0:00
If you're fixing ad hoc one off like break, fix problems for your prospects and then they ghost
0:05
you. After you mentioned managed services, I'm going to show you how a short, really targeted
0:11
five email sequence can help you restart conversations by shifting their mindset, giving
0:17
them some education, and nurturing them along the way. Without you as a salesperson having to do all
0:23
the heavy lifting. Let's dive in. So let's coaching an MSP seller recently who had a very specific
0:28
issue that they brought to us. And it was, you know, hey, we had this prospect, they had a server issue.
0:32
It was a break fix problem. And we went in, we fixed it. And you know, the thought was, you know, if
0:38
we fixed this really quickly, if we show how good our team is, if we show the quality and the
0:44
caliber of our customer service, we will have earned the right to talk about managed services.
0:48
So they went in there, they did their job, they fixed it. And then when they started to talk about
0:53
managed services, crickets, they got ghosted immediately afterwards, which was really confusing
0:59
to them because the prospect was super grateful. The initial emails were like, hey, this is awesome!
1:04
They were quick to pay like it was. They were on top of it. They were happy and they were confused,
1:10
right? The person that the MSP seller was confused. Why couldn't we have the conversation about
1:15
Maynard services? And here's the thing. After you fix something, it's really important to realize,
1:21
first of all, just the psychology that goes into that. They no longer feel any pain, right? Like they
1:26
feel relief. Now, you know, as a as an MSP person, as an IT person, as a tech person,
1:33
you know that pain is temporary. Well, if you're if you're just being reactive, it's just a matter of
1:39
time before you call us back with something else. Like, you know that it's temporary. They don't. So
1:45
what they have is full on relief. You know, they're thinking, hey, this is awesome. Like. And by the way,
1:52
really grateful to you for fixing it. Now, what I'm not going to tell you is don't do this. Like I'm
1:57
not going to tell you. Fixing break fix is a bad idea to move people or migrate people,
2:04
or transition them into managed services. The last thing you want to do is have somebody call in
2:09
with an IT problem, which means it is important. It's critical they're making some investment in
2:15
it, right? There's some infrastructure, something going on, and you have a live person on a phone
2:21
with a problem, with a pain. The last thing that you want to do is say, go talk to another IT
2:26
provider, right. Like go talk to somebody else. And let's hope that they don't have a
2:32
process or a system in place to migrate you or sell you into to managed services more effective
2:38
than us. Right? So you don't necessarily want to do that. Taking the break fix problem is not the
2:42
problem. It's what you do after you've solved that problem. The reality is, I've talked to hundreds of
2:48
MSP sellers and most people will follow up once. The follow up twice, you know, was was
2:55
just following up here. You know, we we fixed the server. We did, you know whatever it was XYZ wanted
2:60
to have a conversation about how to prevent this in the future. You know, could we. Could we chat
3:04
this time? Could we, you know, do an assessment? Could we do this? Could we do that? They follow up
3:09
once or twice and they don't get a response. And so they move on and they move on because they
3:16
know like hey, this this person is qualified like as a prospect. They're qualified. Like it's a
3:20
business that we could we could help. Maybe they're in our industry or they're the size of
3:24
company that we work with, or they're in our geography, like so technically they're qualified,
3:28
but they're not ready to buy. Right. So there's no real intent in terms of managed services at the
3:34
moment. So they they, you know, do one follow up, do two follow ups after they have fixed the problem,
3:40
they stop following up because as a seller you don't want to be you don't want to be annoying,
3:45
right. Like the last thing you want to do, you're like, listen, this person doesn't understand
3:49
managed services. They don't understand what we do. They don't get the value. They're not going to
3:54
appreciate the investment level. They're not going to appreciate the price. And it's just it's not
3:59
worth my time as a seller to keep trying to follow up and keep badgering these people and
4:04
keep annoying them. There's too big of a gap between where they are today and where they need
4:08
to be for me as a seller to really pursue this. So after 1 or 2 attempts, I'm just going to I'm going
4:14
to leave that and I'm going to I'm going to let it go with this pool of prospects. You kind of
4:18
have two options. One is you can say, we're just going to let it go, right? Like we one, we
4:25
only deal with high intent buyers if the opportunity, not the prospect but the
4:31
opportunity is not qualified. Meaning good company. We could service them but there's no intent. So
4:36
there's no actual opportunity. There's no actual deal. We're not interested in that. Right. So we're
4:41
just going to kick the can on that. That's option one. Option two is you build a system
4:48
that helps nurture them, that helps move them from where they are. The gap right, like that helps move
4:55
them from where they are to where you want them to be. And most MSPs do option one by default, and
5:01
it's because they don't have a system in place. Right. So they make that follow up. They make the
5:06
second follow up, and they say too much effort. Like it's not the juice isn't worth the squeeze
5:11
on this. I'm moving on. So by default you're choosing number one. Smart MSPs are choosing
5:17
number two. And that's exactly what I advise them to do. Now, the system isn't rocket science here.
