WATCH The Mindwhirl Marketing Podcast Ep 48 – The Cost of Doing Business

Podcast Transcript

Shelly Miller  00:05

Welcome to the Mindwhirl Marketing podcast and our new format for 2022

Mike Miller  00:10

New year new format.

Shelly Miller  00:13

Love to have new

Mike Miller  00:14

Yes.  I love New. Oh, me too. New cars, new houses

Shelly Miller  00:21

new employees new new everything new clients,

Mike Miller  00:24

right love it do is this new? It’s fresh. It’s wonderful. All right.

Shelly Miller  00:30

What is it this is the new black? What is that? Oh, no blue. This is the new white dude.

Mike Miller  00:35

I don’t know. Yeah, exactly. I just know that 50 is the new 30

Shelly Miller  00:40

There you go. All right. I like that. That’s new.

Mike Miller  00:42

Okay. Yeah,

Shelly Miller  00:43

we’ll run with that as well.

Mike Miller  00:45

Okay, awesome. I like that. So,

Shelly Miller  00:48

I’ve been excited about this new format.

Shelly Miller  00:50

I think it’ll work better with our personalities and be more fun.

Mike Miller  00:50

Me too.

Mike Miller  00:54

Yeah. Hopefully I don’t offend anyone. Because I’ve been known to.

Shelly Miller  01:01

Oh, shoot.

Mike Miller  01:02

So anyway,

Shelly Miller  01:03

Just makes it fun. Now. They have something to look forward to. Ooh, when’s Mike going to offend?

Mike Miller  01:07

Yeah. Every week. We’ll say something every week. That just shocks YOU. Bam. Shocks you

Shelly Miller  01:18

right between the eyes.

Mike Miller  01:19

Yeah. Right. Between the,

Shelly Miller  01:22

Again, more stuff to look forward to.

Mike Miller  01:24

Yeah, exactly. So hey, welcome in no matter where you are, right, driving in your car, going to work, going home after work. On the boat on the lake on a Saturday? Yes, no matter where you are. Welcome to the Mindwhirl Marketing Podcast, where we help MSPs learn how to sell and market their services, their products and services, because it’s tough.

Shelly Miller  01:51

It is tough.

Mike Miller  01:51

It’s super tough.

Shelly Miller  01:53

It’s tough to sell. It’s tough to market. It’s tough to know what will work, what won’t work, what apps to use, what not to use, who to hire, who not to hire

Mike Miller  02:01

exactly exactly what to do. If you’re doing it right. If you’re doing it wrong, how much you should do it. And if you should not even do it, all of that and more. That’s what we’re going to discuss and see we think that you guys need a community. Right? Not not a community like a we have a Facebook page. And you can ask us questions. Now we mean, like we actually want to interact with you, we’ll bring you on the show. If you want, we can do live. We’re doing as a matter of fact, part of the things that we have planned for this year, is we’re going to do the 411 on Friday. Right? So at 411. On Fridays, we’re going to start live streaming. And we’re going to be answering your questions, maybe bringing you on the show. And, you know, seeing what trouble we can get up to.

Shelly Miller  02:53

I think it’ll be fun. We’d been rolling a whole bunch of ideas around like, you know, they can submit a question or one of their if they submit a question, and we get to have it on the air. We will enter everybody who asked the question into a contest, pick one and let you send us a sales letter or anything you want us to review.

Mike Miller  03:13

Yeah, exactly.

Shelly Miller  03:14

So we’re hoping to get that started next month.

Mike Miller  03:18

Yes, No, exactly. And we want to, you know, build up to it. But if you’ve got any questions, you want us to review what you’ve got going on, give you some tips and pointers, we’re definitely willing to do that for free. Anything for the MSP community, we want you guys to succeed. And we like I said, we know how hard it is because we’ve been in the trenches. So we know exactly how hard it is. And and I mean, like if when I compare all of the other industries that we’ve been in all the under other verticals that we’ve been in, and marketed to, and the success that we’ve had in those, and you look at just how hard it is to deploy … have I said hard enough? Yeah, I’m wondering if I’ve said hard too many times,

Shelly Miller  04:12

maybe just a little, yeah, turn it down just a bit. But I know they know, the difficulties

Mike Miller  04:21

So basically, you know, you really have to hustle. And you, you have to realize what you’re selling. And you have to find the ways to sell it, that resonate with your industry, the industry, the targets are going out.

Shelly Miller  04:36

You do and managed service providers have … their services have evolved. So while we’ve been in marketing since 1999, we’ve been helping MSPs for the last year. While you know, there’s always similarities in marketing MSPs kind of have some things that are unique.

Mike Miller  04:54

Yes

Shelly Miller  04:54

because their services evolve so much. So yeah. Another reason why we think you need to have a community.

Mike Miller  05:02

Yeah. Because let’s be honest, who else are you going to talk to? You know, nobody understands. You know, like, everybody, all your friends are probably like, so how’s that business doing of yours? You’re like, well, it’s tough. They’re like, Yeah, okay, well, whatever. You know, nobody really understands what you have to go through in order to make this happen. Right. It’s not like an easy thing. It’s probably one of the most difficult businesses to start. And, and that’s really what I want to talk about later. But we’ll get into that in a future segment.

Shelly Miller  05:40

But that’s what we’re thinking about with our new format. So we want to build a community, a palce for you to get your questions answered.

Mike Miller  05:47

Ask questions, ask us question like you belong, to realize that you have a resource that you can turn to, right, who isn’t going to try to get you to spend $17,000 A month or even, you know, any money. It’s just, let’s all like, join together and bounce ideas off of each other and create a mastermind. And we’ll do it virtually through the power of the internet.

Shelly Miller  06:17

Oh, Vistage.

Mike Miller  06:19

Yeah, a Vistage mastermind peer advisory group.

Shelly Miller  06:23

There you go.

Mike Miller  06:24

Yes. I love

Shelly Miller  06:25

Awesome. Awesome.

Mike Miller  06:26

Yeah. Right. So that’s what we’ve got going this year. And I think the Friday 411 are going to be fun.

Shelly Miller  06:34

Oh, I think so too. will have a great time. You can even bring your favorite drink. Maybe we will, too. Yeah. Depends on if we have to drive somewhere after the shooting. But anyway, yeah, it’ll be a great time. We’ll have a good time together.

Mike Miller  06:46

But after I had a pina colada in Hawaii, I just can’t have another. Like, everything else pales in comparison, you know?

Shelly Miller  06:53

Yes.

Mike Miller  06:54

Like, Hey, would you like the original?

Shelly Miller  06:57

Let’s just have a trip to Hawaii, you know?

Mike Miller  06:59

Yeah, exactly. Okay, yeah.

Shelly Miller  07:01

But speaking of things, you know, wanting the community wanting to help you guys out. We also want to make sure that, you know, if you haven’t already visited our website, that we do have a bunch of downloadable resources.

Shelly Miller  07:14

you can check out that that will help you in your business and to set up processes because we believe that that’s really what we’re all looking for is, is processes. That’s how your business gets acquired. That’s how you can sell it. Because you have processes that go through each … basically each job in your business, you can run the process, and it’s done. So when you have when your company is set up in processes, then you you can get things done quicker and easier. You can hire staff better. You knowwhat you need what you don’t need. Yeah, exactly. So that’s what we a lot of our resources have to do with, processes. and a process map to help you see what your process should be.

Mike Miller  07:14

Yes, exactly

Mike Miller  07:59

Yeah, starts from square one, you know, who am I going after, I need to know who my ideal client profile is. We got an ICP Worksheet for you. We got SEO Checklist, we have social media worksheet. Right. So we’ve got those for you. We have the Client Magnet System Guide and Client Magnet System Webinar, which explains, really, it explains how to develop relationships, how to build your business through sales and marketing, and by aligning Sales and Marketing for maximum effectiveness, because if you don’t have your game, running, right, right, if you’re not if you’re not working it right, then you’re wasting time and money. That’s the thing, I don’t know how many times I’ve heard people tell me, we come to you because you’re everywhere. You know, and that’s how we may help our clients. They’re everywhere. That’s what we want, you know, when you’re thinking about because let’s face it. Okay, here it is.

So businesses go through phases, right? There’s the startup phase, there’s the growth phase, there’s the topping off and the leveling off. And then there’s decline. Well, we’re in that rounding off that topping and leveling off, right? Where it’s just just business as usual. And in the startup and growth phase, businesses didn’t have MSPs. Right? Right. They needed someone who knew technology to help them navigate the waters so that their business could run with more efficiency and more productivity and utilize technology to get those benefits that that you can get right. But they’ve already all kind of converted unless they’re a brand new company or  have venture capital money, which means what we should be doing is chasing ambulances. We should all be knocking on venture capitalists doors going, Hey, we’re technology. Yeah, actually go steal that. I mean, don’t don’t steal that I’m gonna do it. Um, you know, we’re technology companies. And if you have companies that are starting up, we can help them. But otherwise you’re you’re trying to change. So like, otherwise a company that you’re going after a target, they probably already have a solution,

Shelly Miller  09:21

right.

Mike Miller  10:35

 Or solution provider. So you have to, something has to happen in order for them to change. And you’ve got to be there.

Shelly Miller  10:45

You’ve got to be there when whatever, whatever changes, they’re just not getting paid attention to they can’t get in touch with their current provider, they don’t feel like their provider is taking care of them enough making sure that they’re secure. Yeah, I mean, there’s, there’s hundreds of reasons.

Mike Miller  11:00

Exactly. And if your face is there, yep. Yeah, then they’re gonna they’re gonna look at you, especially if they’ve been hearing from you for the last year. I mean, that’s how it works.

Shelly Miller  11:11

It is. like, look, you know, think about what you’ve have, like, for example, they’re so they’re annoyed. They look down. Oh, yeah. I just got a postcard from this company. I think they said they were IT services, right? Let’s take a look at them.

Mike Miller  11:22

Right, exactly. So that’s, that’s what you have to realize that has to happen. And anyway, went off on a tangent, Shelly.

Shelly Miller  11:36

Oh, I allowed you. Yeah, I’m looking at her outline. But anyway, that’s okay. Because it goes with, so you have to have processes and you have to know who your ICP is. You need to keep your your marketing and your sales on lock so that you can continually be in front of your prospects, because you don’t know when they’re going to be looking. You don’t know when that straw will break the camel’s back. And they know I’m tired of having these people I need someone else.

Mike Miller  12:02

Yes, exactly. Exactly. To help you with that. But you you know, exactly. We are. And but if you look at the client satisfaction rating of your competitor, who’s already in, you know, seated in a target, and they’re like 74% satisfaction rating, you know that you need to be hitting those people.

Shelly Miller  12:25

Yes, definitely. Great tip. There

Mike Miller  12:26

you go. Yeah. So, anyway, awesome. So go to mind world.com, our resources section, check out all those guides and stuff ready. And waiting for you to take advantage of you know, it’s an it’s an opportunity we spent time and

Shelly Miller  12:44

our 20 plus years experience. Yeah, there you say more because you know, exactly. Simple maps 1999 to now, but anyway, yeah, you can download any of those guides or like Mike said, Ask us questions. Right. Well, which brings me to the topic of our next segment, which is answer questions. But we have more of a topic this week, don’t we? Yes. Instead of just one general question, the topic in question is around sales letters, how much does it cost to mail them which like, well,

Mike Miller  13:13

well, I mean, this is what my mom calls a come to Jesus meeting. Right? Yes, we’re gonna come to Jesus, we’re going to understand what’s going on. Because if you’re so you’re starting an MSP. Right? Okay. So 80% of MSPs are under a million dollars a year in revenue. Other 20% are over a million dollars. And as Robin Robins said, herself, there’s a there’s a valley of death? From a million to 5 million?

Shelly Miller  13:53

Yes.

Mike Miller  13:53

Yeah. 3.5 is the bottom is the trough. She said. So if you look at that, and you go, okay, so it’s a struggle after a million, it’s easiest. To get to a million, it’s actually easier to get to a million than it is to get to 5 million as an MSP

Shelly Miller  14:11

it is

Mike Miller  14:12

So so all these people 80% are gone. I can’t even I’m struggling to get to a million. Right. So then we have to go okay. What is the reason for this? Right, what is what’s going on? And while I don’t want to talk about what’s going on, or what I think is going on, I really think that we need to

Shelly Miller  14:35

Why don’t you want to talk about it?

Mike Miller  14:36

Well, because I feel like there’s a lot of entrepreneurs. There’s a lot of people who think it’s a great idea to start my own MSP. You know, I’ll start my own MSP and maybe this is me, okay, so maybe this is where I go. Think about it, because if you if you don’t think about it, honestly, then you’re doomed … basically this guy, Michael Breen, he’s a really great trainer. Right? Business trainer. Yeah. And he said, if you’ve been trying to do something for 15 years, maybe you should just realize, yeah, and you haven’t accomplished it or even made moves towards it, but you haven’t actually gone for it. Maybe you should realize you’re just fooling yourself, and you should stop all that foolishness.

Shelly Miller  15:27

Stop trying to do it, because you haven’t done it in 15 years. Seems like you really don’t want to do it.

Mike Miller  15:32

Right.

Shelly Miller  15:33

So in corrolation to what you just said, the zero to 1 million is starting up. So if you’ve been doing this for 20 years, 18 years, 12 years, and you still haven’t gotten past the 1 million mark, is that what you’re saying?

Mike Miller  15:49

What I’m saying is if you’re an IT person, and you want to start an MSP, and you’re listening to all of the money that could be made, and you’ve got, you know, like, dollar signs in your eye about all the money that could be made, and how easy it is to make money in this industry, because you can just open a business, and you can be an MSP, and you could work for all these companies, you could be your own boss, and, you know, I think that you’re

Shelly Miller  16:20

You keep wishing and dreaming for that. But you don’t really take any actions towards it.

Mike Miller  16:24

And every now and again, you make some calls. And every now and again, you do a couple things, but you don’t really, you know, and you bought a logo, and you had a guy on Fiverr, make a website or you even bought a website, right? designed it, you’ve you’ve got some things, but you don’t have a business. I think you should look at yourself and go, am I gonna make this a business and do this? Or am I not?

Shelly Miller  16:49

Yeah. And should I put my effort into something else that I’m actually going to go after?

Mike Miller  16:53

Right? Exactly.

Shelly Miller  16:54

Not just sit here and want and dream for?

Mike Miller  16:57

Exactly

Shelly Miller  16:57

Without taking actions to do it?

Mike Miller  16:59

Yeah. Because if you’re, if you’re a tech, what, there’s a lot of different levels of IT, people. But every level makes decent money. Yes. So there’s nothing wrong with that? No, there isn’t at all, you know, plus, you can bang your head against the wall for a long time and not achieve results.

Shelly Miller  17:22

Well, we’re all different, different humans. And some of us don’t, you know, want to work for ourselves. Some of us don’t want to work for anybody else. We have different personalities.

Mike Miller  17:31

Yeah,

Shelly Miller  17:32

None is better than the other. It’s just basically what the to me, the best thing is, is to recognize who you are, so that you can go after the things that make you the best you are. As opposed to like the example you just gave, I need to start my own MSP, but it’s just a bunch of wanting and spending money on the this person’s next class that promises to get you there. But now it’s we’re going on a year, we’re going on four years, we’re going on five years, while you’re still wanting and dreaming to do it. But you haven’t You should back up and evaluate. Is that really what you want? Because it doesn’t seem like it? So you can focus on what you’re really good at and go after that.

Mike Miller  18:11

Right. Exactly. Absolutely.

Shelly Miller  18:15

Makes sense.

Mike Miller  18:15

Right? So So now that you know, okay, I’m going after it. Now let’s look at let’s just look at the basics of what it’s going to take.

