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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...

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Welcome to Episode 297 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• Every MSP should listen to this book: If you implement the simple ideas inside this book, it will dramatically improve your marketing – you’ll get more attention and ultimately a lot more business for your MSP.
• Would your MSP tackle a one off project to unlock MRR?: There is a way to warm up reluctant prospects and build a solid relationship with them, before asking them to sign a monthly recurring revenue contract with your MSP. Here’s how.
• This MSP looks back on his biggest marketing mistakes: If you could go back to when you started your MSP, what advice would you give yourself to avoid your biggest marketing mistakes? This is the question I asked my guest, see how his answer compares to yours.
• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Are Google’s Core Web Vitals still a thing in 2025? Find out how this affects your MSP and what you should be doing about it.

Every MSP should listen to this book

I know I know, you want to grow your MSP, but actually you barely have enough time to stay on top of the big shows on Netflix, let alone learn how to improve your MSP’s marketing. But could you make the time if all you had to do was read or listen to just one single book?

Let’s dig into a new book that if you implement the simple ideas inside, it will dramatically improve your marketing. You’ll get more attention and ultimately a lot more business for your MSP.

What was your lockdown experience like? Well, some people had a terrible experience, of course, but others discovered new things about themselves. So for example, I discovered a bit of a renewed love of running which led me to doing a couple of half marathons over the years after. And actually I lost about two stone in weight, which sadly has come back now and doesn’t seem to want to go again. But also back then I fell in love with reading one more time and I got through tons of books that summer.

And one book that I read for the first time ever, which I had been meaning to read for years, was a book called They Ask You Answer, written by a guy called Marcus Sheridan. And this was instantly an insane book for me and it resonated with me in every possible way. So I went away and I implemented as much of it as I could in my own business, and I kept telling the MSPs that I was working with that they should do exactly the same. And actually, I decided I had to get Marcus onto my podcast, which finally happened in January 2023. If you want to listen to that episode, Google MSP Marketing Edge and Marcus Sheridan, and you’ll find the podcast episode. It’s episode 164. Marcus was very generous with that interview and it helped to position, They Ask You Answer in ways that made it super relevant to MSPs.

I tell you all of this as background as it helps to explain why I got so excited earlier this year when I heard that Marcus was releasing a new book. It’s been billed as They Ask You Answer 3.0. Version two was a bit of a refresher to the original book which came out in about 2019, whereas this new book is more than just an update, this is a reinvention for the modern age. You see, They Ask You Answer first came out in 2016, that was nine years ago, and the world has changed dramatically since then, hasn’t it? No more so than with the AI tools that we have today. And so They Ask You Answer has changed into something new called, Endless Customers. That’s the name of the new book and it’s available currently as a hardback, but it is also on Audible as well. And you can acc...

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Welcome to Episode 296 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• These emails help prospects love MSPs: It’s critical to have a series of good emails to send to prospects who are looking at your MSP for the first time. Early engagement is key for email deliverability and not being labelled as unsolicited spam.
• A simple way to reach senior decision makers on LinkedIn: Here’s a tried and tested LinkedIn hack to connect with the right people on LinkedIn. Remember, both decision makers and influencers are important contacts.
• Smart ideas to sell more to your MSP’s existing clients: Selling more to existing clients is the big opportunity and my guest tells you how to do it and how it can generate more delicious profit for your MSP.
• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Do you upload PDFs to your LinkedIn personal profile? You should, the algorithm loves it. Here’s how…

These emails help prospects love MSPs

It’s a huge struggle. A lot of MSPs looking to grow, struggle to do effective data capture from their website, and this is an important way to build up your database of prospects. But it’s not just about getting them to fill in the form in the first place, that’s just the start of the process, the real question to ask yourself is: What do I then send them?

Let me tell you some of the perfect emails to send to new prospects looking at your MSP for the first time.

