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Welcome to Episode 305 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• Is on-site support a competitive advantage?: Does your MSP still provide onsite support or are you thinking that maybe you should? Your decision could affect how successful your MSP is.
• How to find your MSP’s next 5 clients: Let me introduce you to the concept of the Dream 100 and how it could completely change your idea of marketing forever.
• Is this the only way MSPs should increase profits?: When profits are down should you reduce costs or focus your time on increasing sales? My special guest is an expert at operations and she’s got a unique spin on this exact problem that you are going to want to hear.
• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Do you have a live chat or instant messaging option on your MSP’s website? There’s so many options it’s hard to know the right one to choose. But I have the answer for you.

Is on-site support a competitive advantage?

Some MSPs do do it, some MSPs make a point of saying, no way. We’re talking about providing onsite support. Obviously back in the day it went without saying, you just did it. But in our modern, remote first world, the need for in-person onsite support has completely changed. So are you still providing it or are you thinking that maybe you should or that you never ever will again, Your decision could affect how successful your MSP is. So let’s explore your options right now.

Let’s be honest, a few years ago having engineers who could turn up at a client’s office and fix something kind of felt like a major selling point, but here we are in 2025 and most businesses now are hybrid or remote, that happened very quickly.

Almost everything can be fixed remotely, so is onsite support still something worth shouting about in your marketing or is it yesterday’s news?

Let’s look at both sides of this.

The case for onsite support being a competitive advantage, first of all. It starts with the fact that some clients love knowing that someone will actually physically come out if needed. You think about clients with manufacturing equipment, specialist hardware, or those who just feel reassured by a human coming into the office. For them, we’ll be there in person if you need us, that’s a big comfort factor. And as we know, comfort sells. And not every MSP is offering this anymore, of course, so if most of your competitors have gone fully remote you’ll be standing out as we’re local, we’re personal, we’ll come onsite. That could be a differentiator in your marketing. It’s a trust builder. It says, we are not just faceless techs in the cloud, we are real people here for you.

Now let’s look on the other side, the case against onsite support being a competitive advantage. Because on the flip side, as we know, most day-to-day issues don’t need it. Clients are used to remote support now, in fact they expect you to fix things fast online, over the internet. And for many, the idea of waiting for someone to drive over and come into an office kind of feels old fashioned, it’s not special anymore. And then of course there’s the cost. Offering onsite support means travel time, scheduling headaches, and of course engineers are less productive if they’re onsite. They’re not doing three things at once like they are if they’re in the office or working from home. So if your competitors are leaner because they don’t offer it, that could make your prices look higher for something the client doesn’t even value.

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge

Welcome to Episode 304 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• 3 big pricing mistakes that kill MSPs’ sales: MSPs inadvertently make these blunders with the way they price up their offering and it often kills sales. Here’s what to do about it.
• This video MUST be on every MSP website: Videos on your website are really important. And a testimonial is the single most important type of video that could help a prospect decide to sign a contract with you.
• The truth about SMS marketing for MSPs: Every single business owner has a mobile phone and yet not many MSPs are using that to their advantage. My guest is an SMS marketing expert and is going to tell us whether SMS text messaging is a viable marketing tool for MSPs.
• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Do you have trust badges on your website? Find out how to use them to get the most credibility for your MSP.

3 big pricing mistakes that kill MSPs’ sales

Getting new clients for your MSP is hard enough, so you should do everything you can to avoid making mistakes, right? Often I see MSPs inadvertently making blunders with the way they price up their offering. It’s a complicated subject with many traps you can get caught in. So let’s look at three common price mistakes that MSPs make that are killing sales.

Let’s talk about something that makes a lot of MSPs uncomfortable… pricing. It’s not the most exciting topic, but wow, it can make or break your sales. I’ve seen so many great MSPs – really solid, technical, brilliant businesses run by brilliant people – struggling to grow simply because they’re just making the wrong moves with their pricing. So let’s fix that.

These are the three big pricing mistakes that can kill your sales, and of course, how to avoid them.

