Revenue Rescues with Megan Killion (EP 937)

Hello friends, Uncle Marv back with another episode of the IT Business Podcast here in Orlando at IT Nation. These episodes once again folks are sponsored by our good friends over at Thread, giving you service magic for your service desk. Right now I am joined by Megan Killion and this is going to be one of those episodes where we don't know where we're going to go. 

She was here at the conference, I was here at the conference, we talked back in April of this year and thought we would put together a show. Didn't happen, things got busy, life got busy, but she found out I was here, saw me on Radio Row, brought me lunch and here we are. Megan, thanks.

It's great to see you Marvin. Thank you for lunch. Very welcome.

So one of the things that I should probably start off by saying is that I can't introduce you the way that I thought I was going to introduce you because you sold your agency. I did. And you are now basically a revenue consultant. 

I'm assuming still for MSPs or for anybody? Still for MSPs and the channel. So it used to be about 90-95% MSPs and now we're really more 50-50 between the managed service providers and then channel vendors. Okay, so it is channel vendors.

Yeah, mostly. Okay, so you're helping Pax8 with their millions? Not Pax8, Moovila is a client. Moovila, really? I've worked with a lot of vendors in this space. 

In particular, my background is very much in infrastructure, so companies like AWS, Cloudflare, I've worked with them in the past. Okay. Do you teach them how to deal with AWS outages that have happened the last couple of weeks? So that's not recently, but I have helped navigate PR around outages in the past on both sides.

So I've helped someone who has had a downtime or an outage and I've also helped other CDNs and infrastructure companies take advantage of ongoing outages to bring more clients over to themselves when they better out. So you know what? I've not really thought of that. Of course, most companies have to at least announce something, but what type of PR really goes around those types of things? We know it's not the company's fault. 

It's AWS, but the customer doesn't care. They're going to blame you. Yeah. 

Legally, they have to provide their clients, according to their SLAs, the outage breakdown, right? So they have to give them information around what happened, why this happened, and what they're going to do to prevent it in the future. And then on the PR side, it's much more around, a lot of times, education. So your average end user has no idea why these things happen.

And most often, the client of the infrastructure company is the one that's getting hammered, right? So like, for example, Cloudflare, somebody fat fingers something on the back end, and all of a sudden, half of America's out, HubSpot's not working. And you, as a HubSpot client, you're pissed off at HubSpot, because they're down, and that's your everyday tool that you're using. And so a lot of what needs to be done by infrastructure companies when this happens is education that can be used for the end user, right? Which is, hey, look, yes, your tool is down, but that's really our fault, and it's our fault because this happened. 

It wasn't a scheduled outage. And I think also a lot of ongoing learning and collaboration behind the scenes around just making the internet better and more robust for everyone. The backbone of our global internet is not built to support the size of files that we are sharing today. 

It was built for email, okay? And here we are sending massive multimedia files, online, like live streaming. The internet wasn't built for that. It's under way too much pressure to begin with, and we're talking about multi-redundant networks. 

And so when something really, truly does go down, it's understanding that that was like a multi-system failure, and in fact, we have to get better if we want to avoid it. Right. Now, you mentioned that the internet's not built for this. 

However, since the year of our COVID, we have just simply doubled, in my estimation, how much we depend on it with all the remote work. One of the things that I constantly have to tell clients is remote desktop or VPNs are network sensitive. So if something happens somewhere along the path that has nothing to do with your home or your office could affect your bandwidth. 

You can't control what's behind the node. So once it's coming to you from the node, then you have some level of control. You can control what's in your house or in your business, the hardware that you're using, whether or not you have a backup network. 

So me personally, I've worked from home since long before COVID. It's been almost 10 years now. And so I have regular home internet that's Spectrum Florida resident, but I also have T-Mobile, one of their business internet, but it's T-Mobile's network. 

So when we have a hurricane, that has a 48 hour battery backup. So I can lose power. I can lose the internet to my home and still have internet enough to at least some basic stuff, right? It's not going to be as good. 

I wouldn't record a podcast on it, you know, but it's definitely there as redundancy. And I think for businesses, they really need to think about what they can and can't control, right? You cannot control whether your internet provider is going to have an outage. You cannot control if they're going to be doing routine upgrades to your network in your neighborhood, and they're putting in fiber, and that's going to be great long-term, but right now it means you're out. 

