2021 was an amazing year here at The 20! We are proud of our accomplishments and the company culture we have established. Within the last twelve months, we have hit many milestones.
Here are some of the highlights from the past year…
Closed nearly over 45,000 tickets!
Increased our footprint in 24 markets
74 new employees hired
Featured in over 50 articles and publications
Received 10+ awards
Published 80 blog posts
Established 4 new vendor partnerships
Held 50+ webinars
Produced 300+ pieces of marketing collateral for MSP
Attended 52 events (Check out our 2022 event calendar here)
Not to mention, we had 300+ attendees at our VISION’21 Conference! Make sure you save the date for VISION 2022, to be held October 4th through October 7th.
It’s easy to see the value marketing provides when you work in marketing, but it can be a lot harder for others to see the true value of marketing. Marketing feeds into your sales process significantly by generating leads, growing brand awareness and nurturing industry awareness. One of the first steps to really see the return on investment (ROI) is to disconnect your marketing process from traditional, transactional sales. You need to make the intangible become tangible.
How you do this is highly contextual and variable, but it almost always helps to present the data, show the relationships you’ve grown, showcase how your marketing campaigns help sell and then help show how to recognize the intangible parts of what you’ve done throughout the process. What does a lead cost, and how was it fed by your marketing campaigns? By showing this to your company, you can prove your worth.
Seeing Data
The difference between understanding data and seeing data is the difference between dawn and dusk. Dawn marks the start of a new day with new potential, while dusk marks the end of the day, when you wrap up what you’re doing to prepare for the next. You can’t just see the data; you need to really take it in and absorb it.
Data makes up the raw ingredients in your recipe, but metrics are what you get after you cook everything. Raw data can be shaped in many ways, but metrics allow you to show just what the data truly means. There’s a hair’s distance between seeing data and it meaning something.
Seeing Relationships
If some random company remembers your birthday, do you remember that? When your birthday comes, will you think of a random company that didn’t reach out or the one company that actually did? The company that sends me a coupon has a much better chance of me thinking of it than the one that doesn’t. If you reach out, you have the chance of your customers thinking about you.
However, too much interaction can feel oppressive. My spam filter keeps getting smarter because some brands get lazier with their campaigns. Great — you know my birthday, and every day from my birthday to my half-birthday (which no one cares about), but all you’ve done is alienate me with your constant outreach. A relationship requires upkeep, but you can’t smother it to death.
Seeing Sales Shine
The sales process makes up your funnel, and your marketing campaign is the difference between the filter dealing with mud or water. One is easy to clear up; the other requires time and effort. What do you think your sales team’s time is worth? Marketing frees up your salespeople from dead ends and helps keep other parts of your workplace functioning with synergy instead of working against each other.
Your sales team truly shines when they’re handed leads that work with them rather than against them. Your marketing process should cut a lot of junk out of the sales funnel. What do the leads look like before and after you run your marketing campaign?
Seeing The Intangible
The problem with most of our modern marketing efforts is that they’re too intangible in many ways. Your boss doesn’t get that the extra lead came from Joan specifically because she needed a company to solve her issue and she thought of you because of a conference that she got your card from. She saw your number and thought of you, and now she’s directed her entire business toward your sales team. How much does that first domino in the chain weigh for you?
How much did that lead cost you? Can you quantify it easily, or is it something you need to sit down and think about? How many leads do you manage to pull in, and how much do you spend on your marketing? How much does your sales team spend? If you see the data and you really break it down, you can quickly figure out just what happens from your marketing campaigns.
Seeing The Process
What is your brand’s awareness worth? When James thinks of your field, does he think of you and your company? You can’t control what potential clients think, but you can control how they perceive you.
We work to make sure that when people think of scalable IT, they think of us. When they think of visionary, they think of our CEO. We think big from the ground up. The data means we can see exactly where we are and just where we want to go. We don’t just focus on the sales funnel; we focus on the people behind each sale. Sales can really shine when the whole process enables people to see each other on an equal level.
Seeing The Return On Investment
The difference between the pieces we started with and what we’ve created is the difference between six of one and half a dozen of the other. What about the subtlety between lilac and lavender? They’re both floral, but one is bright and alive in a way the other lacks. Make sure you’re brighter than your competitors.
The ROI you get from your marketing is going to depend on just how you approach the process and how you figure out your results. When you can actually differentiate the dawn from the dusk, you can see the implication of your efforts. Does it work for you, or does it just disappear?
What does each transaction get you? A lead is expensive, but what is it worth to you? Your marketing feeds, catalyzes and enables your sales team. Do you see value, or do you just hope for it? Once you can see the process, you have to comprehend it and help others make sense of it. Is marketing a black hole for you, or is it the process that separates you and your competition?
Email marketing can feel dated on the surface to people outside of marketing, but it’s still one of the most important tricks of the trade to turn leads into real contracts. In modern marketing, social media gets you an audience, but email gets you a deal. It’s cheap, easy, and scalable. This trend is especially telling in B2B (business to business) ventures like MSPs.
An email list gives you access to potential leads who are interested in you for some reason. This doesn’t guarantee a sales call, but it does increase your odds. You can spend less on marketing for better results statistically.
The move from social media marketing or similar to an email list is also a way to own your audience rather than rent it from a platform. When you’re on Facebook or similar, you’re getting attention based on what makes the platform money. There are also more people with casual interests passing by who have no intention of ever buying anything.
Once someone has bought in a little, they’re at least more likely to buy in more based on the Diderot Effect. If you get them to do a favor, you can most likely get them to do more down the line per the Benjamin Franklin Effect. Combine these techniques the right way and you can ask for an email to ask for a buy in.
Owning Email
You’re asking readers a favor to get their email. What are you giving them in return for said favor? Most email lists have some trade-off, the company gets an avenue of contact, the person volunteering their email address usually gets something. This can be a white-paper, an ebook, or similar. What you use to entice may vary, but you still get some form of buy-in. As an MSP, this can range from data about specific technical aspects to case studies and other productive advice.
When you market on social media, you’re basically renting your audience. Getting their email or some other form of contact gives you a direct avenue. You’re no longer lost in the sea of businesses and chatter on social media, but you now own a direct link to potential prospects. You’ll still get fake emails and people who just don’t care, but dollar for dollar you get much more (as we’ll explore). You now have a path to own first-party data.
