Avoid These Costly MSP Lead Gen Mistakes – And What to Do Instead
Tim Fitzpatrick
MSP & B2B Professional Service Firm Marketing Consultant/Advisor | Fractional CMO | Build and manage your marketing engine to get where you want to go faster. | Remove Your Revenue Roadblocks
You're an MSP leader looking to attract more high-quality leads and build lasting client relationships. But let's face it, lead generation can be a frustrating game of trial and error, often leading to wasted effort and missed opportunities. In this episode, we're diving into the strategies that work, including avoiding common mistakes, leveraging the power audience method, and mastering high-converting webinars to supercharge your lead generation.
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Avoid These Costly MSP Lead Gen Mistakes – And What to Do Instead
Tim Fitzpatrick
You're an MSP leader looking to attract more high-quality leads and build lasting client relationships. But let's face it, lead generation can be a frustrating game of trial and error, often leading to wasted effort and missed opportunities. In this episode, we're diving into the strategies that work, including avoiding common mistakes, leveraging the power audience method, and mastering high converting webinars to supercharge your lead generation. Hi, I am Tim Fitzpatrick with Rialto Marketing, where we believe marketing shouldn't be difficult. Thank you so much for taking the time to tune in. I am super excited to have Scott Millar from IT Rockstars with me today. Scott, welcome. Thanks for being here.
Scott Millar
Thanks, Tim. I really appreciate you having me on today. This is going to be awesome.
Tim Fitzpatrick
I'm looking forward to digging in this with you, man. I know you got a ton of experience in the MSP space. Before we do that, I want to ask you a few rapid fire questions to help us get to know you. You ready to jump in?
Scott Millar
Yes.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Okay. When you are not working, how do you like to spend your time?
Scott Millar
I have two daughters, aged six and two. They basically take up all the time that I have when I'm not working, but I do like to work. I've got IT rock stars and I've got all side projects as well, so there's a lot going on. Yeah. So there's that. There's the gardening. I was out hiking yesterday. I stayed in Scotland, in the UK, and I'm next to all these mountains. So I was up a mountain called Ben Renis at the weekend there. So I'm still recovering from that. It's the first time I've done a hike in about six months. That's how I spend my time. Yeah.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Love it. What's your hidden talent?
Scott Millar
So this is a marketing. It's my hidden talent. I used to be a senior systems engineer for an MSP, so that's my hidden talent. I know we're going to be talking about Azure infrastructure and things like that, but for the audience listening, that's a hidden talent that I have.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Okay. What's the best piece of advice you've ever been given?
Scott Millar
This is a crazy one. This comes from my mother, and that is trust no one. I'm not going to say it's just based off our experience. It's maybe not the most positive thing to say, but it's something that I have... She told me this when I was age six or seven. I'm now 46 or 47, and I'm only just starting to learn this lesson now. It's maybe not a business. Well, it is a business lesson. It's a lesson for life. I would definitely go with that one.
Tim Fitzpatrick
I think that it's... Like you said, somebody could certainly look at that as being pessimistic, but I look at that as it being... It's just making sure that you verify, right?
Scott Millar
It's that. And it's about being resilient as well. It's resilient, I think more than anything else.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Just going into things with a certain amount of skepticism to protect yourself. But just because it's a dangerous world out there, right?
Scott Millar
Always have a backup, Tim.
Tim Fitzpatrick
That's right. That's right. What's one thing about you that surprises people, Scott?
Scott Millar
As I mentioned, I've got IT Rockstars. I've got other side projects. I like to work, but there's a reason for the work. So I'm going to be turning 50 in a few years time, and I really want to dedicate part of my life, and this is part of the plan, to making a change in the world, helping humanity in some way. This is getting back to my roots of helping people. It's how I was brought up. I don't know what that change is going to be, but the whole purpose behind IT Rockstars and what I do in my business is that's not the end game. The end game is something much bigger, so something that I can leave the planet knowing that I've helped humanity in some way.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. So you're using your business long term to enable you to do good in the world. I love it, man. What success mean to you?
Scott Millar
Success is sitting on a beach somewhere nice and warm. I mentioned I live in Scotland. So that's my success, but really the success is I like to see my clients succeed in what they're doing and how I'm helping them.
