Episode 35: Achieving Media Mastery

Read the Transcript

Missed CompTIA’s ChannelCon event this year? You’re in luck. Erick and Rich have included the session about building successful relationships with members of the IT media (like Rich) in this episode of the show. That comes after a discussion of the MSP opportunity in AI infrastructure and compliance, and before one last thing: an AI robotics innovation that’s hard to beat for sheer nightmare-inducing creepiness.

Discussed in this episode:

The AI Goldmine Hiding in Plain Sight

A robot gets a face of living ‘skin’ that allows it to smile

Transcript:

Rich: [00:00:00] Blast off, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the MSP Chat Podcast, your weekly visit with two talking heads talking with you about these services, strategies, and success tips you need. To make it big in managed services. My name is Rich Freeman. I’m chief content officer and channel analyst at Channel Mastered, the organization responsible for this show.

I am joined this week as I am every week by your other co host, our chief strategist at Channel Mastered, Erick Simpson. Erick, how are you doing today?

Erick: I’m doing great, Rich. I’m getting ready to take the kids off to Comic Con this weekend. We’re excited about that. So if any of you Are gonna be at comic con catch up catch me up on social media and maybe we can do a quick meetup But yeah, we’re excited about that and then rich you’re traveling as well, then you and I are both traveling next week with the rest of the Channel Master team for CompTIA ChannelCon.

So we got quite a busy next couple of weeks ahead of us.

Rich: We do. And as a matter of fact ChannelCon kind of figures into the plan for this episode, folks. By the time you are listening to or watching the show, ChannelCon will actually be over. Although just barely when this episode comes out.

But if you were not actually able to attend that show, we’re gonna bring a little piece of it to you. Because ChannelCon takes place in Atlanta what is it, the 30th of July until August 1st. On Thursday, August 1st, Erick and I are co presenting a session at the show. So again, by the time You’re enjoying this episode of the show.

That’s already happened. So we are going to do it for you again, right here, live on this show. And it’s it’s all about working with the media. It’s coming up later in the show, folks. Little different than what we normally do on the episode here. But hopefully something that you will enjoy.

Erick: And thanks for reminding me, Rich, that by the time this airs, Comic con will be over too. So strike everything I said about reaching out to me ahead of time so we can do a meetup Share your shots and pics and feedback on social media with me I’ll do the same and we’ll reminisce together that way.

All right, rich. You ready to kick this new unique format

Rich: off? Absolutely, but let’s begin it with a familiar piece of format here. Let’s go into our story of the week. And this is our story of the week often does, comes from a recent post to my blog, Channelholic. And I’ll tell you, Erick I wasn’t anticipating an unusual response to this particular post when I put it out there, but it actually generated quite a bit.

Of traffic, because I think it called attention to something that isn’t maybe getting as much attention as it deserves in the channel right now. Now we are all, whether you’re in the channel or not, we’re all reading a ton about AI just in the business press. And a lot of the attention understandably gets focused on, NVIDIA and the processor market open AI, anthropic large language models and all the revenue being poured into those companies, not a big surprise.

Businesses worldwide will spend 52 billion on generative AI models and software by 2028, according to S& P by 2027 venture capital firms will have poured 800 to 900 billion Into AI related startups, mostly doing software related stuff, close to a trillion dollars by 2027. So this is big business.

I don’t blame people for paying a lot of attention to it, but how about this? IDC went out a little bit earlier this year and surveyed that granted these are it decision makers that sort of larger businesses, but they asked people, what are your spending priorities for the coming year around AI? 34 percent of them said security, which makes a certain amount of sense.

35 percent of them said infrastructure and software models, etc. Not even really at the top of the list. What are businesses focused on around AI today? Laying in the infrastructure they need to build and run these tools and then laying in the services they need. To secure them. All of that is a present day and a go forward opportunity for folks in our audience.

Give you a little illustration here. Dell in its most recent fiscal report recorded 22%. Growth year over year in its infrastructure solutions group driven mostly by AI related sales of servers. Servers. Could there be anything more traditional, less interesting than servers, but AI seeing a lot of sales growth and service specifically because of AI.

So is HPE, which in its most recent quarterly report said that they have recorded 4. 6 billion of [00:05:00] cumulative AI systems orders. Now. Look, there’s a ton of data that needs to be accumulated and needs to be managed. It needs to be transported across networks. It needs to be secured. All of that requires infrastructure.

And in particular, I mentioned it’s got to be stored. Storage is one of those AI related infrastructure opportunities that again, doesn’t sound very exciting. What could actually produce a fair amount of money and, 24 percent of the folks in the that IDC survey identified storage as their number one AI spending priority for the next 12 months, way up at the top of the list again, in front of all the software and the stuff like that, a lot of reasons for this companies that are building private models have to put a lot of training data together that Require storage space.

Any old storage space won’t do. If you have invested in an NVIDIA processor, you really want to saturate it with data. And so you don’t just need storage, you need high speed storage. So that’s driving a lot of incremental storage server purchases. Once you’ve actually built that model, you’re going to have to archive everything that you use to train that model, basically, for a long time, so that if, for example some media company comes to you and says, you have illegally purloined my copyrighted data, you have a basis for saying, no, I have not.

Take a look. Here’s how I trained the model. So this is a long term storage opportunity for the training data. There is inference data to be stored and served as well. Now again, a lot of this is going to be large business oriented, but there’s plenty of AI infrastructure related need among SMBs too.

We spoke on the last episode of the show about AI PCs, that is AI hardware revenue opportunity for the folks in our audience right now. And just more generally, generative AI, as the name suggests, generates a lot of stuff. And if your customers today are producing stuff that requires a fair amount of storage.

