How MSPs can suck at marketing, less

Welcome to today's MSPs in Conversation. Our topic today is how MSPs can suck less at marketing. First of all, thank you to our panelists for joining today. We're all very excited to talk a little bit about marketing. We love this topic, and we can likely talk until the cows come home about this stuff. If you do have any questions that you want to ask throughout the session, please drop them in the chat. We did have an issue with the chat, but it looks like it's fixed now. If you've got any questions at all, drop them in there. This session will be recorded as always; it will be sent out and syndicated out on our various channels. It is also available now as a podcast on your favorite podcast tool, which is very exciting.

All right, panelists, I'll get you to introduce yourselves. We'll start with Jamie.

Hey everybody, Jamie Warner, CEO of Invarosoft and also CEO of MSP eNerds. Super excited to be here, and keen to share a little bit of my knowledge in this space with you all.

Thanks Jamie. Nigel, welcome back.

Hello, thank you for having me again. Nigel Moore, founder of The Tech Tribe, which is a global community of MSPs all around the world. I love talking about the marketing game. It is one of my favorite areas to dive into, so I'm looking forward to this one.

And James, welcome back again.

Thank you. I'm director of academy — what a fancy title. So I'm in charge of education in Pax8 for partners. I'm excited to talk about marketing and come from a bit of a different spin around the operational side and how it flows through, and what we don't do very well.

Fantastic. Well, a little bit about us, Hosted Network. Hosted Network is a wholesale cloud and telco provider that serves only Aussie MSPs. You probably already know all of our services; they're there in front of you. If you are new to Hosted Network, feel free to reach out for a chat. But today is all about you guys, so let's turn off the slides and jump right into it.

Getting Your First MSP Clients: Early Marketing War Stories

So my first question. Jamie, with eNerds, yours is the MSP, because the two other panelists today have jumped out of MSP land, so I'm going to throw this very first one to someone that is currently in MSP land. How did you start your marketing journey when you first started?

Well, you would think that I'd be good at it, because I actually did a Bachelor of Business in marketing and did an honors in marketing.

Really? Yeah.

So clearly I'm the guru. But no, I mean, ultimately you just end up memorizing a bunch of textbooks and it's all very theoretical and high-level sales and marketing, like beer companies and all that stuff.

Exactly, the four Ps.

So I guess when I first started my business, that's probably where the name came from, to be honest. So eNerds was the first marketing decision, interestingly. And to this day now, I speak to hundreds of MSPs. Names are interesting, because a lot of people have "tech" in the name. It just seems to be quite similar, and it was the same 22 years ago. So that's why I actually decided to call it eNerds. It's partly because I was young, 22, but mostly because I thought it would be memorable, so that they'd remember that name. And you know, when users go from one client to the next that you might not be supporting, in that sense it makes it a bit easier for them to go, "Oh yeah, the nerds, like those guys, right?"

So marketing — I tried to bring what I'd learned at uni to the table, but I started so long ago. The first thing I did marketing-wise, I had a dial-up internet connection, so our tech back at home base was super awesome. And then I had a fax marketing piece of software that would fax out this page that I did in Word using clip art, and I was just fax-bombarding people in that methodology. So that was my first technique. The second technique to get things going was to also still use those clip art design skills I had. Because I had no money, right? I had no money, I was a student, I launched at 22. So I don't have any money, I had to do everything off the smell of an oily rag. And I got a couple of guys to wear eNerds polos and just walk around every business in the city and North Sydney, and hand out that same very old-fashioned looking piece of marketing material. And long story short, that's where it all started. We've managed to scale to 50 staff now, but I'll save that journey for a second.

We don't do a hell of a lot different from what some of the smaller MSPs do. If anything, we probably should be doing a lot more than we do for our size. But interestingly, and probably testament to the business model, is that one of the clients we got in that first — I don't know if it was the fax or if it was the actual physical drop-off — we still have as a client, New South Wales Meals on Wheels, and they've been a loyal customer ever since. So it's a fascinating game.

Certainly, I think my preamble comment to you all to maybe set the scene for today is that sales and marketing is really hard, and I'm happy it's hard. Why am I happy it's hard? Because that means churn is low. So everybody rides through tough times well, the MSP business model, compared to other industries, because of its annuity nature, is quite stable. It's sticky. People don't leave you. If they're not leaving you, it makes it bloody hard to get them as a client, doesn't it? So your sales and marketing efforts become harder because you're essentially selling relationships. So it'd be great today — I'm sure we'll uncanvas all of that — to talk about how do you then deal in a scenario when trying to get a new customer is intrinsically hard, but you kind of want it to be all hard.

Okay, well I'll add that to my list, and we'll try and do a bit of a deep dive into that. I like that. And if anyone has watched our previous MSP marketing 101 series, we often talked in there about sales and marketing being jointly tied together, right? Too many businesses operate them kind of independently, whereas they should be like a married old couple, sort of thing, bickering at each other.

Nigel, so when you started your MSP, what did you do to get your first few clients?

I was actually really lucky in that I was working for another MSP at the time, and that MSP kind of imploded. So I woke up on a Monday morning with a bunch of clients on my books, and so I didn't have to go out and do that crazy pound-the-pavement walk that a lot of MSP startups have to go and do. But that gave me enough clients to pay for my food; it didn't give me enough clients to go and run a profitable business on. I had enough to eat and pay my rent, but I wasn't hacking away at my debt at all. So I did have to go out and start to do some marketing. But it wasn't initially, and so, like Jamie, I had no money, no idea of what marketing was apart from my business university background where they'd teach you the four Ps and it's all enterprise gobbledygook and crap.

