[0:00] All right, ready or not, here we are live, doing our 2025 MSP marketing planning workshop.
[0:11] Last year, I was standing up, and I do use my hands a lot, so you’ll have to forgive me. I’m sitting down with this lovely new background that I have back here. So I’m Laura Johns, founder and CEO of The Business Growers. We have an action-packed webinar for you guys today. It’s going to be a lot, and so we’re going to jump right in. I’m going to share my screen. We are doing a lot of workshopping. This is actually called a workshop because it’s a workshop. We’re going to be doing a lot of workshopping today. And so as I move to share my screen, we’re going to jump right in. I have some ground rules for everyone.
[0:49] Let’s see, make sure it pulls up correct. Okay, yep, here we go. All right, your 2025 marketing plan, and I added the word “your” to this to make sure that it is your plan for your managed services provider or IT business today. Here’s what we’re going to do. Here’s what you can expect. We’re going to set clear goals and targets for your year going into 2025. It is November. Thanksgiving is not even here yet. Now is the time to be setting your goals for 2025, not January. So this is what we’re doing right now for you guys. Also, we’re going to realign your KPIs. We’re going to look at everything with a fresh start. Hey, what are our key performance indicators tracking? Making sure we have all that set up to achieve the outcomes that you’re trying to achieve. We’re going to map out our plan and budget for 2025 on this call today, and we’re going to understand who exactly your customer is. And a lot of that, you know, a lot of you may be thinking, “Laura, my unique value proposition and customer, what does that have to do with KPIs and tracking?” Kind of different sets of the marketing, um, you know, your whole marketing program, but equally very, very important. And we’re going to right here on this call today set the foundation and complete your marketing plan for your managed services provider or IT business for 2025. If you’re with me, give me a yay and yay or yes or some sort of thumbs up just to let me know that you’re with me and you’re ready for this. And let’s talk about ground rules. We are here right now for you. The only reason I got on today and have been promoting this and my team’s been promoting this like crazy is because we want to see you be successful. And so for the next hour, let’s be here right now. Let’s put our participant hat on which, if you can put in the chat, if you are ready and you agree, you might know some of these things that we’re going to talk about today. Some of them may be totally new concepts to you, but if you’re willing to truly participate, put on that participant hat, type the word “participant” in chat so that I know that you’re here to participate. I just ask that you do yourself a service and put your phone on silent, dedicate this next hour to shut out distractions and give this planning workshop that is built for you your 100% focus.
[5:09] For those of you who may be wondering who in the heck I am, I’m Laura Johns, founder and CEO of The Business Growers. We help managed services providers and IT businesses grow every single day with our core marketing programs that are designed for MSP marketing success. And one, one thing I’m here today to help you do is grow a million in revenue in the next year. And this is the plan and the foundation to be able to do that. You’ll see that I’ve spoken at a couple of, you know, various marketing, um, industry events. You can certainly, you know, look me up. We have a great YouTube channel you can look up. We give resources and insight to managed services providers every single week. Um, of course, if you, if you, you know, have seen me out and about before, you’ll see, um, that I have worked exclusively with managed services providers for quite some time. This is our bread and butter. This is what we do with The Business Growers, and this is what I love to do is help managed services providers grow. So that’s who I am. Enough about me. Let’s set some goals. All right, number one, set clear goals. Now, each of you are going to see this link right here, and if you will just open a tab, a separate tab, and whatever browser you’re using and go ahead and type in this URL right here, you’ll see, and Grace on my team should be dropping this in the chat for everyone just to click and download, and you’ll want to make a copy of this. We don’t want to write, and I don’t think you actually can, but we don’t want to write on our copy. So make a copy of this. This is actually our workbook and what we’re going to use today. So this is going to be, um, your guide. This is going to take us through the whole day today. Make sure you make a copy. Go ahead and put it in your marketing planning folder that you have, whether it’s Google Drive or whatever, um, OneDrive, whatever you have. Make a copy of this, type it, type in your company name, marketing plan 2025, and then I’m going to ask you to go to this worksheet. Go ahead and get this tab open as well. So if you, if you also, Grace will drop this in the chat, it’s worksheet 2025 worksheet, um, another tool that we’re going to ask you just to make a copy of, have it ready and sitting. And I am going to move a little fast because we have a whole lot