Transcript
My name is Stephanie Hammond. I'm part of the Head Nerds team here at Enable. I'm the head nerd that focuses on all things sales and marketing related. The goal of these coaching videos is to provide bite-sized sales and marketing advice, bite-sized guidance that you can immediately incorporate into your MSP that will hopefully pay off with either new leads or new signed contract customers at the end of the day. This time around, I'm launching a brand new multi-part marketing training series focused on how do you build a marketing operating system for your MSP. And I'm being joined by my friends and MSP marketing experts, Mark Coatman, Dave Sutton from Wingman. So hello, gentlemen. Thank you so much for joining me. Hi, Stephanie. Yeah, well, thank you for having us. We'll be looking forward to the next however many modules, I can't even remember how many we're doing now. I think there's going to be 13, if we get through everything. Between Dave and I, we've seen quite a lot of stuff over the years. Worth a quick introduction, do you think, to, I'll let perhaps Dave introduce himself just for a quick 20 seconds. Absolutely, please. Yes. I'm Dave. I'm the founder of Wingman. Back in 2017, I started the agency after a career of about a decade being in MSP sales marketing. So I've been there in the trenches with you. I know what it's like to grow a managed services business. Back from early 2013, when I started in the industry for a small family run local MSP to me here in the UK, growing the business by about four or five times over three years, I then progressed on to two larger firms. And during that time, I spotted a gap in the market where MSPs needed help with sales and marketing. We needed help, generalist agencies didn't get it. And then it was time in 2017 for me to take a break away, bite the bullet and start the business. And we've been helping many MSPs around the English speaking world since then to grow their businesses. Fantastic. So what we have between us is that Dave was kind of flying solo with his team for the first four or five years of Wingman. And I joined him and the team back in 2022. And yeah, I've written some books, done all sorts of stuff in the MSP industry and work with hundreds. So whilst I've not been inside one, I've had the pleasure and the privilege of working with hundreds across the industry. Absolutely. And I'm thrilled to be doing this series with the both of you, helping me with this new training content that I wanted to create, because I think sales and marketing is still something that puzzles a lot of MSPs. And so again, with this video series, I want to try and with your help, demystify, simplify sales and marketing for MSPs. Because again, you're working with MSPs that struggle with their marketing. My whole role here at Enable is working with MSPs who are struggling with their sales and marketing and finding new quality leads. And then how do you take those leads and convert them into new signed clients at the end? So really for this first episode that we're recording today, I kind of want to start all the way back at the beginning and really look at the reasons why MSPs still seem to be struggling with their marketing as much as they are. You know, Dave, 2013, I'm 2004. And you know, we're still having these conversations, there still is that need in the market. So all the work that you guys do, what do you see as being kind of the number one mistake that MSPs often make when it comes to their marketing efforts? I think most MSPs see marketing as an action rather than a journey, that they will operate one siloed activity in isolation from everything else, be that SEO or telemarketing or doing an email campaign. And it just being a shot in the dark over a short period of time, and not giving the time and cadence and repetitiveness that's required in selling managed services, particularly because it's such a mature market. Most businesses that are already going to take on an MSP probably have already done so. So you've got that challenge of trying to get them to move partner, and people don't know what they don't know. And when there's a trusted, established relationship there, it takes a lot of repeat marketing over a prolonged period of time to be able to erode that relationship, make people question their incumbents, and just get over the hill of every MSP is the same. You know, people will think better the devil, you know, so we're not going to bother switching. So how do you get that switch to flick in their head to make them question what they're doing right now, and understand that things could be better? And I think just to add to that briefly, it's a little bit flippant. I genuinely have a slide that I use and I put up when I'm occasionally on stage, and sometimes we share that stage together, Stephanie. Which simply says, I tried marketing for a month, and it didn't work. It does sound flippant, but we have genuinely heard that. We've heard it on more than one occasion. And I think that plays into Dave's point there about this stuff does not happen overnight. We see the LinkedIn adverts and the quite aggressive campaigns that go on there outside from other types of marketing agency that guarantee we're going to bring you a dozen leads in each week for the next year. And we've heard the horror stories as a result of going into those sorts of relationships. It just cannot be a thing. And I'm sure that will come out in the series as we talk about it. Yeah, absolutely. And kind of what I always talk about, you know, we tried marketing for a month and it didn't work. And I refer to it as kind of whack-a-mole marketing, like we've done one thing, and then maybe we're going to try something else, and then we're going to try one more thing. So it's a bunch of these ad hoc campaigns that doesn't have any really good design or structure around it. So I know you guys have come out and developed, you know, kind of that marketing operating system. So why did you create it and why is it critical for MSPs to treat marketing as a system as opposed to to kind of doing this whack-a-mole marketing ad hoc type of stuff? Perhaps I'll begin and then I'll hand over to Dave just to talk through some of the detail and we'll perhaps bring the model up as we talk through it on screen as well. So we came up with this concept, I guess, at the time of recording about 18 months ago. Any good business needs a framework to sort of hang its hat on, I suppose. And I think because we've