Shelly Miller  18:27

We’re gonna go off on a tangent, we were talking about sales letters.

Mike Miller  18:30

Now this is it, this is awesome sales letter, right. So let me share the screen real fast. There it is. So this is Vistaprint. Right? And as printers go, Vistaprint is as cheap as you can get. It is cheap as you can it is definitely and the only way to do a sales letter. So why sales letter? Why am I talking sales letter because sales letters are what? Robin Robins says you should do Godfather letter, you know, push the Godfather letter and then follow up with two calls two or three calls.

Shelly Miller  19:06

Well, and not only in this industry, most industries, you know, they stopped doing direct mail because well, we have the web now. The fact of the matter is is direct mail does still work in multiple industries. So they should at any given time, you should always have some mail campaign direct mail campaign anyway. Absolutely. So and we do know that it works in the managed service provider. Industry.

Mike Miller  19:28

Yes. Oh, yeah. It works in every industry, right? If it’s not working for you, it’s because of because you sent one, or like the message is important. Don’t get me wrong. The message is extremely important. And you have to have an offer, which we’ll get into later. But not today. But I mean, we’ll get into it eventually. But if you have a good message and a good offer, it can make up for a lot.

Shelly Miller  19:54

It can

Mike Miller  19:55

but it’s not going to make up for you know, there’s a reason it’s called Reach, depth and frequency.

Shelly Miller  20:01

There you go. It’s not send 50 and then don’t do it again for months and months.

Mike Miller  20:05

Exactly. I’ll send one like that, you know, where we get postcards. Like we were getting postcards from a VoIP provider. They’ve sent six in the last one a week for the last six weeks.

Shelly Miller  20:22

And it was the third one where I realized it was a VoIP company,

Mike Miller  20:26

Bam, bam, didn’t even know what this was for three weeks.

Shelly Miller  20:30

And after the third one, it caught my eye enough to look down and read it. So in the stack of mail that we all get,

Mike Miller  20:35

yeah, so you can go well, gosh, there. And you could say that their marketing isn’t very good if we didn’t realize it was VoIP company until a third time. But you could also say that humans don’t have that kind of attention. You know what I mean? You get mail and you’re like, nope, nope, yes. Nope. Yes. So, so anyway, we’re on Vistaprint. Let’s look at this. So if I have 1000, okay, here we go. 1000 is 29 cents each, that’s $286.50. But that’s only one side. Right? So you don’t have to pay you don’t have to double that price. But you have to add like, like eight cents for the second side. Right? And so that’s $2,850. Or let’s say it’s $300 1000. So this, the funny thing about this is this, this looks like really like nothing. But I want you to think about that. 1000 where that 1000 come from? That’s a list of 1000 that you have to have. You can’t mail nobody, you got to have a list.

Shelly Miller  21:42

Yes. Which is a topic for a huge topic for another conversation, you have to have a list and not the list that you pulled and went, Oh, I got this on

Mike Miller  21:55

Data Axle – Info USA

Shelly Miller  22:00

We’ve been sent lists of many, many times, I will get somebody to tell us that. Yes, I have a list. I pulled it. It’s got 5000 people on it. Yeah. And we look and we look at the list that doesn’t have 5000 lines and Excel, but that’s not leads. So they’re the Econolodge Home Depot, and there’s at 92,000 of them. Yeah, so your your 5000 list is really like 300 quality industry, your ICP and industries you want after now someone has to spend weeks going over all of those 5000 to get 300

Mike Miller  22:38

Yeah, exactly. You need to go to manufacturers. Awesome. You know, you’re gonna get every restaurant every micro brewery, their manufacturing,

Shelly Miller  22:49

there you go. Heck, we even found MSPs who list themselves as manufacturers. So think of that. Yeah. So keep in your mind for another another podcast, you got to have a list.

Mike Miller  23:03

Yeah, you gotta have a list. So we’d let’s say you have 1000 Right, so we’re gonna send 1000 And it’s gonna cost $286 to print. Oh, but we want to two sides. Let’s just round it down to $300. $300 to print. So now I want to send each of these. And they’re what is it? 57 cents each? 58 each, for stamps times 1000. That’s I didn’t do the decimal. That is $580. So plus 300. We’re at $880. And we haven’t done now you know what happened? Yeah, exactly. We don’t have word $170. We don’t have envelopes. We haven’t stuff. We don’t have labels. We haven’t folded these and stuffed Amenda envelopes, right? Think of the work that’s required to do 1000. If you could do 20 An hour of you know, serious 20 an hour. That’s how many you’re going to do. At least for the first hour or so.

Shelly Miller  24:15

I think he’s gonna do a little more, but it’s gonna be a little anyway. If you you know, a teenager handy. Yeah, he wants to make some money. You know, they don’t they’re not $5 an hour. They they’re, they’re smarter than that. They want more money than that. It’s gonna take them a while. If to do 1000 It is going to take a while.

Mike Miller  24:33

Yeah, at least 10 hours. I would think, you know,

Shelly Miller  24:38

maybe a little less, but still you add this money and now you realize that this one spent $1,000 Yeah, this one campaign this one letter that you wanted to send out? Yeah, to basically a list size, like a 100o, is really almost minimum to get a return. Yeah. You know,

Mike Miller  24:55

there’s you’re looking for 1% Yeah, one to 2%. So if you got 1000, you get 1010 to 20. So

Shelly Miller  25:03

you need to at least send 1000? And are you just gonna send that one and not do anything else? Of course you wouldn’t, because then you just be wasting , wasting the money for that.

Mike Miller  25:11

As a matter of fact, what you’re going to find is the first time you send it. So let’s say we just send the same sales letter, the first time we send it, we’re going to get 0%, we might get 0.4, something like that. The second time you send it, you can you should expect the 1%.

Shelly Miller  25:31

Yeah, I agree.

Mike Miller  25:32

The third time you send it, it’s going to go up, you could get to like 2%. Every time you send it, it’s going to go up because people become more familiar with it.

Shelly Miller  25:44

It’s true

Mike Miller  25:45

Which is the strategy behind Robin Robins. Godfather letter, you send it and then in six months, you send it again. Right. And so you can say, Well, what I could do is I could send 20, right? Because I can call 20 This week, right? So it’s not going to cost me $1,000 all at once. The problem is that and you can’t do that. It’s just there’s not enough momentum there.

Shelly Miller  26:18

Right, right. And so we’re talking if you send out a letter, then you’re going to try to call them twice if you just use that sequence.

Mike Miller  26:25

Yes. Yeah, that’s your sequence. That’s your sales sequence, you send a letter, and then you call them twice. So you send the letter, wait seven days, then call day 10. And then called day 14, something like that. Right. So it takes you two weeks to go through those people. And you can stagger it. I’m not saying you can’t stagger it. But you need momentum, you need to keep that up. Because that first time you’re gonna get like 0.4%. And so you got to do it a second time.

Shelly Miller  27:01

You do? Yes. You know, you have to keep going. You have to keep continually be in front of your ICP.

Mike Miller  27:07

Yes, exactly.

Shelly Miller  27:08

So you need to be in front of them.

Mike Miller  27:09

Let’s think about okay, well, I want to start an MSP. You know, I want to be an MSP. I want to start my own business, be in business.  So when you send with so you’re going to market to people, right? You have to, we’re not talking about the cost of the website, we’re not talking about the cost of pay per click. We’re not talking about writing articles, or all of the time that you could invest into content and social media. We’re saying that you have to send letters and call, and most people don’t want to call right. So Dan Kennedy invented the whole send a letter send a letter? Because then he could hit everybody on the block all at once, instead of having to call on everyone or go door to door to everybody. So send letters, but the thing is, is that you’ve got to be able to send enough letters to get their attention. And you’ve got to have a decent message. Because even in this Georgio letter C for the advanced people who know what I’m talking about, the GA letters had three letters. It was three, it’s a sequence of three and they roll off of each other.

Mike Miller  27:23

So if you don’t have money to do one,

Mike Miller  28:04

So you’re gonna spend $1,000 on one. Okay, and we’re talking GA letter sequences three, right? So no matter what you do, you’re going to spend a lot of money because you’re also going to have to call these people. Okay, so you’re going to do it all yourself? Well, you better be calling, you know, 20 a day, at least, or 50. More like 50. You know? Yes. So you’re calling 50 a day, which is going to take you four hours. I mean,

Shelly Miller  29:02

well, it will you know, there’s there’s people who call 150 a day, but they are they work for POS systems and they are under a quota. They have a dialer and they’re made to do it.

Mike Miller  29:12

I can do it but it takes a predictive dialer. And it takes a automatic voicemail drop,

Shelly Miller  29:20

And you doing it not brand new to it, you can’t jump in and go I’m gonna call 100 People today, it just doesn’t happen. Right? No start, you start around 20

Mike Miller  29:29

you got to have the list. You have to have the list. You got to know who you’re calling and what’s going on with them and have a little insight into their business and how you can help them. Yes. So I feel like that’s really the story. Okay, that’s what we wanted to talk about today. You got to get real, you got to get a little bit real and understand that shoot. You know, if I send this every month, if I send a letter every month, or a postcard even right now, I’m not talking about a little small postcard. I’m talking about you know the regular size postcard that you have to use a stamp on a letter, you know, a regular stamp, it’s 57 cents each. So, you know, and and here’s the one thing that we know that we’ve spent the last year banging our heads against the wall learning. You can’t go to market with a list of 200 people, you have to have 2000 that we’ve always only ever had 2000. And that’s where we’ve seen results. And MSPs have like, incredibly small lists.

Shelly Miller  30:36

The thing is, is, you know, and again, I don’t want to beat a dead horse, but they don’t believe they have a small list. They think they have a huge list. Right. But it’s not it’s not an actual list of ICPs that, you know that it’s a list of basically they went let me get all the the doctors around me. And it’s not necessarily … that doesn’t mean because you put that in that criteria. That’s what you got. Right. So because you pulled that doesn’t mean you have a list of 5000.

Mike Miller  31:05

Right. Well, so I just pulled a list. It was 3348. I think that number pops out. Right stands out, but it was definitely over 3000 people. I ended up with 199 qualified leads.

Shelly Miller  31:20

Yeah, it was it was more than that. Until you realize that there were some industries in that were included in that were that were obviously not that industry. Yeah. So you do what you dwindled it down to 3800 to come up with, you know, that had all of the contact information. The email address? Yeah. 199 is unbelievable.

Mike Miller  31:39

Yeah, it was point. It was half of 1%. was, you know, so you think Okay, in this list. 20% is junk,

Shelly Miller  31:48

Right that’s what you usually think but

Mike Miller  31:50

No this was 99.5% was junk.  And this list came from up lead.

Shelly Miller  31:58

Yeah, you know, the better tools, the best tools that they tell you, you need to buy, you know, $100 $300 a month and and still, you’re getting trash.

Mike Miller  32:07

like zoom info, you know, you can’t get better than zoom info. It’s expensive. And you’re gonna you’re gonna get all the information you need. No, you’re not, you’re going to get a bunch of junk, you’re not going to find the targets that you want in there you get once you go through them all. And see this is this the other thing? Well, I don’t want to go on and on. But I’m just saying you’re gonna, what, what most people do is they get the list of 3000. And then they pay to send everybody a letter without looking at the  list and qualifying it and vetting it and realizing 99.5% 99.8% is junk.

Shelly Miller  32:47

Yeah, it’s the truth. I say my rule of thumb to use a CRM or lead company like close, or any of those, just go to it or zoominfo. Just go to it, put your company name in it. Yeah. And just see what kind of information it provides you? Yeah. I bet you at least half of the companies that you try that out on you’re going to look at it and go, What, that’s not what my company does. How many employees it has the revenue, it has the computers, you know, just take a look. So in doing that, you’ll understand why you’re going to get a whole bunch of trash information when you pull a list. So yeah, we’ll leave it at that with the list.

Mike Miller  33:24

Yes Exactly. I think we’ve I think I’ll get that to a dead horse. And I’ve alienated the entire audience. Hey, come be a part of our community.

Shelly Miller  33:46

We were going to also include in our new format, you know, promotion or I mean, not promotions. But the products and services that work best right now that we’re using. Yeah. And so we’ll be sprinkling them in because like you, I think any industry no matter what you do, you find that you spend a lot of time now looking for the best app, the best software, the best tool, and and you spent like a whole weekend going, all I wanted was a CRM or an email automation tool.  And you test them all out as best you can. And before you know it, you’ve literally spent all Friday night or Saturday or Sunday. So we’re going to share what we’re finding our clients are using and what’s working the best for them. You know, from a time standpoint, from a money standpoint, you know, through getting a return on that tool. So we’ll be sharing that as well.

Mike Miller  34:42

Yes, exactly. This is where we do the friends?

Shelly Miller  34:50

Yeah, our friends.

Mike Miller  34:51

All right. So Manuel has a bunch of friends in the industry because we’ve, we’ve reached out to people and realize that, you know, there’s some good people in the MSP industry, and we want to share who they are with you. And basically,  these are the people that we believe are quality individuals, we’ve vetted them. And we know that they are exceptional at what they do. We’re not saying that they’re the only ones. We’re just saying, we like these people,

Shelly Miller  35:24

We like them. And we’ve looked at their products, and we’ve

Mike Miller  35:28

spoken with them on our podcasts. And, and there are pros, there are professionals. I don’t know, we haven’t figured out what we’re gonna call them.

Shelly Miller  35:38

We have been calling them friends. Yeah, we’ll leave it at that for now. But that’s who they are, again, kind of as a adjunct to the to giving you the best tools to use. These are some partners that can help you in your business, run it easier, quicker, maybe with less money more seamlessly have a better product to help you do what you do. Yes, we’ll be sharing that as well.

Mike Miller  35:59

Exactly. And they’re not paying us to say this. They’re just just friends. Alright, so Jennifer Bleem at MSP Sales Revolution, she shows you how to grow your business, and be an MSP learns cybersecurity tactics and how to sell it. That’s the big thing. You know how to sell it. And then OIT VoIP. If you if you’re looking for a VoIP provider, they have a really interesting product lineup and

Shelly Miller  36:39

have two ways for you to use it to you know, they’re white label it or they will, and most companies don’t do both. They won’t, you know, don’t just sell it to you and and white label it. Yeah. So it’s an interesting sell. It is if it’s a product that you’re wanting to add to your services,

Mike Miller  36:54

and make your business look even bigger than it is, which is what you should do, you know, businesses about arbitrage, you know, it’s it’s making a cut off of every transaction. That’s what you want. That’s how Amazon does it anyway, it’s the true Lifecycle Insights, Marnie Stockman is an amazing person. And they built Lifecycle Insights to help MSPs basically keep their QBRs together, and you know, realize that …   she’s hesitant to call her company, a marketing company, or a marketing tool, but I think it is, right because your QBRs are your chance to it sounds dirty, when I want to say upsell to upsell your your customers, but but really to show them that there are other options or tools that they could take advantage of, that would help protect them more.

Shelly Miller  37:55

Right. And what they offer is the ability to know what their customers happiness levels are, their engagement with the product, what they like what they don’t like they are from an educational background, Marnie, and Alex. So they built in their tool, not only setting up the QBRs, and monitoring what your customers have what they need, being able to see, you know, your return on investment from each customer, but also what they their happiness level, basically identifying

Mike Miller  38:32

if they’re like, remember, you remember, as an MSP, you’re looking for targets, leads that aren’t being well served. So that you can snag them. Once they they make a mistake? Well, if you knew ahead of time that you were, like, screwing up.

Shelly Miller  38:57

Yeah, you had a customer who wasn’t that happy. And that customer is a good customer of yours. So you need to take care of them immediately.