So my first forays into the marketing world were, hey, let me go and spend weeks designing the world's most amazing looking business cards and getting my logo super awesome, and then let me spend another couple of weeks painstakingly building a corporate-looking website, and then sit back and wait for the clients to roll through my door. And it did not happen, and it didn't happen for a long time. I had no idea about the direct marketing world, I had no idea about cold calling or networking or any of those sorts of things. And so I was kind of just sitting there going, where do I get these clients from, and having no idea. And it took me a good few years to work out that throwing a shingle on a wall and putting a website up and spending money on business cards, and time more importantly on business cards and stuff like that, is a useless endeavor, unless you're bundling it in with some other tactics where you're actually getting people to see your website and getting your business card in their hands. And that took me some time.

It eventually got to the point where — I again still had no money — so I just did a lot of networking, a lot of events around the place, just trying to build my network and meet people, and build my confidence as well. I was wildly introverted in my early years, to the point where I could not have a conversation with another person very easily without sweat dripping down my shirt. And I always wore white shirts so nobody could see the sweat pouring out of me. So going to networking events was really hard, but I kept doing it and kept doing it and kept doing it. And I used to use a website called Meetup.com, which is a global website where you can find meetups in most places around the world, pretty much every night. So I'd go and just force myself to go along to sometimes breakfast meetups, mostly nighttime meetups, in all different types of industries, meeting lots of different people. And that started to get the wheels rolling and starting to get a few clients on board.

Then I dived into building some relationships with some of the line-of-business vendors that we were looking at across our existing client base, and taking them out to lunch and whatever, and started getting deal flow that way as well. Well before we started doing any paid campaigns or direct mail or anything like that, I started just on that pound-the-pavement, meet people, build that network, and just see how we could be helpful to that network that I was building. And that took a lot of time, a lot of stepping out of my comfort zone to go and do it. But it paid off immensely in the end.

I think you touched on a point that we've all seen businesses do over the years, and that's where they potentially put all this effort and time into the super fancy — maybe not the clip art fancy — brochures or website or business cards or whatever it might be, but not getting it out there. Back before Hosted, I'm a network engineer by trade, many people know that. I used to run a marketing agency, and you guys are the panelists today, so I'm not going to talk too much on it. But I used to have a saying that if it's pink and ugly and it works, then so be it, right? You can build the fanciest website possible, but it's like a storefront. If it's not in a shopping center, with no foot traffic, if it's out in the sticks, no one's going to it, it's not doing its job.

Marketing to Why Clients Switch: Relationships Over Tech Stacks

Yeah, I want to jump in on that, and that's the thing in terms of what the customer is looking for. I mean, this is my opinion, so it's obviously not a rubber stamp thing that this is the way of the world, but from my experience of 22 years, the main reason that they will look to change is — if you are operating in a scenario where it's quite sticky, so why do they leave? They leave because you let them down. You let them down, you let them down, and they actually will give you a few chances, and then finally decide, "All right, I'm done, I'm done, I need a new relationship."

And so when you think about using marketing to find leads, which is the whole point of marketing — to fill up a funnel so you can go and speak to them, and there should be people that are potentially interested in your services — what I've been observing is that the only people interested really, if you want to get them on a monthly support arrangement, is when they're ready to go, right? So you can do a lot of pre-work stuff, and maybe others have more experience than I do in that space, but the best leads, if you want to start the process with the best leads you could possibly get, are the ones that are essentially looking — they're looking for a new relationship. So when you're doing your marketing, whatever it happens to be, that is kind of the signal that you're looking for, and you need to understand that to then pick your methodology in that sense.

So for example, I've tried every methodology from telemarketing to — I literally bought a dude, a sales guy, a car, because we didn't have enough cars for him, so we bought another one. He used that to go to construction businesses of a certain size. We had construction leaflets — sorry, the brochures inside the folders, all construction, everything else — and you go looking and looking and looking, and the only couple of leads we got were ones that had already made that decision to go. Because it requires a cadence, it requires ongoing effort. So one of the things we realized is, if we weren't going to invest in big teams of marketing — we probably operate our marketing like a smaller MSP does — is that we'll go to where those people looking for a new partnership are probably going to go, right? And they tend to go to Google straight away, and they'll go to their friends and colleagues and that sort of thing. It's why when Nigel was doing networking and relationships and those sorts of things, you're in the game, and then people are aware, and they're like, go and speak to Nigel. That's a very, very strong methodology for doing it.

But I think at the heart of all of this is just to understand why someone's looking. And part of the reason why I want to say that is because most MSPs, I've been observing, are not thinking like that. They think that the customer is looking for another technical solution. So the way they present themselves is very much focused on the tech, on the stack. If I ever hear the word "stack" I'm gonna kill myself. There's too much about stack — my stack, what's my stack. Whoopsies, I apologize. But you don't need — it's not about the stack, because they're looking for a relationship. You need to talk about that stuff, but is it the first thing you need to be talking about? Is it really? Did they leave because they wanted a new PC or they wanted a new firewall? Maybe, sometimes. But really, if you read between the lines, they felt like they needed to go somewhere and the partner wouldn't let them do it, for whatever reason — not getting back to them, not feeling like they had the right skills, so they lost confidence in the partnership. So probably the first thing to understand when you do any marketing is to understand your target market, understand the audience, and then frame whatever it is you're going to do with that deep understanding. So, food for thought.

I think that point is the most overlooked component, the people part. And having been in three very distinct industries that are all service-based, there was a different methodology of how I had to generate the leads, but it all came down to what are the people looking for. They're wanting a relationship. It's a service-based business, we're not selling products without a face. I've done the old-school method, like working in gardening and trades, it was all brushes, and I understood what my clients and prospects were looking for, and understood what the competition was doing and what they weren't doing well. So I was able to frame up quite a simple methodology. A lot of them were doing the clip art black-and-white loose-leaf paper because they didn't have any money, where I could spend four grand on a Chinese-takeout-strong piece of cardboard with colors, and I get 40 grand worth of gross margin from every four grand that I spent on that marketing.

