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hello everyone richard up here welcome to tub talk live i'm richard tubb i'm at home in the studio garage of newcastle upon time in the northeast of england and this very special edition of book the podcaster it consultants is screen streaming live across youtube across linkedin across facebook and twitter today with our very special guest ben spector now ben is an ex-managed service provider owner turned project manager for zomentum where he uses his experience of running an msp to shape the development roadmap of the cementum platform from an msps perspective now if you've not come across the momentum before it's a sales acceleration platform built exclusively for managed service providers the zomentum platform combines pipeline management proposal quote builder sales automation and much more more on that shortly think of it as an all-in-one sales solution for msps so today ben is joining us to talk about his journey in the msp world and to give you advice on how you can accelerate your msp sales now if you're joining us live we would love to hear from you so give us your feedback and questions from earth to ben in the comments i'll make sure to pause regularly and ask ben your questions and if you're listening to this on the podcast or the replay well where were you when we were live we're having a great time you can follow me on social media at our blog to make sure you don't miss any future turb talk live episodes i want to give a big shout out and a thanks to the team at fresh productions for supporting us in going live today if you need help with your virtual or in-person msp event then fresh other people to go to with that said ben welcome to tub talk live where are you joining us from today thank you uh joining from very very very very hot way bridge in surrey um in my partner and i just moved flat this is our new study um i had in mind a very academic looking bookcase behind me but before i could do that he managed to order a pellet and bike which uh yeah is not quite the the background i had in mind for these kind of calls well it shows you are a fit guy keeping your healthy body in mind and everything i've just got a load of books in the background here so i haven't touched it once other than helping him put it there and believe me i haven't touched it let's jump in for for those in the industry who haven't had the pleasure to meet ben spector yet and i would encourage you when we're going back on the road soon hopefully getting out there if you get a chance to meet ben in person you really should but before joining zomenton you used to run an msp business right can you give us a potted history of your journey in the msp business so far sure so i mean i i started in it entirely accidentally in about 2008 um kind of dropped out of university uh and wasn't really sure what to do so ended up doing bits of it consulting and there there comes a point i think a lot of people watching probably relate with which is you you go into consult on a project but then you can never really disconnect from that client you know you forever end up fielding the support questions going forwards even though it's not really part of the scope of what you went in to do so naturally that consulting pivoted towards managed services so that i could continue to deliver the support experience after doing the the consultancy project um and so i was doing that um for the last 10 12 years um and we picked up auto task in about 2014 quote works in about 2015 hubspot in 2017 so and then various other kind of peripheral tools along the way and i think what it really occurred to me was that what i enjoyed doing the most in my msp actually wasn't the technical project and it certainly wasn't sales if there's one thing i know a hell of a lot about it's uh the pain of trying to sell i.t services to small businesses um and actually what i was really enjoying doing was focusing on the tooling and the processes within my msp you know just automating the hell out of everything um so i guess it was quite natural in a way that after you know leaving the msp doing the project delivery and stuff that actually joining um a vendor that's that's solving a very real problem um yeah it was an obvious choice really yeah so for people who are not familiar with zamentum how would you describe what they do oh good question i mean our ceo shruti is uh trying to forge an entirely new category in the msp space um which i think we've gone with sales acceleration as a name for that um obviously you've got your marketing tools things like hubspot and infusionsoft that sit at the top of the funnel to the middle of the funnel and help you get from the point at which um somebody first gets in touch with you or maybe they subscribe to your blog through to the point where you actually sales qualified then maybe you've identified the need and you you've actually got a solid opportunity there but what happens then you know and the psas are great at picking up from the point at which you have a client that's ready to continue on that journey and they're great at managing the ticketing and you know all your contracts and your billing and support and management but there's this enormous gap between identifying the opportunity and well putting it bluntly getting a contract signed and so what cementum does is it really elegantly fills that entire space from the point of which you cut prospects put their hand up and said hey i think i'm ready for a quote and even if they're not sure what that quote is for yet you know using momentum you can take them through the assessment process you can do that high level and do you have multi-factor authentication enabled is there cloud backup you just just go through that high level assessment to broadly qualify the opportunity a bit better but also to present the results to them in a really dynamic and engaging way then we can evolve that sales assessment into a quote if if it's for a very straightforward need or maybe a much longer form proposal if it's for a juicy managed service contract um and then once you've got them through the proposal stage it helps you get that actually signed off it's got any sign and then um it also helps to continuously re-engage the customer with the sales cycle on an ongoing basis um i think the the term qbr quarterly business review some people now seem to if you remember tech tribe they're definitely going for the tbr technology business review um all credit to you guys go i think tbr