Setup guide: IT providers, MSPs and cybersecurity firms

Who you are reaching

The owner or operations lead at companies of the size you serve, plus the in-house IT person at the larger ones. Not other MSPs and not vendors, who dominate IT conversation on LinkedIn.

Prospects settings

• Their Job Titles: Owner, Founder, CEO, President, Chief Operating Officer, Office Manager, Practice Administrator, Controller, IT Manager, IT Director. Pick the ones that match the size of company you serve.
• Their Industries: the verticals you specialize in (healthcare, legal, manufacturing, nonprofits), for ranking.
• Words to Watch For: outage, ransomware, phishing, cyber insurance, compliance, HIPAA, audit, new office, remote team, Microsoft 365, backups, downtime.
• People to Skip: MSP, Managed Services, IT Consultant, Cybersecurity Consultant, vCIO, Account Manager, Channel Manager, Sales Engineer.
• Words to Skip: vendor names you compete with, channel, partner program.
• Target Country: set it.

Train Allen

Bio: who you serve, what size, how you talk. Rules: "never mention our company or services", "never fearmonger", "no acronyms without saying what they mean", "never say reach out". Goal: add insight. Length: short.

Sample comments

On a law firm administrator posting that a phishing email almost got through:

• Add insight: "The near misses are the useful ones. The pattern I see most is that the email got through the filter but got caught by a person, and nobody tells the person they did well. A thirty-second thank-you does more for the next one than another training module."
• Ask a question: "Did it come in as a reply to a real thread, or fresh? The reply-chain ones are the type that get past almost everyone, and they usually mean a mailbox somewhere in the chain is already compromised."
• Share an example: "A client of ours had the same thing last month. The fix that mattered was not software: they changed the rule so any payment change requires a phone call to a known number. That one rule has stopped every attempt since."

Autopilot

Five a day, weekdays. MSP owners tend to set ten and comment on vendors; keep it at five and check the first week's emails for peers, then skip their titles.

Watchlist

Current clients (so they see you between tickets), the cyber insurance brokers and accountants who refer you, and fifty companies of your target size in your area.

The first DM

"Thanks for the reply on the phishing post. The payment-change phone rule is the single highest-value change I know, and it costs nothing. If a one-page version your team could adopt would help, I will send it." Then let them ask what you do.