Episode 50: Getting Intentional

Read the Transcript

Live from the ChannelPro Defend West event in Newport Beach, Calif., Erick and Rich discuss a quietly weighty new “Automation as a Service” offering from RPA vendor Rewst and how rigorous documentation can pay off big during M&A negotiations. Then Rich is joined by MSP and brand strategist Lisa Shorr to explore five key lessons you’ll learn from her new book, Your B.R.A.N.D. Unleashed: 9 Proven Strategies That Build Trust and Maintain Lasting Client Loyalty. And finally, one last thing: Does it matter if you’re polite to AI?

Discussed in this episode:

Your B.R.A.N.D. Unleashed: 9 Proven Strategies That Build Trust and Maintain Lasting Client Loyalty

Should I Be Polite to AI?” Study Reveals Most Adults Say Yes

Transcript:

Rich: [00:00:00] And three, two, one, blast off, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to another episode of the MSP chat podcast, your weekly visit with two talking heads talking with you about the services, strategies, and success tips you need to make it big and manage services. My name is Rick Freeman. I’m the chief content officer and channel analyst, channel master, the organization responsible for this show.

I am joined once again, physically side by side by our cohost, Erick Simpson, our team strategist. Where are we? We’re in sunny Southern California, Rich. You’re your home territory where I have flown down from Seattle just yesterday so that the two of us can attend the ChattelPro Defend West event, a two day security event.

They’re hosting here in Newport beach. We have a little speaking gig coming up later today. You have a second one tomorrow. We’re actually part of the show, but also soaking up the content. And I get to pal around with my one time colleagues and buddies at ChannelPro. And me too. So

Erick: how fun, but in a different capacity.

Absolutely. Yeah. So you were there at ChannelPro, Rich, you were the founding executive editor. for over 17 years. Is that

Rich: correct? I get that right. So there was, there was a little bit of a change in title in there, but I was founding editor. I was a a senior contributing editor for a long time.

And then eventually, yeah, I was the executive editor as well. And I was there 17 years before I went off on my own for us to create channel mastered and me to create my blog channel holler. Well, you look pretty good for being only 28 years old, Rich, I’ve got to say. Yeah, yeah, I was precocious too, back 17 years ago.

You know what, folks? This is not the first time Erick and I have been physically in the same room. Even just recently, we were both at IT Nation Connect last week. As we recorded this. And in fact, the interview segment today is one that I did at IT Nation Connect with our colleague, Lisa Shore.

And she is our brand strategist at Channel Master. She does a lot of other things as well. And that’s coming up later in the show. But first let’s just dive into our story of the week here, Erick. And this is actually news that broke during IT Nation Connect. There was so much news from ConnectWise.

And Ingram micro, which was doing an event as well last week, but it kind of slipped under the radar. I think, and I think it’s actually a very interesting story. It comes to us from Roost R E W S T for folks who are not familiar with them. They do robotic process automation software for MSPs. That pretty well known.

They’ve been on the market a few years. I had a chance at it nation connect to interview Aaron Chernin, the CEO of the company. And he told me that really From very early on in the history of this company, when MSP started using their software, they began getting requests from MSPs. I’m using the software very successfully inside my company right now.

Help me use it with my clients as well, because this is streamlining and automating my workflows. I want to help my clients automate their workflows too. And quite honestly, Ruth said, no actually we are not going to help you with that because. They were concerned they, they weren’t convinced yet the product was so new, they weren’t convinced that MSPs really knew how to use it well inside their own four walls.

And they were concerned if they encouraged MSPs to use the software on clients, something might go wrong, the client gets unhappy is unhappy with the MSP, the MSP is unhappy with Roost. Those days are in the past though, because as of last week, Roost is now officially encouraging and assisting MSPs to use the RISC platform on end users as well as themselves.

And it is specifically for right now in two areas, accounting and HR. And so they’ve introduced some integrations with popular accounting packages QuickBooks Online, Xero some popular HR applications from ADP and Bamboo HR. And now you as an MSP can, as a service to your client, help them automate payroll and employee onboarding and invoicing and billing and accounts receivable, and all of these.

Tedious, relatively straightforward processes that take up a lot of time. And this is something that you can do, obviously, on a one time basis and collect project fees for, but to the degree that you are maintaining and managing and updating and creating new processes, this is a source of recurring revenue as well.

They call it automation as a service. At Roost is a new service offering for you as an MSP. And I’ll tell you, Erick, I don’t have access to the books. They haven’t, you know opened up the books to me at Roost. I don’t know what they would have said their total total addressable market was a week ago, but I feel pretty confident in saying that there are a lot more [00:05:00] zeros at the end of that total addressable market right now, because a week ago.

