Terry Hedden (00:00)
Every once in while on the Grow Limitless Podcast we get one of those guests that just sort of blows your mind. Today’s speaker is Jeff Newton. He came aboard as an alumni of the Marketopia program, someone that accomplished the highest close ratio ever with a Marketopia client with a 68 % close ratio. And the way he did it is really inspiring. He leverages EQ, process, and personal responsibility and discipline to overcome every challenge before him. If you’re running up against roadblocks on the path to success, enjoy this podcast. Jeff’s going to help you achieve your dreams. Jeff Newton, a guy that will live in Marketopia infamy. He is a living legend and I’m honored to welcome to the Grow Limitless podcast. Thanks for coming aboard Jeff.
Jeff Newton (00:57)
Absolutely. Thank you, Terry. Happy to be back in your world. Happy to be here.
Terry Hedden (01:01)
Awesome dude, awesome. You know, for those of you that have been around the Marketopia community long enough, you will fondly remember the chapter at which really Jeff came in as a student and ended as a professor. He made incredible strides and achieved incredible things as a salesperson. But what I’m most proud of and honestly impressed by, Jeff, is how you evolved and parlayed the success you had into making a difference in the community.
Genuinely helping people overcome head trash barriers to success and just ⁓ I guess help people down their journey toward where You wanted them to be which is where they were trying to go right and I just wanted to thank you for that man It was awesome to watch honest honestly, we still talk about it to this day and and so I’m excited today to really learn from you and learn about you and
Jeff Newton (01:34)
Yeah.
Terry Hedden (01:57)
and see if we can kind of institutionalize some of that wisdom so that we can help hundreds of thousands, maybe millions or even billions of optimist robots and humans that will consume this training for years to come. So, Jeff, why don’t you kick us off, man? Tell us a little about you and kind of how you got to, what happened before Marketopia? Tell us about
Jeff Newton (02:21)
Yeah, the quickest way to talk through my journey on the MSP side was 18 years, five MSPs, seven times. The first decade was on the tech side. Did a little bit of that account management VCIO stuff in the middle before jumping fully over to sales, sales and marketing and really living on the growth side for the second decade, basically. ⁓ How I got into it was ⁓ it paid the bills.
Right? It was my first job out of college. I worked for the tech bench at Best Buy before that, before it turned into the Geek Squad, right? So like, I loved computers. I didn’t want to sell them. I didn’t want to fix them, but I enjoyed messing around on them, essentially. Best Buy paid for college. And so now like a subsequent natural move was ⁓ this person said, hey, come work for me. You’re smart with computers. I’m like, okay, you’re a what? MS what? An MS who? And I thought I was pretty smart walked in on that first day, he set four laptops down on the desk. He said, okay, we’re going to join these to the domain and get them out with the nurses. It was for a hospice clinic. Like we’re going to, we’re going to join them to a what? A domain, right? My world was shattered because I was at like the top of the work. I don’t know the consumer side of to have IT right before I would then was really just pulled into the corporate side, if you will.
The other way that I’d like to describe the rest of my journey, like all of those changes, there was 11 different titles I held across that, you know, arc as well. And I was always given opportunities that I didn’t deserve at the time, but the people that offered them to me knew that I was capable of becoming the person that I needed to be to be successful in that seat. And it was just that, like one brick in front of the other the whole time. So, you know, how I showed up in the Marketopia community, as you mentioned, like a student.
That’s just how I approached everything. I had a thirst and a hunger to learn. also, failure wasn’t an option. So there’s these two mental archetypes. Again, I came up on the tech side, so I dealt with them all the time. They usually look at the world through this lens of, here are the 100 reasons why this won’t work. And enough trying to figure out, how do I solve these problems that I didn’t go to school for? I don’t know how to do this crap. But I knew the people part.
So I would lean into like the smartest techs in the room to help me get through the technical stuff. And I did that through asking those people one question, which is how can I make this work? And that was like the first sign of magic. When you ask the, here’s the a hundred reasons why it won’t work people, well, how can I make it work? You get a brilliant answer. It’s just like the way that mindset is built. that’s just like the, the absolute cliff note version of everything that happened there. But yeah, that’s really where I ended up rolling into the Marketopia community. So maybe a little bit more context. Let’s maybe do the couple of years prior. Let’s just talk about the sales and the growth side. So I ran sales and growth for about eight years between two of those MSPs. The one prior to when I became a Marketopian, I’d actually considered going to Marketopia at the time. We had an in-house marketing team of three ladies. They did a phenomenal job of driving inbound traffic. I ran the sales team. I was a sales rep and then I ran the sales team. So I had a team of seven and I mastered like the sales process to produce results through inbound driven growth. And then all of sudden that marketing team left. three months, like all three were gone. I’m like, oh shit, that’s going to be a problem. Right. I was getting maybe six leads a month just out of that team. And it was enough to hit, we averaged about 150 grand in net new MRR a year there. And I thought I had everything knocked down, figured out. And then I got recruited to go build growth for another MSP. They had smaller goals than where I was, but bigger goals for who they were. They wanted 50 % growth year over year to their MRR, three years in a row. That was the edict that was given to me. Like, sure, no problem. Because that number was smaller than the 150 I was putting up at the other place. The big difference though was they didn’t have a marketing team. They didn’t even have a GL account for sales or marketing, right? So like no dollars, no cents, no nothing except for referral traditional growth had been there, but I still wasn’t afraid of the numbers because the numbers could, they’re easy. Like it is math and it is science. There’s some art to it, but it really is just in input output. Um, and I had the sales process that was producing like 62, 63 % win rate, but that was all on the inbound side. Well, I was looking to rebuild that marketing team. Right? So was comparing, do we rebuild this in-house or do we go to Marketopia?