They’re going to need a lot more of it going forward. If your clients are using generative AI just to produce a lot of text, that’s probably not to increase their storage requirements significantly, but if they’re producing video or audio, if they’re producing large files, and if you can think back to how much extra storage space they needed when that started happening a few years ago.

You’re going to see that kind of bump again. And one of the storage experts I spoke to said, if your customers are producing bigger forms of content and that Gen AI is enabling them to do more of that, you could see a storage capacity requirement bump in the, 15 to 25 percent rate.

All of this Erick this is and I also, I should mention there are services opportunity around this too, not just in terms of the security and the ongoing management and so on. But aggregating the data, a lot of companies have plenty of training data, but they have it in 18 different places.

Automating a lot of these AI related processes, all that is in service related income too. So there, there’s a lot of infrastructure opportunity out there that I think is probably being shortchanged and overlooked by a lot of folks in the channel.

Erick: Rich, that’s very interesting data and analysis. Thank you for that.

I’m, as I look at it through the lens of the MSP, right? I think the question that I want to ask you is this now a different type of, if not a different vertical market for MSPs to attack? It’s definitely a different target audience, right? So you’re looking at, Organizations that are building upon AI, generative AI.

And so they’re the ones that need all of this space, all of this cute, fast compute, fast processing power, these GPUs, et cetera. What are your thoughts? Is that a, it’s definitely a different target audience than MSPs are used to, but I don’t know if it bleeds over into like its own, like vertical market segment not what we think of traditionally.

As a vertical market, but it’s definitely a different target audience and how easy is it for MSPs to identify that target audience slash vertical market in my jargon and attack it because you’ve got to have, MSPs already do the infrastructure stuff. Like we’re good at that.

We know how to put these things together. So it’s almost Holy cow. If I just shifted my marketing and my sales focus here. There’s a ton of opportunity. So what are your thoughts? Okay. A lot there. So I kept thinking

Rich: I kept spit balling in my head. Let me give you a few thoughts here.

So first of all I would think of the end user building an LLM as if not a vertical, then a new kind of [00:10:00] customer segment, customer opportunity, and that’s going to be a subset of the customer base for a lot of the folks in our audience right now. And there will be plenty of people in the audience who really appreciate it.

Thank you. Don’t have any customers in that area at all. Remember one of the AI infrastructure opportunities is simply finding a place to store and putting in the networking capacity, et cetera, to transmit, to to share all of that content. Let’s say video content, for example, that generative AI is generating.

So that’s anyone, anywhere. The other thing I’ll say is, cause you were saying is this a customer segment. Or is this more like a vertical? And my first thought when you said that is a little bit of both, because one of the things that experts I interview about AI will tell me over and over again, is there really is no AI opportunity per se.

There are all sorts of different vertical industry applications of AI. And so you’re going to need most people, especially I think in our audience, most people who are serving SMBs and even mid market companies are going to need to pick. A vertical industry or two or three to really dive into because their customers who do invest in LLMs and so on are going to be looking for something that’s quite specific to what they do.

So in terms of how easy or difficult is it to to get into this market? Obviously like you were saying, the, if what we’re talking about here is scaling up infrastructure for your customers, this is a very familiar opportunity for folks in the audience here, it’s a question of being aware of the fact that this need, if it doesn’t exist immediately, will probably exist at some point in the future.

And so this is something to talk about with your customers investigate. If it’s really just a standard infrastructure play that happens to be more urgent for the customer because of AI. If this really is more around helping people build and manage LLMs and creating all the infrastructure around that I think the infrastructure piece of that is probably not that difficult for folks in this audience to, to get into.

I think that’s really where the software element of it does require specialized skills. And we’ve interviewed people on this show who are experts. Creating software, HATS AI is a great example of a company. That is creating software specifically for MSPs to help them with with that task, even if they don’t have a lot of skills going in.

That piece of it does require expertise, but the infrastructure piece of it, which is apparently, based on research, going to be the first piece of it where people are spending money, doesn’t necessarily require new skills in house. It just, you need to know a little bit more about what your customers need and how to talk with them about it.

Erick: Yeah, Rich, and as I’m pondering this a little bit, I’m guessing that the tremendous amount of data generated in this new technology, it’s going to eclipse regular data storage. That’s needed by, your typical SMB customer today.

Rich: Again, depends on the customer and what they produce and so on.

But yeah, absolutely. You could imagine a scenario where you know somebody’s story that the amount of content that they’re generating all of a sudden, and content that really does eat up some storage space is going to go up a lot.

Erick: We’ll keep an eye on this developing opportunity because obviously it’s a huge opportunity for MSPs, right? It sounds like blue ocean or first mover advantage opportunity type of stuff here. So thanks for bringing that to us.

Rich: Let’s move on to your tip of the week Erick here. And a lot of what we were just talking about is one time project specific, but you’re going to be talking a little bit about a an end user need among SMBs out there right now that is ongoing and forever.

Erick: It’s absolutely, and this is another one of those six scenarios, Rich, that it’s never going away. The opportunity is never going away. The risk is never going away. It’s just going to keep getting larger and more pronounced, right? The elephant in the room being security, but not just security.

We talk a lot about cybersecurity and security on this show, Rich. I’m going to make a bold statement and I’m going to say. It’s going to be shifting to compliance. We’re going to be shifting this cybersecurity focus and need more toward compliance as MSPs addressing the needs of our end clients, whether that be an SMB client, mid market enterprise, you name it.

