Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast
Paul Green's MSP Marketing Edge
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Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast is a weekly show for Managed Service Providers (MSPs) who want to improve their marketing and grow their business. Hosted by Paul Green, the world's go-to MSP marketing expert, it offers practical ideas, expert advice, and guest interviews to help attract new clients. The show covers strategies to increase Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) and boost net profit. Listeners can also email questions to Paul, who answers them on air, and video versions are available on YouTube.
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Writing The ONE Piece Of Content That Generates MSP Leads 14.09.2026 48minCase studies are the single most powerful piece of marketing in an MSP’s toolbelt, here’s how to get started. Also this week, is it ever a good idea to rebrand your MSP? And, you can’t grow your MSP until you’ve got solid leadership (even if it’s just you and a tech). Welcome to Episode 357 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge. How to write a case study that makes prospects salivate If a prospect said to you right now, “Go on, send me a case study about your MSP,” what would you send them? Do you have just a simple paragraph on your website that’s actually a testimonial wrapped up as a case study that’s just a client logo and a quote saying, “Great service would recommend?” That’s not a case study. A case study is a proper story that takes a prospect on a journey. When they’re reading it or watching it they’re feeling and thinking, “That’s exactly my situation. This is the IT support company that I should be talking to and hiring.” Well, today I want to show you how to write that second kind, because done properly, a case study is one of the most powerful sales tools your MSP will ever have. Let’s start by looking at why most MSP case studies are useless. And most MSPs either don’t have case studies at all, or if they do have something it’s so vague and generic it could have been written by anyone about anyone. If yours looks something like this, “We helped a local business to improve their IT infrastructure and reduce downtime”, well, that tells the prospect nothing at all. And the problem you’ve got there is you’ve written that case study from your own perspective. It’s about what you did technically rather than looking at everything from the client’s perspective. And the client cares about the problem they had, how it felt when the solution came in, and what changed, what got better, what the results were. A case study is not a description of services, and it’s not a boast of how clever you are technically. A good case study tells a story. Stories only work when they make the person who’s reading it, or watching it if it’s a video, it only works if it makes them feel something. You think about every book that you’ve ever loved, every movie that you left the cinema thinking, “Oh, that was just amazing.” None of those started with a list of features of things they were going to do in the film. They started with a character that you could relate to, and that character was in a situation that you recognised and they’ve got a problem that made you feel something. The best stories move us emotionally. And do you know what? Case studies work exactly the same way, which is kind of weird when you think about it because it’s only marketing. But when you’re talking to ordinary business owners and managers, even when you’re talking to IT directors for co-managed IT, you’re looking to move them emotionally. The MSP who can emotionally move the prospect is dramatically more likely to win that prospect. Let’s first of all address a big problem that a lot of MSPs throw up to me, and that is the issue of confidentiality. “But Paul, what if I lay out all of the details about my client and bad actors out there can use those details to attack our client, to pretend to be us?” I get this, I understand it, and I think this is a unique thing within managed services within the channel. It is a real fear, but it is your fear and not your client’s fear. The most common reason that MSPs don’t have proper case studies is that they’re too worried about naming clients publicly and giving details that will be out there. The reality is that that worry almost always belongs to you and not the client. And most happy clients are not just doing case studies with you, they are doing them with lots of other suppliers as well. Most clients are g... -
REALLY Messing Up An MSP 'Discovery Call' 07.09.2026 49minA discovery call is the thing that turns a warm lead into a booked sales meeting – here’s a 6 part format for getting the most from them. Also this week, how to market your MSP during a quiet spell, and the secret to being recommended more by AI. Welcome to Episode 356 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge. The format for a perfect discovery call The discovery call is the most underloved, most misunderstood part of the entire sales process for MSPs. Most owners treat it as an opportunity to tell the prospect about their services, but that’s not what it’s really for. Done properly, a discovery call is the thing that turns a warm lead into booked sales meetings. And right now I want to give you the exact format for running one that actually works, including the differences between a B2B call and a co-managed IT one. And I’ve broken this down into six easy parts to make it easy for you to understand, follow along, and of course implement. Part 1: The mindset shift. When we’re talking about a discovery call, we mean normally a video call and it’s normally the first quality contact with a new prospect. And the goal of the video call, the discovery call is not actually to sell anything. It’s actually to do two things. Number one is to qualify the prospect as someone that you really want to work with, someone that’s worth pursuing. And then secondly is to make them feel as though, “Ooh, this is interesting. These are the guys we should pursue.” So you know that you want to work with them and they are intrigued… they feel heard, they feel as though you could be the right people for them. And the way that you do that is by zipping your mouth because the prospects should be talking like 80% of the time. You ask questions, but then you shut up and you listen really, really carefully and you just occasionally reflect back what you’ve heard, what they have said. Because the best sales don’t come from talking at someone the best or having the best pitch. They come from actually the best listening. So most MSP owners, they get on a discovery call and start talking about their services and their accreditations and their qualifications and their tech stack. And do you know that the prospect doesn’t really care about any of that stuff. At the very beginning of the process, which is what this is, they just want to know if you can understand their world and if you can listen to them. And feeling heard is one of the most powerful psychological forces in all of human connection. When someone feels like you genuinely get them and get their situation and you understand their hopes and their fears and their wants and their needs, then you’re going to form some trust. In fact, they’re going to know you, they’re going to like you and they’re going to trust you. And when those three things are in place, they’re much more likely to give you a wad of cash and commit to you for a three-year contract. Beautiful, right? Part 2: The ask – how long should you request for a discovery call? This is where B2B and co-managed IT are slightly different. So in B2B, I believe you should ask the business owner for just 15 minutes on a discovery call. Why? Because it sounds like a tiny, tiny commitment. Most people are going to say yes to 15 minutes, whereas actually if you ask them for 30, that feels like a bigger chunk and certainly you don’t ask for an hour. So 15 minutes is absolutely perfect. Now in co-managed IT, you do ask for 30 minutes and that’s because IT directors, even though they’re super busy, super overstretched, they also have more complex situations to explain. And 15 minutes isn’t enough to have a peer-to-peer conversation about the real frustrations in their life. Because with business owners, it’s them as a normal perso... -