Taking ownership also helps pull potential prospects into your marketing funnel. Email in B2B is a direct avenue into a business inbox which is monitored more closely than many personal inboxes. You also have someone who has wanted something from you (more often than not) so they’re probably willing to listen if it directly benefits them somehow. This gives opportunity to perform drip marketing.
The Value of Email in B2B Marketing
B2B marketing involves much less impulse buying ; you’re doing something to be involved in their business. A B2B sale isn’t a transaction, it’s an investment after forming a sales cadence.
Email provides an easy avenue in which can help you get more touches to get more conversions. It takes a lot of energy and effort to shift services, but it can be necessary. A no in sales isn’t always a no, it’s more a no, not right now. B2B sales aren’t the same as they used to be.
Your marketing process feeds your sales process. You can’t sell without leads, and you can’t generate leads (at scale) without marketing. The problem with lead generation is that some leads are just worth more.
When someone signs up with their email, you have a contact method, and you have some level of interest. It currently makes up 23.11% of MSP marketing methods for the average MSP, but it becomes essential to scale. With the right tracking methods and data, you can sift leads to find which are worth spending the most on for pennies on the dollar compared to most other active digital marketing methods. You won’t win every sale, but you will greatly reduce the waste of cold calling and blind outreach. They already wanted something, now show them what you have that’s more of an ask.
How to Drip Market
Drip marketing is the same for B2C (Business to Consumer) and B2B; the difference is the scope. B2C can rely on more simple techniques for long-term leads, but B2B requires a bit more. You aren’t buying an individual’s approval, you’re trying to sell a group on your value. For an MSP, this is even more involved since you need your client to trust you with the most important parts of their business.
Drip marketing is basically the practice of contacting a potential lead or prospect multiple times to get them interested. Each email contains something to keep their interest and push them deeper into your funnel. A campaign can start with a problem, progress to solutions, progress through implementation, then progress through the problems with said implementation, and then finally progresses towards the harder sales pitch of why you avoid said process. You guide them through your reasoning towards why your solution has already solved the problem. This is just one example of many ideas which can make for a simple template for a drip marketing campaign.
Each touch can whittle away at doubts and even help weed out incompatible leads. A lead you can sell, but which you won’t retain past the onboarding is worth less than no lead at all. Drip marketing is all about having multiple touches to keep your audience engaged with your brand and your campaign. Sell them on your expertise and your solution while weeding out bad fits.
Applying Email Marketing
Email marketing is one of the lowest cost ways to get more direct access to clients. Email allows you to send to many clients with a single email. Cold calling requires someone calling and the time to talk (as well as luck getting a hold of someone). Traditional ads require money and the risk of misclicks from phone and tablet users.
Email marketing can be near free with Mailchimp and similar, or you can leverage something like Hubspot. We use Hubspot for the features it offers over similar platforms, but the best platform is one which works with you. That said, Hubspot is near standard in many marketing efforts because of the power its CRM offers. Sign up with Hubspot to get the most out of your marketing process and see why we’re an affiliate.
Do you have a newsletter or some kind of blog with information that your customers or potential customers can benefit from? How do you get it to them? You can post it on social media, or you can ask for their emails, pull them in, and provide them with a more direct link. The more they interact with your platform, the better the fit they probably are.
Write what can help your customers understand technology, understand the industry, or understand the news about what you provide. What is PrintNightmare? How does it apply to their business and what would you do about it as their IT specialist?
As an MSP, you should be leading from a technical angle. What do you do for your client and how can you show them what you could do? Email marketing is about providing value and about showing what value your business provides. Some will bite, others won’t, but you get better quality leads and easier sales when done right.
How are you getting leads and where is email in your process? Does email help you or do you get lost making it into something which generates leads? Email is the lowest risk, easiest way to jump from passive marketing to active marketing. All your MSP needs to do is make the jump and target your clients.
Learn how we do marketing here at The 20 and how you can benefit from our marketing program by reaching out here.
VISION ’21: The Year of the Return
Reignite Your Passion for Your IT Business at the Premier MSP Event of 2021
Last year was tough on growing businesses. But if you’re an MSP owner, the future looks bright. Indeed, one reputable research report predicts that the MSP market will grow from $242.9 billion in 2021 to $354.8 billion by 2026. This is hardly surprising; more and more businesses are turning to managed IT services to negotiate the growing complexity in their IT infrastructures. And as remote work — and the cybersecurity challenges that come with it — becomes more common, the need for MSPs is only going to become more acute.
But good things come to those who … take action! MSPs are at a pivotal moment. If you’re an MSP owner, the next several years can bring monumental growth — but only if you stay abreast of market trends, business best practices, and customer demands in a post-pandemic world. Now, is it possible to ride the wave of growth without a community of likeminded MSP owners to propel you forward? Of course it is. But why make things harder on yourself?
The 20 is a group of MSPs who’ve decided to join forces. Our MSP members have risen to the top of the IT industry by leveraging shared knowledge and resources, along with a proven sales platform and single service delivery model. And after a socially distanced 2020, we’re excited to announce that this year’s VISION conference will be a live, in-person event. If you’re an MSP owner who wants to grow and scale, VISION ’21 is the one IT conference to attend live in 2021.
Come to VISION ’21 to CONNECT
VISION ’21 will be packed with stellar content for MSP growth. But as great as this content is, what makes a VISION conference truly special are the people. Our MSP members say it time and again – the sense of community The 20 gives them is unmatched.
One of our favorite parts of a VISION conference is seeing IT business owners who have been struggling on their own for years discover the power of our cooperative approach firsthand. Oftentimes, business owners attend VISION for the first time expecting the same networking opportunities they can get at any other IT conference. But when they actually start interacting with our members, they quickly realize that The 20 is different — that we’re not just a group of MSPs, but a genuine community where we actively help each other grow.
Similarly, ‘networking’ at a VISION conference is so much more than exchanging contact information. It’s coming together with your peers and bonding over shared struggles. It’s discovering that you’re not alone. It’s expanding your perspective and opening your eyes to new ways of thinking. So, don’t come to VISION ’21 to ‘network’ – come to form genuine and lasting CONNECTIONS. You owe it to yourself — and your MSP — to experience what it’s like to be a part of a genuine community in an industry where cooperation is rare.
Come to VISION ’21 to get INSPIRED
We’ve talked to thousands and thousands of MSP owners over the years, and we’ve noticed an unfortunate pattern. A person will found their IT business with a clear vision in mind and ambition to spare. But as the years roll on, and as they work tirelessly on their business without seeing it truly grow, that vision and ambition both start to fade. Even the most stalwart business owner isn’t immune to feelings of frustration and even despair. No one likes working hard without seeing results.