Tim Fitzpatrick
The beaches in Scotland aren't very warm, are they?
Scott Millar
No. Even on the warm days, you're going to get your toe in the sea there and you're only in for a couple of minutes.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. Where's your happy place?
Scott Millar
It's probably the same question again. There's a little village down in town in the Mediterranean, Portugal, called Praia da Luz, I love that place. That's my happy place. That's where I eventually want to end up. When I eventually do retire and I've changed the world in some way, that's my happy place.
Tim Fitzpatrick
It's Praia da Luz. Is that how it's pronounced?
Scott Millar
Praia da Luz, yeah.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Praia da Luz. Okay, awesome. I love it. What qualities do you value on the people you spend time with?
Scott Millar
I like people that think outside the box. They look at a problem and it's an opportunity. And so they turn that around from it's a real problem, an issue, and it's actually, no, this is an opportunity. So I love looking, finding people like that that look at the world in a certain way, because I am quite pessimistic and I always need reminded there's another way to look at the world.
Tim Fitzpatrick
So Scott, tell me more about what you're doing with the IT Rockstars. I mean, you worked for an MSP for a while, you had an MSP, and then you shifted gears.
Scott Millar
Yeah. So I mentioned as a senior systems engineer, did that for many years. I'm still technical at heart. I could go and look at a server log and geek out on that type of thing. But I looked around the room. This was about 15 years ago and looked at the technicians that were my senior and I thought, Do I really want to be here in 10 years? I looked at the owner of the MSP at the time and he was going places. He had a long term plan and I thought, I really need to get into the sales thing. I went and put on the shirt and tie in I was buying the suit at the time. This was before work from home and you actually had to dress smartly. I went on to the wide world of MSP sales, learned that whole thing, did it for a for a number of years, but one of the biggest pain points I had within that experience, it was fine when I sat down in front of prospects that were looking for technology solutions and they had problems. We were able to explain how our solutions helped how we could help them and how we were better than the other MSP, how we added more value and all that good stuff. But the biggest problem I had wasn't closing the deals. It was finding people that were looking for our services. It was a huge pain point that I had. That birthed the IT Rockstars. I left the MSP after doing the sales role. I'd asked the owner at the time, Can I get cut in the company because I'm bringing all this revenue? He was a smart business owner and he said no. I went and set up my own MSP and I got about six months into it. I'd already been through the experience of helping an MSP grow from three staff up to 30. I knew how much work was involved in that. I was six months into this new journey and I realized this isn't really what I want to do. It wasn't like my passion. I always had this urge and a geek of I got out on things like search engine optimization and marketing. I thought, let's put the knowledge that I've got in the MSP space and that big pain point I had and apply what I love doing, which was the marketing side of things. I used to geek out on SEO. I used to have my own break, fix, computer repair business on the site. This was back in 2007 before I was working for the MSP. You had to rank the website and Google for repair type terms, residential terms. I thought, I can maybe do this for MSPs. The last six years, and we started down the route of SEO for MSPs, and it's evolved since that. That's for how IT Rockstars was born. If you want to know Tim, the story behind the name IT Rockstars was a service desk manager at the time. I think I had actually went and deleted a partition on a server accidentally. I really messed up. He said to me at the time, You're a real Rockstarts, aren't you, Scott? I was like, Yeah. And I thought he was complimenting me, able to recover things, but he was actually making fun of me.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah.
Scott Millar
And that name just stuck. So as I mentioned, the whole SEO thing that's evolved over time. Seo still works today for MSPs. It's a very much a long term, it's a longer term marketing effort SEO. But there's much quicker ways to get business in the door. So that's what we focus on, and that's evolved over the last five or six years, how that strategy works. So that brings us up to today.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. And with IT Rockstars, it's It's a monthly membership model, right? And you're providing... You're not necessarily doing the work for the MSPs, but you're providing them the tools they need to be successful. Is that right?