is a better term for it but it's you know it it's something that comes with a certain level of maturity within your msp and i think a lot of the smaller msps are beginning to understand the value in that qbr process and how it helps to do two things it realigns the client with some kind of a roadmap and it re-engages them with that sales process um and so zementum also helps you with that re-engagement cycle getting them through the qbrs we've got templates there to help structure them to to hold you accountable but also to hold the client accountable and remind them once in a while they might need to get their wallet out you know i.t isn't a one-hit wonder no so to cause a mentum a quoting platform is probably not very fair at very rude yeah it's it's so you know it it's so much more than a quoting platform um and and i think one of the real difficulties we're having with communicating quite how much momentum does is because we've been unfairly put into this quoting platform box because the you know a lot of the platforms out there like tech drive and the communities they don't have a box that's big enough to to to really label everything we do i mean surety is probably going to have my head later because she hates labels in general but yeah but you know it's a sales acceleration platform really quoting doesn't do it justice no and it's one of the reasons i wanted to get you on top talk live to talk about it because i love technology that is disruptive to this industry disruptive in a positive way i should say don't like chaos for the sake of it but i really see momentum you know it's we do like to label things don't we but it doesn't quite fit in that box it's not just a quoting tool it's much more than that and it is a sales accelerator so i want to talk a little bit more about that as we go forward but before we do i'm fascinated to know how did ben spectat end up working at momentum i don't really know to be honest um it was one of one of life's little mysteries really um i you know after i left my msp in about october last year i didn't really know what to do so i took up an interim technical director role at another msp in london to help them just realign their service delivery and build out their processes you know to make their business a bit more robust um but i think it it wasn't particularly true to what i'd really enjoyed doing within my msp which was that focus on tooling and automation um and actually the anecdotally the introduction to momentum came by way of uh being forced into a demo by this my ceo at that company you know we'd identified that we really needed some kind of quoting platform and here i am assigning that label yeah we do we needed a quoting tool and um the ceo said well i i said to him look we need a quoting tool quoting out of auto task is really painful you know i've had quote works for the last five or six years i know what's possible and this is such a regression to trying to do it out of auto tasks opportunities and quoting yeah just everything was taking so long and so i said look we need quote works there's no two ways about it it's not expensive i know it inside out i can implement it we can have it up and running in a couple of weeks let's go with it and he said ben hold on a minute shouldn't we at least look at what else is on the market and i was so firm and probably quite rude in my response so there is absolutely no point looking at what else is on the market quote works have been doing this for 20 25 years i know it inside out it's the market leader we're going with it and he sort of sat me down you said ben stop look i've heard about this other platforms momentum it's making a lot of noise in the industry i've seen it on tech tribe it's really getting raved about let's at least have a look at it so i sort of huffed and said okay fine let's have a demo and and just see what it's about and then we can implement quote works so that was so that was kind of january february this year and when i got on that demo uh with one of the the sales reps momentum guy called sam i was just absolutely blown away by by what they were building not just by where it is today but by the clear the vision that's there and the problem they're trying to solve and you know so to go really from this six year love affair with quote works in a matter of minutes to seeing something that really solved the problem i think that hit me really hit me where it hurts and i thought okay this is really exciting and so i reached out to shriti's ceo i think just on linkedin and said hey this is where i'm at let's have a chat and fast forward two months i'm sitting yeah sitting on the momentum side of the fence um adding whatever nuggets of gold i can to the road map to drive it forward from from an msp's perspective that's a brilliant story a very long answer to a very short question it's it's a great story yeah like i can see we've got a number of raving fans of not only is the momentum of yours uh joining us in the live audience today so i'll give shout outs to people if you're using momentum let us know in the in the chat and um we can certainly give you a shout out ask your questions of ben as we go along here today now because it's interesting you know you talked about quote works you've got the background in auto task um you know you've got a lot of technical and business expertise across the board in a managed service provider so i can see why his momentum was so interested in bringing you on board give me an idea what does a typical day look like for you at the moment uh as a momentum product manager working with uk msps what sort of questions are you getting through well i think the first thing i'd say is product manager is probably completely the wrong title um we were looking for for a title so that i could at least join and you know we could put an email signature together but i probably only spend about you know until the momentum i had no idea what a product manager did um and i suspect my approach to product management is is very much coming up with slightly batshit crazy ideas throwing them at the developers and say can we do this um and getting a lot of pushback with uh ben that no just no and and then trying to circumnavigate it you know go up to the cto and say rahil look i know it's mad and the engineers are saying no but can we just do it because we've got a lot of msps asking for it um and so a lot of my time really at the moment is being spent um just talking to the msps you know whenever i see anyone mentioning