If you want to take your MSP to the next level, it’s vital that you take a good, hard look at your own mindset. Are you feeling positive about the future of your MSP? Excited to take on new challenges and innovate solutions to your business problems? Or are you feeling tired, unmotivated … or even hopeless? If it’s the latter, it’s probably time for a change …
Coming to VISION ’21 is a great idea for MSP owners who are feeling worn out or at their wit’s end. There is nothing quite as transformative as coming together with likeminded business owners for a common goal. MSP owners who attend a VISION conference often return to their businesses with a newfound sense of purpose and direction. We’ve seen it happen countless times before, and we can’t wait to see it happen again at VISION ’21.
Remember, sometimes all it takes is one speaker, one conversation, one idea – and your entire perspective can shift. It might be Maye Musk’s incredible story of success and perseverance. It might be an insight from a fellow MSP owner. It might be the refreshingly honest wisdom of Tim Conkle, CEO of The 20. But whatever it is that inspires you at VISION ’21, it’s going to have a lasting impact on how you run your MSP.
Come to VISION ’21 to LEARN
The MSP world moves fast, and keeping up can be tough when you’re an MSP owner who’s working alone. The thing is, IT business owners generally know their stuff … when it comes to IT. But running a successful IT business requires A LOT more than tech expertise. In today’s crowded and highly competitive IT industry, less than 4% of MSPs ever reach $1 million in annual revenue. The reason is simple: the overwhelming majority of IT business owners try to figure out the ‘business side’ of things all by themselves: talent development, service delivery and customer satisfaction, sales and marketing, vendor management — the list truly does go on and on. Achieving competence — let alone mastery — in all of these things is a tall order when you’re already busy with the day-to-day tasks of running your business. So what’s an IT business owner like you to do?
Stop working alone! Come to VISION ’21 and help yourself to the collective expertise of world-class MSPs from all across North America. The 20 prides itself on being a genuine community, and a big part of that is being welcoming to newcomers. We’re not stingy with our wisdom, because we know that the more MSPs we can attract, the stronger we become.
At VISION ’21, you can plug into The 20’s network of IT business owners and industry experts to supercharge your IT business in just two days. Between all of the networking and the bevy of breakout sessions, there isn’t a single aspect of running an MSP that VISION ’21 can’t help you with. From cybersecurity to sales cadence to market automation, whatever you’re curious about, we’ve got you covered.
Come to VISION ’21 to have FUN
We’re bringing up fun at the end of this blog post because it’s not that important, right? Because having fun, when it comes to growing your IT business, is an afterthought … right?
Wrong! Fun is integral to running a successful company. Fun is energy. Fun is positivity. Fun is enthusiasm. Fun is passion. If you’re not having fun with your MSP, what’s the point? Also, if you’re not having fun with your MSP, chances are, it’s hurting business. Your attitude rubs off on your techs, and their attitude certainly rubs off on your end clients. Of course, you shouldn’t be expected to feel positive all the time — running an IT business can be stressful, and you’re only human. But it’s important that you take steps to keep yourself from sinking too low — that you make a conscious effort to ‘troubleshoot’ your own brain from time to time, for the sake of your business, and more importantly, for your own sake!
In our culture, we’re told to believe in “business or pleasure” — in the idea that our jobs aren’t supposed to be fun, but instead, something we ‘endure’ so that we can relax after work, after retirement, etc. But here at The 20, we don’t buy into that “business or pleasure” nonsense. We think “business AND pleasure” is a far better motto.
It’s true — no one parties like The 20. But don’t just take our word for it. Come to VISION ’21 and see for yourself. We promise it will be the most fun you’ve ever had on a business trip.
Let’s Grow!
This is the year you take your MSP to the next level — or, it can be at least, if you commit to making real changes to your IT business. It’s often said that if you want to be successful, surround yourself with successful people. We think there’s a lot of truth to that, and we encourage and warmly invite you and your MSP team to join us at VISION ’21. When likeminded business owners come together for a common purpose, magic happens – hearts and minds change, attitudes shift, hope returns. We can’t wait to see all the magic that VISION ’21 brings.
Registration for VISION ’21 is NOW OPEN. Also, check out our “Top 10 Reasons You Should Attend” video.
Google has announced that Chrome will drop support for third-party cookies before 2022. While they aren’t the first to do so, they are the largest browser by market share to do so. Marketing is about to have a major lateral move where some parts move backwards as other parts move forward to compensate.
The death of third-party cookies isn’t going to be the ad apocalypse of 2021 that some marketing firms claim it will be, but it will be the death of an entire methodology. Data didn’t get diminished, it got different. If you’re ready for the changes, or at least receptive to acknowledging things are about to get much different, you’re ahead of most companies. This is a grand reset of the marketing ecosystem with an old premise brought forward to today.
Learning from the lessons of the past will enable to you to adapt to the lessons of tomorrow once this change hits the ground running. Yes, things are about to get harder for a while, but they’re also going to be harder across the board. That includes for your competition. Capitalize on the chaos and use the foundational principles of marketing, and you can and will prosper.
Third to First: Move Back to Move Forward
It’s a bit of a misnomer that the death of third-party cookies corresponds to the death of analytics. The rumor feels like it’s mostly been quashed, but I still hear echos of it from time to time. Good first-party data and analytics were essential before tracking networks were even feasible, and they’re going to make a return. You may lose action to the connections, but it’s possible to get a very good picture without leaving your domain.
People tend to forget that if people are opting in, you still have their data. If they’re on your email list, if you place or generate the link, etc., you can still collect data on them as a first party. The same tricks that worked in the late 90’s and early 2000’s are still used today. You may lose some of the granularity, but imagination and experience easily fills in the detail.
How are you collecting data and what are you doing with it? How a customer, client, or prospect is using your website or interacting with your content is just as valuable as ever. Your ad targeting will get much more narrow and general, but will also get cheaper on average (when the dust finally settles). We already started going back to older models where advertisements almost need a bribe in technical circles. A business doesn’t put out their white paper for the benefit of humankind after all.
Content Is King: Back to Basics
The first rule of running a business is to have something someone wants, and the same applies to marketing. People buy something because they’re looking to solve a problem or because they want to buy a feeling. People want content because they’re looking to learn something or find out about a product. Why not do both at once? Content is still king and you need to get competitive with it.