Mistake number one: charging too little because you’re scared of losing the deal, and this is so common. Have you done it? You’re sat in a sales meeting, the prospect starts questioning your price and suddenly you’re talking yourself down. You say that you think you can find a way to shave some money off the price by reducing the package, or maybe you can find them a discount. But by doing this, you’re kind of leaving money on the table just because you want the client to say yes. Here’s the thing though, when you undercharge, you actually scare off the best clients. They kind of think, why is this MSP so cheap? What corners are they cutting? Plus, you’re setting yourself up to resent the work later on when the numbers just don’t add up. So here’s what you should do instead… price confidently, know your value. If you’re delivering 24/7 monitoring, a great help desk and really strong security, don’t price it like you’re just fixing printers on an ad hoc basis. That’s crazy.

Mistake number two: making pricing complicated. I’ve seen some MSP proposals that are like three entire pages of line items. So here’s your base support, this bit’s extra, this is going to cost you this, we forgot to include this. It’s just so confusing. And the problem is that confused people don’t buy. So what you do instead is you bundle things, you create clear packages. You could call that bronze, silver, gold. You could call it something else, it doesn’t really matter what you name it. But the point is that when it’s all put together and prospects can look at it and go, Oh, right, yeah, I see. So we’ve got this or we’ve got this, which is a bit more, or we’ve got this, which is even more, do you know...

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Welcome to Episode 303 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• How to market your MSP to accountants: Accountants are a perfect fit for MSPs. Learn how to speak their language to win over their hearts and minds to give your MSP the competitive edge.
• 4 huge marketing problems that damage your MSP: These marketing problems do massive amounts of damage to MSPs, and yet they’re so easy to overcome when you understand them. Are these damaging your business? Here’s what to do.
• MSP insider’s lessons from 18 years of marketing: If you want to grow your MSP by attracting new clients, the chances are you’re making some fundamental marketing mistakes. My guest today shares his 18 years experience working at an MSP and reveals what really moved the needle.
• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Do you sometimes find that your team makes the same mistakes over and over again? Well, this is actually your problem, not theirs, and here’s the process to eliminate the problem.

How to market your MSP to accountants

Dream client alert. For many MSPs that target verticals or niches, they find accountants (CPAs) to be a very attractive sector. Are you targeting accountants? If not, you really need to hear this, and if you already are, then this is going to make things so much easier. Let’s deep dive into why accountants switch MSPs, what they’d want from you and how to grab their attention.

Accountants are a perfect fit for MSPs. They have a business that’s dependent upon technology. They’ve got compliance and regulations, and they’re often very stable businesses with lots of recurring revenue. So imagine this, you are sitting across the table from a busy accountant and they’ve literally got piles of tax returns and spreadsheets and calls with their clients all lined up. What’s the one thing that you know that they don’t want? More hassle. And understanding that is the first step in marketing your MSP to accountants.

Get inside their head and their heart and really understand what drives them and what would drive them to pick your MSP instead of someone else.

Accountants live in a world of rules, a world of deadlines, a world of compliance, and a world of absolute attention to detail. They value accuracy, speed, and security above almost anything else. So if you want them to even consider working with your MSP, your messaging has got to show that you understand their world. Talk about what matters to them, not technology. Instead show them how you help them keep their client data safe, how you help them to meet deadlines without system crashes, and how you help them eliminate the panic of last minute tech issues during tax season.

I mean you can literally paint them a picture, you can say, imagine your team working flat out in January (or whenever your local tax season is) and instead of the WIFI dropping in and out or your software slowing down or freezing, everything just works because in the background we’re monitoring everything, we’re fixing problems before you’re even aware of them, so you can focus on your clients and tax returns and getting things done while we are focusing on your technology.

Now that’s the kind of language that really gets into someone’s heart as well as their head. And then you start to think about how to influence them and get them to influence each other because accountants really do talk to each other. In fact, most people in any sector talk to other people in that sector. They ask for recommendations,...

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Welcome to Episode 302 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• 3 mistakes MSPs commonly make with Google: This is one of the most overlooked tools in your marketing toolbox – your Google Business Profile. Make sure you’re getting it right to get the most out of it for your MSP.
• Why MSPs should send personalised videos: Discover how these videos really can help to secure new clients for your MSP. And how when you open your mind to it you can spot opportunities to send them every day.
• What does great marketing look like in a mature MSP?: If you want to be successful, find someone who’s achieved the results that you want and copy what they do to achieve the same. And my guest this week has 25 years of MSP marketing expertise to share with you.
• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Ever wanted to know your MSP’s true search position in Google? Find out how in one simple step…

3 mistakes MSPs commonly make with Google

There are three mistakes that MSPs commonly make with Google. And when I say three things, I really mean four things because the first is assuming that AI is now your new focus for getting search traffic. Well, it’s not. It’s currently sending only about 1% of traffic to your website. So the focus right now still has to be doing better on Google. But why and how do you do this? What are the three other things that MSPs are getting wrong?