Mike Miller  39:03

And you better do some about it soon. Lifecycle Insights dashboard tells you what’s going on. And it’s amazing. It helps you understand what’s going on, and hey, this is a client you better pay attention to. And last but not least, Craig Taylor, from Cyberhoot. I keep calling them by their first name. So I apologize. Cyberhoot

Shelly Miller  39:22

Becasue we feel like they’re our friends.

Mike Miller  39:24

Yeah, they’re our friends, right? They’re all CEOs. And they’re just like you they’re business owners. They’re trying their best to grow their businesses and to identify the the ways to best serve their clients. That’s the thing about these people, and hopefully us as well, is that we focus on the clients and it’s all about you guys, and giving you the things that you need to grow your business.

Shelly Miller  39:52

Yep. so Cyberhoot, who helps with your cybersecurity employee training for your business.

Mike Miller  39:59

Yes, Cybersecurity Awareness Training.  So excellent stuff. All of these people, we believe that they are the cream of the crop, the top in the industry. And we really liked them. But also remember that we have a whole bunch of resources on our website. In the Resources section just we have the client Magnet System Quick Guide, which goes over the client magnet system. Remember, the client Magnet System is the map of sales and marketing and how to align them so that you can maximize your leads and sales and make more money and grow your business. We also have the webinar that explains the client magnet system. We have a B2B Social Media Strategy Guide. And I see persona work ICP Persona Worksheet and a Plug in Profit Marketing Jumpstart SEO checklist.

Shelly Miller  40:58

Yes, and we also have a YouTube channel that we house all of our podcasts on different topics everything from you know how you should do social. Using a teleprompter. I mean, we have a lot of interesting information that we know from the MSPs that we’ve worked with, you know they can they can use it because like a little teleprompter video has a lot of use because a lot of people need to know how to use that when you make your two to three minute videos, it becomes so helpful. You can shoot them quicker. It makes everything a lot easier. We have a lot of information on the YouTube channel. So we hope to see you there too. Absolutely. Or, or just your favorite podcast player. We are on all of them.

Mike Miller  41:40

Yeah, so if you like Apple, iTunes, we’re there if you like stitcher bam.

Shelly Miller  41:45

Yep, we’re syndicated on 19 podcast players. So yes, we’re saying you’re gonna find us on the internet

Mike Miller  41:50

across the interwebs. Look for the Mindwhirl Marketing Podcasts and you shall find us seek and you shall find. Oh, I know it all of a sudden, I’m a

Shelly Miller  41:59

Pun King.

Mike Miller  42:01

Punching like that. I can just hear someone twist in that right now. That’s gonna be awesome. Um, anyway, hashtag. Yeah, hashtag pun king. So, hey, we appreciate you.

Shelly Miller  42:18

We do and we we really love answering your questions, seeing what you’re struggling with. And lots of times, you know, it seems huge. And it’s not really kind of like in your business. You can have somebody come to you and say, Hey, I you know, they’re terrified about technology … something on their computer. Yeah. And you can put them at ease in a minute, you know, right. Same with us. There’s no sense in worrying about it holding it in, you know, thinking that you’re the only one we love to answer questions and you get you get to marketers for the price of one Exactly. Just free actually will answer your questions for free. So you can email us as always, our email addresses are in the description. But you can also comment on the video a question that you would like to have answered,

Mike Miller  43:00

Yes, please comment, like, subscribe, hit the bell to be notified when we put out new material. And as always, we really appreciate you guys and would love to help you in your business. So send in your questions, so that we can answer them. And I’ll see you very very soon.

Shelly Miller  43:19

We’ll see you next time. All right. Thanks again, for listening to the mind world Marketing podcast. Make sure to subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, Google podcast, Stitcher, Deezer or Spotify. Plus, check out my work on YouTube and subscribe. You’ll find a lot more marketing tips, insights and resources that will help you get your sales and marketing working together and moving in the same direction.

The post The Cost of Doing Business appeared first on MSP Marketing | Mindwhirl.

WATCH The Mindwhirl Marketing Podcast Ep 47 – Marnie Stockman Part 2 – Literally the Book on Customer Success for MSPs

Podcast Transcript

Shelly Miller  00:04

Welcome to the Mindwhirl Marketing podcast, your source for B2B business building information where we talk sales and marketing and give managed service providers and IT service companies, the insider secrets you need to know to grow your business. We want to help you attract leads and sales and show you how to align sales and marketing. So you get more sales faster with less cost. I’m Shelly and he’s Mike. And today with us is Marnie Stockman of Lifecycle Insights.

Mike Miller  00:27

Hey, thanks for

Marnie Stockman  00:29

having me.

Mike Miller  00:30

Yeah, absolutely.

Shelly Miller  00:31

Love that you’re here.

Mike Miller  00:33

Absolutely. Yes. So you have a lot going on in your universe. And yeah, we wanted to like, steal a minute, a minute of your time. And have you talked about it, because it’s really exciting for MSPs. And a lot of really great knowledge that you’re dropping, you know, lately and tools coming up with your, your platform. So. So first off is the book, do you care if we get into the book a little bit?

Marnie Stockman  01:04

Not at all, and be happy to? Happy to share?

Mike Miller  01:09

All right, awesome.

Shelly Miller  01:10

All right,

Mike Miller  01:10

that’s fantastic.

Marnie Stockman  01:11

She doesn’t love a good pun. So dads aren’t the only one that get dad jokes, because, moms can too, so I wrote the book, Literally, The Book on Customer Success. So I use that on the regular with the family who’s probably tired of that. So thank you for, say that you guys for the first time so that the family didn’t have to hear it.

Shelly Miller  01:33

There you go. Take one for the family today.

Marnie Stockman  01:36

You have no idea. So we’re excited about the book. And I say we like the editor that I had, when I was writing the book said, you have to take out all of the we’s in the book and right I and I said but if it takes a village to raise a child, it takes the village and those two children to write a book. So I feel like I should say we because it is the thought leadership of Lifecycle Insights behind what customer success should look like for MSPs. There’s a lot of thought leadership in the SAS world, right. In software as a service industries, from Gainsight to Tango turns your platforms like that, that talk about how do you get insights into customer success? So how happier my clients, how likely are they to churn? Where are my upsell opportunities, so I feel like for a podcast that’s looking for ways to sell upcast should like I mean, upsells should, you know, kind of spark bells and whistles. So there are a lot of there are a lot of platforms out there even that track these types of metrics, specifically for software companies, there are zero platforms, or there were prior to IT Nation zero platforms that track the same metrics for MSPs. And so so we wrote the book, to help MSPs see what metrics could really help them drive more success for them and their clients. And then the side note of that is that’s the platform that we’re launching to. So I say we wrote that book, because it was really compiling best practices, from our own experiences. I was senior director of customer success for huge enterprise corporation, plus lots of MSPs that we’ve talked to that, frankly, have been trying to cobble together some of this information on spreadsheets, which again, is sort of industry term, the old cobbled together. Yes, it’s to put it in one place. And in this is the way we can think about clients to be to have a scalable, supportable process for what I call the human stack, because MSPs have it for the tech stack, but they need to address the human element to differentiate themselves in a world of increasing commoditized stack. Absolutely, absolutely. You, you had said in your book. So like this first chapter, we always think about what has to be true in order for what they’re saying to be correct. Right.

Mike Miller  04:16

And and in your first chapter you like, you lay a lot out, right, so you’re telling your story, but you also have a lot of, like, insight into what it takes to actually create a customer success process that retains clients and keeps them happy and keeps them you know, purchasing renewing.

Marnie Stockman  04:41

Right

Mike Miller  04:42

And you said that so you have five beliefs here. And understanding of our customers businesses, English to English translators, for to advocate for the customer and for our company, which is interesting. Yeah. power and flexibility to get the customer what they need. Which, you know, I want to discuss these a little bit because that one’s another interesting one to me processes to ensure the customer feels heard, and metrics to ensure progress towards our goals. So, you know, metrics would be like, an obvious thing for enterprise level people, you know, someone who’s come from the corporate world, but it’s the first off and understanding of our customers businesses. Yeah, like that’s not very common.

Marnie Stockman  05:36

So and, and it’s part of the disconnect when MSPs come to the table for a business review. As you know, you know, the the start of Lifecycle Insights was to build a QBR PCI reporting platform to automate QBR reports. And we heard from MSPs regularly, that their clients weren’t seeing value or wouldn’t come to the table for business review. And what it really came down to is, is because you’re talking about you the MSPs business, not your clients business. So without an understanding of the client’s business and how technology impacts their business, they’re not understanding that like, they don’t care about the flux capacitors and the bells and whistles and gadgets and gadgets that you’re buying for them, right? Those words don’t mean a lot to them. But if you have an understanding of your customers goals, what they’re driving to, are they simple? Will you are you growing? Are you going to have a new location next year, technology wise, you’re immediately thinking infrastructure wiring, I need new assets, I need it, right. Like they’re all of these things that go along with it, that if you just went with the conversation of do I need to buy more, you know, cat nine cables next year, whatever maybe, I might know, but, but they’re certainly thinking like, Oh, now you’re selling me some some wiring. But if the conversation is tell me about your business, are you growing? Are you going new locations? Or now with so many people working remotely? Are we contracting buildings, where maybe we can utilize some of the assets that we have differently? Right? Are there cost savings? Are there things that you can do for them? So when you start understanding the customer’s business, and that wasn’t even necessarily a strategic conversation around? Are they looking at new markets, or new technologies in their industry that might make them more efficient, make them money, save them time types of things. So that’s what that’s what I’m gearing toward when I say if you need to under you need to understand your customers business. And let’s be very clear, I always say that apparently, when I’m like laying down the law with my children, they’ve let you know that. So I’m being serious here. Okay. This doesn’t mean that, that you have to be the expert in your customers business. As a matter of fact, that would be disrespectful to them. If you came in and said, like, we  know how all lawyers work? Let me tell you how to be a doctor. Like, I am, in fact a doctor on the side and I know how to run your medical practice, right?  What it comes down to, is they are the expert in their business, ask them about the pains in their business. And then when you have expertise in how to do that business better. I think one of the phrases I used all the time when I was in customer successes, let me tell you some best practices I’ve seen from other doctors offices, like you school systems, like you, etc. Because then it’s not you coming in high on the horse, that you know all the things about all the things, especially in their line of business. But instead, I, I have the lucky opportunity of talking to lots of people like you, and let me throw some ideas out there that have worked for them. Right. And so then they Ooh, talking to this person. It’s like talking to a bunch of other people like me, and then I can get some strategic value from this.

Shelly Miller  08:16

Right

Mike Miller  09:08

Right, exactly. Excellent. Yeah, that’s great. Yeah. And as a side note, that’s what the Challenger sale is all about. Right? That book, the challenger sale, it’s about being able, being so intimately familiar with the industry, that you’re able to actually point out things that maybe they’re not thinking and actually be a resource. So that’s amazing tip, I’m just pushing it towards sales. But that’s an amazing tip for every business owner and the the, the markets they serve.

Shelly Miller  09:39

It is, an a good segway, I love how … it is  their business, they are the expert, but you can have knowledge in it and finding that balance to relay that to them when you talk and show how much you care is. That’s an amazing tip. That’s that’s what we all need to do in every relationship we have with our customers every every meeting,

Marnie Stockman  10:03

many times I have ideas about what I think would be better for them. But I don’t tell them. It’s my idea. I always say like, I have seen a customer try this or some best practices, I think if you have that way to, to offset it. So it’s less personal for you, and not all about you. But like some ideas and best strategies. First, it’s easy for them to say no, right? Like, oh, we tried that, and it didn’t work and they’re not personally offending you. It just makes this third party situation we’re going to talk about instead of super personal where either they feel like they’re hurting your ego, or you’ve heard there’s

Mike Miller  10:40

Right, exactly. The next thing is, and I find this one really interesting, because there’s so many different personalities, there’s so people have had so many different experiences, English to English translators to advocate for the customer. And for the company. Yeah. And it seems like you’re you’re walking a fine line there. And you’re having to understand their language their, what their what they mean, when they say certain things. So like, what are the this might be to philosophic, philosophical, but what, what’s the secret to that?

Marnie Stockman  11:18

Yeah, yeah. So it’s funny when I say that, I’ve been tempted to put that on LinkedIn before, especially when I ran customer success, like I, I’m a solid English to English translator, and you wouldn’t think you would need one of those. But you in fact, do. Because one of your languages is say insurance, right? So your customer is an insurance agent, they speak insurance, your engineers that have a problem that you’re going to solve with technology do not speak insurance. As a matter of fact, they speak in three to five letter acronyms that typically have numbers with them as well, because that confuse a lot of people, right. And so the customer success person has to translate business problem that comes in insurance ease, and turn it into what they’re looking for is a way to do this faster. Right? And so you’re that English to English translation, and then back again, right? Like, we always joke, yeah, we don’t let our top engineers in our tickets, they’re not allowed to respond back to an intermediary for that, so that it makes sense when it gets to the other side, right? And so same thing, and then back like, oh, to go faster, to go faster, you’re going to push these buttons, you know, and this is, this is why it’s going to work that way. So the English to English translator really does help turn business pain into a tech problem. The engineer turns it into a tech solution, which we then turn into a business solution, right. So I think that cycle is really important. And it humanizes it, because neither side feels frustrated at that point. And I absolutely have had engineers say to me, can someone have Marnie, go talk to the customer about this problem. And bring it back to me because I understand the translation of it, because she kind of speaks our language. And then the second piece of that is the advocating piece, I think the customer success vCIO account manager, whatever you want, whatever letters, you want to assign them walk a fine line of really caring, right, they have a great relationship with their client. And so they want for them. And they work for the company, so they want for them. And the nice thing that a customer success person does is they don’t come off as high pressure sales, because what they’re trying to do is solve a problem. And they’ve got the toolkit of things that of course, the company would like to, to help them use to solve the problem, but they’re doing it from the place of solving a problem for the customer. And so that’s where the advocate, you know, advocate piece comes from, and then whenever there are, you know, goodness knows, there are plenty of times where technology has glitches, they’ve built the relationships, so now they can really help ease pains. When a technology glitches come along. And you’ve built some political capital and trust that really like to advocate for the company, when there are struggles. I worked for one software company where the running joke was, we love your customer success manager so much that we use you in spite of your product. Your people, right? So yes, yeah.

Mike Miller  14:36

Yeah, well, and it takes a very special person to me to do customer success. Because like if if I’ve okay, right out of high school, I got a job doing customer success and every conversation turned into I know these this business is horrible. We need to get you something you know, to make up This yeah, like I was on, I was on their side too much. So I feel like it’s it’s like sitting on the fence. How can you serve the company and serve the customer and get you know wins for both? That’s it’s it takes a special person is what I’m saying

Shelly Miller  15:17

It does.

Marnie Stockman  15:18

It’s like the yes and parenting trick. Right. Right. And I have marshmallows for dinner. Yes, but or maybe it’s the Yes button. Yes, yes. But first we’re gonna eat the carrots. Right? Yes, marshmallows. So yes.

Mike Miller  15:37

Right like it. Yeah, I like it, too. I get it. Okay. So next is power and flexibility to get the cut. This goes into what we were just talking about power and flexibility to get the customer what they need.