MSP's Ultimate Guide To Winning Financial Services Clients 31.08.2026 54minIf your MSP is looking for a vertical that ticks almost every box, then financial services might be the one… here’s why. Also this week, the “trust transfer” trick of borrowing credibility from people prospects already trust, and my guest built an MSP to $143m exit and understands why MSP founders get stuck. Welcome to Episode 355 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge. Deep dive into winning financial services clients If you’re looking for a vertical that ticks almost every box – recurring revenue, long-term loyalty, genuine willingness to pay for good IT, and a compliance pressure that never goes away – then financial services might be the one. Right now, I want to do a deep dive into winning wealth managers, independent financial advisors, mortgage brokers, and insurance brokers as clients for your MSP, because this is a sector that is genuinely crying out for MSPs who understand their world. Let me show you how to become one of them. Let’s break this down into six easy parts… Why is this vertical so attractive? Well it’s pretty simple really, it’s very stable, very profitable, long-term businesses. These kind of financial services clients don’t tend to disappear overnight, and they also have a very high dependency on technology. You think about it, everything they do involves data, communications and client records. So they are genuinely willing to pay for high quality IT because for them, the cost of getting it wrong is huge, just huge. It isn’t just that the technology is needed by them, it is absolutely mission critical. That ticks a big box for us. But also, and this is huge as well, compliance pressure. For these people, we have no idea what the compliance pressure must be like for them because they have to operate under an increasingly complex and burdensome set of rules. There’s always new rules coming in. It’s very rare that someone comes in and says, “Let’s have fewer rules for financial services.” That just doesn’t happen. So the norm for them is all this compliance. And of course, a lot of the technology is there to make sure that they stay compliant. I’ve been digging around for some stats and I found that 96% of financial firms now allocate more than 5% of their total spending budget to IT and cyber security, and that’s going up. They take technology really, really seriously. And that means that once you’re in, you’re in. Because as we know, for an ordinary B2B company, switching an IT provider is highly disruptive for them. And for a regulated company, that’s just too much risk. You’ve got to be really bad to lose a financial services client or someone that’s related to that. So retention is very, very high in this sector. On top of this, and this just keeps getting better and better, these people talk to each other. The IFAs, the mortgage brokers, the insurance brokers, they tend to operate in very tight networks, either because they’re all part of the same actual selling network or buying network or something like that, or just because they tend to hang out with each other. They meet each other at training and compliance sessions and stuff like that. So they are talking about the suppliers that they use. Once you are in with one and you do a good job, the good news is you’re likely to pick up other clients as well. The psychology of the buyer. For these people that we want to reach, it’s almost always that the decision maker is the owner or the senior partner. And of course, there are influencers as well. In most B2B buying decisions, you’ve got a decision maker and an influencer. So you might have the CEO is the actual decision maker, but the operations manager might be an influencer. The operations manager will pretty much tell them who to p... -
MSPs: How To Win Back Clients Who Left 24.08.2026 36minFor MSP’s, winning back past clients is actually one of the easiest and cheapest opportunities… are you overlooking this? Also this week, the horrendous truth of how MSPs are losing sales opportunities and annoying existing clients on the phone, and the MSP who thinks you should sell Google Workspace, not Microsoft. Welcome to Episode 354 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge. How to win back a client who dared to leave you for another MSP I want to talk about a type of prospect that almost no MSP ever follows up with. The prospect is a client who left you in the past. Let me make the case right now for why winning back these kind of people is actually one of the easiest, cheapest, and maybe even most overlooked opportunities in your entire marketing. Winning back a client who left you is up to five times more cost-effective than winning a brand new client. If you think about it, they already know your name, your reputation, they know roughly what working with you is like, even if you’ve changed in the year since they left. And yet research consistently shows that most B2B businesses do not do this. Almost three quarters of companies have no win-back process at all. They lose a client and that’s the end of the story. So why does this happen? And specifically, why does it happen with MSPs? I wonder, is it down to pride and discomfort? Because I don’t know about you, but I know for me, it feels a little bit awkward to go back to someone who chose a competitor over you. It’s one thing if you pitch to someone and they choose a competitor in the first place, but if you’ve worked with someone for a couple of years and then they leave you for a competitor, that’s where it almost feels slightly personal, doesn’t it? And it can feel a lot more awkward. It almost feels like you’re admitting weakness or you’re chasing them and you don’t want to be. I guess if you put it in ex-boyfriend/ex-girlfriend terms, you don’t want to be the ex that reaches out because that’s uncomfortable. But they’re not an ex-boyfriend or an ex-girlfriend, they’re an ex-client, and that discomfort is costing you easy revenue that’s sat there to be collected. Let’s be clear about the kind of clients we’re talking about here… We’re not talking about the ones that have been acquired by another business, that business is gone. We’re not talking about the ones that have gone bust, obviously that business is gone as well. We’re talking about if they have switched from you to another MSP. So let’s talk this through and all the aspects of it. Let’s deal with timing first, this matters more than you would think. If you reach out too soon, you are the needy ex and of course they’re still in the honeymoon period with their new provider. But if you reach out too late, you’ve completely missed the window where they realise that the grass wasn’t greener on the other side. Because that’s why someone switches, isn’t it? They leave you for another MSP thinking that with the other MSP the grass is going to be greener. And there does come a point where they realise that actually, some of the things are going to be different with that other MSP, but some things will be worse, some things will be better because every MSP operates and delivers in quite a different way. We did a little bit of research on this and the research broadly supports a timing window somewhere between two to six months after they leave. And my gut feel would be towards the back of that. So if they leave you in January, you should be reaching out in June… April, May, June kind of time. And most attempts to win back a client happen far too early. They happen at the point that someone cancels or the point that the client says they’re not going to sign another contract. That’s the wo... -
MSPs: Never Talk About AI Like This 17.08.2026 44minLet’s discuss how MSPs can talk about AI without sounding like everyone else to win more consulting opportunities. Also this week, the pricing page no MSP dares to build, and what are the hot opportunities in the channel right now? Welcome to Episode 353 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge. How to talk about AI without sounding like everyone else AI is probably the single biggest consulting opportunity sitting in front of your MSP right now. But of course there’s a problem. Almost every MSP talking about AI sounds exactly the same as all of the other MSPs who are also talking about AI. So today I want to show you why that’s happening and how to fix it. Let’s talk about how to talk about AI without sounding like everyone else. If we’re honest, most MSPs are not true experts in AI. I know that you’re very capable users and you probably use Copilot or Claude or ChatGPT. I mean, you probably use all of them, right? You’ve probably had to play with all of the major tools available. But when I say that most MSPs are not AI experts, typically you are just a few steps ahead of the average person, depending on the kind of clients that you deal with. These days, being an AI expert does only mean being a few pages ahead of everyone else because of course it’s changing so quickly. I do think there is a big difference between being a capable user and being a credible advisor. They’re two completely different things. And the trap is, for most MSPs, if you are just a few pages ahead of your clients and your prospects that you’ve read a little bit more, you’ve watched a little bit more on YouTube, then you have to be careful not to turn that into genuine expertise. But what you have as an opportunity is the ability to talk to them about AI and how they can roll it out and protect themselves and protect their business. That’s something that they don’t know. And that’s something that even if you are only a few pages ahead of them in the book you still have the ability to talk to them about that. For example, they might be looking at “How can we use Claude? How can we use ChatGPT within the business?” But they don’t know the questions to ask themselves. So they don’t know the concept of shadow AI, that their business’s data is being loaded into everyone’s personal Claude accounts right across the business. And of course that could be happening right now and they have no idea that this is happening. They don’t know that Copilot has those guardrails that you don’t necessarily get with Claude and with ChatGPT and with the others. It’s almost a case of because they don’t know what they don’t know, and they don’t know what questions to ask, that’s why you can consult with them about their AI. So you’re not consulting with them about AI capabilities as much as the best way to roll it out across their business. And actually, isn’t that what you do already? You are already a consultant about the best ways that they can roll out technology and max technology in their business, and AI is just another strand of that. But when you are communicating that, you’ve got to be careful not to use generic AI messaging. And this is the issue with general MSP messaging anyway. You’ve got to be careful not to use generic phrases because when ordinary business owners see the same phrases from all MSPs, it makes all MSPs look the same. And samey kills sales. So it’s exactly the same in AI. Here are some specific phrases that you might inadvertently use which make you sound the same. You might say phrases like “AI is transforming business” or “Unlock the power of AI” or “Stay ahead of the AI curve.” Those by the way, are all phrases which came out of an AI tool. And unfortunately they say nothing because all MSPs could easily put those on their... -