You need content people want to view. Almost every industry is saturated with ads and gimmicks, but how can you get people to come forward to pick your ad and marketing rather than trying to push it down their throats? A blog article that solves a problem can also point all signs towards your offering. You can push a white paper that covers what you discovered behind an email list to get them into your pipeline.
Content should be part of your marketing cadence plan to scale your marketing outreach. People don’t just want an email with details written out, they want something aesthetic, easy to digest, and full of the details relevant to what they’re looking to accomplish. They want a holistic package which balances the information with the glitter to really shine. The exact balance will depend on your audience and what you’re selling.
What can you provide to get people to volunteer to learn about your solution? How can you provide valuable content to begin to monetize your actual value? SEO and marketing cadence are going to decide the next rounds until something new comes along. How are you building a marketing cadence and building your SEO strategy with quality content?
Hitting the Digital Pavement: Get Back Out There
Think of this change as getting laid off with a favorable severance package and a strong safety net. You do need to make changes to keep going, but you have some time to wrap your head around the changes. While the jump when third-party cookies finally die is going to be abrupt, the principles you’ve learned and used will continue to serve as long as you’re willing to make changes, especially if you start testing things now. The service you used for data and metadata may shift to a quick lesson in Excel for analytics.
While you probably can’t just hit the pavement to sell a service or find a job even now, doing the digital equivalent can set you above your peers or competition. SEO tips from 20 years ago may be heavily dated, but the principles themselves are more relevant than ever (such as having good content). We’re moving back in terms of what we have access to, but not what we can do with it. Data may get “simpler”, but how we work with the data can get more and more complex with the right application.
Pay-gated services are going to get heavily shuffled, and necessity will necessitate innovation once more. Things are going to get a bit chaotic before we get some serious changes. It’s a new frontier, temporarily, but you have a chance to make a breakthrough ahead of your competition. Hit that digital pavement and ask around and go back to basics deciphering how to make sense of the new world of marketing.
Retrograde vs. Regressive
There’s a difference between moving back and moving backwards. Go back to the principles but not backwards in the practice. Technology has changed the game and will never be less important than it is now. Make more sense of your analytics and you make more sense of all analytic processes (assuming the data hits a certain standard). If you have the concepts down, we’re moving back in available data not potential.
The move from third-party cookies will hurt the marketing industry as a whole at first, but it is also a chance to see the playing field leveled. It’s also a chance to see a better balance between the creep factor of profiles and the idealized prospect. Marketing and advertising had been beholden to the paradox of choice with data and ways to weight it.
Third party sources each held varying levels of value and none of them agreed with the other. 100 views was 110 on one platform, 91 on another, etc. While I made the numbers themselves up, I’ve seen data that varied (or more) between sources on individual data points. We see data after it has been through the black box of the almighty algorithm which gives each service its edge. Some remove data, others don’t, and others count data which is near erroneous everywhere else for the sake of completeness. The problem is, no one tells you what they actually do before you get the data.
What you see is what you get, but what they got isn’t what they necessarily started with. You just never know. Your data you can understand and thoroughly shape, but outside data may have a differing foundation. Use the principles that worked on a more limited internet and not the contemporary trends. Move back not backwards.
Sales cadence is a new buzzword in B2B sales, but it’s really just a new name for an older concept brought into modernity. Sales is traditionally viewed as a transactional process rather than the development of a relationship. Sales cadence is the process by which you transform a transactional paradigm into a scalable, reproducible methodology to foster lead development and growth. Done right, it increases the volume of successful leads while reducing their relative cost.
Sales cadence is about contacting a lead and nurturing the relationship to where they’re ready to buy or ready to part ways. It takes 10-12 touches to get the average lead in most B2B endeavors, but managed services can take closer to 14-18 touches in our experience. You’re trying to get someone to trust their business to your service, so they need to see more than the brochure. They need you to remind them of your existence and service without becoming intrusive. You need to show them what you offer and how it can help them as well as understanding the specific challenges they face.
Let’s see how sales cadence works with the B2B process, how to build a script, what technology can do to enhance your results, and how it works for an MSP (or other managed service). The process is nothing new, but there has been a paradigm shift in how it is approached. You can sit and cold call over and over, or you can choose to create a process that makes each call worth something while saving you time and effort.
Sales Cadence and the B2B Process
A business relationship is still a relationship, the difference is the whims of the individuals are more muted by the goals of the business. You work with people and sell to people, but you also need to sell to both the individual and the company to make B2B actually work. People don’t remember the vendor that gave them a card once at a show, they remember the vendor which reached out (for better and for worse depending on the approach). How are you making potential leads aware without scaring them away? You don’t sign a potentially life changing contract on the first email, so how can you make your lead trust you and your process to make the right choice for your business and theirs?
The sales cadence process for B2B sales breaks down into several factors. You need to know who you’re addressing, where to find them and what they need, how to contact them, how often to do so, and what to do to either seal the deal or move on without hurting anyone’s feelings. How you balance the importance of each factor or what will work for you and your industry is something which you need to iterate on and improve. We’ll touch on how to draft your content after going over the general stages.
1. Who Is Your Target Lead?
This is the first question you need to ask yourself. Who are you targeting with your current sales process? What do they do? What do they need? How can you deliver it? To sell something, you need someone to sell to and someone who will buy.
You need to create a persona of who you’re trying to sell to that matches what you expect from their industry. If you specialize in servicing the hospitality sector, you’re not going to get the same requirements, or even trends and personalities you deal with as the energy sector. You aren’t necessarily targeting the individual, but you do want to be aware of who you’re reaching out to at a company. They aren’t the final target, but they can act as the gatekeeper as well. What is your ideal lead and what do they look like from an abstract perspective?
2. Where Are They and What Do They Want?
Now that you know who you’re trying to work with, where can you find them? What do they want from a business like yours? You need to find where your leads are and know what they want (if anything). These factors go together since you may know where a bunch of ideal leads are, but it doesn’t matter if they don’t want or need anything from your business.
If you work well in an industry with heavy channel connections, shows and conventions can be a way to generate leads, but so can something like LinkedIn (which is also a lot cheaper). Where are your prospects and how can you get in touch with them? It doesn’t matter what system you have if you can’t get in touch with leads to actually get movement.
