Should your MSP fire a client? It’s a question almost no one asks aloud, but a lot of MSP owners think about it privately… this is what you need to know. Also this week, analogies to help any prospect understand complex tech issues, and how this guy generated 1,000 highly qualified leads for MSPs.

Welcome to Episode 336 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

Should your MSP fire your most annoying client?

A big question… Should your MSP fire a client? It’s a question almost no one asks aloud, but a lot of MSP owners think about it privately. Now, you know the client I mean, right? The one whose name pops up and your stomach tightens slightly. The one who, when they ring, your team kind of looks around quietly hoping someone else answers the phone or more likely they look down at their desk hoping they don’t make eye contact with someone. I mean the client who drains more energy than they generate. And you know that name that’s in your head right now, if you’ve had that name negatively floating around in your head or in meetings or in discussions more than once over the last few weeks or months, then what I’ve got to say here is worth paying attention to.

Every so often in business, perhaps if you just take a few days off or if you have a bit of space to think about things strategically, you get this amazing rare combination of perspective and momentum, the two going together. Perspective because you can step back and see the bigger picture to how the last 12 months have really felt and momentum because you’re thinking about growth and direction and what the next stage of your MSP’s growth looks like. And when you zoom out like that, the handful of difficult clients, they really stand out very, very clearly.

The noisy one, the energy vampire, the one who questions every single line on every invoice, the one who is permanently unhappy, the one who doesn’t treat your team with respect. And you find yourself thinking, “Am I really going to put up with this for another 6, 12, 18 months?” And then the doubt creeps in. You tell yourself, “Oh, hang on here. I’m trying to grow the business. Firing your client is going backwards.” No, that’s completely the wrong way to think about it because here’s something that most MSPs don’t realise until they’ve done it…

Your worst client often costs you more than they actually pay you.

Now sometimes yes, that cost is financial, but it’s always emotional, mental, and operational. A single difficult client can completely demoralise your team. They can drain all the time from your senior technicians and from senior management. They can create chaos in your calendar and slow down work that you’re doing for good clients. Bad clients can even contribute to staff churn, I’ve seen it happen, and they can absolutely destroy your personal mood or the mood of your team with a single ticket. Why would you continue to tolerate that? The opportunity cost of keeping the wrong client is huge. So how do you spot one clearly? To me, there are four big red flags:

• First, is when your team groans, when their name appears on caller ID. That is the biggest warning sign of all. If your people feel dread and are just avoiding the call, something is very wrong there.
• Second, they argue over everything – quotes, invoices, priorities, response times. Every time anyone speaks to them, any kind of interaction, it just feels like a negotiation, which is not a partnership, is it? That’s just pain.
• Third, they expect champagne service on a lemonade budget. I love that line. They want premium response and premium outcomes, but when you explain what that costs, suddenly you’re too expensive.
• Fourth, they don’t follow your processes. They won’t log tickets properly. They won’t approve upgrad...

Here are seven ways you can drive more qualified traffic to your MSP’s website… not vanity visitors or random clicks, but people who are genuinely more likely to start a sales conversation with you. Also this week, reasons to add a price estimator to your MSP’s website, and what to do if your referrals have dried up.

Welcome to Episode 335 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

How to drive tons more qualified traffic to your MSP’s website

If you woke up tomorrow and your MSP’s website had received double its normal traffic, would that actually change your business? For most MSPs, the honest answer to this is no because…

Your marketing problem isn’t traffic, it’s qualified traffic… the right people, from the right businesses.

So right now, I’m going to give you seven levers that you can pull to drive significantly more qualified traffic to your MSP’s website. We’re not talking vanity visitors or random clicks, but people who are genuinely more likely to start a sales conversation with you.

Lever #1: Clarity beat volume. The clearer you are about who you want to attract, the easier it is to create content that pulls them in. If you try to speak to everyone, you’ll attract no one. But when you specialise, even if it’s just in your messaging, you become magnetic to a specific group. And that’s why vertical marketing works so well. When an accountant (CPA) lands on a page that clearly talks about accountants or a manufacturer sees content that reflects their world of production lines and deadlines, they instantly feel understood. Understood… that’s the keyword there because that recognition is what drives qualified traffic.