SPECIAL: MSP Marketing Audit (3 of 3) - Focus On Revenue 10.08.2026 49minWe’re finishing our three part marketing audit with a focus on revenue protection. There is a gold mine sitting inside your existing client base, let’s find out if you’re maximising that in your MSP. Welcome to Episode 352 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge. SPECIAL: MSP Marketing Audit (3 of 3) – Focus On Revenue This is the third and final part of our massive marketing audit that we’ve been doing across three episodes of the podcast. So two episodes ago, that was episode 350, we looked at your foundations: your ideal client profile, your unique selling proposition, your website, and your LinkedIn setup. And then last week in episode 351, we audited your lead generation engine: build audiences, grow relationships, and convert those relationships into meetings and clients. So if you haven’t yet gone through those, it really would be worth you going back through them. Today’s the same format, a bunch of questions to ask you with yes/no answers. We’re kind of building something up over these three episodes of the podcast, so you can really get to grips with where the opportunities are within your MSP. Don’t think of it as, “I’ve got all this work to do”, think of it as “I now know which areas I need to focus on the most.” So we’re finishing with an audit on revenue protection. And this is the part that most MSPs actually kind of never really think about systematically, often because they’re so focused on looking after the existing clients and trying to win new clients that they forget that there is actually a gold mine sitting inside your existing client base. In fact, if anything, I would say that there’s more money to be made selling more and improving the retention of your existing clients than there is bringing onboard new clients. And sure, bringing on board new clients is really important, but actually mining the existing client base is equally important, if not faster results and better results. I’ll tell you something as well, and you may not hear many people say this, but I promise you this is true. If you can get your clients to a stage that they want and they choose to buy more from you, they will be happier and they will stay longer. And that kind of seems highly unlikely. Surely it should be the other way around… the less they spend with us, the lower the bills are, surely the happier they should be. And yes, that’s the case, but the keyword is choice. The more your clients choose to buy from you, the happier they will be. So we’re going to look at three areas today. We’re going to look at first of all, getting the first purchase over the line, as in getting someone to choose you, to buy from you. We’re then going to look at good account management. And account management isn’t just happiness, it’s about making sure they’re going to stay for years and years and years. So essentially systemising your retention. And then we’re going to look at upselling. And remember, I’m not talking about selling them stuff they don’t need or they don’t want, but I am looking at how can we find the things that will make them happy if they bought those things and then give those things to them. Retention is baked into good upselling. I’ve got 30 questions for you in total, and it’s the same format as before, just a simple yes or no answer. Grab a bit of paper, grab a pen, grab a laptop if you have to. Unless you’re driving, just keep score as we’re going through this and I’ll tell you what your total means at the end. Let’s do this. Getting the first purchase over the line. 10 questions here, asking whether or not you’re making it easy enough for a warm prospect to take that very first s... -
SPECIAL: MSP Marketing Audit (2 of 3) - Generating Leads 03.08.2026 30minThis is part two of our three-part marketing audit where we’re auditing your lead generation machine using my three-step lead generation system. Build audiences, grow relationships, and convert relationships. Welcome to Episode 351 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge. SPECIAL: MSP Marketing Audit (2 of 3) – Generating Leads This is part two of our three-part marketing audit. Last week in episode 350, we looked at your foundations, that was your ideal client profile, your unique selling proposition, so basically who you want to work with and why they would choose you, then your website and your LinkedIn setup. So if you haven’t yet listened to that one or watched it on YouTube, please do go back and start there, those foundations are so important. But today we’re going to go deeper into the engine room because we’re auditing your lead generation machine using my three-step lead generation system. Build audiences, grow relationships, and convert relationships. I’ve got 30 questions for you in total across this episode. It’s the same as last week. You’re scoring yourself with a yes or a no answer for each one, and I’ll tell you what your total means at the end. Let’s go. SECTION ONE: Build audiences. So in this first section I’ve got 10 questions for you asking whether or not you’re reaching enough of the right people to market to. Question 1: Do you have a LinkedIn audience of at least 500 people who are decision makers at the kinds of businesses that you want to work with? Marketing is very much a numbers game, and especially for MSPs because the sales cycle is so long, and therefore you need to have as many irons in the fire as you can. You need to have at least 500 connections on LinkedIn, but better… 1000, 2000, 3000. Question 2: Are you adding new ideal prospect connections on LinkedIn every single day? I do think this is something you should be doing every day. In fact, not you, but maybe someone on your behalf, perhaps a virtual assistant or someone on your team. But every day you should be attempting 10 connections. You find those people you really want to do business with and you go and connection request them. And there’s lots of different ways to do this. You could use an automated tool. You’ve got Dux-Soup, for example, or Meet Alfred, I think those two are both still going. I say I think because I haven’t personally used them for a few years and they do come with huge caveats of be very careful… LinkedIn hates automated tools. You could also just use Claude, open LinkedIn in your Chrome browser and you’ve got the Claude plugin that can use LinkedIn for you. It’s slow, but it will get it done. Or as I say, just use a human. That’s the approach I prefer. And even I attempt 10 connection requests every single day. We’re up to about 8,500 to 9,000 connections on LinkedIn now, and we’ve done it the slow, long, hard way. And they’re good solid connections because I have a VA, Christelle, who every day is connecting only to MSPs and to vendors within the channel, it’s a very targeted list. You can do exactly the same thing. Now, even if you only get one or two people accepting your connection request, you’re still building your list every day, which is great. Question 3: Do you have an email list of prospects separate from your client list that you are actively growing? Most MSPs have their client list and they will email them, often from within the PSA. I believe you need a CRM separate and that’s where your prospect data sits. And you should be sending out regular emails to those prospects at least once a week, which is not overkill. Once a day is overkill, once a week is absolutely s... -
SPECIAL: MSP Marketing Audit (1 of 3) - Do you have these fundamentals? 27.07.2026 39minTo mark our 350th episode I’m giving you a complete audit of your MSP’s marketing. By the end of this you’ll know exactly where to focus your marketing efforts to create a stronger foundation. Welcome to Episode 350 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge. SPECIAL: MSP Marketing Audit (1 of 3) – Do you have these fundamentals? It’s episode 350 and I can’t quite believe that we’ve actually made it here. We’ve been doing this every single Tuesday since the 5th of November 2019 and we’ve not missed a single week yet. So to mark this big anniversary, I’m going to do something a little bit different. Not just today, but over the next three episodes, I’m giving you a complete audit of your MSP’s marketing. We’re not just talking about theory here. I’m actually going to go through a practical numbered checklist that you can work through right now, so that you can assess where you stand with your marketing. Before we start, grab a pen and paper because you’re going to be scoring yourself as we go along. Actually, the score is simply yes or no. Yes, we’re doing this or no, we don’t. I’ve got 40 items to go through today and there’s going to be more next week and more the week after. So today we are going to look at the foundations of your marketing. We’re covering things like your ICP, I’ll explain what that is in a second, your USP, we’re going to look at your website and we’re going to look at your LinkedIn setup. And as I say, there are 40 questions in total across this episode. So