What you can control is do you have a place to go that's quiet so that you can work on somebody else's internet? Or do you have a backup? Even if it's just like your mobile hotspot, when we talk like BCDR, right, part of that should be what is your action plan if you don't have internet tomorrow? So I'm just sitting here thinking, these are not revenue-driven type questions, but you just answered them as if you answer them on a daily basis. Is this what you end up doing? So I was in IT before I was in revenue. I used to manage a Radio Shack, and that's kind of like how I got started in IT, IT. 

And then I've worked at both sides of the business since forever, and I feel like as an owner, we end up doing everything, right? And I joke because I sell revenue support and revenue consulting into MSPs, so they're always pitching me. They want to be my MSP. We've never had IT internally at my company, and I have been our IT forever. 

And I joke, and I'm like, it really takes me like five minutes a month. Even when we were huge, like when the agency was at its peak, we were 35 people, and I still was doing it myself, and it was taking five, 10 minutes a month. Like, oops, I need to change some DNS. 

We had one-click onboarding, you know? So I think a lot of it is just business best practices. Like, IT is part of your business, and you should have some level of knowledge there in order to run your business. So how many MSPs tried to pitch you and say, oh, we can take that off your plate? Oh, hundreds at this point. 

So there's the people in my network pretty much anytime I have a new client and I have some type of problem. So like, for example, we have been locked out of our M365 since we migrated off M365 to Google. And it's one of those, like, we were, it was not a best practice. 

I know this. We were using GoDaddy as our host, right? Yeah, I know. I know. 

I know. It's cheap, okay? I know it's cheap. There's a reason it's cheap. 

When I first started, so I went consultant, agency, consultant. And when I first started the consultancy, I just spun everything up on GoDaddy because I was like, oh, temporary solution. Then we scaled really rapidly, and we were stuck kind of in that M365 environment. 

And when we migrated off to Google, it's still got that sort of like ghost M365 shell account. So when, if you send me something in SharePoint, it's like, log in, it pulls that old account and then won't let me in. And so like, every time that happens, a client will be like, we could fix that for you if we were your MSP. 

And I'm like, it doesn't bother me that much. It bothers us. But we also get, I get tons and tons of inbound from managed service providers that are not really in my like network. 

A lot of offshore, but also just a lot of people who are doing the spray and pray method. And it's, it's very educational for me and for my team, because when we answer our phones, I would say that like one in five of our calls where someone's pitching us is they're pitching us IT. And it's, it's, I'm like, this is embarrassing. 

You must not have looked at my website. Because one, like there's, we have no need for it. And two, if I did have need for it, I would definitely reach out to a client and ask them for help before I'm you random person.

We had a call at my office on Monday. Kim happened to be out. I answered the phone and it was a company pitching me IT services. 

And I said, we don't need you. Do you not realize that we provide IT services too? And they're like, oh, well, we can be your MSSP. And I'm like, I already have several MSSP partners. 

I'm huge in the channel. No, thank you. But you're right. 

There are lots of emails in my inbox. People pitching me services. Email, LinkedIn, phone. 

And I think when we're like when we're looking at, hey, what's what is wrong with revenue acquisition in the channel right now? That's a, it's a huge part of it. Like people are annoyed before you even get to the conversation because if you are getting calls, pitching you IT, imagine what the average like small business owner is getting. They're not an IT company. 

They're getting even more. And it's annoying. At some point you're like, dude, I just don't need this service.

So let me ask this. In terms of both marketing, revenue, and the new age of AI, the thought is, is that we're supposed to be able to get smarter at identifying good, qualified leads. But it doesn't seem like that. 

It seems as though we're just shoving everything through a big old fire hose. Yeah. I think one of the challenges for managed service providers when it comes to sales, as opposed to most other industries, is that there are very few MSPs targeting enterprise, right? Enterprises do a ton of, of, of trigger based signaling. 

Like they, they have multiple people on multiple devices, Googling, they publish their financial information. They have new offices popping up. There's so much, like if I'm trying to sell to like a Nike, I can do so much research ahead of time to find out if they would be a good fit for us without ever calling them, without ever emailing. 

When I look at the average main street USA business, how do I know anything about their business from, from Google? Like what AI could really evaluate, right? Is we can look at their location. We can try to get a feel for how many employees they have. But even when we're talking about employee size, the smaller the business and the less, you know, like social selling it is, the, the less likely they are to even have LinkedIn's or be listed on the website where I can like look it up. 

