Have you ever wondered why some marketing plans lead to a cascade of new clients while others fizzle out? Join me, Carrie Richardson, and my expert co-host, Ian Richardson, as we pull back the curtain on constructing a marketing strategy that hits the mark every time.
We take you through the trenches of our own marketing journey with Doberman, sharing the wins and the lessons learned. You'll discover how a deep understanding of your target customer and a consistent, resonant message can transform your marketing efforts from mundane to meteoric.
Then we switch gears and tackle the MSP sales landscape with a focus on a cost-effective sales process that promises to revolutionize your prospecting, selling, and account management.
We're not just throwing theories at you; we're talking proven strategies enriched by the wisdom of industry gurus like Tracie Orisko and Walter Crosby.
And for those thinking about selling their business, you'll get a front row seat to the emotional and practical complexities involved, with tips from my own experience and the unparalleled support from Ian who helped navigate through the sale of Managed Sales Pros.
This episode is packed with hard-won insights that will equip you to refine your approach and scale new heights in your business endeavors.
Carrie Richardson and Ian Richardson host the WIN Podcast - What's Important Now?
Carrie helps businesses improve their sales and marketing teams.
Ian is certified in Eagle Center For Leadership Making A Difference, Paterson StratOp, and LifePlan.
Learn more at www.foxcrowgroup.com
Book time with them here: https://randr.consulting/connect
Be a guest on WIN! We host successful entrepreneurs who share advice with other entrepreneurs on how to build, grow or sell a business using examples from their own experience.
Have you ever wondered why some marketing plans lead to a cascade of new clients while others fizzle out? Join me, Carrie Richardson, and my expert co-host, Ian Richardson, as we pull back the curtain on constructing a marketing strategy that hits the mark every time.
We take you through the trenches of our own marketing journey with Doberman, sharing the wins and the lessons learned. You'll discover how a deep understanding of your target customer and a consistent, resonant message can transform your marketing efforts from mundane to meteoric.
Then we switch gears and tackle the MSP sales landscape with a focus on a cost-effective sales process that promises to revolutionize your prospecting, selling, and account management.
We're not just throwing theories at you; we're talking proven strategies enriched by the wisdom of industry gurus like Tracie Orisko and Walter Crosby.
And for those thinking about selling their business, you'll get a front row seat to the emotional and practical complexities involved, with tips from my own experience and the unparalleled support from Ian who helped navigate through the sale of Managed Sales Pros.
This episode is packed with hard-won insights that will equip you to refine your approach and scale new heights in your business endeavors.
Carrie Richardson and Ian Richardson host the WIN Podcast - What's Important Now?
Carrie helps businesses improve their sales and marketing teams.
Ian is certified in Eagle Center For Leadership Making A Difference, Paterson StratOp, and LifePlan.
Learn more at www.foxcrowgroup.com
Book time with them here: https://randr.consulting/connect
Be a guest on WIN! We host successful entrepreneurs who share advice with other entrepreneurs on how to build, grow or sell a business using examples from their own experience.
Welcome to Win. What's Important Now? I'm your host, carrie Richardson, and I'm a partner at Richardson and Richardson. Today on Win, we're talking about planning for marketing success. My guest today is a huge advocate for gathering perspective before tackling any business challenge. With me today is Lee Richardson. Obviously, he lives in the same house as me, so, ian, talk to me about perspective before planning in marketing.
Speaker 2:Hi internet. I actually took some notes. I did a little bit of preparation for this talk. Perspective is something I really advise and anyone who's familiar with Tom Patterson's work would advise that you do before planning anything. But with marketing especially, it's going to be important.
Speaker 2:Marketing really is going to fail because of three root causes. You've got lack of consistent effort. So if you started something you stopped. You didn't stick with it long enough. You got bad messaging. Or you've got incorrect tactics. For a T-Send. The inconsistent effort is the most controllable and easiest to fix out of there. You start something, just follow through with it. Follow through.
Speaker 2:But let's focus in on issue two and three there for a moment that bad messaging and incorrect tactics. Both of those stem from assumptions. So if you think about messaging, this is the message that you're presenting out to your customer. And if you have a bad message, if it doesn't resonate, if it doesn't stick, if it doesn't land, that means that you misjudged what will resonate with your target customer profile or TCP If you're using the wrong tactics. So if you're posting on Facebook for a buyer that isn't active on Facebook, you're never going to reach them. If you're doing cold calling for someone who functions off of unpublished cell phones, you're never going to reach them. If you're doing email for someone who's been trained by their managed service company to never open unknown emails from third parties, you're never going to reach them.
Speaker 2:Some of these issues are going to be stemming from you like making an assumption about what your customer values, about the relationship with you. Some of these are going to stem from you making assumptions around the problems, desires and beliefs that your customer has, and that's what you're talking about to them. That's messaging and tactics 101 right there. And you have to assume. Whenever you're making a plan, an assumption is a logical conclusion and an educated guess that we make to continue the planning process. But if you're not validating those assumptions, if you're not striving to make sure that those assumptions get grounded into either proven or disproven facts or data, that's where the wheels are going to come off the wagon. So taking a little bit of time to gain that perspective, the perspective of your customer, the perspective of your prospects, is going to make your marketing plan be that much more effective. I have some questions for you?