count your yes answers as we go and I’ll tell you what your score means at the end. Let’s get started. SECTION ONE: ICP – Your Ideal Client Profile We’ve got six questions in this first section and your ideal client profile means that you have a very strong grip on exactly the kind of client that you would like to work with. So I often ask brand new members to our MSP marketing edge, tell me about your ideal client profile and they’re like, “yep, yep, we’ve got all of that sorted out, we know exactly what we want.” And actually their idea of an ideal client profile is, businesses round here that’ll spend at least $400 or $500 a month or whatever the case is. Actually for a good ideal client profile, you need to go more into detail with that. The more you have a real grip on exactly who you want to do business with, the more relevant you can make your marketing. Because one of the biggest tricks and secrets to marketing is making it seem really relevant to the person that you most want to reach. So I’m going to go through six questions and as a reminder, you’re answering yes or no. So just write these down. You can just do like one, two, three, four, five. And at the end we’ll go through what it means depending on how many yeses and nos you’ve got. Question 1: Have you actually written down a specific description of your ideal clients? And if you have, have you included these kind of things? The size of your ideal clients, the kind of sector that they’re in. I mean, it could be that you’ll work with literally any business or you might just prefer professional services, for example you might like manufacturers. Have you written down the location of where the ideal client is? Now, you and I know that you can look after clients all around the world, but you may choose to have clients that you can physically visit at least once a year just so you can show your face because we all know there are benefits still of meeting people in real life. And do you know what the job title of the decision maker is? For example, if it’s smaller businesses, which is typically up to 50 staff, is it the operations manager, the CEO, something like that? So that’s the first question is have you written down, literally in writing stuck on the wall of your... -
How MSPs Can Find New Clients With Direct Mail 20.07.2026 45minMSPs not yet using direct mail to warm up leads are missing out on a major marketing channel – here’s five ideas to get started. Also this week, do video testimonials like this to influence prospects, and how MSP owners unintentionally self-sabotage their marketing. Welcome to Episode 349 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge. Five super smart ideas for MSPs to use direct mail If you’re not yet using direct mail to warm up leads and find out who’s nearly ready to buy from you, then I believe you’re missing out on a major marketing channel for your MSP. Back in May this year, I was a guest at the MSP Show in London, and I got to share a stage with Ian Luckett, Darren Strong, and Mit Patel. These are all people who’ve been on this podcast in the past. It was great to meet particularly Mit for the first time in real life. And we were talking about what it takes to grow and succeed with your MSP. Anyway, later in the day, I was interviewed by James Steel for the GTIA on Location YouTube channel, which by the way, is well worth you looking up, there’s some great content on there. And James asked me a whole load of questions about marketing, but the one that really got me going was when he asked about direct mail. I’m a massive fan of direct mail for MSPs, and I think it’s one of the most underused tactics in the whole channel. So today I want to give you five smart ideas for making your direct mail stand out and actually get a response. And let’s start by asking why direct mail at all? And remember, I’m talking about stuff that’s sent through your letterbox, physical real life stuff. Well, here’s why. In 1999, yes I was alive then, I had 1000 pieces of mail come through my post box every single day. I mean, we were inundated with mail back then. Those of us that were alive, we remember what it was like. So we had all of this stuff in our post box, but we would only get three emails. And today of course, it’s the other way around, right? Everyone’s inbox is full. Their email inbox is full, their notifications inbox is full, their social media feed. It’s all ping, ping, ping, ping, ping. It’s a complete digital mess. So our brains and our inboxes in our digital world are completely full. We’re now getting 3000 things every day digitally, but the physical post, well, that’s almost empty by comparison. In fact, just before recording this, I went out and I checked my mail. Where I live here in the UK, I have an external mailbox. I haven’t checked for a week, which shows how unimportant it is. I just went out there and I’ve got two pieces of mail that were sent to me. One’s like a bank statement that the bank can’t actually physically switch off, they don’t know which computer’s sending it to me. And then there was a letter from some company about something and three flyers for Domino’s and stuff like that. So there’s not a huge amount of physical mail. And this is good because it allows you to stand out in a space where there’s not a lot of competition. A well-crafted piece of direct mail gets physically handled, which means it’s noticed. Notice what I just said there. I went out of my way to go and get my post. I don’t go out of my way to check my notifications or my email. It’s just something that I have to do every day and something I choose to want to stay on top of so I don’t have 67,000 unread emails, which my girlfriend currently does, which is driving me crazy I’ll be honest. But your competitors are almost certainly not doing this, right? They are not sending direct mails. And that means that the physical mailboxes, the physical postal space of all of the prospects in your area or your vertical, that could be yours. Now this works brilliantly alongside LinkedIn. Imagine if you were hitting the same prospe... -
MSPs' Greatest Sales Weapons 13.07.2026 43minHere are six psychological weapons of influence that you can apply to your MSP’s marketing to win more clients. Also this week, three hot marketing ideas around Copilot, and the surprising secret for talking to clients about cyber security. Welcome to Episode 348 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge. A deep dive into the psychology that drives prospects One of my all-time favourite books is called Influence by Dr. Robert Cialdini. And today I want to walk you through his six psychological weapons of persuasion and show you exactly how they apply to winning clients for your MSP. Now, this book which I’ve owned for about 20 years, in fact, if you’re watching on YouTube, the copy I’ve literally got in my hands now, I’ve had for a round of 20 years or so, it was actually first published in 1984. Of course, it’s been updated since, but it is still, in my opinion, the definitive work on why people say yes. Dr. Robert Cialdini is a psychology professor, but he specialises in marketing. He’s still active now, I don’t know if he teaches still, I think he’s in his 70s, but he’s in New York, I believe. He’s identified six psychological weapons of influence, and we can apply every single one of them to your MSP. So let me take you through them and give you an example of how each one can help make your marketing so much easier and more effective. The first is something called reciprocity. People feel compelled to give something back when they’ve received something completely free or something of high value at very, very low cost. So for example, I give away a free MSP marketing wall planner, and I do that partly because I want to educate thousands of MSPs around the world how to have better marketing. But also I know that in giving someone a physical free wall planner that I’ve had printed at my cost, that I’ve mailed out to them at my cost, there’s a certain level of reciprocity in that. And many, not all, but many of the people who get one of those wall planners will come back and buy something from me at some point in the future. And by the way, if you don’t have one of those wall planners yet, I’ll tell you in just a few minutes how you can get one completely free. And there is no obligation to buy anything if there’s a psychological obligation that’s set up in your brain and that’s just good marketing from Dr. Robert Cialdini. But you can do this as well so you can give away free guides, you can give away other kind of lead magnets, scorecards are working really well right now as a lead magnet, and there’s still some reciprocity from that. You could do a really in-depth LinkedIn post, you could do a major in-depth guide on cyber security or something else on your websites. All of this is reciprocity in action. What you’ve just got to remember is that when you give genuine value first, then the prospects feel a pull towards you before you’ve ever asked them for anything, ever asked them to buy anything from you. So practical question on this, what are you giving away that’s actually useful? So things like a buyer’s guide or a sales brochure, those kind of things are okay, but the more value you can give in your freebie, in the things you give away, the better. And just a reminder, by the way, if you’re a member of the MSP Marketing Edge, we have a book called Email Hijack. That’s available to our B2B members. You can get it in the portal right now. It’s in the tool section and it’s kind of like a book, a fictional book about an email compromise attack. So you can very quickly update that with all of your details, put that on your website for free. People just enter their email address and you email them or physically post them, mail them, ship them a copy of email hijack. But th... -
