---
title: How to Get More MSP Clients When Referrals Slow Down
description: Referrals slowing down? Learn how MSPs can win more clients through better positioning, SEO, reviews, events, original content, and faster follow-up.
---

[Viral Marketing Blog | The Viral Marketing Company](https://theviralmarketingcompany.com/blog)

# [How to Get More MSP Clients When Referrals Slow Down](https://theviralmarketingcompany.com/blog/how-to-get-more-msp-clients-when-referrals-slow-down)

 Written by [Jordan Van Ahn](https://theviralmarketingcompany.com/blog/author/jordan-van-ahn) | November 10, 2026, 7:39:04 PM Z

For years, your best clients found you without you doing much marketing at all. A CPA mentioned you to a dental group. A law firm partner told a friend at another firm. A client who'd been through a bad outage with their last provider told everyone at the chamber lunch how fast your team showed up. Then the CPA retired, the referrals came in fits and starts, and now your sales team is asking for "more meetings" while your website says the same thing as the MSP down the street: proactive IT support, 24/7 monitoring, peace of mind.

If you want to get more MSP clients when referrals slow down, start by finding out what made your best clients switch, then say that plainly on your website and in your outreach to the businesses most likely to face the same situation. Most businesses in your market aren't shopping for an IT provider this month, so your marketing has to make you the name they remember when their contract ends or their patience runs out.

Here's how I think about it, what I look at first, and what you can do this week.

## Why referrals work so well for MSPs, and why they stall

A referral does two jobs at once. It carries trust, because someone the prospect already respects is vouching for you. And it carries timing, because the person making the referral usually knows the prospect is unhappy right now. People rarely tell a friend who loves their IT company to call yours.

That second job gets overlooked. When you try to replace referrals with marketing, you tend to focus on trust (logos, certifications, a nicer website) and forget about timing. You end up broadcasting to a market where most people aren't ready to switch, then deciding marketing "doesn't work for IT companies" because the phone didn't ring in the first 60 days.

Referrals also stall for reasons that have nothing to do with how good you are. Your referral partners retire, change firms, or start a relationship with another MSP who takes them to lunch more often. Your happiest clients stop thinking about IT, which is exactly what you want them to do, and so they stop talking about you.

## How many businesses are actually shopping for an IT provider right now?

Fewer than your sales team would like. Peter Weinberg and Jon Lombardo of LinkedIn's B2B Institute, working with Professor John Dawes of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, describe what they call [the 95:5 rule](https://www.marketingweek.com/peter-weinberg-jon-lombardo-95-5-rule): only about 5% of B2B buyers are in-market at any given time. Their example is business banking. If most companies switch banks about once every five years, only a small slice of them is shopping in any given month. Treat the 95:5 figure as a rule of thumb drawn from that kind of purchase-cycle math, not a measured number for managed IT.

Managed IT has its own version of this, and contracts can make it sharper. Here's a **hypothetical example**, using made-up numbers to show the shape of the problem. Say there are 400 businesses in your area that fit your sweet spot: 20 to 150 employees, in industries you serve well. Assume, for the sake of the math, that a typical business in that group changes IT providers about once every five years. That's roughly 80 a year, or six or seven a month.

The rest aren't all out of reach. Some are quietly comparing options months before they act, and contract end dates aren't the only reason a search starts; an outage or a failed audit can start one overnight. But most of them won't sign anything with anyone this month, because they're under contract, comfortable enough with their provider, or too busy to think about it.

Change the assumptions and the numbers move, but the shape stays the same. Your marketing has two jobs: be findable and convincing for the handful who are shopping this month, and be known by the hundreds who will be shopping later. A campaign judged only on meetings booked in its first month is judged on the smallest group.

## What made your last ten clients switch to you?

This is the first thing I'd look at, before any ad account or website audit. Pull your last ten new clients and answer five questions about each one. If you don't know the answers, ask the client. A short conversation is also a good excuse to check in.

1. **What was happening when they started looking?** An outage, a ticket that sat for three days, a new compliance requirement, an audit, an office move, a fast hiring spree, or the "break-fix guy" who finally retired.
2. **Who made the call?** The owner, the office manager who'd been fielding everyone's password resets, the CFO who got tired of surprise invoices, or a compliance lead who needed documentation the old provider couldn't produce.
3. **How long had they been unhappy before they acted?** Sometimes it's months. That's months when a competitor's name could have been sitting in their head instead of yours.
4. **Who else did they talk to?** A national provider, another local MSP, an internal hire?
5. **What almost stopped them?** Fear of the transition, a contract with time left on it, loyalty to a person at the old provider, or not wanting to explain the decision to their boss.