Scott Millar
Yeah. So there's two elements. So the monthly membership, let's get done with you service, where we have the content, we have frameworks, video-led frameworks by myself in the membership, a monthly content and tools for our MSPs to get to put this framework into place, which is called the Power Audience. But we've had a number of members just in the last six months to say, Scott, can you just do this for us? Can you manage it for us? We do have another tier now. We call it managed marketing. It's like, you speak to an MSP, you guys manage the IT and we can manage the marketing for you. There are two tiers to our service. But usually most come in looking at the membership first just to get a taste of what's involved, how our system works and processes work. Then we go from there. As I mentioned, we work US. Majority of clients are US-based, UK as well. That's where I'm based. Australia, New Zealand, all the English-speaking countries. I'm happy to go into more detail, and I don't want to bore your audience, though.
The Biggest Mistakes MSPs Make When Generating Leads
Tim Fitzpatrick
That's all good. Hey, we're going to talk about lead gen. As you mentioned, this comes up with virtually every MSP I've ever spoken to. Like always, lead gen is a huge problem. What are the biggest mistakes MSPs make when trying to generate leads? And how can they avoid them?
Scott Millar
It's a really good question. And it's like there's multifast answers to this. The first piece of it is like, okay, well, what do you actually consider a lead? Because not Not all leads are equal. I'll give you an example of that. I mentioned SEO. You've got potentially a prospect that's maybe doing online research. They're looking for IT services, IT support in a local area, and they type in that type of keyword into the search. They're going to find your website, and maybe they make an inquiry on your website, maybe they take some form of action on your website, the book of meeting. That type of leads, I would say that's a good lead. That's for me because they're further down that sales and marketing funnel. But there is a whole spectrum of leads from the very top to the very bottom. To answer the question, there's different types of leads. I'll give you another example. You have marketing leads that I call them cold marketing leads. Someone that's maybe... They've opted in to a lead magnet that you have on your website. You've maybe been running ads on social media, or maybe you're just organically posting on social media, and they've opted in. They've requested the lead magnet, and now that lead is in your CRM. It's been put in there for you. The question is, okay, that's a lead as well, but it's further up that marketing funnel, I would say, and the one that's maybe for your services. But that lead can change over time. So you've got your lead nurture. The lead that came in further up the funnel was just wanting a lead magnet, depending on what your marketing activities are and where they are in their buying cycle and what potentially your follow-up process is with the leads that come in, maybe 12, 24, even 36 months from now, that lead will turn into something. So Yeah, it's multifaceted, the answers I can give you here. It's important, I guess, to be aware of that.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. One of the common things that I see, there's a few common things I see, and I'm actually curious to get your opinion on this. What I see in the MSP space is a very heavy sales focus, not as much on the marketing. It is very common to talk to an MSP that has an outbound sales effort, but they're not necessarily focusing a whole lot on the marketing side. I think that's a big mistake because I think you need marketing on the front-end, driving awareness and helping just communicate, Hey, how are we different? Getting in front of people and getting them to know, like, and trust you. But what do you see and what are your thoughts on that?
Scott Millar
I would definitely agree with that. We're obviously going to be biased here, Tim, because we're both in the marketing space. So we're going to give that. Yeah, we're going to agree in that. What I see, and I would agree with it, the fact that it's definitely more of a sales orientation. I do think that that needs to come first for MSPs. I speak to a number of MSPs that are just starting out and maybe come from a technical role like I did. I'm like, one of the first One of the things I say to them, you need to figure out sales before you go and start your MSP, because if you don't have that nailed down, then there's absolutely no business. With all the marketing in the world without the sales, there just isn't anything. The way that I see the marketing piece is it helps you get the sale. It's that nurture sequence. It's also the education sequence. You've got the lead that's come in. They've seen your lead about Microsoft Copilot, they have no idea what it is. You help educate them in what it is. You help them understand what it is that you do and what your services are. That can help you in the sales process. That's where I MSP is the marketing company. It almost complements what the salesperson is doing. When I was doing sales for the MSP that I mentioned back 15 years ago, there was no marketing whatsoever. The sale was a lot more difficult because you went and you did your discovery and figured out what their pain points were, what they required. Then you quoted them all this stuff on all these line items, and then you had to attempt to explain it. Whereas if you had marketing that led up to that point that educated them on all these line items, it's going to be a far easier sell.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. They go hand in hand, right? In my opinion, you need both.
Scott Millar
You do, yeah.