MSPs: Use Webinars To Find Hot Prospects 06.07.2026 46minLet’s look at why webinars are an amazing way for MSPs to grow their business primarily because most MSPs aren’t doing them. Also this week, get up at 5am every weekday to grow your MSP, and before you do any marketing or sales, you MUST get these foundations right. Welcome to Episode 347 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge. How to use webinars to identify the hottest prospects So have you ever thought of doing webinars to promote your MSP and if you have, what stopped you from actually going ahead with it? Were you worried that perhaps no one would turn up or worse than no one… one person would turn up? Or maybe you were worried about your own performance. Let’s look at why webinars are an amazing way for MSPs to grow their business primarily because most MSPs aren’t doing them. And let’s just address this right from the start. Yes, there is room in the world for more webinars. You might think there are too many webinars already, but that’s just because you’re inside the channel. Outside the channel, they are getting lots of webinars about the law or carpentry or manufacturing or whatever line of work your prospects are in, but they’re not hearing a lot from MSPs that are pushing technology and talking about the importance of cyber security. There’s plenty of business out there to be won through webinars, but you’ve just got to approach it the right way. Most MSPs think the goal of a webinar is all about getting the attendance numbers in. Get 50 people on a webinar, get big conversion rates. That’s not what it’s about at all. The real goal of a webinar is intelligence. It’s telling you something about the leads and the prospects that you’re talking to right now, the people who are in your CRM or who are connected to you on LinkedIn. I mean, even if you just look at who has done something, so who registered for a webinar in the first place? Actually, you could take that back a step and say, who clicked the email link to have a look at the webinar that I’m promoting? Who then registered for that webinar? Who then showed up for that webinar? Who stayed for the majority of it? Who asked questions? Who booked a meeting or did something afterwards to say thank you? All of this tells you really interesting things about the leads and prospects that you are talking to. And it helps you to kind of sort out the wheat from the chaff. It helps you to show who are the hottest prospects right now and where should you be focusing all of your attention. I mean, the very fact that someone would attend your webinar or even register for your webinar that says something to you. Now, you might know that with my members, I work either helping them to win B2B business, which is what most MSPs want, more business owners, or I help them to grow their co-managed business, so helping them to reach IT directors. And in both these instances, webinars can be a really, really powerful tool. It can help you to see who through their behaviour alone is worth me talking to. Who’s worth me following up, ringing them, sending more emails to them, sending stuff to them in the post in the mail. Someone registering for a webinar and turning up for a webinar and being engaged with a webinar, it’s like their hand going up. These are buying signals that people are inadvertently sending to you and it’s great for you because you then know exactly who you should be following up and exactly who you should be talking to over the next couple of weeks. Now there are three, if you like, kind of three tiers of heat after a webinar. By heat, I mean, how hot is a prospect. So the first tier is where someone has attended and they’ve asked a question or they’ve stayed to the end. So they’ve turned up, they’ve stayed engaged. In fact, if they’ve asked a ques... -
Are Facebook Ads Suddenly HOT Again For MSPs? 29.06.2026 37minFacebook has a new ad system that could be a game changer for MSPs. Also this week, where should you put your LinkedIn energy… personal profile or company page?, and meet the guy who built an MSP from zero to $20 million in six years. Welcome to Episode 346 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge. Are Facebook ads suddenly hot again for MSPs? I want to start with something that I think is genuinely underused by MSPs and that’s Facebook advertising. Now, just to give some context to this, Facebook advertising was really hot for MSPs like years and years ago and then suddenly it wasn’t. It stopped being an effective way to reach people, but actually I think it’s back. Let me bring you up to speed. Now I know what you might be thinking. Facebook, Paul, really? Isn’t that where your mum posts pictures of her garden and people just argue about politics and yes, it is that. But it’s also something else. Facebook is the most universally used social platform on the planet. 3.5billion people use Meta’s platforms every single day. And that includes the business owners and managers that you want to reach. Of course they’re on LinkedIn and that is still the primary social platform because they use that for work. But what if we could reach them during their downtime? They’re almost certainly on Facebook or using other Meta products and that makes it a very interesting place to advertise. As I said, for the last few years, I’ve been pretty lukewarm about recommending Facebook ads to MSPs. The targeting was getting harder after the iOS privacy changes of a few years ago and the costs were creeping up and the results were kind of inconsistent. And most MSPs just don’t have the budget or the time or the patience to run the kind of long test cycles that Facebook advertising used to need from you. But something changed at the very end of 2024 and it matters enough that I think it’s now worth revisiting this whole question. So Meta introduced a completely new advertising engine. It’s got a great name, it’s called Andromeda. And if you haven’t heard of Andromeda, then you’re not alone because it obviously wasn’t front page news. But in the world of digital advertising, it’s actually a pretty big deal. Here’s what Andromeda is and why it matters. Previously, Facebook’s ad system worked by letting advertisers define their audience very precisely. So you’d pick interests, age ranges, job titles, locations, obviously, behaviours if you could, and then the system would try to match your ads to the people that you described. And that sounds sensible, but the problem was the algorithm was really blunt. It would find one ad in your campaign that seemed to be working and dump all of the budget into that ad, kind of ignoring everything else. So it was very rigid and actually got less effective over time, especially as privacy changes made the audience data less reliable. Andromeda replaces all of that with a completely different approach. Instead of you telling Facebook who should see your ad, the AI figures out who should see the ad by itself based on your creative, based on the actual advert that you’ve created. So your ad becomes the targeting signal. The system watches how people respond to it. It looks for patterns, it detects who engages and who converts. And then it goes off and finds more people like them across the platform. So there’s no interest targeting required and no demographic filtering required. You just go broad and the AI does the matching for you. And this is really exciting. Because it’s been running for over a year already, the results from advertisers who’ve adapted to this properly have been really impressive. In fact, Meta’s own data shows a 22% increase in something called return on ad spend, ROAS. It’s a way... -
The 4 types of CRMs used by MSPs (and which is best) 22.06.2026 36minHow to choose the best CRM for your MSP by answering a few key questions. Also this week, the most important metrics to focus on, and how MSPs can actually make money from AI. Welcome to Episode 345 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge. The 4 types of CRMs used by MSPs (and which is best) One of the most common questions I get from MSPs when they start thinking seriously about their marketing is, “Which CRM should we use?” And on the surface that sounds like a really simple question, but actually the more you dig into it, the more complicated it becomes. Isn’t that always the way? Because this isn’t really a question about software. It’s a question about frustration. What MSPs are really asking when they ask me about CRMs is, “Paul, where do I put all my prospect data? How do I build a pipeline that I can actually see? How do I know who to follow up and when to follow them up? How do I stop things falling through the cracks? And why is all of this giving me such a headache?” Those are all the kind of questions that MSPs really have. So before I walk you through the four types of CRMs that MSPs tend to use, let me say something to you. It may be slightly controversial. I believe there isn’t one best CRM for MSPs. There’s only the best CRM for how your MSP markets and sells itself. And those are two very different things. And the reason so many MSPs end up with the wrong tool or with a perfectly good tool that they never really properly use, is that they chose the software before they defined the marketing process and that’s backwards. The tool should serve the process never the other way around. Let’s look at the four types of