Building Raving Fans in the MSP Community

Hey, what's up friends? I'm going to share a little bit of a course that we're working on inside of Empath, and actually something that is just a part of my heart and soul and area of passion for me, which is how do we build raving fans? Now I'm not saying that I have raving fans, I'm not saying that Empath has raving fans, I'm just going to give you some thoughts over the years that I have put in place that I think really does have staying power in effect. Now the focus for this is MSP vendors, so people that just like Empath. So I know a lot of you guys are watching the things that I produce on YouTube and LinkedIn, so I figured I'd just put this out for you specifically. But if you're not a— maybe you're an MSP, not an MSP vendor, great. I think you can watch this and easily tweak it for your uses. Maybe you're not in our channel ecosystem at all and you still follow me. Well, I'm sure there's some ways this will be helpful. All right, so I'm going to probably turn this into a mini series. So this is going to be the first little bit for you, and then I'll drip some more out in the next week or two. All right. So many of you heard this quote from Bob Burg. All things being equal, people will do business with and refer business to people they know, like, and trust. Now I love this Bob Burg quote, you know, and first of all, let's not skip the very beginning. All things being equal, right? So, so people can know, like, and trust you and your company can still fall down if you don't deliver well on what you say. If you have some pricing problems, if you don't listen to your, your partners really well, then it doesn't matter if they know, like, and trust you individually. I know people at certain vendors, and I'm not going to name names or call anyone out. I don't have a particular vendor in mind on this, but I know great people that have lost— that have went away and walked away from bad vendors. It happens. And one of the reasons for it is they say, I know that the people I work with know, like, and trust me, but the company I work for doesn't represent my personal values. And at some point, that becomes a liability to me. At some point, I have to answer, why am I still at this vendor that doesn't represent me? And so they walk away. And then what you notice is that company becomes a shell. It becomes a husk of what it used to be. What happened to all the good people? Well, the good people walked away because they didn't want their name to be tarnished with everyone else around them. That happens. It's a real thing. So that, all things being equal, is important to remember when we talk about raving fans. But assuming that we do a good job of that, or even a medium job at that, even assuming we hit status quo, then we get into this stage where people do business with those they know, like, and trust. If I really think, oh man, that vendor in particular really understands who I am. So I love this quote, but I want to do a Michael Scott, you know how he missed 100% of the shots you don't take, Wayne Gretzky crossed it out, put his name on. I want to do the same thing with Bob's quote. So Take a look at this small tweak we've made. All things being equal, people will do business with and refer business to when they feel like you know them and you like them and you trust them. So what I'm doing is I'm reversing the quote and making about us. What I mean by that is we need to start thinking about this a little bit more like this. Can we prove to them that I know them? Can I prove to them that I like them? Can I prove to them that I trust them? If we can prove to them those things, then I think we take the raving fan capability to the next level. Let me show you how we can flesh this out. I'm going to give you an example and then you can use this. And I would encourage you to use this. I would encourage you, if you're a vendor watching this today or an MSP watching this today, take what I'm about to show you and workshop this in your own company. Take your team aside and build upon this and work on it. Okay. So here's a very simple little guide right here. How do we prove that we know them? How do we prove that we like them? How do we prove that they trust us? So I've got some examples here for each of these. And I would go through these as, again, as a workshop and say, are we— in what ways do we match up and what would we put in and measure them and have some KPIs you can build around this to hold yourself accountable to this. So let's start with the first column. How do we prove that we know them? Well, one is we can explain and articulate their livelihood. Look, one of the most important things you can do as a vendor is prove to an MSP you know their life. They're drowned in 15 to 20 to 35 tickets a day for each person. Owners are terrified of some major cybersecurity event potentially, at no fault of their own, shutting their business down. They don't have 401s and pensions. It's their business. That's all they have. We have to prove that we understand the burden that they have of juggling 25 different tools, maybe not that many, although some do, and the burden and challenge of getting those out to market. I can't just go buy your new tool and go sell your new tool. Stop looking at me as a cash cow and start looking at me as a partner. So proving we know them. The other one, how do we prove we know them? We're actually producing for them free content that's usually ungated. Maybe some of it is gated, but most of it is, we're just giving it away. And it's stuff that I know