That total addressable market was the 43, 000 MSPs out in the world, according to Canalys. And now it’s those 43, 000 MSPs plus every end user those companies support, as long as those end users Do accounting or have employees potentially they are a in the market for automation via Roost.

So huge opportunity for Roost, but also a huge new revenue source potentially for Roost partners in the MSP space.

Erick: Well, you know, Rich, it, it definitely checks off the box. Or MSPs when they’re considering partnering up with a strategic vendor partner, where not only can they use the product themselves to increase their efficiencies, to lower their costs and grow their profit margins, but also rich to create a profit center by reselling it to their clients and their end users in those, in those environments, I think it’s huge, huge news.

And I’m sure that the Roost partners are very happy about it and probably be attracting more prospective MSPs to the platform.

Rich: Yeah. And you know, the, the other thing that I kind of wonder about, so Roost is not the only maker of RPA software specifically for MSPs. You know, the MSPs. Pbots is a relatively well known company that does that too.

Connectwise and Kaseya have RPA platforms these days. All that software is designed to help MSP streamline their own workflows. To my knowledge, none of those companies is doing this sort of end user focused kind of application of the platform. And to the extent that Roost’s partners were asking for that and have been for quite a while, you got to wonder if any of these other companies we’ll make the same pivot and start you know, supporting end user use of the software too.

Well, it takes someone

Erick: to lead the way, first mover advantage, and yeah, others will follow, I predict.

Rich: All right, well, let’s get into your tip of the week here, Erick, and there are lots of really good reasons. Very, very good reasons why MSPs should be rigorous about documentation, but I believe your tip of the week is, It has to do with one more that maybe people aren’t considering.

You’re right, Rich. Great segue.

Erick: And this is something that has become apparent to me in my work with MSPs through a bunch of different M& A engagements. And what I’m talking about is the, the positive impact that good documentation has on During the M, the M and a process. So, you know, buyers want to buy an organization rich that can operate without the seller’s involvement, right?

They don’t want to buy a job. They want to make sure that they have good leadership in place. They want to make sure that they can grow and scale that organization. One of the biggest challenges that MSPs face that we faced in my MSP before we sold it way back, you know, when the dinosaur days, rich, rich was documenting every process that we had, and it was always this reactive kind of last thing on the checklist, you know, thing that nobody ever got after.

We had to be really, really creative about how we incentivize and basically carrot and sticked our staff to document, prioritize the most important things, get them to do it. It was always a struggle, but remember back in those days, there were no good documentation platforms and we were doing this and, you know, spreadsheets and word documents and posting it online and, you know, in our PSA platform, but there weren’t really good documentation platforms like there are today.

So I want to talk about the, the positive impact that I see documentation having during due diligence and to increase valuation and to increase the offer price. for an MSP trying to sell their organization. So number one, it does facilitate due diligence. It makes it easy for the buyers to get a view of not only the MSPs I.

T. infrastructure, but that of their clients and customers their assets and processes. For delivering service. So potential buyers can gauge, okay, this is a mature MSP, or sometimes buyers want to buy an MSP rich because they feel like, but the, the new acquisition target, Is much more mature and they can help them grow their practice.

So it works kind of both ways Number two it reduces Transition risk so post merger integration is what we’re talking about here Rich when you’re trying to bring two companies together after the deal has been signed everybody’s excited Now that the heavy lifting of integrating these organizations comes into play.

So obviously when you have everything documented, it makes it much easier to integrate those two organizations, evaluate the documentation and the processes and figure out, you know, are we just going to wholesale adopt them or are we going to tweak them? But it gets us [00:10:00] a lot further along the way to efficient performance.

After the fact it enhances valuation by demonstrating the organized standardized processes, right? The buyer says, Oh, this is a mature, I must be or. Find out during, you know, due diligence and many M and a engagements. I’ve been involved in rich. The, the guidance has been not to move forward because when you start uncovering things during due diligence, you figure, Oh no, this is not what was, you know, what we expected or what the seller was promoting.

But if we’re doing all these things and documenting it, And it’s demonstrable that definitely enhances the valuation identifies redundancies, right? So what are we doing in terms of platforms, in terms of hardware, in terms of, you know, everything that we’re supporting? We want to, you know, identify synergies from this from this integration.

We want to eliminate redundancies such as, you know, nobody needs two HR departments. And, and, you know, things like that, but we also want to see what’s out there in the wild. And if we want to standardize on a specific deliverable, a hardware, a platform, a a firewall, you know, that kind of thing speeds up the integration, like I said before, and it builds buyer confidence at the end of the day, rich.