Marnie Stockman  15:50

So, in a world of process, you still have to have some flexibility and some humanity, right? So I mentioned before, you’ve got all of these rules and processes and procedures around the tech stack. But when it comes to customer success, they’re dealing with the human stack. And humans are humans. So you have to have some flexibility. So while you should have processes in place, you need to understand the give and take on that. And one of the one of the companies that we’re always talked about, like, what’s the give and get? So if we’re going to have a conversation where something’s not going well, right, like you said, like, Oh, that’s terrible, we’re doing that too. Let me send you some flowers or whatever, you have to kind of think that given get, and you need to know what the parameters are for that. But to have rigid processes in place, think about all of the processes around billing, that might have been in place prior to COVID. And then all of the world stopped going out, eat, right? Yes, step those same, like no my processes, you don’t pay, we shut you off, you’re done. If there had been no give, in the humanity of the fact that we were in a pandemic, and no one was going out to dinner, like imagine how that would feel from the, from the business and of like, you, you know, I’m not I can’t pay for that. Right? Like, and there were other processes that we could put in place, but you needed some flexibility. So to to let a customer success person understand where the given get can be. And when they understand the problem of the company, right? They can often come up with a good solution that’s maybe a little out of the box, because humans just refuse to stay in a box and work the way the technology does.

Mike Miller  17:37

Yes, yeah. That’s, that’s amazing. I love that you said that these were beliefs, because that kind of shapes everything that you do. You know, and and it’s very uncommon for a business to give a customer success person, like, carte blanche, well, not carte blanche, but basically the flexibility to do whatever is required to keep the customer to make the customer happy. I’ve not personally seen it.

Shelly Miller  18:10

It’s rare.

Mike Miller  18:11

Yeah, I think it’s rare.

Marnie Stockman  18:12

And we certainly didn’t have carte blanche from a from a dollars perspective writer. But But what we did have was, so we would always segment our customers into the highest paying highest effort customers, right folks that we met with weekly, and we knew for a fact that if their buttons turned red, you know, so customer health was red, we had a process in place where we would then brainstorm what those things would be. So I absolutely then could skip all of the chains of command, right? And would get executive leadership and say, okay, and, and we didn’t have a rule in place that if they turn red, we send them an email that says we’re sorry, and we’re going to give them 10% off next month, because that might not have been the thing that would solve the problem for them. Right. So what we had was the power and flexibility to grab the right people to problem solve and be that communicator of, okay, this is, this is the problem they’re having this is the part of it that we cost. And what would be really helpful for them right now is if we gave them two hours of manual support to fix the problem, or they do need a concession on a bill or you know, just to be able to have the brainstorming and know that sometimes it’s good to have a playbook and sometimes you have to know when an audible and thrown out the playbook is a good idea.

Mike Miller  19:40

Yes,

Shelly Miller  19:41

yeah. I love in your book that you lay out the process. I think that’s just excellent, because I think a lot of people kind of skip over the customer success process. And then you just mentioned something else that’s just very important and that is to continually revisit it I I think that successful business have processes for everything, but also have to go back in and revisit them at your events. Yeah. You’re even saying that they should with a, with an incident that happens to so that I would think that they would just continually get better and better.

Marnie Stockman  20:18

Yeah. And you know, it’s interesting because obviously I, you know, I let the cat out of the bag, we are releasing a platform around this in January, our partners, so we’ve had 24 Beta partners that are really helping build this with us. And they talk about their process and their iteration of how they, when would you like things to trigger so that you know, you need to think about doing something different. So what an example of that is, if there’s a leadership change at one of your clients, in the land of places where an MSP could be completely blindsided would be if there was suddenly new ownership of one of their partners, right. So to have that trigger in place, so that, you know, this is one of those incidents where we’re going to have to stop and regroup on what we’re doing. And that gets more refined, the more you practice it, right. So if we’re looking at continuous iterative process that wasn’t on the list the first time around. So the reason I point that one out is we had a meeting with our beta partners and said, Let’s talk about all the places where you would want to define customer health, what would make a customer happy, angry, or somewhere in the middle, and we had one list. And then somebody came back the next week and said, We just had a company that got acquired by another company, and that company already has an IT provider. So let’s add sort of this red flag notion of if we see that coming, we know we have to circle the wagons, make sure we talked all you know, boots on the ground to talk to people, etc. So we kind of updated our thinking of like, yep, there are other triggers that you really need to think about.

Mike Miller  21:55

Okay, excellent.

Shelly Miller  21:57

Well, talking to your partners keeps that up to date. That’s awesome. So you’re continually adding new triggers.

Marnie Stockman  22:03

Yeah, absolutely. So to have the flexibility, either yourself or in a platform, and a lot of times that was please keep this in their head, right. But if you really want to scale your process, you said folks don’t often have a process for customer success. It’s often because as you start out as an MSP, if you’re the owner and sales person, you just know, like, oh, Shelly likes fish, we’re good. Mike says this, right. But if you want to scale that, beyond you, you need to be able to say why I think that is true. And the other pieces as Shelly and Mike’s business grows, and you’re not just talking to Shelly, Mike, just because you went out and had coffee with them the other day doesn’t mean the project manager that is dealing with technology isn’t on fire, and you need to, you need to have a system for tracking all those variables. You know, if you rely on your gut, that doesn’t always work out right.

Mike Miller  22:55

That’s yeah, that’s the truth. It is the truth, that system is much better. And, and what I like about the fact that you said that these were beliefs as it shapes your behaviors, for you know, how you how it, it’s implemented in your business, your MSP. You then move into the process, you said that it had to be scalable, repeatable, documentable, efficient, and based on meq metrics. So yeah, it is I can hardly say it. And basically, it reminds me of, you know, E Myth. You know, like McDonald’s has all these, you know, standard operating procedures and MSPs are very, you know, SOP oriented. You know, but yet, then they fall short on the on the customer success formula, So, it’s, it’s interesting, and, and your book, basically, since you let the cat out of the back on the the update. The book is like a workbook for to build these processes in your business.

Marnie Stockman  24:14

Yes. So the first part, I aim to give a compelling why on why they should think about customer success. More than just, oh, I have happy healthy customers, right? So I kind of outlined some stories and some problems we see when they don’t have a system in place for it. And then the second part, it actually there’s a, there’s a url listed in the book. That will I think it’s Lifecycle Insights.io, forward slash literally, that takes you to the worksheets, where you can download and do this work on your own. So it lets you do a few different things. It talks through how do you segment your client base so that you are talking to them at the right cadence for you and for them? And then how do you define health Right, and it walks you through. Like, there’s a suggested list of if you don’t have other ideas, I’ve given some to you, right? And, and they’re ones we’ve grabbed and conversations with our partners around. A lot of folks think, Oh, I already track customer success metrics, we get CSAT scores from our tickets. Well, that’s one metric. But remember, that metric started and was triggered by an event where they were angry to start. Don’t put in a ticket, because you were happy to see them. And then the resolution of that is, is directly impacting that moment, right? When you and when you so any given CSAT is just a point in time, and an average over time talks about the human that is putting in that ticket over time. But is that how the whole health of the company is feeling? At any given moment? Right? That’s just a single metric. NPS scores same thing. But there are other you know, there’s a general overall sentiment that I think is the last human that talk to these people. What is the general sentiment? I’ve had people put in a ticket angry about something, but they’re still happy as a clam with that they just want they just need something resolved, right? Like there’s no, there’s no drama there. So to be able to outline for yourself, what do you think, are the metrics that we need to average to say, I feel like that’s a good gauge on what customer health looks like. And and along with that, in the world of metrics, one piece that I think every MSP is well aware of, but people have really struggled with documenting is how aligned are they to my standards are stack alignment. So to get insights into many times your crankiest customers are cranky, because they only off they’re only using 10% of the services that you offer. But they’re they’re complaining about things that the other 90% would solve for. So if you defined for yourself healthy as somebody that’s using my standards, right, that they’re aligned to my stack, and they turn red, you think, Okay, we’ve got some other bell or whistle to push. But I’ve got another client that’s really cranky, they’re always talking about X, Y, or Z, well, they’re not even aligned to all of my processes. So it’s hard to say that, that I would have solved for that, and only 10% of what I bring to the table. So there are lots of different types of metrics to take a look at. But the pieces that we’re looking at right out of the gate are defining your health metrics, and taking a look at opportunity within your stack. Because it’s first a health metric and second, gives insights into sales opportunities. upsells.

Shelly Miller  27:45

Okay, so So in the book, we it’ll, it walks you through, and like you said, you give them some kind of thought starters as well. And so then the platform is basically a dashboard with that has this information too, or tell us a little bit about that? Yep.

Marnie Stockman  28:01

So, I’ll start with three things, it does a lot more than that. But I find if we can just cut to the chase on a few highlights, it helps. Okay, so the first piece is to give you a quadrant and says, top right are my high value, high effort clients, these are my HIPAA compliant clients, my department of defense clients, right, they have a lot of needs, and they’re paying my highest dollar amount versus low effort, low impact, probably automated clients, right, we got processes in place, and you would want them to be because you keep them profitable, you better not spend the same amount of time with each right. So we want to divide into quadrants. So you can establish a good cadence for working with each of them. So that’s the first piece, then as we’ve plotted them on this chart, we let you define the health scores so that we color those points red, yellow, green. So if you’ve got your top paying high compliance client that is red with customer health, as customer success person, that puts a knot in my stomach and phone to my ear, right? I’m calling that client, I’m circling the wagons on my own executive leadership. And we’re going to figure out what the problem is and solve it for them. Right. If I’ve got folks that are low, they’re not paying a lot, but they’re high effort. I am going to do one of two things, I’m going to make them lower effort so I can automate the way I work with them. Or I’m going to show them, we’re going to solve more of your problems and move they need to be paying more right because they’re just not profitable for you. So that’s the first view you get into on the dashboard. And then the second piece is really around opportunity in your existing client base. So we let MSPs define their standards or services that they offer. And then really document where their partners are aligned or not aligned. So this is my preferred BDR application. They’re not using our preferred one. So there’s some opportunity left, right, and when I want to move them, so there are lots of bells and whistles to make all of that happen. But the goal being that when I look at a client, I can see there 73% aligned to my standards. And there’s $1,500 in MRR left on the table. So I know what I’m going to talk about in my next business review. Because when I’m fully aligned, a more scalable, supportable secure, which is the other piece that we kind of talked about there.

Mike Miller  30:41

Okay, okay. Excellent. I have a question. So let me try to put that off for a second. Because your your platform is coming out. And it actually, from what I understand, it walks you through this process that’s also in the book, or it helps you identify the processes that you’ll use and and like, the the forward Nigel Moore says that this is work. Yeah, right. Yes. Yeah. But and I’m assuming that it’s still going to be some work, but the platform is going to make it a lot easier and virtually hold your hand through it.

Marnie Stockman  31:19

Yes. So yeah, I appreciated that Nigel said that he and I had a long conversation about the work. Because if it was easy, everybody would be doing it. Right. And if it was intuitive, then people wouldn’t be trying to solve the problem with spreadsheets themselves, right. So it’s a problem that folks are trying to solve. But the automation is not simple. So let’s talk about where that work is. Right now. We just discussed where’s that information on customer health? Nowhere in somebody’s head, right, we’ve got CSAT scores over here, we’ve got the customer success manager thing, one thing, the owner thinks another thing, we’ve got NPS scores, right. So that’s kind of all over the place. So there’s some work to get in one place, right? So that’s the one piece, the other pieces, if you truly want insights into the stack, and how aligned your clients are to that, then you’ve got to build out your stack, right? You’ve got to decide, okay, these are my preferred and, and we’ve built the platform, we’re all about flexibility. But I always like to say with great flexibility, with great flexibility comes a lot of power and with great power comes with some effort. And that is because if you want to have maybe your standard stack and security stack and maybe a level two security stack, you need to define what those are right? And we can’t make that up for you. You have to go in and say, My top 10 tools that come on my standard stack, are these they’re included. Everybody gets it. So everybody’s 100% aligned there, or maybe they’re not right, there’s some work that takes a human beings eyes to look at that. And say, Yes, I agree on that. So that’s where the work comes in, is to set up your standards in the platform in the same way that MSPs have spent years building their standards. And they know, these are the chosen toolset, you do need to set that up for yourself. Because we don’t believe there’s a single secret sauce, right? Everybody’s stack is their secret sauce. So they need to define that for themselves in the platform. But once it’s there, you don’t have to recreate it. You duplicate it, right? Every client has the same, we’re ending for that we’re aiming for the same goal. That’s what makes it scalable.

Mike Miller  33:35

Right, right. Well, and somebody told me once, and I know I’m gonna butcher this, but basically, it’s, it’s, it’s better to understand the process and to understand what’s involved in it, and then use a tool, you know, like, like yours, to help you facilitate that process than it is just to get a tool and expect that it’s going to do everything for you

Marnie Stockman  34:05

We are not mandating the process for you. And yes, right. We always say we’re not aiming to do that we’re we want to be flexible enough that your process right, can be done in the tool. So I agree, we would agree with that completely. I would highly recommend folks work through it in the workbook, at least sketch it out, right? You don’t have to, you don’t have to run through the activity for all 40 of your clients. But I’ve recommended in the book, take your top clients take a take a healthy happy high paying client, take a healthy happy, kind of automated, right, just in process, don’t we need to do client and then take a couple unhappy ones. And let’s see what’s a like and what’s not like and let’s build a process around what would improve all those things, and then you’re ready to put it in the platform now that we know I’ve defined. I know my clients are happy when they show up to a QBR in general have a CSAT score over 95. And, you know, regularly respond to emails engage in some way, right, they’ve adopted my tools, they’re at least 75% aligned to my stack. That’s a healthy customer. Once I’ve decided that’s healthy, then put it in a platform and look real quick, anybody that’s not green. That’s where I need to go deal with.

Shelly Miller  35:27

It makes it easy. I mean, that’s just that’s excellent to be able to see exactly what’s going on with who and I love. I love the plan. The plan is look at who you have that successful and what they’re experiencing, look at who you have that isn’t and see what they’re experiencing. I mean, really,

Mike Miller  35:45

it gives you insight,

Shelly Miller  35:46

it does, yes.

Mike Miller  35:48

And a place to start from and you know, if you want to grow your business, and that’s that reminds me of another question that you kind of touched on. And that is, so we look at the post sale phase, part of the post sale phase is an advocacy phase, or I’m sorry, an ascension phase.

Marnie Stockman  36:11

I look it as the advocacy to for the record.

Mike Miller  36:16

Well, yeah, exactly. Um, but so we look at QBRs you know, that quarterly business review as an ascension phase, right. And it’s done face to face. Now, typically, with every other business, you would write letters and postcards and try to upsell, you know, but with MSPs. It’s that doesn’t seem to work. It seems like it has to be a personal hands on approach. That is, you know, obviously, in the customers best interest this is this isn’t just an opportunity to upsell, right, it’s an opportunity to serve the customer and to give them the best. Well, whatever, protect them the best keep them up, maintain their productivity, whatever it is that they’re doing

Marnie Stockman  37:08

Consultative, as opposed to other services that, like the add ons are clear, right? Like, oh, you bought the orange sofa? Did you want the loveseat? To go with it? I don’t need you to write to me what a loveseat is right? Like, but maybe I didn’t know you sold orange love seats. So thanks for that that would match perfectly or not. Right. But when their technical services, and you said like, Hey, you bought your server from me, are you looking for switches? Like, what? Like, yeah, man, I’ve been, I’ve been checking out the switch catalog every night. And it asked me this question. That’s not how that plays out. So that’s why it has to be consultative, because someone’s going to have to explain why you care about firewalls and switches. Right. And it’s, I mean, there are different levels of interest in that. But it’s the consultative piece of why this makes them more secure. Why this makes their business more scalable, more efficient, save them time make the money that drives those sales. So yeah, I’m afraid the postcards not going to work in the situation.

Mike Miller  38:17

Right. And see, that’s what makes Lifecycle Insights really, to me a marketing tool, because you’re able to track, you know, the status of all the QBRs you can schedule them and make sure that they’re you know, on time, but you cannot and also understand the satisfaction level of the customer almost in real time. And, and then create a plan to engage them and make them happy, solved there needs upsell, where need where needed. I mean, it seems like a I mean, I know it’s the premier, you know, customer success platform in the industry. But it’s also to me, like a must have marketing tool.

