Why is this so controversial for MSPs?

If you want more hot leads for your MSP, put a price estimator on your website. Marcus Sheridan is here to tell you why this works. Also this week, change your life (and MSP) with this daily habit, and why email is the #1 MSP marketing tool. Welcome to Episode 324 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge. Why is this so controversial for MSPs?

If you want more hot leads for your MSP, put a price estimator on your website. For some reason, this is one of the most controversial things in the channel, with many MSPs saying it’s impossible to give an idea of pricing before you’ve spoken to a prospect. And yet, prospects don’t want to talk to you in order to get a price. What to do? Well, I’ve got marketing expert and bestselling author, Marcus Sheridan, here right now to give you what I believe is the definitive word on this. I like to think of myself as a bit of a marketing sponge. I read almost every single business and marketing book that I can get my hands on, actually, I listen to them more these days, but I’m also constantly reviewing different ideas and different ways of doing things to keep my mental model of the best way to market your MSP fully up to date. And there was something that I added to this model years back when I read a book called They Ask You Answer by Marcus Sheridan. Have you read this? One of the big ideas in the book is the idea of transparent pricing. Marcus in that book talked extensively about radical price transparency, which means that you talk very openly about your price. You explain what drives the cost up and down, you discuss cheap versus expensive options, and you compare yourself to alternatives.

You’re just trying to help people who want to buy from you, who want to switch MSPs, you’re trying to help them to understand value.

And then Marcus released a book called Endless Customers last year, which was a reinvention of They Ask You Answer and kind of updated for the AI age. And he took the idea of radical price transparency and took it even further by suggesting that you put a price estimator onto your website. What’s a price estimator? It’s a tool for someone to get a rough idea of how much it costs to be a client of your MSP. This to me was so obvious that I actually negotiated a partnership with Marcus Sheridan and his business partner, Steve Auchettl, and we launched MSP Price Guide at the backend of last year. It’s an AI-driven price estimator tool that you can put onto your website and we’ve done all the hard work for you. So we’ve built templates, we’ve added in all the standard managed services, all of that kind of stuff. So you can just start your 30 day free trial and get an estimator onto your website within 10, 20 minutes or so. You can see that at msppriceguide.com. Anyway, I asked Marcus to pull together something to show you why all of this is so critical and so applicable to MSPs. Take it away, Marcus. Hello MSP community, Marcus Sheridan here. Let’s have an honest conversation about whether or not you should be considering a pricing estimator for your website. First thing that we have to understand is that 75% of all buyers today say they would prefer to have what’s known as a seller-free sales experience. In other words, we don’t hate salespeople as buyers, we just don’t want to talk to them until we are good and ready. And that was a B2B study by Gartner, by the way. And I think you would agree with that. We don’t want to talk to sales until we’re confident, comfortable, and we feel like we’re not going to make a mistake. The answer to that is give the buyer more control through what is known as self-service. Self-service are interactive tools mainly on your website that allow...