anything on one of the communities that you know one of the facebook communities or tech tribe if they've if they look confused or lost with the zomentum product i'm quite happy you know jump in set up a call with them and understand why they're lost and if there's something that we can really do to fix that not just for them but obviously if they've got lost probably other people are getting lost in the same way um so i think really i see myself as more of an evangelist for the msp community within the momentum than i do as a momentum employee um i'm sure my bosses would have an another opinion of that but but you know i really quite wholeheartedly believe that my role at the moment is to push the msp's agenda within momentum and make the platform as brilliant as we possibly can to solve that enormous sales problem for msps yeah that absolutely makes sense now you talked i want to move forward and talk about sales a little bit so we've got a lot of msps watching us today a lot of it solution providers they're interested in the tool but you mentioned earlier about the challenges that you had with sales when you're an msp i'd like to say it mirrors my experience i'm gonna be upfront and honest here i've said this before on this show you know i got into this interesting because i'm a techie geek i love helping people and then all of a sudden i found myself owning a business and a business needed sales and i had to i felt as though i had to persuade people ben to buy what i was selling i've since learned that's not quite the truth of the matter but how would you describe your experience with managed service sales you know that i think that story resonates with me and it will resonate with most people watching this um there's there's two types of msp really there are sales-led msps that haven't got a clue how to deliver and there are engineering-led msps that haven't got a clue how to sell and i think you know to be really really successful what the ones that are really successful manage to nail both it's either because the engineering founder finds that best right hand person to head up sales or vice versa but i think interestingly you can you can't teach a salesperson engineering overnight because you know that whole problem solving skill set comes from deep within without wanting to sound too you know metaphorical about it but you know it's got to come from passion really but you can give engineers the tools that make it impossible not to sell and so that that i think is is what's really interesting at the moment to me is how do we find the best tools that make it impossible for an engineer not to sell um i'm not sure that really answers your question but there we go that's me um yeah i've i think i've learned a lot more about msp sales since leaving my msp because you can look at things from that external perspective when you're in it you just assume what you're doing is the right thing or you assume what you're doing is the wrong thing but you have no idea how to fix it and it's very difficult to take a step back and just look at your processes overall and think what am i doing wrong well probably because most engineered msps are too busy to even take a step back to before they can even start thinking about it so it's a real challenge and i've had you know over the last six months or so i've had this amazing time to reflect um i you know stupidly i was reading through some of the tech drive materials the other day and i hadn't been a member of tech tribe until very recently and i think it would have totally changed the way i did business um some of the templates the materials and the conversations going on in there have taught me a hell of a lot very very quickly um about how to do things better especially the processes how to engage with your customers um so i think for me the success in being able to sell effectively is understanding what problems your clients are trying to solve and so many people say it and it's only recently clicked with me is that concept of selling value rather than selling you know selling the tools you're not selling antivirus you're selling security that that those kind of conversations and looking back on it you know pretty much every quote and proposal we sent out had these things itemized it was we were setting ourselves up to be picked apart by the client say wanting to shave you know well if we take this backup off that will save four pounds per user per month and maybe we don't need this advanced email security that's another two pounds a month and as soon as you present something in that way you're just selling something that's so overly commoditized but and i knew what i should have been doing which was packaging up a solution and selling the value but i still didn't do it you know and we had the conversation over and over again with my sales director and with him always saying that you know we need to package this up better and we kept trying to package things up but ultimately we kept falling back on these stupid line items and having our quotes and proposals picked apart by by vultures um totally drift off onto an anecdote partner and i we we just moved into the new flat we're looking for curtains and so we got two suppliers in to to talk to us about curtains and they both had a very different approach to it one of them was asking me questions whether i wanted like lined or interlined or blackout lining or you know did i want white or ivory lining i'm like sorry white or ivory would someone like to explain to me you know what is the difference between white and ivory first of all i'm partly color blind but second of all i just don't care you know what i wanted the other the other curtain supplier on the other hand came in and basically said this is the kind of color you want to go with the walls they're going to look fabulous open or closed and they're going to keep the light out and it's going to make the room cozier and this is how much it costs and you know totally different industries but but map that experience on to selling it sales you know the customer doesn't care about lined or interlined they don't care whether it's webroot or kaspersky they probably don't want kaspersky but they you know they don't care whether it's webroot or or sentinel want they don't care about these things they want to know it's going to work it's going to keep them secure and this is how much it costs yeah i love love that approach because for so many people watching this it is in our nature as techies to try to want to get