Marnie Stockman  39:12

So I mean, when you say that it it people are doing the work just manually or in their head, right? So you’re right, even though like why don’t people already have it is because it’s one of those cases where your strength becomes your weakness. We’re just good enough at all of the IT right that we’ll just cobble this together, but that cobbling together over time, makes it it loses priority, because nobody’s sitting around thinking like, let’s let’s go attack some spreadsheets today. And other things come up, right. So to have those insights right in front of you, does make a huge difference. And we talk all the time about good QBRs do two things. First, a QBR is a mini sales process to existing clients. You get better about having the conversation but it also gives you those best practices that you can talk about In a pre, you know, in a prospect conversation so. So QBR light is what a true consultative sales process looks like you don’t have the same information, but it’s about all of the usual words, right discovery. Let’s find out what they’re doing. Let’s collect some data. Let’s highlight some risk. And let’s point out what they need. Right? That’s what you do in sales. It’s the same thing, you doing QBRs, just kind of to your point at the next level up. And then the other piece that we drive home with QBRs is it’s the place to get referrals, right, if you’ve delivered value to them, and say, Do you know there folks in this industry like I clearly like talking to folks in the insurance industry, we talked a lot about, about a lot of best practices today, you know, that we’ve brought from other insurance industries, you know, other folks in the area, you know, that that might get value from my services today. So that’s a good referral close on a QBR that drives other additional sales. So it’s a big, it’s a big spiral.

Mike Miller  41:06

It is, it is, that’s brilliant. And it’s very important, it’s a great place to stop to because you’ve, you’ve really kind of, like, given us the the what you get, what it’s going to do for you why you need it. And like I said, Lifecycle Insights is the premier, the premier tool for customer success. And you’ve Literally The Book on Customer Success for MSPs.  Yeah, that’s a good way to wrap on my plan. I love it. It’s great. Well,

Shelly Miller  41:44

and could you tell our listeners and viewers what, where is the best place to purchase the book? And, when can they learn more about your dashboard? Well,

Marnie Stockman  41:55

so Amazon, and the nice thing about being named Marnie is that if you Google Amazon space, literally space Marnie, guess what you hear me? So huge advantage there. So yeah, right on Amazon is easy. And it’s 4.99. So I really tried to take it as we really wanted to deliver it to folks because we feel like it’s important information, not because I was looking to be an award winning author, right? We just felt like it was important information to share. There’s a Kindle version. I think we may have an audible version coming next year, so okay, I have someone who sounds a lot like me, but isn’t quite me who has volunteered for this

Mike Miller  42:41

so well, nice.

Marnie Stockman  42:44

If you ever want like a mother daughter to show we can. We can invite mom. Okay. Oddly enough, so experience in this field and our our leave a message, voicemail recording sound a lot alike. So we may go with that.

Shelly Miller  42:59

Oh, fun. Okay.

Marnie Stockman  43:02

So that is how you can get the book. And then info@lifecycleinsights.io. If you want to email happy to have a conversation if you want to go to our website, it’ll have some bright new shiny bells and whistles for the new year for sure. And you can follow us nearly anywhere you would like to be. We’re on Reddit and Discord and Facebook and slack and Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn. So if you can find us, get me a 14 year old and iPhone. Touch.

Mike Miller  43:35

Right. Exactly. You’re not looking very hard if you’re not finding Exactly. Awesome. Thank you so much. Pleasure. Always. Yes, always a great show and

Shelly Miller  43:48

so much information and tips that you provide. We really appreciate it

Mike Miller  43:52

exactly. You for having me.

Shelly Miller  43:54

Thanks again for listening to the mind world Marketing podcast. Make sure to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Google podcast, Stitcher, Deezer or Spotify. Plus, check out my where on YouTube and subscribe. You’ll find a lot more marketing tips, insights and resources that will help you get your sales and marketing working together and moving in the same direction.

The post Marnie Stockman Part 2 – Literally the Book on Customer Success for MSPs appeared first on MSP Marketing | Mindwhirl.

Mike Miller  00:06

So we’re wrapping up Cybersecurity Awareness Month having talked about a variety of cybersecurity topics. We’re going to close out this series of interviews by talking about cyber insurance. If companies heed the advice we’ve heard about all throughout the month, and build a robust cybersecurity program within their company, hopefully they’ll never need to make a claim under cyber insurance, you know, assuming they’ve purchased it. But with us to explain the importance of buying cyber insurance is Craig Taylor, CEO and Co Founder of CyberHoot, a cybersecurity consulting and learning management firm. Craig, do companies today need to buy cyber insurance? And if so, why?

Craig Taylor  00:45

In one word, Mike. Yes, cyber insurance is no different than car insurance, flood insurance, or even life insurance. You buy it, hoping you never have to use it. But you sleep soundly knowing you have protection in case you have a catastrophe. And it’ll help you get back up on your feet after a cybersecurity breach. Every company really should examine their need for insurance and the policies they have such as errors and omissions liability. And cyber is one of them, and purchase enough insurance to cover them based on the risks they face and the data they possess. cyber insurance also requires you to have some kind of a cybersecurity program in place.

When you’re filling out that questionnaire. You need to be honest, and you need to be doing the things that you write down on paper, questionnaires cyber has completed ask companies if they’re doing awareness training, do they have a chief information security officer like we provide at cyber boot? They ask about password managers governance policies, risk assessments and a variety of technical protections such as encryption, anti virus, spam filters and multi factor authentication. Claims are actually being denied Mike, if you fib on that questionnaire, and it’s proven that the breach was tied back to something you said you were doing. But in reality weren’t.

Mike Miller  02:11

While really so some insurance claims are being denied due to inadequate security being in place.

Craig Taylor  02:18

Well, not exactly inadequate security. Because if you’re truthful on the questionnaire, and you say you’re not doing some of the things they want you to be doing, you might get insurance, still, you might not you might not get it to begin with. But if you’re honest, they can’t deny you. But if you’re dishonest they can because you said you were doing X they charge to a certain premium based on your risk, and then you weren’t doing it.

Mike Miller  02:42

Okay. Are there any insurance tips and best practices you can share with us?

Craig Taylor  02:48

Yes, as a matter of fact, we’ve blogged extensively and we’ve interviewed some experts in cyber insurance, about things you should be doing within a company relating to cybersecurity insurance. So if you want to go deeper into this matter, visit cyberhoot.com/blog and search for the word insurance. We did a two part series where we interviewed an expert a noted expert in this area but for tips for the listeners today. Here’s some things you should consider. If you find yourself in a breach, and you’re doing your investigation, but you haven’t yet reported it to your cyber insurance carrier, because you’re maybe investigating your confirming things, that sort of thing.

Make sure you don’t renew your insurance, if it’s up for renewal during the in the middle of a cyber breach, because they’ll deny future claims for not having been have had it reported and you renew, that’s a very important thing that you have to get straight. Second thing is, is there’s hundreds of kinds of cyber insurance, and every business is different in what they need.

So my advice is to consult an insurance industry expert to help that’s familiar with cyber insurance and all the different coverages so that you can buy just what you need specific to your firm to the data you have, and your the needs of your business. Finally, if you have been listening to these interviews, and you’re doing the right things, perhaps you’ve hired a vCISO, so you have a mature and robust cybersecurity program with awareness training, and all of the things we’ve been talking about in these interviews, then you should be asking or demanding a discount and you may have to shop around to find one, but you should get credit for all the good work that you’re doing.

Mike Miller  04:30

Okay. Great tips for companies needing cyber insurance. Thanks for educating us correct.

Craig Taylor  04:36

My pleasure.

The post Day 31 – Cyber Insurance Do You Need It? – Cybersecurity Awareness Month appeared first on MSP Marketing | Mindwhirl.

Shelly Miller  00:06

I went to the doctor last week. I’ve hired electricians and plumbers to fix things in my house earlier this year. These professions are all based upon consumers hiring these folks on a part time basis. Cybersecurity industry is doing the same thing these days with something called virtual or fractional Chief Information Officer of vCISO. With us today to discuss these vCISO services is Craig Taylor, CEO and Co Founder of CyberHoot, a learning management and vCISO service provider to small businesses and  MSPs. All over the world. Craig, please tell us why companies should use a vCISO to help them build their their cybersecurity programs.

Craig Taylor  00:43

Surely that’s a great question. Businesses are increasingly turning to vCISO to build their cybersecurity programs. And those programs include things like risk management, risk assessments, risk registries, and that all leads to a cybersecurity roadmap where you remediate the most egregious things or risks that you face. A good vCISO so can help you establish governance policies awareness training programs, conducts phishing testing of your staff and handles security incidents are answers cybersecurity questionnaires from clients and insurance providers. They also act as consultants on your IT projects to ensure cybersecurity is baked in from the beginning. So there’s just so much that goes on within a modern business that requires advice from a cybersecurity professional. And the only way to find those people because there’s 3 million unopened or unanswered jobs in cybersecurity in the United States today, is to hire a part time professional known as a vCISO.

Shelly Miller  01:44

Wow. Okay. So there’s, there’s more that goes into cybersecurity programs than most people imagined. Can you tell us what process you follow for CyberHoots vCISO program and building out a cybersecurity program for your typical company?

Craig Taylor  01:57

Sure I’d be happy to, for most companies in the small to medium sized business space, and that includes managed service providers, cybersecurity maturity is quite low to non existent in many cases. Unfortunately, that’s not a criticism of these companies, though, because, you know, you can graduate from an Ivy League school in the United States and have no cybersecurity training whatsoever.

So we have to sort of start from scratch with so many companies. Put simply, business owners don’t know what they don’t know, which means I have to do a lot of education when I get in there to start. So during the onboarding phase, first thing we do is we conduct a risk assessment. And in parallel, we start awareness training to educate people on why we’re doing the things we’re doing and why it matters so much.

So we teach them phishing, we teach them password, hygiene, and things of that nature, right off the bat. But that risk assessment is really important because it codifies the administrative, physical and technical risks that accompany faces. And we prioritize those in the risk assessment, and then decide what to do about those risks.

So we rank order them by probability impact and materiality to the business, we get a list that goes from the highest risk to the lowest risk. And then we decide as a in jointly with the business owner, we’re going to accept the risk, we’re going to remediate it or transfer it transferring it is done through cyber insurance. So out of all of that, in that initial risk assessment, we build a 12 to 18 month roadmap that addresses various projects to remediate restaurant business.

Shelly Miller  03:28

So Craig, what process do you follow with your vCISO? So clients?

Craig Taylor  03:32

Good question, Shelly. So we follow a pretty orchestrated engagement process for all of our vCISO clients, they typically have the same immaturity. So we do have to do all of these steps in this order. The first thing we do is we perform a risk assessment. And remember, when we talked about the risk assessment, it builds a risk management framework for quantifying and managing your cyber risks in your business.

And it leads to that roadmap for remediation of things. But we also know that on that roadmap, we’re going to find things like adopting the newest NIST password standards to migrate off of nine character complex passwords that you change every 90 days, which is time consuming and a waste of time to 14 plus character passwords.

That means 14 or longer, that are non complex and non expiring. We adopt a password manager because very few have done that. And that is the only way to secure good password hygiene across all of your employees. So we definitely have a project there. We make sure we examine the multi factor authentication into things like email systems, VPN, banking, and SAS solution software as a service online. So financial applications and Salesforce, things of that nature.

We start awareness training right in the beginning in parallel to all of these other steps, because we find that employees that know more, are more willing to accept the Password Manager and the change of password complexities, things of that nature. And then finally, we also draft up a set of cybersecurity policies that govern the employees behaviors when they have to make independent decisions on their own outside of the controls of technology. So that’s a very important step as well.

Shelly Miller  05:20

Great advice, Craig and very timely with Cybersecurity Awareness Month. How can companies interested in vCISO services contact you?

Craig Taylor  05:28

Well, thanks for the shout out Shelly. They can email me at Craig@cyberhoot.com or if they want to learn more about our vCISO service offering visit cyberhoot.com/vCISO, there we have a service description and you can find out a lot of information and engage with with us that way.

The post Day 30 – What is A vCISO and Why Do I Need One? – Cybersecurity Awareness Month appeared first on MSP Marketing | Mindwhirl.

Mike Miller  00:06

Today we’re talking about vulnerability scanning, and penetration testing of company networks and computers. These tasks are important for just about any business to perform. They’re often confused with one another, but are very different security tests require a very specific skill set to be performed with us to explain what vulnerability scanning is, and how it differs from penetration testing is Craig Taylor, co founder and CEO of CyberHoot. So Craig, what do we need to know about vulnerability scanning and penetration testing?

Craig Taylor  00:39

It’s great question. It’s often confused. When I’m pulled in to talk to companies about well, we need this thing called vulnerability scanning and pen testing. It’s the same thing, right? It’s not, they’re very different. vulnerability scanning is using software. pre built by a community of security researchers to interrogate your company, your network, your computer’s programmatically through a tool, it’s an application you run and it goes out and touches all the computers and networks, it can be trusted or untrusted.

It can be a hacker on the internet run from a perspective of a hacker on the internet with no access to the network whatsoever, it’s going to look at all the windows and doors of your firewall or your company network to see what’s unlocked what’s open and what’s not. It can be run on the inside with credentials.

And without credentials to do the same thing. When you run a vulnerability scan with credentials, it logs into the computers and the servers and the network and it interrogates the operating system for what version of software is running, what patches are installed, what patches aren’t installed. And so it’s a very good way to get a template of your entire network, what exists, what responds to an IP address, and what risks are associated what vulnerabilities are inherent in those devices. That’s a vulnerability scan.

On the pen testing side, again, you can do penetration testing, being trusted, or untrusted. But it’s a human being doing the test. It’s a hacker or white hat hacker typically, who logs into your network and starts looking at the files that are on the file server where a pen vulnerability scan will just see oh, there’s files there, a pen tester will see a file called passwords. And he’ll open that up and I’ll say, Oh, look at this, I have all of the administrative passwords for the network.

Now I can log in anything I want. And I can get access to any data I want. So penetration testers are real people trying to use the information from a vulnerability scan, to escalate their privileges, to steal critical files and data, and to really do what hackers actually do within a network. So they’re very different things.

Mike Miller  02:50

Okay, so vulnerability scanning is more of an automated assessment by scanning software, checking that all the doors and windows or your business are locked.

Craig Taylor  02:59

Yep.

Mike Miller  03:00

Right. But penetration testing determines whether your locked doors and windows could be picked open in some easy way. I guess. Is that right?

Craig Taylor  03:09

It’s a great analogy. I love that mic. And I wish I thought of that, because it’s exactly right. A pen tester can pick the locks if they’re not strong enough, if you haven’t patched the lock, so to speak, in thinking of locks as applications. Yeah, so that’s exactly right.

Mike Miller  03:26

Okay. So when should a company use either option in protecting their business?

Craig Taylor  03:32

That’s a fantastic question. And I get asked this all the time, I get pulled into consult with companies that want a pen test and an application or a vulnerability scan. And I asked them a few key questions. And I say, you know, are you training your employees? Are you governing them with policies? Are you doing some very basic things?

And they say, Well, no, but we were told we need a vulnerability scan and a pen test. That’s what our, assessor, the last company that assessed us said we needed to do. And thank you for bringing up that slide. Because this really gets to the heart of the matter. Imagine you’re in a car accident, you go to the doctor in the emergency room, and you’re bleeding profusely, does the doctor check your cholesterol or order up a colonoscopy or cancer screening, these are all important medical procedures that if you’re healthy, and well help you survive in the long run, which is what I considered vulnerability scanning and pen testing in a in a computer or in a typical business environment. You don’t always need those things right away if you’re not doing the things that are more basic to protect your company.