I think that over time, I, my crystal ball Rick tells me that more and more things are going to be regulated, not withstanding, this CrowdStrike situation that we’ve got going on currently, as we’re recording this show more and more things are going to be regulated and the things that we thought would never be [00:15:00] regulated from a business perspective will become regulated at some point in the future.

I just, I got a spidey sense about this stuff. So what is it that MSPs. Can be doing rich to meet this Existing regulatory compliance opportunities that they have with some of their customer segments I know some msps that i’ve worked with are shying away from compliance. They’ll do the cyber security stuff.

They’ll do the email anti virus, anti phishing, they’ll do the DMARC compliant stuff, they’ll do the, end user security awareness training, but they’re firmly planted in the, I’m using air quotes now, unregulated client markets, right? The target audience. Because compliance can seem like a very daunting, challenging beast, if you will.

I know that we’ve done surveys where it’s a channel mastered asking partners about their sense of why they’re not moving into these areas. And a lot of them say it’s the risk. Some of them won’t even touch cybersecurity because they think it’s risky. Guess what folks, that train is coming, right?

We have to be able to. Help our clients secure their infrastructure, their applications, their behavior, their data, et cetera. And this is a, this does not mean that you are responsible for the cybersecurity and compliance of your clients organizations. I know Rich, that a lot of partners get the cyber liability insurance, data information requests for them from their clients.

And they say, Hey, will you please fill this out? Cause I don’t know what they’re talking about. Oh, there’s a specific question on that questionnaire that says, who is responsible for cyber security in your organization? I know some MSPs that think they should put their name in there and I’m here to say, no, that is your client’s name that goes in there.

All you’re doing is you’re delivering a specific set of services to help them meet a technical objective or a cyber security objective or an insurance requirement or a compliance requirement. You are not responsible for that. Now, Rich, that doesn’t mean that. When things go bad as they do once in a while that you may not be, serve to go testify, but if you are only delivering a set of services in your statement of work, rich that says these are the things I am delivering to you, none of them say that I am responsible or I bear the responsibility for any of the stuff you’re just delivering these set of services.

And you should be in a better position than not. So what do we do when compliance comes our way? We have to look at it from the same lens. Rich we know many great vendors that serve MSPs that help them assess. Compliance for their clients gives them a checklist of every type of different, regulatory framework you can imagine.

And here’s the checklist of where they fail, where they need work. Here’s what you do. Here’s what you do. And you can slowly start chipping away at that, at those compliance requirements to then provide the client a report that demonstrates that they are maintaining their compliance. Again, you are helping them assess.

And deliver these these changes in their processes, in their business so that they can demonstrate that they’re in compliance with that regulatory requirement. So three quick tips, stay informed, keep up to date with the latest regulations and compliance requirements of the clients you are serving or the prospects you intend to serve.

Sometimes the best qualifying question to get someone to say yes to an assessment, Rich is. Do you understand your compliance regulation requirements are for your business if the client says no And you say let me get back to you on that. That’s not very You know, confidence inducing. Is it rich?

You’ve got to be able to say look, here’s what you need to be adhering to in order to them. And you have to demonstrate compliance against that, allow us to do an assessment for you and let you know where you fall and charge them for that, right? This is work that you’re doing that adds a tremendous amount of value and can keep them out of trouble.

Later on use compliance management tools like the great vendors that, I just mentioned there, there are a lot of great vendors that provide compliance assessment, compliance management tools, and give you the step by step process that you can, optimize, or if it’s the client’s responsibility to do some of these things, then you can assign those tasks to them, but you’re working together, remember they’re responsible for that.

You’re just delivering these services to help them demonstrate compliance. And then, cherry on top, when you’re mature enough, assign a dedicated compliance officer. The role in your [00:20:00] organization, it’s almost rich like a VCSO or VCIO, but it’s a compliance officer, basically manages All of the activities that your team is doing to demonstrate compliance for these end clients.

So imagine someone that’s basically having regular meetings with clients, whether those are monthly or quarterly, think of it as a QBR, but for compliance and going over the things that are still outstanding, where the client stands and managing that process moving forward. There’s a ton of opportunity here, Rich, for MSPs.

Rich: And I think that’s a really critical point. It’s funny, as it happens, I dedicated a Channelholic post to to this topic just a few weeks ago, because there is a ton of opportunity. There’s a ton of need. Out there among businesses of every size for assistance with compliance requirements.

MSPs are from a certain perspective, ideally situated to help their customers with those requirements. And like you said, Erick, most of them are really terrified of getting into that space. And the risk is one of the huge hurdles that keeps them from doing that. Another is the the complexity.

It’s I, I, How am I ever going to master HIPAA, for example, if I’ve got clients, in the healthcare space, and how do I keep up with those requirements as they change and so on over time? And I totally get it. Why people are very reluctant to get in. Two things to think about that.

I, it’s you can throw your hands up about security cause you’re worried about the risk there, but your customers. Are going to get hacked and they’re going to blame you anyway, right? Cause you’re supposed to be my outsourced it guy. Why didn’t you keep that from happening? And telling them that’s because you refuse to pay for the security services or whatever.

Isn’t really going to get the job done. It’s similar with compliance. You’re likely to get some of that blame if something goes wrong, during an audit or something like that, and you’re just leaving a lot of money on the table. A key thing that I would add the software that those vendors you talked about that will actually simplify this a great deal.

So if you are intimidated by the complexity of these regulations, these tools are designed to understand all of that for you so that you don’t have to continually read trade journals dedicated to healthcare compliance and stuff like that. The tools are keeping track of that for you.

