Let’s look at how to market your MSP to manufacturers and whether this vertical is even right for you. Also this week, good/better/best pricing for MSPs, and how this 40 technician strong MSP wins clients.

Welcome to Episode 333 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

How to market your MSP to manufacturers

Do you want more manufacturer clients for your MSP? Manufacturers are one of those love it or hate it verticals in the channel. Some MSPs absolutely thrive working with manufacturers. Others hear the word and breakout in a cold sweat. And honestly, both reactions are completely valid. So right now, I want to do a proper, balanced, deep dive into how to market your MSP to manufacturers, starting with whether this vertical is even right for you, and then looking at what manufacturers actually care about when they choose an MSP.

So let’s start with the reality. If you enjoy complexity, manufacturers can be a fantastic fit. They often have expensive production machines, specialist software, bespoke setups, and critical systems that simply cannot go down. And yes, somewhere in most factories, there’s usually a machine still running on an old XP box that hasn’t been rebooted for 10 years because if it stops, the whole place stops. That’s the joke I always make, but it’s funny because it’s true.

The upside of this is obvious. There are lots of large, complicated, high revenue projects. There’s specialist work that you can charge properly for. There’s a real value in what you do because downtime costs manufacturers serious money. When production stops, it’s not a few annoyed users. It’s lost output, missed deadlines, idle staff, and very stressed owners. That makes manufacturers willing to invest when the risk is clearly explained.

But let’s be honest about the downside. Manufacturers rarely have standard setups. There’s very little cookie cutter IT. Every environment is different. Every site has its own quirks. And that means that often you need your most senior technical people involved a lot more often than you would in a nice tidy professional services business. If your MSP is built around highly standardised stacks, minimum variation, and keeping senior techs away from day-to-day firefighting, then manufacturers will feel like chaos to you.

Before you even think about marketing to manufacturers, you need to answer a simple question internally… do you enjoy this kind of work?

Assuming you do want to go after manufacturers, the next mistake MSPs make is marketing to them like they’re any other business, because they are not. Manufacturers think differently. Their world revolves around production, reliability, safety and efficiency. They don’t care about shiny tools or buzzwords. They care about one thing above all else – keeping the production line running. From their point of view, the best MSP is not the most innovative or the most cutting edge, it’s the one that feels the safest. The one that understands their environment, the one that won’t casually suggest upgrades that risk stopping production.

So when you market to manufacturers, your messaging needs to shift. You’re not selling IT support, you’re selling risk reduction. You’re selling uptime, stability, you’re selling calm. Manufacturers choose MSPs who demonstrate that they understand the consequences of failure. Talk about downtime in terms they understand… lost output, missed delivery slots, idle machines, wasted labour. Show that you respect legacy systems, even if you don’t love them and that you know how to work around them safely.

One of the most powerful things you can do in your marketing is to talk about how you approach change. Manufacturers are often change averse for very good reasons. So explain how you test, how you plan, how you sc...

The best way for MSPs to delight existing clients dosen’t actually cost money… here’s 5 ways to do it. Also this week, how to turn your MSP’s success stories into 3 BIG marketing assets, and what if you sold your MSP to your employees?

Welcome to Episode 332 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

5 ways to delight your existing clients without spending a penny

One of the easiest ways to grow your MSP is also one of the least talked about. And it’s this… delighting the clients you already have. And before your brain jumps to discounts and gifts and free stuff or doing more work for nothing, let me stop you right there.

The best ways to delight your existing clients don’t cost money. They cost attention, they cost intention, and they cost you thinking a little bit differently about how clients experience working with you.

So let me give you five examples…

The first is proactively explaining what’s happening before clients feel the need to ask. So most client frustration isn’t caused by things breaking, it’s caused by uncertainty. To them, silence creates worry and worry creates friction, not good, right? So a simple update that says something like, “Hey, here’s what we’re working on for you right now, or here’s why we’re making this change and what you might notice.” Well, that can completely change how a client feels about you. They stop wondering, stop guessing, and just feel really reassured. And reassurance is hugely underrated in the channel, it really, really is.