I mean, you, you now have demonstrated to me that what you said about your organization. You can demonstrate that is is factual and we can move forward and integrate quickly and get to work

Rich: building this organization And you tell me if I’m right or wrong on this, but the other thing that occurs to me listening to that is, you know, one of the big concerns for an acquirer is what kind of end user churn am I going to be dealing with?

How many people kind of bail out when they discover that the MSP they’ve been doing business with has been acquired? And your ability to maintain consistency of service and a high quality of service after the acquisition is going to be that much better if there’s good, solid documentation in place.

No, you’re absolutely

Erick: right, Rich. And not only churn from customers, potentially leaving, but, you know, buyers are also concerned with employee churn and things like that. And, you know, in my experience, the better the documentation is, the more integrated the platforms are You know, among other factors reduces employee chair, right?

Nobody wants to, you know, click a mouse a million times to do a specific task. We don’t want to wing it when we’re delivering service. So processes that are documented, platforms that are integrated, automation being at a high level. allows those technicians to get the job done and feel good about delivering the service to their customers rather than coming in for another day of

Rich: firefighting reactive.

So you know it’s just another example you can tell a potential acquirer this is a mature well run company. But you know, we, we spoke with Rand, with Yannick a week ago on the show about finance and, you know, they’re going to look at the books and that’s going to tell them whether or not you are mature in terms of how you manage your finances and they’re going to look at your documentation and that’s going to tell them something about how mature you are in terms of your, your technical operational processes.

So it’s one of those things to, to pay attention to. It’s going to pay immediate dividends, but it could be a very significant, longer term dividends too. Agreed. So with that we’re going to take a quick break. I’ll only come back on the other side I will be joined by our colleague lisa short. She has a brand new book in which she has collected a lot of her wisdom about brand and image management for MSPs, sounds like a squishy topic, but as you’re going to see, this is actually a, an important money making topic for MSPs.

So we’re going to take a quick break. We’ll be right back. Peace ashore.

All right. And welcome back to part two of this episode of the MSP chat podcast, our spotlight interview segment, where we are joined by Dr. For the second time, for only the first time in MSP chat history by a repeat guest, Lisa Shore. Lisa is a co owner of Secure Future Tech Solutions, an MSP and solution provider in the New England area.

She is a personal and corporate brand coach, which is kind of what we’re going to be getting into in this conversation here. She is also the chief brand strategist at Channel Mastered, the organization for the show, and she is my friend of many years as well.

Lisa: Absolutely. Thank you for having me back.

Time number two. Let’s get into this. This is exciting.

Rich: Absolutely. And this is super exciting, actually, because we’re recording this just weeks after the release, the publication, of Lisa’s brand new book, Your Brand. For those of you who are listening as opposed to watching, brand is an acronym, B R A N D, and we’re going to get into that in just a moment.

But I give a very high level introduction of who you are, Lisa, for folks in the audience who are new to you. Just give them a sense for who you are and what you do.

Lisa: Hello, everybody. I am Lisa Shore, and I, for the past 25 years, [00:15:00] I have spent immersed in the MSP industry. So my degree is in marketing, but my passion is How to build brands, really trusted brands so that we stand out from the competition.

We grow our businesses and we really learn how to build trusting relationships to reduce churn and improve profitability. So I have been in this industry for a long time. I became an image. consultant. And what I like to say is I’m an image coach. I’m a business coach who specializes on the human side of things.

About 20 years, 10 years ago, excuse me, when my MSP struggled, we went through a very, very hard time. And I think Rich will talk a little bit about that, but, and I needed to learn how to actually shift from just marketing Logos and brands and websites to actually figuring out how to do a better job marketing and working on the communication skills of my team, my actual, my engineers, my sales team, we were struggling, we were losing clients, we were getting fired and it was a very, very challenging time.

So I launched Shore Success as a result of all of the hard work I put into transforming my own MSP. And so I’m here today with a new book, which is all of the trials and tribulations and stories and solutions that I did to make a difference.

Rich: Now when we first met which quite a number of years ago but I remember being taken right away by the fact you were the first person I had met in the industry who was talking to MSPs about personal and corporate brand management which you know, and image management basically.

And, let’s face it, a lot of MSPs don’t think that’s something that they need to be thinking about. It’s like, as long as I’m, I’m doing good work, good prices, and you know, my customers like what I’m doing, I don’t have to worry about any of this. I, I know we’ve spoken about this many times before.

What do you say to those MSPs who don’t understand why this should matter to them?

Lisa: I want to say, so first of all, tech skills are critical. I do not ever want anyone to think that I’m discounting tech skills. How important mastering tech skills are and certifications are in this industry. But my challenge to everybody here is to sit down and actually calculate the lifetime value of a client.