Midnight decision was to rebuild it in house. I’m like, F that. That’s when I went to the other location. Okay, great. When I got charged with that, I’m like, well, I already know the solution. I’ve already vetted Marketopia. I wanted to bring them in at the other MSP. So I just called the sales rep at that time and was like, Hey, I’m a new, I’m in a new shirt. I’m the same guy. I have the same challenge. Like put a, put a deal together for me. I need a caller. I it was like the mock for plan at the time, right? Just kind of went all in with a three year commitment on what I knew I needed to be successful to hit the numbers that I needed to hit which was all about producing the in, not in that case, the inbound, but like I needed enough opportunities in at bats to then just run the system. And that is what really brought me to Marketopia was, okay, if that’s the goal, then as long as, as long as you produce those leads for me, there is absolutely fundamentally no way that I cannot hit Michael. Like I just knew enough about myself and knew enough about the opportunity and the system that we’d already built where it was just like, just give me the leads, man. Just give me the leads and we’ll run it through.
Terry Hedden (08:09)
That’s amazing. So, I want to really dig into that because I love how simple you make the input output concept sound. But first, start off with that. You know, I see a lot of techs that become salespeople. It’s not uncommon, but it is extremely uncommon to hear a non-owner salesperson make the jump. feel like MSP business owners tend to learn business through the course of running a business so the transition isn’t as hard. How did you learn what you needed to learn to make that pivot without having exposure to P &L and balance sheet and just the trials and tribulations of running a business? Did someone teach you or did you go to a class or is this in you? ⁓
Jeff Newton (08:56)
Yeah, it is just in me, but I never knew it to be true. Right. So I was at the third MSP that I worked for twice. So that’s where the whole five and seven thing came from. ⁓ the CEO of that company pulled me aside one time and he said, Jeff is after they recruited me back. He’s like, you are my favorite and my least favorite employee. Well, what the hell, man? Like, come on. Right. And he’s like, well, let me tell you why it’s like, is insanely frustrating to have an entrepreneur trapped inside my business, right? And he’s like, you’re an entrepreneur, you’re an entrepreneur trapped inside my company. I’m like, well, I just see problems and I’m here to solve them, right? And I don’t really care so much about titles or hierarchy or any of that. It’s just like, I see the thing, I find the way, I build the system, and then we just go and like, it just makes sense to me. But that was a great perspective to get about halfway through that 18 years was like, okay, now I understand. Well, at that time, I’d probably been…on leadership teams to answer your question. was a part of leadership teams for probably 15 of those 18 years. And again, I had no business being on a leadership team for probably the first 10 of those, but I was 24 years old. was a basically, uh, I was the guy that went out and jumped on grenades, right? Like a field administrator that went and dealt with all the exploding scenarios. And they handed me all 27 people and said, you’re the network operations manager. You’re running the show.
Right? That’s the story that pretty much every MSP has too, but I was 24 and I couldn’t even manage myself. And now I’m responsible for 27 people. Like that was my first cut at having to understand and figure out the numbers, the business, the metrics that make the whole thing go around and why and how it works and doing so with like no baseline, which having that student of the game mentality is huge. But also I think I didn’t come into any part of it. No role no company, no nothing, with any preconceived notions and no expectations. And that I think set me up for more success than I ever realized too, because I wasn’t fighting my own guardrails. It was literally just like gloves off. We have to get to the answers and we’re just going to fail as quick and as often as we can until we get it right.
Terry Hedden (11:13)
I love that and it’s easier to say than do. The failure of failure I think drives a lot of people to make bad decisions. They’ve maybe tried something and it didn’t work and they’re afraid to try it again or it’s something they just don’t understand. They’re not comfortable with it so they don’t feel comfortable doing it. How did you overcome those tendencies considering you started off as a tech? How did you, I guess, get rid of that head trash and push it out of the way so you can start solving problems?
Jeff Newton (11:42)
Yeah, I found myself in a lot of terrible situations, right? And that’s the truth of it. I mean, there’s no like I came out the womb brilliant. It’s none of that. It’s like I just knew well, one, I knew I was not the smartest tech in the room to I could not pass a technical certification to save my life or get a promotion. I just can’t do it. I’m not my brain does not work that way. And so I had to be resourceful. And by being resourceful, I relied on the things that I did know and I did have. And in my college, I went to school, I have a criminal justice major with political science and science and psychology minors, right? And why not be an MSP for 20 years? And the thing though that I took from that is the psychology, some of the sociology, but that crap doesn’t matter. It’s just people, right? So like psychology is everything, is just people. And once you sort of realize that people are also in some ways, and people may hate this, but like there are archetypes, people are like computers, it’s just inputs, outputs especially when you understand psychology because there’s like archetypes and all of those things and like when I know how you When I know how you think when I know how you in take in information and also communicate information When I also know what’s important to you and what you value it’s really about communication and That is like the psychology piece. And so to anchor that back to how did it all work? I was a guy that was in positions again that I was like unqualified for but I could outwork it No one was gonna outwork me period and I wore the same badge of honor every MSP does where 80 hour work weeks were perfectly fine by like Thursday morning, right? And thinking that was great until I just had to figure out if I actually stopped to ask for help, then those 80 hour weeks would be 35 hour weeks because I wouldn’t have grinded so hard on the things that I didn’t have any business grinding on. And that’s the people part. I had to figure out how to crack the code of talking to engineers and get them to want to help me. You know how challenging that is?
Terry Hedden (13:39)
Believe me, I do. do. What’s your secret? What’d you learn?
Jeff Newton (13:43)
⁓ I think there was an element of humility, but honestly, was like reading the recipe of the individual back to psychology. Like once I understood how you were wired, I knew what I could say to you. I knew how I could talk to you. I knew I could show up and be a human with you to like unlock the human side of that engineer on the inside to make them want to help me. Cause the whole goal wasn’t like, fix this for me. Here’s another dead cat. Let me throw it over your fence. It was show me, teach me, I want to learn, I don’t want you to tell me twice. But you really had to approach it through this lens of them understanding that investing that time in you was gonna compound in a beneficial way for them. In some ways, I think, maybe depending on what your intentions are, people could label that as just like I was a really good manipulator, but it really wasn’t that. It’s just to me, that’s the essence of humanity and communication is really connecting at a human-to-human level.