So trying to build that use case in is much harder. What we've seen work is a lot of just niching, like, you know, pick an industry that you know a lot about. It also helps to provide more value to the client as well, because when you're saying like, well, we just help anybody who has more than five, 10, 15, whatever devices in our local area. 

How do you speak to that as, as a value add? But if I say, I help individually owned doctor's offices that have at least three locations anywhere in the US, then I can get much more specific about the stack that they have, right? So I know that they're going to have like a patient portal. I know that they're going to have some type of note taking, and then I can actually have a much deeper conversation about AI where I can come in and say, hey, are you using recording and transcribing to help get your patient notes out the door? Are you using call answering services to help make appointments and facilitate much faster response times to patients when they're trying to get in touch with you? Like we could talk a lot more about the pain points, how we help the stack that we support when we're more industry specific. And I think that's when targeting, we can get smarter. 

If we really focus on what a good client looks for us, I think the challenge is that most MSPs think about a good client in their own mind, like what makes a good client to them to their service desk, which is like someone who pays their bill on time, doesn't put into any tickets, is a certain size or shape. But that's not really how your prospect thinks, how your clients think about themselves. They probably identify a little bit of their business size, but probably more likely their revenue size than their business size. 

And they think about the industry that they're in, where they sit in that industry. They may be extremely niche or they may be a little bit broader. Like they may just say, I'm an insurance agent, or they might say, I am an AI powered insurance agent that only services these three industries. 

So I think a lot of it is just understanding how your ideal client self identifies, and then you can use AI to get better at targeting that by looking at websites, social media, any type of PR media that they're doing. But even then, a lot of the MSPs that are doing those like hyper small, hyper local businesses, AI is not the answer to your sales problems. Like the answer to your sales problem is probably going to be networking and going to events and being in your community. 

Right. But what about using a lot of the databases out there to get access to some of this information? Now, granted, a lot of those databases you've got to pay for. And they're fallible. 

But I'm assuming there's got to be a better way to use those databases. And granted, you're right, they're fallible. People can put in whatever they want to some degree. 

Revenues aren't necessarily correct. An example of that post-agentic becoming standard. So your pro-GPT account can now do agentic. 

So you could give your GPT a login to your state's local government bidding site. And it could then pull everyone who's bidding on a government construction project. And if you wanted to have a talk track around CMMC 2.0, or around compliance, or around how you help, that is a very good way to do that.

Another one would be if you work in compliance-heavy industries, and you wanted to pull mandated reports in your state for cybersecurity incidents, right? Any of the industries where they are mandated to have to report. Medical is one of those, right? Like the HIPAA violations, you can go and look that information up. AI can do that for you. 

When we talk finances, we are really dependent on accurate reporting, which your average sole proprietor LLC, good luck finding my financials, you can't. So that's a challenge, right? But if you are selling into corporations, if you're selling into companies that are required to provide that information, you could look it up. There are a lot of tools out there, like Apollo IO is one that we use. 

It is scraping the internet to find as much information as it can, and it actually has AI built into it. You could plug it into your own GPT, but you might as well just use the interface that's in there, where you can kind of like waterfall cascade search criteria. And so you can do something like, I can say, hey, go tell me if this company is really a dentist's office, look for these keywords. 

Because what ends up happening in most of those databases is often when we file our business for the first time, we just pick the code that just makes the most sense at the moment, right? Over time that may change. It also may just not be accurate. But people don't go back and change that code.

No, nobody goes back and changes it. So when you search in Apollo for healthcare providers, you're going to get a ton that are not. We see it the most when we look at finance, insurance, those types of things.

Attorneys, legal. Yeah. They filed as one thing when they started and they never went back and looked.

And so we get a lot of false positives. So the AI can go and you can say, hey, go look at their website and tell me what they actually do and return back, whether that's what they do. Right.

And you can take it a step further and say, hey, based on... And you kind of build your ICP into it. So based on my ICP, which is I really help finance companies that have at least six brokers because then they make more and they have these pain points or whatever. If you look at their website and their latest press releases and their social media profiles, what evidence do you have that they might be a good fit for us? And this is what we help with.

