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dnsUNFILTERED: Ian Blake, Square Dot
Podcast > Episode 29 | June 09, 2025
Mikey interviews Ian Blake, founder and CEO of Square Dot, a B2B marketing firm specializing in MSPs. They discuss the unique challenges faced by MSPs in marketing, the importance of differentiation in a crowded market, and how AI can be leveraged to enhance marketing strategies. Ian shares insights on identifying unique selling propositions, creating effective marketing content, and practical tips for MSPs with limited budgets.
Mikey Pruitt
Welcome everybody to another episode of DNS unfiltered today. I'm joined by the founding. What would you say? Founder and CEO of Square dot, which is a B2B marketing firm that specializes in MSPs but has ⁓ longer reach than that. Ian Blake, welcome to the show.
Ian Blake
Thank you. Thank you for having me, Mikey.
Mikey Pruitt
Absolutely. tell us a little bit about yourself.
Ian Blake
So a little bit about me professionally, as you can see from the lack of hair on my head. I've been around a long time. Yeah, exactly. So I've...
Mikey Pruitt
and gray beard.
Ian Blake
Lifelong B2B tech sales and marketing. I started my career in Xerox in sales and then moved to mobile telco and worked in enterprise sales, SMB sales and sales management and then also in marketing within those companies. I suppose within...
My last telco role, I ran B2B marketing for a brand you guys in the States are probably not familiar with. called 3. So they're reasonably large in Europe, in Ireland and the UK for sure. He sponsored Chelsea Football Club, if that resonates with any of your... Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
Mikey Pruitt
You mean soccer, right?
Ian Blake
It was while it's there, I went looking for a specialist B2B tech marketing agency in Ireland and couldn't find any. And we had to go to the UK to get an agency to work with us. And that kind of sowed the seed for me going, there could be an opportunity here. And that's where the kind of the idea for Square. was born. And I set up a business 10 years ago.
And in that time we've worked with, like I was explaining earlier, we could break our clients into two buckets, know, 10 % of our business, our global B2B companies, our B2B tech companies, an example that your audience might be familiar with, Otterbox, the mobile phone and iPad cover people based out of California. We do all of their B2B.
EMDA marketing for them, they're only 10 % are them and others are 10 % of our business. 90 % of our business are mid-market B2B tech companies and a large percentage of those are MSPs. We typically work.
Mikey Pruitt
Yes, I personally spent way too much money on Otterbox cases. So your marketing is working. So if you haven't noticed, has a pretty killer Irish accent. But I am curious, not necessarily what percentage of your customers are ⁓ based in UK, Ireland, and Europe versus the US. well, I guess that and.
What are some of the differences you've seen like between MSPs and the different geo locations?
Ian Blake
I the differences in the geo locations are.
They're kind of, well, I suppose they all have the same, they all have very similar challenges, right? And the problems that we solve are similar. the, obviously the market in the US is much bigger than, you know, than the UK or Ireland. And so.
those clients, those US based MSPs would have or tech companies just have a much bigger market to go after. But in the main, problems are the same, challenges are the same, issues are the same. And one thing I find working, or having worked with so many MSPs at this point is actually how different they are when you get to speak to them. But they don't show that differentiation. ⁓
Mikey Pruitt
Well, let's
let's talk about that first. Like I've seen one of your videos and you mentioned the sea of sameness in the MSP marketing. And like you just said, MSPs are rather unique once you get to talk to them. But that uniqueness rarely comes out in their marketing. What is the what is the hang up there?
Ian Blake
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, I don't think it's a hang up. think it's a behavioral and it's behavioral with within the makeup of people that own and run and sit on leadership teams of MSPs. They're typically logical left brain people and where logic is great for solving the technical problems of their clients, you know, replacing hyper converged infrastructure systems and you know, putting in cloud solutions, etc. and logic has a great way of getting you to the same place as your competitors. And there's a there's a lovely story I heard recently actually talking about talking about logic and the importance of not copying your competition. So there's a there's a there's a book written by a guy called Will Godara.
Will Gadara owns a restaurant in New York called 11 Madison Park. And they were number 50 on a list of restaurants ⁓ and they wanted to get to number one. So what they did, Will Gadara brought his team, he's written a book called Unreasonable Hospitality and he brought his team, so kitchen staff, front of house staff, et cetera, to the restaurant that became number one on that list.
And they were all sitting down and having a meal and the staff and the meal arrived and the service was there and the staff were talking about what they could bring back to 11 Madison Avenue. And Will Gowry says, I don't want you to copy what's good. I want us to see what's bad about this number one restaurant and let's bring those things back. And the two things that they thought were they weren't necessarily bad, but they weren't as good as the other things were.
their beer wasn't, wasn't outstanding. So they had two beer options and that the beer drinkers at the table were kind of treated like second-class citizens. You know, the wine sommelier was kind of looking down their nose at them. And then the other thing they didn't do well relevant to the other stuff was coffee. So the two takeaways that they took was that they were going to implement in 11 Madison Avenue. They're going to double down on beer and they're going to double down on coffee. And what they did was that they got
a beer sommelier and a wine sommelier. they got the, so someone who was really into craft beers in, in 11 Madison Avenue and he doubled down with beer knowledge. And the rest one was so good. Anyway, they were number 50 on the list. Remember that, you know, craft beer companies were practically giving them the beer for nothing. And anyway,
Mikey Pruitt
Yeah.
Ian Blake
Long story short is, is, is that they went from number 50 on this list to number one on this list because they over-indexed on the thing that their competition weren't good at. And he has coined a phrase in the book, which I love called reverse benchmarking. it's the opposite of what the likes of McKinsey and Bain and all of these large consultancy companies, they make a fortune benchmarking the competition. Right. And similar, go back to my original point about the logical kind of
Mikey Pruitt
Hmm.
Ian Blake
Senior leadership teams in what make MSPs great, right? But that logic, the same as Bain and McKinsey, their benchmarking gets you to the same place as your competitors, ⁓ whereas if you double down on what they're not good at, it gives you a significant competitive advantage.
And that's differentiation. It's an easy problem. You don't need to bring your MSP stuff to the best MSP in town to find out where the opportunity is. It's in how they show up in the market, for sure.
Mikey Pruitt
That's really fascinating. think the lesson learned there is ⁓ more beer, craft beer. So differentiation in a crowded market and trying to compete. I've liked, you know, New York city restaurants, kind of like the top tier of restaurants, you know, other than like maybe Vegas or something, but very high in this, in the spectrum of a restaurant. So very admirable to go take a risk, I would say. And it sounds like what you're pitching to MSPs is to, you know,
Ian Blake
in every single section.
Yes. Yeah.
Mikey Pruitt
Put yourself out there in what may not mesh well with your left brain logicalness and take a risk.
Ian Blake
Yeah, and I suppose it's not even take a risk. When we work with an MSP, we will research all of their competitors. So we've researched many dozens of MSPs in Ireland, the UK, the US. And it's astonishing how they look and sound. The same and it's all erased if it has the most accreditations with Microsoft or IBM or Broadcom or whoever it is, ⁓ that's, I suppose, that's where the big opportunity lies is to differencing. So it's not necessarily risky. It's just to show up in a way that's true to you, true to your MSB, how you do business. That's appealing to the market and that's different from your competition.
Mikey Pruitt
Are there any recommendations you have on showing up differently, like breaking away from the uniformity people see?
Ian Blake
Yeah, well, we have a process that enables companies to do it. It's not easy. It's the job of what's called a brand strategist. And they start with a of three-step process where they look at segmentation, what segment of the market you're going after, what companies within that segment want to target, and then positioning. And the positioning is where the three things that I mentioned earlier come together. know, who you're for and what you're good at and how you're different from the competitors. And that then, that's the foundation. That's your marketing or your growth foundation. And when you build that and you have a differentiated point of view.