to go through in an hour, and I’m actually going to keep my, my phone available so that make sure that I don’t, um, go over any section on time, but if we breeze through something and you didn’t have a chance to fill it out or complete it at the very end of this webinar today, this workshop today, you’ll see a link. I invite you to schedule time with me, and we’ll go through this together. No problem. All right. So one thing I’m going to ask you to look at, and I’ll actually, and let’s see if I can, um, be clever enough to do this. I’m going to really try, guys, to grab my other screen. So I’m going to share, stop screen sharing. Here we go. Sorry, guys. I’m going to grab another screen quick and go straight to the worksheet while you’re looking at the workbook. Hope that everyone can see this screen. Thumbs up if you can’t. Grace, let me know if something’s wrong. Um, okay. So you’ll see here, and I’m just gonna type through this. I need everyone just so you, um, as you’re planning, actually, this number should be 2020 five, um, you’ll see. So change that 2025, but go ahead and type in, okay, what is your 2024? What will estimate what you’ll end the year with your annual recurring revenue? What that will look like? And then secondly, you want to put, hey, here’s my target. So if you’re at a million in annual recurring revenue and your target is 1.5, you’ll see here is my sample. Then we know that your annual new revenue goal for next year going into 2025 is $550,000. All right, so the next line will already kind of do a little rule of 78s and tell you what your monthly sales target is and monthly recurring revenue. And then this is an answer I cannot answer for you, but I need you to go ahead and put what is your average total monthly recurring revenue per client. And each of you just so you know, there is some instruction, a very detailed instruction video here that you can click on and watch after this, uh, workshop if you need to. So fill out your total average MRR value per client, and then it tells you it populates, okay, how many new clients do I need to hit my goal? And then this also just tells me, hey, if I’m closing right now, whether it’s 10%, 25%, whatever, and and I would say kind of be, um, conservative just to make sure that we don’t overestimate ourselves, but be a bit conservative in what your conversion rate from sales is so that we know exactly how many leads you need per month to hit your target. And then, uh, benchmark cost per lead, and this is after I actually think that you probably could look at a 150, um, benchmark cost per lead for MSPs.
[9:56] …between that 75 and 150 mark. And so here’s my monthly budget required to hit my target from an ad spend standpoint. Now, if you look over here, um, you’ll see, and that’s that’s to hit your goal of how many new clients required to hit your goal. You’ll see here we actually have it mapped out for you, um, taking that annual revenue target goal that you’ve set, and I’m going to talk about digital, external, and internal marketing in just a minute, but we’ve basically mapped out your marketing budget for you, so you’ll know how much to spend every month on generating new business. So again, not in, in an effort to not take up too much time just on that, go ahead and fill that out. Make sure that you have, um, that completed so that we know exactly what our goals are, um, as we move into 2025. I’m gonna next share my screen back on my. So basically, in your workbook, if you go back, your workbook, toggle to that tab, got a lot of toggling going on, but go ahead and insert here’s my existing number of clients. Here’s my average MRR. One thing that’s important to note is what is your project percentage versus monthly recurring breakdown. I’m a big encourager of that monthly recurring revenue to help you, you know, map out scale, pay your people, and know that you can afford to pay your people. But you definitely, if you have a goal of eliminating that project, um, revenue, and maybe you don’t, but it is good to kind of take that into account and not count that project revenue as your recurring revenue when you’re doing this type of planning, um, put in your key metrics, and then go ahead and put in your F, your future vision, vision based on these calculations. How many clients do I want? What’s the average monthly recurring revenue that I want? Um, where do I want my project percentage to be at the end of the year? If you don’t, you know, I always say if you don’t, if you don’t, uh, plan, fail to plan, if you fail to plan, you will not, you will plan to fail. Sorry, that’s a Benjamin Franklin quote. It’s in the workbook. You’ll see, um, I just botched it, but no worries. Okay, so next on, if you see in the workbook, and I’ll try to, um, just really quick toggle to the workbook here, and again, I’m not going to do this too much because I don’t want to, um, deter, but you’ll see here I’m asking you where are you today? Put in this, and the big question is, you know, when we bow it down, how many leads per month am I going to need in 2025 to achieve this according to the worksheet? And then the biggest question of all, why? Why is this important to me? Why is this important to my business? What will accomplishing this do for me? And write out your why right now. Take it just a few minutes to do that. This is critical, so.
