A brand-new CyberSmart survey just dropped showing that three quarters of MSPs admitted to suffering at least one breach in the last 12 months, with 54% reporting being breached two or more times and nearly a third experiencing three or more breaches in the past year.
Come again? Three or more times? In one year?
You know what gets broken three times a year? Cheap luggage. Gas station sunglasses. My crappy WiFi in Florida.
I don’t know about you, but I’d have a hard time standing in front of a prospective client — a dental office, a law firm, a manufacturer — with a straight face and a brochure that says “We Keep Your Business Safe,” selling yourself as a cybersecurity professional if your own shop got knocked on its backside three times in twelve months.
But wait, there’s MORE…
That same survey found that 96% of MSPs rated their confidence in their own security as average or above. Maybe if they’ve only been breached once in the last twelve months, they’re right. Geeeeeze.
So we’ve got an industry where three-quarters of providers are getting breached repeatedly — and nearly all of them think they’re doing just fine.
Houston, we have a problem.
This is why I have repeatedly said:
Service marketing STARTS with the service.
If your service is excellent, marketing adds fuel to that fire. If your service is mediocre or worse, marketing makes you fail faster — with more people watching. You essentially accelerate the pace at which people find out you’re no good at what you do.
So, before we talk about campaigns, lead generation, direct mail sequences or anything else — we have to ask the question that most MSPs would rather skip straight past:
Do you actually deserve your clients’ trust?
Not “do you think you deserve it.” Not “do you feel like you’re a trustworthy person.” But do you actually, provably, demonstrably deserve the trust of the business owners and executives handing you the keys to their entire IT infrastructure?
Because if the answer is no — or even maybe — you’ve got work to do, and it’s not in your marketing department.
You cannot build a successful business on a broken foundation. You can paper over cracks for a while and trick people into buying with AI writing you clever copy on your marketing materials and aggressive follow-up. But if the experience on the other side of the sale doesn’t match what you promised — if the service is sloppy, if the team is undertrained, if your own house has holes in the roof — clients leave when bad stuff happens. And worse, they talk.
Years ago, my laptop was hacked right in front of a room of MSPs during a presentation. The PowerPoint was minimized and someone started to launch the command prompt. I looked at the room and said, “Okay, who’s messing with me?”
They replied, “A hacker. Take it offline NOW.”
The MSP I was paying at the time admitted they weren’t following up on all the security alerts and patches because they “got a little busy and was struggling to find people to help.”
The last MSP we had before Vector Choice quite literally used “Password123” as a system admin password. I. am. NOT. Kidding.
In the IT services world, “trust” isn’t a soft, feel-good concept: It’s the entire product.
Here are my final thoughts on this:
- If you undercharge for your services and then provide substandard support and security, you are GROSSLY incompetent and unethical. Charge what you NEED to charge in order to put the people, software tools and systems in place to keep your clients safe, walking away from anyone who won’t pay.
- If you happen upon a client that you truly do not have the skills, people and capabilities to help, REFER them to someone who can and do NOT “fake it till you make it.”
- If you’re going to be in this business, BE in this business. Don’t dabble and make this a side hustle. Be meticulous about who you hire, the tools you use and the systems you put in place. This is NOT a business for weekend warriors.
And if you’re one of the good guys who’s not let the fox into the hen house, then USE that in your marketing. Aggressively.
Because at the end of the day, trust-based marketing starts with being trustworthy.
Full stop.
If you’re one of the good MSPs with a stellar track record worthy of your clients’ trust, let’s go put everyone else out of business. Click here to retain me as your fraction CMO and let’s start building that profitable MRR.