Pick your, your average MRR or the client that is paying you the most and that you want more of. And so let’s just do a quick example, Rich. If it’s a thousand a month, let’s just say, well, just for easy math on this day, a thousand a month. And times 12 months, that’s 12, 000 a year. And if you have a three year contract, let’s say, that’s 36, 000.

So at right there, it’s 36, 000 a year. But then you add in a good 50 percent more in project work, fees you know, setup fees, maybe you travel fees or whatever additional fees, that 36, 000 is now exponential to 72, 000. But hey, we usually keep clients five, 10 years. So now do the math there. So the first thing I want everyone to think about is what is the lifetime value of your client?

Because to bring on a new client, you know, the marketer in me is talking right now, but it’s thousands of dollars in marketing expenses, advertising expenses, labor expenses, you know, What does it cost you? And so we’re looking to find ways and I’m challenging everybody to think about that. Do the math and actually have a conversation with your team because once you do that number and you realize that, Oh my God, the actual value of a client is six figures easy.

We have to do all we can to retain that client. What can we do? And that’s where the soft skills comes in. And that’s where our communication skills come in because we need to think about growth too. and profitability. So I’m challenging everybody to have that moment of aha. That’s what my client is actually worth.

Look at your average churn and how many clients, I mean, churn is natural part of doing business, but how can we reduce that? We reduce that by setting yourself apart, by building trusting relationships that people just look to you as their trusted advisor, not just their IT provider. We’ve got to make that paradigm shift.

Rich: And as we get into the conversation here we’ll talk about some specific, the, the thing I love about the book is there are all sorts of specific items of advice basically that you can really clearly see whoever you are as an MSP in the industry will lead to extra revenue or protect the revenue that you have.

Right. This, this soft skills stuff has a real dollars and cents kind of impact. But [00:20:00] before we do that and we’ll get into the specifics, but I mentioned, you know, the, the name of the book is Your Brand Unleashed, Brand as an Acronym, B R A N D. And so what, what does B R A N D stand for?

Lisa: So, B R A N D is all of the different facets that I did at Secure Future Tech that I said, I got to take this to the road.

So I put it into a method that I could then coach other MSPs. So B stands for behavior. And that really is the foundational of emotional intelligent behavior. So thinking about how we respond. Too often we’re quick to judge or quick to respond. And so our Our voice and our responses don’t mirror really how we want to make a client feel, you know, our urgency might sound annoyed versus we’re taking this seriously and, and we really care about the outcome here.

So our behavior matters, time management, emotional intelligence, empathy over sympathy. Then R is all about respect. The first thing we talked about at Secure Future Tech was respecting the brand that we represent. We didn’t have enough conversations at the time to really understand that we had an amazing company that created sustainability for our clients and their growth.

And we weren’t talking enough about that and what respect that meant. Then we talked about definitely respecting ourselves individually, and we talked about ways to administer self care. Drinking water at our desks instead of a ton of soda, having healthier snacks in our office, taking walks around our building, and what, what ways can we calm ourselves down, self soothe ourselves, so that we could be a better representation?

And the last piece of respect was certainly respecting our clients brands. And when we walk into their office, what is their culture? How do they want us to, you know, what do they want us to act, behave, be aware of? So then A is our appearance. And I originally started as a stylist at Cleaning Closets and just as a part time nights and weekend gig because I love clothing and fashion.

But what it really meant for this world is our uniforms, our grooming, our and our posture. So those two parts of it is actually our clothing and uniforms. but also our posture and our nonverbal behavior. So you and I are sitting side by side, but we’re also engaging in eye contact in talking to each other to make this a more natural, organic conversation.

So when you’re with clients and when you’re on site fixing, you know, solving tickets, we have to think about how we present ourselves physically. That’s so critical. And was all about networking. Okay. So now we have all this brand. We’ve got to get out there. And so there’s three kinds of networking that I identified were really critical to our success and that’s lead generation networking and, you know, we’re at IT Nation, so getting out and networking and meeting people.

Then there’s also networking with our clients and hosting quarterly business review meetings or technical business review meetings, whatever you refer them as, and then using our engineers. So there was an innovative piece to that and that’s, I call it planting the seed and teaching our engineers. to actually support the sales process and make recommendations.

I’m actually doing a talk on that this week on Friday here. So, we’re talking about ways to really engage and then D is all about dynamic dialogue. It’s everything that has to do with our voice, the words we say, but more importantly, The way we say it, our tone of voice, how we empath, empathy urgency, excitement.

It all varies in our voice depending on the situation and when we need to apply it. We, we discuss that all the time now, and that’s the method.