But there are some things that you will need. To know how to do despite that they’re easier things to learn, but we’re talking here about compliance in the industry. A lot of the experts talk about GRC governance. And regulatory compliance and the governance piece of that is I think that the sort of services piece in addition to the assessments that you were talking about that MSPs can and should be thinking about doing so we’re going to get you in a position where you are compliant and then the government service that we’re providing is keeping you compliant and that software can help you with some of that you’re just going to need to take some responsibility for but it’s easier to do Easier to learn.

And then the last thing I’ll say is, because this is where you began, And this goes back to the risk issue, is I really do encourage MSPs To get into compliance because of the scale of the need and the opportunity. Talk to your attorney first and make sure your master of services, make sure you’re covered basically on what you’re promising and what you’re not for all the reasons you outlined.

Erick: Yeah. Great. Final thought there, right? Yes. Always have your legal team review any agreement, any document that ties you to a client and your responsibilities and their responsibilities. It will protect you and rich in the best case. It’ll protect your clients as well. And you’re absolutely right in terms of the approach of assessing and then addressing and then demonstrating.

I think those are the three things that MSPs have an opportunity to do. And it’s. It’s a big conversation. It’s daunting, but if you’re not delivering these services because you feel you’re at too much risk, and what happens is what you described potentially rich as they get hacked and now they blame you.

And now they’re dragging you into court because you haven’t gotten your agreements looked at by your legal team and you haven’t done anything to, help guard against that, and hopefully that never happens. But the other thing is also true that they never get hacked. But then you don’t deliver these services to them and your competition comes and knocks on the door and takes them away from you as a client.

Oh you’re not doing this stuff.

Rich: Yeah, I totally agree. And that’s a really important point. You’re leaving money on the table. If you’re not doing it, you’re also opening the door to somebody else who can and will do it. And always a dangerous thing to do. All right, we are going to Erick and I are going to take a quick break right now when we come back on the Other side we’re going to go into what is normally our spotlight interview segment this time It’s going to be let’s call it our spotlight event session segment because we are going to share with you a session that the two of [00:25:00] us will have just done the CompTIA channel con event by the time you are enjoying this show It’s all about Working with folks in the media like me, getting your news noticed and reported on and we’re gonna get into that in just a few moments.

Stick around, We’ll be right back

All right, and welcome back to part two of this episode of the msp chat podcast Which as I just said is this time around not our spotlight interview. It is our spotlight event session recreation, segment because when folks are listening to or watching this show it’ll be just a day or days after the conclusion of CompTIA’s annual ChannelCon event this year on Thursday, August 1st, at that event in the morning, you and I did a session called Achieving Media Mastery.

And Erick, the inspiration for this I am approached by, dozens, doesn’t even really do justice to it. A good solid 150 to 200 different vendors a day, probably, trying to get my attention, get me to report on their news. And I do interviews every day obviously just, a very small handful, but I have a lot of interaction with vendors and with their PR people.

I’ve had plenty of conversations with MSPs about, how they are trying and maybe struggling to get the media to cover them. And I would say I’m pretty familiar. With a lot of the mistakes that people make that keep them from getting more media attention. And a lot of the simple things that you can do to be more successful in that area in that regard.

And so that’s what this session we did was all about. And we’re gonna organize it around the life cycle of a news story. And so we’ll just begin right at the beginning. You’ve got something that you want to announce to the world. You think this is newsworthy and important. You want media people to agree to cover it for you and see if you’re going to go out there and you’ve got to pitch them.

On this story and get them, typical journalists can only do one, two, three interviews at most in a day, right? One or two stories at most in a day. How do you get them to be the one that they pick up on? And the the quick tip there, folks, is that, This is a marketing function.

What you are trying to do with your public relations is market your product to people who might buy it. But for purposes of getting media attention, the journalist, I, in this case, I’m your market. And so you need to understand me. You need to tailor your message to me. What is it that would get this guy interested?

What are his pain points? What does he care about? And what I care about, right? What any journalist cares about is reporting on stuff that my audience. is going to find interesting and compelling and relevant that they are going to want to read. And so if you give me something that is really interesting to you, but from my point of view, isn’t terribly interesting to my audience, you’re going to have trouble getting through to me.

And so let’s just say, for example, Erick, you are somebody out there. You think you’ve got some pretty exciting news. You give me a ring. I pick up the phone and I ask Erick, what you got.

Erick: Awesome. Hey Rich, earlier today, we announced that we’ve won our 10th award of the year. We set a new sales record and we signed our 10, 000th client.

When are you available to talk to me about that, Rich?

Rich: Boy, oh boy, are there a number of problems in that pitch there, beginning with the first two words, earlier today. Because if you are a journalist, it is difficult to scramble up your schedule last minute and insert an interview. About something that just broke today and you’ve got to write about it today because it’s not going to be news tomorrow and so on.

One easy thing you can do to improve your odds of getting coverage is to give journalists a little advance notice. I’ve got news coming on Thursday. If you’ll agree to keep it under embargo, we can set something up in advance and that’s going to make it easier. To get an interview book. But the other thing is you were talking about awards and sales records and signing up new partners, which is really exciting stuff for you.

But if I am writing for MSPs and other technology partners out there, and they’re putting out flyers, do they really care about any of that? Is that gonna get me excited to write up a news story that your company is just killing it out there? Probably not. Because my audience really doesn’t care about that.

What they care about is stuff that you’ve got coming. That’s going to help them, make more and spend less. So Erick what might be a pitch that’s likely to be a little bit more successful with.

