Terry Hedden (00:00)
I’m excited to share with you TurnDial’s story. Christian and Michael have been on a journey to figure out the magical formula for lead generation in their MSP. Like so many MSPs, they’ve struggled to generate the number of leads that they need. They’ve tried email marketing, social media marketing. They even put a billboard up trying to generate the number of leads that they need and always fell short. This story is one of perseverance and the commitment to doing whatever it takes to get where you’re trying to go. Enjoy.
Michael, Christian, welcome to the Grow Limitless podcast. It is great to meet you. My name is Terry Hedden, as you know, and I’m excited to learn more about TurnDial. What led to your success? How did you get where you are? And tell me a little bit about your journey.
Christian Boyer (00:51)
Yeah, Mike and I worked together at a prior company for quite a while. And so we kind of got to know each other. We had very similar business ethics. And I think we worked really well together. And we had an opportunity to start TurnDial back in 2019. And we kind of hit the ground running. Fortunately had some success early on and were able to kind of get some footing under us with some early customers and have been growing ever since. it’s been a fun start.
Terry Hedden (01:37)
That’s awesome. you guys, what is your background? What led you to become an MSP? Tell me about that decision to partner up.
Michael Nelson (01:44)
It was ⁓ tough. mean, we worked at a company that ⁓ essentially was jack of all trades. Kind of wanted to do every little piece of technology. They started essentially as a telecom shop. So I think we learned a lot in our time there, especially related to the telecom side. ⁓ When we decided to branch out and… ⁓you start turn dial, we want it to be kind of very narrow focused. That hey, instead of being the jack of all trades, we’re gonna be really good at this one thing. And that thing was to kind of voice over IP, phone system and service, cloud-based phone systems. ⁓ And then have the opportunity to partner with other providers. IT providers, AV providers, security providers.
And that’s been a big key to our success is really growing together with all these other companies, passing a lot of leads, a lot of referrals. ⁓ And that was great and it still is great, but we’re looking to kind of accelerate ⁓ our growth. And ⁓ I don’t want to jump too far ahead, but I know we looked at a number of different offerings and that’s kind of where we ended up kind of running into you guys. growth accelerator.
Terry Hedden (03:00)
Awesome. before you met us, what did you rely on in the past? Was it those lead exchanges, the word of mouth referrals kind of thing? Is that how you kind of grew your business to where you are?
Christian Boyer (03:11)
Yeah, mean, yeah, that’s a say. was me and Mike picking up the phone, calling on businesses, calling on partners, and leveraging any relationship we could find. We did try. ⁓ We hired a couple marketing companies to help us with Google Ads and doing some email campaigns. We didn’t have a lot of success with that stuff. So that’s how we ended up getting together with you guys.
Terry Hedden (03:40)
Okay, talk to me about those companies you went with before. Were they specialists in the telecom managed IT kind of cloud space or were they just generalists in the market that thought they could help?
Michael Nelson (03:50)
I mean they were technology related, ⁓ but they really just focused on email blasts. It was the first one we did. was just cold email blasts. We gave it, I wanna say nine months, give or take. ⁓ And then they started peppering a little bit of calling, but that really wasn’t their specialty. It was just because they weren’t hitting their quota that they started trying some new things. ⁓
Terry Hedden (04:05)
Okay.
Michael Nelson (04:18)
They put together some decent emails that just, I don’t know who they were sending them to and what the follow-up really looked like. So, it just didn’t work for us. ⁓ We did try some Google Ads and ⁓ we even got a big billboard. I think that was more just for brand awareness and we thought it was cool just to have a big billboard right by our office. ⁓
Terry Hedden (04:38)
Yeah.
Michael Nelson (04:41)
And that was great because I felt like our Google traffic definitely increased quite a bit with the billboard. And it was kind of just neat to see. And I have four kids, so was cool to bring the kids to the billboard and like, check this out. It’s my company.
Terry Hedden (04:54)
Daddy’s made it! Daddy’s made it! I love it. I love it. That’s really cool, man. So it sounds like you tried email marketing. Tell me about what you spent, what the ROI was in terms of leads and sales coming out of those initiatives.