Patterns may start to emerge. You might find that six of the ten came from healthcare or legal practices that had a compliance scare, or that the office manager started the search in most cases even though the owner signed. That tells you who to talk to, what situation to describe, and what objection to answer before anyone raises it.

## Why do so many MSP websites sound the same?

Read your homepage, then read three competitors' homepages. Cover the logos. Could you tell them apart? "Proactive," "partner," "peace of mind," "your trusted technology advisor," "we take care of IT so you can focus on your business." Each phrase might be true, and none of them help a prospect choose.

Those phrases describe the service from the provider's side. A prospect arrives with a situation. "Our last provider took two days to answer a ticket while our front desk couldn't check in patients" is a situation. So is "our insurance broker sent a security questionnaire and we don't know how to answer half of it." When your website describes the situation in the prospect's words, they feel understood before they've talked to anyone. When it describes your monitoring stack, they're left to translate.

I've seen the same problem in search. [Symmetry Resource Group](https://wearesymmetry.com), an IT consulting firm in Appleton, Wisconsin, was an established business with recognizable clients and a strong reputation. But its title tags, headings and meta descriptions used generic branding instead of clearly describing the services potential customers were searching for. The credibility was there. The website just wasn't saying what the company did. The fix was going out and getting Google reviews from clients, and rewriting the title tags, headings and meta descriptions to describe its IT consulting services in plain language. Symmetry moved pretty quickly to number three for "it consulting services appleton wisconsin." That was a combination of changes in one local market, not a single trick, and rankings move over time. Meta descriptions mostly shape how a listing looks in search results rather than where it ranks, but a clear one helps the right person click. If that sounds familiar, I wrote about [why a website doesn't show up on Google](https://theviralmarketingcompany.com/blog/why-is-my-website-not-showing-up-on-google-how-to-check) and what to check.

A quick test you can run today: write down the top two or three switching triggers from your client list. Then check whether your homepage, your main service page and your LinkedIn company page mention any of them in plain language. If they don't, that's your first rewrite.

## Which channels actually bring in MSP clients?

Earlier in my career, I was the marketing lead at Information Technology Professionals (now Elevity IT), a five-time Inc. 5000 MSP. I owned paid search, LinkedIn ads, outreach, email, vendor-funded programs and event marketing there. I've also worked with IT companies including Symmetry and JMARK. The lesson I keep coming back to is to pick each channel based on where the buyer is in their timing, then make sure the channels support one another.

**Search** is for the people who are shopping now. Someone typing "IT support for law firms" or "managed IT services near me" may have a problem today. You want a specific service page waiting for them, and possibly paid search on terms that signal real intent.

**LinkedIn** can help you reach the people who make or influence the decision, over months. You can put your thinking in front of owners, CFOs and operations leads at the companies on your list, long before their contract is up.

**Email** keeps you in touch with everyone who has ever talked to you and said "not now." Those people are often your warmest future clients, and plenty of IT companies never contact them again after the proposal goes quiet.

**Events and vendor co-op or MDF funding** can help, especially when a vendor will help fund a lunch-and-learn for exactly the kind of business you want. They work best when the room is full of businesses on your list, rather than whoever shows up for free food.

**Referral partners** still matter. You just stop leaving them to chance. CPAs, attorneys, insurance brokers and office furniture or phone system vendors all talk to businesses when something changes. Ask which ones your clients already trust, then give those partners a reason to think of you.

Whether Meta belongs in that mix depends on your buyer. If your sweet spot is very small businesses where the owner handles everything, it may. If you sell to firms where the CFO and a compliance lead sign off, I'd expect LinkedIn and search to line up better with how those people find vendors. I'd test it rather than assume either way.

These channels work better together than alone. Someone may see a LinkedIn post, watch a short video a few weeks later, meet you at an event, and finally search for your name when they're ready. That doesn't mean you need to be everywhere. It means each piece should make the next one more believable.

The same goes for your services. Cybersecurity, Microsoft 365, cloud migrations, compliance support and co-managed IT each solve a different buyer problem. If customers search for them separately and there's enough demand, give the important ones their own pages, then measure which attract qualified prospects.