5:22
Like, the system is a five email sequence and you can make it seven. You can make it six. Like five
5:27
is just like a sweet spot for me, where I feel like I have enough space to, like, make a case to
5:34
make a strong argument, to get a couple different angles, like in that argument. So that's I can I
5:39
can help educate somebody on the process and move them from here to there. You can make it more
5:45
emails. You can make it fewer emails. Completely up to you. I pick five like it's a good, solid, sweet
5:50
spot for me. And you know, I say, you know, after five, six, seven emails probably you're just like,
5:56
you know, hammering somebody. So, you know, take five emails, right? And in this specific instance, what
6:02
you can do on a on a break fix client is create a specific sequence in your CRM and
6:09
create five emails. The first email is something like a case study. The case study that I would
6:15
share first is something around a customer or business who didn't think they needed an MSP,
6:21
right? Like so. If you can capture some some testimonials or some of their own verbiage or
6:25
some of their own wording, perfect. If not, you can, you know, paraphrase where they were at with
6:31
things and you highlight how this particular company didn't think they needed an MSP, they
6:36
weren't big enough, or they weren't going to be a target, or they didn't manage enough money or
6:40
whatever vertical you're in, like, you can, you can, you can fill in the blanks. But the purpose of
6:45
this case study is to highlight this is a company that didn't think they needed an MSP. And then
6:52
they discovered all of these vulnerabilities that they didn't know they have. They learned about the
6:57
exposure. They learned about the costs that are associated. If you get if you get hacked. If you
7:03
know, you get if you're the victim of a phishing scam, if somebody interrupts the, you know, the
7:07
invoicing system, if you're in construction. Like there's all sorts of things that you can
7:11
highlight here and you're, you're you're basically demonstrating company. Didn't think they needed an
7:16
MSP. Learned about their vulnerabilities, made the switch. And this is where they are now. And this is
7:23
how things are running. Right. So that's that's email number one. Email number two is something
7:29
around the chaos factor right. Like break fix is very reactive. It's like kind of like a hair on
7:35
fire mentality. In fact they should know this because they just came to you with a specific
7:40
issue with a relevant issue just like this. So it's reactive, results in a lot of firefighting,
7:46
results in a lot of frustration from employees, results in loss, productivity results in, you know,
7:52
client issues, results in like all of the things that, you know, are associated with a reactive
7:59
culture and a reactive environment, and tying that back to the business impact, right? So it's
8:05
demonstrating. It's educating. Hey. Reactive. It actually has a huge impact on your
8:12
business. And here are some of the ways through money, through morale, through
8:18
productivity, through, you know, money on growth. Money on costs. You know, you've got productivity
8:24
issues. You've got morale issues. You've got all sorts of things that you can tie into, like what
8:30
is the reactive environment versus the proactive environment and what are the benefits. The third
8:35
email that I would send would be around the real cost that's associated with, you know, break fix
8:41
type of environments. Okay. So you can use I'm sure you've got a ton of examples of how reactive
8:48
it is more costly to a business than the than being proactive. Because and you know,
8:55
this, you know that one of the biggest issues that people have when they go from break fix to to
8:60
managed services is this feels more expensive. Can you demonstrate in an email how it's not like
9:07
the hidden cost of a reactive IT environment, right? Like what's the cost of, you know, of of an
9:13
outage? What's the cost of server going down? What's the cost of anything like that? What's the
9:19
cost of what are your employees having access to your stuff and then taking your stuff? I was I was
9:24
part I was a CEO of a company that had an employee that we terminated that had access to
9:30
stuff. Now, this was years ago before I knew about it. So forgive me now a lot of stuff was tied to
9:35
his personal Gmail. We had one of our our corporate dashboards that was tied to it, and he
9:40
came in. He wiped out our corporate dashboard, like wiped it out. It was on his personal Google email.
9:45
And this is and this was a $15 million a year company. And so I very quickly learned about the
9:50
cost of that. All right. I've now got to hire somebody to go stop that, because he's got all the
9:56
data and rebuild it at the same time, not to mention the opportunity cost that's happening in
10:01
between. Right. So can you highlight something like that in an email? The fourth email may be
10:05
something like highlighting a strategy gap between companies that are using it as an asset,
10:12
like a strategic asset to grow and to to build the business versus people that are looking at it
10:17
as an expense. And what are the what are the costs and the difficulties of keeping up with
10:23
cybersecurity? What about in an evolving world where you've got, you know, AI changing how people
10:28
are hacking your shit every single day, and new phishing scams coming out every single day, and
10:33
the amount of money and resources and time that you invest into staying up to date and all of the
10:38
platforms and the programs and tech that you use to invest and how trying to manage that on your
10:43
own is asinine, right? Like it's like, can you can you create some messaging around the strategy gap
10:49
between a company that's doing it this way versus a company that's doing it this way? Right. Like one
10:54
is almost risk by design and one is, you know, being proactive and, you know, having the strong
10:59
infrastructure and everything. And then, you know, maybe email number five is something like a
11:03
disaster story. It's the flip side of the first case study. It's somebody who, you know, originally
11:08
said, we don't need MSP stuff, right? I actually like this one for the fifth email on purpose said
11:13
we don't need, you know, managed services. We got this. And then they came back. Right. Because they
11:19
said, we got this. And it turned out they didn't. Right. Like something happened. It was a it was a
11:25
breach. It was ransomware. It was a, you know, a server going out. It was a critical client issue.
