MSP Sales Secrets: Tools for Market Dominance – Full Webinar

Hello, hello. Welcome everybody to the MSP Sales Secrets webinar. Megan, this is our first webinar together.

It is. Well, just the two of us.

Yeah, that's true. We both, we met at one of Empath's things. You spoke right before me at some event and I was like, who is this person?

Where did she come from?

Yeah, we, uh, Yeah, we got along right away. Just letting some people roll in. Hello, hello to those joining us. Hopefully the LinkedIn stream is happening. Hey, if you're on LinkedIn, do us a favor, drop a comment, let us know you see us and you hear us loud and clear.

Are we real?

Are we real? Okay, sometimes LinkedIn does its little thing. If LinkedIn ever goes down, there's a YouTube link in the description of the event. You're welcome to Pop over there, join us on either side. Okay, so, um, while people roll in, let's just talk a little bit about kind of what we're doing and why we're here, right, Megan?

Yeah, that sounds good.

Awesome. Okay, loud and clear. Hey, hey, hey, Scotty, great to see you on YouTube. How do we know that anyone is real? Well, Tom, we don't anymore. We don't have time to get into that on this one. All right, everybody, so glad that you guys are here. Hey, Jesse. Hey, Brian. Todd, Mr. Todd Curtis. Okay, so, um, let me pull up my little banners here for a minute. We were talking about this, Megan and I were talking the other day when, or a couple weeks ago, we decided we wanted to put this together because there's, there's a lot of rhetoric about sales and growth in the channel, but we found like there's some glaringly obvious problems that are so solvable in building a sales and marketing engine for your MSP. But it's, it's like the tactical stuff that's not always maybe as sexy. So people don't typically like for influencers to talk about, so they just don't get into it. Right. So we just thought, let's just identify what are these core problems that both of us are finding in our MSP clients that are struggling to grow or, you know, at the beginnings of building their revenue operations. And let's just identify some of those problems and then kind of, uh, we're gonna get into the, the tools, the strategy, and some of the, the practical pieces of how you can actually dismantle those obstacles and start getting more consistent results, right? Anything you wanna add to any of that before we get into the problems?

No, you're, you're doing a great job so far.

Okay. So, uh, let's, let's give me a minute. Give me a little color commentary on these. Um, first of all, Megan, cuz You have a lot of thoughts on this one specifically, when an MSP is depending entirely or overdepending on referrals.

Yeah. So I mean, referrals are great and I think Brian and I both agree that they're easier to close. They show that you're doing a good job on the service delivery side of the business. Referrals are amazing. But the problem is that eventually they start to run out, especially if you don't have a referral program and someone to work them and continue to grow them. Eventually you kind of run into this brick wall of— we've just like when you start your business and you run out of friends to sell to, your clients also run out of friends.

Right.

And it's just not permanently scalable. And most of the MSPs I talk to, they have specific revenue goals. And I very, very frequently hear like, we want to do like 1 or 2 clients a month, but it's never coming in that way. And the reason is because they have only one lead generation stream. It's not diversified. So if they don't have a referral, they're not closing a deal. And that's, I think we can all agree, not the healthiest way to grow your business. You need to have pipeline coverage, as those of us that have been in sales have heard many, many times.

Yeah, 100%. There's so many reasons, but I mean, at least largely it's been accepted now by folks that they realize I cannot wait for the phone to ring. That is not a strategy. But even more than that, let's talk about this one. What about— oh, lost Megan. Okay, y'all, I guess it's just me. What about no sales process at all? What happens if you have a marketing process? You're back. Okay. What if you have— maybe you're doing some marketing investments, maybe you're buying some canned content or whatever you're doing, you're even— you hire a BDR, but hiring a BDR is not the same As having a sales process. I always liken it to, like, if you have a crop field and you need water, going in the field and doing a rain dance is like, that's wishing. You want things to show up. Unfortunately and tragically, sometimes you do a rain dance the day before a storm and then you think, oh, okay, this is going to work. But we don't want you to be doing a rain dance. We want you to put in irrigation. So it's a little bit of work up front and a little bit of maintenance, but But now water happens wherever you need it, as consistently as you need it, and then you're going to get the consistent crops, but you're not going to get a consistent crop if you don't consistently water. That's what a sales process should be doing for you, right?

Yeah, absolutely. Nailing it.

What about this one, Megan? What happens— speaking of process, what about when a buyer wants to buy something and we make it difficult? Talk about this.

This is one of the biggest common problems I see when I come into an MSP and they're like, hey, we don't have enough leads. And I look at their website and I'm like, well, if I wanted to buy from you, I'd have no idea how. There's almost always a lack of pricing. And I know I hear from MSPs all the time that they don't want their competitors to know their price, but I promise you that your serious competitors that are actually trying to defeat you, they know your price. They've seen it from your clients, your prospects. They may even have somebody out there secret shopping MSPs to get your price. So transparent pricing is kind of like the absolute bare minimum. To taking friction out of your buying process. As we are beginning to position ourselves to a younger demographic, millennials are making up like 66% of business just buying decisions these days. They want to be 80 to 90% sure they want to buy something before they talk to you. So if you don't have content, case studies, testimonials, reviews, and your pricing out there and what your service actually entails, Chances are you're missing out on a lot of the market that just wants to know what you do.

Right. It's shocking, isn't it? Yeah. I just like this comment from Christo. We're taught IT, everything IT related, and zero about marketing and sales. Yeah, 100%. And well, even more tragic, maybe this is a bonus pain, is that a lot of the voices in the channel who are like, we're gonna help you grow. They're just a vendor who's in your stack. They don't know how to sell managed services. They want you to sell their agent, so they know how to talk about their agent, but that actually is drinking salt water. It's adding to the problem because then our sales process becomes increasingly technical. And I have, I have news for you. Your customer does not give a shit. What's in your tech stack. They'll never care.

And they don't understand it. So your deep understanding of IT may actually be crippling you. Um, I don't know how, like, you know, the demographic of who's tuning in. There are tons of MSPs that do co-managed and therefore sell into IT decision makers, but the majority of the MSPs I work with are selling to business owners and office managers. They have no idea what you do or how you do it. They want to understand how it impacts Their job role, their business, their goals. They could care less if you're doing that with Kaseya, ConnectWise, Halo PSA, your cybersecurity stack that's just the best one on the planet. I believe you that yours is the best, but your customer has to believe you that you can protect them.

100%. We got some great comments flowing in. Really good stuff. By the way, guys, if you have questions, throw them in now. Don't feel afraid to throw them in. Or if you have thoughts on some of these pains specifically, uh, you know, talk to us because we want to have— we're going to have as much time for questions as we can. I want to power through a couple of more pains that we don't— I think, uh, we don't have as much time on some of these, but lack of consistent lead flow. That's why you're here, right? You get— when you get leads, this is— I, I heard this this morning, Megan. When I get in the room, I can usually close them. I just need more leads.

Um, listen, let me guess, that person's mostly dependent on referrals, Brian?

Yeah, uh, that's right. And they get 2 to 4 customers a year. They've been in business for 11 years, right? So, um, I have, I have news for you, and this, this might be news to you, it might not be news to you if you're watching. Closing 75% of your referrals is actually industry standard. It does not. That is not indicative of the maturity of your sales process. That's indicative of the length of your reputation. So once you're in the room with a word-of-mouth referral who's super ready to buy, who's probably already shopped but then didn't like people, wanted somebody to go to somebody they trust, converting those is actually— if you're doing less than 75%, you're doing very poorly. Even 90% is very normal. That's not going to translate over to the buying side. In fact, Megan, don't you have some stats? Maybe we should talk for a second on this.

Yeah, absolutely. We can, we can throw those up there. So these stats are from our MSP clients and kind of just paint a picture of what's going on. 80% of them, owners, owner-led sales can close their referral and inbound opportunities. 80% of them, when they start trying to work outbound, meaning cold, it shifts down to about 25% becoming the standard. And those leads are hard to get. It's a lot of uphill work to get in the room with these people. It takes 6 weeks to 3 months. Um, you have to touch about 11 touchpoints. Only 2 out of 10 people that you call cold will even result in a conversation. 90% of your prospects, the actual decision makers, are never going to pick up your call. 60% never see the emails you send them, and 95% are never going to reply. So you're working really hard to get in the room, and then you're only closing 25% of those deals. So it's super important at the very beginning when you're, you're unraveling how much money you want to put into sales and where you want to put it, to really understand that the referral leads you're getting, it's easy money. And if you're not hitting that 75 to 80% on referrals, then I would not put any money into lead generation until you figure out what's going on there.