[13:11] All right, and again, if there’s anything that you don’t get to for whatever reason, don’t worry, you can always go back to it and watch this again. Okay, kind of going back to your why. Another big step as you’ve planned your numbers, you know what goals you’re trying to reach. Now, what makes you unique, and who are your clients? So I put together this little graphic for those of you who can see, um, I want you to write down in the workbook the answers to these questions. You’ll see in the workbook we’re talking about your unique value proposition. You’ll see it referred to as UVP, but who do you primarily serve? And in your workbook, you’ll see a lot of, of, um, kind of tabs below, uh, on 2.2, more detail about your ICP. You can fill out a little bit more detail, but who do you primarily serve? Number one, what problems do you solve for them? What is your specific method or expertise? I.E., how do you do it differently? And you’ll see some examples here on the slide. And then finally, we want to know what sets us apart. What set? What sets your company apart or makes clients or your customers stay with you? And you’d be surprised how many folks actually don’t do this work. So we’re taking the time to do it now and set yourself up for success. Who do you primarily serve? What problems do you solve for them? What’s your specific method or expertise? And what sets you apart? What’s your key differentiator? And again, for the sake of time, we’re going to move along. You can watch the recording immediately after this. The good thing about this platform that we use is it’s available to you immediately. So you can go back, rework, pause, stop, write it down, um, but for the sake of time, we’re going to move forward because here’s what happens once you’ve written those answers down, then you write your unique value proposition statement, and this can become what you say. And I’ll show you in a second a way that you can use it, but I help blank achieve desired outcome by what’s your unique approach, utilizing what’s your key differentiator. Here’s a couple of samples here. Law firm, specific, specific Medical Practice. If you don’t have a specific industry you serve or niche, you can certainly say small business, Enterprise, medium-sized businesses there. And here’s just a quick example of how we, you know, one, one of many ways that we use this at The Business Growers. There’s mine. So we want to make sure before you get into doing any marketing in 2025 that you know what makes you unique, what sets you apart from those competitors in your local market, and how you’re going to communicate What Makes You Different and why anyone should care. Essentially, that’s your unique value proposition. If you do not have that dialed in, that’s a whole exercise internally for you to do before the end of this year, 100%. Now, do you know your client? Knowing yourself, your unique value proposition, now it’s do you know your client? This is our ideal customer profile. When my team onboards at The Business Growers, we’re constantly trying to understand who our ideal customer is. Again, there’s a section in your workbook where you can dial this in and write exactly who this person is. Um, again, I got a lot of things to share, but I’m going to show you this really quickly so you can see. I’m gonna click on, if I can, you have to excuse me. I’m sometimes, uh, screen share illiterate, but I’m not going to show this in, in great detail, but I do want you to see how we’ve got our buyer persona dialed in. I mean, this is what we train on. Here’s exactly what’s, what his core problem is, some of his biggest fears. This is how this is how dialed in and detailed your company should know and should understand your customer.