That enables everything else to happen. it enables how you show up in the market then in a way that's true to you and different from the competitors and appealing to the market.
Mikey Pruitt
So do you think there's any type of mind shift that is necessary to make those moves? Or is it just reading it and trying it?
Ian Blake
So to do it well, you need a specialist to do it, right? So, but what, the MSPs that we work with, they typically start the journey with a commitment, right? So that commitment can come from an event that happens in the company. So it could be a strategic.
move or it could be they've they've taken investment from a private equity company or they've acquired some other organizations or it could be a management buyout. So there's this concerted kind of, you know, realization within the organization and they typically, you know, they're quite honest and they put their hands up and they go like we don't really know how to approach this particular problem. And that's where they get in touch with a company like us and we can help them with that and to go on that journey.
Mikey Pruitt
So there's usually like an event perhaps, some acquisition, some major tech change perhaps that kind of spurns this like, ⁓ I'm in over my head feeling. And then they're like, Ian, help.
Ian Blake
Yes.
Exactly. Yeah, yeah.
Or they might just have this kind of because I suppose they're general. I'm speaking generally here. There isn't someone in the organ within the organization that has the skill set to be able to solve this problem. And what can happen is that is that they they know there's something wrong. They can't put their finger on what it is and they might phrase it like I was on to it.
Mikey Pruitt
Ahem.
Ian Blake
CEO of a large MSP a few weeks ago, he was saying, I don't know what we want to find out what we're going to be famous for. Or they might say we do great work. We just don't come across like that in the market. Like our website doesn't, you know, and they just don't know how to go about it. they try things, you know, but because they don't know how to build that foundational layer, ⁓ it can be challenging.
Mikey Pruitt
So I want to jump into kind of a how, not necessarily like a roadmap, you know, steps. We don't want to give away the secret sauce of Squirt, not necessarily, but I wanted to broach the subject of AI and marketing. And I want to just begin that with a story like every, I or the guests on this show always mentioned AI. So I'm going to shoot for it this time. But AI and marketing is pretty powerful. So I work in marketing now. I come from like a tech background.
Ian Blake
Yeah.
Okay.
Mikey Pruitt
And I am not the best writer. I'm not the best, you know, at researching, but I am really good at like, ⁓ scratching notes down and like organizing things after they are presented to me. So in preparation for this interview with Ian, so we've never met in person. We've, you know, looked at each other on LinkedIn and chatted back and forth briefly, maybe a couple of emails. And I gave you some questions before this and your response to me was.
Ian Blake
Okay.
Mikey Pruitt
Wow, you've really done your homework. So these are really good questions based on Ian's presence on LinkedIn and a few other social platforms. So what I did is I, and I didn't tell you this beforehand because I want to get your live reaction. So I did watch some of your videos. I took some very rough notes about some of the things you had mentioned. And then I fed that into AI to say,
Ian Blake
Okay. ⁓
Mikey Pruitt
Um, you know, take these notes and what you can find about Ian Blake on the web and generate some questions. And I did tune them a little bit because some of them were kind of ridiculous, but it was very helpful. And you were like, wow, really great job. And I, you know, it's not like, I guess it's kind of cheating, but, but it, was good output from the AI with the human grooming the stuff. So what do you think about AI's role in marketing strategy?
Ian Blake
Yeah.
So yeah, think it can be very valuable if it's used the right way by using the right way and going back to the sea of sameness, right? So, and to my kind of foundational layer, right? So if you take an MSP, for example, that haven't built down that foundational layer.
And an ⁓ MSP that's guilty, like the other 90 % of MSPs of living in that sea of sameness where AI will just magnify that and turn it into an ocean of uniformity, which actually presents an even bigger opportunity for the MSPs brave enough to
to go on that journey and find a differentiation, a point of difference, something to stand for in the market. And when you have that foundational layer and you use AI, the AI just magnifies that point of difference. And you can create really good ads on the back of it. And you can create really good content on the back of it because you're feeding the AI the...
the right thing, you know, because, but if you're the same as everybody else, everybody else is feeding, is feeding the AI the same stuff, know, you know,
Mikey Pruitt
Yeah. the, the AI, mean, it's essentially just kind of regurgitating the average of the internet and in what you're in, what your, your whole pitch is like, you have to not do that, but you can kind of tune AI to be your uniqueness. So you have to figure out that uniqueness. And, and like you said, some MSPs have a hard time putting their finger on what that uniqueness is. What's going to make me famous. said, so
Ian Blake
Exactly.
100 cents.
you
Things after.
Mikey Pruitt
you have to feed in that uniqueness to the AI. And I'm curious, like what tools would you recommend? Like those AI tools that you kind of lean on heavily. Which ones are those?
Ian Blake
So once we use ourselves, it's mostly to help with, well, it can help with a lot of research. So the ⁓ ChatGPT, is it the 1.0, the one that the deep research tool, it has deep research underneath the search bar. That's really good for researching, which is hugely important in that kind of foundational layer and also segmentation and targeting. can get it to help you with, you you can feed it a database and it can come up with ways of weighting that database or helping you think through, well, you know, if we're going after a particular, if we're targeting a particular segment of the market, you know, what's the revenue, what's the number of employees, where do we want them to be based, et cetera. And it can really, you know, speed up that process.
So that's one tool that we would use and we would use it for that. And then content creation, again in the right hand. if you want to get something written or get you started on writing something or coming up with a list of pieces of content, whether it's LinkedIn posts or blog posts or let's say an ebook or video ideas.
You can feed, and Claude is very good for this, and they have a project. can create a project from Claude and you can feed on the right-hand panel all the documentation required. So it could be the tone of voice document, the brand document, your point of differentiation, pain points of your target audience, and those documents live in the project. And then you would prompt it then to provide you with whatever it is that you want, whether it's LinkedIn posts, let's say.
So I have a project for LinkedIn posts and I'm to have all the information down there in the repository that's there. And you get to know how to use it. I'm prompting, think also ⁓ in AI, not being lazy about your prompt, know, so other advice I give is, ⁓ me if your audience know this already, like ⁓ the more context that it
that an AI has about what you're trying to get out of it, the better. So I always ask it to act like a B2B tech writer, act like a brand strategist, or act like whatever. And I want you to do the following and give it as much information as possible. And then iterate on that thereafter. And a massive thing is quality checking.
Mikey Pruitt
Yes.
Ian Blake
Like, oh my God, really need to quality check. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So you can really, and I'm like, so that email that you sent me, I didn't, I wasn't naturally inclined to think you had used AI. I went, oh, I just went, because you had made those tweets, you know, which you, you owned up to there five minutes ago, you know, so.
Mikey Pruitt
Especially if there's like links.
I didn't do it five minutes ago, so like it still worked. what Ian is saying and what I, what the example that I gave was still work to do, but instead of taking, you know, two hours, it took, you know, 30 minutes essentially. And the output was good, but I like what you were saying. You're kind of saying use the deep research tools. There's a open AI has one and also Google Gemini has one, which I think the Gemini one is free currently. guess they're.
Ian Blake
Yeah, yeah.
Mikey Pruitt
They're falling behind in markets, market share. they're giving it away, giving it away for free. And then you're saying kind of take that deep research, make sure it's. You know, accurate and includes your uniqueness and then kind of feed that into like a writer and give that writer AI a role. And the Claude, like you mentioned is really good at writing great ⁓ messaging and plans, I guess you would say, but yeah, you're kind of.
Ian Blake
Okay.