Now, MSPs are a lot different than what you're saying there, Jamie. It's really difficult to generate leads because there are so few people in the market looking at one time that are ready to go. And when they're looking, if they're looking at Google, every website looks the same. Every website looks the same. I work with a lot of MSPs and I look at their websites, they're all the same. I don't know how many times I can say that. Sometimes they even have the same picture of the same people because they've used stock images photography. Oh my god, lesson one, don't use stock photos, please. Real — your point around finding where they're at and talking to them in that tribal, private way is really difficult for a lot of MSPs. Outside of the whole "we're not taking into account the people component," we don't actually know who our clients are and what the verticals are and what the unique differences we're actually providing. So we just look all the same, and we can't target that messaging and can't decide on the correct methodologies to actually go spend our time and effort on.

And from what I've found, the guys who are the most successful in the MSP world in their marketing, they've got some sort of a niche, whether that's a verticalization, whether that's a specific play in technology, whether that's a play around specific needs around security and compliance. Today, in the red ocean market of MSPs, if you're just a generic MSP, it's very hard to stand out from the crowd, let alone then start tying into the people component. So it's really important to step back before you start chucking time and effort and money into marketing. And that's what most MSPs do, and they burn a fortune on it, and they'll focus on the widgets, the products and the features and all that sort of stuff.

So it depends what you're trying to build. If you want to have more support deals, which is the most profitable line item of any MSP in my view — everything else is really just fries with that — then you frame yourself a certain way. You are essentially looking for new people that are looking to outsource. If you want to focus on certain industries, you don't mind, you'll take consulting gigs, you'll take whatever, then there's lots of work out there to do that sort of stuff. My viewpoint of growing a business is very much the reoccurring revenue model. So if that's the mindset, that's what you should search for.

And I'll give you an example. So you could be like, "Oh, but I just want to get leads, I want to get somebody in the door to have a chat with me, so I'll start putting ads up for Office 365 migrations," or "you want to go to the cloud," or whatever it happens to be, but not around support. And so when you get those leads, you're going to get what you're saying, because that's what they're looking for, and then that type of work is going to be transactional. So you're going to spend a lot of marketing dollars on potentially the wrong type of deal than you want. If you want those deals and you want to have that transactional type of business, then awesome, you will achieve that. But if you're trying to build something that over time doesn't require you to be working in it, then that is as simple as signing up more dollars than you lose every year, and therefore you've got to be looking and positioning yourself that way. So it's just getting the head right.

And it's very easy to suddenly look at all your tools, look at all the stuff — not even the tools, look at the stuff that you actually sell — and start wanting to frame messages around that. And what makes it worse — you've probably forgotten — but the vendors are just relentless. I mean, vendors seriously, whether it be Dell or HP or whatever happens to be, it's like, "do the latest marketing campaign," I'll push you and push you to do that. So you go, "Oh okay, yeah, I'll send some messaging out around that." Well, with a limited time around your marketing function in your business, you just want to be clear. If you're clear on who you're targeting, you want to be clear on your messaging and make sure that it's going to get what you're looking for. Don't get distracted. If you're looking for a new support deal, don't start advertising for Office 365 migrations. That's just a complete disconnect between what you're doing, and it happens because you get pushed that way from vendors wanting you to do things. So I think clarity is important.

Okay, so with that in mind, to kind of conclude what you guys were saying, think about who you're selling to — the individual, what are their pain points — but also the vertical, what pain points are there. Some good tidbits there, I like that.

Marketing Activities With Real ROI: Face-to-Face, Google Ads and Direct Mail

All right, so let's move on a little bit. We've talked about a couple of different things that you guys have all done, from brochures with good old clip art to the fancy brochures. In terms of activities, when I talk to our various partners, I often see MSPs doing marketing activity for kind of the sake of it. It's like they feel that they need to do some activity, and so they just, sometimes a marketing agency says, "Oh hey, well you do this," and it's like, "Oh yeah, great," and it's kind of airy-fluffy and it doesn't really drive any results, right? Marketing needs to have a return on investment, right? So with that in mind, what types of activities — obviously ideally you have a nice planned-out campaign, but that doesn't always work out in all cases — what types of areas, be it social, brochures, pay-per-click, those sort of areas, have you guys seen the most success in? James, in terms of your partners?

Quite honestly, it goes back to what Jamie and Nigel were saying about when they started their businesses — it's getting out there and actually being face-to-face with people. If you're setting yourself up in the circles that you want to work in, and they know who you are, and you're setting yourself up as that expert, you're the instant drop. They're not even going to look for other people at that point, and your marketing becomes the validation of what you're saying. It's funny how it's a supportive thing, it is, and it's not a leading thing. The ones that are growing fast and making quite good returns and good money out of it are just hitting the pavement and going to events, presenting, getting involved in industry groups, and circling in those tribes. They're not generically doing Google AdWords and SEO.

Interesting. And that's where I sort of see the success as well — the guys that run things like lunch-and-learns, where they get that face-to-face, and then they use other things to support them. Nigel, what about you? What do you see? I mean, you've got partners across the globe. What do you see that is currently working?

Loads of things. Like Jamie — Jamie built a lot of his business off the back of Google Ads, and using Google Ads sending people that are, as he was talking about, very low in the funnel because they're very hot, they're looking to move to someone else, they're searching for "IT support Sydney" or "IT support New York" or whatever it happens to be. So they're ready to buy. And so that works incredibly well in pretty much every marketplace around the world. It can be a little bit competitive, but not really, because most MSPs are doing it pretty crap. And if you just go in and you just do a little bit of work over a six-month period, learn how it works, most people are seeing results in there.