11:32
It was something that came back, bit them in the ass. And they said like, all right, gotcha. Like
11:36
we're we're back. Like, can you share that case study? And the reason I like that when it's fifth,
11:41
by the way, is because if you've gone through one, which is kind of like the more positive story, and
11:45
you've gone through two and three and four and you're still not there, then you know something
11:50
that's like the disaster story. It's not fear mongering, by the way, when it's real. Like if it's
11:56
real, it's not fear mongering, it's responsible. It's education. It's telling people this is the
12:02
reality that is out there today. So can you share a story where somebody you know. Originally said,
12:07
yeah, came back and you know, and then, you know, said, okay, we're ready to go and where they are
12:12
today. Now, when you send these emails, what you're not doing is you're not pitching like, you're not
12:18
saying, hey, like, here's specifically why I'm making this case, by the way, book of calls that
12:23
you can buy or shit. What you're doing is you're trying to make this email valuable and
12:28
educational in and of itself. The way that I actually frame this for a lot of our clients is,
12:32
can you write an email that's shareable? Right. Like, can you write an email that's so good that
12:37
when somebody reads it, they go, huh? You know, my buddy Joe and Jane should see this too. They
12:44
let me forward it to a couple people, like, can you write an email that is so valuable on its own
12:49
that it's worth consuming, and they get some degree of insight. And by the way, that also
12:56
positions you better positions you as a better like a stronger expert. Your status goes up for a
13:01
whole lot of reasons, but you're also making deposits instead of making withdrawals. Now, it
13:06
doesn't mean don't have something in the email that says, if you want to talk to us, you know, here,
13:12
like don't make it difficult to to talk to you, but don't make it a sales email like it is a it
13:17
is an educational email that is designed to say, I am teaching you this. I am sharing this with you
13:23
as as an insight. And if you come to the conclusion that you would like to reach out, then
13:29
you know somewhere on the email, make it super, super easy, frictionless. But don't make that the
13:35
purpose of the email. Make the email something that I would want to forward to my friend. Now, in
13:40
this case, with the person that we were coaching, we we installed that that sequence. Now it was it
13:46
was like a week and a half too late. Like I like to get these things faster, but it was like a week
13:50
and a half too late. But we installed the email. We said, let's, let's write this thing out. Let's, let's
13:54
knock it out and let's put it into a sequence. Let's send it out about once a week is what we
13:58
did. You could do once a week, once every other week. I'm not a huge fan of like if you're if
14:02
you're going to fire them like sending him every other day because that just screams I'm trying to
14:06
sell you. I'm trying to close you instead of I'm trying to educate you. I'm trying to nurture you.
14:10
You want to remember? The goal is they're here. You're trying to get them here, right? Like. And you
14:16
don't have to necessarily accelerate it, like, you've email's doing the work. You're going to
14:20
push a button in your CRM and it's going to go, so what is the most effective way to get them there.
14:27
Okay. So we sent it. Four weeks later he gets a call. It says hey, we're curious. You mentioned
14:34
in one of the emails that they that you do security assessments. How much are those? Now we
14:39
have an opportunity. We have taken a prospect who's qualified and turned it into an opportunity
14:46
that is qualified. And the best part is they showed up with higher intent. They showed up with
14:52
better education, better understanding, better knowledge, and they showed up thinking that
14:59
he and they as a company had more credibility Because they aren't just now in the
15:06
market. They're in the market because of them. Right. Like they had the opportunity to educate
15:11
them and bring them there, which improves their credibility and improves their status and
15:15
dramatically improves the likelihood of them closing that deal. Now, here's the thing. Like this
15:19
is a five email sequence, and it's not a magic wand. It's not going to work on everybody. Right.