See you time.
Exactly.
Mikey Pruitt
using the strengths of each tool. And tool is the keyword here. Like AI is just another tool like any other, but you're using them in a way that produces a good output for you and your business. I'm curious, you did mention ⁓ ads in there. So do you and your team use any ⁓ AI image generators or anything like that for advertisements?
Ian Blake
Yep.
Peace out.
No, because we haven't found one good enough yet. So we've tried them and they're terrible. They're really, bad. So yeah, at the moment anyway, they're improving. They're improving. I saw an interview with I don't know if you're familiar with Mogadot. He's an Egyptian and ex-Google guy and very prevalent on different podcasts talking about AI. And he was just talking about the fact that AI is doubling in its power every five months. And so you can even see it, you know, but at the moment for image, for image generation, certainly the image generation that we're trying to do, ⁓ it hasn't been good. And you'd also need, you know, people who think that they, you know, they can create images using AI that are, are, that are,
Mikey Pruitt
Yeah.
Ian Blake
Yeah, and reflective of the brand, right, which is really important. And the you need you need a proper designer to be able to liaise with our prompt AI to be able to get you the quality that you need. You know, if you're if you're interested in, you know, getting your brand as famous as possible in your in your target market, you know.
Mikey Pruitt
Production ready, perhaps.
Yeah, the AI image tools in the hands of a real graphic designer are pretty impressive work. We've actually used ⁓ some image generation and then run it through video generators to create ad videos, which are good. A video person could have done way better. An animator could have done way better. But usable. yeah, like you said, it's getting close. Not quite there yet.
Ian Blake
Yeah. I don't think we're too far away.
Mikey Pruitt
But I totally agree. But I am curious of the steps to get to this kind of new market space. what you're trying to do is to get the MSP into thinking differently, have their uniqueness come through. What are some of the questions, perhaps, you would pepper them with to draw out that uniqueness?
Ian Blake
That's a very good question. yeah, ⁓ a lot ⁓ of what we do is asking questions that may not have been posed before, right? So to get them to a place or to get us to a place where we can come back with a hypothesis of how you should show up in the market now, we understand the following. So who you're for?
the problem you solve, what you deliver, why it matters, why it's hard and how you're different. And they're typically, you know, six questions that we we would we would go through, you know, not only with the senior leadership team of the organization, but also customers and non-customers and employees within the organization. And then and with the customers or with the buyer, it's quite
you get a lot of really good insights from the buyer, which is I think, you know, for most businesses, right? They have customers and they talk to customers, but you're very much, I suppose it's in game activity. You're talking to them about what you're selling them at that time or their problem, the problem, but you're not asking ⁓ deep strategic questions, right? So things that we would ask a buyer or a potential buyer, we try, we have a framework.
called pains, gains and jobs to be done. So we're trying to understand that the pains that your buyer is trying to solve and the gains they're trying to make by solving those pains and the jobs to be done, what are they doing to achieve that end goal? And there, that's it. We find a very good framework to be able to crystallize the buyer.
and help our MSP clients then show up for that buyer.
Mikey Pruitt
I think that was pretty powerful. you kind of laid out, was that six questions you would ask the MSP? Whatever they were. I'll rewind the transcript and I'll pluck those out for the link, the inevitable LinkedIn post for this. So you would pepper ⁓ the MSP, perhaps their executive team, some of their staff, maybe their board, whoever, and get
Ian Blake
Yes, yeah.
That's a good idea. Yeah.
Mikey Pruitt
Answers to those questions. Like I'm seeing, I'm thinking of like an internal survey, like, Hey, everyone answer these questions and then comb through those. What are you saying? And then you're saying slightly different questions for their customers and to see what their customers say. And I imagine there's like a process like do these match or are they totally different? And then who wins in that situation?
Ian Blake
Yeah, so I'll you an example if that would help of a client that we've done this for. So ultimately, what this process is trying to get to is an insight or insights that is true to the MSP, true to the buyer and different from the competition or an insight that will inform that, right?
And so one of our clients was or is a large Irish MSP Microsoft partner and they play in the enterprise and government space. And from this process, are interviewing the market and talking to the people within the organization. We found that in the market, the IT buyer
was saying that typically IT projects go over time and over budget. I'm sick of projects not delivering impact, right? Which isn't unusual. If you ask most buyers, they're going to say that, But when we found out what our client was good at was delivering on time and on budget. And in some instances, over delivering. So coming in before the due date or
you know, less than budget. So the positioning that we came up with for this particular client was impact delivered. That became the tagline. That was a whole other stuff, a bit like the iceberg underneath that. But that kind of impact delivered was the statement that we came up with for this client. And then everything that flowed from that made sense, know, so, you know, any content they write is about delivering impact.
they can, you know, write ebooks on and call it out, you know, when a call out kind of continue to call out issues in the the in in the IT world. But it gives them it gives them that something to stand for gives the gives the organization energy. They can rally around this particular thing. And so that's yeah, that's that's just an example of, know, of how the insight then becomes. And again, if you you compare it to you know, lot of the language that we would see in the MSP space, like, you know, your IT cybersecurity and compliance partner or cloud technology for modern businesses. Like they all say that, you know, this is completely different. You know, but it's, but it's all the category. Like it's not, you know, they're not trying to be like Red Bull, you know, it's all the category, but it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, ⁓ appealing to the buyer.
Yeah. ⁓
Mikey Pruitt
Yeah, what you do may be similar to others in this space, but who you are is almost always different.
Ian Blake
And how you do it, how you do it is different, right? So this, you know, delivering impact, even in how they manage projects, was something that they really passionate about. It was less about, you know, trouble ticket raising and, you know, patching and that kind of stuff, you know, which is fine for someone else. But for these guys, was kind of deep craftsmanship and that, you know, delivering impact at every point of their projects.
Mikey Pruitt
So you mentioned a word in there, the word ebook. So you were saying you gather these insights and then from those insights, you could develop an ebook. So in the last little bit, you said, perhaps this MSP writes an ebook about the strategy of their process and how that helps them and why it would work for you, blah, blah, blah. So other people can get benefit from reading this ebook, not necessarily, Hey,
Ian Blake
yeah.
Yes.
Mikey Pruitt
Call us to be your MSP, like get value from it. In the marketing biz, we would call something like an ebook a lead magnet. So like, are there other, like lead magnet, lead magnet assets that you kind of recommend or does it kind of depend? What do you, what's your story there?
Ian Blake
Yeah. So like again, we're kind of getting into tactics now. And once you've got that foundation built, the tactics become very easy to create. So another client of ours, they're in the MSP space, but their deep subject matter expertise on infrastructure is where they play, right? So they provide infrastructure.
Consulting and project delivery from large enterprise clients. And part of that infrastructure work or that infrastructure work gives them the ability to deliver cyber recovery solutions for clients. So we've recently done a size-able enough campaign for them where their subject matter expertise around cyber recovery.
was videoed. So we videoed their experts talking about the importance of cyber recovery and how cyber recovery is distinctively different from cyber security and then, you know, how they go about it because it's quite nuanced and believe it or not, like from the research, it became apparent that the decision makers within IT
weren't 100 % sure about the difference between cyber recovery and cyber and cyber security. They thought they were, they thought they were, you know, covered with cyber security, but you know, cyber recovery is another layer on top of that. So it was, was a real education piece, but again, it was linked to their, to their, what they stand for in the market. And that enabled us to come up with that kind of concept quite quickly, because it was true to them.