The other thing that I'm seeing tons of MSPs get awesome results with is direct mail. The old-school, not email marketing, not all of this stuff — literally getting stuff in people's physical mailboxes and onto their desk. And I'm not talking about the old-school brochures of "we do this and we do that." I'm talking about things that get their attention. I've brought a couple up from the ground here. If you're doing any sort of direct mail, you've got to stand out from the crowd. You can't go and do a boring old bloody brochure that's a one-pager that's printed off, that just talks all about you, because it's gonna have very low response rates. But if you're sending out to someone — a targeted list — something that looks like this, which is an awesomely designed campaign around BDR products, that's done in old-school newspaper format, opens up to have some awesome stuff in there with awesome copywriting and calls to action and everything on it, that there is an MSP marketing campaign in one.

And now those sorts of things are working wonders in the US, Australia, Canada, UK, and all sorts of marketplaces around the world. They take a little bit of time to get set up. These are the types of campaigns we give out inside the tribe — not the shield of the tribe, but they're the types of campaigns we give out inside there that people can go and use to send out. Again, they take a little bit of time to set up. And people say, "Oh but they cost too much." But what they're not weighing up is the return on investment. And marketing is really about return on investment, not upfront cost. So if you're putting a thousand dollars or two thousand dollars into a campaign around this sort of stuff, and it drives you one or two clients, that's darned awesome compared to you putting a thousand or two thousand dollars into brochures that you go and send out to a ton of other people that get zero results, or putting that time and effort into pounding the pavement or something else that's going to have a lower return. So marketing really is about trying to find the highest-value ROI activities out there that are proven by other MSPs all around the world, and then going and figuring out how to take your unique kind of take on it in your marketplace to the exact type of client that you're trying to attract. And that's, like I'm saying, tons of people have awesome results with that when they do it well.

Mind you, tons of people have awesome results with Google Ads, tons of people having awesome results with getting out and doing what James said, getting out and doing the networking out there, which kind of borders the line between sales and marketing. It is a marketing initiative essentially, but you're kind of doing sales at the same time in there. But getting out and just networking and going and building your network of essentially referral partners out there — but people are, I think I'll finish off by saying, don't shy away from direct mail at the moment. It is having a resurgence all around the world, and it's because people's inboxes are wildly overloaded. And it's quite easy to get something for a couple of bucks onto someone's desk. An email nowadays — like a typical open rate on an email in most industries is 20% — getting something on to someone's desk, you've got about an 80 to 90% chance of it being read and looked at on someone's desk. And so it might seem like it costs less money to go and send an email to someone, but the reality is you still got to put the time and effort and energy into writing the email and sending it and all that stuff. If you put that into another campaign that's proven to get awesome results around the world, you're likely going to have better results.

But you've also got to understand, when you do anything like that, it is about the consistency of doing it. Doing it once and then going, "Oh, it sort of worked," and then you just forget to do it — that is the challenge. I sympathize with that because it's hard, unless you're going to get a marketing person inside your business. I've always said if you're the business owner doing the sales, doing the marketing, you're basically resigning all that stuff to a part-time job, which I did as well. Maybe you still do in my MSP, to be fair, I mean we've just been so busy growing anyway. I guess maybe you just don't think of piling even more. Like if I said tonight, well here's another — well maybe not Nigel, but another MSP — here's a hundred clients right now, go and do 100 orders, you're not going to even be able to handle it. So growth in an MSP world is slow because it's hard, and you wouldn't want it that much faster, otherwise you'll explode, because you've got to hire so many people, and process and everything changes.

But consistency is going to be important, and understanding that when you think about your city — whoever's watching this, think about your city — at any point in time there'll be someone metaphorically raising their hand saying, "That's it, I'm out, I need a new partner." I don't think it's that much. I really don't think at any point in time there's a million people looking for that. And that's why those approaches, when you do email, when you do direct mail, the ones that will call you are the ones like, "Yeah, I have been thinking about that." Like, of course, that's how marketing works. You say a message, they go, "Oh my god, that's what I was looking for," and they do that. So you're only going to get those types of leads. And that's why it's kind of a timing thing. Like if you only do it once every six months — it's probably once a month is a good cadence. You've got to commit to it.

And that's one thing I'd say about marketing as well. Let's use AdWords as an example. A lot of people go, "I want to do AdWords now." I will say this, that over the last two years, through COVID, AdWords for us has dropped. It has definitely dropped off — same spend, Google, but certainly the number of quality leads. And I think a lot of people — yeah, I just don't think they're swapping and changing IT providers even now. Maybe different markets are different, that's my personal experience, but we still keep doing it because one deal will cover the cost of that in a year anyway, so it's worth it.

So essentially, when I talk about budget with Google AdWords, people go, "Oh, but it's going to cost me like a thousand dollars a month or two grand a month," and they start sort of freaking out, and then they'll only do it for three months. And it's like, no, you've got to think about a thousand dollars a month for 12 months, just do it for 12 months, and figure it out at the end of that year. If you signed up one deal, it's still good, because that deal might be a thousand dollars a month or two thousand dollars a month. You've doubled up — let's say it's two grand, so you've got to think of it that way, of an ongoing thing. And I would imagine that most small businesses in general, regardless of industry, will have a very inconsistent marketing methodology. It's why AdWords has always been a good one, because it's set-and-forget to a degree, a little bit of maintenance but it's not massive, for someone internal that's only doing marketing part-time to do that.

And it's why AdWords and referrals have been huge. And I just want to make this clear, because nobody mentioned it — referrals. Referrals do an amazing job, and you will get referrals. And ironically, or not ironically, it's just mathematically, the bigger you get, oh my god, you get more referrals, just because you're managing more users. Instead of only 100 people you managed, now we're like 5,000. 5,000 people could walk out the door to another company, see how their IT partner does things, and go, "Oh my god." That is why the whole Invarosoft piece of having a proper digital client portal and client portal apps and all this stuff, it's all about the wow factor, so you can deliver a modern experience. Again, people don't think about the way you deliver your services being a marketing tool. If you're ho-hum and average, and you're sort of — I always say the Nokia approach, the mouse pad and sticker with my email and address on it — you're not really impressing anybody. I mean, everything's digital now, and it makes no sense. So you just have to do a little bit more to stand out, and your service delivery becomes part of your marketing. I mean, everyone knows in professional services, doing an amazing job helps you grow. So a couple more points there, hopefully that helps.