And I got really good at that because I had to, it was a survival technique. And, you know, fast forward to when I switched sides of the aisle and maybe even the in-between, like I said, I was an account manager slash V C I O roughly 10 years ago was when that transition was happening kind of when V C I O was a first thing, even in the market name wise or title wise. And all that really meant was you were a technical enough individual that could actually sit in front of business people and have business conversations and like hold your own in a room. That’s all it was. And To me, that was the same thing. It’s just like, people are people. You put your pants on the same way I do, unless you change legs or something, right? But it’s just all the same thing. And because I have that like broken lens of not seeing hierarchy, not being intimidated by anyone in a room, I’ll walk into a room, that’s fine. It really just came down to, you know, looking at the micro expressions and understanding where are you? What are you thinking? Why are you thinking it? And I want you to think of this. So like, let’s just move towards those goals.
Terry Hedden (15:36)
Use the word manipulation and then you talk about people and you talk about emotions and understanding what drives them and I think there’s a lot to that in terms of what separates some from achieving their goals in the sense that high EQ people don’t tend to get into the IT space as much as…you know more technically capable or or some might say IQ type people. How did you how did you is that are those skills I guess that that that your your educational foundation gave you and are there any if I’m a I’m a tech that says you know what
Jeff Newton (16:08)
Yeah.
Terry Hedden (16:21)
He’s onto something here. want to figure out how to evolve and develop my EQ so that I can start reading emotions and manipulating people into doing what I want them to do. Is there a cheat sheet there? Is there a book or a video or a YouTube or a TED Talk?
Jeff Newton (16:39)
There probably is and if it comes to me, I will blurt it out out of turn even, but I would say you hit something important, which is true. It was my educational path. It was also just my childhood path. was baked in, ⁓ it was cloaked survival instincts. So from a school perspective, I started off in a Montessori school. Nothing wrong with Montessori. It worked for me.
But it worked for me because I was forced to figure out the people part and manipulate my teachers because I avoided the work. I didn’t want to. didn’t understand school, didn’t hate it. I’m not dyslexic, but I felt like it just in like an educational environment. And everything was hard. Like I still don’t know my time stables because of those fundamental years that I just like didn’t learn them. But I figured out how to work my contract as Montessori schools went to like do these other things and just sort of get through and get by grade school and then middle school and high school. was in traditional education, but it was the same thing. Like, okay, well now I don’t have a foundational baseline to be set up for success. And so it was a lot of just constantly having to figure out who do I need to see and target in this room to help get me through the situation I’m in. And then that turned into my career path too. ⁓ and I’m careful with the word manipulate and, but it is a dual edged sword. And I do think that it just comes down to what are your intentions and what’s your integrity like, but it’s a very fine line. You’re using the same principles of psychology and people and understanding is just to what degree and for what interest are you using it in a certain way.
Terry Hedden (18:12)
I don’t think, know, manipulate is, I think has a negative connotation to it, but I don’t consider it necessarily negative at all. At the end of the day, your doctor needs to manipulate you so you start doing what it takes to get healthy. Your trainer has to manipulate your behavior so that you start losing weight or accomplishing your fitness goals. As a salesperson, you’re trying to help them at the end of the day, secure their business and achieve their goals. As your manager, you’re manipulating someone to⁓ to overcome barriers between them and success. I you could use it for good or evil, but manipulation is a core skill of a great salesperson at the end of the day. ⁓ think having that skill probably enables you to do it for evil or good. The difference is good people use it for good and evil people use it for evil.
Jeff Newton (19:04)
Exactly.
Terry Hedden (19:06)
Yeah, that’s interesting. ⁓ I’ve had some talks with some people in my inner circle about the word manipulation because I think it’s an incredibly powerful skill. mean, if you look at successful politicians, successful professionals, they’re good salespeople, man. They’re selling their ideas. They’re getting people bought in. At the end of the day, they’re just manipulating people in a positive way. So I think it’s an interesting perspective there. ⁓
Jeff Newton (19:36)
Yeah, if I had to distill down the essence of what sales really became for me, it was nothing more than transferring conviction. That’s it. Now you had to figure out what is that person compelled by? What are they motivated by? What do they want? What’s the outcome? How are they measuring success? Cause it’s different than mine. Every one of them was different. One of the easiest ways to figure that out was once I got in their office with a whiteboard on a wall, without them expecting it, that’s a pattern interrupt, was to stand up and grab the whiteboard marker and hand it to them and ask the CEO to write, are the top three initiatives of the company right now? I don’t know, if you’re an EOS shop, give me your rocks. What is actually going on here and what are you currently trying to achieve? And every business would be able to answer those questions, even if you weren’t talking to the CEO or an office manager is gonna know what’s expected of them. It’s kind of the same thing. Hey, if the CEO walked in this room right now and wrote three things on that whiteboard, what are they gonna be? It’s what they care about. Great. Okay, well now I know exactly where the organization is aligned and what they are, where their momentum is going. And then it was just a matter of, okay, I can align to that. That was the best part about selling IT services is like, it’s the Swiss army knife. It can be anything to anyone, which is also what makes it so freaking hard to sell if you don’t maybe have, you know, all of the…really experienced because again I didn’t walk into this knowing how to do it. I just got really good at failing really fast and figuring out what didn’t work until I got to what did.
Terry Hedden (21:07)
I love that. You know, so to me, the path to achievement involves potholes of failure and the difference but everyone fails everybody fails the difference between dreamers and achievers are the ones that overcome the temptation to then let that failure become fear that you can’t overcome and keep doing what it takes to achieve your goal right none of us are omnipotent none of us are so lucky that we make nothing but great decisions right.
Jeff Newton (21:39)
Yeah.