Erick: So if I’m an MSP rich looking for some media love, making some of your guidance, I would adjust my pitch to you.

Something like this. Hey Rich, three days from now, we’ll introduce the first automated AI security solution in the industry, specifically for [00:30:00] SMB clients, let’s say. At a disruptive price point, would you like to receive An embargoed press release from us and then schedule an

Rich: interview. Much better.

You gave me advance notice. You gave me an opportunity to schedule something in advance and you brought me something that I am likely to find interesting. You included the word first in there. That’s going to get my attention right now. First. Biggest, most, et cetera. I’m going to be, at least intrigued to find out a little bit more about that.

But it’s also AI related and security related and therefore there could be trends there that my readers really need to know about or want to know about, or, this could wind up being competition for them. Now if you want we’ll get into this a little bit.

You, you’ve gotten my attention. I’m going to cover you because you’re doing something that is newsworthy. For my readers, if you wind up spending a few quick minutes in that call, just letting me know that we have also won a bunch of awards and set sales records and saw it, you can get that information to me.

I may or may not write about it because I probably don’t think my audience cares, but if you’re really trying to get me to write about you, you’ve got to bring me something that I am going to have a good reason to write about, and that cannot be. This is just a really super exciting time. For us

Erick: now, let’s so my takeaway here rich is what i’m trying to do is close you on an interview I’m, not trying to give you all of this stuff.

That’s you know, that is not very newsworthy So i’m looking for things like First, biggest, most, I’m throwing in like something that’s trendy. It’s in the news all the time. Security AI, it’s gotta be interesting. I’ve got to bait you into wanting to learn more. That’s what I’m taking away from this first lesson.

Rich: That is well said. I like that, so I was likening it to marketing before you’re bringing in a sales metaphor with the clothes there. But that is a great way. To think about it, and it segues nicely into the second sort of pitch related tip that I’ll provide because, if you’re trying to sell something that is specific to the legal industry, you’re probably not going to bring that to your customers in the healthcare industry, for example, right?

You have to think about your audience, know your audience when you decide what to bring folks, what to sell to folks, what to market to folks. Because if you are bringing them irrelevant ideas not only will you not get the sale in that case or the media coverage in the case of what we’re talking about in this session, but you will acquire a reputation for yourself as somebody who wastes my time which is not what you want.

For example. Let’s just say I picked up the phone. Hey it’s Erick Simpson again. Erick, what you got for me this time?

Erick: Hey, Rich, we’re about to release our network security product for enterprise businesses in Germany. Let me send you a press release and then let’s book an interview.

Rich: First example of what I’m talking about right now.

This is, this example is specific to me. But I write about the SMB channel and my audience is overwhelmingly in North America. And you just brought me a story for enterprise IT departments, not the SMB channel, that takes place in Germany. I do not care. There is no way I’m going to write about that.

And fine, you might think I’ll take a stab at it. Maybe he’ll surprise me. But again, you really don’t want your name to become affiliated with waste of time pitches. Show that you took the time to understand me and my market and my needs. Bring me stuff that’s going to make us both successful here.

So that I’m more apt to look at your emails, take your calls text, etc. Future. Okay. So now let’s just say you made a great pitch. Erick, I have booked an interview with you and we are headed towards that interview. There are some things that you can and can’t do before that interview takes place.

And let’s just start out with something that I get asked all too often, but that you really shouldn’t ask. Erick, what? What’s that? You have a question about the interview we’re doing

Erick: tomorrow? Yeah, rich, I just want to make sure i’m prepared and ready So can you send me over a list of all the questions you’re going to ask me in advance so I can bone up No,

Rich: I not Do not whether you are the person being interviewed or you’re the pr person who’s arranging this interview Don’t ask for the questions in advance.

No self respecting journalists It’s going to give you those questions. Look, I get it. I understand it is easier to be the interviewer than to be interviewed in these, and I totally understand why people are a little anxious about that. And they feel like I’m going to do a better job. If I’m prepared, I can practice.

I know what to anticipate, but it’s just unprofessional for the journalist to tell the person that they’re interviewing, here are all the questions. And the other thing I’ll just say is I’m doing so many interviews in a typical week. Erick, I, you’re going to ask me that question and I literally don’t know.

I don’t have I haven’t even thought about that interview yet. I’ve got four to do between now and then don’t do it Don’t [00:35:00] do it. i’m not going to give you the questions. It’s going to make you look bad and unprofessional It’s going to make you look like you’re not sure of yourself and confident in your ability to answer the questions What so might if you want to be prepared I respect that what might you ask me to do instead?

Erick: So taking your feedback rich and also I think there’s a little bit of a You know, it’s a respect, right? Hey you’re, you are who you are, and I’m putting my, I’m putting my trust in you because you’re going to guide the conversation in unique and interesting ways, and if it’s all canned questions and all that, it’s going to come off canned and that’s not the integrity of the journalist has to be maintained at all costs is what I’m sensing here from some of this.

Am I in the ballpark there, Rich?

Rich: You are absolutely right. Yes, and and the cons, I particularly appreciate you pointing out that if I did give you the questions in advance and you gave me canned answers, that might backfire on you too because I’ll do the interview, but maybe I don’t wind up writing the story because this was such a stilted, uninteresting conversation.

Got it. Okay. So processing

Erick: what you shared. So instead of asking you for a list of questions, because maybe I am new at this. I don’t know what I should do is say something like. Hey, Rich, I’m super excited. Thank you so much for agreeing to interview me. What kind of topics or areas do you plan to cover

Rich: in the interview?