3. How Do You Contact Your Leads?
While we’ve touched on finding where leads are and how to potentially make the first contact, the whole point of establishing sales cadence is to establish a line of communication rather than a one-off outreach. You have to identify your prospect, then find a way to establish first contact, but how do you reach them and keep the cadence going? Some people want email only, others want to hear a person on a phone, and others are a complete mix. Who are you dealing with and what works to get in contact with them?
If your prospect’s primary contact is busy, how do you get their ear without wasting their time or making a negative situation for either of you? A phone call is more personal, but some people don’t want to deal with personal. Every relationship has boundaries, and you need to find a safe balance where you don’t push too hard and don’t hesitate too much either. Either find out the ideal communication method for your client, or try to anticipate it based on the persona you assume for the industry if nothing else.
4. How Much Should You Reach Out?
You want a cadence and not a cacophony of communications. Don’t hit your prospect up every single day (unless they’re receptive to it), but don’t let them go too long without reminding them of your existence. For most prospects, this is going to be once every few days or a few times a week. Sometimes it pays to start slow, then increase frequency, but sometimes the reverse is true. It can also help to vary up the methods of communication.
What works depends on who you’re working with. For most prospects, you’re going to spend around a couple weeks to a month with correspondence every few days. You want to ping the prospect and get their interest, not bug them or waste time calling when they aren’t available.
5. Moving On
There is a point where you need to either seal the deal or move on with your process. Once you’ve hit a dead end or gotten the client’s interest, you need to move to the next steps.
If a client isn’t interested, you want to send them a “breakup” message of some sorts. Something along the lines of: We’ve tried to contact you a few times, but haven’t heard back. Flesh this out with how your solution could be of help to their business and leave the door open in case they are interested or receptive down the line.
6. Iterative Improvement
Why didn’t your sales process work out? Ideally, you can ask your prospect, but this may alienate them down the line or they may ignore it. Another way to approach this is what did your new client like as a prospect, and what did they wish you did differently?
You aren’t necessarily looking for them to give exact suggestions, but what did they like and dislike about the general process? How does this correlate with other input from other prospects? Is there a specific message or step where prospects drop off? What can you do better the next time around and how can you test it?
Building a Script
The general process for building a sales cadence with your “script” is to focus on creating a scalable and reusable process rather than a singular script. Having a script or base to work off of just makes this process easier.
When establishing a sales cadence, you have 3 main steps. First, you need to get the prospect’s attention or reach out. Second, you need to build rapport and gauge their interest. Finally, you need to steer them to the funnel or let them go.
Introductions
The first cold interaction is about them. What do they do and how can you hook them? Establish your understanding of their business and dig deeper while introducing why they should spend time even talking to you. If you have multiple parallel processes, this can help you gauge what the individual and the business are like and provides a way to steer closer to what should work.
For instance, we may start a cold call with something like: Hey [name], we haven’t had the pleasure to meet yet, but can you give me 2 minutes to share something with you that could increase your revenue and profitability by 3x to 10x? This sort of wording gives them a reason to want to listen. How can you distill your service down to something accessible and advantageous for them?
Most businesses are looking to use a service to either improve revenue and profitability, or to reduce costs to enable the same. Who are you and how do you help them hit their goals? What challenges do they face and how can you address them? We follow up an introduction with something like: I am part of the expansion team for [your company]. We are a group of MSPs across North America who came to together to form a national footprint and we focus on three things: lead generation, sales and scale. We enable our members to grow top line revenue and profitability by 3 to 10 times in a short period of time.
Provide data and statistics for what makes you the right choice for them. You may touch on their specific business or you may work from a script or a form email. What works depends on the clients you’re hitting and what they’re expecting. A focus on you and how you help businesses like them can make for a more scalable process rather than focusing on each company from the very first introduction. You’re going to hear “no” a lot at this stage, so the easier you can make the initial touch, the more success you can get long-term for your lead generation.
Rapport
Once you establish a basis for rapport, you need to build interest in your service. How does your service fit into their business? How could your service fit their business? What could you do to make their business work better? Where are they potentially lacking? Transition from focusing on them to focusing on how you fit into their future. Evolve your strategy from expressing what you do to what you can do for them, and try to get commitment for either a call or a meeting, or a similar commitment.
This is where marketing collateral starts to get even more useful for the sales process. What do you have that showcases your successes and your specialties and how does it fit with the potential client? No one is expecting you to custom-make pieces for each individual prospect, but the right piece on hand can seal the deal. Get your one-page sheets ready about how you saved clients money or how you improved revenue. Start with the more general pieces tailored to what they mention (or you gather) as an obstacle and grow into what they mention as their pain points or in the direction they ask questions.
Get communication going at this stage. Get them involved and asking questions. The more the client is curious, the more likely you are to make it to the next step. What data or nice pieces do you have or can you make to forward this branch of the relationship? Take note of what the clients ask and have it ready for the next pipeline. This is also the stage to push the prospect a little harder to connect so you can try to seal the deal.
Moving Forward
We already talked about the breakup itself, but as you try to build rapport, you also want to set the stage to exit or to seal the deal. Target their pain points, target their issues, target the problems in the industry, but don’t preach to them. You want to push them to the naturalness of your relationship with their business without them feeling pushed. If that doesn’t work, you want to leave them with something to ponder and an open door to come back to.
Try to get commitment to move forward with the process if they seem receptive. Are they interested in your offerings or is there a specific offering they’re curious about? What would it take to get them to sign? This is the stage to get a little more aggressive so long as you don’t get too aggressive.
Leave the ball in their court if things aren’t working. It can help to push potential times in the future to reconnect, but this tends to work best if the prospect has shown some interest so far. Leave them with some food for thought and wait a healthy amount of time (several quarters or even a year) to revisit the prospect unless there’s a reason to be more aggressive.
Technology’s Role In Sales Cadence
Technology facilitates the communication itself more often than not, but how can you use technology to do more? Are you sending emails out directly or are you automating this process to have more insight into where the process works or doesn’t? It’s not enough to measure a response or not.
Is your prospect opening your email? Are they reading some and not others? What is working in the process and what isn’t? Are you controlling for these factors and fixing them as you can codify the issues? Modern marketing platforms provide these tools in various formats, but you need to make sense of the data. Analytics don’t mean much without an understanding of the implications of each data point and an understanding of how they’re measured.