Christian Boyer (05:08)
We spend a lot, but there wasn’t there wasn’t much of a return so ⁓
Michael Nelson (05:14)
Yeah, we very little return. Very little. Yeah.
Terry Hedden (05:18)
Alright, so then you decided that to get where you want to go, you’re going to have to do something different, then got you where you are. So tell me about that journey. What was your criteria you were looking for? What kind of companies did you talk to? And what was the deciding factor for you in terms of what your goals were and what they needed to provide in terms of achieving those goals?
Christian Boyer (05:40)
We met ⁓ Brian and I forget her name, but she helped with some of the onboarding. We met them down at a conference and had a nice rapport. And that was probably over a year ago.
We just weren’t ready at the time and we had gotten some good feedback from a couple of ⁓ Marketopia customers. We hired a business development rep, so we figured in conjunction with that, we wanted to really ramp things up and allow Mike and I to focus more on…know, growing the business and not as much on, you know, cold calling and doing some of the hunting. yeah, was really, it was kind of word of mouth and some referrals that led us to you guys, ⁓ which obviously mean a lot to us.
Terry Hedden (06:31)
Yeah, it’s nice to hear someone else sort of social proof, someone else having success that you can see yourself there. I’ll be honest with you, man, it’s not surprising that you had challenges because it’s really hard. It’s not easy to get leads in managed services and B2B in general. It ⁓ just takes a tremendous amount of work. And you’ve got to be great at what you do and do a lot of it to achieve the results. So don’t feel bad, I guess. You’re not the only ones that kind of had that challenge. ⁓that I’m glad to give Marketopia the opportunity. We’re talking about your experience so far from the time you signed to where you are today.
Michael Nelson (07:10)
⁓ I honestly think, Christian probably did a little bit more in the early stages, ⁓ but everyone we talked to and just kind of hearing, even you pitch us, ⁓ I felt like it was good. was like, these guys all kind of worked in these roles. They did ⁓ lead Jen to start and they kind of developed themselves. ⁓ I liked even some of the sales pitch that you guys provided to us. was…I kind of felt like you guys knew what you were doing. ⁓ Even just ⁓ Cesar ⁓ just helping us get set up in the portal and kind of walking us through on all the capabilities that the portal does have. Linking in social channels and the Google My Business pieces just to show real good data. That’s the one thing that we never had with the other platforms. ⁓
It was just like, we sent all these emails out. We tried multiple times. We had no visibility into what was actually happening behind the scenes. And that’s the one thing that was refreshing looking at what you guys provided was just that whole database. The growth machine. And ⁓ it’s great that we can reference that even when you guys started to add in the leads. Myself and Christian went through yesterday, kind of peeking through that. They seem like really good contacts. ⁓ So we’re excited about what could come based off that list you guys provided already.
Terry Hedden (08:39)
Awesome, so are you going to use the growth machine to help run sales as well or are you just going to have marketing and sales being in two different systems?
Michael Nelson (08:46)
We’re still up in the air yet. Right now, I think it’ll be great to try it out, see what’s good, bad, and different about it. Because we haven’t really gotten dirty with it yet, gotten our hands dirty with it yet. But I think we’re open to both sides. Let’s kind of just play it by ear and see what happens. I’m a little bit more of a shoot from the hip kind of guy, where Christian’s very…calculated, ⁓ which is great. So we’re the yin to the yang.
Terry Hedden (09:17)
Absolutely. Christian, so what do you think so far? I’ve gotten Michael’s approach or Michael’s perspective. said you were a little more involved. What’s your impression so far? Walk me through, I guess, your experience. Yeah.