[17:55] Right. So we want to make sure that when we’re dialing in who our ideal customer is, that we’re asking ourselves all of those questions that are listed in your workbook so that we understand exactly who that person is so that when we’re building our content, building our communication, that we’re able to dial in how we communicate. Okay, moving right along. Service Excellence, achieving service excellence. You know, I like to say you can’t, I think there’s, there’s another quote that’s similar, but you really can’t outsell a bad product. And so I think that it would be a disservice if we weren’t talking about, um, your current service offerings. Let’s do an audit. So in your workbook, you’ll see under section three, achieving service excellence, you’ll see an area where you can list your current service offerings. So go ahead and do that really quickly. I know it’s more than three, more than likely, if it’s not fine too, but go ahead and list. There’s a place for you to do this. And then we want to also just address what services are clients requesting that you don’t offer, and you’re, if you’re not having this conversation on a very regular basis with your sales team, um, then that should be something you work into your, your regular practice because we want to know what are people asking for that we don’t offer because you could either form a partnership with another company who does offer that and add revenue that way, or of course, you could start offering it. Um, we had a webinar just a couple weeks ago with, or months ago, I guess it was probably a little over a month ago with Jeff Zimmerman of the AT&T Partner Exchange. Great opportunity to add a new service, AT&T services, and still on that relationship. If you have not watched
[19:59] …and watch that. You can look it up on our YouTube. Great opportunity if your clients are asking you for internet, but then list out what are some emerging technologies or services that you might want to integrate this year because that’s going to be a big part of your marketing planning right, and you can go ahead and put those down here in the worksheet, workbook. Excuse me.
[20:27] Okay, everyone who showed up, Laura, I thought this was a digital marketing webinar. It is. We’re getting there, um, so I want to talk about three marketing focus areas, um, if you go back and look, there will be, and I’m going to mention this in just a second, there will be a link provided to a webinar that I did, same time last year, maybe it was January of this, this year. It was called the 2024 marketing plan on that webinar, and I didn’t want to repeat that verbatim because I felt like there was a lot of value there that you can just go back and rewatch, but we talked specifically about every single area of digital marketing and exactly what you need to be successful to set that up, what you need on your website, how you should do paid ads, um, Google Business Profile, all of those things. Go back and watch that. I’ll provide the link to it here in just a second. Grace can also put that in the chat, but I want to make sure that you’re considering all areas of focus specifically for managed services providers and that you’re thinking about the buyer’s journey for your services. I show this graphic a lot. I’ve shown it on other podcasts and webinars. You’ve seen it before more than likely if you’ve watched any of my content, but we need to remember that the likelihood, you know, if you’re trying to move from referrals from an only referral-based business into a hey, we have a consistent lead flow that we are successfully operating in using lead generation tactics with digital market marketing, if you truly want to move in that, you need to understand that, um, only 3% of your audience at any given time is ready to buy. And of those buyers, they are engaging at about 70% through the buying journey. That means they’re doing their research. So you are essentially with your marketing efforts taking an unaware, clueless buyer to a point where they realize they have a problem. They want to figure out what’s out there to solve their problem. And you can kind of see here, uh, the journey that they take. And so I often like to kind of debunk the myth that there is one legion solution. No one, you know, wants to spend the money on, um, some of the foundational marketing things. And the truth is, when you look at it this way, it’s not just one thing. It is a cohesive marketing plan that integrates, um, meeting them where they are. I like to call it omnipresence, making sure that you are showing up everywhere along the buyer’s journey so that when they get ready to make a buying decision, of course, they’re going to choose you because they’ve seen you all along the way. Right. So, um, in that kind of spirit, if you look in your workbook, you’ll see there’s three core focuses that I talk about, and this is also in that worksheet. You’ll see how much budget I recommend to allocate to each of those three, um, so number one, internal marketing. This one, giv, uh, I would say probably disregarded, and I feel like it’s the lowest hanging fruit, um, we do usually typically recommend less budget, um, as far as how much you’re going to budget versus digital marketing or others, um, it’s less budget required because it is low hanging fruit, but you know, here are lots of different areas where you need to make sure you can check these boxes. So in your workbook, you’ll see, do I have a