We’re talking about one of the most overlooked tools in your marketing toolbox – your Google Business Profile. Now, before you skip this or zone out, do stick with me. Google Business Profile isn’t just for coffee shops and hair salons. Your Google Business Profile shows up when someone googles your MSP’s name or even if they just Google MSPs .

Your Google Business Profile is like your digital shopfront and it can make you look trustworthy… or not, if you get it wrong.

So let’s look at three common mistakes that I see MSPs making and how you can fix them quickly and easily:

The first mistake is to have a boring generic business description. If your profile says something along the lines of “We offer IT support and services to businesses”, oh, you’re not alone. Loads of MSPs do this, but it’s bland and it’s costing you clicks. So here’s the fix. Speak like a human and not a robot. Use the first sentence to make it clear who you help and what problems you solve. So try something like “We help businesses worry less about IT with fast friendly support, bulletproof security and advice with zero jargon.” I mean that alone, just using that sentence instantly sets you apart from other MSPs.

Mistake number two, no photos or photos from the year 2005. Did you know that businesses with photos actually get more clicks and more calls from their Google Business Profile? You don’t need to go and hire a pro photographer, just pull out your phone, grab a team photo, maybe grab some photos of your office, your vans if you’ve got vans, you could do a behind the scenes look at your setup, it could be your help desk, someone answering a phone, it could be your security dashboard with obviously the sensitive stuff blurred out. People just want to see people, they want to see who they’re dealing with. And even one new photo added like today or this week can boost engagement. If you added a new photo every week or at least once or twice a month, that could be huge.

And then mistake number three, letting your reviews go stale. Google Business reviews are like gold...

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Welcome to Episode 301 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• Should your MSP get HubSpot? A review: The system you use to manage marketing with your prospects has to be a good match for your MSP, otherwise you could have a very costly waste of time on your hands. So, is Hubspot the right choice for you?
• Free Windows 10 end of life marketing materials: Windows 10 end of life is now less than two months away and this could be a massive once a decade marketing opportunity for you.
• How to run your MSP by the numbers – and which to track: If I asked you about the most important marketing and growth numbers in your MSP would you know what those numbers should be? My guest works with MSPs to help them understand just this.
• Paul’s Personal Peer Group:

Should your MSP get HubSpot? A review

Whatever you do, don’t pick a CRM for your MSP until you’ve heard this, and especially if you’re looking at HubSpot. The system you use to manage marketing with your prospects has to be a good match for your business, otherwise you could have a very costly waste of time on your hands. So which is the right CRM for MSPs? Have you been considering systems like MailChimp, MailerLite, Growably from the Tech Tribe or even HubSpot? Eight months ago I switched my business to HubSpot, so let’s review it eight months on and see if I’d recommend it for your MSP.

On the 14th of April 2009 I committed to my first serious CRM. It was called Infusionsoft. I know the date because I’ve still got the welcome email. Now, back then I owned a different business, actually one I sold in 2016 just before entering the channel, but even back then I knew that finding and committing to good software that sat at the heart of my marketing was critical.

At the time, Infusionsoft was the hot property. In fact, I’d say it was instrumental in our success building that business. It allowed me to build up a large audience of prospects. I had 12,000 of them in that last business and using Infusionsoft I could grow a relationship with those prospects using content marketing all sent out in that CRM. And I had a telesales team whose job was to call those prospects and book them in meetings with our salespeople, and that allowed us to convert the relationships from prospects into clients.

I look back now at that 2009 to 2016 period and realise that was kind of a golden time for Infusionsoft, because since then it really has gone off the boil. First, there was a focus on not just being a CRM and a marketing platform, but becoming a payment platform as well. And then the original founders left and then the new people that took over, the new management team, they rebranded it as Keap, and they created a second CRM, which seemed to do the same things as the first CRM but in a different way. And then the original founder took control again and then they tried to bring those two products together as one, and I’m not quite sure how successful that was. And then they were trying to turn themselves into an automation business, but there was no clear roadmap of what that meant or how they were going to do it, and they also massively hiked up the prices.