Boom. It's critical, right? Like, we have to do this in the right order. You know what I'm also— as I'm seeing those stats, I'm imagining, okay, 6 months to get somebody on the phone, multiple attempts, 6 to 7 to 8 to 12 attempts to get somebody there. Can you imagine having to be responsible for doing all that work and not having any way of organizing your workflow? But a lot of MSPs are in this situation where I talk to them all the time. We're like, well, I said, what do you do to grow? I do some cold calling. And I go, okay, what does that mean? And they said, well, you know, I Googled some businesses. There were 7 businesses that looked pretty good in my neighborhood. I gave them all a call. They were busy. When was that? Uh, March. You did nothing. They don't even know you called. You might as well have done nothing. And if you don't have a way of measuring what you did, when you did it, what happened, what they said, what they didn't say, and tracking all of your follow-ups, you're never going to have consistency in results, right? Absolutely never.

And you can't just buy a tool to fix it either. You have to use it.

Right. So here's a thought. Maybe some people don't know. Maybe some people are like Megan superfans and they— I'm just some guy. And maybe I have one Brian superfan here. They'll probably know who Megan is. But just in case, um, let's give them just a quick second on who we are, why we're doing this, and kind of what we have to help. Do you want to go first on that?

Yeah. So usually my opener is just that I've done $550 million in B2B tech sales. Yes, you heard that right. That's half a billion. And I have never lied to seal the deal. About a 15-year B2B tech sales and marketing career. It's above that now, but I don't like to think about it. And in my own business, I've slowly moved from like a 100% outbound to an 80% inbound, primarily leveraging content and thought leadership. I've sat in pretty much every revenue seat that there is, from BDR/SDR, BD manager, director of VP, marketing, sales, CRO, CEO. I know the grind, I know the tools, and I have dedicated hundreds and hundreds of hours of my time and my team's time to properly vetting vendors to only present solutions that actually work for MSPs. 90-95% of my clients are MSPs. I've worked directly for MSPs. I know how hard it is, um, but made impact anyways. And I know Brian has too.

Yeah. And my, you know, I come, I come by it from a different route. I have spent much less time in the mid-market and enterprise space. I'm sort of the like grassroots sales guy. So all of my sales experience is with zero marketing dollars, zero help, blank page. My first sales job was a catering sales job and The manager would say, go find me money. And I couldn't come back until I closed it, until I sold a lunch to an office. So I just literally walked around my city. I made a map of it and I, every summer I would hit my entire downtown. That was how I started at 18. I mean, we 5x'd the catering business and I just did it the slow, hard way. I am, I'm not a hockey stick growth guy. Uh, if you want, if you want to grow to a billion dollars in 5 seconds, I don't really know how to help you do that. Okay. Without losing $10 billion along the way. What I know how to do is linear, consistent growth that you can predict. So if you want 8 to 12 really highly qualified ideal clients a year, that's what I know how to do. I grew an MSP to $2 million in 3 years and left that business in August of 2020. And this month we just had our 3-year, our 3rd birthday for Feel Good MSP, where We build sales processes for MSPs. That should feel good, hence the name. Okay, Megan, um, why don't we talk a little bit about strategy? By the way, it's a great question here. David, I don't really know. I see the question. We're going to circle back to this in a little bit. I just wanted to put it up. How do we balance what's included in the MSP versus what would be considered an exclusion or required a separate scope of work to implement? Very good question. Um, I'm sure others echo that as well. If you have more questions, guys, throw them in the chat. I like curveballs. I like when people try to stump the chump on these, so bring me the hardest ones that you can, and then I'll give those ones to Megan. Okay, let's talk about strategy. Um, there's an epidemic in the channel of people leaning on tactics. I'm gonna go buy some content, I'm gonna post it on my LinkedIn, and then I'm gonna get sales. I'm not telling you—

That's ever worked for you guys.

Yeah, has that worked? And, and by the way, this isn't a trap. I'm not telling you you shouldn't. There's— I've got very, very good friends in the channel who make awesome content that you should use. I'm not anti-content. Uh, I mean, content is— if you know who I am, it's probably because you saw some of my content. The thing is, that is a tactic, right? That is one way of getting eyeballs. That is one deployed tactic. That is not a sales process. Just even if people, you get some eyeballs on people, then what are you gonna do? What happens when they message you and go, what are your rates? Do you know what to say? When they say, do you guys do this? How are you going to turn that into a paying MRR customer at $150 to $250 a seat? If you can't do that over and over again, and if you can't start a sale, hand it to a different person and they know where to pick it up, pick it up and finish it. then you don't have a process. So we have to start with strategy before we just try to band-aid with a bunch of tactics. Makes sense? I have a lot of thoughts on this. I wanna give— do you have anything you wanna throw in here on the sort of the importance of starting with strategy?

No, I mean, I think you're nailing it. It's really important to differentiate the difference between strategy, process, and tactics, and you need all 3. We're certainly not saying, Any of these pieces can be missing. But if you're starting with tactics, you're not starting at the right place. The strategy should come first. I will say that tactics and process have to go back and forth because you have to do it to optimize it.

Yes.

Document it, run it again. And that is a forever process. There's not one sales process either Brian or I can hand to you and be like, this will work forever.

You're right. Or that will work without you executing it. Like, you have to execute, you have to post the content, you have to then when people like or comment, you have to answer their comments. Like, you have to, you still have to, there's so much more to LinkedIn than just posting a video and going, I hope I get money now. You've gotta actually execute correctly and you can only automate so much, but you can't abdicate, abdicate with those responsibilities when you automate it. Like, You're still ultimately in charge of the brand, the reputation, and ultimately the revenue operations machine. So the big thing about strategy is this. We have to zoom out and ask ourselves a few key questions. Now, if you're an MSP, this is probably the first thing we've said that's worth writing down. You have to start with, what do I sell? And when we talk messaging in a minute, I think Megan is going to have a lot to say on this particular topic, but what do I sell? And all of this, of course, through the empathetic lens of who am I selling it to? What do I sell? Who am I selling it to? Why should they care about it? Why do they need it? And then what does it help them achieve? What does it help them avoid? In simpler terms, or perhaps to reduce that down, What are my values? What are my outcomes? What are my differentiators? You have to know the answers to those questions before you can sell anything. You can't just say, I'm an IT company, call me. That's— well, you can try, but it won't work. Your tagline says, we'll focus on the technology so you can focus on running the business. That doesn't work.

And I think it's important to note that the things that worked 10, 15, 20 years ago Aren't working.

Right.

When most MSPs entered the marketplace, and there's some that are newer, younger, but I see a lot that have been around 20, 25 years. And when they entered the market, the average business was like, I need a computer and I don't know how computers work. So they needed somebody who could come in, set up email, set up their network, set up phone systems, get their printer working, make sure that their computer could connect to the network, all of these things. And today the average business owner has at least one millennial or Gen Z in their office that can do all of that stuff. So I do IT support isn't the end of the messaging. There is a small subsection of the market that continues to just be like, hey, I need IT support, and they're on Google Googling IT support. And if you want to dump $20,000, $30,000 a month into SEO Then you can be the number one result for IT support in your metro area and get leads that way. Um, but the majority of MSPs aren't going to win that game.

Right. It's, uh, when we get into messaging, I want to talk a little bit about— we just put this in for, uh, one of my customers, one of my MSPs targeting healthcare. And healthcare, as we all know, it's— they're, they're very fickle. Their attention is very fickle. They're very hard to get a hold of. And none of them care about HIPAA compliance. So you can't just say, we'll keep you HIPAA compliant. They'll go, all right, but what's it cost? And if it's more than zero, then they'll go, eh, come and get me, HIPAA. Because this is not enforced. It doesn't— it's cheaper to pay fines than to pay your stack if you— if all you're offering them is HIPAA. So we looked at what do they actually need? We run some customer development interviews. Guess what the biggest problems are in medical? It's, it's talent.

Mm-hmm.

Retention. Keeping good people is the hardest problem they have. And we got, we pulled some amazing stats that say like 40% of medical professionals say the technology is difficult or something like that. So we have this amazing proof now. And now the message goes, find and retain the best talent in the industry by having the right technology partner.

And be able to onboard and offboard them.

Yes. Onboard and offboard in seconds. Retain them, increase their quality of work. Boom, boom, boom. Manage them all without— with like less micromanaging, more productivity, more happiness.

Human work for human people.

Now all of a sudden, our value is so much more visceral, right? But this guy figured out, what am I actually offering them? And what he's offering them is those outcomes, not process. So once you have those key things in place, we can start finally Amalgamizing them into some messaging that's gonna convert. I wanna give you the mic here, Megan, 'cause I think you do really good stuff on messaging. And in fact, if you want, you can screen share some stuff, but I'm sure you don't have to.

Yeah, I'll pull it up. Let's see.

While you're doing that, we have some comments.