Terry Hedden (21:41)
You know, I want to really, if I’m a salesperson watching this, I see someone who not only overcame their own things, but they also convinced the manager to kind of get bought in and to give them what they needed to be successful. And you mentioned different approaches to lead, Chen, you mentioned different things, but how did your salesmanship…relate and how did you employ those skills to get what you needed to be successful? Because obviously you were successful everywhere you were in service and sales, at least based on what I know. How did you get your manager to be bought in to give you that support? you’re talking to a salesperson right now and their manager is resisting, talking about failure, unwilling to give the salesperson the fundamental input to their desired output, which is leads, how do you get them to those temptations as a salesperson.
Jeff Newton (22:37)
Yeah. Really uncomfortable conversations, but a willingness to have them. Right. And ultimately what those boiled down to was challenging their level of commitment to the expectation. Right. So when I came back, when I, when I made that change from MSP to MSP, and then I became a, a marketopia customer, I challenged the three owners of that MSP at the time, which I became an owner there as well. But I challenged the three of them of like, how committed are you to the expectations and the goals that you’re actually placing, right? Like, and by commitment, it’s not just like, well, of course we want to do it because otherwise why wouldn’t we say we want to do it? Like everyone says that that’s not what I’m talking about commitment. It’s the time, talent, treasure piece, right? So time, how much time are you going to give me? Cause you don’t know what you’re doing in regards to building this, which is why you’re asking me to do it. And like from a time perspective, I said, we will not have a conversation about expenses for 12 months.
If we’re going to execute this agreement, I will not have a conversation with you about where we are with the numbers or anything else for 12 months. Why? It takes six to nine to get there. I don’t want to have the overreaction that happens inside. I saw it, whether it was sales, marketing, tools, stack, anything, there was a month to month, like visceral physiological reaction to any MSPs, which was so ridiculous because then you’re constantly like chasing the wake of change and never actually getting to where you were trying to go. So like that was my first, maybe whatever, maybe 15 years at the time when I made that change. Like I’m not gonna deal with the oscillation of that’s a really tough check to cut. Where is it at? Where’s the numbers? Where’s the MRR? Where’s that? It’s like, did you or did you not want me to build the system that was gonna predictably create revenue for you? If so, I need this amount of space to do it. That was a test of commitment and time. The talent was…one, what I brought to the table, but also the team that I built and the team that I had, didn’t just like gut everyone and rebuild. kept, in fact, in that place, I had everyone and I kept them, just rebuild them. And then the treasure was, are you going to commit the 300 grand or whatever it was, $350,000 over that three year goal timeframe to actually get the outcome that you’re asking for, which was the most important of all the commitments. The other ones are very important, but like the resources was the thing because It makes everything else futile. If you don’t have the inputs and the by-product of what you’re trying to accomplish, which to me, that was the leads ultimately, right? The meetings that we needed. So it comes down to being willing and able to challenge the commitment, but you have to challenge in a tactful way and you have to do it respectfully. It’s not like you just come in because your ego is huge. ⁓ that’s not the way to do it. So don’t take that from this conversation. But I also had a you know, long history at this point of demonstrated results too. And so to a certain extent, you know, like being a quota carrying individual and exceeding quota is a great way to like gain the clout you need to challenge things like that. And so I was fortunate in that I got to have that conversation before I became the employee to build it. Right. But like I knew what was necessary before I said yes, because I wasn’t going to put myself in a position that I’d already been in multiple times before.
Terry Hedden (26:02)
When we launched, it’s a lot easier to sell when commitment is day to day, minute to minute, hour to hour, week to week, month to month. And one of the things that we did really early on was to help overcome that oscillation that you mentioned before by having a contract and telling people there’s…There’s a you have to be committed if you’re not committed don’t try if you’re not gonna see it through to the end don’t make don’t start because all you do is waste money until things start to work and they will start to work but you have to be patient yet determined and disciplined and all that yeah in today’s society it feels like everybody wants no commitment and sometimes I feel like it’s disservice to give people what they want because you’re setting everybody else up for failure. If you’re only committed to the salesperson on a day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month basis, then you’re not going to give that salesperson the runway get where they’re trying to go. If you’re not going to give the lead generator or the marketer the same runway, they’re never going to give the next person in the chain the runway necessary. in these days where everyone wants no commitments and all of that, how does a vendor set up an MSP for success knowing these natural temptations? How do you get people to how to instill discipline as a vendor, I guess. I’m curious.
Jeff Newton (27:37)
Yeah, the it’s interesting a couple of the keywords you had there because it does come down to discipline. And I think there’s probably an element of even fortitude. There’s something even more, maybe not important, but more prevalent that I’ve also witnessed, which is the I mean, just to put it plainly, like, people are allergic to work, right? Like people want what they want, but that’s also why I challenge commitment. Like you want the outcome, you want the dream, but you’re unwilling to go through the shit you got to go through to get there. And like, that is the journey. That is the thing. ⁓ you know, one of my very first people that I read a ton on when I went to, into sales was, ⁓ Brian Tracy, like one of the OGs of selling and he’s got the book Eat the Frog and basically it talks about that concept anyway, where it’s like the thing that you’re avoiding is the very first thing you do it you do it in the morning and then you just reverse engineer your day every day that way. And as a result, you’re going to get so much further and farther and faster than anyone else because everyone else is not going to eat the frog, right? They’re unwilling to do the work or do the things that are necessary to actually get there. And the thing that sales taught me really fast and it taught me fast because it humbled me really, really fast on my very first appointment when I was a sales rep after I was a Vcio as the closer for three years. So I went from being like perceived as whatever, right? That was the ringer you brought me in and I just did those things, but I was really just me. Well, I did, I misunderstood sales altogether because I only participated at that little sliver, the little moment when I was on stage, right? In the meetings and talking to people, I didn’t have to do any of the other stuff because the reps did all that. Then I became a rep and I’m like, ⁓ okay.