Christian Boyer (09:29)
I ⁓ so I like that it was a pretty low pressure sales process. ⁓ And I don’t know if you’d like to hear that or not, but it would have turned us off if it was like, you know, we have some people, it’s like every couple weeks, you know, they’re checking in and putting pressure. And so I think we appreciated the fact that, you know, I felt like…
We just needed time to kind of get ready and feel comfortable with it ⁓ and get started off on the right foot with you guys. So the sales process was great. And yeah, for me, ⁓ I liked, I feel like you guys did a really good job putting together kind of like a proof of concept where you outline like, this is how many leads you’re gonna need. This is your average customer size. And we were able to kind of give you guys some of that data and you were able to… ⁓help us kind of forecast ⁓ what it would look like in terms of, yeah, like a tangible return on the investment. So I like that, made it easier and kind of ⁓ put our minds at ease a little bit more, just being able to see some of the data that hopefully ⁓ comes with fruition.
Terry Hedden (10:46)
Well, you know, we’ve been doing this a long time. We’re about 11 years old now, so we’ve seen a lot of success and a lot of lessons learned. ⁓ And I can tell you that at the end of the day, it comes down to one thing, which is your ability to close a deal. I’m curious, what you’ve done as far as, you know, consuming the sales training, how prepared do you think you are for your first appointment? Because I think it’s coming up next week.
Christian Boyer (11:07)
Yeah, we got to leave the first day you guys started calling. So ⁓ that’s always a good sign. Yeah. And for Mike and I, we’ve always been pretty good. Once we can get out in front of somebody, feel like our experience and our ability to kind of relate to prospects ⁓ is really good. And we have a really good close rate. Sometimes it’s just that back end legwork of like. Getting that prospect to sit down and talk to you. So yeah, no, I mean, we’re excited and it seems like a good first kind of go around with some of the cold calling and so we’re excited.
Terry Hedden (11:47)
So one thing I’ve noticed and I’m curious at your perspective, so word of mouth sales processes are very different than a normal marketing sales process. So what changes have you made to your sales methodology in preparation for this marketing lead that doesn’t know you from Adam, it’s a cold lead, other than the fact that obviously they’ve heard of you through the marketing and that type of thing. What changes have you made to your sales process to kind of slow it down and build the trust before you try to close the sale?
Michael Nelson (12:17)
We haven’t made a ton of changes, but at the same time we still try to go in cold below. Especially for myself and bringing on a new business development person that I kind of wanted to get the feel myself and started making more cold calls, cold emails, even just attending some more of the networking events just to kind of start. Seeing the hurdles or the obstacles our business development person is going to be running into. ⁓ So I feel like I always have to keep myself in check and keep myself somewhat sharp ⁓ with new outreaches and not just rely completely on the word of mouth or the warm leads coming in. I feel like I always do that to myself for the sole reason that hey, can’t I can’t be out of the game completely. Plus it’s the thrill of the hunt. It’s like, hey, I’m still stalking out. ⁓
Terry Hedden (13:16)
Yeah, I can understand that. I would highly recommend that you take a look at the methodology and join the peer groups and get the experience of the team. There’s a lot of people who are where you want to be right now or where you want to be in six months or a year. So soak that in. There’s a lot of wisdom, a lot of experience. It’s an incredible community of people who genuinely care about each other and want each other to be successful. And it’s hard to get them all together. It’s hard to corral them all in the office or even to the peer groups, but people to build relationships. Pick up the phone, call each other, work on things. ⁓ You know, I encourage you to make the most of the investment you’ve made and at the end of the day it’s going to come down to sales. So hopefully you can ⁓ close more than near fair share and achieve every dream you got on that spreadsheet Krishnan was talking about earlier.
Awesome. You know, let me ask you a question, I guess, from a bigger picture perspective. What advice would you give someone that wants to grow their business faster, wants more leads, is confused about where to go, they want guarantees, they want to share things, but struggling to find that right growth partner, what advice would you give them in terms of their journey to find that growth partner for their business?
