Reviews for MSPs

Hey guys, I'm Megan Killian.

I've done $550 million in B2B tech revenue. $50 million of that has been for MSPs, and I'm here today to talk to you about your Google reviews. Most MSPs have Google reviews, and very few of those have actual proof in them. They're not the same thing. A review that says great company, very responsive is nice. I'm glad that your client likes you. Truly, it means you're delivering on the scope of work or the MSA. But that doesn't tell a prospect why they should choose you over the other 5 MSPs in their city who also claim to be responsive, proactive, strategic, secure, and all the other words every MSP has beaten into dust. 5 MSPs is a light guess, by the way. Let's take a look. I'm in Orlando, and I'm gonna look up MSPs near me.

You can see my screen, right? All right. So we've got people paying for sponsored results.

I've actually never heard of One IT before. So they're newish to our market, or they just started investing in Google Ads.

Never heard of All Covered either. Then we've got a couple different Google Maps results. Support My MSPs. Interesting. That's a weird name.

Miles IT sponsored. Oh, look, Cloud Tango. Let's see top managed service providers in Orlando, how many there are. Taylor Works. I used to work there. They're better reviewed than Scarlet Group, but Scarlet Group is higher. Just heard of a lot of these guys, but look how long I can scroll like. These are definitely all Orlando MSPs. Okay, so that's CloudTangle. Let's look at Clutch. I've never actually looked at MSP database before, but okay, so there's 189, 189 MSPs serving my market that are on just Clutch, which is also a review system. So that's a, that's a lot. Like, that's a big market to try to be grabbing a share of, right? And if we don't differentiate, then what we end up in is a commodity market. And if we're in a commodity market, the only way to compete is on price. And that means you're driving the value of what you do, we do, what the channel does down, down, down, down, down. So the problem isn't that your reviews are bad. But the problem is that you're probably treating them like reputation management, When they should be part of your overall revenue infrastructure. And yes, I do know that that sounds a little dramatic, but this matters because reviews are no longer just a nice little trust badge sitting at the bottom of your website. They influence whether people click, whether they trust you, whether AI tools recommend you, whether Google understands your relevance, and whether your sales team has anything credible to use when a buyer asks, why should we pick you? So today I want to talk about how MSPs can turn reviews into actual sales proof without being manipulative, without buying fake reviews, and without sounding like a LinkedIn growth bro who just discovered the word weaponize. 5 stars isn't enough. It's not a positioning strategy.

It's a baseline.

It tells the buyer this company probably does not light the building on fire.

Great, helpful, bare minimum.

But when every decent MSP in your market has a 4.7, 4.8, or 4.9, the stars stop doing the heavy lifting. The buyer isn't just asking, are they good? They're asking, are they good for a company like mine? Do they understand my industry? Will they actually answer the phone? Will they communicate clearly? Will they prevent problems or just close tickets? Will they make my life easier, or am I about to inherit another vendor that I have to babysit? And that's where most MSP review strategies are falling apart. They collect the review, say thank you, maybe slap it on the website and move on. But they never extract the useful sales language. They never ask, what does this review actually prove? Does it prove speed? Does it prove executive trust? Does it prove fewer recurring tickets? Does it prove better onboarding or less downtime? Does it prove that a non-technical business owner finally understands what is happening with their IT? Because that's the stuff that your buyers care about, not highly recommend.

Highly recommend is fine.

Highly recommend does not close the deal. Most MSPs tell me that referrals are their number one growth motion.

So how do we make a prospect who's never heard of you before feel like they were referred to you?