Rich: So I wanna get into some specifics from the book that will give people a, a taste for what they’re gonna get if they buy and read the whole thing. And I would not normally do this by the way, but I went to the Amazon page for the book before, and there’s this bulleted list of things you will learn inside the book.

And it was a pretty interesting list. So I actually want to kind of dive into a few of those with you and get your thoughts, one of which ties to something you were just talking about a minute ago. So there’s a, an item in there that says that you will learn how to shift your team’s focus from just completing tasks to generating client satisfaction, leading to more referrals.

So. What is that about?

Lisa: So historically, we create a ticket, the engineer solves it, closes it, on to the next. That’s fine. And that’s customer service. So there’s a difference between customer service and client experience. There’s a massive difference. Customer service is getting the job done, closing tickets, answering phones.

Those are part of our day to day, sending out an invoice. But what [00:25:00] I needed to teach my team, and that I needed, and I took it to the road, was You’re not just actually a ticket closer, you’re actually someone who is guiding that client to success in some way. Whether it’s making them more efficient or more productive or we specialize in law firms.

So it’s finding a file if someone’s at court and, and in showing and demonstrating urgency, not just closing the ticket and saying, here you go, but saying to the client, okay, I found that file. Did you have what you need? Are you able to open it? Let me know. Are you able to continue your court case? So going that extra mile and, and having discussions with our team of what that looks like, what does that mean?

Because our clients, this, there are so many MSPs now, Rich, and, and how do we retain that trust? The way we do that is definitely being innovative in our technology, but it’s really being an indispensable partner to your client and, and demonstrating that. Desire to help and we’re such we’re in a hamster wheel all the time and we have so many tickets and it’s I mean, we’re so busy, but we have to take that time and teach our team.

It doesn’t just naturally happen. You know, I say that we, you know, we spend so much time monitoring data backups and making sure the health of a hard drive is there, you know, all of those things. We need to also take that same stance.

Rich: And, and customer experience focus too, which I think is really important because you were saying, I mean, ultimately this leads to referrals and referrals are much more likely to happen when the customer doesn’t just think of you as a company that closes the tickets effectively. That’s great.

They’ll say good things about you based on that, but it’s the company that delivers an amazing experience that gets that referral.

Lisa: Yep. You have to call Secure Future Tech. You have to call, you know, so absolutely, and that’s for all of us in the industry. Having that brand recognition is what we want. We want to be known for, you know, you determine your industry and, and how do we do that?

That takes a lot of effort. It’s not just closing tickets. It’s really, it’s being innovative with our technology, but also demonstrating a knowledge of understanding what keeps our clients up at night. And showing that we understand that and the actions we take and the behavior we take to build that rapport, to build that respect.

I talk about all kinds of strategies in the book of how to build rapport, how to build respect. And. There might be some things in there you say, Oh, I already know this, Lisa, but my question to you is how often are you practicing it? How often are you actually, are you doing this daily? Are you having a conversation daily?

Could be a five minute conversation, check in call, reminder with your team about how are we going to be client focused today? What is it that’s going to set us over the edge? And really make us that experience partner, not just customer service.

Rich: So you were talking a moment ago about teaching your technicians to deliver great a great customer experience and great customer service.

And the second item I want to get into is, is sort of along those lines as well. And this again from the Amazon page, it said, the book will teach you how to use branded scripting and processes to ensure every team member. Provides top notch service, branded scripting and processing. Tell me more about that.

Lisa: I take all the guesswork out for everybody here. I have every almost every kind of script you want. I have it in the book. I call them credibility builders and credibility crushers. There’s also a section on phone skills. And that’s not part of the brand method, but it has become part of my coaching process because we were fired years ago.

This, this whole thing happened because we were fired and we were given the honor of an exit interview because you don’t get those very often. But they actually said, every time I call, your team acts as if they have no idea who I am. This was a 10 year client, Rich. So that has to be part of my training.

So I actually have a whole chart on say this, don’t say this. And I give you instructions on how to do role playing with your team. I give you scenarios of what happens in the small business environment. How do you know, and you can tailor all of it for your team. So I take all the guesswork out. Anything you need.

Rich: So here’s another, this really interested me above because it concerns something. That is difficult, even for people who have great people skills and communication skills and emotional IQ. And let’s face it, technicians, you know, don’t often [00:30:00] fall into, into that category. So you say one of the things the book addresses is how to handle tough discussions with the client’s perspective in mind to retain and grow contrast.

Lisa: Oh, yes. So I’m actually going to be speaking about that here at IT Nation on Friday. I have a one hour workshop and, and handling difficult conversations. I actually created, and it’s in the book, a six step process to handle a situation. So we’re, we’re bombarded. The minute the phone rings in the morning, we’re handling a difficult conversation because it’s a client who doesn’t understand tech, but needs some help.