15:24
Like it's you're going to have this break fix issue. You're going to create a sequence when they
15:28
leave, when they don't, you know, respond to your first or second reach out, then you're going to
15:32
trigger the sequence. The sequence is going to go to work at the end of the sequence, you should
15:36
have a task that says call this person back. Right. Like after that 50 mil goes out, you know, after,
15:41
you know, 2 or 3 days, you should have a task that's automatically generated that says, call
15:45
this person and you should call them and you should say, hey, how's that server going? And by the
15:50
way, you know, anything else that we can look at to ensure that that doesn't happen again and be more
15:55
proactive about this? You know, maybe we have a free assessment something like and make your
15:59
offer right. It's not going to work on everybody. It will work on a percentage of people though. and
16:04
in in the MSP world a few deals meet. It makes a lot of difference in terms of revenue, so the
16:11
small percentage is worth the effort. The kicker though, is this works on a lot of things. People
16:17
think that content is just a top of funnel machine, right? Like that. We're supposed to publish
16:21
content on social to get more leads. We're supposed to publish content to drive more demand.
16:26
And that's a great use of of content, right. Like, that's I mean, we use it for, for that purpose. It's
16:32
like and it works really well. But content is actually arguably more valuable in the
16:39
middle and the bottom of the funnel than it is at top of the funnel, because it can be more targeted.
16:44
It's it hits harder. The receptivity tends to be higher, the open rates tend to be higher. The and
16:51
because, you know just a little bit about them right in this in this situation, you know what's
16:55
keeping them from getting here. So you can create the messaging that's very targeted to do
17:02
exactly that. And you can do this with anything, any issue that is recurring in your
17:09
business in the sales process, if you run into price objections, price resistance frequently. Well,
17:15
do you have a sequence that's set up to trigger in the background that helps people understand
17:20
why cheaper is not better? So that after they tell you know that you've got information, you've got
17:26
targeted content that's designed to help them understand why cheaper is not better. Like, do you
17:32
get ghosted after discovery? Do you get like, whatever it is, like you can like sit down and
17:37
name your top 3 to 5 issues and say, hey, you know what would happen if we created a
17:44
simple sequence for each one of these things? And every time the seller ran into it did their part
17:48
like did everything they could, just said, let's give it a shot, right? Let's push the button, let's
17:54
let content do some of the work, and then let's give them a ring. After that, they've had a chance
17:59
to do that. This is the exact same strategy that people are using in our SDR accelerator, our
18:05
fractional management program to five x the results of everyone else. We dug in, we said, hey,
18:11
what's going on? Like, what are you doing this? Oh, well, every time the SDR has a disposition, it
18:16
triggers a certain thing. The STR is required to say which disposition it is. They're not ready
18:21
right now. They have a current provider. They don't need it. They don't know whatever that is. And it
18:26
triggers a very specific sequence that then goes through. Now theirs was a little bit longer. It's
18:31
like three months and the stars calling after three months. Well, they're calling a very
18:35
different list, I promise you, than everyone else. So this isn't just a break fix issue. This is how
18:41
are you using content? How are you using automation? How are you using the messaging and
18:45
strategy to sell asynchronously for you? Because the best part is, as a sales person, this is
18:52
working for me in the background, right? Like, I'm I'm going, okay, I don't have to call every single
18:57
week. I don't have to badger this person. I don't have to do these things. What I can do is I can
19:02
let this do some of the work for me. And then when I call, in some cases, I'm calling a warmed
19:08
up prospect and it will change the game for you. My recommendation? You know, name the very specific
19:14
sticking point, right that you are you are targeting in this case break fix. Okay, so somebody
19:20
ghosts you after breakfast. Let's name that as the problem now. All right. What are my best
19:26
arguments for that person? Like, if I could sit down that person and say, okay, hear me out.
19:33
Here's my argument for this and here's all my evidence for it. Like, this is the best case that
19:38
I've got. Like, get all that together, right? So name the sticking point, get all your evidence and your
19:43
arguments together. Then plug that in and sit down and write a five email sequence. Again,
19:50
don't make it salesy. Make it value add. Make it educational. Make it something that they want to
19:56
share with people. Write those emails. Then fourth, plug them into your CRM into a sequence. Make sure
20:03
to add a task for yourself or for your salesperson to call at the end of that sequence,
20:08
and then fifth, track it, and then sixth. I guess just repeat that whole damn thing for all of the
20:14
major sticking points and see what happens. So I hope that helps. Really, really good way to to be
20:19
using content in addition to using content for, you know, top of funnel lead generation, everything
20:23
like that. And if this has been helpful, feel free to do 1 or 2 things. We've got the MSP Sales
20:28
Toolbox, which is a collection of resources, templates, playbooks, frameworks, you name it, things
20:34
that we use with clients. We drop them in periodically into the toolbox and we update that
20:39
frequently. You can have access to that for life for free. That is at MSP Sales Toolbox. Com the
20:45
links below as well. And then you can also join my weekly newsletter on email. The link for that is
20:51
in the description where we share more sales advice, sales tips, things like that. So, um, I will
20:57
see you in the next video. Thanks for watching audios.