Are you using Hubspot or Mailchimp? Do you use an email list through a CRM or are you keeping it in Excel? Some things work, but they can inhibit you from reaching your potential. We know in tech that: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” just doesn’t cut it in most technical enterprises, so why should it apply with your sales process that leverages technology? How can you enhance your process to shave off the inconvenient bits to make it more scalable?
How Sales Cadence Can Work for Your MSP
Most people who start an MSP aren’t business types. It’s hard to run a technical business with only business and sales knowledge, but more than a few MSPs have made it off of a good technical basis and word of mouth. The problem is, while you can subsist with this method, you hit a wall for growth and scalability.
Many MSPs join groups like The 20 just for the sales and marketing offerings (though our technical offerings are a great hook too). We are able to grow because we can keep selling. You may have enough clients now, but what happens if an industry crashes, an owner sells, or similar? If you aren’t continuously adding prospects, you’re probably going to shrink and hit a less ideal equilibrium sooner than later.
Sales cadence is about acknowledging that a sale for a “big item” isn’t necessarily a single transaction, and a way to scale this process and make it reproducible. Sales scripts are popular because they work, but sales cadence takes this to the next level. You aren’t reciting a script, you’re touching the prospect in certain ways, seeing what happens, and using this to grow and improve your process.
What are you doing to ensure your MSP succeeds? What are you doing to make sure that you have an exit plan when the time comes? Do you want to run each bit of your business forever, or do you want to be able to hand it off? The simpler you can make your business needs in terms of their time and effort costs, the more you can focus on scaling the rest of the business. Even if you don’t feel the need to grow, being able to have a more results-oriented process should the need arise can pay dividends to your security. What are you doing to establish a better sales process to ensure your future success?
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The next big leap for artificial intelligence has “been around the corner” for decades. It’s not that the technology hasn’t been advancing, it’s just that the more we learn the less we know about what to do to really raise the bar. We’ve been waiting for the AI equivalent of the transistor, but nothing seems to really nail it to bring us into the Star Trek utopia singularity we’ve been promised (or at least make our jobs that much easier).
While it’s too early to really determine whether using a light based system over a standard electrical one will be that change, it will do what most AI advances do and open new doors which push everything forward. From the preliminary results we’re talking about an order of magnitude or more of improvement, but will this scale with current AI is the question? I can’t claim to know enough to give an answer, but what I do know is that the prospect of more accessible AI opens the door to many life changing prospects from career and on.
AI being easily applicable in marketing would be game changing for the field. The old way of marketing has had a rougher year than most of us, pushing digital marketing to the front. Despite the chaos around the world, marketing is seeing an almost Renaissance level of change and revitalization. The core of classic marketing is being rebirthed into the current era. It’s not much of a silver lining, but I’d rather see the drop in the glass than say it’s dry.
How Will AI Change Marketing?
Marketing has largely moved from physical networking to digital marketing. Your business card is something nice to have, but not a necessity anymore either in many circles. Going to a conference can help you network and forge deals, but it’s not the penultimate solution it was previously sold as. (That isn’t to say the traditional methods are dead, they have become an element rather than a full solution). It’s cheap and easy to reach out to basically any market anywhere in the world with the globalization of the internet and the collapse in advertising costs.
You aren’t constrained to a single market or markets you can physically reach, you’re constrained to your solution solving a specific problem. A plumber in Denver isn’t going to fix anything in Florida, but that doesn’t mean that digital marketing isn’t essential. Even local businesses are found mostly through search results and digital ads.
The problem your solution answers is constrained by region, but your outreach isn’t. This is both a blessing and a curse. The extra reach is a byproduct of your effort, not really a cost when done right, but that just means there are that many extra results in each search. It’s cheaper than ever to market which means everyone is doing it, you have to learn to do it better.
The big problem is that we have so much more data than we have ways to make sense of it all. People have gotten used to more and more personal outreaches (while expecting fewer in person and phone outreaches), and expect things to be more and more tailored to them while wanting to volunteer less and less. You have to read between the lines, but you need to know which lines matter too. Knowing where to go next and how much to use for any part of a campaign just gets increasingly complicated with the plethora of variables to track. There are also things which are repetitive but painfully manual due to technical limits. These are the problems AI in marketing will (eventually) solve.
We won’t start at AI, but we’ll work there as the technology becomes financially feasible. Amazon, Microsoft, and others have each released machine learning and AI frameworks, but they can be cost prohibitive. Frameworks like Torch exist, but they require you to understand more than just the recipes. The big barriers to entry are the cost in terms of both skills and platforms in order to really get moving. You need the right people who can create, condense, coalesce, and coordinate every piece of relevant data into something which can be further processed into something meaningful. The Amazon of today for that level of AI and machine learning (ML) will be the one-person marketing hustler of tomorrow once we find the right catalyst.
Automating Data Science
Virtually no one in marketing or otherwise has a problem getting data, they have a problem in getting the right data. You can either build data as necessary which is time consuming and slow, or try to get a massive dump of data and cut it down. These processes can be combined in different ratios and different stages as the secret sauce of your marketing program, but it’s still the same two ideas at play.
When should you acquire bulk data and scale down, and when should you slowly build a list? Just how should you cut out unnecessary bits and just how should you add individual entries? There isn’t a universally correct answer, you have to have some kind of metric for each effect, a way to measure changes from your action(s), and the knowledge and wisdom to make it work.
Ideally, AI will eventually take this sort of task over. You guide it based on what your campaign aims to do, and you offload the pain to a machine which won’t make mistakes (unless misprogrammed to do so). The seeds of change already exist in various analytic systems and similar which help collate and break down data. When it gets economic to do so, we’ll see a huge jump in platforms working in machine learning and beyond in some form. This process will either target increasing efficiency, decreasing inefficiency, or a balance.
Campaign Personalization
Once we have a bunch of data, we need something to do with it. If a specific campaign hits on 75% of the metrics for a subset of an audience, but the average take from the same campaign is 50%, how do we only target the more profitable side with that piece? How do we know what kind of campaign to build and balance? Your data is working to help you identify how to bring in clients, how to keep them happy, and how to get them to your sales team to close the deal. It also helps you figure out how to retain who you’ve already pulled in (if you use it right).
All of these sorts of things exist, but they’re buried in the data and metrics. It’s beyond what the average person can make sense of all the time. You need to have a way to reduce the data to something a person can cognitively process, then find a way to make use of that data. If you find that you get a nice Pareto distribution of a specific group from your data, you can personalize campaigns for them.