Mikey Pruitt (35:23)
I can just see you and your team like asking these questions and that cyber recovery topic comes up and you're like, wait a minute. This is, don't hear this often. So like, let's start, let's double click as they say onto that. And they're like, oh yeah, like, you know, we do this and that. So like, they're like, yeah, your cyber security is like taking care of, we do not want to have to use the cyber recovery methods that we have, but if we do, and there's, you know, it, it's happens every day. You can pull up a story right now.
Ian
Yeah, absolutely.
Mikey Pruitt
type in a cyber breach into Google and you'll see something that happened yesterday about a company, a government, an MSB or whatever. Like that is a really good differentiator there and something that probably people don't call out and that you kind of plucked out of their strategy discussion into now to become a tactic of theirs. That's awesome. So how do you, is it, are they pretty readily?
Ian Blake
Yes.
Yeah. ⁓ Exactly.
Mikey Pruitt
going forward with these tactics that you suggest? So you're like, okay, you told me all this stuff. We think X, Y, and Z are great tactics for you. Do you ever get pushed back in that space?
Ian Blake
Not necessarily, no. With a lot of these clients, we would have built their foundation. So we're extremely familiar with their business, extremely familiar with what they stand for. We would have given them the king that we recommend that they stand for. So we built their brand, we built their website, and we work with them on an ongoing basis. we get to know them intimately, get to know their business intimately.
And typically at the beginning of a year, beginning of a quarter, they would have things that they want to achieve or, you know, a new offer that they want to go to the market with. And then because we have the foundational layer, we're able to kind of move quite quickly because we can get our strategist to link the foundational layer with this new offer or new product or could be it could be a piece of marketing development fund from Microsoft or IBM that they have and want to do something with it. But again, linking it back to that, to the financial ⁓ position. Exactly. ⁓
Mikey Pruitt
to their core differentiator.
So we touched a bit on when we were talking about AI and deep research that you can identify your ideal clients for the MSP. I'm curious, like, why is that so important?
Ian Blake
Hmm. Hmm.
It's segmentation, targeting in particular is probably. The most strategic part of your of your brand strategy or your marketing strategy, right? So and so the three things it's called the Holy the Holy Trinity of them of marketing, segmentation, targeting and positioning on it. And the reason it's so strategic is that it.
It helps you decide what not to do. And because unfortunately nobody has unlimited budgets, well maybe Amazon or Microsoft do, right? But typically MSPs will have limited resources and you want to be able to ⁓ your efforts in a direction that is going to be as effective as possible.
So go back to your question about AI and how it helps with segmentation and targeting. Well, if you're able to feed AI a database of 5,000 professional services firms in the Northeast of the US, right? And you feed it in your customer base.
And within your customer base, have, you know, how profitable different customers are, the type of products that they have, you know, what issues they typically have, how much time they take from you and your team, et cetera. And if you're able to prompt it well enough, it can come back, you know, like this work would take weeks of a week searcher to do, you know, going through Excel spreadsheets with a fine-tooth comb. You can feed all that into ChatGPT and get it back.
Mikey Pruitt
Yeah.
Ian Blake
You know, it could be days of work as opposed to weeks of work, you know, and sometimes it can get a little bit frustrating. can it can forget where it was. I don't know if you've noticed that, you know, you have to wake it up every now and then. Wake where were you with that segmentation? You and if you manage to stay on it, yeah, it's like they're like teenage boys, you know, not doing their homework sometimes, you know. Yeah.
Mikey Pruitt
Yeah.
Wrecking cards and drinking beer.
Ian Blake
And then they come back all kind of all of it, all of all of all flusters, you know, with the whole load of work, you know. And but yeah, it's so sorry. I don't know. I went off on a little bit of a tangent there, but I did. Does that answer your question about how I would.
Mikey Pruitt
Yeah, yeah,
absolutely. the segmenting is important because of your, the MSP's limited budget. And this isn't just the case for MSPs. This is every business. Like you have to, you have to pinpoint who your top customers are and then essentially find like look alike companies and go after them. Now, once you are really good at that, then you can maybe broaden your scope of it.
Ian Blake
100%
Yeah, but even the bigger, even bigger MSP, like typically we would work with MSPs that have a turnover between 10 million and 400 million. And even within those organizations, like we're working with a 400 million euro organization at the moment and for their SM, SME segment, we're finding targeting within that segment that's going to be easier for them to sell to.
you know, when you know the criteria, ⁓ it's just it's a soft center. It's like, where's the soft center in this in this segment? And how can we become intensely appealing to that soft center and make some easier sales that are that are more profitable than the others, you know? Yes.
Mikey Pruitt
Absolutely.
So let's craft like a hypothetical situation. Let's say the MSP doesn't have budget to do ⁓ anything very expensive. They don't have the budget to hire Ian and team. They don't have the budget to do like Facebook ads or LinkedIn ads. What are some like very quick practical tips that we could give them to help them get more work on the strategy and then get tactic.
Ian
Yeah. So I would say it depends on, it depends on the size of the MSP. So an MSP would say between half a million and three, even $4 million in revenue. Yep. They're still kind of, they have to be
Mikey Pruitt
Which is a vast majority of MSPs.
Ian Blake
Well, I say a call of the car category, right? They're probably too early to make that leap, that differentiated leap. Right. So, you know, there's nothing wrong with them engaging in tactical activities. You know, so it's that kind of old school hand to hand combat. You know, using the tools available to them like email, LinkedIn and on a tactical perspective. There's nothing wrong with them being strategic where, know, in terms of segmentation and targeting or, you know, what segment to the market we want to go after and then who we target. So let's say you have a kind of a two and a half million dollar MSP and they've a lot of experience in the legal, you know, they over index and in the legal world, right?
without knowing anything else about them, would recommend that they double down on targeting more law firms with an offer to get in front of as many more law firms as they possibly can. Because they have a story to tell when they get into the sales conversation, they can talk with confidence about how they've delivered for the other 20 law firms.
And they'll be familiar with the challenges that the law firm has, whether it's, you know, it's around data or compliance or, you know, automation or whatever it is. And they'll have stories to tell, not unlike the stories I have to tell around the MSP world, you know, ⁓ it just makes it easier, you know? So that's like, that's, that's what I would, I would recommend the quick wins from a strategic perspective. And I would definitely, I wouldn't ignore positioning.
Mikey Pruitt
Yeah.
Ian Blake
Because if you can figure out a way to show up in the market, that, as I say, is differentiated from your competition. Well, that would be something I would do as well.
Mikey Pruitt
Yeah, you mentioned also just to call out, kind of mentioned, ⁓ speak the language of your target audience in there, which I thought was really, really good. So Ian, thank no, go ahead.
Ian Blake
I was going to say, then as you move up through the kind of the sizes, like once you go beyond five million, MSPs need to really, the biggest opportunity for them is differentiation. ⁓ Anything over five million. And these guys will have the budget, you know, to engage with someone like us to do, you know, differentiation strategy and then show up in the market with messaging.
That's put out into the market on a consistent basis and then that compounds over time. And you get famous for the famous for the right reasons in the right circles. And all of a sudden people start people start ringing you and asking you to be on podcasts and stuff.
Mikey Pruitt
That's how it goes. Well, Ian, thank you so much for coming on and enlighten us a little bit about getting us some strategy and some tactics for the MSP marketing. I think it's a place where MSP struggle a lot and it's good to see that you're out there and you're giving knowledge away freely. So I really appreciate that. Where can people find you on the interwebs?
Ian Blake
Absolutely, yes.
So my email address is ian at square dot agency. I'm very active on LinkedIn. My LinkedIn handle is. Okay, cool. Thanks. Thanks for your help. What is this? Exactly. Yeah. ⁓
Mikey Pruitt
It's Ian Blake in the number one.