And so imagine this red line is your cybersecurity maturity. On the left, bottom left is a very low maturity company. And they need to increase their maturity by doing the things that are in that chart that you see there. So for example, on the administrative risks, which are green, they need to do a risk assessment.

They need to start awareness training governance policies on the technical side, you need to put two factor authentication on all your Internet facing ports, protocols and applications. Make sure any viruses running everywhere, filter all your email with a spam filter, do Asset Management get automated patching in place. Once you have those basics in place, you’ve stopped the bleeding for a company that could be easily compromised. And you move up the maturity scale, you can start doing more advanced things like adopting a password manager on the technical side or establishing a stronger risk management framework hiring a vCISO.

So eventually you get out to the point where you’re so mature, you should be doing vulnerability scanning and pen testing, but they’re much later in the maturity of a company. So it’s important, but it’s not necessarily the first thing you want to do.

The post What is Vulnerability Scanning and Penetration Testing – Day 29 of Cybersecurity Awareness Month appeared first on MSP Marketing | Mindwhirl.

Shelly Miller  00:06

I hear about ransomware attacks all the time in the news from the Colonial Pipeline to the Kaseya breach that impacted 1000s of businesses in the summer of 2021. I mean, ransomware causes havoc and damage to our computers and networks. Like did you know that what makes ransomware such a dangerous and effective attack, is the encryption built into its malware? With us to explain benefits and challenges of encryption? Is Craig Taylor, CEO and Co Founder of CyberHoot while ransomware uses encryption and is bad encryption is actually very important for all of us. Am I right? Craig?

Craig Taylor  00:40

100% correct, Shelly. Encryption is what enables the entire internet to function as we know it today. Without encryption, we would be unable to perform most of what we like to do on the online today, such as visit a bank and pay a few bills. Your communication is always encrypted between your computer web browser and the remote banking website. This is a good thing because it ensures you and only you are doing your banking and all your private data is kept secure.

Encryption protects the confidentiality, integrity and availability, what we’ve called and talked about previously, the CIA of data protection.

However, when encryption is built into ransomware, if it’s done correctly, because there’s been plenty of ransomware that can be broken by security researchers and your data can be gotten back by poor implementations of encryption. But when they do it, right, it locks your files up solid, so you cannot get access to them unless you a pay the Bitcoin ransom or whatever Maze ransom, or you restore from a backup, a good backup and so many IT companies have done really great jobs of backing up your data, you get hit with ransomware, you turn to your backups, you’re back up and running pretty quickly.

That’s not, we don’t want to go too far down ransomware because now hackers are releasing your data to the internet. And it’s affecting the confidentiality, not just the availability. But when it’s done correctly, encryption and ransomware is a bad thing. But all the other times for our daily lives and our online internet, it’s a great thing.

Shelly Miller  02:16

Okay, so encryption can be good or bad, depending on how its used. Okay, so what are some of the common ways that encryption should be used to protect businesses?

Craig Taylor  02:25

Well, that’s a great question. For starters, let’s talk about your workstation. If you’re on a Mac, your data is encrypted by default for the last five or six years, or maybe longer, Mac’s automatically encrypt your computer and the data on it with something called File Vault on a Windows computer. Since Windows, I forget how early they introduced the BitLocker.

But with Windows 10 is but it’s on by default, it’s there. You do need to enable it though. And it’s called BitLocker. On the Windows computers, and key management is important there as well. If you imagine in our all our homes, we have those push locks where you can push a pin through the hole and unlock a door that someone locked from inside.

And people put the key, usually above the doorframe. That’s called Bad key management, if you can just pop it open and get in, right? Well, the same is true of computers, if you have BitLocker. And you’re not managing your keys, not on the device itself, but somewhere else. Then if it’s on the device, someone can use that key to unlock the computer and get you know, get access to the data.

So key management’s important. Speaking of backups, though, you have to make sure as a business that you encrypt your sensitive and critical data, both on an online and offline backup for these very reasons. If you have online backups, and those backups are encrypted by ransomware. Well, they’re of no good to, you know use.

Finally, the best advice I can give most companies is to adopt a password manager. And that’s an encrypted database of all the individual employees passwords that they use to do their jobs. It does some other magical things like prevent phishing attacks from working when you’re trying to log into the wrong website, the password manager will refuse. There’s lots of other benefits. But those are three examples of things companies should do to protect themselves with encryption.

Shelly Miller  04:09

Okay, so in summary for individuals, we should make sure we’re working on the web over encrypted communication. So we’re going to check to make sure there’s the lock symbol in our browser. We don’t use or access any websites that doesn’t have the lock. Now we learn and adopt a password manager that encrypts our passwords. And for businesses, we make sure that we encrypt our mobile laptops, practice good key management, encrypt backups and fund the adoption of password manager within the company. Great, these are some of the many ways encryption can protect personally and professionally to keep you safe.

Craig Taylor  04:47

Exactly right. Well said

The post The Many Benefits of Encryption – Day 28 of Cybersecurity Awareness Month appeared first on MSP Marketing | Mindwhirl.

WATCH The Mindwhirl Marketing Podcast Ep 46 – QBRs Built for MSPs with Marnie Stockman of Lifecycle Insights

Podcast Transcript

Shelly Miller  00:04

Welcome to the Mindwhirl Marketing podcast, your source for B2B business building information where we’ve talked to sales and marketing, and managed service providers and IT service companies, the insider secrets you need to know to grow your business. You want to help you attract leads and sales and show you how to align sales and marketing. So you can get more sales faster, less cost. I’m Shelly. And he’s Mike. And today we’re speaking with

Mike Miller  00:26

With Marnie Stockman of more of LifeCycle Insights Hey Marnie! Hey, so good to have you here!

Marnie Stockman  00:33

It is good to be here.

Mike Miller  00:36

We’re really excited about this. Because you’re you have a lot of knowledge on QBRs quarterly business reviews, and, and you know, keeping that major part of an MSP business going right, this is where a lot of the sales take place. So …

Marnie Stockman  00:55

I liked what Shelly said in your intro of sort of what your podcast is geared toward, because we always say we help MSPs sell to execs, not techs, right? Because it is QBRs are a sales tool, you know, for both existing clients and even in pre sales, because that’s the way you do the work.

Mike Miller  01:13

Right. Yes, exactly. And you’re obviously the person to talk about this, because not only are you the co founder and CEO of Lifecycle Insights, but you also have a doctorate in education?

Marnie Stockman  01:27

I do. Yeah. And add leadership. So

Mike Miller  01:30

Amazing. And, and not just anything but math. Yes. So very intimidating.

Marnie Stockman  01:38

I hope not to be intimidating. I not that I haven’t heard that before from a bunch of 17 year olds.

Mike Miller  01:44

Right? I’m sure

Marnie Stockman  01:45

I have to smile a lot.

Shelly Miller  01:48

Well, it also explains why you’re so good with numbers, you know, yeah, looking at data, figuring it …

Marnie Stockman  01:55

You know, my background comes from like you said, I was a high school math teacher. But then when I landed in technology, it was in the EdTech space. And we built an assessment and reporting platform for teachers. So in the land of making numbers consumable, imagine standing in front of 30 students and having to make a decision immediately about what action to take next, you need it in red, yellow, green, like I can’t do any thinking I have to look down at this report. See that Shelly and these four other folks are green and need some enrichment activities. And and so we really focus on, you know, making reporting simple, which is what we brought to Lifecycle Insights. That’s kind of how it came to be is, hey, can we use this idea of making data simple for managed service providers?

Mike Miller  02:41

Okay, okay.

Shelly Miller  02:42

Excellent.

Mike Miller  02:44

Tell us a little bit more about Lifecycle Insights, you know, what do you do? What’s the product? How does it help?

Marnie Stockman  02:51

So, so our goal, so as I said, I was in an Ed Tech space. And I and another colleague and I were interested in starting a company we had really rallied around the idea of customer success and creating raving fans and our process for doing so. And we were interested in finding a problem to solve where we could create some raving fans of our own product. And I did not expect that I would find the answer to that at a volleyball court. But I had played volleyball with Alex Farling for 20 some years, and knew he was an IT guy. And he knew I came from education. And that was kind of it. And when I told him, we were looking for a problem to solve, particularly around making data easy and consumable for folks, did he have a problem? And he said, Yes, I spent six hours today cobbling together industry firm, I did not know, right, cobbling together reports. For a QBR. I’ve got, I’ve got a PSA and an RMM. And this and that, you know, Excel spreadsheets posted notes on my computer, and I need to deliver a consumable report to executives to help them understand their technology health, and it takes me forever, is that something you could do? So the three of us got on a zoom call, and Alex kind of  of Shark Tank pitched us on? Like, this is the problem? Is this something you could solve? So that is why Lifecycle Insights came to be we in doing that, we realized that you need to have a source of truth so that you don’t end up with lots of duplicate data. So we found that was a problem with the cobbling together notion of reports. So we integrate with PSAs, specifically ConnectWise Manage,  Datto Auto Task, Halos PSA Synchro and ITglue. And that is where we grab company contracts, contacts and assets to pull into the platform. So we then do three things just to keep it simple. We automate the QBR reports that you need to take as supporting documentation, asset lists, user lists of full budget forecasts. So we automate a budget roadmap for your Client. And then not automated is the business pain, the sailing portion of a Business Review, which is an assessment. So we have assessment templates in the platform, we also let you build your own. So folks have multiple assessments depending on what they’re trying to address. And then we have a unique way of tying those pieces together in recommendations. So we color code everything red, yellow, green, stoplight reporting, right, red is bad, green is good. And it’s really easy for an exec to read their assessment report, like, Oh, why is my hardware scored 47% and then have all the supporting documentation behind it, and the recommendations that the MSPs would deliver. So it really helps MSPs have the strategic conversations with their clients, as opposed to feeling commoditized in that we’re just giving you widgets and gadgets. Right? It really lets them speak to the health of the technology and how it helps their business, not just a line item on their budget.

Shelly Miller  06:02

Okay, okay. Um, on on your homepage, you have a great walkthrough video that and I one of the things that stuck out even though it seems simple is the colors because you can easily and quickly note, this is what section this is. So that’s uh, our to our viewers, go check that video out. It’s and it’ll be in the description to a walkthrough. That’s, that’s really informative, and helps you see this is the differences that this tool would make.

Marnie Stockman  06:26

So it’s funny you say that because at the bottom of that page, we have one of our partners, William from ETop, who talks about that his whole presentation when he first was like seven days into his trial of lifecycle insights. He, he just told us clients, red is bad, we’re going to get the red out. And he sold $100,000 worth of projects in his first seven days, but just on like, bad, red, bad. Let’s fix this. I was like, wow, you have a really good relationship with them if you only need two words to communicate so well.

Shelly Miller  06:56

Yes, definitely.

Mike Miller  06:58

Yeah, definitely. But that’s great. That’s wonderful. So it’s a, it’s helping them sell more. Right. So the tool is helping them sell more.

Marnie Stockman  07:06

Yeah, without without being just salesy, right. Like it really helps them say business pains, right? Where what are your business priorities and goals? And then how can we align new technologies, increased technology security measures, to help you scale and secure your business? And in doing so, it really helps everybody I, you know, they talk about software is being software as a service or SaaS, and I really believe that managed services are CS as a service. So customer success as a service because they’re in the business of making their customers more successful. And their their method of doing that is just technology. Okay,

Mike Miller  07:48

okay, that’s a good point.

Shelly Miller  07:49

It is.

Mike Miller  07:50

That’s a really good point.

Shelly Miller  07:51

It is, which reminds me so you’ve made several reasons and points why your, your tool would really help out an MSP, and we’ve been hearing lately, you know, how about if I just from MSPs? How about if you just make my marketing automation tool, for example, run my QBRs.

Mike Miller  08:10

You know, I have MailChimp, that’ll send emails. 

Shelly Miller  08:13

Can we just do it there? And yeah,

Marnie Stockman  08:15

So. So I have a whole rant around. And, and male marketing tools. So the CRM rant is like, let’s just take what a CRM is, right? A customer relationship manager tool. And the the c part is, in fact, not true. The whole point of a CRM is prospect management to get them to become a customer. So we have first a badly named tool that makes people think that they should be doing that work in that tool. So that’s when they start pasting, and cobbling together. And let’s face it, it business owners are good at it. So if anybody can cobble together with duct tape, and some chewing gum, two different products, it’s this group of folks. But the reality of it is, you’re most efficient when you use the right technology. That’s what we preach it QBRs we can make your business better if you use the right technology. So I would say the same thing around the marketing tools. The marketing tools are good for automation and regular cadence. So if you’re trying to schedule an email, based on your cadence, okay, I can see that fit. But where are you building the reports, the marketing tool, for sure, is not letting you house your asset report the kind of your contact user report that you have to deliver to make sure you’re not missing exposed licenses and that type of thing. So it’s really a matter of that,  it’s pennywise foolish type of thing when you try to use a product for multiple purposes when they really don’t fit. So that’s my that’s my thought there. There are components of it that you can use, but the whole process is not a scalable if you’re not using a tool designed to scale that process.

Shelly Miller  09:54

Very well said so yeah, who wants to you really shouldn’t ever want to cobble anything together because If what when you’re in business for even a little while you start to realize, maybe I I know how to do it. I don’t have time to do

Marnie Stockman  10:07

Or should I do that?

Shelly Miller  10:09

Yeah, Exactly.

Mike Miller  10:11

Yeah, exactly. So with your with lifecycle insights, I’m not aware of another QBR tool. I mean, because there’s

Marnie Stockman  10:26

There several jobs, I have more than happy to share who the others are.

Mike Miller  10:30

Okay, well, so the ones that I’ve seen are always like cobbled together marketing automation tools, like either with Keap or with Active Campaign. But what I was wondering is, you know, you, Lifecycle Insights comes with, well, a lot of people have told us just how amazing the tool is, right? So, I’m, I’m going okay, so what is it about it that makes it so amazing? What’s that major difference? That makes all the difference? for MSPs.

Marnie Stockman  11:02

So it’s interesting, you asked about kind of what the other tools are. And, and I, there are other tools that focus on sort of one or the other area that’s really QBR focused. So we could speak to warranty lookups, for example. So if part of doing a QBR is to present all of your assets, and your customer doesn’t really want to discuss every single asset, but you need to have that supporting documentation of when assets or warranties are going end of life.

So part of what Lifecycle Insights does is warranty. lookups so there are certainly warranty lookup tools out there, like the scale pads of the world, right? They include warranty, lookups. But we go beyond warranty. lookups. That’s just part of what we do to clean up your data in the platform. So there’s this whole notion of automating reports, what types of reports can you automate. And then and there are a couple other products that do that.

So Narmada and Propel Your MSP are the two we typically hear about that work on those Automation Components. The other part of our platform, the assessment piece, we’re not a CMMC assessment tool that goes out with an agent and and detects things. We’re not a network detector. So not in that regard. But in terms of what questions are you asking, so a lot of you folks use, like we’ve heard strategy overview vCIO toolbox managed services platform, that’s more of a questionnaire tool that’s very manual.

So those are kind of the two places where we see competitors. But what Lifecycle Insights does is helps you connect the dots, so we take your assessment responses that are red, and say, which of these assets are causing the problem, right, so we automated all of this stuff over here. And now you can connect the dots and say, if we replace these seven, heaven forbid, Windows seven machines, you still have, we’re gonna solve his business pain problem, and we put it together in a recommendation.