client communication strategy? Yes, we’re checking with clients regularly and delivering value to them. Are we sending them things that can educate them, um, in our field of excellence, um, how often are we checking in? Is the renewal time the first time they’re hearing from us? And if that is the case, then we need to make sure that we certainly focus on this this year. Also, employee engagement programs. The better your culture, the better engaged your employees are, the more business you’re going to generate just from internal referrals, um, if your employees are not happy or do not have an incentive to refer you business, then you will not get referrals from from your existing team. And then just designing a system to for employees or clients to refer business to you. Do we have an easy way and a very clear path to making them money or giving them gifts or something where they can get, um, something if they have a little skin in the game? So, mak, developing those referral systems, and those generally don’t cost a whole lot of money, especially for the revenue that you acquire from it. And remember, this is your low, lowest hanging fruit. Also, client education programs are you serving that? Kind of goes back to client communication strategy. Are you giving your client something without them having to ask for it? Are you giving them help in their business as a business owner, giving them tools and resources? That’s a huge thing that you could be doing regularly that helps you. That doesn’t mean it’s a salesperson reaching out or an account manager reaching out. It’s just you serving them with value. Think Facebook group, think, um, regular webinars or podcasts or emails that you can send them and deliver to their inbox to help make their day easier. What are some client education type programs that you can implement this year? So go ahead and spend time in your workbook. You want to write down, check, check the things that you are doing. If you’re not doing it, leave it unchecked because this is how we’re going to develop our, our 2025 marketing plan. And then next, traditional outbound marketing. So these are these are things that are you being out and about. This is again, traditional outbound marketing. So community involvement, strategic partnerships, you can kind of see here, speaking engagements. I like to say I’m in a mastermind group with other agency owners. We say stage time is money time. If you can get on stage and help offer value at no cost to someone, the chances of that sticking in their brain and them remembering you down the road is huge. Local business networking, industry, and vertical events. Go ahead and check what you’re doing. Check what you’re not because again, we want to make sure we’re building one of these at minimum in every month or quarter, at very minimum every quarter, making sure that you’ve got this. I would say you want one of these things going on every month, um, so, so this is a good just kind of checklist. Go through this. What traditional outbound things are you doing, um, to help grow your business locally, regionally, statewide, nationally? And then here’s that link I was talking about, um, it’s, it’s, oh, excuse me, Grace is going to put that in the chat as well, um, but it’s, it’s basically a copy of our last year’s digit, digital marketing, um, 2024 plan, but it goes through your checklist for all of these things. And I didn’t want to spend, since we’re already half an hour in, I didn’t want to spend too terribly much time focusing on this because we already have the content available to you, but these are things that are very, very important to setting yourself up for success. I kind of consider this webinar a version two or extension of that original, uh, marketing planning webinar. So if you for whatever reason have not seen it or have not had an opportunity, this is quite literally the checklist that you need to set your, set yourself up foundationally for digital marketing success in all of these areas. So make sure you watch that marketing plan and also in your workbook right now, just take a little time and go ahead and just based on what you know today, yes, we’ve got our branding figured out. Yes, our messaging is on point. Our content is all rowing the same boat. Everyone’s run the same boat on how we say what we do. Our website is built. It’s converting. If it’s not converting, that’s a one problem we need to solve. And I do talk about that in the 2024 marketing plan, um, but all that again is foundational and really important. So, so make sure you go back and watch that, um, if you haven’t already. And this is just again a quick picture of how our marketing growth programs work and how we work all of those key digital marketing things into our marketing programs at The Business Growers. You have to, you know, it’s a crawl, walk, run, um, make sure that you don’t, you know, everyone is, is typically primarily only interested in lead generation, but like I said, kind of going back to that unaware buyer to ready to buy buyer, it takes, um, effort and it takes effort from a lot of different angles. So, um, all right, so we are into action plan. And if it looks like we have