The first shift is simple. Stop looking at reviews as compliments and start looking at them as buyer research. Your reviews are your clients telling you in their own words what they value, and that's incredibly useful if you're paying attention. When you read through your reviews, look for repeated patterns. Do people keep mentioning fast response times? That is not just a review, that is a positioning clue. Do people keep mentioning communication? Again, another clue. Do people keep saying that your team explains technical issues clearly? Another clue. Do people mention that you helped them through a transition, a cyber event, a compliance issue, a move, a new office, or a bad previous provider? It's not just social proof, it's messaging. The mistake most MSPs make is that they summarize all of that down into mush. They take specific client language and turn it into generic marketing copy. A client says they helped us get through a messy office move without losing a day of work, and the MSP turns that into We provide proactive IT support for growing businesses.

No! Stop standing the interesting parts off of your proof. The specificity is the fucking asset. A better version would be, our clients rely on us during high-risk operational moments like office moves, vendor transitions, and infrastructure changes when downtime is not an option. That's stronger. That tells me why I need you. That gives sales something to say. That gives your website something useful to explain. And that gives your next prospect a reason to believe you.

And here's where it starts getting spicy, but not sleazy. Your competitors' reviews are, are useful too. Not because you should attack them by name. Do not do that. It makes you look weird, small, and desperate. But competitor reviews will tell you exactly where the market is frustrated. If the bad reviews in your market keep saying they never call us back, tickets disappear, we never know what's going on, they nickel and dime everything, they were great at first, then service declined. They made us feel stupid. They did not explain the risk. They were reactive. They missed important follow-up. It's not gossip, it's market intelligence. Those reviews are telling you what your buyers are afraid of before they ever get on a sales call. So instead of saying our competitors are slow and terrible, you say, if you have worked with an MSP where every ticket felt like it disappeared into a black hole, our process is built differently. You get clear ownership, clear communication, and visibility into what is happening before you have to chase us.

That is ethical competitive positioning. You're not inventing fear, you're answering the fear that already exists in the market. And that's the difference between manipulation and relevance. Once you know the themes, you can actually use them. Here are 5 places that your reviews should be showing up. First, your website. Not just a carousel of random testimonials. I hate those.

Everyone ignores them.

Use reviews inside the pages where they support the point being made. If your cybersecurity page says you help clients reduce risk, place a review nearby from a client who specifically mentions feeling more confident, more protected, or more informed. If your co-managed IT page says you support internal teams, use a quote from someone who talks about partnership, communication, or technical depth. If your local IT support page says you are responsive, use proof that actually talks about response time. Second, your sales deck.

Now, first, I just wanna caveat this by saying that I don't particularly like sales decks, and I will do a separate video on why I think that they're a waste of marketing dollars. But if you use them, your sales deck should not just say who you are and list your services. It should reduce the perceived risk. A good review can do that if it's tied to a specific buyer concern. For example, the concern, will switching MSPs be, be painful? Then use proof from a client who talks about a smooth transition. The concern: will your team actually communicate? Use proof from a client who talks about clear updates. If the concern is, are you strategic or just ticket-based? Then you can use proof from a client who talks about planning, roadmap, or business impact. Third, your sales follow-up. After a sales call, do not just send, it was great speaking with you. Send proof that matches the conversation. If the prospect complained about their current provider's poor communication, send a review or case study snippet about communication. This does not mean after the call, load up all your case studies and reviews and send them all. It means slow down, think about what their primary concern was, or 2 or 3, then find the social proof that is relevant to that and send only that, preferably in snippet form where they can like click in and see more if they want to. So an example of that would be like if your case studies are hosted on your website, you could send a screenshot of a quote from that case study and then hyperlink that screenshot so that they could click through and see the full case study if they wanted.

The reality is that your prospects don't care about you as much as you do, and they don't want to do hours and hours and hours of research on you. They want you, the salesperson, the owner, the person benefiting from the transaction, to do the hard work For them, clean it up, make it easy, remove the friction from the process.

So if they're worried about onboarding, you should send proof about onboarding. If they're in healthcare, send healthcare proof. If they're in manufacturing, send manufacturing proof. Relevance beats volume. Fourth, your Google Business Profile responses. Stop replying to every review with, thank you for your kind words, we appreciate your business.