## How do you create MSP content competitors can't copy?

AI has made it easy for any MSP to publish "7 cybersecurity tips for small businesses" every week, which is why those posts blur together. Google's [guidance on helpful content](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/creating-helpful-content) asks whether content demonstrates "first-hand expertise and a depth of knowledge" and provides "original information, reporting, research, or analysis," and it says using generative AI to produce large amounts of text without manual oversight or curation represents little to no effort.

Your technical staff already have the material your competitors can't get. They know what they fixed last week, what clients keep asking for, and what clients still don't understand no matter how many times someone explains it. The hard part is usually getting that out of their heads, because most engineers would rather fix a firewall than write a blog post.

This is where AI makes technical content much easier to produce. Set up a 20 to 30 minute Zoom call every week or two with an engineer, a help desk lead or your technical director, and record it with their permission. On eligible paid plans with cloud recording and the right settings turned on, Zoom can [automatically transcribe the recording](https://support.zoom.com/hc/en/article?id=zm_kb&sysparm_article=KB0065911). Hand the transcript to an AI tool and ask for a first draft of a blog post, a LinkedIn post, a short video script and an email. Then have the engineer check the technical details, and add your own judgment before anything goes out.

The questions matter more than the tool. Try these:

- What did you work on this week that a client would find interesting?
- What do clients ask for most often?
- What do they actually need that they rarely ask for?
- What do they keep misunderstanding, no matter how many times you explain it?
- What do you find over and over when you take over a new client's environment?
- What did you fix recently that the client never even knew was a problem?

Listen for stories, because facts on their own rarely persuade anyone to switch IT providers. "Turn on multi-factor authentication" is a fact your prospect has heard dozens of times. Here's a **hypothetical** story instead: a 30-person accounting office can't log in on the Monday before a tax deadline, and your technician traces it to a setting the previous provider changed and never documented. A prospect reading that pictures their own Monday morning.

The point is to tell stories like that from your own work. Anyone can publish cybersecurity tips, but only your team can explain what actually happened in a client's environment, how you approached the problem, and what you learned. An AI tool can't pull that from what's already public, and a competitor can't copy it authentically, because they weren't there. One caution, which matters more for an IT company than most: remove client names and anything that could expose a client's security setup, and get permission before you identify anyone.

One recorded conversation can become a blog article, several short videos, a LinkedIn document, a checklist and a follow-up email, which lets you reach someone who only watches a 60-second clip and someone comparing providers who will sit through twenty minutes. That does more for you than twenty generic posts about why cybersecurity matters.

## Why Google reviews make your content work harder

Your blog posts, service pages and videos are you describing yourself. Google reviews are your clients describing you, in public, in their own words. That's the kind of independent evidence a skeptical prospect looks for after reading your article and before picking up the phone.

Reviews help with visibility too. Google's [local ranking help page](https://support.google.com/business/answer/7091) says prominence is partly based on how many reviews you have, and that "more reviews and positive ratings can help your business's local ranking." Public reviews are also part of the record that AI-powered search tools may retrieve or reference when someone asks for a recommendation, and reviews that describe specific problems you solved back up what your content claims. I wrote more about AI recommendations in [how to get your business recommended by ChatGPT](https://theviralmarketingcompany.com/blog/how-to-get-your-business-recommended-by-chatgpt).

A lot of MSPs have far fewer reviews than their service deserves, for the same reason referrals stall: happy clients stop thinking about IT. So build the ask into moments when your work is fresh, such as after a smooth onboarding, a finished migration, a painful ticket you resolved, or a quarterly business review where the client hears what you prevented. Send the direct link to your Google Business Profile review form so it takes them less than a minute.

Be careful about how you ask. Google's [prohibited and restricted content policy](https://support.google.com/contributionpolicy/answer/7400114?hl=en) prohibits offering incentives for reviews, discouraging negative reviews, and selectively soliciting positive reviews from customers. It also lists requesting reviews that include specific content, such as a staff member's name, and asking staff to collect a certain number of reviews. So ask your clients consistently, as part of your process, rather than only the ones you know are happy. Your happiest clients will be the most likely to write something anyway.

Then use what you get. Google's ranking page says positive reviews and helpful replies can help your business stand out, so reply to them. Read them for patterns, too. If three clients mention how fast you handled a ransomware scare or a messy office move, you've learned what to write about next and which switching trigger to put on your homepage.