So tell me, do you have some form of data capture on your website? You really should. The most basic data capture is asking people to sign up for your email newsletter, which actually very few people will. A better form is to offer them something known as a lead magnet, also known as an ethical bribe, which is where you give them something in return for their email address. And this might be a guide, like a cyber security guide. Although the 2025 version of data capture that’s working really well right now is to do an interactive quiz and you allow them to build a scorecard for something. Again, something like their cyber security score would be a great way of doing that. But the data capture itself is only the start of the process.

What’s critical is to have a series of good emails to send new prospects, because you can make an assumption that they may be looking for a new MSP in the future.

And you need to send them content that’s going to influence them to pick you and not another MSP. So let me give you some examples, starting with the very first email you send to them. And the goal with this first email is to get them engaged with your content and either get them to click something on the email or hit reply. Why? For email deliverability. Because that sends a very clear message to their email agent that they are interested in your content and they don’t just see you as unsolicited spam.

I do this with the first email in my sequence. I introduced myself and then I ask the MSP who’s reading that email to hit reply and tell me which marketing problem they’re suffering with right now. And we do get a pretty good reply rate to that. Of course, I make sure I answer every single person who replies. I do that personally, which in itself is good for engagement. It’s good for showing there’s a real human at the other end who’s listening. And of course it’s good for email deliverability. So I would definitely do that with your first email.

Here’s what you could do in some of the other emails that you send out to people wh...

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Welcome to Episode 295 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• Ghosted? Send your MSP’s proposals in 3 ways: There are a number of things we can do to minimise proposal ghosting with prospects. Only sending it digitally risks your proposal being lost in digital noise.
• A free cyber security webinar outline any MSP can use: Webinars are a great way to enhance your reputation and your perceived authority as the local tech expert. Let me give you a free cyber security webinar outline that any MSP can use.
• Why every MSP must niche in some way: My guest and I to talk about niching and about the power of super laser focus on a very specific set of people. Find out exactly what to do and how it works.
• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Confused about which social media platforms to use to market your MSP? Let me tell you my top 5 in priority order.

Ghosted? Send your MSP’s proposals in 3 ways

This must have happened to your MSP… proposal ghosting. You send a proposal to a hot prospect and crickets. All the conversations, all of the relationship building that you did leading up to this proposal seem to have counted for nothing. So how do we fix this? Why don’t they reply? Why can’t you get hold of them? Are there three simple things that you can do that will improve your hit rate? Absolutely, there are, and let’s get into them right now.

A few years back when I was single, dark days, I was being ghosted all the time. OK, that was on Tinder and Hinge and Bumble and other platforms, but I know that you get ghosted by your prospects now they seem so hot, so ready to join you, and then you send the proposal through and they never get back to you. So you never quite understand what’s happened.

Is the problem that the price isn’t right, that you didn’t display an understanding of their business? Have they changed their mind? Have they gone off to another MSP? Have they signed another contract with their incumbent MSP? Are they actually dead? I mean actually really, are they dead? And you can phone them as much as you want, but there’s no one there to answer the phone. We all have these exact thoughts when we get ghosted by prospects.

The problem is not your prospects… the problem is actually you. You’ve allowed them to take some level of control of the sales process.

You’ve allowed them to ghost you. I believe there’s a number of things that we can do to minimise ghosting, not in dating, but certainly with prospects. Now, let me tell you about two of those things. The first is that I think you should send all of your proposals out in three separate ways, and then the second thing I’m going to tell you about is that you should always have the next appointment in your calendar. That’s coming up in a second. Let’s first of all go into some of the details.

So, how do you send your proposals now? If you’re like most MSPs, you probably just do it digitally. Maybe you use a specific piece of software or you have a proposal tool built into one of the platforms that you’re using and these kind of tools they are cool, especially as they can track who’s opening your proposals, how many times they view it, all of that kind of stuff. Or maybe you just pull a PDF together or even just an email and you just send it off to them by email. Most MSPs do proposals digitally because it’s quick and it’s easy, but anytime something is quick and easy for you to send out, it’s then quick and easy for people to consume it and ignore it....