The Hidden Cost of MSP Peer Groups

One of the very best things about the MSP industry is the peer group, the accountability group system. I’ve never seen an industry that has so many groups and systems designed to share best practices and support each other. And I think it’s an exceptional asset and advantage to owning an MSP. It’s also a trap if you’re not aware of a few things. The very same thing that makes it a strength and an advantage for you as a business owner can also become a liability if you’re not aware of a few things.

And this is just coming from my experience, from my perception of it, having been in the industry now, coaching and supporting hundreds and hundreds of MSPs on sales process, sales coaching. I get to see how they’re marketing. I get to see how they’re selling. I get to see what the results are. And more important, I get to see what the trends are. Because now we’re doing fractional sales management. We are actually managing the salespeople, and we’re looking at the numbers. We’re logging the numbers.

And the three things you want to be aware of with the accountability group system. First, there’s a ceiling that gets set, kind of psychologically, when you’re in peer groups. People tend to either join or get lumped into certain revenue groups, right? Like, hey, you’re at that stage of company, you’re at that stage, you’re at that stage. And that’s not just with MSPs, that’s with really any large group system. You’ve got to find some way to systematize it, and the easiest way to systematize it is usually by business maturity level or revenue or whatever it is. What happens is the psychological ceiling gets set in your mind, around what’s possible or how things are supposed to be done. Just, hey, these are the best practices that are working for everybody. Everybody’s doing it that way because our eight people or our 80 people are doing it that way.

I have found personally that some of the biggest breakthroughs in business, or in life in general, have come from somebody getting outsized returns and reframing what I think is even possible. I meet somebody who’s done something that’s just, like, “How’d you do that?” And he’s like, “Oh, well, you know, I did this and this and this.” And I find out that there were a couple of beliefs that that particular person didn’t share that I did. And after seeing that it was possible, I was like, “Damn.” This happens in fitness, this happens in business, this happens in health, this happens in all sorts of things. We get these caps and these ceilings within our own mind, and we’re within that group, and we’re sharing all of these, and we’re reinforcing it. The worst part is that these ceilings, on what’s possible and how it’s supposed to be done, are mainly subconscious. They get installed and we’re not even aware that they get installed.

So just be aware that that happens when you’re sitting in a room of a hundred other people who are at or around the same revenue size or the same business maturity stage or whatever it is. It’s very easy to start to think that’s the way it is, right? That’s the standard, and that’s what’s possible. Meanwhile, there’s somebody else out there who didn’t share some of those same beliefs, and they reframe it for you. Like them doing something 10 times bigger, better, faster, whatever it is, you go, “Oh.” So that’s something you want to maintain, keeping that always fresh.

The second thing is that the nature of a peer group is to share best practices. Now, there are certain things in your business where stealing best practices is absolutely a hack. It speeds up the progress and growth in your business. There are a few things in our own business that we’re working on trying to systematize, like the sales management delivery, because we’re on our fifth full-time sales manager here. We’re making sure that we’re executing in a way that’s consistent, while still enabling each sales manager to exercise their experience and their wisdom and what they know to be the right thing to do. Well, if I had an accountability group to go to that said, “Oh, dude, here’s the framework,” I’d be like, “All right, awesome.” That would speed things up, whereas now I have to tinker away and figure it out, because I don’t know of an accountability group like that. So there are times where it’s an absolute strength and you should leverage it.

But there are things in your business where, if you’re doing what everybody else is doing, it works against you. Particularly when it comes to branding, marketing, sales. Now, I’m not talking about the fundamentals. The fundamentals are the fundamentals. The fundamentals of marketing: know who your target audience is, understand how different channels work, and certain things like that. There are elements of marketing that are timeless. There are elements of sales that are timeless. I’m not talking about those. I’m talking about the tactics, the execution. If you’re running a campaign with literally all the same copy as three other people in a medium-sized town, and all of you have been running those things for a couple of years, the impact is diminishing results. Why? Because the purpose of marketing is to stand out, right? The purpose of marketing is not just to take people from a break-fix model and move them into MSPs. You guys know that’s one of the hardest things you can do. The real advantage of marketing is when you can say why we’re better than the other MSPs, and we can create differentiation. And you don’t necessarily get that if you’re using the same exact thing that everybody else is, and you’re not taking the time to personalize it, to customize it, to make it yours, to highlight your unique selling proposition, to reframe it into your own offers and your own strategy.