You're like, yeah, that's it. You'll recognize the handsome bald fella in the picture.
Ian Blake
Yeah, and website is www.squaredot.agency.
Mikey Pruitt
Awesome. Well, thank you, Ian. I appreciate it.
Ian Blake
Pleasure.
Thank you, Mikey.
Welcome everybody to another episode of DNS unfiltered today. I'm joined by the founding. What would you say? Founder and CEO of Square dot, which is a B2B marketing firm that specializes in MSPs but has ⁓ longer reach than that. Ian Blake, welcome to the show.
Ian Blake
Thank you. Thank you for having me, Mikey.
Mikey Pruitt
Absolutely. tell us a little bit about yourself.
Ian Blake
So a little bit about me professionally, as you can see from the lack of hair on my head. I've been around a long time. Yeah, exactly. So I've...
Mikey Pruitt
and gray beard.
Ian Blake
Lifelong B2B tech sales and marketing. I started my career in Xerox in sales and then moved to mobile telco and worked in enterprise sales, SMB sales and sales management and then also in marketing within those companies. I suppose within...
My last telco role, I ran B2B marketing for a brand you guys in the States are probably not familiar with. called 3. So they're reasonably large in Europe, in Ireland and the UK for sure. He sponsored Chelsea Football Club, if that resonates with any of your... Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
Mikey Pruitt
You mean soccer, right?
Ian Blake
It was while it's there, I went looking for a specialist B2B tech marketing agency in Ireland and couldn't find any. And we had to go to the UK to get an agency to work with us. And that kind of sowed the seed for me going, there could be an opportunity here. And that's where the kind of the idea for Square. was born. And I set up a business 10 years ago.
And in that time we've worked with, like I was explaining earlier, we could break our clients into two buckets, know, 10 % of our business, our global B2B companies, our B2B tech companies, an example that your audience might be familiar with, Otterbox, the mobile phone and iPad cover people based out of California. We do all of their B2B.
EMDA marketing for them, they're only 10 % are them and others are 10 % of our business. 90 % of our business are mid-market B2B tech companies and a large percentage of those are MSPs. We typically work.
Mikey Pruitt
Yes, I personally spent way too much money on Otterbox cases. So your marketing is working. So if you haven't noticed, has a pretty killer Irish accent. But I am curious, not necessarily what percentage of your customers are ⁓ based in UK, Ireland, and Europe versus the US. well, I guess that and.
What are some of the differences you've seen like between MSPs and the different geo locations?
Ian Blake
I the differences in the geo locations are.
They're kind of, well, I suppose they all have the same, they all have very similar challenges, right? And the problems that we solve are similar. the, obviously the market in the US is much bigger than, you know, than the UK or Ireland. And so.
those clients, those US based MSPs would have or tech companies just have a much bigger market to go after. But in the main, problems are the same, challenges are the same, issues are the same. And one thing I find working, or having worked with so many MSPs at this point is actually how different they are when you get to speak to them. But they don't show that differentiation. ⁓
Mikey Pruitt
Well, let's
let's talk about that first. Like I've seen one of your videos and you mentioned the sea of sameness in the MSP marketing. And like you just said, MSPs are rather unique once you get to talk to them. But that uniqueness rarely comes out in their marketing. What is the what is the hang up there?
Ian Blake
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, I don't think it's a hang up. think it's a behavioral and it's behavioral with within the makeup of people that own and run and sit on leadership teams of MSPs. They're typically logical left brain people and where logic is great for solving the technical problems of their clients, you know, replacing hyper converged infrastructure systems and you know, putting in cloud solutions, etc. and logic has a great way of getting you to the same place as your competitors. And there's a there's a lovely story I heard recently actually talking about talking about logic and the importance of not copying your competition. So there's a there's a there's a book written by a guy called Will Godara.
Will Gadara owns a restaurant in New York called 11 Madison Park. And they were number 50 on a list of restaurants ⁓ and they wanted to get to number one. So what they did, Will Gadara brought his team, he's written a book called Unreasonable Hospitality and he brought his team, so kitchen staff, front of house staff, et cetera, to the restaurant that became number one on that list.
And they were all sitting down and having a meal and the staff and the meal arrived and the service was there and the staff were talking about what they could bring back to 11 Madison Avenue. And Will Gowry says, I don't want you to copy what's good. I want us to see what's bad about this number one restaurant and let's bring those things back. And the two things that they thought were they weren't necessarily bad, but they weren't as good as the other things were.
their beer wasn't, wasn't outstanding. So they had two beer options and that the beer drinkers at the table were kind of treated like second-class citizens. You know, the wine sommelier was kind of looking down their nose at them. And then the other thing they didn't do well relevant to the other stuff was coffee. So the two takeaways that they took was that they were going to implement in 11 Madison Avenue. They're going to double down on beer and they're going to double down on coffee. And what they did was that they got
a beer sommelier and a wine sommelier. they got the, so someone who was really into craft beers in, in 11 Madison Avenue and he doubled down with beer knowledge. And the rest one was so good. Anyway, they were number 50 on the list. Remember that, you know, craft beer companies were practically giving them the beer for nothing. And anyway,
Mikey Pruitt
Yeah.
Ian Blake
Long story short is, is, is that they went from number 50 on this list to number one on this list because they over-indexed on the thing that their competition weren't good at. And he has coined a phrase in the book, which I love called reverse benchmarking. it's the opposite of what the likes of McKinsey and Bain and all of these large consultancy companies, they make a fortune benchmarking the competition. Right. And similar, go back to my original point about the logical kind of
Mikey Pruitt
Hmm.
Ian Blake
Senior leadership teams in what make MSPs great, right? But that logic, the same as Bain and McKinsey, their benchmarking gets you to the same place as your competitors, ⁓ whereas if you double down on what they're not good at, it gives you a significant competitive advantage.
And that's differentiation. It's an easy problem. You don't need to bring your MSP stuff to the best MSP in town to find out where the opportunity is. It's in how they show up in the market, for sure.
Mikey Pruitt
That's really fascinating. think the lesson learned there is ⁓ more beer, craft beer. So differentiation in a crowded market and trying to compete. I've liked, you know, New York city restaurants, kind of like the top tier of restaurants, you know, other than like maybe Vegas or something, but very high in this, in the spectrum of a restaurant. So very admirable to go take a risk, I would say. And it sounds like what you're pitching to MSPs is to, you know,
Ian Blake
in every single section.
Yes. Yeah.
Mikey Pruitt
Put yourself out there in what may not mesh well with your left brain logicalness and take a risk.
Ian Blake
Yeah, and I suppose it's not even take a risk. When we work with an MSP, we will research all of their competitors. So we've researched many dozens of MSPs in Ireland, the UK, the US. And it's astonishing how they look and sound. The same and it's all erased if it has the most accreditations with Microsoft or IBM or Broadcom or whoever it is, ⁓ that's, I suppose, that's where the big opportunity lies is to differencing. So it's not necessarily risky. It's just to show up in a way that's true to you, true to your MSB, how you do business. That's appealing to the market and that's different from your competition.
Mikey Pruitt
Are there any recommendations you have on showing up differently, like breaking away from the uniformity people see?
Ian Blake
Yeah, well, we have a process that enables companies to do it. It's not easy. It's the job of what's called a brand strategist. And they start with a of three-step process where they look at segmentation, what segment of the market you're going after, what companies within that segment want to target, and then positioning. And the positioning is where the three things that I mentioned earlier come together. know, who you're for and what you're good at and how you're different from the competitors. And that then, that's the foundation. That's your marketing or your growth foundation. And when you build that and you have a differentiated point of view.
That enables everything else to happen. it enables how you show up in the market then in a way that's true to you and different from the competitors and appealing to the market.