You're just that one part of my screen. So the biggest thing I think Brian really nailed the fundamental important thing here. And I tell all my MSPs that the first 2 questions they should be asking any prospect is why us, why now? Why do anything? Most deals are lost to do nothing. You will lose to not making a change more often than you will lose to a competitor coming in and doing something fancy. They outperform you in some way. I'm not saying that won't happen. It does happen. But the majority of deals are lost to nothing. You have to be better than the status quo. And when we talk about messaging, I think we all get so caught up in our own value and what we bring to the table and who we are. And all of those things are great to capture and sprinkle into your messaging, but nobody cares about you until they know you. They care about themselves, their pain points, their problems, their desired future state, what puts their job at risk. And as MSPs, we're frequently selling to the owner. Owners typically have 2 major levers, right? Money and time, which sort of equate to each other. They want to know what's it going to cost them and how much time is it going to take. Does it give them back some of their time? Does it make them more money? One of the difficult things about selling managed services is that it's just not very sexy, right? I can't tell you that if you bring me on as your IT support professional, magically there's gonna be more money in the bank account next month. It doesn't work that way. But that doesn't mean we can't still talk to those major levers inside of our prospects' minds of their own time and their own money. One of the number one cold call openers that we use after we get past the, hey, it's, it's so-and-so from what, what's and such company is saying, like, do you want to be able to unplug from your business without seeing the bank account shrink? Okay, how do you do that? You do that by getting your employees more efficient in their roles, and technology, especially as we're sitting in the middle of the digital evolution, is key to that. So it's not as simple as resetting somebody's email password, but Almost every MSP I know has specific things that they can do or have done for clients that impact productivity, that impact the amount of time people spend that's just kind of like wasted, and that impact the scalability and growth of the business. They just haven't mapped it yet. So messaging is all about good mapping, and the very first step is to back away from your desire to pitch Reduce skepticism and break stigma. MSPs that are in the comments, how many of you have negative connotations with the entire concept of sales? Maybe you've said, I don't really like salespeople. Buyers have mental spam filters. We all do, and they're getting stricter. Just like Google and Microsoft are tightening their spam filtering, so are human beings. Because we're all the recipients of this endless barrage of sales and messages everywhere we go. I open my LinkedIn, I'm getting hit. I answer my cell phone, I'm getting hit. I answer my email, I'm getting hit. So if you want to connect, you have to break through that, whether it's with marketing or sales, it's direct, or you're trying to passively draw people in. It doesn't really matter. The messaging needs to be about them. I think we've all been in rooms where we were annoyed by someone who would not stop talking about themselves. I actually just had this conversation with one of my SDRs. I was like, hey, what are the consistencies in people you don't like and you don't want to be around? And it's these people that just like won't shut up, and they're, they're not contextualizing the conversation. Don't be that guy. It's not about your sales pitch. I know that a lot of us who've been through any type of like sales training or, or like old school stuff may have heard that whole like old elevator pitch concept. It's not about your elevator pitch. It's not we help, we're the fastest, we're the best, we're pioneering, we're disrupting, all these things. It's all about who you're talking to and what their priorities are. So like I would say, MSP owners are often telling me that they struggle to scale their revenue beyond relying on referrals and they don't have a sales process. It's top of mind for them because they want to get their revenue up to be able to make an exit. How does that compare with what you're seeing or your priorities? Or if I were talking to like, um, let's say like a, a doctor that runs a medical office, I might say that, you know, many doctors share That they just don't want to deal with IT because it distracts from their patient care, and their office managers are frequently busy dealing with billing systems being down and systems not integrating rather than focusing on the patient right in front of them. How do you feel about that? The goal is to move to this customer voice and contextualize the buyer, their process, their priorities, and move away from thinking that we're what matters. I know Bryan and I both talked about sales process. We're both big fans of the sales process. The sales process only matters in so much as it matches your buyer's buying process. They love to buy. They hate to be sold to. So you have to make them feel like they're just buying. You really can get here, and the best way to get here— I have a whole bunch of examples and such. But the best way to get here is really just to talk to your clients. Finding the customer's language is about listening. So go back, listen to your sales calls if you record them. Record some of your calls with your clients, particularly if you're doing QBRs, record your QBRs, listen to their language. Talking to top performers, most MSPs, not most, but a lot of the MSPs I work with are in peer groups. Talk to your peers and hear what they're seeing, the ones that are outperforming you. Like, what are they doing differently? How are they talking to— what does their website look like compared to yours? What does their LinkedIn look like compared to yours? Um, go to review sites like Cloud Tango and Clutch and look at the reviews people are leaving for MSPs and find the common threads in what they're saying. Um, even like Google reviews can be a good place, or Facebook reviews can be a good place for this. Obviously, there are reviews that aren't legitimate, but you can use your human brain to filter those out and just look for the consistency. What do people say is good about their MSP or their IT service partner? Case studies, ebooks, white papers, what your competitors are putting out there, the stuff that's resonating. Interview your customers. Take some of the prospects that you care the most about or the clients that you love the most and look at their LinkedIn. How do they talk about themselves? Think about those keywords, um, use their language. Not everybody has customers. Some people have patients, some people have clients. Um, reflecting back to them their own language builds rapport and builds trust and makes you easier to buy from. Um, and then there's a whole worksheet you can go through in terms of finding their current solution, speaking to their priorities, finding the problems with the current solution, and trying to map that to aspirations. I cannot drop links here from StreamYard, but I'll jump on LinkedIn and drop this at the end. You guys can grab it to kind of run through how messaging should work. But the most important piece is really just nailing their language. And putting it consistently as many places as you can.

Yes.

Anybody have any cool curveball messaging questions? I know I saw some about pricing that I do want to answer. And I know I saw one too about what is and is not included. So I want to answer those.

Right.

But if anybody has messaging questions, I'd answer that first.

Let me scroll through the questions real quick. Um, by the way, and if you want Megan to drop that, let me say this. If you, if, if you will complete that worksheet, if it was sent to you, comment and say, say so in the comments right now and tag Megan and say, send me that worksheet, I'll do it. But don't comment unless you're gonna do it. And then I just give you homework now. You have to send it to them.

No, I was gonna send it to him anyways. It's just— yeah, but this way I mean, directly versus dropping it in the comments. Your way is better.

Let's just do it that way. Um, okay, great questions all around. Bing, bang, boom. You want to just pause here for a minute and talk a little bit about some of these questions? Like the pricing calculator might be a pretty good one.

Yeah, I'd love to talk pricing calculator.

And, and truthfully, I think we're going to agree, but I also think that I can probably play devil's advocate and make a case either way for a pricing calculator. But I'm interested to hear what your thoughts are, and then I might do some sideline color as well. So Colby says, what are the risks of putting pricing or a price calculator public on your site as a lead capture and qualification tool?

The 2 major risks people bring up when talking about transparent pricing are one, your competitors getting ahold of it and weaponizing it, and you becoming a part of the whole race to the bottom problem as people will just undercut your pricing. The other one is that you'll scare people away with price. The problem around pricing calculators, as someone who has done both sales and marketing, is where it sits in your funnel. So it is important to be transparent about pricing when it becomes relevant. If you haven't built any, built any value yet, then just giving the price away might not be the absolute best way to come at it. Now, what I will say is having no pricing anywhere on your website can be a really big red flag. So what I typically encourage people to do is use something like a pricing calculator, gate it, and use it kind of as like a lead capture and qualification tool, but make sure it's sitting at an intent stage in your process. Someone clicking pricing on your website does not necessarily indicate intent. They could just be poking around, like they have a current MSP, they're not unhappy, but they want to see what's out there in terms of pricing. Um, so gating it is a big, big piece of that. Um, and you can— the way you develop a calculator can build the value through how you do it, right? So instead of making that calculator just like, how many users do you have? Ask targeted questions that build value. So things like, um, how many M365 licenses do you have? How confident are you on a scale of 1 to 10 that you are leveraging 100% of the value from your M365 licensing? Um, how many tools are in your tech stack? How many devices are on your network? How many remote employees do you have? By asking deeper questions, one, you're showing that you understand the complexity of their business and you're building value because they are internally psychologically being like, oh, well, if they're asking the question, that means it's important. It matters. Now, I've seen behind the curtain of a lot of MSPs pricing, and I know that y'all are just pricing per seat, which by the way, we can get into a conversation about how that's the wrong model another day. But that calculator taking more into account plants the seed that all of those things are things you're going to help them with, which you are. But when you just say like, how many, how many users do you have? You're not implying any value.

