MSP's Ultimate Guide To Winning Financial Services Clients

If your MSP is looking for a vertical that ticks almost every box, then financial services might be the one… here’s why. Also this week, the “trust transfer” trick of borrowing credibility from people prospects already trust, and my guest built an MSP to $143m exit and understands why MSP founders get stuck. Welcome to Episode 355 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge. Deep dive into winning financial services clients If you’re looking for a vertical that ticks almost every box – recurring revenue, long-term loyalty, genuine willingness to pay for good IT, and a compliance pressure that never goes away – then financial services might be the one. Right now, I want to do a deep dive into winning wealth managers, independent financial advisors, mortgage brokers, and insurance brokers as clients for your MSP, because this is a sector that is genuinely crying out for MSPs who understand their world. Let me show you how to become one of them. Let’s break this down into six easy parts… Why is this vertical so attractive? Well it’s pretty simple really, it’s very stable, very profitable, long-term businesses. These kind of financial services clients don’t tend to disappear overnight, and they also have a very high dependency on technology. You think about it, everything they do involves data, communications and client records. So they are genuinely willing to pay for high quality IT because for them, the cost of getting it wrong is huge, just huge. It isn’t just that the technology is needed by them, it is absolutely mission critical. That ticks a big box for us. But also, and this is huge as well, compliance pressure. For these people, we have no idea what the compliance pressure must be like for them because they have to operate under an increasingly complex and burdensome set of rules. There’s always new rules coming in. It’s very rare that someone comes in and says, “Let’s have fewer rules for financial services.” That just doesn’t happen. So the norm for them is all this compliance. And of course, a lot of the technology is there to make sure that they stay compliant. I’ve been digging around for some stats and I found that 96% of financial firms now allocate more than 5% of their total spending budget to IT and cyber security, and that’s going up. They take technology really, really seriously. And that means that once you’re in, you’re in. Because as we know, for an ordinary B2B company, switching an IT provider is highly disruptive for them. And for a regulated company, that’s just too much risk. You’ve got to be really bad to lose a financial services client or someone that’s related to that. So retention is very, very high in this sector. On top of this, and this just keeps getting better and better, these people talk to each other. The IFAs, the mortgage brokers, the insurance brokers, they tend to operate in very tight networks, either because they’re all part of the same actual selling network or buying network or something like that, or just because they tend to hang out with each other. They meet each other at training and compliance sessions and stuff like that. So they are talking about the suppliers that they use. Once you are in with one and you do a good job, the good news is you’re likely to pick up other clients as well. The psychology of the buyer. For these people that we want to reach, it’s almost always that the decision maker is the owner or the senior partner. And of course, there are influencers as well. In most B2B buying decisions, you’ve got a decision maker and an influencer. So you might have the CEO is the actual decision maker, but the operations manager might be an influencer. The operations manager will pretty much tell them who to p...