Mikey Pruitt
So do you think there's any type of mind shift that is necessary to make those moves? Or is it just reading it and trying it?
Ian Blake
So to do it well, you need a specialist to do it, right? So, but what, the MSPs that we work with, they typically start the journey with a commitment, right? So that commitment can come from an event that happens in the company. So it could be a strategic.
move or it could be they've they've taken investment from a private equity company or they've acquired some other organizations or it could be a management buyout. So there's this concerted kind of, you know, realization within the organization and they typically, you know, they're quite honest and they put their hands up and they go like we don't really know how to approach this particular problem. And that's where they get in touch with a company like us and we can help them with that and to go on that journey.
Mikey Pruitt
So there's usually like an event perhaps, some acquisition, some major tech change perhaps that kind of spurns this like, ⁓ I'm in over my head feeling. And then they're like, Ian, help.
Ian Blake
Yes.
Exactly. Yeah, yeah.
Or they might just have this kind of because I suppose they're general. I'm speaking generally here. There isn't someone in the organ within the organization that has the skill set to be able to solve this problem. And what can happen is that is that they they know there's something wrong. They can't put their finger on what it is and they might phrase it like I was on to it.
Mikey Pruitt
Ahem.
Ian Blake
CEO of a large MSP a few weeks ago, he was saying, I don't know what we want to find out what we're going to be famous for. Or they might say we do great work. We just don't come across like that in the market. Like our website doesn't, you know, and they just don't know how to go about it. they try things, you know, but because they don't know how to build that foundational layer, ⁓ it can be challenging.
Mikey Pruitt
So I want to jump into kind of a how, not necessarily like a roadmap, you know, steps. We don't want to give away the secret sauce of Squirt, not necessarily, but I wanted to broach the subject of AI and marketing. And I want to just begin that with a story like every, I or the guests on this show always mentioned AI. So I'm going to shoot for it this time. But AI and marketing is pretty powerful. So I work in marketing now. I come from like a tech background.
Ian Blake
Yeah.
Okay.
Mikey Pruitt
And I am not the best writer. I'm not the best, you know, at researching, but I am really good at like, ⁓ scratching notes down and like organizing things after they are presented to me. So in preparation for this interview with Ian, so we've never met in person. We've, you know, looked at each other on LinkedIn and chatted back and forth briefly, maybe a couple of emails. And I gave you some questions before this and your response to me was.
Ian Blake
Okay.
Mikey Pruitt
Wow, you've really done your homework. So these are really good questions based on Ian's presence on LinkedIn and a few other social platforms. So what I did is I, and I didn't tell you this beforehand because I want to get your live reaction. So I did watch some of your videos. I took some very rough notes about some of the things you had mentioned. And then I fed that into AI to say,
Ian Blake
Okay. ⁓
Mikey Pruitt
Um, you know, take these notes and what you can find about Ian Blake on the web and generate some questions. And I did tune them a little bit because some of them were kind of ridiculous, but it was very helpful. And you were like, wow, really great job. And I, you know, it's not like, I guess it's kind of cheating, but, but it, was good output from the AI with the human grooming the stuff. So what do you think about AI's role in marketing strategy?
Ian Blake
Yeah.
So yeah, think it can be very valuable if it's used the right way by using the right way and going back to the sea of sameness, right? So, and to my kind of foundational layer, right? So if you take an MSP, for example, that haven't built down that foundational layer.
And an ⁓ MSP that's guilty, like the other 90 % of MSPs of living in that sea of sameness where AI will just magnify that and turn it into an ocean of uniformity, which actually presents an even bigger opportunity for the MSPs brave enough to
to go on that journey and find a differentiation, a point of difference, something to stand for in the market. And when you have that foundational layer and you use AI, the AI just magnifies that point of difference. And you can create really good ads on the back of it. And you can create really good content on the back of it because you're feeding the AI the...
the right thing, you know, because, but if you're the same as everybody else, everybody else is feeding, is feeding the AI the same stuff, know, you know,
Mikey Pruitt
Yeah. the, the AI, mean, it's essentially just kind of regurgitating the average of the internet and in what you're in, what your, your whole pitch is like, you have to not do that, but you can kind of tune AI to be your uniqueness. So you have to figure out that uniqueness. And, and like you said, some MSPs have a hard time putting their finger on what that uniqueness is. What's going to make me famous. said, so
Ian Blake
Exactly.
100 cents.
you
Things after.
Mikey Pruitt
you have to feed in that uniqueness to the AI. And I'm curious, like what tools would you recommend? Like those AI tools that you kind of lean on heavily. Which ones are those?
Ian Blake
So once we use ourselves, it's mostly to help with, well, it can help with a lot of research. So the ⁓ ChatGPT, is it the 1.0, the one that the deep research tool, it has deep research underneath the search bar. That's really good for researching, which is hugely important in that kind of foundational layer and also segmentation and targeting. can get it to help you with, you you can feed it a database and it can come up with ways of weighting that database or helping you think through, well, you know, if we're going after a particular, if we're targeting a particular segment of the market, you know, what's the revenue, what's the number of employees, where do we want them to be based, et cetera. And it can really, you know, speed up that process.
So that's one tool that we would use and we would use it for that. And then content creation, again in the right hand. if you want to get something written or get you started on writing something or coming up with a list of pieces of content, whether it's LinkedIn posts or blog posts or let's say an ebook or video ideas.
You can feed, and Claude is very good for this, and they have a project. can create a project from Claude and you can feed on the right-hand panel all the documentation required. So it could be the tone of voice document, the brand document, your point of differentiation, pain points of your target audience, and those documents live in the project. And then you would prompt it then to provide you with whatever it is that you want, whether it's LinkedIn posts, let's say.
So I have a project for LinkedIn posts and I'm to have all the information down there in the repository that's there. And you get to know how to use it. I'm prompting, think also ⁓ in AI, not being lazy about your prompt, know, so other advice I give is, ⁓ me if your audience know this already, like ⁓ the more context that it
that an AI has about what you're trying to get out of it, the better. So I always ask it to act like a B2B tech writer, act like a brand strategist, or act like whatever. And I want you to do the following and give it as much information as possible. And then iterate on that thereafter. And a massive thing is quality checking.
Mikey Pruitt
Yes.
Ian Blake
Like, oh my God, really need to quality check. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So you can really, and I'm like, so that email that you sent me, I didn't, I wasn't naturally inclined to think you had used AI. I went, oh, I just went, because you had made those tweets, you know, which you, you owned up to there five minutes ago, you know, so.
Mikey Pruitt
Especially if there's like links.
I didn't do it five minutes ago, so like it still worked. what Ian is saying and what I, what the example that I gave was still work to do, but instead of taking, you know, two hours, it took, you know, 30 minutes essentially. And the output was good, but I like what you were saying. You're kind of saying use the deep research tools. There's a open AI has one and also Google Gemini has one, which I think the Gemini one is free currently. guess they're.
Ian Blake
Yeah, yeah.
Mikey Pruitt
They're falling behind in markets, market share. they're giving it away, giving it away for free. And then you're saying kind of take that deep research, make sure it's. You know, accurate and includes your uniqueness and then kind of feed that into like a writer and give that writer AI a role. And the Claude, like you mentioned is really good at writing great ⁓ messaging and plans, I guess you would say, but yeah, you're kind of.
Ian Blake
Okay.
See you time.
Exactly.
Mikey Pruitt
using the strengths of each tool. And tool is the keyword here. Like AI is just another tool like any other, but you're using them in a way that produces a good output for you and your business. I'm curious, you did mention ⁓ ads in there. So do you and your team use any ⁓ AI image generators or anything like that for advertisements?