Consistency Wins: Why MSPs Give Up on Marketing Too Early

I just wanted to double down on that mistake that Jamie talked about that most MSPs do, and I made that mistake many times in my MSP, which is giving up too early. In any marketing campaign — I haven't seen any in the MSP space where you can put in a month or two and a grand and be guaranteed of a client. It just doesn't exist. And so I often see MSPs go, "Well, I'm going to try Google Ads because Jamie says it works, or Nigel says it works," or whatever it happens to be, and they go down that route of doing two, three, or four months, and they're going to put three or four thousand dollars into it, and then they give up. And then they go, "Well, that didn't work, that campaign's crap," and then they move across to direct mail, and they go, "Let's try direct mail, and I'm going to put a couple of thousand dollars into that," and they do that for two to three months, and they don't get a client out of it in two to three months, and so they give up. And then they get into this thing where marketing doesn't work, marketing is this bad thing for them, and that's such a horrible position to be in. When in reality, each of those campaigns absolutely works. Those tactics work 100% of the time when you put in the right amount of time into them, and you work on them and you get better at them and you tweak and fine-tune them.

Google Ads — Jamie, you probably know numbers better than me here — but I'd say it's probably three to five grand that you've got to put into Google Ads before you start to learn all of the ropes, over a couple of months period, probably three to six months before you even have two to three prospecting conversations out of it. And that's just part of the marketing, you're learning through that whole thing. That three to five grand is not wasted spend, it's investment in your learning, and it's investment in figuring out what's working and what's not. And once you frame it like that, it becomes so much easier. You go into those things and go, "Okay, well I know I'm gonna throw five grand down here, and I'm probably not going to see results for the first five grand. That's going to be tough, but I'm going to come out the other side with a bunch of awesome lessons that are going to give me the best chance."

And think about it this way — I probably haven't even myself thought about it this way — Google AdWords is the single most consistent marketing strategy that eNerds has done in the last, arguably, 13 years. So I think I've been doing it since '09, maybe '10, whatever, somewhere in that range. Every day those ads are up for the last 13 years. And when I first started doing it, we were $1.6 million in revenue, and now we're $10 million. Works, go figure. I mean, it took a while, but it was consistent, right? And we'll just leave it there doing its thing. Again, I will openly say that it started to drop off a little bit, we're getting more through referrals these days, but I'm sure it'll bounce back. But it's been consistent. And so with anything you do, consistency is going to be massive. But it's getting past that first hump — that first hump is the key.

But when you get the lead — I'm going to drop this bomb, and I'm going to hand it over to Ben and James, because if you let Nigel and me go, it's like, we were thinking about what we weren't saying. So this is the thing, and it really annoys me, and it's what Ben said earlier, which is the two sides of the coin, marketing and sales working in unison nicely. And this is what I observe all the time, and Nigel is trying his hardest through his Tech Tribe with templatization of this type of IP, is to nail your conversion. When you get a lead — if we are fundamentally operating in an environment where there are low leads, and the low leads are a big cause because nobody wants to leave their partner, which has two sides of the coin, that's good and bad — if we're operating in a low-lead environment, and anyone on this call, anyone listening to this in the future, will be going, "Well yeah, I only get like one to three good ones a month," then what do you think is important is conversion. If you're going to have only a couple of leads, you want to get out there and absolutely nail it.

So do you have a sales playbook for how you handle a lead? For example, our playbook — we get on the phone, find out their requirements, basically shut up and listen. It's like going on a date — say nothing and they think you're the best in the world. We book in the meeting, we got the data, we're going to present it. Nothing. Yep.

Well, it's hard to believe that you would say nothing.

But the point is, you've got to have a playbook. When you go and present, what are the first things you say? Before you even flip over it, do you bind it, do you make it look super professional? If you're doing it online, is it just amazing? But what questions do you ask at the start? What's your first page, what's your second chapter, what's the third chapter? How do you do pricing and packaging — is it — that's a whole other debate, let's not get down there. Do you have calls to action? Do you show them what it would look like after they've said yes? So get in the buyer's mindset. Can you see how there's so much strategy just when you go out and build out a playbook? Do you have a playbook? Like, do you honestly have one?

Because in a low-lead environment, I think that's the other reason that eNerds went from 1.6 to 10, is because I've always thought about that. I've always thought I want to try and — it probably came more so from a competitive thing, I just want to win everything that you go into. So if you want to win everything, you're going to start putting all the effort in, going, "Why didn't that work? Why didn't that work?" And you're going to make mistake, mistake, mistake, mistake, and you go, "Well, I'll try something different, I'll try something different," until it gets better. So please, god, focus on conversion, because that will turn all your marketing dollars into the best ROI. Because you can get the leads, and marketing's like, "Yeah, I did it," and then sales goes out and takes too long to get back to a lead, or when they do, they just do a poor presentation and it doesn't allow that buyer to just feel like you are the best partner for them to deal with. And if it's all about relationship, that's what they're looking for, is to feel like, "Oh my god, the trust, like this is it, you guys are the right ones, the way you laid it out, everything you did meant you're the number one."

I think what you were saying though, Jamie, that's important — and it's what Nigel said before and what I'm saying about activity for the sake of activity — I see businesses, not just MSPs, go and do marketing, and they do it for a month, "I didn't get the results," and then they move on to something else. You can get the results, right? So consistency is key, but when you get those leads, you actually have to do something with them. You know, people that don't call them until a week later — well, come on. They're very basic fundamentals, but then marketing gets blamed. "Oh no, the marketing's not working, I haven't actually got any sales out of it." Well, hang on, we've got some leads. So the point I'm trying to make is tracking and measuring, right? And that'll also allow you — Jamie, you've been doing AdWords for a long time, I can guarantee you that those initial ads that you wrote 10 years ago aren't the same as they are today, right? So tracking and measuring what you're doing. That playbook — always treat that whole thing, from your marketing through your sales process, the whole thing, always treat it as a work in progress. The good thing about marketing is it should always be data-driven, right? If you're tracking it, you can see what you're getting the return on. By all means track it for a month, but consistently track it as you go through, so that as you make these little changes, you can see where the improvements are, and if it dips or if it goes back up.