they're using, stuff that's actually helpful. If you want an example of this, we recently produced and is available free— just reach out to us, we'll give it to you— a list of 5 cybersecurity objections and how do you handle them. How do you deal with— then a client comes and says, I'm not paying for that, I've never been a target, why now? Those are tough things. And so because we know that those are tough objections, we built some talk tracks around that that I have found to be helpful, that I've I personally used in my own life, and then we gave them away. It's for anybody. And so that's a great way to prove that I know you. If I'm producing stuff that you're coming back to me saying, dude, Wes, that was really helpful, that was really useful, thank you— we've proven that we know them, that we know their challenges. So I would say go back and look at what you're producing. What is your marketing team's producing? What kind of content? And are people downloading it? Are they using it? Are you getting good feedback from it? Is it helping the MSP better? If you make that work, you can prove that you know who an MSP is. All right, those are two examples. Maybe you're doing some of those, maybe you're not. What else would you add? That's why I've got the third one blank. Workshop this with your team and figure it out. Let's move to the next column. How do we prove that we like them? Not just that we know them. There's some vendors out there that know MSP really well, but I don't think they like their partners. I'm not, again, not picking on anyone specific, but we have to prove that we like them. So here's some ways we can do that. We can go spend time with them. Maybe at conferences we meet them. We, we don't just come and drop in at a talk and then walk out and never see them again. Stay for 30 minutes at a booth and walk away. No, we actually prove that we care about them. We like them. We spend time. Then we hang out with them. I'm going to call out two people that I think do a really good job with this and go follow them on LinkedIn. Follow them at conferences and watch them do it. One is Adam Slutskin from Cyberfox. Go watch that guy. He genuinely loves MSPs. He's calling them up on the reg. He's meeting— he doesn't have to go to the booth, but he chooses to because he likes to. He hangs out with them late at night. I've seen him close the bar down, but not like because he's out busy being a wild person. He's just spending time talking to MSPs and he's there to the last minute. The other person I'm going to call out, and you know who it's going to be, Rob Ray. Rob is known for this. Go watch how Rob does this. He remembers things about people. He asks questions. He actually— he looks at someone in the eye and he smiles. You can tell I'm not just another number. Rob cares about me and he does such a good job of that. So just two people. I would love to know, who would you pick? Who would you call out? There's other awesome people that do a good job of this, but prove that you like them. The other column that I added here, the other area in that column is under, under the like, is we try to meet with MSPs in their office. Maybe you say, look, we're going to be in Dallas for this event. I got 3 MSPs. I'm going to go swing by one of them and take them out to lunch. Just show up and say hi. Spend time in their world. Maybe you do some things like you do a lunch and learn for their clients and you come in and speak for them. Those are great things that you can do to prove that you like them. Now, the last column, how do we prove that they trust us? So we've proven that we know them. We've proven to them that we like them. Now, how do we build trust? Well, there's some ways we can do this. First of all, I love this first example I wrote is MSP memories go long, trust goes deep, but gossip goes wide. MSPs will talk about you behind your back. People say, is that person really what we think they are? What about that vendor? What do you think about that, man? This one time they did this one thing and they didn't fix the problem, and they tell everyone. And gossip goes wide, as it should. And, and trust— here's the awesome thing: you build trust with MSPs and you don't violate that trust. That goes a long way. Doesn't mean they're going to automatically buy everything you do, but it does mean that they're going to care about you and they really listen to what you say and they believe in what you say and they know that you're someone that they can rely on. That goes— that's so important. MSP memories go really long, and that's something fairly unique about our industry, whereas outside of our industry you can do people dirty and there's thousands and thousands and thousands of others. Just it never goes further than that. I don't think that works in the MSP space. You got to really work on your integrity and character. And then another one, we're transparent on Reddit and other places and we don't get downvoted to Hades and back. I love this. This is another great example of like, we don't— we're not perfect, but when we make a mistake, we own it. We communicate it clearly and we tell people what we're doing about it. And people are like, oh, I don't expect you to be perfect. I expect you to care. I expect you to communicate and expect you to answer. So there we have in under 10 minutes my first section on how to prove raving fans. And it starts with this, making sure that we know that we can prove to them that they know, like, and trust us. Us. What thoughts would you add to this? Give me some comments down below. Thanks.