CRM based on the four types of MSP. The first type is what I’d like to call PSA led MSPs. So these are MSPs who basically live inside their PSA. ConnectWise, Autotask, HaloPSA, Synchro, Atera, Kaseya, whatever it is. Their agreements are in there and this may be you. The billing’s in there, your tickets are in there. So for you, the idea of keeping your sales activity in exactly the same place feels logical and tidy. And actually if your sales are largely driven by referrals or renewals and everything’s kind of straightforward and simple, then this can work perfectly well. If you’re not trying to build a sophisticated marketing engine but you just want visibility on leads without having more software, then that might be the right answer for you. But a big word of caution. When a PSA vendor says their platform has a marketing module, that’s a little bit like a Swiss Army knife saying that it has a saw. So technically, yes, it’s true, but it’s not what you would choose if sawing things was something that you did every day. You can’t use that tiny little knife every day on a tree, can you? It’s just for the odd job. And it’s exactly the same with your PSA. Most marketing modules in PSAs, and I haven’t looked at all of them, so if I’m wrong on this, please email me and let me know. But most marketing modules in PSAs are not really up to the job of actually doing good comprehensive marketing every day. The second type then is marketing-led MSPs. And these tend to be MSPs that don’t have enough leads and know that marketing has to be their principle growth activity. Again, you may be in this category right now. So they want to run campaigns, they want to publish content consistently, they want to capture leads through forms, and importantly, and this is the right thing to do, is use automation to follow up all of these leads. So if that is you, the platforms to look at are things like HubSpot, making sure that you’ve got the marketing hub, HubSpot’s broken into lots of different hubs, so you’ll need the marketing hub. Or you could look at ActiveCampaign or look at Zoho One, or the... -
Focusing On Tech Doesn't Grow Your MSP 15.06.2026 36minMSPs must build audiences and relationships before selling IT support, which is why marketing is so important. Also this week, why technically superior MSPs lose deals to “average” competitors, and how MSPs can build resilience every day. Welcome to Episode 344 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge. Every MSP is now a media & marketing company I want to start today with something that landed in my email inbox a few weeks back from a guy called Tom Orbach. Now, he writes a newsletter called Tom’s Marketing Ideas. I’ve been a paying subscriber for a while. He’s sharp, he’s very original and when he says something, I really do pay attention. Now, the subject line of his email was this… Every company is now a media company. And after I read the newsletter, I just couldn’t stop thinking about it because I believe he’s absolutely right and I believe it matters enormously for your MSP. Let me explain what he wrote about and then I’m going to add my own layer on top of that. So Tom’s argument started with a data point. It was about OpenAI and how they’d recently spent over $100 million to acquire a podcast, which is kind of weird if you think about it because they didn’t acquire another technology company or any kind of software platform, they spent all that money on a podcast. In fact, it was two guys who’d been doing a live tech show for just 17 months. And then the week before that, a fintech company called Plaid, which by the way is worth $8 billion, they bought a newsletter with 200,000 subscribers and actually Tom listed company after company after company that have done the same thing. HubSpot bought a newsletter with 2.5 million subscribers. Stripe bought a founder community. Semrush, which is an SEO tool, they bought several SEO publications. And these are not media companies, these are software and technology businesses, but they’ve all been spending hundreds of millions of dollars to own audiences. So before we explore why, let me first of all just put something out there to the universe. If there’s any business that wants to come and buy this podcast for let’s say $100 million, then please email me. Obviously I’m joking. (I’m not joking. Email me.) Anyway, let’s look at why all of these big businesses are doing this and why even though these are big businesses buying podcasts and newsletters and stuff like that, it’s still relevant to you as an MSP. They’re doing it because they figured out something that most businesses are still catching up to. In a world where AI can produce infinite content at practically zero cost, the one thing that can’t be replicated is a trusted human voice with a loyal audience. Attention is the scarcest resource in business right now and the companies that own attention don’t need to chase customers anymore. The customers come to them. Tom Orbach in his newsletter puts this brilliantly. He says, “The company that teaches about the industry earns the right to sell the tool.” And that sentence is basically the entire philosophy behind what I do with this podcast, with my LinkedIn newsletter, with my weekly emails, with all of my content. I’m not really selling my MSP Marketing Edge membership. I’m building audiences of MSPs who trust me. And when they’re ready to take their marketing seriously, I’m the person they’re going to think of. Now, here’s where this is applicable for you because the good news is you don’t need to spend $100 million on a podcast network, but you do need to think of your MSP as a media company. And what does that mean in practice? It means you should be publishing content consistently. Something that educates the business owners and managers that you want to work with. At the very least, a weekly email, a weekly LinkedIn newsletter, a sh... -
Deep Dive: How MSPs Win Healthcare Clients 08.06.2026 34minMSPs love healthcare practices for many reasons, so here’s how to reach them and win them as clients. Also this week, the 5 questions your MSP website’s MUST answer (or prospects go elsewhere), and the scary implications for MSPs when your clients buy cyber liability Insurance. Welcome to Episode 343 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge. Deep dive: How MSPs win healthcare clients Let’s talk about one of the most attractive client verticals that any MSP can go after. Healthcare practices. And when I say healthcare, I mean private practices specifically. So doctors, dentists, dental surgeons, optometrists, or opticians as they’re known here in the UK, veterinarians, we call them vets here in the UK, physiotherapists, cosmetic clinics, all of that kind of stuff. The kind of practice that’s owner operated or partnership run. I mean somewhere that’s got a reception desk, clinical staff, and a growing pile of technology holding the whole thing together. This is not about hospitals or large health networks. This is about those small to medium-sized healthcare practices that need IT support and they’re probably getting it from someone who maybe doesn’t really understand their world, and that is your opportunity. A heads up that this podcast is consumed all around the world and obviously there are lots of different healthcare systems out there. So for example, here in the UK, most doctors and what we call general practitioners, GPs, they work within the National Health Service, which is run by the government. So this means I’m not going to dive into specific details or specific laws for any particular country. Instead, I’m going to talk generally about how you can reach all of these kind of clients, whichever country you’re in. Because even though there are different laws and different systems around the world, these healthcare professionals all think and feel and act pretty much along the same lines. So why do MSPs love healthcare practices so much? Well, let me count the reasons… First of all, they’re almost entirely recession proof. People don’t stop going to the dentist when the economy wobbles. They don’t stop taking their dog to the vet. I mean, they might cut back on the extra spend such as having all their teeth replaced with those weird looking teeth that Hollywood people have, but they still maintain the basic essentials. So these businesses have a good solid base of revenue still coming in no matter what’s happening to the economy. In fact, these are businesses typically built on recurring appointments, loyal patients and services that can’t be postponed indefinitely. Second, they are deeply dependent on technology. The appointment system, the patient records, the digital imaging, the billing software, the online prescribing, the payment processing. It’s all technology, right? And all of it needs to work all day, every single day, because when it doesn’t work, the consequences are immediate and painful. A dental practice that can’t access its patient management system on a Monday morning isn’t just frustrating. It’s losing appointments and revenue and it’s letting its patients down. And that’s the kind of downtime that gets you fired as their IT provider and the kind of risk that makes them incredibly motivated to find someone they can genuinely trust. A side note, I worked with dentists in a previous business, one that I sold 10 years ago, and here in the UK, they call helping the patient’s “chair time”. That’s all the dentist wants, they want chair time. They want the patient in the chair, they want their fingers and metal things in the patient’s mouth, that makes them happy because they’re earning money, and anything other than chair time is losing them money. So it’s really good for you to get into the mindset of what is most import... -