passionate about talking about features and the reality is is you've just really well uh highlighted with your anecdote about curtains there you know it's the benefits that we're interested in as the buyer we could not care less about the features it's the benefits that it brings us so i'm intrigued in in terms of new msps let's say if you were starting from scratch with both run msp businesses if you were starting from scratch though at what stage would you suggest an msp get a sales acceleration platform did you notice there i didn't call it a quoting platform yes i did correct um so i i don't know really i would i think really as as early as possible but you need to have a view of what your overall stack should look like because i think the the integration between these tools is probably the most important thing if you don't have a seamless flow from that subscriber lead first contact on your website through to sending out the invoice things are going to fall apart along the way so i mean there's four kind of key tools along there there's your marketing crm your sales acceleration or sales crm like momentum there's your psa and there's your accounting platform and long term you know it takes a certain level of maturity to reach that full stack but so i think looking at the the minimum features needed in my view you really need a psa first like you you need a psa to run an msp business but as soon as you've got an msp an msp nailed down a psa nailed down then i think really is the time to start looking at sales acceleration because the marketing bit can come later you know within a platform like momentum you can manage a good 50 or 100 opportunities on the kind of the boards and the views that are in there it's only when you get past that point that you need to start bringing in the the automation power behind marketing you know a platform like hubspot which is probably going to cost you thousands of pounds a month it's in a whole other league but that's probably the thing i would add last you know start with the psa but then pretty soon after you've got the psa i'd bring bring sales acceleration in okay so you've got professional service automation tool then you would bring so you you know your auto task you're a terror your connect wise harmony whatever that might be then you would bring in a sales acceleration platform such as um zementum to to complement that you talked about then as well having you know your accounting package and maybe a marketing uh package in there as well so you're looking at at least four tools that you've you've talked about in the stack there yeah and and i think you build it from the end to the beginning yeah you you need to conscious i'm doing left i don't know if i'm doing left to right right to left but we'll run with it um you need your accounting tool first you've got to be able to submit your taxes you know in the uk your vat returns you don't stand a chance without an accounting tool once you've got your accounting tool because you can also you know you can add time to it you can put line items on for your licenses and stuff you know you can bill your clients that's the most important thing can you get money out of your clients because there's no point doing anything else if you can't send them a bill um so you know you've got to get your accounting in place first then start managing those clients on a psa then start accelerating your sales then start accelerating your marketing try driving marketing you're going to end up we're talking to a couple of marketing agencies at the moment that specialize in msps they've all got hubspot and a psa and the marketing agency is saying hey our clients don't think we're generating any leads we're trying to explain to them that actually we're generating loads of leads but they can't close them so you know there's no point going into this lead generating mode until you've nailed closing them and that's really where you need kind of the sales acceleration to fit in yeah so we're getting some questions coming in live i will get to everybody's uh questions here we'll put ben on the spot but david carr on linkedin says hey richard thanks for uh hosting he says question for ben what is the momentum's usp now there's a sales question right there people talk about usp first of all explain what a usp is the audience and secondly in answer to david's question how would you explain zementum's usp so first up i would say i have nothing to do with sales at momentum so i'm probably going to use all the wrong terminology and the marketing people will have my head on a platter later um usb unique selling point yeah i think the momentum's got a couple of usps at the moment one nobody else is doing it you know we really are the only people doing sales acceleration there are quoting tools out there and this is why we don't want to be put into that quoting box because we do so much more around it you know we are the only platform out there that helps you get from that prospect opportunity point all the way through a signed contract um you know i think there's there's various stats behind it we have um quite a lot of detailed aggregated stats on the way msps are using the platform typically we see closing something like four times faster so if the typical close speed you know it's sales cycle trying to find these old sales terms from my sales director all i can hear now is time kills deals time kills deals um if you can get that sales cycle down from eight days to two days that's the kind of improvement we can see with cementum um but also bizarrely a 600 increase in opportunity close value now i don't really understand entirely how that works but i think by by leveraging options and a certain level of professionality to what you're presenting you know if you can easily put on the quote you're let's say you're selling an hp laptop if you can quite easily pop on options for the monitor the accessories the five-year next business day warranty you know we all know there's no money in selling an hp elitebook there's a lot more money in selling an hp elitebook with a five-year next business day warranty so by being able to put those options onto the quotes we see this massive increase in in the average margin that msps are closing yeah thank you for the question dave i hope that answers it uh keep your questions coming in on whether you're joining us on youtube twitter facebook linkedin carrier pigeon smoke signal we will get there for all of them on to uh to the point there about you know have