 IT business marketing. Question comes up all the time. How do you do it? I see this in forums. I see like, you know, does LinkedIn work? Is this effective? Is that effective? And so I'm gonna talk about from my perspective, been in business for 16 years, and I wanna talk about what I do now, what I've done in the past. There's different things that work, but they're not relevant. I'm gonna talk, you've been working for us the last few years, but I will leave an exclusion in for YouTube. Yes, YouTube is one of the ways we have a lot of our clients and that we have a lot of inbound leads coming in from YouTube, but YouTube's not for everyone. Welcome anyone to try it. I'm not trying to say you shouldn't, but it is a longer, more drawn-out process, and I'll leave a link to the video I did about how we make money with YouTube. Back to the subject of IT business marketing and MSP marketing. So every time I post a job or a project, like the recent polling alley one or the bigger project that I talked about on the blog, there's a, people wanna know how I got those jobs. They wanna, was it some type of bid list? Was it some type of, like, hey, you're on Angie's list or one of these other IT hiring company websites that kinda aggregate on-demand IT for stuff? And those I've not found effective at all. I know someone's gonna leave 20 links to one, but they thought this one was great. Most of the time, every time we sign up for those, they want to pay us generally one fifth of our billable rate to go do things. Probably great if you're starting out so you can get some experience doing things, but I actually feel it's a lot of times why people don't like those services because it's a bunch of people that are less experienced doing them. One of them we left because they wanted us to configure like a series of Cisco ASA VPNs, they're only going to pay $20 an hour onsite to go configure them. And we laughed or like, well, these will be misconfigured by someone. And that's just unfortunately a lot of what I see in there. Now, what about Facebook and LinkedIn and Google ads and all those fun things and Instagram ads? For B2B, I've not found those to be particularly effective. B2B is mostly about relationship building. People buy from people they like. People buy from people they trust. Developing a rapport with these businesses is important. I mean, there's cold calling. You can make thousands of cold calls. And I'm not going to say cold calling is ineffective because my wife worked for Quicken Loans and their inbound lead system is cold calling, but it requires like, you know, 10,000 calls a day to turn into a number of leads and it keeps whittling down as they call it your sales funnel. And you're putting it out here like this and narrowing it down to a sale. It's exhausting. It can lead to that, but the reality is I didn't get to sit where I was yesterday at a C-suite and pitching a company that has locations across about four countries and 40 locations globally. I didn't get in their C-suite from a Facebook ad or a random cold call to a CIO going, hey, I got an idea for a solution you probably need. That's really tough. That may get some of the smaller businesses and some of the real small mom and pop places you might get some of that. If you want some of the bigger leads and some of the bigger projects, it's very much about relationship building. That is an important aspect of business in general when you're doing B2B services. I mean, you can do all the cool ads and marketing you want and videos, but people aren't always assuade by them because they see the polish, they see it. They see a cool website or like, man, look at this, it's beautiful. But does that mean they are good at what they do? We're taking over IT from a company right now that had a really, their website's really nice. I really like it. Their ability to respond to emails is terrible and that's even the clients, as the responding to problems is even worse than responding to emails in general. This is why relationship building is so important when B2B. People want to trust you. They have to have a rapport with you. They have to have a tracker. This is difficult to do. This is really is hard work. It requires me going to lots of business events and chatting with people and things like that. It's not that I don't like people. Don't mistake me for someone who's saying I don't like people, but I don't always want to be around a crowd of people. So it's even me getting out of my comfort zone to do that. I don't mind standing up in front of a crowd but interacting in a crowd, standing here holding a drink and shaking a lot of hands is an awkward situation for me that my business got better as I got better at dealing with those awkward situations. You may hire a salesperson to handle that because they love the crowd. And everyone knows that person who wants to be the center of attention or a good storyteller. They're engaging. And that's what I learned a little bit myself through determination was to be a little bit more engaging. And no, I'm not singing and dancing about tech and how awesome we are installing Wi-Fi. That's not how I landed the bowling alley job. That came from me being friendly with specifically another IT company that I met at one of these networking events became friends with them. I chatted with them for a while and say, this is what we do. What fancy things do you do? That's actually an opening line that I have a lot is, hey, what fancy things or what interesting things did you do today? And it's a generic question. I can ask this to an accountant. I can ask this to other people but I start learning about their business. I start talking with them about things. You build a rapport with them. They start to trust you and then they're willing to go, hey, he seems the least guy. Maybe we will actually check out his website. So I'm not saying you shouldn't have a website but people think that your website will generate just a massive amount of inbound leads and things like that. You do have people who are price shoppers who