Right. In fact, you're doubling down On the stigma of us being a commodity. And I would argue, so my, my 2 cents here, Colby, specifically through your question of what are the risks, Megan mentioned them. To me, the risk is I would rather have a discovery call where I can contextualize the price. But if I sell, say the price, they won't book a discovery call. So I'm worried I'm going to get less discovery calls. As an MSP, I didn't put price on my website and this was why. But Here's my 2 cents on a calculator. Kind of another spin on very similar to what Megan just said. If you're— if the way that you portray yourself is as a commodity, then actually the people who want the best partner won't engage with you. You have to transcend the stigma. You can't just say, but we're the best commodity. Actually, the more you compare yourself to other people, the more you sound like you're just one of the pack. So if you wanna actually push off from the pack, you have to fundamentally change the way they perceive what you do. So I would have a pricing calculator that says things like, what's your biggest goal in the next 12 months? And the questions are like, get more clients, get more talent, develop a new blank, whatever. And it should all be business vision questions. They're not even technical.

Stabilize.

Yeah. Are we trying to increase top line? Are we trying to increase bottom line? Which would you rather have more of right now? These are— I almost said the F word. These are effing awesome questions.

Do you have a problem to solve or are you just trying to save some money?

Yeah. And, and neither one necessarily, by the way, is saying that they're not qualified for us, but it's going to change the type of engagement in their mind at least, because this is how we create really, really— this is how you become the preeminent Option because I guarantee no other MSP asked them those questions. They said, "Do you have backup? Are you Microsoft shop?" Well, if you're not, then I can't work with you. If you have Apple, I'm afraid of you, and I secretly wish you were all Linux and whatever, whatever. How many computers do you have? Okay, that'll be this.

Do not betray. Do not betray your. I don't. It's not bigotry. Don't don't betray the the. secret hatred you have for their tech stack before you even get in a call for them. Preferably never do it. Don't ever tell them how much you hate their tools.

Maybe if at all, be like, if anything, be like, are you a Microsoft shop, Google shop, or option C, don't know, don't care?

Yeah, right. We don't care.

Just say that and they'll be like, I don't care. Just shut up. Just tell me something. That, that's the thing.

In relation, sorry, I didn't mean to talk over you in relation to whether or not you should put pricing on your website, whether or not you should do pricing calculator. It really depends on your internal structure and how, how much lead gen and sales you even want to manage. Brian mentioned a really good point about like not wanting to put up pricing because he'd have less discovery calls. If you are a busy owner, less better qualified discovery calls is probably in your best interest more than more people who don't have money to buy from me. Brian sat in a full-time sales role. So if his calendar's stacked with people who like are immediately gonna hear the price and run away, who cares? Because there'll be 3 or 4 people in there that aren't that.

Right.

But when you're an owner, if they're gonna run away the second they hear your price anyways, it's almost better to get it out early and, and be like, okay, you know, you're never gonna buy from me if you know that we're this price. I tend to lean towards ranges.

Right.

You know, you're gonna like, most of our clients are paying between this amount and this amount, but we really do need to properly scope you in order to get you a quote. And you can do that one of two ways. You can book a discovery call right here, or like position that as an assessment, whatever, like book an assessment, whatever, right here. Or you can fill out this form and I will mail you a quote. So instead of saying like it's a calculator, make sure your response time can be really good. Have them fill out a form that helps you to generate a custom quote. And if there's something there that's like, if you can't get enough data that way, then you can follow up and say, hey, I think you'd be in this range, but I need to talk to you because I have a couple more questions.

Right.

And that's your process.

Whenever a sales process requires the intervention of a subject matter expert to establish the actual solution, then it, you can't ever do any better than ranges. So I, what we're trying to do is get them to want to talk to you, but if they just fundamentally don't, then that's another conversation, especially as buyers become less and less like more and more like, hey, will you just text me? Because I'm terrified of talking on the phone because I have phone anxiety. Then like, okay, we might have to come up with new processes. But I'm a big fan of like, have an intent-based calculator rather than a license-based calculator. That's going to demonstrate that you are, you're thinking differently and that you're not thinking about how do I push agents to you, but how do I help you achieve your business's goals? And then you're actually communicating much more value than just to say, we're the tech partner who cares. Now, how many Microsoft licenses can I sell you?

There's also an underlying problem too of a lot of the MSPs that I work with don't— their pricing doesn't even really make sense to begin with. So don't put pricing on your website that doesn't make any sense and isn't in the language of the buyer.

Right.

So like when you're like, oh, it costs this if you want these licenses and this if you want this, and then you've got all these little like add-ons and stuff that don't mean anything to them, you're making them work hard for no reason. So if you're gonna like, I'm very, very pro-transparent pricing. However, I think you first have to understand your pricing and why you price that way and do a little bit of inner work on productizing.

Right.

Based on deliverable outcomes instead of just like X amount of users.

It's a great question from Colby. I hope we, I think we, we probably got as deep into that one as we can. I wanna pivot a little bit and I'm gonna pass the mic over to you, the person who's watching right now. Here's what I'd like to see. Everybody who's watching YouTube, LinkedIn, wherever, go in and comment for us right now. A, does your company use a CRM? Yes or no? And what CRM are you using? Okay, just put that in the comments for us. This isn't a trick, but what we wanna know is what CRM—

It is a little bit of a trick. Is it?

Oh yeah, yeah.

It's only a little bit of a trick because some of you are gonna tell us that you're using an RMM or a PSA. And think it's a CRM.

Sure. But, and, and that's okay. But if you are, but that's, that's still what you're using, we won't chastise you, but we wanna know how to best, cuz we're gonna talk about specific tools right now.

So, CMIT is using Salesforce. That is, that's a real CRM. So is Zomentum. So they get an A.

Okay.

HubSpot, that's a, that's a CRM. Keep is a, is a CRM.

Uh-huh. That's great. That's great. Keep 'em coming. Keep 'em coming, guys. We probably have some more.

Tell me you're partnered with TMT without telling me you're partnered with TMT.

Uh huh, right.

Right.

HubSpot. Growably, great. Okay. Love a Growably shop. Anybody here Glasshive shop out of curiosity? HubSpot. HubSpot.

Go high level. Yep.

Cool.

See, go high level a lot with people that are working with agencies. Very common agency tool. It's got got a lot of features.

Growably is Growably is just high level. But with everything turned on and through Tech Tribe.

So, yep, HubSpot, Growably, love it.

RevScale, Zoho. We use our inbox. Okay, Colby, I'm not gonna give— I'm gonna give you a pass because Colby's about to join our membership. We'll get you sorted.

Inbox. Not even a spreadsheet, Colby?

I mostly just want to give you a hug.

We're gonna need some like meditation.

Yeah, we need sales therapy to work through how freaking hard it is to use your inbox. So great work.

Glass half, glass half, glass half. Yep.

All right, so here's the, the moral here is imagine, uh, hang on, let me think of the diplomatic way to say this. Sometimes when I talk to a technical person who's saying that they— who's coming into a sales role and they have no formal sales training there's this conception that being likable and communicative equals being a salesperson. But that's like saying being smart and playing Dungeons and Dragons makes you an IT person. That's not true. Now, you might be those things, but being an IT person is a trade, correct?

Mm-hmm. Is—

wouldn't, wouldn't you be insulted if any person just said, oh, I'm smart, I could do your job? And you'd say, well, you don't actually know what, how detailed my job is and how hard it is and blah, blah, blah. Now imagine you've got a technician, a tier 1 technician, and you say, okay, your job is to answer calls, track down tickets, keep the balls in the air with the clients. These tickets might spread over weeks depending on the complexities of them, blah, blah, blah. And they say, how should I manage this? And you go, your inbox. Impossible. Not only impossible, I actually would argue it's unethical. To your clients. Now, this is exactly what it's like when you give a salesperson no CRM. You're telling them, remember those stats Megan pulled up? It might take 9 months to talk to a CEO, and they're doing 9 months of follow-up with no way of tracking it.

And Google, it's fine.

And Google. It's impossible. It's impossible, and it's just too hard. You, if you want a salesperson to be successful, including yourself, You have to tool for success. Now you guys all know, you guys are all trigger happy, you love your tools, but, and okay, honesty time for real, and we're not gonna make fun of you, but I just wanna, because I think actually this will probably be encouraging to anybody to hear everybody else. How many of you have a CRM and you have not logged into it for at least 2 weeks? Raise your hand. Jacob, just Jacob, great to see you, man. Just start using HubSpot today. Welcome to the dark side. I love a good HubSpot.

I wish we could do an anonymous poll. I think people would answer it more. I know.

I wish we had an anonymous poll.

I, I can tell you that I have a client that was in this, the MSP 501 this year, who has a, a, an expensive Lexus of a CRM. That their salesperson didn't even have a login for. So just to kind of pull back the stigma a little bit, just because you're not following every single best practice Brian and I are going to give to you, it does not mean you're a failure as an MSP. You can be in the top 5%, 2%, 1% of MSPs and have a CRM you haven't logged into. It just means that you're leaving some money on the table that we can help you go pick up.

