoughts on this topic, but you're here, so I'll let you take it.

Yeah, so step 1 for me is always ask for referrals from your current clients. So if you're doing a good job, you should be able to ask them to make some introductions. If you have a CRM, go out and look at your old pipeline, your deals lost report, See why you lost those deals, reach back out. Maybe something that was out of place before can be fixed now. Reaching out to your network, like your immediate network, and building lead groups is such a huge— like, I get most my leads from lead groups where people are recommending me because they're in a similar space, but we don't compete with one another. So like people who sell printers, networking, cabling, security systems. Listen, if you can find your local ADT rep, They're on the ground putting a business card in the door before they even like break ground on a new business. So they're great, they always know what's happening. Connect with those people in your industry. I would say honestly focus on sales first, get the revenue where it needs to be to invest in marketing, because while there are some tried and true best practices for marketing that I can recommend that work for everybody, The reality is, is what's gonna work for you is what no one else is doing. And that requires a strategic mind to really sit down, look at your local geography and say like, what are the other MSPs doing? Where can I fit that they aren't? Can I specialize? Good marketing takes a lot of work and is not as immediate in its results. So ultimately, my recommendation on leads is get your salespeople or yourself working harder. on lead gen and then spend the money you get from that revenue on marketing later. Because you'll also have better feedback about what's, what's good about you if you have a wider swath to pull from than just like maybe the 3 or 4 clients you started off with.

Right. And Megan, we're outta time. But I think, you know, there's something, there's still some other questions here. So if you look in the Q&A, maybe you can reach out to those people in the app and just set up some conversations because I think they're valid, very valid questions. Before we end here, I just want to make sure that everyone is aware to go up to the schedule in the upper left-hand corner of the window and just find your next session that you're going to be a part of. Any closing comments, Megan?

Yeah, I mean, if you have questions, comments that didn't get answered here, feel free to connect with me. I'm insanely active on LinkedIn.

If you shoot me a message, I'll Questions, and, uh, hope you have a great rest of your RejectionCon.

Thank you.

Hey, Megan, Alex had to jump, so I think that we're gonna close the window here and get on to the next thing. I think you're muted.

Oh, we clicked the schedule at the top left and moved to the next session. He gave us instructions.

Yeah, so for the next thing, if you can go to the schedule in the upper left-hand corner and just click on your next session, and then you'll be able to move to that. If anyone's still in the room.