adding options for people my great friend andy parks who runs ibis solutions in the west midlands years ago andy taught me uh i was going to call it a trick that sort of doesn't do it justice he said when he sends his invoices out to clients and managed service invoices ben he used to include all the services that the client didn't take and he saw an upswing in clients then coming back and saying oh we didn't realize you did that can we have that as well so it's a really interesting tactic if you make people aware of what they're not taking as well as what they're taking it naturally just leads to upselling opportunities it it does and anecdotally again both my parents are retired solicitors and one of the things that i think we often found an issue when within the msp was when we'd made recommendations and the client hadn't gone for it and then there was an issue like you offer them back up they say no don't want to spend two pounds a month no brainer um you know don't want to spend two pounds a month and then there's some kind of data issue and there's no backup in place actually totally aside from the sales by putting these things on the quote as an option the it's very easy to then demonstrate to them later six months a year down the line when they've forgotten hey look we actually offered you this when you signed off on your main contract and you know it's not our fault you didn't take it yeah so i'm always looking for the problem rather than the solution when it comes to these kind of things no that's that's why you are nailing it in the industry and building your reputation there right i want to talk a little bit more about the momentum platform because we're getting lots of questions around that specifically before we do though i just want to delve a little bit more into your experience so let me ask you the question around sales when you run an msp and what you've learned since looking back how much time do you think an msp should be dedicating to sales and the sales process all of your time but you know all of your spare time like it's such a hyper competitive market you need to be able to differentiate yourself but you also need to be able to dedicate time to it um again you know as part of this six months of reflection i've had looking back at how much time i spent working in the business rather than working on the business i i hate using these cat buzz phrases that you know all the nasty sales coaches like to use you know you've got to work on your business not not in your business i use a midterm all the time i've got a few in mind um yeah i don't want to sound like that because it it's just not what i what i want to do but you've got to you've got to listen to that you know and i think working on your business really you've got to nail your technical processes your sops you know the standard operating procedures and make sure that your team know what they're doing but then every day you know ask yourself am i creating a job or am i building a business and if if you if the answer to that is ever that you're just creating a job you need to shift focus and i think you know the more time you free up by trusting your team to do what they do best hiring the right people working on the business you can then really spend a lot of time driving sales i didn't spend anywhere near enough time doing it you know like i said i know a hell of a lot about the pain of trying to sell i.t services not necessarily the success of it yeah so you talked earlier on we've got a question here to do with integrations we've already talked today about you know marketing platforms psa platforms or um accounting platforms can you talk in more specific terms about the automations that are has momentum already has built in to perhaps some of the major players in the market sure so do you mean automation or integration sorry integration uh beg your pardon mixed up because i want to talk automation in a minute thank you for correcting me integration because you need questions saying do you integrate with this that and the other rather than name them all i just wondered if you could uh run a few of them off yeah so the integrations are reasonably tight at the moment um i was just trying to log into my test tenant now so in terms of psas we've got auto task connect wise synchro and cassaya bms um we've had several really great conversations with um the delightful tim bowers at halo psa which is making some serious noise at the moment as well and so we're in the design phase of the moment of an integration with halo psa i'm really excited for that one i think halo has the the opportunity to really knock some of the big boys off their perches now um so so that's the psas hopefully we'll have halo out maybe at the end of this quarter i know our head product manager will have my head for that one um but definitely by the end of the year he said never promise timelines ben never promised timelines so first thing i'm straight on to tech tribe two weeks for that one three weeks for that one it's between you and us ben it'll be fine nobody else will hear about it yeah um so yeah hopefully by the end of this year there will be five psas which you know the major ones um then in terms of marketing automation we've got infusionsoft and hubspot nails so you know my dream stack hubspot into zamentum into autotask into quickbooks online you know we we've got that nailed for the infusionsoft i think it's now keep and um and hubspot we've handled the psas there's then various integrations with distributors um so for the us we've got um obviously ingram and tech data we've got those pretty much across the world in the uk we're uh just about to release west coast um and obviously i'm naturally pushing for lots more of the uk integrations because that's you know i know them better um we've got um some of the most of the big distributors in the u.s um and those and then the same for australia and new zealand so we've got quite a lot of distributor integrations there and where those really add the value is the fact that you can so quickly and easily while creating a quote you just do that quick search for dell latitude and it will tell you current models what the specs are who's got what in stock and how much it's going to cost you and you can just put that straight onto a quote with all the specifications a picture of the product yeah everything you need that makes sense and then one other category of integration sorry is the payment gateways um because obviously give me my money um and