Partnerships Unraveled
The weekly podcast where we unravel the mysteries of partnerships and channel to help you become more successful.
Partnerships Unraveled
087 - Andrew Down - MSP Marketing 101
Managed Service Providers (MSPs) often struggle with marketing despite their technical prowess. In this episode of Partnerships Unraveled, Andrew Down, the Director of Sales for the IT channel at Vendasta, sheds light on the importance of marketing for MSPs.
Andrew shares compelling insights on the common misconception that merely providing content to partners leads to its utilization. Learn how a collaborative effort between vendors and MSPs can drive effective marketing and lead generation, turning technical expertise into business growth.
Ready to transform your marketing strategy from product-centric to solution-based? Andrew Down explains why this shift is crucial for MSPs to resonate with SMB end users. We dive into the importance of thought leadership, credibility, and relationship building, along with Vendasta’s innovative approaches like digital marketing needs assessments and an AI lead capture tool.
Connect with Andrew: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewdown/
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Welcome back to Partnerships Unraveled, the podcast where we unravel the mysteries about channel and partnerships on a weekly basis. My name is Efe and I'm excited to announce our special guest, Andrew Doan. How are you doing, Andrew?
Speaker 1:I'm doing great Efe. How are you?
Speaker 2:I'm doing great. Thank you for asking Andrew, for those who may not know who you are. Could Epin, how are you? I'm doing great. Thank you for asking, andrew, for those who may not know who you are. Could you?
Speaker 1:introduce yourself. Who are you? What do you do? Why should people listen to you? Yeah, absolutely so. My name is Andrew Down. Currently I'm the Director of Sales for the IT channel at Vendasta, a Canadian cloud marketplace software company, and I've been in the IT space for about 15 years now, have an education, a commerce degree, got right into tech sales and I've worn many hats, including being an MSP owner and head of sales for over six years. So you know, I like to think I have a good understanding of distribution channel marketing manufacturers and the MSP ecosystem. The channel marketing manufacturers and the MSP ecosystem.
Speaker 2:Now, I'm so excited for this episode because we met each other a while ago I think it was last year.
Speaker 2:And I've been thinking about this, so I think it's going to be an interesting conversation. So I think you're also exceptionally knowledged and you focus especially on the MSP channel, the MSP partners, and you also have a strong opinion about MSPs, and that is that they suck at marketing, which I think everyone would agree, because MSPs are typically traditionally they are made up of more tech oriented people, but I think when it comes to sales, and especially marketing, they really have no idea how to do it. They don't know what they're doing. So, but I think that we can all agree that it's important for MSPs to start investing in marketing, so why would you say that that's an important point to be discussing?
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know most MSPs when they start. You know I'm a sales and marketing person myself. I did not start an MSP. I don't know how to do the technical work. So, most MSPs out of the gate, you know one or two people. They tend to be technical in nature and you know, when I joined my last MSP there was three founders, all technical. You know they were struggling with sales and marketing. They could do the work, they could solve a lot of business problems, but they didn't know how to position, how to find customers, navigate distribution and all those sorts of things.
Speaker 1:And I just think it's something that isn't necessarily a strength and that's okay.
Speaker 1:But you know, the one thing that MSPs have is they solve so many problems for businesses and it's just a matter of getting out there and, you know, meeting people, finding that first customer, getting referrals, being known in your local space and really focusing on marketing, you know, and marketing your brand, marketing your business, but definitely something and I mean it's not my opinion, I think it's many's but you know, msps do tend to suck at marketing and, like I said, I just think it isn't their natural kind of what they're good at, what they're used to.
Speaker 1:And those that get it, those that lean into it or maybe even outsource it right. There's lots of industry experts that will help with marketing as you grow. You can hire on the sales and marketing side those that do that tend to see that that larger growth, you know, and get to a million and 5 million and 10 million in sales. It really starts with, you know. Marketing ultimately drives leads, which converts to sales, and there's a few, a few dials and knobs you can turn to, you know, attract better leads and convert higher percentages of leads into closes, which just ramps up sales. But it really starts at that top of funnel and the marketing kind of ecosystem. So it's very important for MSPs, and all businesses for that matter, to focus on marketing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think MSPs, I think channel partners in general a lot of their business. They do it via personal relationships, so I always think that if they had that marketing support, imagine how much faster they would grow. Now, when it comes to, I think, enabling these partners and helping them market and generate demand, so a lot of vendors they assume that if they provide content to partners, they will use it, and we both know that it's not that simple and they don't necessarily use that content that are provided by the vendors, especially if the partner is small. They don't have a marketing team. They work with many different vendors, so it becomes really hard to be updated in all the content and all the marketing campaigns. I think so, so I recently hosted Catherine Rose, founder of Channel Marketing Association.