That is dead copy. Instead, reply in a way that reinforces the value For example, thank you. We're glad the onboarding process felt smooth and the team had clear communication throughout the transition. That is exactly what we aim for when helping growing companies move from reactive IT support to a more stable managed services model. We love to hear that our process is working. That response does 3 jobs. It thanks the client, it reinforces the specific proof, and it provides future buyers language to understand why the review matters. Okay, your short-term video. This is wildly underused.

Take one review theme and make a 30-second video about it. Not look at this nice review, nobody cares. Make it useful. So for example, you could say a lot of business owners think responsiveness means answering fast, but what our clients actually value is not just speed, it's ownership. They want to know someone saw the issue, understands the context, and is driving it to its resolution. That's a much better use of a review than screenshotting 5 stars and calling it content. So now let's talk about getting better reviews. You can't script fake reviews. You shouldn't be bribing people for positive ones. And if your review strategy depends on gaming the system, congratulations, you built a liability without a marketing budget. But you can ask better questions. Most MSPs ask, can you leave us a review?

That's too vague. Vague asks create vague reviews. Instead, guide the client towards specificity without telling them what to say. Ask, would you be willing to mention what changed after we took over your IT support? Or could you share what the onboarding experience was like for your team? Or would you be comfortable mentioning how our communication compares to what you had before? Or if another business owner was considering working with us, what would you want them to know?

Or could you mention the specific problem we helped solve? If you know your clients well, if you've got a great account manager, you can be even more specific. So you can send a question. Like your account manager could send something like, here's kind of an overview of what we've done for you so far. It seems like the impact is X. Would you be willing to leave us a review explaining how transformative XYZ was? Give them a little bit of help. Don't write the review for them. It always reads, right? Like you're gonna write it differently than they would write it. AI is gonna write it differently than they would write it. Let them use their own voice. You can help them figure out what they should be saying. It's not manipulation, it's helping the client be useful. And if they do like the service that you're providing and they're agreeing to leave you a review, they probably want to be useful to you. Because here's the thing, happy clients often do know what to write. They defaulted to great company because they're busy and they're trying to be nice. Your job is to make it easier for them to tell the truth in a way future buyers can actually use. Think of it as prompting instead of controlling.

So what can you do this week? Here's what I would do if I was an MSP owner looking at this right now. I'd pull my last 20 to 25 positive reviews if I had them, less if I didn't. I'd put them in a spreadsheet, then I tagged each one by theme: speed, communication, security, strategic guidance, onboarding, trust, technical expertise, business continuity, industry knowledge, executive confidence. Then I'd ask 3 things.

One, What do our clients keep praising us for? 2, is that actually reflected in our website, sales deck, proposals, and follow-up? 3, what do unhappy buyers complain about in competitor reviews, and are we clearly positioned as the antidote? And that last part matters because your positioning should not just describe what you do, it should answer the market's existing frustration. If your market is tired of slow MSPs, prove your speed. If your market is tired of vague communication, prove your clarity. And if your market is tired of reactive ticket shops, prove strategic ownership. If your market is tired of surprise invoices, prove transparency. If they're tired of being made to feel stupid, prove that you can explain technical risk in plain English. That's how reviews become revenue assets, not because you weaponize them, because you made them useful. The MSPs that win locally are not always the ones with the most reviews. They're the ones with the clearest point of view. Proof. Reviews are not just reputation management anymore.

They're search signals, trust signals, AI recommendation signals, sales enablement, voice of customer research. And when you treat them like that, you stop collecting random compliments and start building a proof engine. So if your reviews are just sitting on Google doing nothing, the question is not how do we get more 5-star ratings? The better question is, what do our reviews prove?

And are we using that proof anywhere buyers actually make decisions? Because if the answer is no, you may not have a lead problem, you may have a proof problem.

And that is exactly the kind of thing we diagnose inside Revenue Triage.