Episode 227: MSPs: Get 408 comments on a LinkedIn post

Episode 227

Welcome to the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This is THE show if you want to grow your MSP. This week’s show includes:

• 00:00 Can you generate leads by literally knocking on doors?

• 05:20 Achieve INSANE engagement with a 48 hour LinkedIn frenzy

• 16:35 How to avoid ‘spammy’ marketing

Featured guest:

Thank you to Fractional CTO & CPO Mark Herschberg, for joining me to talk about his experience of being on the receiving end of spammy, untargeted ‘cold’ marketing, and for offering alternatives to MSPs to engage with their leads and prospects in a more meaningful way.

Mark Herschberg is the author of The Career Toolkit: Essential Skills for Success That No One Taught You and creator of the Brain Bump app. From tracking criminals and terrorists on the dark web to creating marketplaces and new authentication systems, Mark has spent his career launching and developing new ventures at startups and Fortune 500s and in academia, with over a dozen patents to his name. He helped to start the Undergraduate Practice Opportunities Program, dubbed MIT’s “career success accelerator,” where he teaches annually. At MIT, he received a B.S. in physics, a B.S. in electrical engineering & computer science, and a M.Eng. in electrical engineering & computer science, focusing on cryptography. At Harvard Business School, Mark helped create a platform used to teach finance at prominent business schools. He also works with many non-profits, currently serving on the board of Plant A Million Corals. He was one of the top-ranked ballroom dancers in the country and now lives in New York City, where he is known for his social gatherings, including his annual Halloween party, as well as his diverse cufflink collection.

Connect with Mark on LinkedIn:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/hershey/

Extra show notes:

• Listen or watch every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform, hosted by me, Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert:
  • https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-green-msp-marketing/
  • http://mspmarketingedge.com/about/
• Find out about my MSP Marketing Edge service:
  • https://www.mspmarketingedge.com
• Subscribe to my YouTube channel:
  • https://www.youtube.com/mspmarketing
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• Connect with me on LinkedIn:
  • https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-green-msp-marketing/
• Subscribe to this podcast using your favourite podcast provider:
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  • https://deezer.com/show/1512622
• Grab yourself a copy of this week’s recommended book, ReWork: Change the Way You Work Forever:
  • https://www.amazon.co.uk/ReWork-Change-Way-Work-Forever/dp/0091929784

Transcription:

NB this transcription has been generated by an AI tool and provided as-is.

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Fresh every Tuesday for MSPs around the world. Around the world, this Paul Paul Paul Greens MSP Marketing podcast and welcome back to the podcast. Here’s what I got in store for you this week. [00:00:14] Speaker B: Hi, I’m Mark Herschberg. I’m a fractional CTO and I am sick of all the sales spam I get from MSPs. Join me on Paul’s podcast to learn better way. [00:00:25] Speaker A: And on top of that interview with Mark later in the show, we’re going to talk about LinkedIn and how I got 408 comments on a single post. I’ll tell you how you can do exactly the same thing.

Paul. Paul Greens MSP Marketing podcast let’s talk about whether you can generate leads by physically knocking on doors. One MSP is doing just this and has two super hot prospects. So I work very closely with about 20 MSPs and we jump on a Zoom every other week and we discuss their marketing in detail. And one of them told me something totally shocking a few weeks ago. You see those MSPs with me? We’ve been working to implement my three step marketing strategy. You may have heard me talk about this in the podcast before. It is the absolute cornerstone, the bedrock of everything I do with MSPs. Three steps. Step one is you build multiple audiences. Step two is you build a relationship with them. And step three is you commercialize that relationship. So that means growing your LinkedIn and your email and other audiences. It means putting out content on a regular basis, at the very least daily on social media and weekly on email. And then that third step is commercializing the audience. And typically that involves, well, what I suggest is you go and get a back to work mum to pick up the phone on your behalf and to call people so that you personally don’t have to. And these phone calls that she’s making, they’re not sales calls, they are relationship building calls. The idea is to find out where someone is with their existing relationship with their incumbent MSP and see if they’re ready to switch today, or whether we should just do some more relationship building with them or whatsoever. So I’m working with an MSP who has done their own version of this. And sometimes it makes me really excited when people take advice and they tweak it and change it and go off and do something different. And this instance is definitely exciting. Listen to this. The MSP I’m working with isn’t phoning people. Instead, he’s getting in the car for a couple of hours a day and he is going out there and essentially calling on businesses in fact, his target is seven calls a day. So when he first started he literally did the other businesses in his building and then the next day he did the businesses in the next building and then he was going down the street. And as the days go on, he’s working further and further away from his office. But every day he literally goes and knocks on seven doors. How cool is that? Right? And he’s very motivated to do this because of those seven knocks he will typically get to speak to and you’ll be shocked by this two or three decision makers. So let’s just put that in perspective. If you were to make seven outbound calls, I would expect you to speak to zero decision makers, right. It can take 10, 15, 20, even more outbound calls, unsolicited outbound calls before you get hold of a decision maker. And yet this guy is going and knocking on seven doors. And on average, and it is an average. Some days it’s more, some days it’s less. But it balances out. On average he’ll knock on seven doors, talk to seven receptionists and end up speaking to a couple of decision makers. So as you can imagine, he is very very motivated to do this because the second he’s having a one on one conversation with the business owner, he’s bought a couple of hours of their time, right? And he takes along some printed materials with him. He’s got some stuff that we put in the MSP marketing edge, particularly our IT services buyers guide. And out of this and talking to these decision makers, he’s actually got a couple of genuine hot prospects. People who are really, really upset and unhappy with their incumbent. They’re happy to talk to him. He’s moving it forward to having an engagement, moving towards putting in a proposal and that’s fantastic, right? In fact, in fact, if he can win a client off the back of this activity, that becomes then his activity, right? Because here’s the thing, it doesn’t really matter what you hear me telling you to do, what you hear other marketing people telling you to do, what you read on the Internet. What I think you have to do is you have to find the activities that work the best for you in your business. And when you