Tim Fitzpatrick
If you don't have marketing on the front-end, your sales efforts are going to be not nearly as efficient and much, much more difficult.
Scott Millar
I'm learning by this just now. To give an example, I haven't done this sales piece because I've had this a different model for the last six years. I had a couple of members that have asked us, can you just manage the marketing for me, which we're doing. I'm like, okay, we can go and sell this managed marketing service for MSPs. I'm now selling that and I'm struggling because I'm also in the marketing now, but I haven't done the sales in six or seven years, or sorry, 15 years. So it's like you need to have both.
The Power Audience Method
Tim Fitzpatrick
Have to. So Scott, you had touched on your power audience method and how it helps MSPs consistently generate leads while building more long term relationships. Tell us more about that. Break this down.
Scott Millar
Okay. So you're an MSP. You want more leads. Most marketing agencies, consultants, whatever type of marketing you're going for, they can probably get you more leads. It comes back to the question of the type of lead that's coming in the door. Where are they coming in? I can go on to some of the social media platforms. I can spin up an ad for you. And I was looking at the the stats today from the last year on some of the ad stats that we run. We were getting leads for around about $5. They were opting into a webinar. But a lot of those leads are not going to be... First of all, they just want to maybe know more information about the topic of the webinar or the lead magnet that you have. They're not going to be the ideal type of customer. They're not going to be qualified, and certainly maybe it's not in that position to buy your services. You can quite easily acquire marketing leads. It's very straightforward, but it's what you do with them once you've got them. That's why I go into this power audience. You can, through the use of lead generation and ads on social media, you can acquire these leads. If you set up your lead magnets correctly in regards to the types of things that you drive this traffic to, say, for example, a webinar where you can start to build a relationship. We find that webinars work really well. The reason for that being that you can start to build that relationship with the prospects. You can't really do that with an e-book or a PDF or something that's downloadable. But if you've got someone's attention there for 20 minutes like we're doing here today, it's a one-sided relationship more than likely, but you start to build that rapport. Then off the back of that, they're in your sphere influence. They're on your CRM. You can be sending out your weekly newsletter to them. You can be retargeting them on the social media and the digital platforms. Over time, what you can do with these leads is you can qualify the ones that are in your CRM, but the ones potentially they've maybe just signed up with their Gmail or Yahoo, they're maybe still consuming your newsletter. You can't really qualify them, you can't pick up the phone and speak to them. But you can have something like a referral program in place where they're maybe not your ideal prospect, but they'll be able to refer you to your ideal prospect with the right type of referral program. If you're picking up, say, for example, 100, 200 leads a month using this method over the course of a 12-month period, that's maybe 3,000 contacts you've got there, and it's in the local market. You can target down on the local market and you can leverage both from your CRM and your follow-up, maybe you've got an SDR where they're going through the CRM seeing the leads that are coming in. You've maybe got lead scoring, so you're seeing who's interacting with your newsletters, who's attended the webinars. Your SDR is following up. But there's that other colder piece of leads. That's where you can leverage a referral program. There's some amazing referral programs that I see MSPs using throughout the US. There's some awesome ones. I was speaking to an back in October. He's given away a Tesla, and that was his referral. It was some prize. I don't know how the structure of that deal worked, but he was giving away to some lucky person, and It wasn't necessarily a business in Tesla because they referred this piece of business to them. There's other types of referral programs, for example, where you're maybe... The referral commission is not cash in hand, it's not a gift, it is maybe a donation to a local charity. If you're going down that type of route, there's almost three winners in that. The person that did the referral, they're going to get the PR for that because you're doing another business. And then there's the two businesses that are connecting there for the referrals. That's why I call the power audience. Hopefully that makes sense, Tim.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. So you're really with the power audience method, it sounds... Are you highly recommending some type of paid ad on the front to bring people in?