So. From the get go, we’re handling difficult conversations, so there’s a strategy that I suggest that we all follow to help so that we emotionally handle the situation so that we have a mutual understanding between each other and also that there’s an outcome outcome. That’s satisfactory. I mean, it’s not going to be 100 percent all the time, but we focus on areas of emotional intelligence, certainly.

Breathing. We need to actually take the time to physically assess ourselves and breathe and calm ourselves down. Then there’s also strategies of listening skills. So three times in the book, I have an acronym for listening skills. And how do you actually listen? So that you hear, you comprehend, you are able to, you know, show validation and understanding.

Because half the battle in a negotiation is someone just wants to be, they want to be heard, they want to be validated. They don’t always have to be right, but it’s an important exchange of validation. So we talk about nonverbal behaviors of how do you sit? How do you make eye contact? How do you lean in maybe?

And if you’re in a tabletop discussion like this. Or if you’re virtual, we, there’s a huge need to have a conversation about what our virtual presence looks like. And that’s not something that we take enough stock in. I’ve seen so many background rooms, and it’s fine to have a natural room. We’ve got a natural background there, you know, with IT Nation folks running around here.

But it’s important to demonstrate that there’s organization or, How do you want to be perceived by others? So, I have a whole strategy in the book, and I’m actually going to be talking about that on Friday. So, it’s been a really great topic. Because it’s daily for us, this industry, you can’t get away from our difficult conversations.

That’s for sure.

Rich: So here’s another one that it’s about helping technicians generate and protect revenue for for the company. And so what it says on the, the Amazon pages, I’m turning tech minded teams into trusted advisors. So accelerate revenue growth by turning your teams into trusted advisors who make the sale without having to sell.

Lisa: Love that. Yes. I love that. So we have a client and and this is again, another topic I’m going to be actually on a stage talking about. So I love it. We have a client, we had a client who had a server 2008 and it’s end of life and it was ended. And we, my sales team met with this client for six months.

forever. I mean, for over a year, literally saying, let’s talk about a server upgrade. Let’s talk about making this change. It’s, you’re not, it’s the end of life. There’s not going to be any upgrades to it. It’s going to be a security risk. You could risk downtime. I’m fine. That’s all we kept getting. I’m fine.

I’m fine. I’m fine. We were so nervous for this client because we do take a client centric approach. And so MSP, we thought, okay, let’s have a conversation about a different approach. Our engineers, your engineers, are the day to day trusted advisors for your clients. They, they’re not perceived as salesy.

They’re not perceived as you know, anything that could be threatening to them other than fixing, fixing their problem. Oh, you’re my problem solver. Every day. And so we thought, let’s train our engineers to, so with this one, we tested it out with this one, and we trained our engineer to not only go into this client, but taught him what to say.

I’m concerned about, I’m nervous about your server. I’m worried that you’re going to have downtime that a hacker could get in. I’m nervous. What is it? So we, and we talked to him about how to say it. So when an engineer, so this is making the case. That your team have great relationships and communication skills with your, with your clients and are polished and prepared for any situation.

Because my engineer went in and said, you know, I’m nervous that your server is going to, you know, is going to crash. [00:35:00] Microsoft is not doing any more updates to it. We’re not going to be able to fix it. We’re not going to be able to really patch it that you need. There’s going to be a lot of security holes.

I’m nervous. And what does the client say? Microsoft Okay. You know, Erick’s been talking to me about this for a year. Have him, just have him send me the quote. And we were like, what? Just like that? And so, and then as the, as my presentation will go, I’m kind of giving a spoiler alert. I said, bam, literally a 12, 000, a 20, 000 project.

20, 000. Because my engine, so then we thought about that experience and said, let’s build this out. Let’s actually make this an intentional project. You know, that word is very intentional, soft skills, people skills. This whole process is very intentional because we want to think about how we want to be perceived.

And we now talk about ways to, we have now, for all of us, we’ve got the Windows 10 to Windows 11 upgrades. Some of our clients are going to not want to make any upgrades, maybe, you know, how can we engage our engineers in the conversation and help plant those seeds?

Rich: You know, I, I, I love that in part because you’re absolutely, and this is something I haven’t really thought about or spoken to anyone about before, but you’re absolutely right.

In, in a sense, the technician is like this stealth salesperson. Nobody perceives the tech as wanting to sell them something. Right. And that engenders a certain kind of trust. And, and obviously if you have also trained the technician to build trust in a relationship and so on. There’s that much more.

Willingness to go along with the technician’s recommendation. But yeah, yeah, there’s power in that.