## How easy is it for a prospective client to contact you?

An MSP can spend months improving its search visibility, running ads and creating content, then make it unnecessarily hard for a prospect to get in touch.

Imagine a business owner whose systems have been down for hours. They've had enough of their current provider, and they find your website on their phone. Can they tap a button and call you? Can they book a time without trading emails? Does someone actually respond when they submit a form?

I'd also consider testing an AI agent that answers basic questions around the clock, helps prospects book a call, and collects enough information for the right person to follow up. It shouldn't pretend to be your technical team or make promises it can't keep, and it needs clear privacy boundaries and a fast way to reach a person. But someone researching IT providers at 9 p.m. shouldn't have to wait until tomorrow to learn whether you support their industry.

When someone is ready to talk, response time matters. If they reach out to three MSPs and yours takes two days to respond, you've made their decision easier for the wrong reason. Test your forms, scheduling, phone routing and follow-up yourself, and track how long it takes someone to get a meaningful response, not just an automatic "we received your submission" email.

## How do you win a prospect who's still under contract?

A prospect who says "we're locked in until next September" has handed you useful information. Record the renewal date in your CRM on the first call. Ask what they'd want to be different next time, and write down their words. Then set a reminder for four to six months before that date, when they may start thinking about it.

Between now and then, stay useful without pestering. Send them something short every month or two that helps them run their business, such as a plain-language explanation of a security question their insurer is likely to ask, or a checklist for onboarding new hires securely. Your recorded conversations with engineers are a good source for these notes. A prospect who has learned something useful from you several times before their renewal may walk into that conversation already trusting you.

Be careful with fear. Cybersecurity is a real risk for your clients, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. But a prospect who gets scary emails from six different MSPs learns to ignore all of them. Specific, calm explanations of what could go wrong and what a sensible business does about it tend to earn more trust than another headline about ransomware.

Your current clients are part of this too. A quarterly business review where the client hears what you prevented, what you fixed and what's coming next is a good moment to ask, "Who else do you know who's dealing with what you were dealing with before you hired us?" Name the situation. People find it easier to think of someone with a specific problem than "anyone who needs IT." It's also a natural moment to ask for that Google review.

## Why in-person events and webinars still matter

Now that AI makes it easy for almost anyone to produce professional-looking marketing, in-person events deserve more attention. An article or video introduces someone to your business. Meeting you lets them ask questions, challenge your thinking, and decide whether they'd trust you with their company's technology. Presenting to a room also gives you a chance to establish authority: if you explain a complicated problem clearly and handle the questions that follow, you've shown something a generic website can't.

You don't need a major technology conference. You might host a cybersecurity lunch-and-learn for local business owners, partner with an insurance broker to explain cyber insurance requirements, or present to a local association of healthcare practices. Webinars can do a similar job for people who can't attend in person. Record the presentation with the necessary permissions, and it becomes more material for videos, articles and follow-up emails.

You don't have to fix your website first. If you already have access to the right audience, an event might be one of the best places to start. Just be selective: fifteen decision-makers who fit your ideal client profile may be worth far more than a webinar with hundreds of people who will never buy from you.

## How do you know which marketing activities are working?

Start with a few activities, measure what happens, and do more of what produces useful results. Look at which services are gaining search visibility, which content gets the right people to engage, which campaigns lead to real conversations, and how many of those conversations turn into opportunities and clients. More impressions are encouraging. More qualified opportunities are better. If a service gets a lot of attention but very little profitable business, that matters too.

Look beyond the first interaction, because no single platform's reporting will capture a buyer who watched your videos, came to an event and read your reviews before calling. Ask new prospects how they first heard about you and what made them reach out, and keep those answers in your CRM. Don't assume something failed just because it hasn't produced immediate leads, particularly when you're marketing to businesses that might not need a new IT provider for another year.

## What should you do in the first 30 days?

You don't need to do all of this at once. Start with whatever is limiting you most right now. If you don't know why clients choose you, that comes first. If you know but your website doesn't say it, start there. If plenty of people talked to you last year and went quiet, start with them.