Speaker 1:Sure, all right. When you're creating a marketing plan for the year, how do you start? What's your first step?
Speaker 2:I would start with really defining what's that you're going to market with. There are plenty of people who have multiple SKUs or multiple products, but what are those products? What are those SKUs? Each product is going to be geared towards a buyer or a set of buyers. So what are you selling? Who are you selling it to? How are you going to sell it to them? That's the first step and each one of those you're gonna need to get perspective around. What is it exactly that we're selling? So if you're selling widgets, great, you're selling a widget, but what's the reason someone would buy a widget?
Speaker 1:What does the widget?
Speaker 2:do for them, what's the impact on the world that widget has? And so if you really circle around the concept of hey, I'm selling this thing, I'm selling this widget, and understand why someone would buy that, or why, what the different reasons that person a, b and C Might buy that, you'll benefit in a lot of in a lot of ways.
Speaker 1:So talk us a little bit about when you were marketing for your own MSP. What are the methods that you employed for success? I know that you had a couple of very successful years at Doberman when you were doing all of them, all of the marketing, all of the moving parts necessary for client acquisition. What worked best?
Speaker 2:what works best, it's easier to Say what didn't work well, which was abject abdication, trying to stick your head in the sand and say hey, everyone else, deal with this for me. I'm not gonna participate in the process, I'm gonna.
Speaker 1:Outsource.
Speaker 2:100% of that doesn't work, you have to get involved, you have to keep your hand on the wheels to speak. There's no autopilot with sales and marketing the parts that work best were honestly Creating a strategy around what I wanted to sell near the end of my tenure at Doberman.
Speaker 2:We had a all-inclusive strategy that included the projects and resources and Routine activities that we knew people were gonna have, but it was a cost leader in our market and when you're thinking about doing a cost leader, hey, why would I pay you $250 a seat when the guy down the road will sell it to me for a hundred or 75?
Speaker 2:which is the market that I was in and small town mid-Michigan Hyper, focusing on that offer and then figuring out why it mattered to a customer. Why did they care about having this all you could eat package, which was support plus projects at the core of it? Why did they, frankly, why did they give a damn? And then non-stop Hitting that message over and over again, and I would only tweak one or two parts of the message at once, called AB testings. Hey, here's my normal message, here's my stump speech for Politics fans, and then I would change part of it and then I would go back and I would change.
Speaker 2:I just measured what worked and what didn't work and made small adjustments over time. When I was doing a big, drastic change, I would usually do that on a low-impact audience. So if I was in a room full of small businesses that had less than 10 employees, that was low impact me whatever. If I'm losing a thousand or two thousand dollar MR opportunity, that's not a big deal. I wouldn't want to necessarily try a brand new script or brand new section on a 50 seed opportunity. So it's selective and how I test it and how I tweet.
Speaker 2:I also Practiced in front of existing clients. I had a few different clients who were willing to invest their time and into our success and they would be happy to spend half hour listening to a a conversation track and offering some feedback and then, near the end of that, I just hired you To take care of the top of funnel thing and that's a little tongue in cheek there. But I invested in a strategic partnership in the spot that I was weakest. The spot that I was weakest was opening conversations. When I had someone who expressed an interest in what I did, it was relatively easy for me to process them through and structure the conversation and run discovery the same way, but I had a lot of difficulties in the MSP days doing doing door opens, so I hired someone to take care of that task for me but only after I learned.
Speaker 2:That's where I was weakest.
Speaker 1:All right. One thing I'd love for you to share with everyone today is tell us about MSP sales process. A lot has gone into it and it's a relatively new offer, and I'd like everyone to learn a little more.
Speaker 2:Yes, this is by far and away one of my best domain and name grabs ever, so I'm super happy about that. I'm going to be at that top level of domain on something that's pretty cool. The sales process is really the culmination of 16 years of me learning what not to do, followed by three or four years of me learning what to do from my own experience at Doberman, from listening and working with you and the rest of the team over at Managed Sales Pros, from then helping run that call center for a period of time and dive deep into the backend processes and having a conversation and a series of conversation with MSP owners, with vendor sales leaders and with sales professionals both inside and outside the IT channel.
Speaker 2:So a really long tail, 20 year learning process on hey, this is what works and doesn't work in complex relationship based selling.
Speaker 1:And what can people expect from MSP sales process right now if they sign up?
Speaker 2:Yes. So if you go to MSP sales processcom and scroll down, you'll see a big bulleted list that kind of breaks into three parts. There are the actual processes, and when people say process, they think of different things. So these are guided step by step processes on how you prospect, how you sell, how you grow and manage account. Under each step, there's a series of here's the data you have to collect, here's the stakeholders you need to identify, here's what you need to do. And paired with those processes is enablement content or how to guidance, both written in video.