That can be cost prohibitive now because by the time you run the numbers, the campaign is usually already dusty with more traditional methods and more diverse campaigns. AI will make crunching the numbers for that something far easier. What are the unifying factors between various groups and what divides them? You could make 10 variations of each section and a program could reassemble them easily, but then the content looks fake without multiple people to proof and test. AI will provide a way to accommodate these sorts of changes without having to reinvent the wheel at each step.
You have to keep track of which people are in which group, and which campaign hits which group or groups. Identities change and it’s easy to miss subtle changes in a person the traditional way. A machine doesn’t make mistakes, but you can and will. Most of these ideas exist in some consumable form, but they just aren’t as mature as they could be. As automation accelerates, we’ll see more and more personalization with a cut to budgets due to the extra efficiency.
Resource Utilization
Part of increasing efficiency and reducing inefficiency is getting the most out of your resource utilization. If you know what is important (and most important) for a campaign, it can be easy to refocus your resource utilization in a way that makes sense. You don’t put your best graphic designer on a low importance task if you can help it.
If you know what matters, you know what you can target. This doesn’t need to be some Orwellian level robot overlord, but you want to be able to more efficiently use your resources. Where are things falling through the cracks and what is missing its mark, without being creepy?
HR, managers, and various leads currently try to balance this role, but there is so much more to it which takes way more people than it feels it should to get an underwhelming level of efficiency (compared to what is possible). You need someone making sure things function correctly, but you also need management to translate tasks between one group to another, and you also need oversight that the process hits the requisite checkboxes.
The right analytics, metrics, data, and algorithm could make this process more efficient. We probably don’t want to take the humanity out of the process anytime soon (if ever), but a lot of wasted labor could be reduced so that people can accomplish more important tasks rather than communicating the same things differently a dozen times a day.
Technical Limitations
Whether or not light based TPUs will bring us to the singularity remains to be seen, but each development is a step towards a more automated future. As technology progresses and our interactions with it do too, we’ll continue to see more and more growth in the applications of advanced data science with marketing and everything. AI is arguably just advanced data science with the right math to make things work. It sounds simple, but it’s like saying marketing is just sending the right communication. The devil is in the details for each part of the process.
Technical limitations, including scale and cost are what really hold us back from further use of AI in marketing and beyond. As the technology matures more and more, we’ll see data science and ML take off. It’s begun in some places, but it’s a bit like the Dot Com era, a Wild West of technology complete with the digital snake oil salesmen. Some supposed AI is just a weak ML principle with lot of “if” statements to make it work. It’s a black box by necessity and by design.
As the veil is lifted and it becomes easier to more scientifically approach the application of ML and AI in marketing, we will see a shift at even the lowest level to more integrated data science. Moving the apex moves the base of what is acceptable. The bar will get higher and higher until we hit the true singularity for AI. Until then, we’ll see advanced data science grow and grow in application in modern marketing from big to small. As more and more data can be produced and processed, we’ll see more and more automation of actions on this data. The singularity is coming, but that doesn’t mean you can’t grow from it first.
A Guide to Long Tail SEO for MSPs
Long tail SEO is one of the simplest concepts in SEO, but can also be one of the most confusing in practice. A long tail search is one where you have a non-trivial search to get more specific results. For instance, if you want to search for a backup solution like Unitrends, you might search for “Hyper-V cloud backup solution”. You (or your prospective client) can always use some other non-trivial set of descriptors which spells out a similar combination of factors the solution offers (for instance “VMWare” or “SaaS” in the mix), and this is what makes long tail SEO so valuable and so difficult.
Long tail SEO relies on you optimizing your content for long tail searches which would actually bring in the right audience. This form of SEO combines many techniques which help with all forms of SEO. You’re doing keyword optimization many times over while incorporating live data and reacting to changes. Let’s break long tail SEO down further, see how to target for long tail searches, then we’ll dive into when and where to do it, and how to make it work for you.
Long Tail SEO
If you’re a business, someone is searching for something that describes your business or what it does the longer the tail gets. Done right, this means that you get more prospects naturally. On the flip side, if it’s done wrong, you just get raw traffic with no real value looking for something else entirely. It works because the search engine becomes an artificial filter for your incoming demographic.
Some searches are worth more than others. Singular search terms (or short search phrases) are saturated or generic and there really isn’t a way to get ahead because the search itself is generic. The goal of long tail SEO is to focus on winning more niche topics that are less contested. Each term added to a search adds a filter which reduces the number of viable results. The more they zoom in, the bigger you get, but only if you’re in the continuously shrinking window.
We’ve touched on the basics of long tail SEO, but there’s a lot that goes into the process. Long tail SEO needs to be calculated based on how your clients search. Who are you targeting and what are they searching for? What keywords do you see from Google Search Console or similar and how can you put them together? Keywords are important, and knowing what keywords your prospects actually use for plain searches is the first step in making long tail SEO work.
You also need a way to track the results. If you haven’t used Google Search Console (or similar), you need to start now. An analytics system (Google Analytics, Bing Analytics, or even something like Koko Analytics) will provide insight into the metrics which will help you measure what people are searching for and where they’re going.
Measuring CTR and Other Metrics
These tools enable you to begin tracking the CTR (Click Through Rate) for a given search as well as the landing page. If 3 of your pages mention backups and associated terms, is one faring better than the others? If so, why? To optimize SEO, you need to understand what is actually working, then figure out why it’s working. Or, if nothing works, you need to figure out how to make the right changes.
Google Search Console gives you the query, clicks, impressions, and the search position for any term which involved your site. For our purposes, we can treat the ratio of clicks to impressions as the CTR for the site. Some organic searches will have a great ratio (some can be as high as the double digits for a percentage), others not so much (<0.01%). Position is important as well, with the higher the better, but improving your ratio will improve your position most of the time too.
Google can also give you a similar break down for any given page, and the clicks, impressions, and position it has which can get you a similar search CTR per page. Putting these two calculated metrics together won’t give you exactly what ratio you’re getting searches for specific pages, but you can combine analytic solutions to approximate this.
No set of numbers when working with search and analytic data will ever be absolutely right. If I compare the numbers from Google Analytics with the numbers from Google Search Console, the numbers between them aren’t usually going to add up exactly. The data is collected, culled, and combined in different ways so you get different results. Work off the trends and ratios rather than getting maddened by the fudge factor.