Scott Millar
Yeah. Because you can go down the route, and this is what I see, and I see it. A lot of MSPs are doing this now. They're going in buying data from data sources like Apollo or ZoomInfo or places like that. Then they're loading it up into their cold email platform, something like instantly, and they're warming up mailboxes, and they're sending out maybe 10,000 emails over the course of a month, and they're getting back three or four sales appointments in the diary. While it starts, it's a long-winded method, and it's very much your spam. I consider it spamming your prospects, spamming your local market or the industry, the niche that you work in. There's a much better way to do it, and that's to get your prospects to actually opt in to what it is that you're saying. If you look at the cost of those leads, you can go through all that effort, and it probably works out to about the same cost as actually just running lead gen ads. But you can have a much warmer audience of contacts that you can leverage.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. But once those contacts come in, the key with the power audience method is you've this multi-pronged, multi-channel approach where it's like, hey, they come in. But getting them is one thing, right? I mean, with paid ads, they're going to come in, but you're not going to convert those well at all if you don't have the back-end to support it. And so it's whatever they're opting into, whether it's a webinar or an e-book or a cheat sheet or whatever, once they're in, we've got to have this process of continuing to nurture and build that relationship. And that's what you're focusing on with the power audience method is, we're going to use email, we're going to continue to educate and add value and build that relationship, because you touched on this before, it could be 12, 24, 36 months before that person is ready to buy. There's this I think it was Chet Holmes who talks about the buyer's pyramid. And only 3% of a market is ready to buy at any given point in time. Another 7% is open to buy. The rest of them, they're not buying at this point.
Scott Millar
That's right.
Tim Fitzpatrick
So 10% of the market is ready to buy. If all we're doing with our marketing is trying to find those 10%, and they're coming into our world, but if they're not in the 10%, they're just falling by the wayside, we're losing all kinds of opportunities. And with the Power Audience method, you're making sure that you're not losing those opportunities. They're staying in your world until they get to the place where they're ready to buy.
Scott Millar
That's exactly right, Tim. You've got it spot on there. And I guess the other thing to this, the other benefit, the hidden benefit, is that you've got this marketing spend, you're building up this power your audience, it's actually an asset in the business. When you come to sell, you've got this warm audience, and if you've got lead scoring set up in your CRM, you can go as part of the value of your business. Whereas you can't get that if you're just going after the 10 %.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah.
Scott Millar
And to tell you the truth, those percentages that Chet Holmes mentions from an MSP's perspective, someone in that business is looking for IT services. I question the It may be even lower because the buying cycle for an MSP and how sticky MSP services are.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. I don't know how long ago that pyramid was created, But they're good, rough numbers. But like you said, yeah, depending on the market, it could be way lower than that, right? Which is why there's a lot of MSPs who are making these outbound calls, trying to find those people that are in the 3% that are ready, that are looking to buy. They're like, this isn't working.
Scott Millar
I bet you could make the outbound calls, but just make them to the leads that you're bringing in for your advertising. Stop buying that data that's completely cold. This is much warmer data that you've generated yourself.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Well, the other thing, too, Scott, is everybody else is using Apollo or whatever it is. All using the same data sources. You're speaking my mind.
Scott Millar
This is my other argument with us. Now, there's a divide here because I geek out on a lot of MSPs on the cold email side of stuff. You're basically cold calling, fair enough. But if you're going down the cold emailing route, you're buying the data and then you're cold emailing, you're really spamming them. At the same time as you're spamming them, you're also implementing email filtering solutions to help stop the spam. It's like you're set a fire in someone's house and then you're going to sell them a fire extinguisher. Just like, morally, it's slightly questionable. And I do get the other side to that, while you still need to do business, I do get that. And as I said, this is a better way to do it. Have a warm list of contacts that you're generating off the back of your marketing.
Tim Fitzpatrick
There's more than one way to skin a cat, right?
Scott Millar
There is. Yeah.
The Key Elements of a High Converting Webinar
Tim Fitzpatrick
So, Scott, you touched on webinars. I'm a big fan of webinars. Let's dig a little deeper into that. What are the key elements of a high converting webinar? And Why is it such a powerful tool for lead gen, in your opinion?