do call around and they're not always my favorite clients. The people who randomly have cold called us because they're looking for an IT company, they're usually just dialing down a list of them and looking for someone but then you give them a price and they're like, oh, come on, the last guy was that much too. I mean, we're looking for someone who can do it for half of what the last guy was. And I always ask them, what's wrong with the current IT company? That's a regular question. I ask whenever I get in that call, they're just too much money. But do they service well? Do they answer the phone? Are they too much? And sometimes you find out their rates are even less than years and you're like, well, they're not. Anyways, building these relationships is how we get these clients, how we get the bigger jobs, the larger jobs. So if you wanna work on something and it's not like having the best opening line on LinkedIn which has also become this giant spam house. I ranted a little bit about that the other day on LinkedIn about just how every time I accept a phone request, I'm like, oh, look, it's going to be a full stack or full web marketing services company who's taking no time to learn about me. If you wanna do an opening line at LinkedIn, you don't start with a sales lead because, well, they delete it like I do. Like, bleep block, delete block. And that type of thing. People have asked me about, oh, what about these LinkedIn scripts? I see people selling them. I'm like, it's not relationship building. I don't even request or reach out to people on LinkedIn unless I met them in person. Then I can get to know more about them and things like that. You know, I find and get their business cards, start chatting with them, start talking about things. You know, hey, sometimes it's a little bit personal stuff that you talk about, just like generic things. Like, hey, where'd you last go on vacation? Opening lines like that. You're trying to build a friendly relationship. And it's not fake. I actually have met some awesome people like this. And I've become friends with a lot of them. We have some really interesting discussions about not just technology, but life and stuff like that. So that becomes that rapport. And that's what brought me into these big projects. Knowing these people, being friendly with them, and then, of course, they become interested in you as well, which they start learning about what you do without you forcing it going, but I'm the Wi-Fi expert. You should be using my company. We're the best MSP ever. We will service and do everything magic. And you just sound like a sucky sales guy who's kind of annoying. Plus, if you run around introducing yourself as your company all the time, as opposed to you, yeah, you're also asking for a little bit of trouble. So how do we get all these clients? How do we get these big jobs? I'm answering it with relationship building, relationship building. That starts first, then comes, maybe they check out your website. Doubtful to look at your Facebook ads. They may look at your Facebook profile. I will admit, I get a few clients that are from Facebook, but it's not from Facebook ads. It's from the interactions with them on Facebook for joking around. I have a couple of companies that they see me posting some of the job pictures and they realize we do the wiring thing that led us to almost $100,000 in sales at one company all in wiring and infrastructure buildouts because they've seen some of the wiring photos. But I know that they personally will engage in politics and I don't, but if I did, and my politics didn't match the politics that they like, they probably would have never called me for those wiring jobs. So perceptions about your company can be conveyed. Once again, Facebook can be used for personal, but the ad, there's no secret. There's no secret ad that worked. There's no, because my website was cool. I get some compliments, I think my website's pretty cool, but that's not my inbound lead generation. It happens, but it's so small compared to the other aspects we do. The relationship building is where the big money comes from. If you wanna do the B2B work, if you wanna get trusted for them to say, I trust Tom's company to come and be the MSP that's gonna take over and sign that check over or award us a bid for a facility that's 100,000 square feet infrastructure build that's pretty huge. They didn't decide that by looking at my website. They decided that because the person that recommended us who's a friend, another business friend says, they do great work, I've worked with them. That recommendation comes in and they go, well, we like you to bid on this project. This person, they vouch for you. That means still a lot in 2019. Those are the relationships you really need to work on. You need to try to be in those events, these networking events, Chamber of Commerce, B&I, whatever is local to you. I have an event I'm going to tonight referred to as IT&D, same thing again. These are the events that I build these relationships, meet people, become friends with them. We're actually gonna be, it's always at a bar. IT&D is a IT networking event where all this IT people in the field get together and it's, look them up, I'll leave a link. Their title is networking one beer at a time and they live up to it. So I'm gonna be having fun doing that and this is where I'm gonna meet more people. But this is the video I wanted to use as a reply to a lot of you people who ask you, what are you doing for marketing? What are you doing for marketing? What's the secret that works? Is it linked in? Is it co-calling? Nope, it's still a relationship building. I mean, this is still the best way to do it, the most effective and where we make the most money. Not saying the other ways don't work at all, but in terms of return on investment, it is a big investment to go to these events and physically be there, but it's very worthwhile to us. Thanks. Thanks for watching. If you liked this video, give it a thumbs up. 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