Christian Boyer (14:30)
Yeah, I mean, I think, I think for us, you know, we had to, I suppose early on, we probably could have aligned ourselves with, you know, somebody like you guys to help us accelerate the growth and the sales. But I think we needed to kind of validate our theory behind like, okay, we can do this, right? Like we can build a successful business and we can kind of do it sort of grassroots and, you know, a little old school where we’re, you know, we were in our basements. For the first few months making calls. So I think we had to make sure first that ⁓ the thought in our head was an accurate one. And I think once we were able to do that, in particular that first year and prove to ourselves we can make sales, can do installs, we can support our customers and build upon it, ⁓ I think it just makes. The decision to make the investment with the money and finding the right partner, ⁓ it made it a lot easier. Whereas I think if we did it probably sooner, it would have been, I don’t know, maybe a little more stressful or maybe we wouldn’t have been prepared for what would have come.
Terry Hedden (15:49)
Okay.
Michael Nelson (15:49)
Yeah, think that’s, he kind of hit the nail on the head and I feel like you need a foundation ⁓ and the other pieces. I think in the beginning we were afraid to spend money. That’s the biggest thing is we didn’t want to put extra money out there until we kind of proved that we had something ⁓ built that was successful already. ⁓ And now it’s, yeah, we can see that there’s gonna be a return on investment at this point.
Christian Boyer (16:14)
I think it’s also like when we started it, we started with another guy and obviously we’ve hired people since. But I think it’s important that, you know, as a team, know, everybody kind of sees like, hey, Mike’s picking up the phone 60 times a day and he’s driving out and dropping off cards and Christian’s, you know, calling on partners and prospecting and kind of putting in the work to like help build this thing. And it’s like we all have a vested interest in it rather than us just outsourcing it right off the bat, I guess.
Terry Hedden (16:48)
All right. So it sounds like you kind of built the fire. You got embers going, got things burning. You know you’re ready. You’re never going to be ready ready, but you’re ready enough to start shoveling coal and putting it on top of the fire to kind of get it burning a little bit hotter. So it sounds like you kind of did it the right way, I guess you can say. You didn’t wait so long that you demanded perfection. You just got it going. You proved that it’s at least a viable business, just needs more customers and then you pour the coal on there and hopefully you’ll get the 50-100 % growth rate that you’re looking for. What is your growth goals? do you hope to achieve? Talk to me about where you see yourself in the next one, two, three years.
Christian Boyer (17:35)
Go ahead, Mike.
Michael Nelson (17:36)
⁓ I ⁓ think we have a couple different ⁓ essentially goals of growth. So we’re looking to grow at a steady, manageable pace. ⁓ But we’re looking probably to hopefully double here within the next two to three years. ⁓looking to possibly grow through some acquisition as well. Like there’s been a lot of talks of us kind of you growing our territory ⁓ whether that’s another state or just ⁓expand our market. Roughly we’re about a hundred mile radius of Philadelphia so ⁓ we’re trying to see what’s manageable and what’s going to know aid to our success opposed to you know create more obstacles down the line. you know there’s a lot of things we’ve worked at. actually have the book behind me. Traction. ⁓ So we’ve been setting up more kind of ⁓monthly, weekly, yearly goals that, which we haven’t done previously. And I know we were probably a little late to the game, but we’re trying to play a little catch up and make sure that we have ourselves set ⁓ on the right path.
Terry Hedden (18:52)
Awesome, well it sure sounds like it. Both of you guys seem to have level heads about you. You know what you’re trying to do. You’re trying to achieve your goals. You’re willing to invest in them and I commend you for that. Not everyone’s got the courage to run a business and grow a business and that they create, it ends up creating a situation where they never make enough money, they never have enough stability, they always are stressed out. You gotta grow to get a business functioning without necessarily 100 % of the burden on the principal. So I commend you for that. It’s not easy but I’m sure it’s gonna be a very. It sounds like you guys both have a lot of confidence in your sales skills, so that’s going to help too. Awesome. Good deal. Well, thank you guys so much. I appreciate you sharing your story with us today. Hopefully it inspired the listeners to take the same leap of faith you did and start taking steps toward achieving their goals, turn those dreams into expectations by doing what it takes to achieve them. Thank you so much. I appreciate you joining us.
Christian Boyer (19:47)
Thank you.