Speaker 1:She's great.
Speaker 2:Yeah, she's great. It was a great episode. And then she shared that I think less than 15% of partners engage in marketing programs that their vendors deliver. Now I think what I want to ask you here is that, within the ecosystem, whose responsibility is it to drive leads within the ecosystem, whose responsibility is it to drive leads in the ecosystem like it's like? What I want to say is that it's probably everyone's responsibility, especially vendors, partners. How do you think it all comes together?
Speaker 1:yeah, great question and I agree with you. It's, it's everyone, it's the vendor, the manufacturer, it's the MSP. The problem I find is I think most companies focus on their objectives and don't think of the end state, and I believe that good marketing is marketing that's seen by people. So I like to think of it as the SMB experience. First, the entire goal of a blog, a social post, a thought leadership article, whatever you're doing to promote your brand, it's only as good as the people that are seeing it. You can have the best blog, the best social posts, the best billboard, but if it's on a road that no one drives by, it doesn't really matter. I liken it to if you have a store in a mall but it's in the basement at the end of the hallway beside a bunch of closed stores. No one's going to go to you, right? So you spend all this money for your location and no one comes.
Speaker 1:I think that's what happens with a lot of marketing content. Manufacturers make beautiful white papers and you know you put your logo on it. You send it out to your clients, but if it doesn't reach them because it's hard, it takes time and effort to distribute that content why write it? You now have this amazing thought leadership piece that no one sees. I think the other piece, too that's really important to tie in is some MSPs will share something for the sake of sharing it. That can almost be as bad, because it doesn't tie into their why, to their business. And if you don't have a strong digital foundation, reviews and social posts and a LinkedIn page and a decent website, you can drive traffic to competitors, right? Because when people start to search for a problem or a product or a solution, if you're not coming up on Google, if you don't have a website, if you're not active on social media, they'll often go to the next, the next company, the next person, right? So, and and I mean we'll get into it and talk a little bit more, I'm sure, about some of the digital foundations that we do, but things like SEO and coming up on Google map packs and looking like a real business are so important.
Speaker 1:So it's, you know, using getting your foundations first being reputable, being findable, being trustworthy, and then it's about distributing the content to your end customers and, like I said, the value of content is only if it's seen. You know, and I think it's important for vendors to remember that as well. You know, Just because you're creating the content, how can you help your MSPs distribute it? And, as MSPs, just because you're getting all this amazing content from your vendors as a thank you for all the great sales you're providing, how do you make sure that your customers see it? And marketing? The whole goal of good marketing is it fuels more sales and it's this beautiful circle. Good marketing results in more sales, which results in an increased investment in marketing. But it really starts with that eyes on the content. If people aren't seeing it, you know it doesn't really matter how good the piece is.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm going to get back to you know all the great things that you're doing at Vendasta and how you're helping the partners you know the foundable be ranked on Google search and things like that.
Speaker 2:But there's a topic that I want to tackle first. So at Chenex, from our partners we often hear that they really don't want to publish vendor content or vendor marketing campaigns that is really product oriented. So, for example, a campaign that talks about the specs of a product, because I think, at the end of the day also their end users also you know SMBs they do not really understand and care about the technicalities of the product and you know that's also kind of the reason why they get help from an MSP or a channel partner. So I think, at the end of the day, what the SMB end users want is that they want to understand how their problem is going to be solved. So from our experience we have seen that solution-based campaign, solution-based content that are provided to partners or push through partners, they perform much better in terms of both partner and end user engagement than product based content. Now you work with a lot of MSPs. Would you account for this?
Speaker 1:I would a thousand percent agree with that. You know I talk about this a lot when we're having our meetings at the enterprise level with manufacturers or when we're meeting and consulting with MSPs in local markets. No end customer. You know, if you think of a doctor, a lawyer, a hair salon, a retail customer, whoever you're serving as an MSP, they are not going to Google. Where can I buy a Lenovo X1 Carbon Gen 3 with 16 gigabytes of RAM and a 512 solid state hardware, like they are looking for products right?
Speaker 1:They're not looking even maybe for brands. They're going to say I need a new laptop, right? Or you know how can I do this on my computer? And you know I think a lot of brands, especially the manufacturer side, focus on the products you know Cisco, meraki, mx270. No business outside of your MSP customer is going to Google that. No one is searching for a specific product and if they are, they know what they want and you might not be a good fit for an MSP anyway. They're just looking for the cheapest solution to order online, right.