Lever #2: Relevance over randomness. Most MSP websites are full of really generic service pages about IT support and cyber security and backup and cloud, and that content really doesn’t attract qualified buyers because it doesn’t answer specific real world questions. Instead, think about what your ideal prospect is typing into Google or their AI tool late at night when they’re worried about their business. They type in things like “What happens if our server fails?” or “How do we pass a cyber insurance audit?” or “What does downtime actually cost a manufacturer?” So when you create content that calmly answers those questions, you attract people who are already thinking about solving a problem that they believe that they have. It’s because you’re talking about them and their issues and not you. That’s a real key thing in website content.

Leaver #3: Consistency. Because traffic compounds over time. One blog post won’t move the needle at all, but 50 might. 100 definitely will. 500 absolutely will. When you publish regularly, weekly blogs, weekly videos, daily LinkedIn posts that link back to your website, you just create more entry points and you stay more visible. You build familiarity. Qualified traffic rarely comes from a single piece of content. It comes from repeated exposure over time. The trick for most MSPs is to put in place a system whereby you have content going out on a regular basis, and that system does it 52 weeks a year with minimal impact on you as the business owner. And as a side note, if you want a system that puts content out there, go and have a look at my MSP Marketing Edge membership. It’s a system that we’ve designed and it’s trusted by hundreds and hundreds of other MSPs as a way of them getting content out every single day with minimal amount of work for them. Go to mspmarketingedge.com.

Lever #4: Distribution. Creating content is only half the job. You need to deliberately put it in front of the right people, and that means emailing it to your database, sharing it consistently on LinkedIn, even sending...

Learn how to collect social proof obsessively and build it into your marketing to attract new clients. Also this week, why every MSP needs a dispatcher, and how to get vendors to pay for your marketing.

Welcome to Episode 334 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

The one marketing habit every MSP should obsess over

If there’s one marketing habit that I wish every MSP would build into their regular rhythm, it’s this. Collect social proof. And not casually, I mean obsessively because nothing builds trust faster than a client telling the world that they’re genuinely happy with you. You can talk about your service all day long, but the moment someone else says, “These people are amazing,” the whole dynamic changes. So let’s talk about why social proof works, the three types that every MSP should be collecting and how to do it in a way that never ever feels awkward or forced.

To understand why social proof is so powerful, you need to look at a bit of basic human psychology. Back when humans were still figuring out fire and trying not to get eaten by dinosaurs, survival depended on sticking with the group. If the herd ran, you ran. And that instinct is still baked very deep within our brains and our gut reactions. Even though we like to think of ourselves as rational, independent, modern decision makers…

People are still heavily influenced at an emotional level by what other people are doing. That’s why testimonials, reviews and case studies work so well.

They quietly say, “Hey, people just like you trust a business like this and that feels safe.” So as I said, there are three types of social proof that every MSP should be collecting, and the first is reviews.

Reviews are the most powerful form of social proof because they live on third party platforms that you don’t control. So places like Google. They’re public, they’re credible, and that makes them so much harder to fake. And that’s also why if you have to prioritise, I’d always prioritise reviews over collecting testimonials. A simple and very effective tactic is to ask a client to leave you a Google review and then reuse that review in your own marketing. So you get it on the third party platform, but you use it in your own website. So you could screenshot it and include it in proposals or as I say, your site or social posts or even better than screenshotting it. Get your website designer or any designer to recreate the review so that it looks consistent across different screen sizes while keeping the exact wording that you’d see on Google Reviews.

And there are, just out of interest, three great moments when you should ask for a review. During the first 90 days of working together, when everything still feels fresh and positive, just after you’ve completed a big project successfully or right after you’ve saved them from something serious. The only real rule for this is don’t ask for reviews if you’re in the middle of any kind of difficult conversation with your client, which sounds obvious, but you’d be surprised how many people forget or they don’t realise that there’s a bit of conflict going off at the same time, we’ve sent them an email asking for a Google review. So that’s reviews.

The second type of social proof is testimonials. And testimonials are like a review except you have control over them. That’s what makes them different. So they come directly to you. And that might be as a quote or a video clip or an email that you’ve asked permission to reuse. And because you control them, they’re easy to polish and deploy across all of your marketing. And yes, they do work, but they don’t carry the same weight as a public review because everyone knows that you could have edited them. That said, one strong video testimonial, especially from a well-known local...