Now I’ve been using Infusionsoft (or Keap) in the MSP Marketing Edge since day one, since we opened back in 2017, and I’ve been feeling for a while up to last year that we needed to change our CRM. But our use of it was so extensive, I mean, it was weaved throughout the whole of the MSP Marketing Edge that the thought of migrating to something new made me feel sick inside because...

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Welcome to this SPECIAL edition of the show, Episode 300, of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green.

This week I’ve got an incredible and motivating story of resilience.

700 nights of “will the business survive?”

Featured guest: Colin Knox is a serial entrepreneur and seasoned executive in the MSP and SaaS space. As the CEO & co-founder of Gradient MSP, he leads the charge in transforming how managed service providers operate and grow, with a focus on automation, billing reconciliation, and revenue enablement. With multiple successful exits, over $15 million in capital raised, and a track record of building companies from startup to nine-figure enterprise value, Colin brings deep expertise in scaling businesses, fostering culture, and navigating M&A. When he’s not building businesses, you’ll find him sharing insights on branding, leadership, and the future of the channel on LinkedIn.

Hello and welcome to a very special episode of the podcast as we celebrate 300 episodes. Every single Tuesday since November 2019, we have put out a brand new episode of this show, and today I have an astonishing story that you will almost not believe. It’s a feature length interview with a well-known vendor in our space who nearly lost it all a few years ago.

Imagine how you’d feel if your business lost all of its available cash in one day, and you had to fire most of your staff, and this situation was so bad that it didn’t resolve itself for two years. Could you keep going? Could you push forward and still try to build something amazing? Well, that’s what my special guest did. His story is so inspiring and I’m delighted to introduce you to him right now.

Hi, I’m Colin Knox, CEO and co-founder of Gradient MSP.

And it’s great to have you back on the podcast, Colin. I think you were here in 2021. I say I think, that seems like so long ago, the podcast is in its sixth year now, and we’ve decided to go for at least 10 years. We’ll have to book you now to come back in like 2028 or 2029.

Sounds good.

So thank you for joining us again. You have joined us today to talk about something really important, which kind of affects every MSP at different stages of their business growth, and that is dealing with when things go bad. It’s the issue of resilience and we’re talking more today about mindset and how you get through problems and how you get through stuff that just seems too big to tackle. And you’ve got an amazing story to tell, which happily you are the other side of that story now, which is a great time to tell us. So before we get into that story and we talk about what the problem was and the lessons you’ve learned, just give us a sort of a brief overview of who is Colin Knox?

Yeah, Colin Knox. I often refer to myself as the accidental entrepreneur. I worked at an MSP, one or a few for a number of years, and came to a place where I started to get frustrated with things. I never really had thought of or wanted to be a business owner but finally just said, nevermind, I’ll step out and try it for myself. So I stumbled into entrepreneurship worked through all of the lessons learned some of the very hard way, some an easier way of what it takes to build a business, grow a business, exit a business, and maybe sometimes foolishly start a new business and go through it all again. So yeah, accidental entrepreneur, maybe with a bit of founder amnesia, some people call it, but hopelessly devoted to building great businesses and impacting others.

I love it. That’s a great title. In fact, that could be the title of your book when inevitably you write a book. I think all of...

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Welcome to Episode 299 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• Marketing an MSP is like boiling water: Marketing your MSP is difficult. It requires a long-term strategy, not a series of one-off activities. But it will pay off for you very well with clients that stay with you for years and years.
• MSPs: Get a better understanding of your prospects’ pain points: You can get a better understanding of your prospects by using the five why’s framework. It’s a problem solving method developed by the founder of Toyota and I believe that you can use it in your MSP sales.
• How MSPs build trust, authority and credibility in the AI age: In this new world of AI some marketing tactics don’t work anymore and some are way more important than they’ve ever been. My guests reveal how you can use PR to your advantage in this new landscape.
• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Do you struggle with content creation? I have a brainstorm of really great ideas for you to try.

Marketing an MSP is like boiling water

You must get so frustrated at how long it takes to generate leads and new clients for your MSP. And you’re not on your own there, lots of other MSPs feel the same. But imagine if there was a quick and amazing fix for this frustratingly long drawn out problem. Well, there is, and even better news, while this painful long wait for new clients will be driving your competitors insane, you can train yourself to think differently.