The second way to delight clients is to remember what matters to them beyond just their IT and their technology. Clients feel delighted when they feel known, not remembered as just an account number or a contract size, but they’re known as a business and especially as people. So referencing things like previous conversations or remembering a big business priority for them or acknowledging a stressful period that they’ve mentioned. None of that costs you money, but it really builds emotional loyalty between you and them. In fact, you can make clients feel like they’re in a very safe pair of hands.

The third way to delight clients is to remove small annoyances that they’ve quietly learned to tolerate. Delight really comes from removing friction, not adding features. So give them clearer instructions, remove the need for them to ask follow-up questions, do better handovers, send cleaner emails, make the next steps more obvious for them. When something suddenly feels easier, clients really do notice, and they might not send you a thank you email, but if they feel it, then those feelings really add up over time.

The fourth way is to tell your clients what you’ve prevented, not just what you’ve fixed. MSPs are brilliant at quietly stopping bad things from happening, but terrible at talking about it. Clients rarely know what didn’t go wrong because of you. So when you explain the risks that you’ve reduced and the issues that you’ve headed off, the problems that never really became problems, then you reinforce the immense value of what you do. You remind them why they chose you in the first place.

The fifth way to delight clients without spending a penny is to make it safe for them to bring you bad news. This one is bigger than it sounds. Clients are delighted when they’re not judged, lectured, or made to feel stupid. You understand that, right? I do. Absolutely. When they feel psychologically safe and it is all about their feelings, they’re going to come to you earlier and not later. They’re going to be more honest and tell you the stupid things that they’ve done, which is good, right? They’re going to be more collaborative. In fact, they’re going to trust you more deeply. That’s exactly what we want from them. That’s the partnership that you wan...

In this podcast special we’ve joined thousands of other podcasters around the world to take part in something called Podcasthon. I’ve chosen a charity called 404 Stress Not Found, that’s aimed at helping MSPs to cope better, and here’s my guest to tell you all about it…

Welcome to Episode 331 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

MSPs: How to get help if you’re struggling

Featured guest: Paul Croker is an award-winning Cyber Security person with a rich background in IT that span the years and sectors. In his last corporate role was heading up the IT for a pan-European space company where Paul led the way for the UK entity spanning two sites, managing complex needs of IT for space projects with budgets and an aggressive headcount to take into account too as the business was ramping up.

Hello and welcome to this special episode of the podcast. This week, we’ve joined together with thousands of other podcasters around the world to take part in something called Podcasthon. We’re giving up this episode to promote a charity of our choice, and you’re going to love the charity that we’ve picked. It’s called 404 Stress Not Found. It’s a new organisation that’s aimed at helping MSPs to cope better. And here’s my special guest to tell you all about it.

Hello, I’m the founder of 404 Stress Not Found. My name is Paul Croker.

And thanks so much for joining me on the podcast, Paul. You and I have known each other for, it must be 9, 10 years something like that, it’s been a long time. And bizarrely, and what has sort of created this special episode today is I bumped into you and your wife, Gemma, at Barcelona Airport like back in autumn/fall last year. Now we had actually both been to MSP Global, so it’s not like we were just randomly flying into Barcelona, but we had a great chat outside the airport. I was very hungover, I remember that. And you were a bit more bright-eyed and bushy-tailed than I was.

I think I just had a coffee as well, which probably helped.

Yes, you had. Which is a dangerous thing at two in the afternoon, but there we go. And we started talking about what you’re doing with 404 Stress Not Found, and I realised this is the perfect thing for this special episode. So let’s start right at the beginning. So just first of all, let’s find out about you. Just give us the brief version of your story in terms of the MSP that you run here in the UK.

Sure, so I started a company called 18iT about five years ago now or thereabouts, off the back of exiting a pan-European space company, which is all very cool. So when we talk about rocket science, I know what that used to look like. And what we do now over here is very different. But I take those lessons and basically curate them for MSPs and people in the tech space.

That’s really cool. And you can actually say it’s not rocket science because that’s what you used to do.

And I do use that quote when I talk on stages. Yes.

So you should, I would. I mean, I couldn’t even get into a rocket facility, let alone be a rocket scientist, but that’s pretty cool. And you founded this thing called 404 Stress Not Found. So how long has that been in your life? And we’ll exp...