And that is a much, an entirely legitimate, much better question to ask. So again, you want to be prepared. What topics are we going to be covering? We’re going to be talking about the recent changes you made to your partner program, what those mean for your partners and why you went about making this.

I’m not giving you. The 10 questions I plan to ask. I’m just telling you, I scheduled this interview because I wanted to cover these three or four topics. You know what to expect. The other thing I’ll add there, though, is do understand this is not a binding agreement between you and the journalists, meaning it’s totally fair game to say, what topics are we going to cover?

But if you get into some area during the interview that I didn’t expect to be talking about with you and it’s interesting to me and I think it’s something I want to include in the article, I might ask you about a topic that I didn’t tell you was coming. That is completely legit and fair for me to do.

But if you want a little bit of a guidance going in so that you’re not completely blind about what this conversation is going to be about, go ahead and ask for topics, just don’t ask for questions. All right. Now we’re going to get into my private nightmare. Some of the things that actually happen during interviews on an all too regular basis here.

And maybe the best way to set this one up is just for me to ask you a pretend question. And get your pretend answer here. And so here’s my pretend question, Erick, I’m interviewing for a story. We’re talking about this new product that you’re launching. What’s distinctive. What’s unique about this new product?

Erick: Awesome, rich. And I’m, I was answering the other ones as an MSP. So now I’m going to be, I’m going to switch it up and be a vendor now. So you’re interviewing me. What’s distinctive about this new product you’re releasing. Rich, let me start by reminding you that we’re the only vendor in our market that sells exclusively through MSPs.

We raised 10 million of funding last month, and we have the highest customer satisfaction scores in the industry.

Rich: And trust me, folks I have done interviews where I ask a question like, What is unique or distinctive about this product? And I’ve got to wait five, ten, I’ll get an answer. But I’ve got to wait five or 10 minutes because I’m getting answers to all these other questions.

And here’s the thing I’ve got, maybe 30 minutes with you. I know what I need to learn from you in order to be able to write the story. If you are devoting time to other stuff, other topics that I’m not asking you about, you’re burning up time. And the, in the worst case scenario, the 30 minutes is up.

I haven’t learned what I needed to learn. And I cannot actually write the story because you told me about everything. Accept what I need so that the tip here folks is stay on topic. Listen to the question, answer the question that you have been asked. Doesn’t have to be a, we’ll get into the length of that answer in just a moment here.

Stay on topic and understand that even if there are other things that you wanna talk about, what you’re really trying to do is let the journalist set the agenda for this conversation. Because if they can do that, they’re gonna come away from the conversation with the information that they came to the conversation to get.

And they’re gonna be much better prepared and more inclined to go ahead and and write up a story. So for example, let’s just say Erick, I asked you what is distinctive. Or unique about this new product that you’re watching.

Erick: Rich it’s the first multi tenant product of its kind, and it targets a pain point for MSPs and their end users that no other solution addresses.[00:40:00]

Rich: I asked you a question, you answered the question, it was an interesting answer, it gives me all sorts of opportunities and avenues for follow up there. And instead of me sitting there trying not to show my impatience and frustration on the Zoom call while you’re talking about everything but what I asked you about I’m thinking this guy is on his game.

So that, stay on topic. Now, even if you are on topic another issue that I run into sometimes is people stay on topic for a little bit longer than they ought to. So let’s let’s try this. I’m going to ask you another question for this interview, Erick. How long does the promotional pricing for this new product that you’re announcing remain in effect?

Erick: Well, Rich, as I’ve been in the channel a long time, starting at Microsoft and then I moved on to Oracle a few years ago before making my way to my current position. So I know what channel partners want and what delivers value. And I understand the economic pressures that MSPs are under these days, which are getting worse and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Rich: And again, it overlaps a little bit with the last tip there. You want to stay on tar topic, but you also want to get the answer out there concisely. Don’t. Don’t spend 10 minutes on the first question in the interview, even if it’s relevant to the topic, the question that I asked.

Because again, 30 minutes are up, I’m going to hang up, and if I haven’t collected what I need to write the story, you might be unhappy with the outcome. Or even if I do, collect enough information to write a story, if that story only covers half of what you consider newsworthy, and that’s because we just never had time to get into the other half.

This is going to be a problem for both of us. Be concise, stay on a topic. So let’s say you did all that and I went ahead and I wrote the story. And that story is scheduled to run on Thursday when your news breaks. And here we are, the day before that it’s Wednesday and I got a call from Erick again.

Erick, what do you need to know?

Erick: Hey, Rich, just checking in. Can I see the story before it runs, please?

Rich: Erick, you want to know the one thing worse to ask a journalist than give me the questions in advance? It’s show me the article before it runs so that I can quarrel with you about it or make edits or Absolutely not.

And again, it’s insulting for you to think I might do that, right? So you don’t want to offend the journalist. I understand your concern. And I, that people who ask that question may have been burned in the past. I saw the story that the last story you wrote about my company and you got 18 things in there wrong.

And so now you’re thinking I want to see the article before it goes so I can fix those problems in advance. You can’t you cannot ask that question because nothing good is going to to come from that. So now you know that the story has actually run it’s Thursday and the story is out there.

You’ve just read it. I was talking about a scenario where you’ve seen 18 things you don’t like. Erick is calling me again. Erick, what’s up?

Erick: Rich, I just read the story and you know that quote about our 2023 revenue. It’s not supposed to be public.

Rich: I understand maybe in, in this specific instance here, you inadvertently said something that wasn’t meant to go out to the public, but that interview was on the record and you can’t go back retroactively and pull anything you said off the record.