Scott Millar
Okay, so I'll start the first thing, the last bit first. It's powerful for lead gen because you speak to most MSPs that are in sales. They're basically building relationships to get the sales. That's what it's all about. How can you build relationships at scales? Well, either an event or a webinar, you can have 20, 30 people in the room. That's why I see it as a highly effective method. It positions you as the expert. You're on the stage, basically, in the virtual stage. The other reason I like webinars is because you just have to click a mouse button. You don't have to go and rent a room and buy everyone lunch. We live in that digital world now. You just never know when the next pandemic is coming down the pipeline. You're basically scaling the relationship starting process. That's why I love them. But some of the We see things in regards to webinars like attendance. We look at the stats of attendance. We've been facilitating webinars for our managed clients for over a year now. What we see with attendance is if you can get 100 people to register for your webinar, you're probably going to get around about 25% attendance.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Interesting.
Scott Millar
You have to make you aware of that upfront, setting expectations. When I first started doing this, I was doing it for I see Rockstarts, and I was like, I'm going to spend... It was like $2,000 this month and I was getting leads in that certain amount. I had all these people register the webinar, and I had only a 25% turn up. But that's actually a good number. The rest, though, they're still in your CRM. You can still leverage those contact details like we discussed. Some of the tricks in regards to engagement and attendance is, and this is I think this, some of you guys will love this, is to geek out on how we've set this up. When you're running ads, there's types of ads that are available on LinkedIn and Meta. They're called lead gen ads. The prospect basically just enters their data, their details in a form within the platform itself. It doesn't even go to landing page. It pulls the data automatically and they can opt in. You can set up a Zappier connection to pull that data when they opt in. Then via Power automate, you can send them an invite to the webinar and it happens all automatically. They put their email address in on LinkedIn or Meta, Facebook, Instagram, and they get the meeting invite immediately to the webinar in their calendar. That's one of the first mechanisms that we implement for engagement. The second one is actually having a sequence, an email sequence. When they do register, you're tagging them in your CRM, they're entering your CRM and you have an automation. Reminders, basically, Hey, the webinar is going to be in a couple of days. Here's the amazing things that are going to happen in the webinar. Here's all the cool things you're going to learn about copilot or cybersecurity in the webinar. Then a reminder sequence, you're hitting them maybe 24 hours before, 6 hours, and then 10, 5 minutes before. I haven't implemented this myself or for my clients, even an SMS reminder. I think our CRM might be able to help with that just to remind them that it's going to start. From an attendance perspective, that definitely helps. There's other things that you can do there. You can incentivize the webinar. We ran one as a guest back in the summer. We called it the MSP Games. It was almost like a quiz show. We ran a series of prizes within this. We used a piece of software to run a game in the webinar. It was a series of questions that all the attendees had to answer. There was a prize rewards at the end of it. You could be doing that in your local marketplace for a bunch of local business owners, and you could be rewarding prizes. It gives you that opportunity after the webinar, give them a call up, just ask them, How did you find the webinar? Some feedback. Where did I send the prizes to? Everyone actually wins a prize. I didn't mention that. What's your address? Let me send this prize to you. These are some of the little tricks you can do to really help with engagement, get people to turn up to the webinar, add that value. Then there's that other 75% that aren't going to turn up What do you do with them? Well, you've got all that content from the webinar. Hopefully, you've been recording it. You can go and upload it into somewhere like OpusClip or one of those AI short makers that will make lots of video shorts for you. You can blast them all out into your social media. You can tag out the attendees. You can run them as ads when you're retargeting. You can send the recording to all the guys and girls that never turn up to the webinar. There's a sequence and series of things you can do with that webinar. These are some of the things that work the best.
Tim Fitzpatrick
I got a couple of things I want to ask you about this. You touched on this a little bit. In As an example in the MSP space, and by the way, any of the stuff we're talking about can be translated over to all kinds of different industries. But you mentioned, Hey, I might do a webinar on Copilot or cyber security. The webinar topic is just something that is going to help educate and serve that target audience. Is that right?