Targeted Keywords
These calculations give you how people search for you (keywords), where you show up (searches), and how individual pages show up. To improve your SEO, you ideally want to reconcile the first and the second sets of terms to be closer. The closer, the better your search does and the higher your natural position goes (usually).
What keywords define your MSP and your business? What keywords define what your current and ideal clients expect from your MSP? This is the specific part which gets a bit fuzzier for MSPs. You also need to consider what value each page adds and what people would search on it.
When targeting keywords, most businesses are playing with a level field. MSPs usually have a mix of B2C (Business to Consumer) and B2B (Business to Business) considerations which can be further exaggerated by the fact that peers and vendors exist across a spectrum of technical knowledge. Content has to be accessible and usable to both sets as a whole though. This isn’t to say you can’t target more jargon-laden terms, but you need to explain them.
Most clients won’t know what RAID is (or think it comes in a can), but a vendor is going to be confused if you never reference it directly in more technical pages. A page obviously for consumers won’t matter, but both sets of content need to exist and be targeted. Create your own information and writeup on topics which come up continuously with technical and lay versions.
How to Improve Long Tail SEO
Target the keywords which work for your business first. Build them into phrases which clients, vendors, or whoever you want to bring in would search for. Once you have an idea for the keywords which work well (this involves either looking at your metrics or keyword research), you can begin embedding them in content.
Apply these techniques like you would keywords to any content as we mentioned in The Top 13 Easiest Ways to Improve SEO for MSPs. You want content to include these words abundantly, but naturally. For instance, in this article, we have used the term “Long Tail SEO” over and over, but in a way where it flows.
SEO all works off of content, but there are little tricks which can help give you an edge. Use them to your advantage and target the keywords you need. For certain phrases, feel free to include them as is or with grammatical or filler words in between. If “MSP high uptime backups” is how people are finding you, feel free to work that in. “Our MSP prioritizes high uptime and safe backups,” or similar on an About Me page can help solidify that search.
What Not to Do
You can’t work every term, keyword, or phrase in everywhere. There are people who try, but it ends with the content either taking enough of a hit searches drop off, or else it becomes buzzword bingo. You can cheat the algorithm but not the reader usually. Target the keywords and phrases which actually matter and actually occur per metrics and research.
Prioritize the things which are the easiest to implement and provide the most value. Just because a keyword can get you to the number one position of an extremely cryptic search doesn’t mean it’s good. You need the right mix of a niche with accessibility.
Don’t omit cross-referencing terms and researching similar terms when prioritizing your keyword targeting either. Basically, how can you save time and effort by batching search terms? If “email parser” is a common term with many okay searches, it can be viewed as worth the same as one term which has a single usage and much more success. Keep in mind that there is a bigger picture when creating a strategy.
Don’t try to capitalize on searches which will conflict with your brand. There’s no such thing as bad press is a marketing cliché, but whether it’s true or not is different question than how SEO works. If you sacrifice parts of your content for the sake of targeting something else, you’re typically robbing Peter to pay Paul for your SEO. It can work, but it’s way beyond the scope of this article.
Making Simple Content Adjustments
I won’t touch on all the standard SEO techniques in here. SEO is SEO, the only difference is the focus and the purpose of each strategy. Good content gets you good SEO, but like anything, there are things you can do to get the most bang for your buck and “good” is often subjective.
If you see a phrase in the search console which is bringing in traffic, try to work it in, or work in the keywords. If a synonym beats out what you’re using, work it in. If your clients find you under “support desk vmware comptia certified”, but you use “help desk”, consider at least adding in “support desk” on any page the help desk is mentioned. I would also increase references to the rest of the terms (if relevant).
If a singular term is showing up with many variations, for instance: “vmware installation msp”, “vmware certified msp”, “vmware virtualization msp”, etc., and is bringing in a good amount of traffic, use it where possible. You can continue to expand on this as the tail for the search query gets longer and longer and work these things in as you go forward as long as the content stays relevant to the searches.
Deeper Content Strategy
As you move forward with your strategy, you’ll reach a point where there aren’t small things to change anymore. You need substantial rewrites, content is deprecated, etc. If things still kind of work, it can be worth a little cleanup first to improve results while you get the time to go deeper.
Long tail content tends to be more long lived for relevance, but less relevant overall. That being said, some things do have a lifespan. There aren’t many searches for CAT3 anymore, but there are plenty of references to its installation or usage left. While this example is neutral, old content can eventually hurt you if left unchanged and unchecked.
What content do you have which is completely obsolete? What just needs a change to something more modern to be relevant? This gets more complex with tech articles. A guide to fix a DOS-era POS system may still be relevant to why some clients hire you. Context makes the difference between your guide being a relic and it being proof of skill. Update your content with context as to why it’s still relevant. Search engines tend to favor content which is updated, so by adding context, you show the content is being maintained, and make it stay useful for readers.
Content that no longer serves a purpose needs to be culled. There’s probably going to be some useful pieces caught in the crossfire which need to be heavily reworked or redone. The weaker your search rankings, the more likely you have a lot of work to do. Sometimes, this may even coincide with an entire redesign of the site. You have to run the numbers and weigh the cost of redoing content to the reward it can bring.
Going Forward With Long Tail SEO
Understanding what long tail SEO can do for your business is the first step in using it. Research and analyze what people search for, what they search to find you, and the intersection between these. Calculate what each keyword means to your site and searches for you.
As you learn and apply these principles, you’ll possibly reach a point where minor changes just don’t work anymore. Sometimes you need to make some massive changes or effectively start over to get the results you need. Start with what gets you quick results and move on as possible.
Gradual steps will be more efficient for most working professionals than a huge changeover all at once. This gives you a chance to see results without a large investment. SEO is only as good as the content and strategy behind it, so figuring out what actually works first can make the next steps easier. Researching and testing works better in an iterative process.
Long tail SEO isn’t the only thing to focus on, but it can easily be combined with other techniques. You won’t hurt your SEO shoring it up to make longer queries lead to your content. The process of shoring up long tail SEO is going to incidentally affect “standard” SEO. As you work through long tail SEO, you get the data and metrics to fix everything else.
SEO is SEO as I mentioned before, the difference is in the strategy and implementation. Focusing on long tail SEO doesn’t come at the expense of other strategies, it enriches them. Done right, you aren’t trading one strategy for another, you’re batching the work and doing a little extra analysis. Even if you can’t apply everything, just starting the process can be enough to make huge strides with SEO.