Ian Blake
Yep.
Peace out.
No, because we haven't found one good enough yet. So we've tried them and they're terrible. They're really, bad. So yeah, at the moment anyway, they're improving. They're improving. I saw an interview with I don't know if you're familiar with Mogadot. He's an Egyptian and ex-Google guy and very prevalent on different podcasts talking about AI. And he was just talking about the fact that AI is doubling in its power every five months. And so you can even see it, you know, but at the moment for image, for image generation, certainly the image generation that we're trying to do, ⁓ it hasn't been good. And you'd also need, you know, people who think that they, you know, they can create images using AI that are, are, that are,
Mikey Pruitt
Yeah.
Ian Blake
Yeah, and reflective of the brand, right, which is really important. And the you need you need a proper designer to be able to liaise with our prompt AI to be able to get you the quality that you need. You know, if you're if you're interested in, you know, getting your brand as famous as possible in your in your target market, you know.
Mikey Pruitt
Production ready, perhaps.
Yeah, the AI image tools in the hands of a real graphic designer are pretty impressive work. We've actually used ⁓ some image generation and then run it through video generators to create ad videos, which are good. A video person could have done way better. An animator could have done way better. But usable. yeah, like you said, it's getting close. Not quite there yet.
Ian Blake
Yeah. I don't think we're too far away.
Mikey Pruitt
But I totally agree. But I am curious of the steps to get to this kind of new market space. what you're trying to do is to get the MSP into thinking differently, have their uniqueness come through. What are some of the questions, perhaps, you would pepper them with to draw out that uniqueness?
Ian Blake
That's a very good question. yeah, ⁓ a lot ⁓ of what we do is asking questions that may not have been posed before, right? So to get them to a place or to get us to a place where we can come back with a hypothesis of how you should show up in the market now, we understand the following. So who you're for?
the problem you solve, what you deliver, why it matters, why it's hard and how you're different. And they're typically, you know, six questions that we we would we would go through, you know, not only with the senior leadership team of the organization, but also customers and non-customers and employees within the organization. And then and with the customers or with the buyer, it's quite
you get a lot of really good insights from the buyer, which is I think, you know, for most businesses, right? They have customers and they talk to customers, but you're very much, I suppose it's in game activity. You're talking to them about what you're selling them at that time or their problem, the problem, but you're not asking ⁓ deep strategic questions, right? So things that we would ask a buyer or a potential buyer, we try, we have a framework.
called pains, gains and jobs to be done. So we're trying to understand that the pains that your buyer is trying to solve and the gains they're trying to make by solving those pains and the jobs to be done, what are they doing to achieve that end goal? And there, that's it. We find a very good framework to be able to crystallize the buyer.
and help our MSP clients then show up for that buyer.
Mikey Pruitt
I think that was pretty powerful. you kind of laid out, was that six questions you would ask the MSP? Whatever they were. I'll rewind the transcript and I'll pluck those out for the link, the inevitable LinkedIn post for this. So you would pepper ⁓ the MSP, perhaps their executive team, some of their staff, maybe their board, whoever, and get
Ian Blake
Yes, yeah.
That's a good idea. Yeah.
Mikey Pruitt
Answers to those questions. Like I'm seeing, I'm thinking of like an internal survey, like, Hey, everyone answer these questions and then comb through those. What are you saying? And then you're saying slightly different questions for their customers and to see what their customers say. And I imagine there's like a process like do these match or are they totally different? And then who wins in that situation?
Ian Blake
Yeah, so I'll you an example if that would help of a client that we've done this for. So ultimately, what this process is trying to get to is an insight or insights that is true to the MSP, true to the buyer and different from the competition or an insight that will inform that, right?
And so one of our clients was or is a large Irish MSP Microsoft partner and they play in the enterprise and government space. And from this process, are interviewing the market and talking to the people within the organization. We found that in the market, the IT buyer
was saying that typically IT projects go over time and over budget. I'm sick of projects not delivering impact, right? Which isn't unusual. If you ask most buyers, they're going to say that, But when we found out what our client was good at was delivering on time and on budget. And in some instances, over delivering. So coming in before the due date or
you know, less than budget. So the positioning that we came up with for this particular client was impact delivered. That became the tagline. That was a whole other stuff, a bit like the iceberg underneath that. But that kind of impact delivered was the statement that we came up with for this client. And then everything that flowed from that made sense, know, so, you know, any content they write is about delivering impact.
they can, you know, write ebooks on and call it out, you know, when a call out kind of continue to call out issues in the the in in the IT world. But it gives them it gives them that something to stand for gives the gives the organization energy. They can rally around this particular thing. And so that's yeah, that's that's just an example of, know, of how the insight then becomes. And again, if you you compare it to you know, lot of the language that we would see in the MSP space, like, you know, your IT cybersecurity and compliance partner or cloud technology for modern businesses. Like they all say that, you know, this is completely different. You know, but it's, but it's all the category. Like it's not, you know, they're not trying to be like Red Bull, you know, it's all the category, but it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, ⁓ appealing to the buyer.
Yeah. ⁓
Mikey Pruitt
Yeah, what you do may be similar to others in this space, but who you are is almost always different.
Ian Blake
And how you do it, how you do it is different, right? So this, you know, delivering impact, even in how they manage projects, was something that they really passionate about. It was less about, you know, trouble ticket raising and, you know, patching and that kind of stuff, you know, which is fine for someone else. But for these guys, was kind of deep craftsmanship and that, you know, delivering impact at every point of their projects.
Mikey Pruitt
So you mentioned a word in there, the word ebook. So you were saying you gather these insights and then from those insights, you could develop an ebook. So in the last little bit, you said, perhaps this MSP writes an ebook about the strategy of their process and how that helps them and why it would work for you, blah, blah, blah. So other people can get benefit from reading this ebook, not necessarily, Hey,
Ian Blake
yeah.
Yes.
Mikey Pruitt
Call us to be your MSP, like get value from it. In the marketing biz, we would call something like an ebook a lead magnet. So like, are there other, like lead magnet, lead magnet assets that you kind of recommend or does it kind of depend? What do you, what's your story there?
Ian Blake
Yeah. So like again, we're kind of getting into tactics now. And once you've got that foundation built, the tactics become very easy to create. So another client of ours, they're in the MSP space, but their deep subject matter expertise on infrastructure is where they play, right? So they provide infrastructure.
Consulting and project delivery from large enterprise clients. And part of that infrastructure work or that infrastructure work gives them the ability to deliver cyber recovery solutions for clients. So we've recently done a size-able enough campaign for them where their subject matter expertise around cyber recovery.
was videoed. So we videoed their experts talking about the importance of cyber recovery and how cyber recovery is distinctively different from cyber security and then, you know, how they go about it because it's quite nuanced and believe it or not, like from the research, it became apparent that the decision makers within IT
weren't 100 % sure about the difference between cyber recovery and cyber and cyber security. They thought they were, they thought they were, you know, covered with cyber security, but you know, cyber recovery is another layer on top of that. So it was, was a real education piece, but again, it was linked to their, to their, what they stand for in the market. And that enabled us to come up with that kind of concept quite quickly, because it was true to them.
Mikey Pruitt (35:23)
I can just see you and your team like asking these questions and that cyber recovery topic comes up and you're like, wait a minute. This is, don't hear this often. So like, let's start, let's double click as they say onto that. And they're like, oh yeah, like, you know, we do this and that. So like, they're like, yeah, your cyber security is like taking care of, we do not want to have to use the cyber recovery methods that we have, but if we do, and there's, you know, it, it's happens every day. You can pull up a story right now.