Speaker 2:Guidance on hey, how do you ask a good question? How do you reach a decision maker? How do you overcome an objection? How do you perform a good discovery? What goes into making a good findings proposal deck? We ran a webinar series called the Thursday process, all throughout 2022 and most of the way through 2023. And all the lessons learned from those leaders appearing on that webcast, as well as conversations with you, with Tracy Orisco, with Walter Crosby and a bunch of other leaders across our space and outside of the IT channel shared their best tactics and techniques for sales and marketing, and it all got consolidated into this process.
Speaker 1:And how much is it?
Speaker 2:Zero dollars. Right now there's about 15 spots left for MSPs who want a lifetime pass into this. There's no catch there. You're not going to get hit up by me saying, hey, I need to buy coaching or consulting or whatever. I'm happy to answer questions, happy to make it better. I do want feedback on how it works for folks. The only thing around it is this process is built out in a piece of software. That's a piece of software is called Membrane. You get the process, you'll get a free trial membrane for 30 days, but if you want to keep using it, you do have to buy a license of their software, which I think is maybe 150, 200 bucks a month. That's between you and them. I'm not marking it up. You're not billed by me.
Speaker 2:It's just hitting your credit card from them, but that's the software I use to build the process, so you have to buy a license of the software. That's the only catch.
Speaker 1:And tell us a little bit about the sales processes that we can find in there.
Speaker 2:So right now there's four of them. There's how to do cold outreach. There's how to do social selling, so selling through social media, and I don't care what platform it's on, so it's not platform specific. There's how to do event follow up. So if you went to a trade show, a webinar, face to face, virtual, doesn't matter how do you follow up on leads from there? And then there's the base sales process. By the end of this month, our referral generation process, which I just shared out at RejectionCon, will be built out fully functional in there, and end of January, mid-february, we will have an additional process in there that I'm going to keep behind right now, but it's going to be around newsletters and using newsletters for conversions, which is something you and I have been playing around with for quite some time.
Speaker 1:Now I have a tattoo on my wrist. It's push. It means pray until something happens, but we've repurposed that into play until something happens, and that's been our whole last two years of just trying different sales techniques, marketing techniques. We met with a lot of really smart people over the last couple of years. We met a lot of people in our space and that's something that I really wish I'd done more of as I grew men in sales pros. I spend a lot of time at industry conferences selling our services to MSPs. I wish that I'd gone to more educational events that were about me, about our industry, about what we did and how we did it, and just sat through sessions and listened a little more. So that's one thing I would definitely change. That's something that I'm glad that we're doing now, because it's been wonderful to just sit with other people and hear different opinions outside of our echo chamber.
Speaker 1:I think sometimes in the MSP space we all get a little. We all get a little follow the leadery and people are afraid to take risks and chances. People are afraid to invest large amounts of their marketing budgets in unknown things and we threw some money at some things that failed and we did some free things that worked really well and I'm really interested to see how it's all going to pay off in 2024. Ian has a question for Ian, either about something that he did at Doberman or how he assisted with the sale of managed sales pros, and that was an extraordinary gift to me. For those of you that don't know, after Ian exited from Doberman, ian joined managed sales pros as the CEO to get me through the six month period of due diligence, stress and alignment that was necessary to exit from my business, so it was great to have somebody in that role where I knew that I could trust them to make decisions that ruin my best interest, especially as things got a little like anxiety ridden and heated near the end.
Speaker 1:Selling your business is stressful. There's a lot of things that happen. There's a lot of things that you're not expecting that happen. There's a lot of lawyers. There's a lot of accountants. There's a lot of things that people with my personality style aren't necessarily great at, and what I didn't want was my reactive nature or my lack of attention to detail to cost me money at the end or to ruin my opportunity to exit. Ian came on board and did that. That's something that he's replicated and is offering as a service now, and it's been really exciting, not just to sell my business but to watch Ian partner with other companies that have sold in the last year. So being a part of one of the best days of someone's life is an extraordinary privilege. We get to do it at least once a quarter of these days, so that's been super exciting.
Speaker 1:If you're considering selling your business, I would definitely reach out to Ian and have a conversation about the things to look out for in that final period where you can burn out really quickly, having to go through hundreds of pages of documentation over and over again and getting into arguments about things that you haven't thought about in maybe four years. But someone's going back through your financials and wants to know what was this and is this going to end up being an add back, and you can lose an opportunity pretty quickly if you don't keep yourself in check, and I think if anybody watching this today knows me, they know that's probably not my strong suit. Very grateful, you can't marry him I already did that but you could definitely partner with him and work with him to get your business across the finish line. Thanks for joining me today, ian, if anyone would like to learn more about Ian and how he helps businesses gain perspective, create plans and processes for strategy, marketing and gout to help entrepreneurs scale and sell, they can visit his website at wwwfoxgragroupcom.