I think one of the things that MSPs find the hardest when they really start taking their marketing seriously is just how long it takes to win a new client. Because you read stuff on the internet, don’t you, about people who set up a funnel or they have a special offer or they do this new shiny tactic and there’s always a promise that you launch something at 9 in the morning and you have your first sale by 9:30, but that’s not really how it works for managed services.

Managed services are a double-edged sword in that you both benefit from and you are punished by them. Let me explain what I mean by that. On one side of the sword, it takes a very long time to win a new client, but on the other side of the sword, they pay you money every month in monthly recurring revenue and they stay for years and years and years. And it’s that lifetime value, the revenue that the client contributes to your business over the decade they stay with you, that is what you’ve got to stay focused on with your marketing.

So if you are measuring your marketing by doing a little piece of activity today, like sending an email or posting a blog post or putting something on LinkedIn and you expect that is going to generate a hot lead who turns into a client tomorrow, it just doesn’t work that way. You haven’t got the right marketing mindset and that’s always going to lead to you being frustrated with your marketing.

The right marketing mindset is about having a great strategy and implementing that day to day, but sticking with it until you are sick to death of it.

Because at the point that you are sick to death of it, that means it’s actually just starting to cut through to the people you’re talking to. So you keep doing it and keep doing it and keep doing it, and it really does work like that.

The strategy that I always recommend to MSPs is super simple. Three steps, six words: build audiences, grow relationships, convert relationships. Which means finding people to listen to you, for most MSPs that’s LinkedIn and your email li...

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Welcome to Episode 298 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• ICP: Jargon or a powerful MSP marketing tool?: Your MSP’s Ideal Customer Profile is a clear picture of the type of business that you want more of. When you’re clear on who you are targeting, everything else becomes easier.
• MSPs: How to never drop a ball (no matter how busy you are): If you want to run the best MSP you can and find new clients at the same time without the fear of ever dropping the ball, you need to get this system into your life.
• AI is changing EVERYTHING with your MSP’s website: Websites that were perfectly optimised for Google just a few years back are now not good enough for the age of AI. My guest explains what MSP’s should be considering now and in the future.
• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Ever wonder whether you should be sending promotional emails as plain text or HTML? I have a very clear answer to this…

ICP: Jargon or a powerful MSP marketing tool?

Just like in the tech world, marketing is full of confusing sounding acronyms. There’s your LTV, your CTR and your PPC, but while you can safely ignore those, there’s one that you must not ignore. Perhaps you’ve heard of it already. When you get this acronym right, it influences all of your MSP’s marketing and you get better results. Let’s talk about this acronym that you must be aware of and how implementing it in your MSP will help you win brand new clients.

So we’re going to talk about something called an ICP, which stands for Ideal Customer Profile. And don’t worry, this isn’t going to be some kind of big scary marketing concept. It’s actually really simple and it can make a massive difference to how effective your MSP’s marketing is. So what’s an ICP? Think of it like this.

If you could clone your best customer – the one who always pays on time, never complains, values what you do, and is a dream to work with – who would that be?

That’s what sits at the heart of your ideal customer profile. It’s a clear picture of the type of business that you want more of. And I’m not just talking about the vague stuff like saying small businesses or anybody with computers and a wallet. I mean details like what industry they’re in, how many staff they have, where they’re based, what kind of technology they use, who makes the buying decisions, and even what headaches are they dealing with right now that you can solve?

Why do you bother with all of this? Because when you are clear on who you are targeting, everything else becomes easier. Your marketing becomes sharper, your messaging really hits home. You stop wasting your time chasing leads that when never a good fit in the first place because you understand exactly who you want to work with. It’s like fishing with a rod rather than chucking a net into the sea and hoping to get a very specific kind of fish.

So how do you build your ICP? Well, I suggest that you start with your current clients. Have a good look at them, analyse them. It could just be while you take the dog for a walk, you don’t need to sit down and stare at a screen for another six hours, but just think it through. Who are your best clients? Who are the ones that you wish you had 10 more of? Write down what it is that makes them great. Look for the patterns. Is it that they’re all in professional services? Do they all have a round about 15, 20 staff? Do they all hate dealing with IT and they just want someone to handle it all for them and they’re willing to pay for th...