[32:18] …a lot of time, we have a bonus at the end of this. It’s going to take a few minutes, so I don’t want to spoil the bonus surprise, but let’s go ahead and plan your focus for 2025. And I want you to take that, uh, worksheet, look at your numbers, go back to the very top of the workbook, um, make sure that you’ve gone through all of three of these checklists, both internal marketing, external marketing, and just put I, I put in the, you know, 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, go ahead and put what, what are the three to five takeaways, things that you didn’t check, things that you can confidently say, “No, Laura, we do not have a plan for this.” Um, you will see that I linked in the workbook, the webinar, but go the webinar from last year that you can go back and watch, make sure you bookmark that, go back and watch it. But if there are things that you could not confidently check, that’s what we move into the marketing action plan to do. So what are the areas where you feel like you need the most focus? And if you look at the marketing action plan in your workbook, you’ll see that we have internal marketing, um, it should be, uh, outbound, external outbound marketing second instead of internal marketing. Again, sorry about that, guys, um, I’m certainly flawed often, but internal marketing, you can change that. Second section is going to be external outbound, um, traditional outbound marketing, but go ahead and put in those sections what you need to do here. Yes, or X, or this is something we need to work on. And if you have a specific idea of what you should be working on in that particular area, go ahead and put this event, you know, this, this conference, this BNI group, this chamber meeting. Here are the things, you know, referral systems, yes, we need, we need an employee referral system because this is really quite literally you building your marketing program. Once you find the holes of what you don’t have yet, this is how we build the marketing program. Right. So go ahead and and plug those in and develop your own action plan. Remember on that second set of blocks, you’ll see, and I’ll, um, try to switch to it really quickly just to make sure we’re all seeing. Hold on, stop share. Here she goes again, trying to be tech-savvy. So I’m going to pop back up the workbook and make sure you put traditional outbound here, but go ahead and start filling in each of these boxes. Tell me exactly, and make sure you make a copy. Don’t forget to make a copy if you haven’t already. You can’t mark up this one. I don’t think, but just go ahead and put in each of these like, need to get this under wraps. I know this needs to be done because this is you building your marketing plan. I’m G, give, give you kind of the most time to do that, about a minute or two. If it feels like we’re speeding through this, it’s because we are, but I promise you can go back and watch immediately, and
[32:18] pause. Don’t forget to spend some time on watching the digital marketing plan from last year. And then at the very bottom of that section, let’s go ahead and put, okay, here are we don’t have to do it all at once, but guess what? Quarter one comes before Quarter Two, that comes before Quarter Three. So top three takeaways, things that you know you need to implement in the first quarter of 2025. Go ahead and write those items down. We’re going to move next into a really fun bonus section of today’s webinar that will give you some, like, we’re, we’re really, really going to workshop it. I’d love to get, I see somebody waiting on the bonus, um, I’d love to get a thumbs up if people are feeling good about starting to map out their plan, and we’re going to head straight into that bonus. All right, who’s ready? Okay, so this is probably what will cause a shift or change in your marketing plan for the year that will really, you will re, if you consistently commit to doing this, this is what is going to bring in the million dollars. Okay, here we are. We’re going to go ahead and create a year’s worth of content right here. Like I said earlier, if only 3% of your total buying audience is ready to buy at any given time,
[34:29] then we know that that means that we have to be in their face giving them value every single day. And so I’m a big fan of the book, “They Ask, You Answer.” You’ll see me talk about the book, “StoryBrand,” when I talk about building your brand messaging framework. But in the workbook, again, tag this for your reading pleasure. Big, big proponent of this book, love it because it basically tells you in the book, and it’s a wonderful, you know, well-written by Marcus Sheridan, it basically explains to in the book how your content that you are creating is what’s going to create for you those leads that are coming in that are qualified and prepositioned to buy because guess what? They were looking for an answer to a problem, and you solved it with your content. If you all over the internet answering questions for your ideal customer, this is what moves the needle folks. And this, of course, adding all of those things that we’ve already talked about. And today we’re actually going to take this, uh, next few minutes and plan out your content, um, and I’d love to start by you going into the workbook and writing out what are these, are the top questions. And I put some samples here. These may not be the questions that you’re getting asked, but go ahead and write out the top 20 questions. And I’m going to show you a trick if you’re not really sure, um, we can do that. We can do this another way as well, but it is really good for your team.
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I hope this helps! Let me know if you have any other questions.