so we've got connect booster integration which has been around for a while um until uh i was about to say until a couple of days ago but i think next week ach payments are supposed to be added so we've been doing credit cards on connect booster for quite a long time we've just rolled that out to canada as well we're about to roll out ach payments which i think a lot of people out there are going to be quite excited by uh through connect booster but then in the background we're also working on a stripe integration which i think is the really obvious one like if i'd been in charge a year ago i'd have said push let's push connect booster to second and do a quick you know quick and easy stripe integration first um so yeah again pretty soon we're going to have stripe out there for you to quickly and easily take credit card payments that makes sense thanks for listening those off so we've got other people asking about cassaya yes i can see on the zamentum website there's integration with kasaya there as well somebody else has asked about zapier or zapier depending on which way you pronounce it uh do you uh allow uh sort of hooks into zapier there um yeah absolutely so you won't find it on the zapier um platform you have to do that from the momentum side once you log into momentum go to integrations there's a button to add zapier it's a private connector um we're working on publishing it at the moment but so yeah we can hook into zapier um actually i was uh spent like the last month pretty much it feels like helping people build out various zapier integrations into weird wacky wonderful tools um you know if there's msps out there if you're using momentum or if you're not using mental want to use momentum if there's weird workflow stuff you want help doing just you know reach out to me like my contact details is going to be at the end or connect with me on linkedin um you know like i said i'm i'm here to evangelize for the msp community so if you want to see an integration with something in particular it doesn't matter how mad it sounds reach out to me talk to me about it explain the use case if we can do it immediately on zapier i'll happily give you a couple of days you know my brain to try and work out with you um but otherwise i can also push for for that proper native integration as well very cool ben we've got some other questions here so mike proud across on facebook asks who says can the momentum create accounts in autotask or does it have to pull information from autotask first so that's a great question i know mike runs an msp in the northeast of england uh auto task shop there a fellow northerner of yours indeed so so yeah it's a full bidirectional sync with all the psas so when you first sign up to cementum if you're already using psa it will pull in all of your existing accounts but also if you think about my dream stack let's keep going back to it you don't want things that started at the subscriber phase you know you don't want all the leads that never go anywhere polluting momentum you don't want all the opportunities that never got signed off polluting auto task or whichever psa you don't want all the you know clients or the opportunities that go a little bit further but the dead ones that there's no billing for polluting your accounting system so at each point ideally all the data should be pushing in one direction so yes if you create an accounting momentum you create an opportunity in momentum once it hits that one stage and you're ready to move it on to the auto task journey or the psa journey then yeah absolutely it creates things going that way but it'll also pull stuff back when it's updated very cool and for everybody not at all ben you know people are eating this up very grateful for the for the information you're sharing and in answer to everybody's question yes i will make sure to share ben's contact information at the end here because i know ben you've already won a number of raving uh fans here in fact jason says uh just looked at momentum sign me up now um talking of raving fans uh the legend that is andrew moon who does incredible linkedin for msp uh content here he says um can you ask what were the crm tools that you mentioned again he said he heard keep uh infusionsoft hubspot active campaign what else is that um so we've got uh infusionsoft keep and hubspot i i believe we've got a salesforce integration but it was built quite specifically for a large organization i don't know if it's in production but i can probably get it pulled into production if needed um active campaign and mailchimp there's a couple of things out there um they're not natively integrated but it would be quite easy to do something with zapier you know all you're really looking to do is once uh a contact reaches a certain stage you know in active campaign or whatever i'm sure you've got automations there once they reach for example sales qualified then push them into into momentum that's really easy to do with zapier so reach out happy to happy to make it happen fabulous well get your questions in for ben if you've got anything zementum specific anything to do with the msp industry as you can see ben has got a lot of knowledge that he is uh willing to share question here an interesting one because it's it's more to do with the msp sales process as a whole a question from jason says we don't get many sales inquiries why do we need a tool oh and by the way how do we get more inquiries but you know to paraphrase that question there's going to be a lot of people watching this saying well i'm not sure we want to invest in at all because our marketing sales funnel isn't right at the moment we'll get in the tool help to fix the funnel it's not going to help you fix the funnel but it's going to help you maximize a very thin funnel you know if if you've only got two or three or four leads that you're working on you need to close like a hundred percent of them you need to close 200 of them um but you know you've got to be able to close them and the easiest way to close them is going to be with the right tools yeah that makes sense um i'm intrigued as well you know why did you you've got so much experience why did you choose zamentum or a fairly new player in the market to lend your experience to instead of maybe you know one of the bigger players out there because i know for a fact you weren't sure of uh sort of offers to go and join other companies as well um yeah i mean there there were quite a few opportunities floating around i think and actually i'd say