The Growth Mindset: Lead Flow, Churn and Sales Efficiency

So before we move on, there's a reason why very few of us get this stuff right. Everything that Jamie said, 100% I agree, all that detail from the marketing through to the sales, the end-to-end, and we need to treat that as a learning exercise and we need to measure it and keep focusing on improvement. The problem with all of that is it's a lot of work, a huge amount of work to do this stuff right. And what most of us as MSP owners suffer from — we're already not attuned to sales and marketing in general, so it's uncomfortable, and we've got no purpose driving it. Like, why are we actually wanting to market? Do you actually want to grow your business? There's something they've got to step back and actually think about. And most MSP owners don't actually want to grow their business. They don't want to grow from that one-to-three-million-dollar company to a 10 million to a 20 to a 30 million. So they intentionally throw up roadblocks, and often don't even know what's happening.

Yes, subconsciously most of the time.

Yeah, 100% subconscious, and it's all because we're drummed in, as we're small business owners organically growing our business — the catchphrase is "if you're not growing you're dying," and that's just simply not true. You can run a very high-quality small business that's quite sustainable in that one-to-three-million-dollar mark, that can generate a lot of money. And it's a different approach to how you would approach to go from a one-million-dollar business to a 10 million.

But yes — no, you still need lead flow, if that's your goal there, because you're going to have natural attrition. You will have churn, for sure. You've got to keep up with your churn at a minimum, and you should be dashboarding that as well, guys. So having, going, how many support deals dollar-wise am I winning throughout the year, and how many am I losing? You'll be surprised that churn adds up. You'll all have those 50-seat clients, they're the ones that get bought out by other businesses all the time because they're a nice size, they get merged into a 200-seat business. You lose them, and they're the ones that pay you five, six grand a month of fat.

The handbrake comment is really — it's a good ops thing, I mean, James, you would see that a lot with the coaching, everything you do. But if my bro — and he'd be open and he'd agree with this — this has been a journey with my brother, and he's technical, and I was always like sales, front-end. But anyone technical, which is 9.5 out of 10 of you guys as MSP business owners, let's be honest — what do you see when you see a new client coming towards you? Work, more work, more tasks, more servers, more flashing lights, more of everything. And it's actually quite demotivating. And to be honest, even as a salesperson, I saw this with quoting, right? So I actually think the biggest thing you can do to grow your MSP is to squeeze your procurement — you know, like network upgrades, deal flow — into a shorter period of time. The number one thing I would do if I was a coach is to go into the MSP, get that squeeze, and I'll add half a million dollars of revenue just by sales compression and sales efficiency straight away.

But even for me, as a sales-orientated person, before I had a sales quoting tool, every time I quoted something it took me forever to get the quote done, because I was copying and pasting everything from Ingram Micro, putting it in a quote, adding it up with a calculator, and then sending it out. That was exhausting. And then I'd get a yes, and I'm like, "Okay, now I've got to do like 10 purchase orders from all these sort of things." So I had the wrong emotional state from even just signing up 30 grand worth of stuff back in the day, because it was a pain in the butt. Then Quoter came along, and it would do all this sort of stuff, and I'm like, "Oh my god, it does." We went from 900 grand to that 1.6 million in a year through sales efficiency, just because we pump these quotes out faster and do the orders faster. So your mindset around growth is probably one of the things you need to have a think about too, before you even worry about marketing. It's like, do I want to? But Nigel's comment is true, you will lose more. It's why a lot of people start fading — they'll get to three and start fading back to two and go, "What's going on?" It's because, well, slow spirals still need to have a marketing engine, otherwise you can't even maintain the status quo.

Yeah, it's interesting. I see that, regardless of just MSPs, businesses that say, "Hey, they never lose a client." The amount of people that have said that — and I've heard that so many times — "Oh yeah." How many? What's your conversion rate? "Oh, 100%, I win everything." No. You've got to be realistic about this stuff. And if anything, be on the conservative side, be realistic about it, and track and measure, look at how many you are actually losing. Because you don't need to be an Amazon. I mean, Hosted Network, I never want it to be an Amazon, I think we'd lose our soul. So that's not our mission, right? But understanding what your mission is, I think, is important with that as well.

But marketing is — if you think of it as a, I'm going to say, funnel, top-of-funnel activity generating leads, everything else has to support it along the way. And that can be, you can ideally turn it on when that suits, and then dial it back when you're busy, but you do need those processes and things like that in place. Of being able to quote, turn things around quickly. The amount of partners that we talk to today that would still prefer to quote laptops or desktop replacements because they're easy to turn around, than a full solution, because there's a lot more work that goes into the proposal. Whereas laptops, you can punch it in.

Here's something that I haven't spoken about for a while, but we do it every year without fail, which is what we call our Dell discount campaign. And I've told so many people to do this and they don't even do that, so even the easy bit. All you're basically saying to your clients, you develop a brochure with three laptops and three desktops — good, better, best pricing — and you send them their report with a traffic light system of the ones that are red that they probably should replace. You get on the phone, you speak to each one, and you say, "Hey, we're doing a discount period with our vendor at the moment, crazy price, here's the RRP, here's your price, this is your saving." I mean, we do that every year. I've been doing that one also for 12 years. I always thought you could sell more than you can. Just for anyone that actually wants to do that, you end up selling about 10 to 15% of whatever devices are over four years old. I saw a thousand number once, and I was like, "Oh my god, I'm gonna sell a thousand computers." No, they don't all buy that, but you'll sell 150. And 150 at two grand each, there's $300-400 grand of revenue, boom. Squeezing it, you know, sales compression. And we do it every year without fail. That is another marketing tactic we've been executing for a sustained period of time, and lo and behold, again, I can guarantee that's a big part of eNerds' consistent growth. Just getting the fundamentals right and executing. And that one, there's no excuse.