1. **Week 1: Understand why clients choose you.** Talk to five to ten recent clients. Use the five questions above and write down their exact words.
2. **Week 2: Fix your website and contact experience.** Make sure your homepage and service pages speak to your top switching triggers. Check your mobile call button, booking link, contact options and response times. Add a review request to your onboarding and QBR process.
3. **Week 3: Reopen old conversations.** Pull the proposals and "not now" prospects from the past 18 months, record renewal dates where you know them, and send each one a short, useful note.
4. **Week 4: Record your first content conversation and build your list.** Spend 30 minutes on Zoom with one of your technicians and turn the transcript into a blog post and a LinkedIn post. Then build a short list of businesses that resemble your best clients, plus the people likely to influence an IT decision at each.

If your website already speaks clearly to your buyers, spend week 2 on reviews and content instead. If your CRM has few old opportunities, move on to the list sooner. The order matters less than finding your biggest bottleneck and working on it first.

## What does it cost to keep waiting for referrals?

I won't make up a number, because it depends on your contract values and how many clients you lose each year. But when referrals are your only channel, your growth depends on other people's calendars. If one partner retires, your pipeline changes and you had no say in it. Meanwhile, the businesses that aren't shopping yet are deciding who they'd call. If you're not one of those names when their contract ends, you may never find out you lost.

If your marketing, sales and leadership aren't working from the same picture of who you're trying to win, the channels above won't fix it. I wrote about that in [marketing alignment](https://theviralmarketingcompany.com/blog/marketing-alignment-when-strategy-sales-and-leadership-finally-sync).

## Frequently asked questions

### How long does it take for marketing to bring in MSP clients?

There's no guaranteed timeline. Because so many prospects are under contract, a meaningful part of the payoff may come when their renewal approaches, which can be months away. Search can produce conversations sooner because it reaches people who are already looking.

### Should an MSP specialize in an industry?

It often helps, because you can describe a specific situation in that industry's language and show you've handled it before. If several of your best clients already share an industry or a compliance requirement, you may have a specialty you haven't claimed yet.

### How should an MSP ask for Google reviews?

Ask every client consistently at natural moments, such as after onboarding, a completed project or a QBR, and send the direct review link. Google's policy prohibits incentives, selectively asking only happy clients, discouraging negative reviews, and requesting specific content such as a technician's name.

## Want a second set of eyes on your pipeline?

You can do the client-list exercise, the homepage test and your first technician interview on your own this week. What's harder is deciding what to fix first: your positioning, your content, your reviews, your follow-up, your website experience, or how you measure all of it.

That's what the [free strategy session](https://theviralmarketingcompany.com/lead-generation-for-it-providers-the-viral-marketing-company) is for. In under 45 minutes, you'll walk through your positioning, how consistent your messaging is, how leads come in and get followed up on, which channels fit your buyers, and how you're measuring results. You'll leave knowing where your next hour and your next dollar should go. If you want to [see how VMC works with IT companies](https://theviralmarketingcompany.com/lead-generation-for-it-providers-the-viral-marketing-company) first, read about [marketing and lead generation for IT providers](https://theviralmarketingcompany.com/lead-generation-for-it-providers-the-viral-marketing-company).

[Book your free strategy session](https://theviralmarketingcompany.com/meetings/jordan-van-ahn/free-strategy-call).

[View full post](https://theviralmarketingcompany.com/blog/how-to-get-more-msp-clients-when-referrals-slow-down)

```json
{
  "@context" : "http://schema.org",
  "@type" : "BlogPosting",
  "author" : {
    "@type" : "Person",
    "name" : "Jordan Van Ahn"
  },
  "dateModified" : "2026-11-10T19:46:44.462Z",
  "datePublished" : "2026-11-10T19:39:04Z",
  "headline" : "How to Get More MSP Clients When Referrals Slow Down",
  "image" : {
    "@type" : "ImageObject",
    "height" : 941,
    "url" : "https://242171632.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na2.net/hubfs/242171632/From%20Referral%20to%20Multichannel%20Growth.png",
    "width" : 1672
  },
  "mainEntityOfPage" : "https://theviralmarketingcompany.com/blog/how-to-get-more-msp-clients-when-referrals-slow-down",
  "publisher" : {
    "@type" : "Organization",
    "logo" : {
      "@type" : "ImageObject",
      "height" : 60.0,
      "url" : "https://242171632.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na2.net/hubfs/242171632/V%20(2).png",
      "width" : 60.0
    },
    "name" : "Blog"
  }
}
```