And asked me to remove it from the story. No, the interview is over. You were on the record. We both understood that and I reported what you said. And so this goes to another kind of related point, which is just that folks in an interview, you are always on the record with a journalist unless you specify to the journalist in advance that you’re going off the record.

Because that’s the other thing, you can’t say something and then come back and say, actually, you know what, that’s off the record. Some journalists, I will, in fact, sometimes, if it’s, Understandable. I’ll say, okay, fine. I understand. You didn’t. But generally speaking, everything you say is on the record unless you say, I’m going to tell you something right now that is off the record.

And you absolutely cannot go back after the story is run and pull your comments out of that article. It’s just not going to happen. Here’s something else that’s really just not going to happen. Again, I’m getting a call from Erick about the story I just ran about. Erick what is it this time?

Erick: Rich, thanks so much for writing the article about us and your coverage. But, I don’t like the way I came off the way I was quoted. I wanna change, is that okay?

Rich: No, I am afraid it’s not .

Erick: Oh, I know that one’s gonna be the answer.

Rich: Yeah. Yeah. Surprise. That is not okay. What I am doing in that story is recapturing and communicating to my audience what you said when we spoke before.

It is your responsibility to say what you mean. If it, if the answer was incoherent, it’s probably [00:45:00] not going to show up in the story anyway because it’s not going to read very well. But if there’s something in there where you don’t like a word, an adjective you used, or you said something about a competitor that was a little, maybe stronger than you intended to you, you don’t get to go back and edit the story.

I, we were talking before about this kind of a marketing function. I am not on your marketing team. It is not my job to make you look good. That’s your job. My job is to inform my audience.

Erick: Say that again, Rich. Say that again. Say it again for everybody to hear, because that’s important.

Rich: I am not on your marketing team.

I am not here to make you look good. We are not on the same team. I may like you a ton, but the reason I’m interviewing you is because I’m writing a story that I think my audience is going to appreciate. I am not here to help you be successful. You are responsible for being successful. Yeah,

Erick: that’s the point I wanted to get across.

Like it’s my job to be prepared to make myself look good and not make these rookie mistakes, if you will.

Rich: Absolutely. One more thing here. Let’s get into, cause again, the story has run or has it? Or has it? We did an interview on Wednesday. Here it is. It’s Friday morning. You’ve been going to my website every hour on the hour and you’re not seeing the story.

Here’s the phone. Erick Simpson, yet again on the phone. Erick, what is it this time?

Erick: Rich, is there something wrong with your website? I don’t see the story. What did it run? Why didn’t it run?

Rich: There, there are two variations of this mistake. And one is this classic instance.

There’s a certain species of email that I will get typically from a PR person as opposed to like an MSP or a vendor or something like that and for the sake of just in case somebody has kids in the car or something like that, I won’t give you the exact term that I use To these emails, but I think of them as where the F is my story emails, because what will happen typically is you did an interview with me on Wednesday.

You told me the embargo lifts at 10 a. m. tomorrow, 10 a. m. You went to my website story is not there yet. You went back at 101 1002 still not there. You send me an email that is very politely worded in its passive aggressive sort of way. But the gist of it is. Hey, Rich, where the F is my story? And the answer to that question will quite often be, it’s coming.

I’ve got three, I had to put out eight fires since we spoke. I’ve got two other stories I had to get to first. I couldn’t get to this one yet. It’s coming. And again, unless you want to you want me to associate your name with being a pain. Don’t ask me over and over again, where the F is my story.

The other thing that can happen here though, is that sometimes. I’ll do the interview and for many of the reasons that we just talked about, you know I didn’t collect the information I needed you wandered off top. I just I can’t do the story or Crowdstrike let’s say has brought the entire civilized world to a standstill and now i’ve got to cover that I cannot cover your story and by the time I have time for it.

It’s not news anymore So we all need to understand now and again you’re going to dedicate time to an interview and invest that time with a journalist and nothing is going to come of it. And it, it’s, I don’t love it when that happens. I don’t like wasting people’s time, but it happens.

We, we all have to be gronk about that and accept that it is it is going to happen sometimes.

Erick: I think, Rich, at the end of the day, we have to appreciate that you’re doing us a favor. We’re trying to do you a favor by bringing you stuff that’s going to help you. But you’re really doing us a favor.

If we’re not prepared and concise and direct and interesting and quotable, then we’re not giving you enough for you to Help us.

Rich: Very well said. You are a pros pro, Erick. You . That is exactly right. That is exactly right. And similarly, here’s another thing that that people ask me about after a story is run.

Erick, what what are you calling me

Erick: about? Hey, rich, I saw the story, but I don’t see my quote in there. Why am I not quoting?

Rich: Because I, I interviewed three people about this AI story that I wrote, and the other two people gave me interesting and relevant stuff, and they asked questions, and they were concise, and they stayed on topic, and you didn’t, and so you’re not in the story.

And I’m sorry about that, because again, I don’t like wasting anyone’s time, but it goes right back to what you were just saying here. I, my professional responsibility is to the quality of the writing and to my audience. I am not on the hook for making sure that you are quoted in the story, so you gotta take care of yourself and make sure that you’re doing what you need to do to ensure that you are going to be quoted in the story.

And the more you are aligning your comments with the journalist’s needs the likelier it is that you’re gonna get quoted, not just once, but maybe multiple times. Yeah,

Erick: fantastic. And I [00:50:00] know rich and the only reason that I’m better than I used to be at this kind of stuff and is because of working with you.