Speaker 1:And I think MSPs the real focus, as you touched on that solution-based content. It's thought leadership, credibility how are you solving business problems and how can you help your customers? Right? And that comes with referrals and testimonials and sharing examples of work you've done. And you know we do a lot of work with the manufacturers and we try to pull them away from products and into solutions. At the end of the day, if you're funding and you're providing marketing to MSPs, you have to have a belief that there's a two-way relationship. If you help an MSP get a customer, it means they're going to sell more of your stuff, right? And so you don't just because you aren't promoting a product or your exact brand. Helping an MSP drive sales will, in turn, help you as a vendor as a manufacturer and that's where we genuinely see this as a relationship.
Speaker 1:And at my Old MSP, we really focused on three brands. We had a security vendor, we had a hardware vendor and we sold Microsoft and that's all we did. If you wanted options of laptops or firewalls or whatever the product was, we weren't the place for you. But we had very, very strong relationships and trust built with a couple of key vendors that would share with us all sorts of marketing content and money, right through MDF and different initiatives where they would trust us. They knew if we won the deal, we were going to sell their brand.
Speaker 1:And I really encourage MSPs to get close to your vendors. Don't just think of them A, don't think of them as a vendor right, they are a partner but get close to them and get to know your sales reps and the teams there and help each other, because through the channel, the manufacturers only succeed with the MSPs selling the product right and the more of that solution-based content and thought leadership you can get, the more they'll sell, which is good for everyone in the channel. So, yeah, I mean I very much agree with you and the team at Chamex on that and it's something that I think all of us could be better at. You know, stop pushing your thing and help the end customers learn and in turn that will lead to those sales.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I fully agree, especially, I think, in the SMB segment, that educating the customer, I think, becomes much more important, especially when it comes to the philosophy of marketing.
Speaker 2:I think it should be all oriented towards making them aware, showing them how the solution could really help their specific business problem. Now, andrew, in our last chat you said that MSPs are the most important outsourced partner, which I thought about this after a chat and I think I agree, because I think nowadays the foundation of every business is IT and now the MSP space is also expected to grow faster than the rest of the channel in 2024. So Canada's shout out to Jay McBain you know they made 10 predictions for the MSP space in 2024. And they predict that new customer acquisition will be among the top three challenges for MSPs. I would say that this probably applies to other types of channel partners as well. But do you share this view? And also that's the first question and also, could you tell us about you know the great things that you're doing at Vendesta to you know, help those MSPs overcome that challenge and help them acquire customers more easily?
Speaker 1:Yeah, the lead generation, the new customer, acquisition of new customers, is definitely top of mind and we hear on both sides of the channel. On both sides of the channel, vendors are looking for ways to acquire new resellers and MSP partners and the MSPs are looking for ways to acquire new SMB and customers, right. So we hear that in all of our conversations through the channel. For us at Vendasta, we like to boil it down. I touched on it earlier, but we really start with a digital marketing needs assessment. So we run a proprietary tool or snapshot report and it's basically a report card. How are you doing compared to your competitors and industry leaders on things like your website, social media, reputation, listings, ads and SEO? So we benchmark you and then what we'll do is we'll make recommendations to either invest where you need to improve so if you're not coming up with organic SEO or paid ads, that might be a focus point to invest, right, whether it's vendor funded or your own marketing budget or double down where you're winning. If something's working really well, if you have a great reputation and a ton of reviews, get more right. Google likes that, so you're gonna come up higher on search rankings. When you have higher rankings, more reviews. You're responding to reviews, right, so so we really look at the whole digital customer journey and make sure that we can help you.
Speaker 1:The final thing and you know, vendasta is a large company. We have about 700 employees globally. A lot of that is sales, but then we have two really big departments. One is our developer team. We have over 200 developers, so we're always coming up with new technology. And we have a fulfillment team, a marketing services team, who are actually like an outsourced agency, who write content and build blogs and LinkedIn pages and whatnot for MSPs and other channel partners. But the developer team one of the cool things we've come up with recently is an AI lead capture tool that goes on your website, because one of the really interesting things we find is people go to your website but there's no strong call to action, no conversion, so they kind of they check you out, but then they don't really know where to go and most people don't want to pick up the phone anymore. They don't want to really call you. They want to chat or maybe send a text or an email. But this new chat widget that we have, which will scrape your website, knows all the information. It's conversational, it is not just a glorified form fill, like so many chatbots, where you ask a question and all it wants is what's your first name, what's your last name. You might as well just have a form fill on your website, right? It's not a real AI experience. Ours will answer questions. It will, you know. You can scrape vendor pages. You can have content.