Like sales isn’t just going to the golf course for 90 hours out of the week and then like asking me to come close something for you. It’s all these other things that I used to not ever even one notice or two chastise before, but like it was a lot of that. And, and none of that is pleasant either. And that was one of the first things I would do when I would get in conversations with their MSPs and challenge them on like, how committed are you truly to sales or growth? Anyway, you say you want to grow, like give me your to-do list.
Right? Just do a time audit and then give it to me in a list. And guess where every single send this proposal, follow up with this proposal, reach out to this person, create the quote, generate the contract. All those were always at the bottom. Every sales function and activity was always at the bottom of this list. Like, okay, well, that goes back to eat the frog. You’re never going to do the things that you actually have to get done to move the needle forward and like get the deal done. And like, that was just commonplace. and so like, to say it simply, it’s like you’ve got to do the work there. And I fell victim to that. Even when I started with Marketopia, I’m like, shit, they’re going to give me, with one caller, I was at like eight leads or something like that a month, right? They’re going to give me eight leads a month. Like I’m going to have the MRR fairy is going to sprinkle my P and L exactly where it needs to go. That’s the way I came into it. Cause why not? Right? I already had confidence in the sales process. I just needed those leads. The issue is that my whole sales process, all of my experience was still built on inbound leads.
Not outbound leads, not customers that were at the very top of the awareness funnel. Like there were so much there. I like to call it, I had a sales system that was like the interstate. And when I first bolted Marketopia onto it, I didn’t have an on-ramp. The whole thing was broken. It didn’t work. I didn’t blame Marketopia for that. I realized, ⁓ shit, the way that I’ve been doing it is not the same as the way that this works. I need to figure this out. And so I spent the first…four months, I think, of the relationship, taking every lead and every opportunity and leaning into the caller, leaning into the support staff, leaning into everyone, like becoming a student of the game and figuring out exactly what was going on, the psychology of the people I was working with, and then building the front end of the system to deal with leads that were in that position, the top of funnel, the stuff that no MSPs used to because it’s not the people that you’re talking to usually, because MSP sales is an event driven process.
What do mean by that? There’s like one of five reasons someone’s actually going to sign a contract and make the move, right? They’re going to have some sort of catastrophe, some sort of security events. Their internal guy is going to leave their favorite person at their outside outsourced person is going to leave or some other magical fifth thing, but it’s basically that. And all of that work that gets avoided is the stuff that actually gets you that seat at the table when one of those five things happens. Right? So the other big learning I had once I figured out the front end was there’s two tracks that I measured as it related to sales. And I’ll never forget, you had even said it when I shared it with the group one time was like the first person that you had seen really bring like an engineering mindset to building and running sales as far as the metrics went because of the way that my analytical and logical brain worked. It’s the only way I knew how to build it. And it was then the inputs that produced the outputs. But the thing that really became obvious was as we got further into the relationship, was that I then became aware of this second wave of events where it was like, if we didn’t stay on top of these leads for basically 14 months, then we would never get the opportunity to have it hit and close just like that about around 18. And so like, yes, we did have some that closed early, right? Three month, four months, sale cycle, something along those lines. Like that was pretty normal, 90 day sale cycle. But then you had this whole like rest of the iceberg which was all the other leads, that we just never stopped working, which is all the stuff that, again, traditionally gets left behind because it’s not sexy, it doesn’t produce dopamine, there’s no serotonin involved, it’s just boring, you know, it’s the work that you’re avoiding, mostly, but it’s also where all of the, all the wins come from.
Terry Hedden (33:35)
Yeah, it seems as though, and I know you ended up kind of, as I remember, your total close ratio is around 70%. Is that still an accurate number?
Jeff Newton (33:45)
68
Terry Hedden (33:50)
I think most MSPs would dream of a 68 % close ratio. you know, you’re still, you know, in the the the sage category as far as I’m concerned, how many those 68 to your point didn’t all happen in 90 days, right? Where would you put the the close percentage if you know what percent of the 68 what that closed in 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, give me give me your best guess, I know it’s probably analysis you never did, but I’m curious as to where the big surges were in terms of close ratio over time.
Jeff Newton (34:27)
Yeah, the greatest thing that I kind of figured out to help sort into that so that I knew how to drive the system afterwards was realizing that every ⁓ first time appointment, right? Every first time appointment fit into one of three buckets. They were either a buyer or a non-buyer. And if they were a buyer, they were either a buy now or a buy later. And the buy later bucket is the bucket that absolutely gets probably not even acknowledged, let alone it gets forgotten, right? So if I take that approach where it was those three things, 18 % of our wins came out of the buy now bucket. The rest was the buy later bucket. And so it was all of the other things that we had to put in place. Like it was the guy, the atomic habits guy, right? He’s the fault. You don’t rise to whatever, how great you are, you fall to the level of your systems. That’s true. ⁓
Terry Hedden (35:06)
It.
Jeff Newton (35:25)
It’s not easy work. Or maybe it’s simple, but not easy. Right? Like it is the extra email. It’s the extra phone call. It’s the caring. It’s the showing up. It’s the consistency. It’s that it never falls off the cliff or the end of the follow-up. That’s the stuff that created the buy later bucket. Right. And then because of all of that is where we figured out, wow, the thing that actually matters the most is messaging and positioning. No one talks about that.
Like, but it’s the stuff that matters. It’s the part that unlocks the psychological pieces that moves a buyer through the five emotions they have to go through in order to sign a contract. And again, that’s where I kind of tongue in cheek, like equated people to systems earlier, but like once I understood the 15 emotions that mattered and which order they needed to happen in, that’s where we ended up just having it systematically producing and getting to that 68%.