both been involved with so many different MSPs over the years, we've heard so many of the same stories alongside the rest of the team here as well. We just felt the need to bring together the repeatable, consistent things that we know need to happen into a single place. And you know, as we talk through this, you'll see the jigsaw pieces in the middle, but it's actually the boxes around the edge, which are equally important as well. And perhaps if I, would you like us just to chat through this, Stephanie, right now? Is this what you'd like to do? Yeah. Like, that's what I thought. You know, you have that initial slide that has the puzzle pieces, so do you want me to bring it up? Okay. So, yes. So that's the rationale behind why we've created this. And as I say, you'll see on screen the jigsaw pieces in the middle, but the boxes around the edge are equally as important. And what we've seen time and time again, and the mistakes and the issues that people come to us with, it's not like we're making stuff up. You know, I, on my side of the business, I deal with a lot of prospect calls, lots of marketing clinics, and we hear the same sorts of things every single time. And it normally stems from not having a plan, not having that clarity on where you're heading, what that target market might be, which is why we worry so much about the business fundamentals at the bottom there. And then once that is all ironed out, how to create that marketing foundation, because all roads tend to lead back to your website. And if your website doesn't represent who you are, you can do a whole load of work and spend a whole lot of money, but it's never going to reap results because the place that people find themselves homing in on and seeing how you present yourself to the world, it doesn't necessarily reflect who you are. So you've heard my phrases before, you are what you are online. And if your website looks like something from the 1970s, as far as people and visitors looking at that site are concerned, your business is also stuck in the 70s, even though the likelihood is that is not true. So with this model, we worry a lot about getting the fundamentals correct. And it doesn't matter if you've only been in business for a month, five years, 10 years, 20 years. We've certainly seen a lot of this ourselves in that sometimes people just need that shot in the arm and some people need to just have a bit of steering because things have changed around them and they perhaps haven't changed the business to fit with the industry that's moved around them. So yeah, we worry a lot about that bottom piece and we ensure that that is correct before you start to do the repeatable marketing, which is that middle jigsaw part where I'll be quiet for a minute and let Dave say, unless you've got a question you want to bring up at this particular point. Can you go into that bottom piece, the marketing fundamentals and the business foundation elements? Because I do agree, you need to get those foundational pieces in place first before you can even really start strategizing on what your plan is going to be. So maybe talk about those bottom pieces. Okay, so I'm going to hand over to Dave to talk about his, this is relatively new in our world, our jigsaw and this repeatable marketing effort, and that's the reason we've put this jigsaw together. So we'll perhaps chat through each of the boxes in turn. Yeah. I think Stephanie meant the bottom, explained the journey, I think, from the bottom. Yeah, like the ideas of, you know, we have the different jigsaw puzzle pieces here and each episode is going to be focusing on specifically each of these individual puzzle pieces. But in order to, you know, kind of start working on the puzzle pieces, there's just the business fundamentals and the marketing foundations that need to be put in place first. So like any good business, you have to have a framework to hang your hat on. And we call this the MSP marketing operating system. Because we've had so many conversations with prospects, with customers over the year, over the years, we needed to create something which we could help guide people through. We could start to explain to them how to do marketing and sales, how we can take people from an endless marketplace at the bottom of the diagram there through to growth, new customers, new logos, but also growth from within as well. And so that's why we've put this together and we focus our business on this. It doesn't matter if people want to buy our services or not. The principles are absolutely sound. And I'll hand over to Dave and let him talk through those first two boxes. And that's what I love about that, because the principles are sound. And I think the MSPs that are struggling with sales and marketing, especially marketing the most, is I just don't know if they have really kind of looked at what marketing is and the breadth of it and all the different pieces that need to be considered and strategize and put together as a cohesive plan instead of looking at it from an ad hoc standpoint. That's why I love this visual that you guys have created. So I'll let Dave talk about those first two boxes. I think that's probably the best place to start. So I think from the very bottom, we look at the marketplace, as Mark mentioned. Who are you selling to? Not just your existing client base, but who do you want to be selling to moving forward? And look at the reality of how many of those businesses exist. You know, if I had ten bucks for every time an MSP said, you know, our sweet spot is about 30 or 40 seats or whatever it might be on that sliding scale. But so often, MSPs look at maybe their top handful of customers and think, yeah, I would like more like those. And yeah, of course, that makes sense. You know, all of our business is mature. You would like to get more mature customers at the same time. But as we said earlier, they are very hard to acquire. Given the maturing journey they've gone on with their existing MSP, you've got to work that much harder to be able to break into those businesses to get them to pivot to your MSP. And so don't set aside the opportunity that exists in the market from startups and smaller businesses with less maturity that have not gone through that same journey as all of your existing clients have that you've taken on over the years that have grown in number of users, grown in maturity, grown in their spend with you because other MSPs will have done that same thing with their client base. So don't