Speaker 1:We have a lot of manufacturers who are leveraging it to build like knowledge bases for their MSP customers. It'll answer what's on your Google business profile and your Facebook profiles and all these different things, and what it leads to is an actual lead capture with content and questions that the customers ask that the MSP can then follow up with. And we find this so powerful. It identifies two things. One, the problem of many MSPs are small and they're on site. They're helping customers, they're installing new infrastructure, setting up computers. They're not able to answer their phone, right. So having this on the website instead of a call to action of call me, when you're going to miss the call anyway and they're going to move on to the next provider, is great. The other thing it does is it identifies another thing where you have this AI lead capture.
Speaker 1:It's a great tool. No one's chatting with it. Well, it's probably because no one's coming to your website. So why don't we look at that part of the story and are you using SEO and ads and driving people to your pages? Because there's kind of these two problems right? I mentioned before the store that's in the basement of the mall that no one goes to. That's one problem no one knows where your site is. And then the other one is once they're there, what's your call to action? And I think having both sides of the equation solved you know, driving traffic, driving awareness and having a strong call to action and a reason for a potential customer or prospect to engage with you is so critical today.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I love it, you know. Thank you for sharing that. And to everyone who's listening, who wants to learn more about Vendasta or who wants to connect with Andrew and talk about MSPs, I'll make sure to leave Andrew's LinkedIn in the description, so go reach out to him. Last topic that I want to discuss, because in our last conversation you shared something that's interesting. You shared that you are seeing a trend of convergence in the channel. So we have been seeing, you know, print and telco companies buying MSPs and you shared that now you're starting to see that convergence happen in the MarTech world. Could you share your thoughts on this trend and also the implications it will bring to the MSP world?
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know, we're seeing it lots here in North America and I think globally, where you look at two print companies and telcos acquiring MSPs, you'll be at Conica, minolta, ricoh, five local and regional MSPs up in Canada. And what we've seen in our space now, because we work with so many agencies, marketing agencies is we're starting to see MSPs and agencies merge and be acquired. We've had some regional ones where the local MSP has bought a local agency and even unofficially there's these local partnerships that are starting to form. And I think it all comes from the lens of helping the end customer, helping the MSP or the SMB. Sorry. So I really think of it as you want to make it simple for the SMB customer and in my mind there's no one that an end customer trusts more than their MSP. You know their passwords, you have their login information, you're running the backups and you're the most trusted advisor. And you know Canalys and others have released studies that 67% of SMBs want one trusted advisor and I believe the time is now that the MSP can be that holistic, trusted advisor, you know.
Speaker 1:The last thing I'll kind of say is we talk a lot about, you know, is the internet IT, is website IT, and I like to look at it again from that customer lens. I think, to a doctor, to a lawyer, to a retail store, to a florist, the internet is IT. You know the old joke used to be if it plugs into the wall, it's IT, and I think now if it's online, it is IT. You know the old joke used to be if it plugs into the wall, it's IT, and I think now if it's online, it's IT. And those customers want to be helped by their MSP with their website, with their SEO, with their social media, not only use and consume the products and services for their own business, but sell them through creating a revenue stream to their already existing customers, offering some of these MarTech and AdTech product services.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's very interesting because I recently shared another podcast with you and they were talking I don't know if you had the time to listen to it, but they were talking about how, especially in the SMB segment, we are moving to 100% MSP, 100% managed services. So I think that also, as you mentioned, more SMBs are now looking at a single trusted advisor, so everything that's IT related, so for a doctor, everything that's not taking care of a patient, then they will get that MSP to do it for them.
Speaker 1:I fully agree with that.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you so much, Andrew. Before I let you go, I have a final question. We're a channel podcast and we always like to ask our guests for referrals. Who do you think we should have on next on the podcast? Who do you think would be a great guest?
Speaker 1:Oh man, how many do you want? Where do you want me to start? I love the panel. I love relationships and networking. The panel. I love relationships and networking. We've met through some mutual contacts. You've had some great guests. This episode aside, there's some really really good content and people out there. Michelle Ragusa-McBain with SonicWall would love to hear the podcast. Juan Fernandez with superopsio or Matt Solomon at Channel Program would love to make an introduction and see if I would get one of those people on the podcast in the future.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much. Well, Michel, Matt and Juan, if you're listening to us, I'll be coming to get you.