Yeah. So we've got a couple of honest souls here. I think there's like a 30-second delay on the, on the thing. So we're seeing a couple people logged in for the first time after a while. You're not in trouble. But the question, the point is that imagine you're, you're, imagine you had a technician who was like, I'm doing my job, I'm in the grind, I'm really working on it. And you go, okay, what are you doing in the PSA? Oh yeah, hang on, I think I have that.

Did you want me to close out those tickets? Uh, right. So that's insane.

Having a tool and using a tool are 2 different things. So that, as I always, as I'm very fond of saying, the best sales tool is the one that you'll actually use, not just the one that has the sexiest interface.

So, and a lot of stuff is subjective too, like what my brain likes and what your brain likes. They may not be the same things. Brian and I don't even necessarily use the same exact tech stack. No. But we both have a tech stack.

Yep.

And tools for each kind of specific thing. For example, like I use Apollo to find contact data.

Right.

And Brian does not.

And I just don't do marketing. So there's a—

no. You definitely do marketing, just not the same kind.

Yeah. So why don't we talk, I mean, we're a little bit over, so I wanna see if we can make up a couple minutes. But this is the, this is important that we talk about the sort of categories of tools. So especially if you're here and you're like, what the hell am I supposed to do next? Look, let's talk categories here. You have to have a CRM, customer relationship management. You have to have some way of getting contact data, which Megan, you're gonna, you're gonna give us some good insights there. And then you're gonna need some way of outreach. So, or you might not. I mean, a phone is probably plenty, but you might have an EMS, an email marketing system that might be integrated with your CRM. You might have some LinkedIn automation that would be considered a sales tool. I was, I did LinkedIn, all my LinkedIn DMs manual for 2 years, manually typed first names, everything until I knew my messages was good. My message was good. My ICP was clear. And then I started automating and honestly, like it wasn't that big of a freaking deal to just do it myself. I've never used an auto dialer in my career and I've made tens of thousands of cold calls manually pushing buttons and holding a phone to my face. So you don't have to get overkill, guys, with AI. If you just do it, do the work and use the tool, it will work. So let's talk about categories a little bit for CRMs. You wanna go on that for a little bit, Megan?

Yeah. So I think with the CRM itself, there's a lot of different types of focus for CRMs. MKC, my agency, we used to be a HubSpot agency. We were all in with HubSpot, and I do think that they're a great tool. But in working with MSPs, kind of what I learned is that very, very few MSPs have the capacity to leverage a tool enough to justify the $1,200 a month plus commitment it is to have both Sales and Marketing Hub turned on in HubSpot. If you are an MSP that has 2, 3 revenue resources or more that are dedicated to marketing or sales, A tool like HubSpot could be incredible for you. But if that's not you, you probably need to save some money on your CRM tool. And most CRMs today, the competitive ones, they sort of have marketing stuff that they do, sales stuff that they do, and then true good old-fashioned CRM, customer relationship management stuff that they do. So if you look at like HubSpot, they They have ticketing, they have an operations hub for all kinds of automations. They have sales, which is calling, sequencing, emailing, reporting, deal pipeline flow, marketing, which is landing pages and social media and analytics, email marketing, so on and so forth. Then you have tools There's a kind of growth in the market of tools that are MSP-specific. So like Brian mentioned, that Growably is just GoHighLevel unlocked and with kind of Tech Tribe living on top of it. Some of you may be familiar with like Nate Friedman from TechProMarketing. They use GoHighLevel equally, add some MSP-specific stuff on top for you. TMT, Robin Robbins, they're on Keep, which I have not seen the back end of. other than to pull some data out of it. I've got a lot of MSPs picking up ActiveCampaign, which historically was very much a marketing tool, but has grown to add the sales hub. And I think that this is, it's sort of a relevant place to just talk about a shift in the industry that I'm seeing, which is that we are in the digital evolution and almost everybody's suffering from tool fatigue. And pretty much every tool on the planet is very rapidly expanding to try to capture more market share. Zoom now has meetings, like meeting links, and works as a whole phone system. You can do webinars in it. You can now do messaging. Slack just launched project management. HubSpot just launched a whole bunch of new features in their CRM. Glasshive is adding features. Constantly. Um, my project management tool Basecamp just launched a whole new section of features where we use ClickUp, and that just launched a whole bunch of new features. Microsoft has a new version that comes out every single year. Google makes changes to the backend of Analytics every 3 months, completely throws you off your game. This is super relevant to MSPs when it comes to your positioning and messaging and how you work with your clients as well. So beyond just mastering CRM for your own reasons. CRM is something that almost every business on the planet has, every type of business.

Right.

They have some type of CRM. Being able to manage that, manage it well, optimize it, leverage it, that's a value add as an MSP beyond just being able to do it for your sales team. Being able to work in these tools, it matters. So you've got sales CRMs, and you've got marketing CRMs and you have tools that do both.

Right.

Almost every tool is good at something. None of them, I've never ever come across one that I've said, I love exactly how they do this thing, they do it the best. And so as you build out your sales org and it grows, you may end up putting together multiple tools to build your stack. I will say that when you're first getting started, your best bet, especially if, if you don't have dedicated resources to work in the tool, is to go with something like a Glasshive, a Growably that has some templates in it that you can use, is easy UI, does not require a full-time admin, and is inexpensive so that if you go a month without using it, oh no, you threw away $200, whatever, not I threw away An entire client worth of money.

Right.

And none of the tools are going to be magic wands.

Right.

Our stack, personally, we use Apollo.io for our contact sourcing and our prospecting. Things live in Apollo until they're ready to move to HubSpot. Now everything moves to HubSpot when it's a lead. Difference between a contact and a lead, a target and a lead is like engagement or some type of trigger that makes you believe that they're in market for your solution. Then it goes into HubSpot. HubSpot is what we use for our deal management and our true sales outreach. So that one-to-one messaging, not sequences. And then we use GlassHive as our marketing piece. And people are always surprised that we do that as an agency. We're not an MSP. Why GlassHive? And the honest answer is because it's $200 a month, not $700 or $800 a month for the same stack as what HubSpot has.

Right.

Even as an agency, we do not market enough to justify the cost of HubSpot for the marketing side.

Yeah.

And all that's to say that even as like a mature sales org, we still use multiple tools. Because they're good at specific things and it's rare that you come across one that's good at absolutely everything.

In fact, I think everybody can probably relate. What other— so just like we went around and shared your CRMs, what are the other tools in your sales stack? What do you guys use? Quoting software? Are you using separate marketing software from your sales software or your pipeline management? Do you have any of those things? Throw those in the chat too. We want to hear. I used, so as a CRM, as an MSP, we used Autotask. That was my, that was what I had for CRM. And this was pre-big bad merger. And, uh, it was very clunky, but again, I'm like, I'm the grassroots bootstrap scrappy sales guy that when I said, hey, could we have a little bit of money for it? Ended with no, you know, so I couldn't have anything else. Yeah, right. That we're invested in Autotask. It's like, use it. So I just built some AutoHotkey scripts to make Autotask suck less for like completing a task. For example, you, cause you had to tab through all the fields and then fill it out for like, if you're just leaving a voicemail one, like leaving your first outbound voicemail, which I call like VM1 is code word for me for a specific type of voicemail I leave. And then I want to automatically set a follow-up in X amount of days where I would follow up on that voicemail. So I had a shortcut for voicemails 1, 2, 3, and 4, and it was like whatever, Ctrl+A1 or something like that, and it would tab through the task, complete it, mark it as done, open a new task, create it, and then say follow up on VM1, and it would do it in like 2 seconds. But that's the point of like, you don't have to invest in Lexus tools. You can just use the hell out of the ones you have. And I made, guys, $100 a day. I had 5 people making $100 a day. manually clicking, manually doing everything in Autotask, everything. There was absolutely no excuse they couldn't hit 100 dials in 2 hours of talk time per day. But nowadays, so my business is built on Airtable because I just am like that and I just want to build my own stuff. I, I guess I'm a glutton for punishment, but I was like, I wanted to do exactly what I want.

And Salesforce of the 21st century.

Right. Um, so Airtable, and then we use ActiveCampaign as our EMS, and we are actually like Right mid-process of moving our full CRM. So now everything until the contract gets signed is done in ActiveCampaign because it works now. It didn't used to be able to do that. But I think anyway, you mentioned that we could talk forever on how tools are now no longer being built for acquisition, but they're actually finally being built for market share. So they're diversifying functions. But before it was like—

I think it's important to sit down and reevaluate like at least once a year. Just sit down and say, what are the tools we're paying for? What are we paying them for, for them for? Like, what is the use case? How many people are using it? Why this tool? And if you can't come up with like a reason for why you're with that tool, it's probably time to put it up against something else. Because annually, every single one of these tools is adding features. And I think that there's typically a trade-off we make when we cheap out on the tool. Like Brian and I were talking actually before the webinar kicked off around like web scraping for data rather than using like a data sourcing tool like an Apollo or a Lucia or ZoomInfo, just scraping for data. And the trade-off is just the human time, right?