And it was so dialed in that it was truly became at the numbers game. Right. We started with one caller seven months in, we went to two callers six months after that, we went to three callers. were getting 38 appointments held a month. So right. And, and now you’re talking about this whole world where. Like even if you had no clue what to do, but you had 38 chances in one month. Right. I, I, I don’t take lightly the opportunity that I had, right? 38 appointments. Some of the people listening to this show, might be five years worth of leads, right? I had that in 12 months or one month, right? Each month. So three-year agreement, we haven’t even told maybe the best or worst part of the story, right? Three-year agreement, that was the progression of the arc. 24 months into a 36-month contract, We broke operations, but like broke it to the point where they absolutely couldn’t scale, grow, keep up. Cause we didn’t, they didn’t do a lot. We didn’t do a lot of the right things along the way to manage the growth as we had it for the first 18 months to be in a position to, even though the projections were there to tell them, Hey, this is what we need to be prepared for either way. like 24 months in, we stopped cold Turkey. Right. And like, that’s also why inevitably the relationship ended at the end was because it took a long time to get that part fixed, the ops side before they could turn the engine back on. yeah, it was just the, I usually talk about it as a Rubik’s cube, right? You just gotta kind of keep tweaking and twisting until you get the colors in the right spot, but everything needs to be a system in the end.
Terry Hedden (38:04)
I love that. And I love that the, the, if I’m an engineer, I’m an MSP owner and I’m a logical structured thinker, it’s just a system. It’s not magic. This isn’t hocus pocus, you know, it’s, it’s logical. Hey, listen, we took care of this problem. We outsource this function. They’ve got a consistent tracker, kind of producing this input. Now salesperson needs to focus on turning those into, into revenue. Yeah. All right. While that’s happening daily, someone needs to keep sales or service not only functioning, but also incrementally improving its procedures, processes, controls to keep the ability to execute up. I think if you the magic in terms of just exploding would be to somehow, without having private equity money with these huge dollar people, for an MSP to say, okay, I have three rocks I’m doing. Hey, listen, Jeff, I need you to focus on converting these leads into revenue. Steve, you’re running service. I need you to focus on process, procedures, controls to make sure that we are growing operationally as the revenue is growing so that we don’t break ourselves. ⁓ That’s really interesting.
I love that and I think it makes sense for a lot of people and I wish everyone would take that approach because it feels like too often we harp on the part that we know the least and that we have the least amount of and confidence in which in our case is that lead gen part. Every lead that doesn’t close is because the lead is bad and ⁓ therefore it’s just like instead of just saying just focus, hire great people, hire just let him take care of this, hire Steve, let him take care of that, like hold people accountable for doing their part of the machine and if you do that everything is gonna run in harmony and that train is gonna start moving forward. I love that.
Jeff Newton (40:03)
Yeah. Yeah. You’d mentioned earlier, something that, that really brought kind of two principles out that I remember picking up out of, sales as well. And that was when I first started, becoming a student of the marketing side, one of two things came out of, ⁓ the same mentor, but one of them was to default to imperfect action, right? Like get out of your head, stop trying to design perfection and just default to import, like do something and do it as quickly as you possibly can because everything changes once you’re in motion. And the second part to that was stop stopping. And if you can combine those two ingredients of default to imperfect action and stop stopping, I assure you that you will get to success, whatever your definition of that is. Because the biggest piece, which kind of goes back to that oscillation, right? The biggest problem there is that you’re essentially stopping. You’re just pivoting and chasing the next dopamine hit and that’s it. And then you as soon as like it gets hard and uncomfortable or you don’t want to be accountable for it, you just pick the next shiny object and you chase it for another three months. And that’s like, that was my experience in the MSP world at least. And so when I was able to instead combine like the discipline, the fortitude and the conviction to keep going and figure it out, that was the whole stop stopping thing. And that was really where everything just came together and clicked and, and took off. ⁓
Cause I didn’t take lightly the commitment that I made when I signed that agreement with Marketopia. Like that was, it was Jeffrey Newton’s name on the line for more than a quarter million dollars when they didn’t even have a GL account to put it in. Right? So like, I don’t know, that’s just me. take personal responsibility for that, even though it’s the company’s money. And so like, I wasn’t going to fail. I’ve never failed before in that regard. So I’m not going to do it now. And like, that’s a decision and a mindset and an approach where you’re like, well, okay.
I’m not converting any of the leads they’re giving me. I could sit here and I could blame them all I want to. I can chew my success coach up. could call Terry and tell him whatever I want to tell him or I can like figure it out. Well, why aren’t I? Not everyone is going to not want something. Right. And so like I had to really face the mirror in that regard and be like, okay, like what is it about me and what I’m doing that’s just not working in the situation? And again, it goes back to the Rubik’s cube. Just keep tweaking and adjusting and figuring that piece out. But I came into it with the wrong mindset and my attitude. I thought it was the MRR fairy. It was the lead fairy. I started to do everything else with the lead once I got it. But I wanted the turnkey MRR factory really. And I had to build that, but I needed the leads to go in.
Terry Hedden (42:48)
awesome. And Jeff, you achieved extraordinary things. to break services. I’ve seen you give multiple podcasts where that was sort of the main message. And I loved seeing that because I think that’s cool. I’m so good at what I do. First of all, I overcame obstacles to success, figured it out. And then I effectively got so good that the team behind me couldn’t keep up. I think that’s something that’s almost like a your grandkids will probably hear that story ⁓
Jeff Newton (43:24)
It’ll be out there in the airwaves somewhere. Yeah. And just to like put some numbers to this for people, right? Cause I think sometimes, I don’t know, bring the receipts, I guess. Right. So in year one, when we first started out, it was 72 grand in net new MRR. then year two was 80, 84 or 85. I can’t remember exactly because it kind of got dwarfed then. So year two, we improved, right? But year three, six months into that, we were already 86.