ignore the 5, 10, 15 users that exist out there that have yet to go on a maturing journey. They may feel imperfect to start off with, but they're worthwhile considering when you look at the makeup of what exists out there in the market, because there will be many more of those smaller MSPs, smaller prospects out there than there will be of the larger ones. But that's all part of the consideration of what is the audience? You know, who do you serve? What industries do you serve? What industries do you have specialisms in? There may be expertise within your business that you've disregarded or ignored or forgotten about over the years, maybe even your previous career. What is your background? Where have you come from? Because there will be secret intelligence that you have in all of those experiences you've had, both perhaps as an employee in your career before starting your MSP, but also those customers that you've solved real world business problems for over the years. So take a moment to reflect on that. Who are we most appropriate to? Because ultimately, you can't market to everyone. Trying to be all things to all people means that you appear to be a generalist. There is nothing focused in your message, and you appear to be exactly the same as every other MSP. So just consider all of those things to start off with. Who are we serving? How do we best serve them? Where do we differentiate in the market with those experiences, with those stories that we have to tell? And that's where we should focus our energy from a marketing perspective. Marketing is all about storytelling. So you want to pull those things together, focus on a particular lookalike audience, and that sets the scene for where you move into the business fundamentals. Once we understand the target market and how numerous they are, what problems they face, what challenges they have, what goals and ambitions do they have, we can then focus a message around how we solve those things for them through technology, through data, through compliance, through security. We help those businesses overcome hurdles and mature and grow in their marketplace. Once we understand that and we can shape some goals, you've then got some vision and direction for your marketing. You can then map out a plan instead of going out and just doing siloed marketing tactics, as we said earlier, running a PPC campaign in isolation without considering who are we targeting? Where do they spend their time? Where do they consume content? What message is going to resonate with them? What call to action are they likely to engage with? This exercise uncovers all of that. So you can then set the scene before you go out and start investing real marketing money in promoting your business to those audiences. Once you've established that, you can then set the, I always refer to like shop analogies, you can get the sort of storefront right to attract that right ICP. If you're specialising in healthcare, you're able to have headline messages that talk about healthcare, talk about the regulations that they face in that market, the operational challenges that they have, and the success stories that you have in solving those problems within that industry environment. Because there's no better way of tailoring what you do as every MSP says, oh, we're the same as every other MSP. Well, your products and services might be, but the way you deliver them and how you tailor them to the customer will, of course, differ. And that will differ based on your experience. And if you can focus that, whether it's by industry niche, it's by horizontal, so size of business, you might be a specialist in a particular size of customer, be that co-managed or startups or average SMBs. There will be little success stories that you've got that you can tailor that message to feel super relevant to that audience, rather than trying to do this broad brush and appeal to 1,000-seat enterprises that want co-managed at the same time as appealing to that sort of five-man band that's around the corner. Because the message and approach will be very different, which, of course, then shapes into our marketing fundamentals of the website. What messages does it say? What pages do we have? How do we lay out the content? What calls to action do we offer? What social proof do we gather? Video testimonials, case studies, all of those kinds of things. So you can set out that shopfront to best appeal to that target customer that you've got in mind. So that's the bottom of the MMOS described. And Stephanie, you talked about in your intro the way that MSPs are, I quote, puzzled by how to do sales and marketing. And we happen to have a set of puzzle pieces in our model here. So we're going to spend the rest of the series focusing on the eight puzzle pieces there. But also, the two boxes to the left and right are also important as well. You can't manage what you don't measure. You can't improve it. So some thoughts around showing progress and measurement will come later in the series. But also something I think, or we think, that people quite often forget about in these sorts of frameworks. It's actually holding yourself to account and actually delivering and doing the things that you say you're going to do. It's so easy as an MSP owner or somebody senior within a business to be distracted by real life and push marketing and sales down the road a little bit. So we'll also talk a little bit about that accountability and setting milestones as well later on the series. But hopefully, that's a good step in the right direction to describe this framework. We can get into the details as the series moves on. Absolutely. So absolutely appreciate, gentlemen, helping us set the stage on what I feel are these necessary first steps that business owners should be considering when it comes to implementing their marketing initiatives. In our next episode, we are going to start the deep dive into those eight different puzzle pieces that you see there that make up an MSP's marketing operating system. We're going to be starting with the first task of how do you create awareness of your MSP through the generation of intent data so that you can be found by potential prospects. And we're going to be talking about blog content creation, SEO, social media management, website tips to drive visitor traffic. So that's what we're going to be talking about. So hope you can join us on our next installment of building your MSP's marketing operating system on Take It to the Bank.