What Happens When You Copy Another MSP 01.06.2026 31minMost MSPs are just copying other MSPs’ marketing and this is a massive problem. Here’s what to do instead. Also this week, LinkedIn’s big algorithm change is SEXY for MSPs, and don’t bother starting marketing until you’ve got these fundamentals in place. Welcome to Episode 342 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge. The trap of copying other MSPs’ marketing (and how to escape it) Let me describe a scene to you. You sit down one afternoon because you’ve decided that you’re finally going to sort out your marketing and you think, “I’m just going to do a bit of research. I’m going to see what other MSPs elsewhere are doing.” And that sounds like a sensible place to start, right? So you Google IT support not just in your town, because you want to look out there and see what other people are doing, so you go and look for IT support in a few different towns. And you pull up 10 MSP websites and then you start looking at them and reading them and just getting a feel for them. After about 20 minutes or so, you close your laptop and you realise that they all say kind of the same thing. They all say things like proactive IT support or your trusted technology partner or we keep your business running, something like that. Tailored solutions for businesses of all sizes, cyber security you can rely on… all of these kind of things. They’re all versions of the same thing. Here’s the problem, because you looked at all of those websites and thought, that’s what all MSPs say so I suppose that’s what I should say too. And because of that, you then go away and write your own version of exactly the same thing. And now your website sounds exactly the same as the other websites that you already looked at. Does this make sense? I see this pattern constantly and I do completely understand why it happens. When you don’t know where to start with your marketing, looking at what other MSPs are doing feels logical because you think maybe they’ve already figured something out. Why do I need to reinvent the wheel? I’ll just do a version of what they’ve done. The problem with that is that in the MSP world, almost nobody actually has it figured out. Most MSPs are just copying other MSPs, who themselves copied other MSPs, who copied someone who copied the first MSP website that ever got built around about 1873. That was a bit of a confusing sentence, but you get the idea. It’s like an echo chamber of sameness that’s been bouncing the same tired phrases around the whole of the channel for 20 years or so. When everything looks and feels the same, ordinary business owner prospects cannot tell MSPs apart. This is a massive, massive problem across the whole channel. So the business owner prospect defaults to comparing you and all of the other MSPs on the only thing that they can compare you on, which is price. And that’s exactly the outcome that you don’t want. Now here’s the really interesting bit. The reason that MSP marketing is so samey isn’t that the businesses themselves are samey. It’s just that as I was saying, when MSPs write their marketing, they think about what they do rather than what their clients feel. So they describe their service from the inside looking out and the result is technically accurate but forgettable. It’s completely interchangeable with everyone else. So how do you escape this trap of sameness? I believe the answer is to stop looking sideways at your competitors and start looking outwards at your clients. Specifically three things: First of all, look at who you actually are not what you do. So your personality, your story, your opinions, the way you run your business. These are all the things that make you slightly different, slightly unconventional. Th... -
MSPs: Hiring A Salesperson Is A Mistake 25.05.2026 32minThe average MSP does not need a full time salesperson, here’s what you really need. Also this week, five cool marketing ideas from other sectors, and how to outsource operations without making mistakes. Welcome to Episode 341 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge. Why you shouldn’t hire a salesperson, even if you hate selling Can I be honest with you about something that might be just a little bit uncomfortable? If you hate selling, hiring a salesperson feels like the obvious answer. You get someone else to do the bits you hate, right? Problem solved, except it’s really not. And I’ve seen enough MSPs go down this road to know that for most of them it ends in frustration, wasted money, and a salesperson who quietly stops hunting for new business within about three months. Let me explain why. The average MSP does no more than about two sales meetings a month. Two. And before you think that sounds shockingly low, it actually makes complete sense when you understand the business model of MSPs. MSPs don’t generate enormous volumes of leads because most of them don’t do a lot of marketing and that’s a kind of obvious thing to say. But more importantly, when you do win a client, that client pays you all the monthly recurring revenue for years and years and years, sometimes a decade or more. So you don’t need to win clients every week to run a very healthy, profitable MSP. In fact, you might not be able to onboard them. You might not have the capacity to onboard a new client every week. You just need to win the right new clients, at the right time, consistently. And that might be for you one every month or two every month or something like that. But here’s what that means for hiring a salesperson. If you’re only doing two sales meetings a month, what exactly is a full-time salesperson going to do with the other 150 odd hours? Because new logo sales in an MSP is not a full-time job, not unless you’re a reasonably large business and you have a lot of sales activity going on. And a good salesperson who’s sitting around not selling is going to get bored, demotivated and expensive very quickly. So MSPs think, I’ll get them to do lead generation as well. But asking a salesperson to generate leads is like asking, I don’t know, a network specialist to build a PC. And sure, they may be able to have a go at it, but it’s not what they’re good at. Lead generation and going out and meeting people and closing sales are two completely different skillsets. With all of the marketing jobs that need to be done within your MSP, you need different people to do each of those jobs. Bearing that in mind, MSPs then think, okay, if they can’t do lead generation, then I’ll get them to do account management as well. That seems to fit. They can look after the existing clients and hunt for new ones. And yes, that kind of sounds logical, but 95 times out of a hundred, it’ll end in disaster. And here’s why. Account management is a genuinely enjoyable job. You’re talking to people who already like you, they’re already giving you money, you’re already solving problems for them and they already trust you. These are nice conversations, sorting out little small problems, conversations about the future of their business. Everyone enjoys an account management conversation. New logo sales is the complete opposite. Until you get into the process with someone, a lot of it can be rejection, cold audiences, long sales cycles. It’s having to build trust from scratch over and over and over again. So if you give someone both of those jobs, of course they’re always going to drift towards the easier one, which is account management every single time and not because they’re lazy, because they’re human. And that means that your existing clients get lots of love... -
MSPs Using LinkedIn To Find Clients: NEW WARNING 18.05.2026 30minMSPs, there’s a danger lurking inside my marketing advice… platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram are actually “borrowed audiences”. Here’s how to build an “owned audience”. Also this week, how to turn boring compliance updates into lead gen on LinkedIn, and how to sell more cyber security by telling stories. Welcome to Episode 340 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge. The danger of building your MSP’s marketing on borrowed platforms Can I be honest about something? There’s a danger lurking inside the marketing advice that I give to you every single week in this podcast and I want to address it head on. If you’ve been listening to or watching this podcast for a while, you’ll know that I tell you to build your audience on LinkedIn to make connections, post every day, send messages, and just grow your network. And of course, I stand by all of that. LinkedIn is still the number one place for MSPs to go farming for new business. But here’s the thing… LinkedIn is not yours. Your connections, your content, your years of relationship building. All of it lives on a platform that belongs to someone else. Well, it’s Microsoft, I mean, they own LinkedIn. So that means that someone, some vice president of Microsoft hidden away in a building somewhere can change the rules at any point without warning, without apology, and without any obligation to protect what you’ve spent years building. We have a name for platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook and Instagram within marketing. They’re called “borrowed audiences”. And borrowed audiences are really cool right up until the moment that they’re not. So let me give you two examples from my world that really bring this to life. And the first one involves my own MSP Marketing Edge Facebook group, which we use for member support. So