So that’s one of the big differentiators. Another would be the fact that we actually check your data quality. So when we first started Lifecycle Insights, our beta partners were really excited, they were confident they had good data, they were ready to go run their report. But they found that they needed the warranty lookups and some manual intervention to fix their data because you know, garbage in, garbage out. And then the other piece that is fairly new to us is we built Report Builder, so that you can get a very consistent look over all of your reports in the platform.

But not only that, with a click of a button, you can regenerate the exact same QBR for each of your clients. So to have kind of an easy button to push to generate that report saves a ton of time. And it also has presentation mode. So other folks were then taking pieces from other platforms screenshotting them putting into a PowerPoint. So like in the land of mind numbing things, it would be screenshotting, an entire 70 page document, to put it into a PowerPoint. So we allow you to have this report builder view, which is a presentation mode that lets you click through it like it’s a PowerPoint, but you don’t have to build the PowerPoint to do it.

Mike Miller  14:16

Oh, wow. Okay.

Shelly Miller  14:16

I can see that for so many different applicants. Wonderful.

Mike Miller  14:21

People are telling us that it’s lifecycle Insights is amazing.

Marnie Stockman  14:26

Well, and I’ll be honest, I don’t think it’s so much the I think it’s a good bit of the tool, but we really do focus on creating raving fans. So I have to brag on both our developers and our support team and our adoption specialists. So if you go ask folks what they think of us, they will probably tell you that like they respond to tickets quickly. I asked them for something on Friday. They built it on Sunday. I know somebody on support sent over a note yesterday and it took them three hours to reply and they apologize and the MSP wrote back like same day service is superior to me to which we felt like you need to set the bar higher, because we’re disappointed that that took three hours for us. So we aim for raving fans and, and our partners make us better. So we listen to feedback. And then we pivot based on what they need and what makes sense. So we have weekly workshops on Fridays that any of our partners can come to, they can provide feedback, we show them updates of what’s new and upcoming, we try to do some thought leadership if we hear things in the space, and it is the conversations with them, that do make it a very community based, right this is what you need, because this is what you’re telling us you need not because we’ve decided it’s what you need.

Shelly Miller  15:40

Well, you’re very passionate about it. That’s clear. So you have you have a new book coming out. And you’re also a platform, could you tell us about that?

Marnie Stockman  15:54

I’d love to Yeah, so sneak peek, I had the author’s copyright here. It is Literally the Book on Customer Success for MSPs. Because I feel like we should be able to say like, literally, we wrote the book on it literally, all about upon. So this book comes from, you know, my previous world where it was an enterprise, a tech company, we had a huge team $20 million worth of ARR with over 95% Set retention rate. You can’t track metrics on that size scale, just by going with your gut instinct, right?

Like, oh, I think Shelly and Mike like us, they’re surely not going to go anywhere. And then come to find out that Shelly and Mike haven’t logged into the platform, or even noticed that we exist in seven months. And they’re, you know, you’re a threat for churn. So, so we wrote the book about, really, it’s kind of a half half stories, half guide or workbook. You know, there are there it comes with downloads of worksheets that you should print out to do the work to help really define a few things.

How do you segment your customers, so that you know who needs a true quarterly business review? And who maybe only needs one semi annually, right, so So not everybody needs the same business review. And they don’t need to be Quarterly. We call them that, because that’s the industry standard. But the reality of it is, they’re different segments. So we talked in the book about, I say, we because if it takes a village to raise a child, it took that whole village plus my two children to write this book. So so we talked about segmentation, we we kind of define the process that we used to define customer health, right? How do you know, your clients are happy?

And what metrics do you have. And if you’re using your gut for that, that’s not scalable, so we need to write it down. Because MSPs are all about processes that they can put in place to make things scalable, so other folks can do it, they can delegate it, opportunity. So a big portion of customer success is knowing where you have opportunities within your client base. So we work with a lot of consultants and the the industry, there’s agreement around the fact that quarterly business reviews done right, can really bring 30% more MRR or project work into your client base, you know, without even going outside. And then lastly, setting customer goals and tracking toward those goals with technology health. So in the book, I talked through doing that manually. And then in a shocking turn of events, we thought it was such a good idea, we decided to build a platform that mirrored the process so that MSPs have pretty color coded red, yellow green charts, to track their customer health, their segmentation, business reviews and stack alignment. And I have to say that our that our beta folks are most excited about both the stack alignment and the customer health by segment. Because if you’ve got your largest, most valuable client who’s red in terms of customer health, right, that’s that is anxiety producing, and you need to get to work to repair that. So we’re we’re very excited about both of these. So yeah, thank you for asking.

Shelly Miller  19:12

So when when’s the book coming out? Yeah.

Marnie Stockman  19:15

So I hit click on Amazon, next Tuesday. So it should be a really, I don’t I don’t know if that takes a 24 hour period or something. So it should be available November 1 ish. And we will have the book at ITNation November 10 through 12th. So we’re, we’re packing them up. Anybody that comes in chats can can grab a book, and that’s when we’re launching the platform as well.

Shelly Miller  19:38

Okay, great. I’ll I’ll put the link in our description

Mike Miller  19:42

I can’t wait to buy the book

Marnie Stockman  19:45

Stop by and see me, I’ll just ship one to you guys.

Mike Miller  19:49

That’s nice. Yeah, that’s great. So I’m assuming that you go into detail about what makes a customer you know, an MSP client red, right? Like, what puts them at risk.

Marnie Stockman  20:05

So for an MSP, I actually walk them through an activity. Because, you know, the reality of it is, is there are many different rules for this is there are MSPs. So I walk them through an activity and start with, like, here are some ideas. For example, is there a new leadership change in the organization? Are you hearing merger and acquisition? Have they asked for the password to any of the super secret? You know, services that they may need? Have they emailed you and asked for a line item list of your contract? Are they happy in terms of CSAT, you know, customer satisfaction scores, Net Promoter Score, what’s their general sentiment, that and, and the general sentiment, everyone thinks like, well, that’s the one. But I, you know, when I, when I did these numbers, when I did customer success before, just because someone liked, you didn’t mean they were going to stay with you. So stack adoption is another piece, if they, if they use 85% of the services that you offer, even if they weren’t happy for a day or two, they’d be hard to leave you. But if they’re only using a small portion, like maybe two or three of your services, then somebody else could easily come in, under cut in bidding. And you wouldn’t even know right, because you didn’t have a strategic relationship, or a sense, really, of how they’re feeling about it. So we give you a place to, to really create your own, we give you some out of the box, right? We give you sentiment and CSAT and NPS renewals are they likely to renew, but also you can define for yourself, and then score them on a scale of zero to 100 average that together, right? You can wait that and decide like, if they’re if they’re not 75% happy with me, I’m not going to make them green, I want to I want to, I want to trigger when that falls below 75%. So I can really go work to make them happy.

Mike Miller  21:59

Wow, that’s

Shelly Miller  22:01

automatic projections. Yeah.

Mike Miller  22:05

It is I mean, it is then you could well want to know that then you can develop strategies to bring them to green.

Marnie Stockman  22:12

So you have checklists in the platform of like your CPR, right? Your your recovery strategy, like how are we going to bring this back to life? Exactly that right, as soon as they fall. That’s what I did when I was a customer success manager on Mondays, I would look and if anybody moved, because we were in software, so I could see if folks weren’t using the platform. So if their usage dropped off, I would go see why. Right? Like, are they not interested in the product? Were they on vacation last week, and I don’t need to worry about it. And then there are strategies that are not just calling and saying, Hey, are you mad at me, you know, if you’re in charge of a strategic relationship with someone, you need to have a reason to call them. So hey, it’s the end of the year, it’s now time to look at assets that you might want to buy, because you’ve got you know, PPP money from this year. And you don’t just want to go buy everybody iPads because they’re cool. We need to look at the technology, you have to help prioritize. That’s a great reason to call somebody now at the end of the year. And it gives you insights then into, like, he did not take that call, you know, like she was mad and started yelling about a ticket. So I know there’s a customer satisfaction problem. So you need to have a plan for addressing it and a checklist for how to get them back. And not just to green, we want them to be raving fans. So there’ll be referrals, because what a great way to sell is through referrals, you know?

Mike Miller  23:38

Yes

Shelly Miller  23:39

I love that. Yeah. It’s like an insider tool. Like it’s like a secret to me. I mean, you know, like, Wow, you really need this. I mean, it helps you in so many aspects of your business.

Mike Miller  23:50

Well, like Dan Kennedy always said that. You wanted to approach marketing, like, like this, if you owned a restaurant. And Jim came in every morning, comes in every morning and gets eggs and bacon. Every morning. He’s done that for two years. If one morning he doesn’t show up. Somebody needs to find out what happened to Jim.

Shelly Miller  24:13

Yeah, absolutely.

Marnie Stockman  24:15

Absolutely.

Mike Miller  24:16

That’s what you’re talking about with, you know, customer success.  So it makes me wonder how far you take it.

Marnie Stockman  24:24

So So I think, first you have to start somewhere. So you can’t say like, I have to have all these things right away, or you get overwhelmed, but you have to prioritize the first thing. And when you look at your, like I talked about them in quadrants of let’s take our high value, high effort clients. So these are probably your compliance clients. They have a lot of needs, they’re providing a lot of value to your company. And if they left, it would be bad for you. If one of those goes red, that’s got to be your first priority, right? And then you also need to put processes in place to address how can we automate right now this is a good time for our marketing tools and our, you know, automation tools with if we’ve got this lower quadrant, that’s low effort, low value, but it’s still MRR to your company, right referral opportunities. What can you do from a mark remarketing to your current client perspective, that would keep that client, front of my unit, but keep you front of mind for that client. So if you’re providing certain value, then every month, you should remind them, but you can remind them with, hey, it’s fall. And all of my clients wanted to know how to do this. So here’s some things you could do. Right. So it’s the whole, it always comes back to education for me so. So you can use that segment and automation, right to remarket back to your customers that are not in the high touch Business Review component, but are in the lower maybe once a year annual review, but you still continually go back to them and remind them of why they need you your technologies and any new ideas you have for them.  Perfect, perfect. It reminds me of your social posts. And I am going to plug that and promote that because it’s like the most entertaining thing to me on LinkedIn. Always give away so much great information. The the webinars that you’re part of are wonderful. Because you care so much about MSPs and making sure they have the tools. So it’s every every article is a knowledge bomb that you put out there. And I appreciate also have those your social links in the bottom for anybody.  That’s awesome. Thank you.

Mike Miller  26:39

Yeah, everybody should connect with

Marnie Stockman  26:41

Yeah. Oh, I would love that for sure.

Mike Miller  26:45

Yeah, good. Good. Um, and what else was there about the there was the book, and then

Shelly Miller  26:53

The new Platform, but what discusses that with the book.

Mike Miller  26:54

Oh, yeah, that’s right. Yes, that’s right. Yes.

Marnie Stockman  26:58

I don’t know how you managed but we smushed them all together.

Shelly Miller  27:02

I guess it’s just best to that’s so much to undertake. So put them all together. Yes, get this. It’s a lot of work. But you get it all done at the same time. So

Marnie Stockman  27:12

Well, it’s you know, in the world of education. When we were, as we were working through with our partners, we were getting questions around, how can I track this for my own clients? Right, so so we started to see a need, and we started to do research on what customer success look like, in the MSP space. Now, of course, they’re called account managers, salespeople, vCIOs, CEOs, right, a lot of folks are doing this role around customer success. So it doesn’t need to be defined as a human. But as a part of the program. So when we started looking in this space, we really didn’t see any other tools in this space. But we were getting a lot of questions about it. So we thought, well, we should write a book around how they can think about it, and answer a lot of the questions that our partners were already asking us. And I was familiar with a lot of the Customer Success tools that are there for software products. So there’s Gainsight, Totango Churnzero, Planhat, etc. But they’re not geared toward the same metrics that an MSP would want. So they are more geared toward automation of of how many clicks you’ve had in platforms type of thing. Whereas what MSPs really want to see is that stack alignment are folks, you know, have they agreed to use my secret sauce, my DNA of my MSP, right, because they believe in what we’re bringing to the table. So that’s, that’s what brought us from, like, let’s write a book about helping folks, you know, answer their customer success questions to like, you know, what, we should probably build the platform to go with it.

Shelly Miller  28:49

Excellent. I think they go hand in hand. That’s, that’s amazing.

Mike Miller  28:53

Yeah. And that’s a that’s a huge effort an undertaking to put it together to make it. You know, we are that. I have one, I know that you’re under a hard deadline. I have one more question for you. Just just to see. You know, I’m wondering You had mentioned 30%. Yes, exactly. So is that what MSP should be looking at? Like so if, if I’ve got if only like, let’s say 10% of my revenue is coming from up sales to existing clients. I should be thinking that’s low. Right. So

Marnie Stockman  29:39

So what we typically see and this is from talking with lots of other consultants in the space, so it’s not just us with our partners, it is working with consultants that work with hundreds of other partners right. So what they what we hear is that 10% upsell on MRR and additional 20% on project work right out of the gate. If you haven’t been doing business reviews with them regularly. If you’re on a regular cadence of business reviews, that initial bump wouldn’t be as high as 30%, necessarily. But if you don’t have a cadence, you shouldn’t be surprised with at least a 30% Bump. And it will be a combo platter of MRR and some project revenue. Okay, so we have one partner that lets us tell this story. He was about 350,000 a year and had been for six to 10 years. And then he decided to follow the process and build business reviews and we coached them into you know, what, what, how that business review looked? And I mean, pinged us afterwards and said, when we got to the end, and I didn’t know what to do, and one of my business partners, Alex said, like, when do you what do you mean, you didn’t know what to do? Like, we went, we went through this, what do you mean? And he said, Well, they said, okay, and I said, Okay, what? And they said, we’ll do it. And he said, We’ll do what? And they said all the $80,000 project. So if you figure compared to where his revenue had been, like he added, you know, all of that in one shot. Yeah. So so, you know, it’s sort of those results may vary. But we really see if you consistently implement a process where you have not had one, you between time savings and upsells, my goodness, 30% is is reasonable, for sure. And you should be saving. If you’re cobbling together spreadsheets for 12 hours, let’s just do an under an hour with some clicks, can we? Can we can we do it faster? Like we can push the buttons on the date is reading in nanoseconds. So let’s improve on that.

Shelly Miller  31:44

And that’s the compelling reason.

Mike Miller  31:45

Yes, exactly. So so what I’m hearing is, you’re gonna make more money every year, and you’re gonna save a lot of time. And time is money.

Marnie Stockman  31:57

And you’re gonna reduce churn. So like, if you’re having strategic conversations with your partners, they’re less likely to leave you.

Mike Miller  32:08

Yeah, absolutely. And that’s so important. Because let’s face it, you know, leads are hard to find, you know, and getting customers is difficult. So when you have exactly, yeah, once you have one, you want to keep them and keep them happy. Lifecycle Insights is what helps you keep them happy. Exactly. Yeah. So that’s fantastic. Well, Marnie, really, thank you so much for joining us on the Mindwhirl Marketing podcast. And it’s really been a pleasure

Shelly Miller  32:41

We have really enjoyed it, we’ve been looking forward to it for a couple of weeks.

Marnie Stockman  32:44

Yeah. Excited. Yes.

Mike Miller  32:50

Oh, good.

Shelly Miller  32:51

It’s almost like you know, you’re famous. We keep hearing about you. And then you’re like, Yeah, I’ll be on the show. I’m like, All right. Well, okay.

Marnie Stockman  32:59

I don’t have the ego to believe that but I will

Shelly Miller  33:04

soak it in. So yeah. Believe it believe it.

Marnie Stockman  33:07

I feel like I’m walking into the show. And you’re having like a New Year’s Eve event, and I’m just in my power. I feel like all stars here.