Right.

So like I can pay $0, no tool, or make a kind of stack of free tools and then like pay a VA to clean it for me. Please don't skip the paying a VA step or the cleaning it step because your email deliverability will disappear if you just web scrape and automate.

Yeah.

Or you can pay for the tool that's going to cost you something for the tool itself, but it saves you on the time aspect because most those tools have some sort of verification of the emails built in and they're doing it at a certain interval.

Right.

And then we always look at our other tools and could our other tools be doing it, right? So I'm paying for this and we're do— we're actually doing it right now at our agency, which is why it's so highly relevant for me. Like we're mid-Google migration and evaluating VoIP solutions and just kind of putting our tech stack up against, you know, what got us here. Is it going to get us there?

Yeah.

Is this the stack that we need to take our business to the next step? And I think MSPs are very used to doing that on the technology side, in your ticketing and your cybersecurity stack. I'm sure that you guys evaluate that stack regularly and ask yourself, like, do I really need to be paying for 3 different spam filtering tools? Probably not. Could just pick the one we think is best and offer it to all of our clients. Do that for your CRM.

Right. On that, you know, I think, well, first of all, I wanna do a rapid-fire answer to this question. It was such a great question. And, uh, David, I hope you're still with us, but let's do like, we'll do a super lightning round answer to this. And then I wanna get into what the, some practical ideas of getting lead data. That we just talked about, because we talked about that before. We have a couple of ideas. David asked the question, how do we balance what's included in the MSP? I guess you mean like in a service, in your services, versus what would be considered an exclusion or required a separate scope of work to implement? David, let me give you my answer first, and then Megan, love to hear if you have any thoughts as well. Um, you have to decide— here's the short answer— is like, what is your tool, what is your toolset and your team tool to be able to do at scale? And what things can you not do at scale? And that's, it's kind of gonna be the, the answer. Like if you can include it and it doesn't massively affect your revenue per employee matrix or your cost per employee matrix, then it should be included. I think I've seen people do like the Haas model where they include that stuff. I think I'm not a big Haas fan, but sometimes people will say unlimited remote support. Remote support should always be unlimited. Onsite support is usually the line where people will disagree. You might have some radius differences where we, you get X amount of onsite support or you get block hours onsite support, or it's always whatever. That's going to kind of be the question. If you have a dedicated field team and you are a close, like most of your clients are within X miles of you, I actually don't hate just basically including it, but baking in block hours to your monthly recurring price. So that you're auto-selling them on-prem block hours, but don't delineate it that way. And then make sure that you are doing that in a manageable way, but then you get to decide whether or not you roll a truck. So if they say, I want you to move my water cooler, you go, yeah, just so you know, that's not typically in our scope. So we can't include that for you free of charge. But if it's regarding to a specific piece of equipment we manage, blah, blah, blah. But the big thing, David, is Don't shy away from selling hardware. I don't get why MSPs think they're not allowed to sell hardware and mark it up. Like, of course you can. Don't shy away from projects that are like big moves. If they're moving an office, freaking charge them for that. If they're rolling out new devices, if they're— if they're— all that stuff should be, I think, should be a charge. And I like to have a— I had a right of first refusal for hardware and projects. So I would say you don't have to buy your computers from me. But if I'm going to manage it, I have to see the quote before you buy it. And then I get the chance to sell you one so that if they're going to go to Amazon or whatever, I just basically have the right to say, don't buy that one. Um, that's how we did it. And I think that that was a very good way of decreasing friction because quoting for a mouse is such a huge pain in the ass for the MSP anyway. Do you really want to make your 40 cents on a mouse that you probably end up just buying from Amazon? It was cheaper than Ingram Micro anyways. Like just let them buy that kind of shit if you want, but then give them, say, if I'm gonna manage it, then I have to know where you're buying it from and I have the right to say you can't buy it from there. But that was my shortest answer.

So I don't have any popular opinions on this topic.

Okay.

It's a hot potato for me because I think the MSP pricing model's completely broken and I, it's not optimized for the future. It's not optimized for millennial buyers. And it focuses on a lot of the wrong things that your buyers don't care about. It's really a business model and a product question. So ultimately, your business model is your business model. What you want to do and don't want to do as a business is completely up to you. The fact that you identify as a managed service provider or an IT service professional or whatever acronym you want to give yourself should not dictate the way that you run your business. The word agency is affixed to the end of my business name. The MSP is right in Brian's business name. Um, I don't operate like a standard marketing agency, and fudge every business coach that tells me that I have to. Um, at the end of the day, when you figure out what is inside and outside scope of work, There are 2 really important questions you should be asking yourself. What do I want to sell and what do people want to buy from me?

Right.

So match your product to the market that you want to sell to. If you want to, for the life of your MSP, be like, oh, we sell tech support to MSP, to small businesses, that's your prerogative. That's what you want to do. That's what you want to do. Scope that however you want. What's included? What's not included? Whatever. If you want to scale your business more rapidly by productizing and marketing those products, then let's talk about something different, which is instead of saying you get unlimited remote support or this much on-site or whatever, like that's how you're building the product. What about specifying your solutions to industries and problems? So instead of saying like we just do IT support, IT support is the assumption when you say that you're a managed service provider. You have a website that says MSP anywhere on it, the assumption is you do tech support and that you do that in a relatively unlimited model. And if you don't, like why are we here? That's the very bare minimum that you can be doing as just like the very bare minimum that I can be doing is marketing.

Right.

Instead, be like, we help manufacturing companies modernize their business for acquisitions using this exact workflow and process. And the process is the product, which is that we come in and we evaluate your legacy technology against all the IoT and automation and AI that's available in your space, against the compliance regulations and cybersecurity best practices that you should be doing because we are the experts and you don't know how to do it and we can. And I can get you 4 or 5 times the valuation you would get without me because you brought me in as your MSP. Yeah, we do tech support and you can call us when you can't figure out how to get into your email or—

Right.

A system goes down and you need to pull a backup. Yeah, we do that too. But more importantly, we modernize your business. We bring you into the digital era. We help you figure out which of these tools that are all available to you, because like the same way Brian and I are here trying to help you navigate CRMs, your clients are confused about the IoT that they're putting into their, uh, manufacturing floors and whether or not that is going to open up a vulnerability for them and if it's going to actually align with the CMMC 2.0 compliance that they have to get on board with to be able to keep their contracts with the government subcontracting.

Yeah.

Like, there's so many moving parts when it comes to pricing. It— I wanna like step away from the concept of like a scope of work in, in and out and instead productize the solution to a real problem and position that. And by the way, you can charge a whole bunch more money than if you just say like, we do tech support. Because when you sell a commodity, you're, you're gonna commoditize the price. If all you do is this thing that 100 other companies do within a 10-mile radius of you, then you have no option but to negotiate on price or, or just try to be like, well, my techs are better. We're better, faster, stronger, whatever. Um, think outside the box and productize something.

And that worked in 2015, 2017. But the point is that like that messaging is, is sort of antiquated now. Um, I think the takeaway I mean, or if I can, if I can summarize sort of my version of what you just said is that first of all, we poked the bee's nest with this particular topic because we both have some thoughts on the future of managed services. But Megan and I both— here's a, here's something right here. If you guys want to see the next webinar on this topic, put tell us in the chat and we'll put one together.

Yeah.

But we think the future of managed services is basically whatever the new term for digital transformation is. Like we're gonna call it post-digital transformation perhaps, and low-code, no-code.

Mm-hmm.

I think low-code, no-code is the future of managed services. As more businesses go to ClickUp, Airtable, Basecamp, whatever, as more businesses are building their own line of business applications because it's like easier and easier. And now you can tell AI, build me this app and it'll go, all right. Then I think low-code, no-code management and execution and deployment for the purpose of express outcomes for the business operation, like you're describing, I think is going to be what in 5 years or whatever, in some number of years, that's when it's gonna be what managed services is because Alexa is already basically smarter than half of our tier 1 techs. And we're pretty close with large action models to being like, why is my computer running slow? Oh, Oh, it looks like you have too much stuff on your hard drive. Can I reconfigure your partitions for you? Sure. We're not that far away from that. So not to sound like doomsayers, but just throwing that out. If you guys want more conversation on the future of managed services from 2 very contrarian millennials, then, uh, how you could productize to attract business owners like us, which there are more and more of. Yeah, in the market, 100%, because my business doesn't need a traditional MSP. I have 8 10 contractors all over the world. It's a bring your own device cloud Airtable environment. What do I need an MSP for?