Scott Millar
Yeah, that's right. The way I approach the topic, and it's when someone joins our membership at IT Rockstar, the first two actions we have is set the date of the webinar, decide what your topic is. I always suggest that the topic It should be something timely, but something you're also confident talking about. We had a member that did a webinar back in October, Steve, and he was really nervous. He didn't want to do a webinar. He didn't He's going to have to be in front of the camera, and I totally get that. But he understood that if you want to change your business, you're going to have to challenge yourself and put yourself out there a little bit. I said, Well, just asking the question, what piece of your What business do you love what you're confident talking about? It turns out he's really into backups and making sure his clients have got the right backups. We did a webinar about it was business continuity. How can you make that timely? If I was talking about backups to you, it's quite a dry subject. The most interesting question I've got is, are you actually checking your backups are working? That's always a good one to check. But if you can make it timely. If you think about what's been the news recently, you had these massive fires in California. Those businesses and people's homes have been burnt. You can relate the topic that you're confident with on a timely, something that's timely. Because it's trending that topic, you're going to get more people that are going to opt in, you're going to reduce your cost for these leads. Ai can help with this as well. You can basically go and scrape the top 10 news articles, and you can basically just say it's ChatGPT. These are the top 10 news articles for the last couple of weeks. This is what's trending. This is the topic that I want to talk about. How can I marry the two? And AI will give you some really good ideas on how you can position your webinar.
Tim Fitzpatrick
I love that. And so when you... A couple more things here. When you're running ads to the webinar, how far ahead of the webinar are you running ads? I mean, is it a week? Is it two weeks? Is it longer? What are you doing there?
Scott Millar
This is a great question because I learned this the hard way. I mentioned that I spent $2,000 back in 2024, thinking I was going to get all these attendees. I thought, Okay, this is a month's budget I'm going to put into this, and I'm going to run it for a month. I'm going to start the webinar at the start of the month. Sorry, start the ads at the start of the month and run the ads the whole way up to the webinar. There's probably lots of different advice. You could go and speak to an events company and they'll give you the most scientific approach to this based on their data. But I'm basing on the data that I have is that you probably want to start around about two weeks out. The closer you get to the date, you're going to find you're going to get more people signing up. That's based on my experience of running these, what I found so far. Speak to me 12 months time, Tim, I may have a better answer for you.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Now, last thing on webinars.
Scott Millar
Yeah.
Tim Fitzpatrick
As marketers, you and I have, I'm sure, been on plenty of webinars where you just... They're going through stuff, they're going through the presentation, and then I'm just sitting there going, Okay, when's the pitch? Okay. How do you recommend MSPs handle closing out that webinar? Do they have some type of call to action? Is it gentle? Is it strong? What are your thoughts on that?
Scott Millar
I like doing it subtly. There is no pitch. There is references in the webinar to specific things about your services and your business. I've done that here Tim. I mentioned that when new members join us, that we help them come up with a topic and set a target date for their webinar. It's these subtle hints that you're dropping about things within your service that at the moment you don't have access to, but hey, you can speak to me about it. There's these subtle drops. For the people that are engaged in your webinar, they're going to hear that and they're going to take that knowledge in. But then it's followed up by, I would suggest a phone call just asking the question, How did you find the webinar? We'd love your feedback on it. Then the conversation can go from there. You're not trying to pitch them anything. As I mentioned, this is really about scaling the relationship making process at this stage. So it's about really just starting to make new relationships with people.
Conclusion
Tim Fitzpatrick
Cool. I love it. This has been great, Scott. What... Any last minute thoughts you want to share with us before we wrap it up?
Scott Millar
Yeah, I would say I've done a lot of trial and error in regards to this. I mentioned that I geek out in SEO. Seo still works for MSPs, but there's a lot quicker ways to get leads in the door. But it's the system that you deploy to turn those leads into meeting appointments in the diary. That's the piece. The bigger thing is, okay, you've heard here that you can go and run lead gen as you can run a webinar, but there's a bigger process involved in this that you really need to be aware of. That's why you've got the Power of Audience Method, the IT Rockstars, because without that nurture sequence in place and some form of follow-up, you can do 99% of the things that we've covered here. But if you don't have that 1%, the whole thing is going to fall flat in its face.
Tim Fitzpatrick
I love it, man. Scott, thank you so much for taking the time. People want to learn more about you, they can head on over to itRockstarts.net, and we'll make sure that that gets in the show notes as well. So, Scott, I really appreciate you taking the time, man. And those of you that are watching and listening, appreciate you. If you want to connect with us, you can do that over at rialtomarketing.com. The other resource we've got for you is over at revenueroadblockscorecard.com. If you want to know which of the nine revenue roadblocks are slowing down your growth, that's where you can do it. So take advantage of that. And until next time, take care.