Ian
Yeah, absolutely.
Mikey Pruitt
type in a cyber breach into Google and you'll see something that happened yesterday about a company, a government, an MSB or whatever. Like that is a really good differentiator there and something that probably people don't call out and that you kind of plucked out of their strategy discussion into now to become a tactic of theirs. That's awesome. So how do you, is it, are they pretty readily?
Ian Blake
Yes.
Yeah. ⁓ Exactly.
Mikey Pruitt
going forward with these tactics that you suggest? So you're like, okay, you told me all this stuff. We think X, Y, and Z are great tactics for you. Do you ever get pushed back in that space?
Ian Blake
Not necessarily, no. With a lot of these clients, we would have built their foundation. So we're extremely familiar with their business, extremely familiar with what they stand for. We would have given them the king that we recommend that they stand for. So we built their brand, we built their website, and we work with them on an ongoing basis. we get to know them intimately, get to know their business intimately.
And typically at the beginning of a year, beginning of a quarter, they would have things that they want to achieve or, you know, a new offer that they want to go to the market with. And then because we have the foundational layer, we're able to kind of move quite quickly because we can get our strategist to link the foundational layer with this new offer or new product or could be it could be a piece of marketing development fund from Microsoft or IBM that they have and want to do something with it. But again, linking it back to that, to the financial ⁓ position. Exactly. ⁓
Mikey Pruitt
to their core differentiator.
So we touched a bit on when we were talking about AI and deep research that you can identify your ideal clients for the MSP. I'm curious, like, why is that so important?
Ian Blake
Hmm. Hmm.
It's segmentation, targeting in particular is probably. The most strategic part of your of your brand strategy or your marketing strategy, right? So and so the three things it's called the Holy the Holy Trinity of them of marketing, segmentation, targeting and positioning on it. And the reason it's so strategic is that it.
It helps you decide what not to do. And because unfortunately nobody has unlimited budgets, well maybe Amazon or Microsoft do, right? But typically MSPs will have limited resources and you want to be able to ⁓ your efforts in a direction that is going to be as effective as possible.
So go back to your question about AI and how it helps with segmentation and targeting. Well, if you're able to feed AI a database of 5,000 professional services firms in the Northeast of the US, right? And you feed it in your customer base.
And within your customer base, have, you know, how profitable different customers are, the type of products that they have, you know, what issues they typically have, how much time they take from you and your team, et cetera. And if you're able to prompt it well enough, it can come back, you know, like this work would take weeks of a week searcher to do, you know, going through Excel spreadsheets with a fine-tooth comb. You can feed all that into ChatGPT and get it back.
Mikey Pruitt
Yeah.
Ian Blake
You know, it could be days of work as opposed to weeks of work, you know, and sometimes it can get a little bit frustrating. can it can forget where it was. I don't know if you've noticed that, you know, you have to wake it up every now and then. Wake where were you with that segmentation? You and if you manage to stay on it, yeah, it's like they're like teenage boys, you know, not doing their homework sometimes, you know. Yeah.
Mikey Pruitt
Yeah.
Wrecking cards and drinking beer.
Ian Blake
And then they come back all kind of all of it, all of all of all flusters, you know, with the whole load of work, you know. And but yeah, it's so sorry. I don't know. I went off on a little bit of a tangent there, but I did. Does that answer your question about how I would.
Mikey Pruitt
Yeah, yeah,
absolutely. the segmenting is important because of your, the MSP's limited budget. And this isn't just the case for MSPs. This is every business. Like you have to, you have to pinpoint who your top customers are and then essentially find like look alike companies and go after them. Now, once you are really good at that, then you can maybe broaden your scope of it.
Ian Blake
100%
Yeah, but even the bigger, even bigger MSP, like typically we would work with MSPs that have a turnover between 10 million and 400 million. And even within those organizations, like we're working with a 400 million euro organization at the moment and for their SM, SME segment, we're finding targeting within that segment that's going to be easier for them to sell to.
you know, when you know the criteria, ⁓ it's just it's a soft center. It's like, where's the soft center in this in this segment? And how can we become intensely appealing to that soft center and make some easier sales that are that are more profitable than the others, you know? Yes.
Mikey Pruitt
Absolutely.
So let's craft like a hypothetical situation. Let's say the MSP doesn't have budget to do ⁓ anything very expensive. They don't have the budget to hire Ian and team. They don't have the budget to do like Facebook ads or LinkedIn ads. What are some like very quick practical tips that we could give them to help them get more work on the strategy and then get tactic.
Ian
Yeah. So I would say it depends on, it depends on the size of the MSP. So an MSP would say between half a million and three, even $4 million in revenue. Yep. They're still kind of, they have to be
Mikey Pruitt
Which is a vast majority of MSPs.
Ian Blake
Well, I say a call of the car category, right? They're probably too early to make that leap, that differentiated leap. Right. So, you know, there's nothing wrong with them engaging in tactical activities. You know, so it's that kind of old school hand to hand combat. You know, using the tools available to them like email, LinkedIn and on a tactical perspective. There's nothing wrong with them being strategic where, know, in terms of segmentation and targeting or, you know, what segment to the market we want to go after and then who we target. So let's say you have a kind of a two and a half million dollar MSP and they've a lot of experience in the legal, you know, they over index and in the legal world, right?
without knowing anything else about them, would recommend that they double down on targeting more law firms with an offer to get in front of as many more law firms as they possibly can. Because they have a story to tell when they get into the sales conversation, they can talk with confidence about how they've delivered for the other 20 law firms.
And they'll be familiar with the challenges that the law firm has, whether it's, you know, it's around data or compliance or, you know, automation or whatever it is. And they'll have stories to tell, not unlike the stories I have to tell around the MSP world, you know, ⁓ it just makes it easier, you know? So that's like, that's, that's what I would, I would recommend the quick wins from a strategic perspective. And I would definitely, I wouldn't ignore positioning.
Mikey Pruitt
Yeah.
Ian Blake
Because if you can figure out a way to show up in the market, that, as I say, is differentiated from your competition. Well, that would be something I would do as well.
Mikey Pruitt
Yeah, you mentioned also just to call out, kind of mentioned, ⁓ speak the language of your target audience in there, which I thought was really, really good. So Ian, thank no, go ahead.
Ian Blake
I was going to say, then as you move up through the kind of the sizes, like once you go beyond five million, MSPs need to really, the biggest opportunity for them is differentiation. ⁓ Anything over five million. And these guys will have the budget, you know, to engage with someone like us to do, you know, differentiation strategy and then show up in the market with messaging.
That's put out into the market on a consistent basis and then that compounds over time. And you get famous for the famous for the right reasons in the right circles. And all of a sudden people start people start ringing you and asking you to be on podcasts and stuff.
Mikey Pruitt
That's how it goes. Well, Ian, thank you so much for coming on and enlighten us a little bit about getting us some strategy and some tactics for the MSP marketing. I think it's a place where MSP struggle a lot and it's good to see that you're out there and you're giving knowledge away freely. So I really appreciate that. Where can people find you on the interwebs?
Ian Blake
Absolutely, yes.
So my email address is ian at square dot agency. I'm very active on LinkedIn. My LinkedIn handle is. Okay, cool. Thanks. Thanks for your help. What is this? Exactly. Yeah. ⁓
Mikey Pruitt
It's Ian Blake in the number one.
You're like, yeah, that's it. You'll recognize the handsome bald fella in the picture.
Ian Blake
Yeah, and website is www.squaredot.agency.
Mikey Pruitt
Awesome. Well, thank you, Ian. I appreciate it.
Ian Blake
Pleasure.
Thank you, Mikey.