quite personally i'd talk about this you know to anyone who's currently running an msp and thinking like i did what comes next you know is there a life for me after an msp um msp owners xmsp owners don't come onto the market that often you know generally they're lifetime businesses for most people so there is a lot of demand for xmsp owners especially smart ones um got myself a break but you know there is a lot of demand for xmsp owners um i think what really excited me about momentum is it's a problem i understand like on a really personal level i understand the excruciating pain of trying to sell i.t services to small businesses and what i saw in momentum that first time i looked at it with sam was a genuine solution to almost the entire problem but then also all the gaps that i could just think how has no one that cemented the thought of this and you know it became quite clear because no there were no actual msps a momentum at the time it's obvious why these little things fell through the cracks and i think that's why you know i could see so much opportunity to add value because i understand the pain i really understand the pain and the other thing the growth opportunity um you know datto rewind 10-12 years there were like three or four people uh chris tim for example you know one of the really early auto task people talks about how wonderful auto task was to work at back in the day you know as it was scaling up towards 100 people and there was so much going on so much energy just this the attitude was just always delight the customer at any cost and and what momentum is right now you know we're up to a what two and a half years old 2018 up to about 75 people adding a couple of people a week to the team and that same mantra just delight the customer at any cost it doesn't matter just delight delight delight delight and i get to spend all day every day delighting people i'm pulling in the resources needed to delight people um and and so i can really i can see the momentum being the next datto scale you know billion dollar flotation and i think to be to be a part of that at an early stage and to really be able to add value at this early stage is really exciting yeah i love it i can see why you're a part of the business uh there and uh you mentioned chris tim you remind me of chris tim you know had a lot of it a lot he does have a lot of experience in the msp industry you know i've got chris's book we've had chris on the podcast before it's so great to see so many people coming out of running a managed service provider and lending their expertise to the vendors to make the managed service provider business better as a whole so uh kudos to you more more of this type of thing i mentioned earlier on automation i didn't mean to i was talking about integration but i mentioned automation talk to me about automation not just momentum but automation as a whole across an msp business how can msps make their sales process flow more easily using automation if we come back to what i said earlier about giving the giving an engineer the tools that make it impossible to sell it's very impossible not to sell um when when all you want to do is solve problems it's quite difficult to pull yourself back into that oh i need to manage my pipeline i need to update my opportunities who's waiting for an overdue follow-up those kind of things so there's a lot there that we can automate around following up opportunities and automating the pipeline so that you can as an engineer you know do what you enjoy continue focusing on solving problems um some really basic automations that i think had an enormous amount of value is things like scheduling follow-up calls a couple of days after sending out a quote you know generally from my experience proposed quotes and proposals they either get signed off within five minutes or they get signed off like two weeks later and there generally isn't much in the middle so i think what happens in a lot of msps is if they don't get signed off in five minutes they give up and they need that encouragement to keep going with the opportunity i don't know what the figures are but there's a lot of people that talk about the sheer number of touch points needed before you get that signed deal and so if you can easily put in place the automation that's going to schedule a follow-up call two days after that it was sent four days after it was sent an email seven days after you know just doing those little things that make managing your pipeline less laborious um i think that that really helps yeah i've got to give a shout out for its fellow tech tribe here uh i know he's already a big fan um and that's steve dempsey across and near law so to your earlier point about you know upselling and options there steve says while using cementum i've got the ability to send a customer quote for one laptop and my proposal goes from a thousand dollars to over six thousand two hundred dollars because the client has the ability to change the quantity of the items ordered it also allows our clients to add or upsell items such as monitors docking stations wireless combos on their own so i know steve is a raving fan of your stuff and he's a great contributor to the tetro so uh thank you steve but another example there about using given the clients options that's going to risk going to increase the amount of sales that you make there yeah coincidentally that's pretty much exactly the 600 increase that we we're seeing on average across those kinds of opportunities one thousand dollars you put one laptop on there but give them the opportunity to edit the quantity and before you know it they've signed off six oh yeah plus you know plus all those optional extras um yeah hi steve you know thanks for that one we've uh exchanged a couple of emails over the last few days um trying to work on a couple of things to help them out at the moment yeah very cool so we're coming to the towards the end of our time here so final call on questions um for ben there get your questions in on whatever channel you're using we'll make sure to ask them i've got a question though ben you know you left the manage you've not left the managed service world let me rephrase that you've left a managed service provider behind joined a vendor what would you say is the biggest difference in perspective that you have for the managed service provider market now that you've seen both sides of the um the virtual fence so to speak i think the thing that surprised me the most and it may be unique to momentum is the