And the AI can do that. If you built the algorithm or the scorecards like we have, we built Excel spreadsheets forever ago that score how good of a lead someone is. Right.

And so you can take that information, feed it to the AI and say, based on everything available about this company that you can find, how would you score them? And then you can use that to sort your outreach, which is another challenge, especially for those that have broader markets, is how do I even decide who to call? Right. I'm not going to call 5,000 companies, but if I just look at the database and I just put my filters in, wow, that's how many companies are probably going to show up. So prioritizing that also by the efficacy of the data. 

So you can say, hey, only show me results where there's a phone number that we know is correct. There's an email that we know is correct. And it meets these criteria and prioritize it based on who's most likely to respond.

Right. All right. That sounds like a lot. 

So two questions that come up, one going back a little bit, when you talked about giving ChatGPT a username and password to a site, how does that work now? Because a lot of sites are forcing us to do either CAPTCHA or the one-time password or even MFA. We can't give ChatGPT to our MFA. It really depends on what security barriers they have in place. 

There's certainly ways to skirt some of them and others there's not, at least not that I know of. But also often you can just export data. So worst case scenario, you log in yourself. 

Grab it. You grab it. You export it. 

You give it to ChatGPT to analyze, which I think is when we talk about the things that AI is really good for, analyzing large amounts of data is one of my favorite ways to use both Gemini and ChatGPT is to say like, hey, I have this spreadsheet of 10,000 contacts. Clean out everyone that doesn't have a direct line because I'm not going to call general phone numbers. Clean out everyone who the email is a catch-all email address like hello at or about at or whatever. 

And then prioritize based on these five things, right? Have they had a recent cybersecurity incident that we can find? Is there indication that they care about compliance? And I think a lot of it too depends on what type of MSP are you? If you aren't a real cybersecurity focused MSP, you probably don't need to be targeting industries that care deeply about cybersecurity. If you are an MSP that primarily just helps like your local businesses and you don't industry specialize, you're going to do this very, very differently than someone who say like, just does a dentist's office. So there's a part of me that's thinking that this sounds like it could be very daunting for someone to look at. 

But if you're going to be looking to grow revenue, is this really the way that we're going to have to look at things going forward where we're going to have to be able to use AI in a very agentic way, parse things out that specific in order to garnish our stuff. And I'm going to give you one other thing to throw into that. How ethical is all of this? So first, I think there's more than one way to skin a cat. 

So a lot of MSPs are doing nothing. Let's be honest, there's a lot of MSPs that for sales, they just wait for all to come in. That's their sales strategy. 

Doing anything other than that is going to be better. And there's so many different ways to come at things. You can do an inbound focused marketing strategy, outbound focused sales. 

What I see work most often for MSPs is very much community presence. Go be active in your local community, develop a name for yourself. Be top of mind when shit hits the fan. 

That's what you need to do. Because really, when we look at managed services, it is 2025. We are no longer selling against most companies doing nothing. 

They have some type of solution in place for IT. They're not just winging it. So we have to wait for that solution to either fail or be frustrating.

You want to be the first name someone thinks of in correlation with what you do. So for me, it's like, I want to be the first name you think of when you're like, shit, my revenue's tanking. Who do I call? Oh, I'm going to call Megan. 

You want to be the first person someone thinks of when they're like, my fucking laptop won't turn on, my email, I can't get in, or my MSP is really pissing me off. Like they haven't answered the phone in three days. I'm mad. 

You want to be the person they call, right? That's your job as an MSP. There's a ton of different ways to do that. But most of the digital ways, those channels are extremely noisy. 

We all get too much email. We all get too many text messages. We all get too many phone calls. 

But if you know your niche, whatever that may be, and you can figure out how to get deeply involved in that community, that's really the biggest winner. Now, in terms of like, yes, AI data analysis can be one way to win that race. And in terms of the ethics, I think it depends on how you are acquiring that data and how you are using it, right? That's what I was pointing to. 

Because yeah, people are going to be like, how did you get this number? And that's one of the number one questions people ask. If you cold call at all, one of the top objections is, how did you get my information? I am a big fan of, I don't want to do anything that I wouldn't be comfortable then telling you I got that information. So like, I'd be like, well, I sponsored a booth at IT Nation and they gave me your phone number. 

