A mate of mine said something last week that I’m still chewing on. We were talking about the slog of marketing — the endless push to fill webinar seats, chase trial sign-ups, follow up on outreach that goes nowhere. He stopped mid-sentence and said he was done with all of it. He didn’t want to spend his career flogging tickets to a show. He wanted to make a body of work so strong that the show booked itself.
That hit me, because most MSPs I speak to are stuck in the wrong half of that sentence. They’re flogging tickets to a concert when nobody has heard a single track.
The album is the persuasion
Think about what actually changes someone’s mind in this business. It isn’t a sales page. It isn’t a “book your free assessment” button at the bottom of a generic landing page. It’s the post they read on a Sunday morning that made them rethink how they saw their own business. It’s the short video that answered a question their current provider had been dodging for months. It’s the comment on someone else’s post where you said something sharp and useful, and they thought, hang on, who is that.
That body of work is the album. The offer at the end — the assessment, the migration, the security review, the Copilot rollout — that’s just the tour. If the album is good, the tour fills. If the album is thin, the tour costs you blood to fill every single time, and you’re back to the slog my mate was so tired of. It’s the same hustle dressed up in a new font.
Make the work before you sell the work
The trap is producing thin content with a CTA stapled to it. A 200-word post that took twenty minutes and ends with “DM me to book a call” is a flyer, not a song. Nobody travels to see a flyer.
A real piece takes longer. It needs a genuine opinion. It needs a story you actually lived. It needs editing — the part most people skip because it isn’t fun.
Microsoft 365 is built to take the friction out of that work without taking the soul out of it. I draft most of my posts in Word with Copilot sitting next to me, asking it to push back on my argument, sharpen the opening line, surface the point I’m circling but haven’t written yet. I’ll record a short Teams call talking an idea out loud and ask Copilot to pull a structure from the transcript. I keep a SharePoint page where every client conversation that surprised me gets dropped in as a few lines, and over a month it becomes a list of post ideas I’d never have remembered otherwise.
The point isn’t to make more. It’s to make better, more often, with less of the activation energy that usually kills the habit before the third post lands. That’s the shift that matters — not the volume, but whether you can keep showing up with something actually worth someone’s attention.
Then you stop selling tickets
When the work is genuinely good, you stop chasing. People who already trust how you think don’t need to be sold the offer — they need a way to say yes. The hustle quietly drops away, because the persuasion happened months ago, in public, while you weren’t pitching anything at all.
So before the next campaign, the next list, the next funnel — ask the harder question. Are the songs any good? Good enough that someone would forward one to a colleague without you having to ask. Because nothing on the tour can rescue an album nobody wants to hear.
CIAOPS 