Honestly, I do. If you can help me, if you can make my business better. Yeah, you have to be able to sell me how you're gonna make my business better, not just we can reset your employees' email passwords. Like, so can I. I actually don't have to. It's the computer will do it.

Um, I think what we need to do is Go ahead.

You want to jump into showing how to find some contacts?

Yeah, let's do it. Let's keep things spicy here, uh, and relevant. We're going to talk about contacts. There's 2 ways to do this that we're going to recommend. So if you're sitting here going, how do I start? Well, like, I need fundamental data basically to work off of. You're gonna get 2 ideas. Neither of us are sponsored or endorsed by either of these ideas, by the way, right? Um, we don't have any skin in this game. This is just Let me tell you exactly what I did, and you're gonna laugh at how comically dumb it is, and how— and you're going to be shocked at how effective it is. There's a tool called DataAxle. If you're familiar, put this in the chat. Tell me if you've used it before. Used to be called, uh, ReferenceUSA, then InfoUSA. They rebranded to DataAxle. It's like one of the biggest databases in the world. I, I think at the time it had like 45 million records or something like that, right?

Massive.

In America, if you have a public library card, you get DataAxle for free. Guess what? You can go get a public library card number online right now. I could get one in 5 seconds on your— on the public library's website. Then you can get access to DataAxle. Then you get a login, and this is exactly what we did. Okay, and it's a database, which means there's some fax numbers and dead people in it. Of course, it's a database, right? Data decays at a rate of like 25% a year. Um, it just does. But it's data. Okay, um, so what you do is you go in there, Reference USA— sorry, DataAxle has functions like you could say only show me records within a, a mile radius, an X-mile radius of a given address. You can literally put your headquarters in and say only show me people within 30 miles. Then you can filter by industry. By SIC code is the best way to filter by industry there. Um, if you don't have an inclusions list, like if you're not a verticalized MSP, then I recommend using an SIC exclusions list. So exclude all the SICs that you're not going to work with. We're talking convenience stores, restaurants, strip clubs, you know, dispensaries, whatever. If there's like places that you're like, well, I'm not the right fit for you or whatever, you can exclude those SIC codes to get it closer and closer to your target. There's free data in there. There's phone numbers, email addresses I think you have to buy. Um, but then you could do that, and if you wanted to, you could all put— you could put all of that in a website called clay.com. You can pay per record and enrich it if you want to do scrubbing-powered enrichment. Then you can validate all that with an— with a VA There's probably a billion YouTube channels of people have just shown how to do this and just go get a VA and scrub it. But I've had tons of people who pay a VA $250 to scrub 10,000 records or whatever, tidy them up, standardize all the records into the same format. Back in the day with ReferenceUSA, you can only export 25 at a time via CSV, so we wrote a script to do that. Now I think you can export like as many as you want, so you can just export them all Clean up the data, standardize the data, make sure that that's what you want, import it into your CRM, done. Start making calls. Now, Megan, that's the V— that's the time-intensive, I don't want to spend a dime on this way, which isn't necessarily wrong, right?

No, no, there's nothing wrong with that. If you have the time to do it, you have the team to do it, your human labor costs are affordable. Or if you're just like a scrappy young sales guy like Brian was and your CEO's like, fuck no, I'm not paying for any tools for you.

Right.

Like, okay, I guess I'll just build a custom script to pull from a public database and hope for the best here because I'm certainly not gonna Google this every— I'm not gonna spend all my time in Google every day looking for businesses to find their office phone number. Although, right, my SDRs frequently are like, just do it through Google. Like, you sometimes get better results than when you work through a data tool, because one thing to know about these data tools, which I'm about to show you Apollo in the back end so you can kind of see it, is that everyone, not everyone, but a lot of people are buying from them, which means that just by being in the tool, they're getting hit by more salespeople than if you go to say like the 10th page of Google in your local area looking at a specific industry, those businesses are probably getting hit less, particularly if they don't have Google My Business profiles because that's a common place to scrape. So sometimes stepping outside the block box and doing something different can be beneficial because they're just not getting hit as much. That said, we use Apollo.io and we build it into our other tools. So it automatically is connecting to HubSpot, which connects to GlassHive. So everything's kind of all in one place. And the way that we search is primarily by building an ICP and then working it. So you can see in here that you can actually just go in and build like a persona in advance and just click that persona and go from there. But you can also just say, hey, I want to look at CEOs within 50 miles of me, right? And I'm just outside sunny Orlando, Florida. So I can say like, you know, show me people within 50 miles of my zip code that are in a specific industry. Let's just say accounting because it's at the top and that makes it easy to select. And now I've only got, you know, 55 to start with. But what makes this tool— I don't want to say superior, but an edge— is that I can go ahead and click likely to engage and verified. And so these are emails that the tool is already verifying and seeing if they actually respond and reply to things. So if I uncheck verified and I just look at likely to engage, there's 10 prospects here that are accountants near me that own like accounting firms that are engaged. They're responding to other people. So that means like they're, they're opening their emails. These emails are actively working, whereas verified just means it was verified in the last— I think Apollo does it every like 3 months or so on a rotating basis. You can also set up scores. So that you know based on your own scoring mechanisms how good somebody is, um, and look at like technologies that you're using. So for me, like when I'm searching for MSPs, I frequently throw ConnectWise in there because I'm like, if they're using ConnectWise, we can talk about GlassHive, we can talk about, um, the integration with HubSpot. Or but if you're like an MSP and you work with a lot of accountants, maybe you can throw in there like QuickBooks and have some talking points around maybe how like QuickBooks integrates with another tool and put both those tools in there. We've had a lot of really good luck for MSPs throwing in like M365/Outlook and then adding a second tool that a lot of their prospects might not know can integrate. There's a lot of use cases for this in various industries, but basically just getting their tools talking to each other is a top priority for a lot of industries. Like, we have these legacy systems that aren't communicating with our new cloud solutions. Is there a problem? Like, can that be solved for? We've also done a lot of work around sunset dates with specific technologies, so you can reach out in advance of a technology that's going away and tell them they need to get ahead of it. That's how that technographic data can be used. I don't really use the revenue functionality, super unreliable, but job postings is a great way to do it. Obviously, like if they're hiring for IT support, but even if you're just looking at overall growth at a company, if we go to more filters, you can see some data around specifically how fast they're growing. So really common problem that MSPs help solve is onboarding and offboarding. If they're growing at like 20% or greater in the last year, then that gives me different messaging. So the plus side of a tool like Apollo is not just that like you can get the data itself, but also that you can build out some triggers that can make your messaging more relevant. And a tool like this additionally has this concept of plays. So once I build this really targeted, uh, search function, I can build a play where I can say add people like this to a sequence regularly. So I don't really care about the changes I made here, but if we look at plays, you can add to a sequence. And that's a lot of what we do is like add to similar, like add similar people researching your category, add contacts for this reason or that reason. And then on the other side, when you have a sequence in place, You can then create a play on the back end. This is a really common one that is just to call when an email is opened or clicked. There is this concept I talk about a lot when it comes to messaging itself, which is tiering your sequences. I believe you should have 3 tiers of your sequences. Your top tier, 100% manual. That's like your Dream 100 list. Your the list, your whatever, your warm 250, whatever you're calling that. Your top tier should not have more than 200, 250 companies in it. And you should be able to build a hypothesis for why those companies should buy from you. And your outreach should be personal. Send manual custom emails, make calls with like bullet points down on a piece of paper, knowing what you're gonna say. That's where personalization comes in. These should be the clients that you think you can charge $5,000 or more a month. It's, it's the upmarket goal, the people you think you could help the most, etc., and that you think have some type of trigger, or they're engaged with your company in such a way that you think they're more likely to buy from you and you don't want to burn them. That's tier 1. Tier 2 of your sequences should be those kind of like middle-of-the-road clients. Like, I would definitely not be upset if we onboarded these guys. They're in our ICP. If I put these filters into a tool like Apollo or I data scrape for them, these are the results I'm gonna get that are in my ICP and would score high, but I've never looked at their website. I don't know what their CEO's name is off the top of my head. Tier 2, you're gonna automate a lot of that sequence, but you're gonna set up triggers so that you will call them if they're engaged.

Mm-hmm.

Tier 3 is your throwaway, which by the way, highly recommend you run on a different domain Then you run your tier 1 and tier 2 sequences on because you don't want to burn your deliverability. That's a separate conversation. That tier 3 sequence, 100% automated. You're just— it's basically a throwaway. You're relying on volume rather than actually, like, really good messaging. The messaging should still be good. It should still be compelling, but it's built on a persona, not the actual individual that you're reaching out to. Yeah.