Right. So we were on pace to be where I knew I needed to be, which was going to be up into that, ideally the one 50 range and then it just worked. I mean, it didn’t just work. We made it work. created the system that built the, the, momentum. And then, you know, we had to pull the plug at 86 for that year, but, ⁓ but everything was there. It was, it was there because of the hard work, the consistency, the endurance, commitment, like all the things that we’re talking about by no means that i get to just sit there and wait for thirty eight leads to show up on my door and then signed thirty eight contracts but we were on boarding four to six customers a month at our peak right so it and that was really just like the the way in which the snowball had to be built and then it is produced consistently.
Terry Hedden (44:37)
Interesting. I find that really interesting just hearing you talk about the level of commitment that you had to your piece of that machine and then somehow you found commitment either through an internal team or through a third party for the piece of the machine that you needed to make your machine work. It didn’t work, but that didn’t matter because you were committed to making it work, so you figured it out and then it ended up failing because at the end of the day, the people after you struggle to have the same commitment and discipline and tenacity or whatever you need to figure out their part because it’s not hard to grow.
Jeff Newton (45:18)
Yeah.
Terry Hedden (45:19)
If you have the process of systems controls, if you have all the inputs to get the outputs you’re looking for for the whole machine, it’s just not that complicated. when any leg of the stool fails, they all fail. Let me ask you a question, because there’s a lot of people who are afraid to grow because service is not ready to grow.
Yeah, and and you’ll hear that I’m talking to be like I’m like, me get this straight You don’t want to grow because you don’t think you’re ready to grow Yep, I’m like but I’m so you think you’re gonna have the money and resources to be ready to grow before you have the revenue That comes from that growth from your you know perspective, you know, obviously you have even the benefit of hindsight now Can you fix if every part of the machine had the discipline?
Can you build the operation process procedures controls people while the machine’s running? Or are those MSPs right that you actually need to have everything built imperfect and documented and strong before you start to push the gas pedal?
Jeff Newton (46:27)
No, specifically on ops side, then like process matters on the sales side. Process is garbage. Frameworks are the thing. Right? Like you need enough nuance to be able to adapt the goal and the steps and everything else. not saying like just go out and be a Maverick. That’s not what I’m saying. But process was a banned word on the sales side for me because we followed frameworks, which gave us the fluidity to make it work in a lot more opportunity. On the op side, you do need process, right? Like you need the maintenance folks to just maintain. Now, to your point about like, how do you build the system, solve the system and fix the system, on a reporting standpoint, right? I had to fix that for predictability as well. So not only did we have the win rate that we had, but because of that, I also had pipeline projection reporting that was 80 % accurate at 90 days out.
Ops had 90 days at a minimum with 80 % accuracy to know what they were going to have to support. Right. And we still broke it for a lot of reasons that I dealt with that a lot of MSPs, not just this one. And I think a big piece of it comes down to one thing you mentioned earlier, which is fear of failure. And I saw it all the time and I had it as well. I have it still in this seat today, but you do it scared anyway. And that sounds cliche, but it is the thing because you default to imperfect action.
And so the fear of failure though on the op side is like you get paralyzed because you get stuck in that here’s the hundred reasons why that won’t work. And then you rationalize your way into staying comfortable. My goal and my edict when that was the growth goal that was given to me was like my role in the organization was to make the organization uncomfortable. Growth is not comfortable.
Right? Like if you work out, if you walk up the stairs too fast today, you feel it tomorrow or you go to the gym, like all those things, you feel the muscle tension and the soreness. Like you have to rip it and break it for it to grow. That’s how that works. So like that was my role. That was my responsibility was to force a level of discomfort within the org that they had to level up behind the sales. used to call it the tip of the spear, right? Nothing happens until the contract is signed. Nothing happens. Another way we would say it is like, what is it? Revenue⁓ revenue solves pretty much everything else, but it’s just like the numbers had to be there. And when they were, we had the resources to your point, or we had the time, or we had the flexibility, or we had any of those things, but without it, you know, do you build Rome before anyone shows up at all? No, you don’t do it that way either. So to me, that’s why sales with the tip of the spear, we led and we pushed by producing the revenue. And then we constantly made sure that ops was uncomfortable. It had capacity, but it was uncomfortable the whole time. It was never standing still.
Terry Hedden (49:21)
know, one thing I’ve followed you in your career and today I really appreciate you giving me an understanding of just where it started. You know, it feels like you have multiple chapters to your career. as you were closing that MSP chapter…I was blessed to be a part of that and see you give back and share some of the wisdom that you had gained for 20 years in the space in every different role so you can kind of have a perspective that most people don’t have. When you start off as a consumer grade tech at Best Buy and you end up with a 70 % close ratio salesperson, you’ve learned a lot in those periods.
Jeff, I know you’ve ⁓ graduated out of the MSP world and went into the vendor world. How has your knowledge and experience over those 20 years in the MSP world parlayed into your success, or maybe not so, ⁓ and what you’re doing today? Tell us about where you are right now. Yeah, you’ve benefited from your experience.
Jeff Newton (50:23)
Yeah, I think more than anything, you know, the, there’s no substitute for lived experience, right? Shared experience is one thing where I can tell you what I did or like didn’t do or any of that, but lived experience is just, there’s, there’s no substitute for that on the vendor side. It’s shocking and alarming how many, whether it’s companies, whether it’s founders, whether it’s products, whether whatever, like they, they haven’t actually lived the experience of their ICP or the person that they’re solving for, right? They have been around it, maybe. We call ourselves the channels. We feel like we’re a part of it, but like, did you sit in that seat? Did you sit in all 11 of those titles and those roles when stupid decisions were being made because best practices told them to make them that way? And like, you have to live and feel the, I mean, it’s palpable, right? When you’re in it and you live it. now being a vendor, being able to direct, and lean into and influence and impact immediately the why and how we do what we do. Because I know exactly down to the atomic step, how it impacts and influences the person in that seat, the human, not the role and not the title and not the responsibility, but the human. There is nothing more rewarding now than to leverage, you know, 18 years of sitting in those seats to be like, I know exactly why and how we should meet this person where they are to do it.