Same thing on the sales side. If everybody is doing the same thing on the growth side of stuff, you actually end up commoditizing yourself. That is the last thing you want, particularly with a service like MSP, because the buyers already have a hard enough time differentiating and telling one from another. So you acting and looking and sounding and doing the same stuff that everybody else is doing makes it harder for your customer to tell you apart, and it also makes it more powerful for the people who are differentiating.

And I can tell you, we manage 65 SDRs who are doing outbound campaigns. We manage 10 to 12 outside sales reps, a couple that are in training right now. So we’re seeing what they’re saying, we’re seeing what the results are, we’re seeing what the end result is in the pipeline. And I can tell you beyond a shadow of a doubt that one of the biggest challenges MSPs have right now is standing out, is differentiation. In part because the advantage of the industry is the peer group system. That’s also a potential disadvantage. So when it comes to certain things, just make sure you’re thinking, hey, how can we take the best practices and the fundamentals and apply our flavor of it, our strategy, and what makes us unique and what makes us different?

And then the third thing I’ll say to be aware of with the accountability groups is that people tell you what works for them at the moment. That gets frozen in time, and it becomes something that is taught for a really long, extended period of time. Take, like, you guys know more than anybody how quickly technology is changing, right? We’re watching it. New models are coming out every single day, and I’m like, “Damn, all right, this is cool.” Tech is changing very quickly.

Think about something like list building and list cleaning. There are a couple of particular methods where I hear people say, “Oh, we’re using the so-and-so method.” And I know so-and-so, the one who created that method, and I know what they’re doing now, and what they’re doing now doesn’t reflect what they did then. They shared what worked then. It was true. They were using it then, but then they found a new way, and a new way, and a new way. Those things get frozen in time. They get packaged and then productized, and that’s the thing you’re supposed to do. Well, within a period of time that’s fine, but if it’s list building, man, if you’re using the same list-building technique that you were two years ago, it’s obsolete. You can build lists from scratch in AI right now. You can scrape lists, you can build your own CRM and list-cleaning tools. I mean, it’s absolutely wild. Not to say you’re supposed to waste your time on that. I’m just using it as an example that there are many, many tactics where, look, if you don’t know where to start, if you’re actually lost on something, you say, “All right, cool, let me start here. Let me grab this packaged method. It worked at some point in time. I’m going to put it in place, but I’m not going to necessarily get married to it. I don’t have a better solution, I don’t have a better idea, so let me take this thing and use it.” Fine. But just be aware that what you’re seeing works for that person at a particular point in time. A lot of times you end up adopting the best practices of yesterday, because that’s when it got packaged and productized, and it’s either not working today or it’s not the best way to do it today.

And this is true of a lot of things right now. It’s not that the underlying strategy is any different. Take list cleaning, for example. Cleaning your list, clean data, as a principle, is still obviously a very important aspect of prospecting, good business development, good sales, good marketing. Your list is one of the most important assets in your business. I believe that, absolutely. And maintaining it is super important. But the way you maintained it two years ago is not the way you would maintain it today, at least not efficiently. There’s not really a need to go hire people abroad, lower-sourced, actual manual labor, to be doing a lot of the list cleaning. There are just as effective, if not more effective, ways. And many of the people who advocated that aren’t even using it today. So the big part of that is that people tell you what worked for them at a time, and that becomes the thing that worked for them before, not necessarily the thing that’s working for them now. Being aware of that, I think, is really critical.

Now again, full circle, this is not me saying don’t join accountability groups. This is me saying join them, use them, leverage them. But just like everything, just like AI, you leverage AI, but don’t let it think for you, right? Same thing with the peer groups. Join the groups, steal the best practices, implement them, fill the gaps that you have in the business, but don’t let that stop you from thinking. Don’t let that stop you from being creative. Don’t let that stop you from being different and standing out and applying new ways of doing things. Maybe I need to create a unique offer and not the same one everyone else is doing. Maybe I need to think about a different way to brand our company. And think about different lead capture mechanisms. I could go on and on.

That’s my lesson today, and it stems from looking at numbers and having a couple of conversations this past week with people who are struggling, and seeing what they’re doing, and then knowing what many of the people who are doing two, five, ten times what other MSPs are doing are doing. And it’s not the same, right? They are doing things that are different, and that’s a good thing.

So, hope it helps. Adios.