So you have a quantity play and a quality play. Of course they're both balanced, but—

And I will say that you can cut that quantity play entirely if it's not in line with your values. We don't do a ton of quantity outreach for MKC ourselves because it's not in line with our values, but we talk to our clients to decide whether or not we're doing it for them. Yeah. So because it's up to you, like, do you want a chance pissing people off on the opportunity they might reply to your email, or would you rather just not?

Well, I want to say, I mean, if you're— I'll let these people finish taking their notes because nobody could dare fault us for not providing as much specific value as we possibly can— could in these 90 minutes. We, we went pretty deep. Um, what we're gonna do is we've got about 5 minutes left, so right now is the time. Throw your questions, throw your Hail Mary questions in right now. While we're waiting for those questions to roll in, I'm going to talk for about 5 minutes on LinkedIn. Okay. Because if you know who I am, there's a good chance it's because of LinkedIn. I'm not a LinkedIn guru. I don't even know what that means. I'm not a salesfluencer. I'm just a guy who likes selling stuff. Okay. And my audience is on LinkedIn. That's so, that's where I am. Okay.

Same.

If your audience is on LinkedIn, you should use it. If your audience is not on LinkedIn, you shouldn't use it. Doctors don't use LinkedIn. If you're trying to get doctors, it's not going to be that way. That's my observation. If you're in the AEC space, there you go, you're going to get more LinkedIn. If you're in manufacturing, it's going to be less LinkedIn. They're not— those guys aren't always on LinkedIn, but depends on the scope. Anyway, 2 things I want to talk about right now as these questions continue to roll in. Any questions you guys have for us, just get it on the record, and if we don't have time, we'll get you with an email. There's 2 prongs to LinkedIn. There's going to be your content, and then there's going to be your outreach. Both of these are critical, and if you want LinkedIn to be successful, you need to revise your profile. And in short, your profile on LinkedIn is no longer a way for people to think of you as a candidate for a job.

Not if you're a business owner.

Not if you're a business owner. It should not say— your about section should not say dedicated and passionate individual whose, you know, career, 30-year stellar career has blah blah blah. That's not what it should be about. The first line of my About section says, are you tired of waiting for referrals? Because my About section is not about me, it's about you. That's why people read it. People don't read information about someone else, they read information about themselves. Okay, so I've got a whole bunch of training on LinkedIn. We just don't have the time to get into it now, but your profile needs to be optimized to be a landing page. It— you need to think of your LinkedIn page as I would argue just as important as your website's landing page, because it's— people want relationship with individuals, not with brands. We see this time and time again. There's, you know, Elon Musk has like 3 times more followers than Tesla does because people don't like following brands. They like following people. So they wanna follow you. And then your content needs to be freaking helpful. It can't just be like, I exist. It has to be helpful. If it's not helpful, don't post it, period. And from beyond there, if it's not helpful, if it's not clear, and if I would argue, if it is not unique, it bothers me that things that go viral are incredibly like regurgitated simple things that people already believe. So if you really, if you want to get likes, do simple, you know, cute puppy videos. If you want to get customers, be clear, contrarian, and unique. And you will get customers. And then and only then when you have content that's streaming, you should start adding people into your network because there's no point in being connected if you don't have content that's going to educate them about why they should become your customer. But if you're doing content and you have no followers, it's just as useless. So if you have 76 people in your network, you should not be paying one of these content people to post on your website every— or post on your LinkedIn every day. Go get connections first or alongside. Okay, there's a lot of trainings out there on how to do that. I'm sure you guys, um, you know, throw out a comment or let us know if you guys want a more LinkedIn-specific deep dive. But for the sake of time, Megan, I think what we maybe do is just— I think we give everybody a quick shot at how, if they wanted to hear more from each of us, maybe where or how they would do that. What do you think? And then we can end this sucker on time.

Yeah, absolutely.

Let's see, do we have— you've got links in there. This is great. So in the comments, Megan's got some more, a bunch of LinkedIn amazing stuff. Is there a website or something if, or somewhere that they could go, Megan, if they want to learn about you or get in touch with you?

Honestly, the best thing is you can see my LinkedIn profile right there. You can check out our website if you want to, but LinkedIn is better.

Okay, great.

It's more updated.

Follow, follow Megan. I'm putting this on there. Follow Megan Killian on LinkedIn. Um, there you go. She posts, she's got the spicy takes and she posts a lot. I love your videos. I love the stuff you've been doing. I'm loving this Spicy Monday trend. I'm like shamelessly jumping on this bandwagon.

I try. And I will say to kind of bring it back to what the point you were making earlier about what goes viral. Um, when I very first got started with LinkedIn, I posted a lot of stuff for reach, which is what I just crossed the 20,000 follower threshold this week.

Congratulations.

And that's what like really skyrocketed me in the followership. I never ever ever sold a deal from a post that went viral, ever. I have sold 7-figure, 8-figure deals off of LinkedIn posts that got very little reactions So I warn everybody that's using LinkedIn away from leaning into those kind of vanity metrics. It doesn't matter who likes, shares, engages with your content. What matters is what's happening in the DMs.

Right. 100%. Um, just got some great people on here. Thanks everybody for these comments. Uh, if you want to— so Megan posts great stuff. There's tons of ways to get ahold of her. I'm sure there's a lot of other value as she's already provided a lot of resources and stuff. Uh, I'm going to shamelessly, uh, plug this workshop next week. Listen, if you want more time to get into more practical sales stuff for MSP, uh, I got a workshop on Monday. It's 3 days, 90 minutes a day. It's $47. And I let in— I let in a dozen MSPs. That's it. And it's a Zoom call, so you, you have to talk. You show up and We you I ask you questions. I'll go on your website. We'll look at your web copy. So this is not a third monitor talking head sort of a situation. This is like I want to make more money now and I'm willing to do something about it.

Ha ha!

I have a perfect workshop for you. Feelgoodmsp.com/workshop. I have uh I don't remember how I I have less than ten seats left, but I'd love to have you. Forty seven bucks to get registered. You can go to that website there, Megan. Any thing that we need to let these folks know before we, we land the plane?

So I saw a whole bunch of comments initially that were like, send me the worksheet, and they are no longer there. So I don't know what happened, if that's a StreamYard thing or a LinkedIn thing or what. But if you want the worksheet, you can DM me and I'll send it to you. Or for the registrants, did we collect emails? Because if we did, I can just send an email blast and give everybody the resources.

Yeah, we might have. If nothing else, there Yeah, the comments do exist on LinkedIn. StreamYard just doesn't show all of us, so we can go back through and find those. But yeah, they, they do exist on LinkedIn.

I'll send a VA on a hunt. It'll be good.

Yeah, perfect. Okay, well guys, thanks so much. Megan, we did it. 90 minutes machine gunning as much as we could.

We got, we got through like 80% of our agenda. That's pretty good.

It's pretty good. And we didn't even talk about anything crazy. Or how birds aren't real or anything like that.

So no, no, no wild conspiracy theories were added. Yeah, so I hope everybody feels like it was a good use of your time. Um, I think it'll be available recorded for people that want to come check it back out. Um, and yeah, connect with us on LinkedIn, follow us, engage, engage with us, tell your friends, and join Brian's workshop.

Yes.

For $47, like, really, what What's the worst thing that could happen?

I don't know.

You feel like you wasted a little bit of time? I don't think so. I don't think that's gonna be the takeaway. I actually can say personally that I onboarded one of Brian's clients recently to one of our SDR programs. Normally onboarding with an MSP is frightening because they don't know what to do with leads when they get them. But the client that I onboarded from Brian was one, an absolute gem to onboard because he He already had an ICP. He already had an idea of his messaging and strategy and what to do with a prospect when he got in front of them. He really truly did just need more at-bats. And he told me that Brian's responsible for major growth at his company. I think he said like 60%, but I don't remember the exact stat off the top of my head.

$1 million to $1.6 million.

Yes, that is 60%. And he credited, I think, one of your workshops, right?

Yeah, he came to— he closed a $2,500 MRR deal from my 3-day workshop, and then he ended up working with me, and then he became a client.

Yeah.

Uh, yeah, good shout out to Fred. It's— yeah, thanks Megan for that. I appreciate it. And, um, yeah, Megan is the only agency, the only BDR agency I would ever— I only ever send people to. That's the only reason we're here, because most of them I think are, are kind of a sham. But, um, that's why we're here, guys.

Automation and tell you that that's Not automation, right?

Amazing. Okay, everybody, thanks so much. Uh, go kill it today. Hope, hope this was helpful. Send us any questions or comments, and, uh, maybe we'll do another one of these, Megan, in the future.

Sounds great.

All right, for now, guys.

Bye for now.