amount of reciprocal love from the vendor for the customer like when i was sitting in the customer shoes that you know that small msp clearly not spending enough money with the vendor did they really care i think they did and i think we probably were more than just a number to those vendors even if we didn't necessarily feel like it and what i'm seeing from the momentum side of the fence now is you know despite these these thousands of customers i know probably half of them by now and we genuinely have conversations internally about customers how we can make their lives individually better you know if if we know if a customer has reached out to our support team with a particular issue even if we haven't been able to solve it there and then because we just don't have the feature or we you know whatever it is we just can't fix it there and then believe me that haunts us until it is actually resolved you know that those comments those suggestions they get logged on our platform product board which we use for road map management and we can't unsee these issues until they get resolved so and i think what i would say to to people who are still on the msp side of the channel is your vendors probably do love you more than you realize they just don't always make you feel like that and i think what i'm really trying to do at momentum is make sure that we outwardly project how much we care about the customers you know i don't ever want one of our customers to feel like i did to loads of our vendors back in the day you know i i want everyone to feel listened to i want them to see what you know that they they matter to us because yeah i mean that's i guess on a very personal level it's still quite raw how badly we were treated by a lot of our vendors um and so seeing the other side of that have been quite powerful as well yeah i would say actually and this is a you know an open letter to the msb industry is a tough time for vendors at the moment because they have lost the trust of a lot of msps and the wider market and that is not picking on anybody in particular so what you have just said ben absolutely matches my experience of working as an msp and doing consultancy work with the vendors the vendors really do care about the msps but perhaps don't show it as obviously as often as they need to so shout out to the to the vendors there appreciate what you do make sure to spread the love around there because we know you care make sure the msps realize that as well ben you are brilliant we're all human we're all humans at the end of the day you know when when you slag off a vendor on the tech drive or whatever there's going to be people working at that vendor who works so hard to make your life better and actually it can be really quite hurtful seeing some of the criticism out there you know i feel some of the pain for cassaya for example at the moment you know they're in the spotlight a lot i feel the pain for their product managers and their cyber security chief cyber security officers stuff like that you know who's being ripped apart i bet they work so hard you know they really do work so hard to do the best and it's just unfortunate circumstances absolutely ben you are an amazing uh advocate for the managed service provider industry we're getting a lot of love for you in the chat here so many people saying you rock awesome thanks for your time and everything i'll leave you to go away and check out all the social channels with the individual contacts there lots of people asking for your contact details so for anybody um who wants to continue the conversation with you be it ben spector former msp owner be it ben spector product manager as a momentum if they want to continue the conversation with you how can they contact you yeah absolutely um obviously i'm on linkedin ben spector if you want to talk about momentum stuff just you know email me ben at zomentum.com i'm sure when we're up to thousands of employees it'll be ben dot something or other but for the moment i'm the only ben at cementum.com you know just email me um i can send you a calendar link we can work some time always happy to talk to msps understand what pain they're going through and understand how we can help them solve that pain and i think it looks like my contact details might be down there unfortunately someone beat me to com forward slash pen spectre at the moment the top ben spector let's go with that it has been an absolute pleasure having you on thank you and i'll say up front here you know um we've run one of these tub talk lives before we ran it last year as an experiment we're going to turn this into an ongoing series now so if you've got value from today uh please i hope you will join us again in the future but i want to give a massive public shout out massive uh public thank you to ben spectrum's momentum for joining us today for being a guinea pig in this whole endeavor here ben i hope it's been fun for you we all know about you and guinea pigs if anyone's not sure do your research first person to email me with an explanation of uh richard tubb and guinea pigs gets a ten dollar amazon gift card wow well there you go so lots of people are searching for richard tub msp guinea pig now it's a real thing go and check it out but thank you everybody for joining us for tuntalk live today as i said we are going to make this a regular series and i want to give huge thanks to richard hall and ben harding the fresh productions for making all of this possible it was a really interesting very first tub talk live we've got ben spector richard tubb and then behind the scenes we've got richard hall and ben harding so we've got two richards two bends absolute chaos when we're trying to uh to do the uh pre-roll uh for this one but thank you richard and ben fresh productions for making all this possible fresh do some amazing work hosting live and virtual events for the msp industry if you are a vendor msp want some help with your live or virtual event encourage you to get in touch with them for tub talk podcast subscribers uh we'll see you on sunday evening uh when a new episode drops that's all the time we've got for tub talk live this month though we'll look forward to seeing you next month with another guest one final ask if you've got a guest that you would like to see on subscribe live drop me an email richard blog dot co dot uk we'll do our very best to get them on ben ben richard me everyone out there thank you so much for your time today that concludes today's episode see you next month you