And so that’s like maybe the backdrop for how it’s more of a catalyst, a plateau to jump from versus like abandoning it and starting over. And then the other side to that is, you know, from a vendor standpoint, like your biggest challenge is product market fit, right? Which also ties straight back into that. Like when you intimately know the pain and also like, you probably, anyone that’s listening and doesn’t know me has probably picked up it on this. I’m pretty like, ⁓contrarian. I don’t like to be boxed in. I don’t really prefer authority all that much, but I’m also trying to figure it out all the time. so like bucking the system, if you will, and like thinking about things completely differently and bringing a unique approach to solving something that the whole industry has just accepted as good enough for as long as I was in it is like, well, what if there was a different reality? What if it didn’t have to be the way that it’s always been? And, and like, how do we impact and change and influence that while you do that by going ironically enough back to one of the core values of one of the first MSPs I was at, which was be the change you seek. It’s like, okay, well, the only way to make it different is to go make it different, not to complain about it and not to like, you know, preach about it or chastise it or pretend that I know what I’m doing. It’s just like, we’ll go do it, go create the reality that we want. And so after those years, surprisingly, it’s actually a piece of the Marketopia story really.
So we had stopped selling, right? We pulled the plug, took about six months off, and then got operations fixed. We were ready to rebuild the engine. So naturally after six months, like the tools and the market and everything sort of changed, I needed to rebuild the sales system starting from scratch, but whatever. So I went out to the market to try to figure out, what tools are available? Like what’s changed in the market in the last six months? What’s out there now?
And I saw a LinkedIn post, which I’m never on social media at all, but I happened to be on LinkedIn one day or I got like a notification on my phone. Jesse Miller had posted about, Hey, anyone that’s looking for voice to CRM, want to do a user interview with a vendor that I’m aware of or whatever. I’m like, voice to CRM sounds cool. I’m rebuilding my sales team. You mean I don’t have to update HubSpot on my own or whatever? Like that was the thought as soon as I saw it, couldn’t unsee it. It’s exactly, it was exactly as advertised like.
Hey, update that deal for Marketopia from Q1 to Q3. needs to be at 78 grand instead of 72. I met with Terry, make sure that I tell him, you know, let’s go fishing the next time I’m in town. And it just went into connect wise. like, okay. What these guys had thought of and built, which are now my co-founders, but what they built was that. And as soon as I saw it, I’m like, this is brilliant. But if you want to sell it to MSPs,
Terry Hedden (54:32)
That’s cool.
Jeff Newton (54:44)
We’ve got to solve it for the service side of the house, right? Because of the ratio, there’s 10 texts to one owner who is the salesperson versus anything else. like, can you do that for tickets? Can you do that for QBRs? Can you do that for meetings? Can you do that for all of the service side of the house? And three weeks later, they called me back. They showed me the demo of that time, our MVP and hey, create a ticket on the managed service board for Terry’s printer. He needs to cut paychecks before noon and there’s an issue boom and it’s in ConnectWise. Okay, so now here’s a whole new world of natural language to the PSA and we never look back from there. So instead of rebuilding the sales team, they loved my approach and my attitude and sort of the chip on my shoulder towards the way that things were from vendors and ⁓ a couple months later they offered me a co-founder slot. So I jumped and I have been building this since. ⁓
Terry Hedden (55:42)
How’s it going so far, man? Has success found you? I’m curious, what have you learned in terms of your sales methodology, in terms of how it applies for MSPs?
Jeff Newton (55:52)
Yeah, the, a lot of it’s still the same messaging and positioning matter more than marketing and more than sales. ties straight into psychology. It helps that I am my ICP so I can just have a peer to peer conversation with people. That’s a great thing. I’ve never sold something that’s so easy to sell. It’s not even selling. It’s just showing them, this problem that you know, you’ve dealt with forever. It doesn’t have to be a problem anymore. And so that part is I’m so fortunate to be able to live in that situation.
⁓ So kind of fast forwarding maybe the short version the last year and a half is ⁓ we had an MVP at about a hundred users, about 30 ⁓ MSPs, built that up, got a bunch of attention, raised $5 million from in our seed round at the beginning of this year, went out and recruited and hired some brilliant talent to take the idea and then build it as enterprise software instead of just the MVP. And then we ⁓ plowed forward this year.
And, are just releasing that right now. Actually I’m in the middle of the product launch, ⁓ right now, the enterprise product launch of it, not enterprises and it’s only available to enterprise people, but the production grade version of what we’re selling is now available. And, and it’s just such a blast, right? Like to have completely eliminated the stress, the anxiety, the cognitive load of documentation, ticket notes, time entry, like an MSP that never has to slam the door and demand time sheets be submitted by 10 a.m. every morning. it’s one, that part goes away, but two, the quality of life for the human in the seats can actually focus on the parts they want to do, which is help the people. So it’s great.
Terry Hedden (57:32)
You know, I want to grasp onto that last statement and use that to bring us home. Jeff, you’re a pleasure to talk to, you’re a pleasure to learn from, you’re a pleasure to work with, and I just want you to know as a Peanut Gallery member…
Keep doing what you do. Keep trying to help people. Keep trying to pay it forward and to partake and to contribute and just make a difference in the community. Because I feel like whatever conversation I’ve either witnessed or been a part of, your passion’s about making a difference and helping someone. And I wanted to applaud you for that. I wanted to celebrate that. And I wanted to encourage you to continue finding that platform to do that. It’s an honor to talk to you here. invite you to come to the Marketopia office any day you want, clients are here or not, because I think everyone can learn from you. You have a fresh perspective on things, you have a lot of wisdom, and if you shaved your beard a little bit tighter, you might look like Jimmy Neutron, boy genius, because that’s what I think you are, dude. I appreciate you, and I celebrate you.
Jeff Newton (58:39)
Yeah, thank you very much, Terry. Always happy to help.
Terry Hedden (58:42)
Thank you so much. Have a great day. Yeah, you as well. All right, man. See ya.