That's a good example of where you can find things like marketing automation, right? Tying this in so that you at least do the framework or the foundational piece right, and you don't have to continue to do that every year, or whenever you're doing it.

Yeah, we just change the same crappy template with my clip-art features, and we just change the numbers and send it out the door every time. Even my brother was like, "Are you ever going to change that image in your Dell email?" And we're like, "Don't worry, we just keep selling it, it works, it keeps working."

Working With Marketing Agencies: Strategy, Skilling Up and Avoiding Abdication

All right, let's change gears a little bit. Another one that I get asked all the time — and we've touched on MSPs being time-poor, the fact that it's basically a part-time job as it is, or a full-time job depending on the size of business, for the business owner — marketing agencies, right? What are your takes on them? What are some of the challenges that you've seen dealing with them? Would you deal with them? So, James, I'm going to throw it to you. What do you see?

There are some absolutely fantastic marketing agencies, and there are absolutely low-level, low-maturity marketing agencies, and you get what you're going in to buy. So this goes back to the purpose, and like a strategy. A lot of MSPs are going for cheap, set-and-forget, "let's just dump and run," and they end up finding those kinds of marketing agencies. So that's marketing for that, and "we'll just automate it." They don't question you about what's your actual marketing strategy, who are your clients — there's no high-level engagement. So we talk about it a lot in our MSPs, of how we're engaging with our clients and what level we engage with them at, and we like to talk about, "we engage with our clients at a strategic level," but very few of us actually do that with our clients, and very few of us do that with our solution providers and vendors. So we go into it as a very transactional, low-level, tactical thing. And I would say, 100%, if I'm doing marketing and I don't really know what I'm doing — that's an MSP — I would go to a marketing agency, and I'd go to one that actually talks to you at the strategic level, and that is actually leading you through the process, the same as how we would expect to work with our clients. If we're not doing that, we're just getting a transactional break-fix type engagement at that point, and where's the value? And that's where most people fail, because they don't have a strategy, they get the wrong person, and it's set up to fail from the very start.

Okay, Nigel, what's your take on this?

There are some amazing ones out there, as James said, but the problem typically is not the agency, it's the buyer, and James touched on that. So many MSPs — and again, I went to a few agencies in my MSP and I had no idea what I was buying, and I had no idea how to talk the talk and how to hold them accountable to results out there. So I just didn't get results, because I just let them go and do their thing without me being involved. And until I learned that a marketing agency gets its best results when I drive the strategy from my side, and I drive the particular campaign types that we're going for, and I dive really deep into the particular target market that I'm looking for, and I work with them, not just abdicate responsibility, just hand them a couple of thousand bucks per month and just tell them to go — that's when results happen.

And so, the two biggest mistakes I see MSPs get bad results out of agencies — number one, they don't skill themselves up enough in what marketing actually is to start off with. They don't understand all the technical terms like CAC and CTA and all those sorts of things. And so the marketing agency kind of sees that, and a lot of them, not intentionally, not maliciously, but they'll go, "Well, we're just going to do the basics here, because we're kind of not being held accountable, the people are just paying us money, so we'll just go and do some basics here," and you don't see results. If you go to an agency and say, "Hey, we're looking for this CAC and this is our exact target customer, and these are the campaign types we tested before, and this is the CPC we're trying to aim for," and all these types of things, and you actually learn a bit of the lingo and are confident having conversations around it, the good agencies will often go, "Awesome, we're dealing with someone here that knows their way around things, so we can actually go pretty deep into this, and we're going to have the best chances of working here." And so I think the number one opportunity is to skill yourself up in how the marketing game works first.

And number two, don't abdicate responsibility. It's your responsibility to let these agencies have the stuff that they need to be able to work. I've never yet seen someone say, "Hey, excuse me, Mr. or Mrs. Marketing Agency, here's a couple of thousand dollars per month, get me results," and it worked. Or if it did work, it was very crappy results that they were getting out of it. It always works when it's, just like an MSP client partnership, a really deep partnership which you're diving into, and you're driving strategy enough from your end, and you're knowing your customer deeply as well through that process. So they do work, but just don't go into these situations blind, you'll fail 99.9% of the time.

Yeah, and that's what, even when I ran a marketing agency, you can't — you have to have collaboration with the client. And in a way, you kind of go into it thinking, "Oh, I'm going to be able to just hand that off and free my time up," where it's still — you're still heavily involved.

We had David in the chat say most MSPs are too small to afford a marketing agency, and if they execute well, you'll break the delivery side of the business because you spend so much on your marketing fees. And that's really your operational maturity, right? If your marketing is 10 out of 10 but your sales is a 1 out of 10 and your service delivery is a 1 out of 10, well, everything kind of does need to be a little bit balanced.

I'm going to challenge that a bit, a bit like what Jamie was saying earlier, it is a handbrake, that comment is handbraking itself. Marketing — if you can't afford the marketing, then we're not really targeting properly, and marketing agencies are actually pretty generally cost-effective these days. So it's more a prioritization thing of where we're spending and investing in our business to grow. If you want to grow, then it's just an expense. We're paying five grand a month as a starting point to work with a marketing agency and start to drive stuff. If you're not seeing that as an investment to get a return on, of course it's a cost that you're throwing away, it's better to keep it in your pocket. But that investment of five grand in marketing and doing it right, to get leads and sell them into clients, that's how you grow your business. And that's the thing, it can be planned, because you go, "Oh okay, well" — because it's all slow motion, it's none of this "oh my god, I did this marketing and I have like a million clients and I have to charge 30,000 a month more." Since when does that ever happen, right? So that's a psychological thing where you go, all right.