Lisa: Massive power. Massive power. And I encourage everybody to start tracking your QBRs. I want to put a caveat out there that it doesn’t mean that every sale is going to close. That’s not what I’m saying here.

And I’m certainly not putting any pressure on the engineers to be salespeople. All I’m saying is they are an amazing team. asset, because our employees are our most important asset in our companies, and they’re an amazing asset to help plant that seed. And seed is another acronym. I do love my acronyms because it helps me to stay organized when I coach, but it’s, it’s, there’s a process and when they have that relationship and they can support that process and make a recommendation.

And boy, when it closes, So, it benefits everybody because we’re not in it just, we’re in it to make money for ourselves. Of course, we need to grow our businesses, but we’re also in it to make sure our clients grow and they thrive and they’re more efficient and secure and productive. What an amazing cycle of life that that creates.

Rich: Okay. One more. And this, this kind of goes back to the customer experience idea that we were talking about before, but the book will teach people how to ensure every potential client feels valued. How do you help a customer know, you know come away from their interactions with you feeling valued?

Lisa: So there’s a couple of strategies that we learned from getting fired. And and then I learned, I’ve been training in image, I’m a member of the Association of Image Consultants International, so I do regular trainings with other image professionals globally and we have a lot of conversations of how to present ourselves so that we’re building trusted relationships.

And one of the things that I learned is using someone’s name. So, one of the concerns that my client had is we never made them feel like a VIP. We never used their names. Everyone was just sort of a genErick call. I’m answering the call, I’m putting a ticket in, I’m scheduling the ticket, putting it on dispatch, ticket’s closed, it’s going to invoice, you know, so we weren’t thinking about rapport building.

That’s, that’s one thing I want everyone to walk away from this podcast with is start using names. And if you don’t, you know. A good person with memorizing names, that’s okay. Have a post it note in front of you. Have a notebook in front of you. Some way to write it down when they, you know, when you’re calling them or finding it in your PSA and, you know, getting those names are important.

Another thing that makes someone feel heard and validated is, is saying it back. And part of my listening skills acronym, acronym, is, is saying it back. You know, it’s a two way conversation demonstrating that you’ve heard. So what I’m hearing is, or I want to make sure I understand, what you’re looking for is this.

So, and then the client says, yes, that’s exactly, or maybe they’ll say, no, I actually didn’t mean it that way. I mean it this way. But you can get that clarification. And I think one of the last things though, and there’s a lot of things in the book that talk about it, but I think one of the last things I want to say is don’t say no.

I do a lot of calls to MSPs when I’m signing on a client, I always call their office to see what I hear. And so often I hear, well, if you’re not a client, we can’t service you, or we [00:40:00] can’t do that. Or instead, how about we use some different language and say, let me find out, you know, I, let me, I have a great team to talk to.

I don’t have the answer at this moment. Let me get the answer, and I’ll call you back. And then follow up. That’s the last bonus tip. Follow up. So there’s ways to demonstrate rapport, respect, showing that you care, validating, half of the battle is just validation and recognition that you’re hearing them.

You totally are connecting with their needs, their struggles, because they’ve got pressures on them. And, you know, your clients have pressures on them too. How do we build that respect and our language, it’s not just what we say, but it’s our tone and how we say it really sets that whole experience over the edge.

Rich: So like you say there is a lot in the book we’ve actually talked about a lot just in the, this conversation here. Let’s let’s leave people with maybe one thing, one thing. That is achievable and practical for anyone in the audience here listening to or watching the interview right now, that after they’re done enjoying this podcast, they can go off and do to get better at at the, the brand disciplines.

Lisa: The one thing I think to start, just to start, is to start using people’s names. Really, on phone calls and meetings. And, and I hear what you’re saying, Rich, or I’m so glad you invited me on, Rich. Let’s talk about that. You know, like just using names is going to be a rapport builder. It’s very primal. We hear our name and that’s a primal piece.

So that’s, that’s the start. I mean, there’s a couple of other things I would think, but, but names and, and talking to your team about that, having a staff meeting discussion about using names, especially on the phones. There’s still the backbone of who we are as an MSP. We, we use the phones all the time.

And I think that that’s a critical starting point. Then the book has so many other areas that I created so that they’re all staff meeting discussions. Everything, every success exercise is a staff meeting discussion. I give you instructions. I give you conversation starters. I tell you how to do it, so, but it has to be consistent, that’s the key.

Rich: So the book is Your Brand Unleashed, it is available on Amazon, as as we have said, we will have a link to that page in the show notes. The author is Lisa Shore. Lisa, thanks for joining us on the show.