I started that in 2017 and for years that group has been a buzzing community with members sharing ideas and asking questions and getting answers and just helping each other out. It’s been great. But over the last couple of years, I’ve noticed something. The engagement has dropped significantly and it’s not because our members stopped caring or because the content within the Facebook group got worse. It’s because Facebook changed its algorithm. It stopped showing content from the groups that you’re in, in your feed. And you might have noticed this yourself if you still use Facebook. You’re probably still a member of 10 or 20 groups and they’re all things that you’re really interested in. But the content from those groups never really appears in your feed anymore. You have to remember to go to those groups. And instead in your feed, you just see content from other places and other people trying to sell you stuff. And Facebook, for whatever reason, has prioritised that. So I’ve still got great content in my group, there’s great help there and great conversations, but some of my members never see it because they don’t remember to go and look at it. And the algorithm has decided without asking anybody that group content wasn’t worth promoting anymore. Thank you, Mark Zuckerberg. I didn’t get the memo on that. Well, actually there was no memo on that, there was no announcement, the rug just got pulled slowly and silently. And that was a risk. It crept up on me. And obviously we’ve now actually gone and we’ve started other communities for our members on other platforms. Technically, we’re going to face the same problems again, but at least we can get around the Facebook algorithm problem with our other places that we can build communities. Now the second example involves a friend of mine, Matt Solomon of Better Tracker, who’s very, very well known in the channel. A couple of Christmases ago, Matt got what I can only described as L... -
Grow Your MSP 10x Faster With Co-managed IT 11.05.2026 23minHello and welcome to a very special edition of the podcast. For the first time ever, we’re doing a complete deep dive into one of the biggest growth opportunities available to your MSP right now… co-managed IT. Welcome to Episode 339 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge. Grow Your MSP 10x Faster With Co-managed IT Before I get into it, I want to tell you something about how we prepared for this episode, because I think that’s going to matter. So some background… we’re launching a new co-managed IT marketing membership, and I’ll tell you more about that at the end of the podcast, although if you do want to sneak peek, it’s on my website right now at mspmarketingedge.com/membership. Anyway, to help us get this right from day one, over the last six months, my team and I have done hundreds and hundreds of hours of research into this topic. We’ve interviewed IT directors, real ones who actually buy co-managed IT, so people who sit in the role that your MSP will be trying to reach if you did this. And we’ve also interviewed MSPs who already have co-managed clients and are winning more of them. And all of that work has helped us to build a new membership. And of course, it’s also got into this podcast episode. So what you’re going to hear or see today isn’t just my opinion about marketing to IT directors, it’s grounded in what they actually told us. In their own words about how they think, what they fear and what they want, and crucially, how they make buying decisions. In fact, throughout this episode, I’m going to play you some clips from one of those research conversations. It was an interview I did with an IT director who was very open with us, and I’m operating here on the principle that it’s better to seek forgiveness than it is to ask permission so he doesn’t know I’m playing these clips. Let’s keep this a secret, shall we? To protect his privacy, his voice has been filtered, and I’m going to call him Dave. Obviously, that’s not his real name, but these are his real words, completely unscripted. And remember, the call that I did with him was a research call six months ago. It wasn’t an interview. I’ve picked Dave for this because he really gave us insight into the emotions that an IT director goes through when they think about partnering with an MSP. And I think when you hear him speak, it’s going to change how you think about this massive opportunity. So, four things we’re going to cover today. First of all, what co-managed IT actually is, and just as importantly, what it isn’t. Number two, who makes the buying decision. Number three, why businesses choose co-managed. Number four, how you need to position and market yourself differently if you want to win this kind of work. Let’s go. What co-managed IT is and what it isn’t The single biggest mistake that MSPs make when they try to enter the co-managed market is assuming that it’s just a variation of what they already do. They take the same messaging that they use for business owners and bolt the words co-managed onto the front. And then they wonder why the conversation dies. Well, it dies because the buyer is completely different and a different buyer needs completely different language. In traditional B2B sales, you’re usually talking to a business owner or a senior manager who doesn’t live inside technology every day like you do. They don’t really want to understand it. They don’t want to talk about governance, architecture, service tiers, all of that stuff. What they want is relief. They just want someone to take all of the technology away from them. And that’s why phrases like, “We handle everything” or “Leave your IT to us”, they work so well in B2B marketing because you’re selling peace of mind to someone who just wants... -
Find new MSP clients: Only THIS marketing works 04.05.2026 35minYour MSP’s marketing should feel repetitive to you but fresh to the people seeing it… here’s how that works. Also this week, what margins should you aim for and how to increase them, and you can be an influencer in your marketplace without taking photos of your dinner. Welcome to Episode 338 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge. Why your marketing should feel repetitive to you, and fresh for prospects Your MSP’s marketing should feel repetitive to you, but fresh to the people seeing it. And I know that sounds like a kind of a strange goal at first, because when something feels repetitive, most of us assume we’re doing something wrong. We assume we should mix it up and try new things and be more creative. But actually, when it comes to marketing your MSP, the opposite is true. Now, I’m a huge fan of marketing systems. And by that, I mean a simple set of activities that you do on a regular basis. Small tasks, repeated daily or weekly. Things like publishing a blog or recording a podcast, posting on LinkedIn, emailing your list, putting out videos. None of these things are individually spectacular, but they have a power, which comes from doing all of them consistently every day and every week. Now here’s the interesting bit, if you run a proper marketing system for your MSP it will eventually start to feel boring to you. I’m recording this podcast for the 338th time. So every week since November 2019 I’ve sat down, decided what I want to talk about, written myself a script, and then recorded it. And obviously I’ve had holidays and vacations along the way, but in that instance, I just do two podcasts in a week so I never get behind. It is a hamster wheel, I will tell you. And writing the script is not a thrilling creative adventure every week, I’ll be honest. It’s a job, it’s a task in the system. And of course I still enjoy it, but I have to sit down, I have to write it, I have to record it. My team, I’m sure it’s as much a hamster wheel for them. They have to edit it. They have to do all the colour corrections and the promotions and all of the stuff like that. It’s all just a whole series of systemised tasks. And I do it and my team, which is James and Simon and Laura, they do it as well because it’s an important part of our business’ presence out there. And the same thing happens with your MSP’s marketing. If you’re doing it properly, there’s going to be a rhythm to it. You’re doing the same types of content every day or every week, the same channels, the same cadence week, after week, after week. And after a while, you might start thinking, “Oh my goodness, am I just repeating myself here? Am I just saying the same things again and again?” And the answer is probably yes. And that’s a good sign because here’s the thing that most MSP owners forget. You see your marketing every day… your prospects do not see it every day. You’re inside the system, they’re only catching glimpses of what you put out. So if you do think about it from their point of view, a prospect might see one LinkedIn post from you this month, or maybe they read one blog on your website or they hear an episode of your podcast if you do that because someone recommended it to them. They are seeing a tiny, tiny slice of what you produce. Meanwhile, you’re seeing everything… every post, every email, every article, every video. So of course, to you it feels repetitive because you’re experiencing the whole system, but your prospects are not. And even if they do see your content more than once, it’s usually spread out to them over time. So they might see something today and then they might not see anything from you for another two weeks. And then by the time they see the next thing, the first one has already kind of faded from their memory.
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