Mike Miller  33:15

No, no, our shelf fell off the wall. So we had to get fancy.

Marnie Stockman  33:21

If my shelf fell off the wall. You would be looking at an even emptier wall than I currently have.

Shelly Miller  33:32

Well, great talking to you.

Mike Miller  33:34

Thanks Marnie.

Shelly Miller  33:35

You are welcome back anytime. Thanks again, for listening to the mind world Marketing podcast. Make sure to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Google podcast, Stitcher, Deezer or Spotify. Plus, check out my where on YouTube and subscribe. You’ll find a lot more marketing tips, insights and resources that will help you get your sales and marketing working together and moving in the same direction.

The post QBRs Built for MSPs appeared first on MSP Marketing | Mindwhirl.

Mike Miller  00:06

Welcome to our video series explaining cybersecurity terms and best practices and simple and understandable language. Today we’re here to talk about the concept known as least privilege. This sounds important, and I’m sure it is. And with us to explain what lease privilege means is Craig Taylor, Co Founder and CEO of CyberHoot. Craig, what is least privilege? And why is it important to small businesses and managed service providers?

Craig Taylor  00:31

Mike and Shelly’s least privilege, it refers to the access given to a device, a network, a computer or a data store. So a database or an application in a company. And the least privilege means giving them only the privileges to do what their job requires. So for example, on a computer, you may not need administrative rights to do your job, you could run as an unprivileged user, which would prevent you from installing software, things of that nature. It’s important because giving a user especially a new user too much access or control can spell disaster, for example, accidentally exposing critical or sensitive information could happen, or someone might click on a file they shouldn’t, and they have the rights to install the software. And that could lead to a compromise of the computer network at that company.

Mike Miller  01:30

Okay. So that’s, it sounds like a good idea, you know, but what are some of the ways in which least privilege could be implemented at a company that, you know, might be listening to this?

Craig Taylor  01:42

First off, when I’m called in to consult with a company through our vCISO offering or as a risk assessment, I always ask if they remove administrative rights to all their users. And I usually get quite a bit of pushback, because it’s what people are used to receiving. They they don’t like having shackles on what they can do with their computers, especially power users. In those cases of power users, I’m often telling them, well give them a second account for administrative rights if they absolutely need them.

For someone that knows what they’re doing, or is a developer or an engineer, because they will have enough occasion that they don’t want to wait for it to wander up to their desk to install software, or do what it is they need. Another important step for least privileges classifying the data in your company knowing what data you have, and where it lives. So that you can set application controls, file permissions, maybe even segment the network to prevent access from everyone, perhaps to the human resources file share, or the Human Resources network, or perhaps the finance department is on their own network segment. And you control and limit access between different parts of the company. That’s also a concept of least privilege is this idea of network segmentation. Finally, not every company can put in place these mandatory controls like removing administrative rights or segmenting the network enough or any other manner of file permissioning.

So it’s important to place governance policies to in place for your employees have them review a WISP a Written Information Security Plan, a Password Policy and Information Handling Policy, because when they make decisions about how to run their their lives, or do their jobs, they may have discretionary control or access to certain data. And they need to understand that they need a job. You know, it has to be part of their job to access certain files. For example, in a hospital, if you’re not tending to a patient, you’re not permitted to review the record even though you have access to do so. That’s a discretionary control. You need policies to govern and guide employees and then mandatory controls where possible to set and require and limit access to least privilege.

Mike Miller  04:04

Okay. So I understand now the context of least privilege. Could you give me an example maybe of what could happen when a company or employee doesn’t follow the best practice? Is there no repercussions?

Craig Taylor  04:18

Yes, absolutely. It happens quite regularly in my engagements, usually, that’s why I’m called in because something’s gone wrong. But for example, if your employee operates their computer with admin privileges, we’ve been talking about that. And they go to download a utility they need and they think they’re on a safe and secure website, and they download and run that file. It may in fact, have a Trojan or ransomware embedded within it. If they have that administrative rights, they’re not going to be prompted or prevented from infecting their computer and like quite likely their entire company with ransomware.

And it happens all the time. I’m not talking like dozens of times. I’m talking 10s of 1000s of times all over the world this has happened. Another example and I’m sorry familiar with this one, a nurse who new a famous movie star sports figure was at their hospital went into that person’s record to see what they were in for so they could maybe sell it to The Hollywood Reporter. They were summarily fired because they did not have rights or they were not supposed to be in that. So even though they had the access, they weren’t following lease privilege or need to know in their job responsibilities, and it led to a termination.

The post The Principle of Least Privilege Explained – Day 27 of Cybersecurity Awareness Month appeared first on MSP Marketing | Mindwhirl.

Shelly Miller  00:06

We enjoy a free country governed by the rules of law, which is written for us. So we know what should do and what we should not do. I mean, I think back to when I took Driver’s Ed and study drive a driving manual to get my driver’s license. So why then don’t more businesses have written rules or governance policies outlining acceptable behaviors, and requirements for operating computers and securing the data in our businesses from compromised and harm?

With us to dive into this question today is Craig Taylor, CEO and Co Founder of CyberHoot and awareness training and cybersecurity program service in the cloud. Craig, why do businesses need cybersecurity policies?

Craig Taylor  00:44

Well, I appreciate that question very much. We have policies that we watch and read the rules of the road for how to drive, but we don’t have them in most companies for how to operate a computer.

And yes, you can drive a car and kill somebody, if you’re not paying attention, you don’t know what you’re doing. But computers can lead to the death of our companies if we infect ourselves with ransomware, or something along those lines. So policies that help guide your employees, governance policies, and in the cybersecurity space are really helpful for setting high level expectations with your employees on their expected behaviors relating to technology and the operation of a computer, you have in this graphic in front of you other documents that are needed to run a business with control objective standard procedures and guidelines.

But at the beginning, any company should be looking at rolling out a set of governance policies. And to explain that a little bit better to understand that I want to explain for you the difference between discretionary and mandatory controls. Because technology plays heavily into that on the mandatory side. But governance policies play heavily into that on the discretionary side.

So for example, discretionary controls are actions and behaviors freely decided or acted upon by your own employees at their free will. Mandatory controls are actions, behaviors that are imposed upon them are controlled by the technology. If you remove administrative access from your users at your company, which I highly recommend, they can’t install any software of their own, they need to get the IT department to do it. That’s a mandatory control. But if they have that administrative access, they can install anything they want from anywhere at their discretion, and that could be a really significant property are probably

Shelly Miller  02:35

Okay. So for example, a discretionary control while I’m driving is the speed limit. Unlike most others, I can honor the speed limit if I want to, but at my discretion, it’s my choice. So Craig, what’s an example of a mandatory control while while driving?

Craig Taylor  02:52

So that’s a great question. So on the one hand, the speed limits your discretion. On the other hand, a mandatory control is a governor, which is often installed on rental vehicles that limit how fast you can drive. That’s a good example of the difference between discretionary mandatory and it’s a, it’s a good analogy for technology and the administrative rights that I just spoke about.

So allowing everyone administrative access to their computer, gives them discretionary control to do anything, and anything they want. And some of that could be quite harmful. Not purposefully, but accidentally. On the other hand, taking it away, can make it more secure by having a mandatory control.

Shelly Miller  03:39

Okay, that makes perfect sense. So now back to cybersecurity policies, why do I need them and what should I focus on for my MSP or my small business? Good question.

Craig Taylor  03:49

And almost every company we walk into to do cybersecurity program development under the CyberHoot vCISO program, we start with four policies and two processes. The policies are a password policy, a acceptable use of computers, policy, a written information security policy, and an information handling policy.

These outline the discretionary controls that employees must follow. And I’ll give you two examples. password policies have requirements around the length of passwords, storing those passwords in a password manager, and enabling two factor authentication. If you sign up for a SaaS application in the cloud, your company might not have control over that. And if you pick your weakest password that you’ve used in 25 other places to access that critical cloud application maybe it’s Salesforce or something else, you’re putting your company at risk, and therefore the password policy is meant to remind you and set high level objectives that you need to choose a 14 character password for Salesforce and put it into your password manager which allows it to be a unique password and then perhaps even tie two factor authentication to that account.

On the information handling side. We have prescriptions in there that are all all discretionary for you. If you’re an accounting firm or a tax firm, and you’ve got people’s social security numbers in their tax returns in their financial data, you need to shred that when it’s no longer needed when that file is closed, and it’s no never going to be referenced again, shred those documents.

And while you’re using it, you know, have it out on your desk when you’re doing the tax return for your employee. But if you go to lunch, put it away, lock it up. You don’t want to have someone or overnight you don’t want the cleaning staff to come in and take photographs of all the identity information and steal your clients identity because it will be tracked back to your firm.

And that could be a real devastating event for your brand damage. So in summary, policies allow you to set high level expectations with your employees on protecting the data entrusted to your company and to them when technology can’t over time. Those are augmented by control objective standards, procedures and guidelines right.

However, by setting these policy requirements, you can help employees make independent decisions to protect your company in very important ways and hopefully reduce the chance of a compromise.

Shelly Miller  06:19

Okay, very good.

The post The Importance of Cybersecurity Policies – Day 26 of Cybersecurity Awareness Month appeared first on MSP Marketing | Mindwhirl.

Mike Miller  00:06

We’ve recently discussed the importance of data privacy measures in our businesses and personal lives, but got me thinking about how I’m supposed to protect data as a business owner or as a managed service provider. So with us today to discuss data protection and the CIA, is Craig Taylor, CEO and co founder of CyberHoot, an online Cybersecurity Awareness training and cybersecurity program tool for MSPs to resell, and businesses to use. So Craig, how should I be protecting the data entrusted to me as a business owner?

Craig Taylor  00:39

So great question, Mike. And it’s really important in Cybersecurity Awareness Month. So cybersecurity is very much focused on protecting data and information. But the question is, and what most people don’t understand is, how are we supposed to protect that data? And really, the answer is simple. There are three main tenants that we focus on for protection of data.

And they’re known as the CIA, I use that very specifically, because everyone remembers that three letter agency and the government, whether they love it, or they’re nervous about it, that is a different story. But it’s a good way to remember data protection.

And the C stands for confidentiality, is the data accessible by only those who should have access to that data. So for example, in your business, if you have a spreadsheet on the salaries of all your employees, that shouldn’t be on a public drive for all your employees to view, it should be in an HR folder, where you make, you know, raises and decisions around hires, and salaries, and is limited to the CEO or the CFO and HR.

Integrity is what I stands for. And that is, whether the data is accurate or free from tampering.

So for example, if that spreadsheet was open, and it was used for the payment to employees of what their salary was, what if an employee got access to the spreadsheet and added a zero to their salary or something more subtle, just, you know, a few $1,000, the HR person might not recognize that and that person will give themselves a raise, and the integrity or the accuracy of the data would be suspect. And that would be that’s a problem.

The third is the most commonly understood and the one that everybody is most typically concerned about A stands for availability, is the data available when you need it. And a lot of folks say, Well, if I get a backup, and I get a ransom event, I can just restore that data. And I’ll get that availability back.

But newer ransomware puts that data on the internet affecting its confidentiality, and possibly tampers with the data affecting its integrity so that it looks like your company is doing some bad things. So all three are really in critically important for businesses. Now, there are other aspects of data and access and permissioning.

Things like identity and access management or non repudiation of actions, that’s can you prove that whoever made a change was the person who made the change, all of those things go around data, data protection, as well, but they’re the three that I want you to go take to take home with you today is the CIA confidentiality, integrity, and availability.

Mike Miller  03:16

Okay, okay. So protecting the confidentiality, integrity and availability is important to businesses. But can you give me like the top ways, like, let’s say, five, three or five ways in which businesses should go about protecting their data, in these ways, like through confidentiality, integrity, and availability?

Craig Taylor  03:39

Absolutely. So one of the best ways I’ll give you five ways or five things that every business ought to do in order to protect their, their data, and, frankly, their operations and their business, their reputation, everything, these five are sort of the minimum essential security measures that every company should take. And as a consequence of them, you’re looking to protect your data.

The very first one is a risk assessment, you should do a risk assessment. This many most companies I go to consult with in my vCISO, practices through CyberHoot who have never had a risk assessment before. And they sort of cherry pick the things they want to fix, but they don’t know if they’re the most important or the most dangerous or why they’re doing it. It’s just their, their choice.

A risk assessment really codifies it and puts it into a method of analysis that allows you to rank order the threats, you face, the risks you face, and then plan over time how to remediate that. So that’s your number one.

The second is you can’t really do a risk assessment on your own. You need a seasoned professional. If you said, Oh, my daughter broke her arm. Let me try and fix it. You wouldn’t do that you’d go to a doctor. So you should go to a vCISO or chief information security officer. Not a full time one that you hire yourself because you won’t find them and they’re too expensive, but you should hire a vCISO. So and I’ll be shameless plug CyberHoot has a series of vCISO standing by to help your company out with these kinds of things, we always start with a risk assessment. And some of the later things I’m going to mention, but that chief information security officer helps you build a cybersecurity program that fits your business, it’s right sized for you. And for your current cybersecurity maturity.

Many times people will say, Oh, I need a next generation firewall, or I need this technology or that technology. And it’s like saying, when you go to the emergency room, you’ve been in a car accident and you’re bleeding. The doctor says, oh, you should have your cholesterol checked, makes no sense because you’re not there. In that moment, that’s not going to help you at all. Certainly in the long run, it does, but at the moment, you need to stop the bleeding. And most companies I walk into have a number of critical risks that need to be addressed long before they check cholesterol or do some of these higher order higher, more mature activities.

The third tip is to begin Cybersecurity Awareness training with your employees, consultants and contractors. Without awareness, these people are just ticking time bombs for clicking on a phishing attack, giving up their credentials to a hacker buying gift cards out the wazoo sending a wire transfer to the wrong person. There’s just so many different hacks that are out there today with hackers, you know, COVID has led to a lot more hackers a lot more free time to attack us all attacks are going through the roof.

So you need to train your employees on how to spot and avoid those forms of attack. Forth, once you train them on how to spot phishing, it makes a world of difference if you even test them one time with a phishing test, to make sure they apply their knowledge, I have very important cases where I’ve been training a company for three years, the first test I ran, they failed miserably, and they passed every single test. Since then. They didn’t apply their employees did not apply their knowledge.

So testing them at least once or once a quarter is our recommendation. And again, CyberHoot does all of that govern your employees with policies. We talked about discretionary mandatory controls earlier in another podcast and discretion is up to the employee. And that’s where governance policies create the set of requirements for your employees to choose wisely, when they’re signing up for an online service, and they can pick a password at their own discretion, they should follow your governance policy that says 14 or more characters in length, not their favorite eight or nine character password, because that will lead to a breach of that Software as a Service website.

So Mike, in summary, a risk assessment, a virtual chief information security officer awareness training, test your employees and govern them. Those five are the part and parcel of our CyberHoot vCISO program in case folks are interested in that. And if you start with these things, you’re on your way to building a basic minimum essential security program that you can then augment over time with additional controls and protections that will help protect your company and lower the chance that she’ll be breached and your data will not be available and not it might be changed, the CIA of your data protection will will be protected.

Mike Miller  08:05

Okay, so protect your data is confidentiality, integrity, and availability by hiring a CyberHoot vCISO to help you do it.

Craig Taylor  08:15

Yes, we’d love it to be CyberHoot but any vCISO as long as they’re, you know, they come with great recommendations. But yes, we we’d like you to hire us but we have there. You just need that outside assistance to make it work properly for your company.

Mike Miller  08:29

Great advice.

The post The CIA of Data Protection – Day 25 of Cybersecurity Awareness Month appeared first on MSP Marketing | Mindwhirl.