Lisa: Thank you so much for having me, and once again, I your friendship and your support is unmeasured, so thank you.

Rich: Thank you very much. Folks, we are going to take a quick break. When we come back to the other side, I will be rejoined by Erick. We’ll have a few thoughts to share about Lisa and the book and all these great topics we’ve been talking about here. We’ll have a little fun. We’ll wrap up the show. Stick around.

We will be back. Welcome

back to part three of this episode of the MSP chat podcast. I always enjoy, I think we both always enjoy speaking up with Lisa. She has a huge body of knowledge about a topic. That is I think hugely important for MSP and for vendors for that matter, and just doesn’t get the attention that it should.

And what I particularly appreciated about this, this conversation with Lisa is just, she was able to provide a number of different examples where the stuff that kind of feels like, you know, Hey, tuck in your shirt and so on. You know, you, you work with your techs on how to communicate with customers and so on.

It can lead not just to retaining business, but to turning up new business, to generating referrals. This is real rock solid dollars and cents kind of stuff. It’s not just making a good impression on somebody because you cleaned up nice. Yeah. You know, Rich, it’s,

Erick: it’s one of those topics and one of those areas of expertise that MSPs really, you know, Have very little knowledge or exposure to when they’re building their businesses.

I mean, you know, our MSPs challenges included, you know, bringing in new clients, hiring technicians, the, the Achilles heel, the kryptonite is marketing sales, brand image management, all of that stuff. So, yeah, it’s a pleasure working with Lisa and learning from her. Exactly how to to connect these dots, because it’s kind of a larger expansive conversation when, when you hear how she expresses.

How it’s the core of the organization and how existing clients and prospects view your organization as well as employees and prospective

Rich: hires. So Lisa has written a bunch of great articles on the subject matter for us at channel master. And you [00:45:00] can find those at our, our website, www.

channelmaster. com and the insight section. But the, I think now that the book is out there, the best way to really understand what he’s talking about. Why it matters and how to put it to work is to go out and get that book. And we’ll have a link to that book in the show notes. Well, that leaves us with time for just one last thing.

Erick and yet another insight from the world of AI. There was a research study done recently in which a couple of different companies went out to market together and asked people some questions about how they interact with AI chatbots, chat GPT, et cetera, just, I mean, from an emotional standpoint and so here are some of the results that they came in with three out of four millennials and Gen Xers try to be polite.

When asking a question or giving a prompt along with 65 percent of boomers, two and five millennials say, thank you. When the AI answers the question one in three people feel that they are doing something wrong. If they use an unkind, Tone of voice, and I will say I am, I am someone, you know privacy be damned.

I’ve got echo devices all over my home and I, I, I wouldn’t say I go out of my way to be polite to Alexa and I probably don’t say thank you when I get a good answer, but I do feel bad if I’m a little snippy, you know even though I’m just, I’m talking to a machine, there are no feelings to be hurt. What about you?

Do you, do you, are you polite to AI or Alexa? Not at all.

Erick: Not at all. In fact, the thing that I tell Alexa, and you know, we’re, we’re keying everybody’s Alexas off every time we say that. The thing that I say the most to Alexa, I don’t know about you, but is Alexa stopped when she thinks she hears a question or not, you’re just no Alexa stop.

And sometimes it’s like, yeah,

Rich: yeah, exactly. And yeah, and you do that because you asked a question and got a useless answer. So that is when you tend to be a little snippy but it’s, it’s okay. It’s okay. I saved my kindness for people mostly. That’s a good policy. I like that policy. Well, folks, that is all the time we have for you on this episode of the show.

We thank you so much for joining us. We’re going to be back again in another week’s time with another episode for you. Until then, I will remind you this is both a video and an audio podcast. If you are listening to the audio version of the show, but you would like to check us out on video, go to YouTube, look up MSP Chat.

You’re going to find us there. If you’re watching us on YouTube, but you’re into audio podcasts, go to Spotify, Google, Apple, wherever you get your podcasts, you’re going to find us there too, and wherever you find us, subscribe, rate, review. It’s going to help other people find and enjoy the show. Just like you do.

The show is produced by the great Russ Johns. It is edited by the great Riley Simpson. They are both. Part of the team with us channel mastered. They would be very happy to help you create a podcast of your own podcasts. There are a tiny, tiny piece of what we do for our clients. Channel masters. You want to learn about the rest of that?

Go to www.channelmastered.com channel mastered has a sister organization called MSP mastered. And it’s Erick working directly one to one with MSPs to help them grow and optimize their business. And you can learn more about that at www.mspmastered.Com. So once again, we thank you for joining us.

We’ll be back again in a week with another episode for you until then, please always remember you can’t spell channel without M S P.