And David, firstly, thanks — you've built an amazing MSP, and thanks for all the commentary in there. So David, if you check down there, he's doing a great job of interacting, he needs to be on the next one. He does, to be honest, I keep saying it to him. He's got a lot of people, eventually — he's a very, very good operator.

So the thing is, though, I actually do believe a little bit in the whole law of attraction, if you've ever seen that nasty video The Secret. It really only talks about the one concept, which is what you put out there is what you get back. The problem with thinking that way is that it could stop it, because you keep thinking and it stops it anyway, so you're just thwarting any effort. So you want to release it, go nuts in terms of wanting to bring business towards you. And I actually think it's a secondary problem to fix the things in the back end — you can sort that out, because it's never that fast. You'll see, clients don't go, "Cool, let's start tomorrow," they go, "All right, I'm ready to start" — we're in August now, let's say, "in October," or "I'm ready to start here." So you can sort of plan this out ahead of the curve.

And I mean — yeah, go Nigel, go, sorry, I'm jumping in on the beards.

The absolute worst-case scenario, if you do get too many clients through the door, there is an amazing thing you can do, and that's, "sorry, but we're at capacity at the moment, please just give us a month or two to open up capacity and then we'll be ready for you." That is one of the most powerful dynamics you can possibly have in your sales and marketing arsenal, to be able to say "no, no, but soon" to someone. That person will be sitting there chomping at the bit, a call to action — "you better hurry up and make a decision because we've got so many people we're looking at, we're gonna cap it soon." So people want to be part of it.

But David just mentioned he got 170 leads at an event. Okay, fine, if you've got 170 leads at the event, fair enough, that's a lot to get through. I've never experienced that myself, that's a high volume, that's not the normal low volume.

Yeah, that's amazing.

But can I just say something about marketing agencies? Like, we've sort of dabbled a little bit here or there, but a couple of points though. Firstly, we're talking about professional services, B2B relationships, right? And most marketing agencies make the most money specializing in product businesses, ones that scale really a lot. So they will obviously make more money dealing with mid and enterprise type companies and doing larger campaigns. So you often don't find marketing agencies that actually specialize in SMB, because there's no money in SMB. And the only way they can pay the big salaries to their staff is to charge you 30 or 40 grand each, because they may only have like 30 or 40 clients. You do the maths on the model, right? So that's why they tend to drift to mid to enterprise. So therefore there's not a lot that actually focus on SMB, which we are, and there's not a lot that actually focus on professional services.

So that's one thing. I think where the marketing agencies can help are those coaches around the world, of which we all know who they are, that are just MSP-focused. Like them or don't like them, because they've all got different methodologies, at least it's focused, and at least you go on that journey and they know the track record. That marketing execution assistance is probably more relevant.

The other thing I'll note on AdWords — a lot of people go, "Oh, I heard Jamie say AdWords, cool, I saw a marketing agency down the road, I'll get them to manage my AdWords." Well, they end up just — you've got to understand how it works, right? It's like law firms or accounting firms, they'll have the seniors, senior account executives, and they have juniors. So they'll give jobs like that to juniors who don't really know what they're doing anyway. So now you're paying an extra thousand dollars a month for a marketing person that's only thinking about you maybe half an hour a week, an hour a week, and they'll fiddle around with it. AdWords is so simple, my advice would be learn it yourself, maybe get a marketing agency to train you on it if that's what's needed, or appear in your network, and then just manage it yourself. Honestly, if I can do it — and I can, I've never set up a computer in my life, think about how good I am technically — anyone could do it.

Yeah, I know about hotspot drives and power, all that stuff, it's easy peasy, I don't know how to set any of it up.

But on the Google AdWords thing, if anybody is interested in looking at that, you can go to places like Udemy.com, and for 100 bucks you can take a 20-hour course that's going to take you from zero to expert, or close to expert, in 20 hours. And you do that over a couple of weeks, and you're going to learn all of the nuances of the platform and all the tips and tricks pretty quickly, and then you're ready and primed to go and start testing it. It's just like figuring out a new Microsoft product, right? You go out and you do the training on it, and you can knock it out and get up to speed pretty darn quickly. And the same goes with Google Ads or any of these marketing strategies out there — there's so much awesome training out there to take you from knowing nothing about it to knowing at least enough to be able to get yourself out there and start to get results from it.

Yeah, definitely, there's some great stuff like that, yeah. Some of them are even cheaper. And on that note, you could also use it as a career development opportunity. Maybe you've got a budding person internally that wants to — put them on a bit of training and get them to help you and guide you through it as well.

Guys, we are at time. I had so many more questions I wanted to ask, but that's okay, maybe we'll have to look at this as another topic another time. But thank you again, as always it was fantastic to have you guys here.

So we've got our next MSPs in Conversation coming up on the 8th of September, which is very exciting — navigating mergers and acquisitions in the MSP space. So we've got a couple of guys on there that in our industry have done a bunch of M&A, so that will be very exciting to hear from them. We've got a sales workshop which has been requested by a bunch of partners. And it's funny, we sell internet connectivity, we don't do much training on it, so we've got an internet fundamentals — probably not for the business owners, but great for your staff, if you want to get some of the staff up to speed on some of those fundamentals, please send them along to that.

And I hope — I will expect to see at least the three of you guys at IT Nation coming up at the end of August, the end of this month. Wow, time flies when you're having fun. So we'll be there for three days, we are sponsoring, so anyone that is there, please drop by our stand or come out for a beer afterwards. But until then, thank you guys, and hopefully everyone took away a couple of tidbits on how to suck less at marketing. Good luck everyone.

Thanks Ben, thanks for having us.

Thanks guys.