But I, and now as we do this session, I realized how much sometimes I just must be driving you nuts when we’re on our podcast and we’re, interviewing folks and stuff because I, me, I just, I get caught up in something and I just wander off into different, yeah. Brassy areas, they’re not part of the compound, let’s say.

But I will, I am now, trying to be better at that stuff. And this, these tips are super, super helpful and they’re not a lot of them. It’s just basically very kind of prescriptive guidance that anyone can follow and just learn to execute on. I want you to write an article. On this rich that we can get out to people because it’s awesome

Rich: My final words on this will just be don’t you know, if you have made some of these mistakes before don’t feel terrible about it because they’re very common mistakes and they’re very easy mistakes to make especially if you don’t have a lot of experience with the media so the issue isn’t that you somehow are stupid the issue is just that you’re new to this you are maybe new to how the industry and how the world looks from a journalist’s point of view.

And so the whole point of our session, Erick, was just to help people understand that better so that they can get better results. And yeah, I’m going to get better results out of that as well.

Erick: Yeah. And the other salient piece that I’m taking away is, the more someone makes these kinds of mistakes, the less likely you are to want to work with them.

So you’re doing yourself like you’re, you’ve got to think ahead. If you’re delivering, consistently, then it’s you’ll be okay. I’ll talk to Erick, we got, he gets it. We can get this done rather than, having a bad experience with somebody and then, them sending you the, where the F is my article emails and stuff like that.

And trying to get you to change your, the way that you do what you do and maintain your journalistic integrity. That’s just not going to fly after that first, experience,

Rich: right? You’re absolutely right. And it’s human nature. People, journalists like to work with people who are enjoyable to work with.

The people who are painful to work with aren’t going to be contacted. The other thing, we haven’t spoken about this a lot, but I know a lot of MSPs want to be authorities that journalists go to. Something like the CrowdStrike. Thing happens. Journalists are looking for expert input and there are a lot of MSPs who want to be on the receiving end of that call.

And you need to do a lot of what we were talking about. First of all, be responsive. Somebody in the media gets in touch with you and they’re covering breaking news, get back to them. But let them set the agenda for the call. Listen to the question, answer the question, be concise, stay on topic.

And if you do all those things and you make life easier for that journalist, they’re going to come back to you. The next time there is a security story. Because again, I need some expertise and that guy was really great last time. I’m going to make it easy on myself. I’m going to call him or her again.

Thanks Rich. Thanks. That is the session that we presented at a channel con this week. I’m hoping the folks in our audience, they’re enjoying it. I hope you did as well and got some value from it. Feel free to drop us a line and let us know if you have any questions. Thoughts or questions? But right now Erick and I are actually going to take a quick break We’re going to come back on the other side.

Normally we would talk about the interview We just did since we didn’t do an interview We’re just going to have a little bit of fun and wrap up the show stick around. We will be right back

Okay, and welcome back to part three of this episode of the channel pro podcast Like I said Erick no point here really in rehashing what we’ve just talked about but I do have time For one last thing. And I’m, I am glad I am not displaying video of what I’m looking at right now to our audience for a very good reason, because this video is going to haunt my dreams and I wouldn’t want to do that to the folks in our audience here.

And basically the story comes to us from Japan where a company has developed a substance made from human skin. That they feel they’re going to be in a position to put on robots someday and then using little mechanical controls behind the skin, this is going to enable them to create robots that have very human features and responses and, subtle smiles and eye movements and all that stuff.

And it’s just a creepy thought, basically, that companies are out there growing human skin for robots. But my goodness, if you look at the pictures in this story I, this is not going to make me more apt to communicate with a robot. It’s going to make me more apt to flee in terror from the room.

Erick: Have they not seen The Terminator? Have they not seen what that, how creepy that is? Yeah, Rich, I don’t know. I don’t even know what to think about that, but that is, that’s pretty high on my creepy scale. That’s [00:55:00] for sure. See why the first question is why?

Rich: And I’ll cut them a little slack.

This is all, this isn’t even 1. 0, right? They’re trying to invent a technology that will work much, much better down the road. But I don’t know, you know what, talking about bad media tips, maybe don’t run this story. When the. Video and the pictures you share are going to creep the hell out of people because this stuff is just weird looking right now at this point in its evolution.

Erick: Why not oh, skin grafts for humans? That’s how, why we’re growing, artificial skin, right? What? I don’t know. Robots? Interesting. Let’s just leave it

Rich: there. We’ll just leave it there. Folks, thank you so much for joining us on this episode of the MSP Chat Podcast. We are out of time for this week.

We’re going to be back again next week, though, with another show. Until then, I will remind you, we are both a video and an audio program. If you are watching us On YouTube but you’re also into audio podcasts. Go to wherever it is to get your audio podcast. Look around for m ms p chat.

You’re gonna find us there if you’re listening to the audio version, but you wanna check us out on video, go to YouTube, look up Ms. P Chat. You’re gonna find us there too. Either way, please. Great review. It’s going to make it easier for other folks out there to find the show. And we appreciate that this program is produced by the great Russ John’s part of the team here at channel mastered.

He would be delighted to produce a show for you as well. You can learn more about that and about Russ and about everything else, all the many other services that we provide for our clients, channel mastery at www. Channel mastered. com and channel mastered has a sister company called MSP mastered, which is where Erick works directly with MSPs to help them grow and optimize their business.

More information about that organization is available to you at www. mspmastered. com. So once again, we thank you for joining us. We’re going to see you again in another week’s time. Until then, please remember, you just can’t spell channel without M S P.