If you have a problem with that, please contact them because they sold it to me. You know, like that, that type of conversation, right? Now I'm not saying that's what happens here. I'm just saying like anywhere that you're having that conversation, like you want to be able to say confidently, like, well, I sponsored MSP Everything's Christmas holiday giveaway this year and they gave me your information to participate in it. 

Or even like we use Apollo.io and I just say like your information's in a database. And at some point you put it somewhere that got it in there. And I tell them the URL, like, I'm like, hey, do you want me to email you how to unsubscribe? Like you can get your information removed, but you have to put in a ticket to do that if you don't want to receive these types of calls. 

And so like, I don't have a problem with using a database, as long as that's the purpose of the database. And there is something that happens somewhere consensually. I know a lot of people aren't educated on how putting their information one place gets it someplace else.

Well, that's a whole other discussion. And I do know of companies now that they are going out to help people get their information off the internet. And that's going to be a fun little time.

Yeah, I think it's tough. It's certainly creating an uphill battle for salespeople. But I also think it means that we just have to be smarter and more strategic in the way that we engage.

And I have all I felt for a very long time that community engagement is really the win. It's the way to win. But it's very challenging. 

Most clients when they come to me and to be fair, there's a little bit of a sort of echo chamber where like no one's coming to me because they killed their last year's revenue goal. And they're set. You know, they come to me because they're like, we have no process. 

We have no CRM. We don't know what we're doing. But when they come in, often I'm like, well, how many MSP events do you go to throughout a year? And it's usually like two or three. 

And I'm like, okay, and how many local community events do you go to? And often the answer is none. Yeah, zero. I went to the chamber once.

It didn't work. And I'm like, yeah, well, okay, the chamber didn't work. But like, you know, if you do legal, why aren't you in the ALA? And to be fair, the ALA takes about three years to get your return on investment. 

But once you hit that, I mean, I have clients that are getting 12 to 13 leads a month out of their ALA involvement. I got a lead because I took one of my attorney principals to an ALA event. And they're like, that was the best thing in the world. 

So now I get referrals from them just because I took them. So that was very interesting. I think a lot of it, and also like, I think a lot of MSPs rely on referrals to just happen by doing a good job. 

I'm sorry, doing a good job is the expectation. I pay you to do that. That does not make me a raving fan. 

Yeah. Well, that's relying on the next door effect, where, you know, if I do a good job, people will tell me. And I'll be honest, people aren't going to next door to look for their IT specialist or MSP.

No. And also, other people don't think about you that much. Like, especially when you're just doing a job for them that they pay you to do. 

The expectation is you're going to do a good job, and you're going to make them happy. If you want referrals, one go above and beyond. So that's like, send the Christmas gift, show up in ways that aren't just, I come when I'm called. 

And also, ask, but ask in a way that provides value to them. So instead of just being like, hey, we have a referral program, and I'll give you 50 bucks if you send me a lead or whatever. Don't do that. 

In your quarterly business review, outline what you've done really, really well for them. So if I were sitting down and I were talking to a doctor's office, I'd be like, hey, you know, based on what we looked at, we've increased the productivity of your desk staff by 30%. I assume that that's giving better, you know, patient care in the office. 

Is that true? And they're like, yeah, it is. We are giving better patient care now because we have all these things taken care of. That's amazing. 

Do you know any other doctors locally that you think could benefit from that so that we could get better care to all the patients in our town? Okay. Like, let's have a real conversation one-to-one about why a referral makes sense without just being like, I do good work before people debate. Because you're making, like, just don't ever make it about you is really the end all be all there.

All right. Well, Megan, we're going to have to kind of stop it there. We've gone a bit long.

And I know that there's a lot of stuff happening here. I want to get you back to the conference. But I want to say thank you for reaching out and stopping by. 

We've got to do this again with a little bit more of a runway. Absolutely. With a plan.

With a plan. Go for that. But Megan Killion, thank you here. 

You're local, right? You're not far from here. Yeah, I live right down the street. I'm like 30 minutes out in Winter Park, Maitland. 

Winter Park. It's a nice little area. It is. 

It's cute. We'll chat about that off air. So, all right, folks, Megan's information will be in the show notes. 

You can reach out to her if you are well past the time that you should have been paying attention to your revenue. Got to get it back up. She's somebody that can help you. 

We'll be back with more from ITN Nation here in Orlando. We'll talk to you then. Holla.