The One Thing MSP Owners Control That Drives Sales

There's one thing you can do as an MSP owner that will help you sell more. And it has nothing to do with your sales process or sales execution or sales training, or even your salesperson.

Not to sell against myself, because that's what we do. We're fractional sales managers for MSPs. And so the playbooks matter, the execution matters, the training matters, the coaching matters, accountability matters, KPIs matter. All of it matters. It does move the needle. But I promise you, the one thing you can do to drive sales is this: all of those things downstream rely on you having clarity over what makes you different.

If you can sit down and talk to somebody and say, these are the things that actually make us different. We serve a specific market. We have a different business model. We create different contracts. We have different offerings. We have different talents. We've created a unique culture. We have documented case studies. Whatever it is, from expertise to delivery to branding to your team.

If you can audit your company and clearly describe it to somebody, to a stranger, a layman, not another tech person, but a layman, your spouse, a friend, somebody at the bar. You can sit down and say, "Every IT company does XYZ, but you know what we do differently? These are the unique selling points that we have."

Those are strategic decisions that a business owner or a leadership team makes. Those aren't things that just kind of happen. They're things you decide to do differently. You decide to make your processes within the company proprietary. You decide to create your own technical assessment combining AI stuff, creating your own introductory offer, and creating different outputs than everybody else. It's a choice to do things the way everybody else does them, or to find strategic differences and strategic ways to separate yourself from the pack. Offer some unique selling points, things your buyer is going to actually think are relevant, think are worth paying for, think are important to them.

Because the thing you've got to understand, the thing you've got to remember, is people aren't buying tech. They aren't buying the thing. They aren't buying the mechanism. They're buying the transformation. There's some transformation that they want. They want some problem solved. They want some pain to go away, right? They want faster response times. They want a partner that knows what the hell they're doing and can give them advice on tech. They want somebody who understands their industry. They want somebody they can trust on compliance. They want somebody XYZ.

They've got a problem. They've got a pain. They want it to go away. They're here, and they want to be here. That's the transformation they're paying for, and your service is the thing that bridges that gap. That's what they're buying. That is the thing they're making their decision on. Are you the person or the company that's going to help me get from here to here?

The things that MSPs a lot of times think set them apart, like elements of the tech stack, are not things the buyer A, understands, B, knows how to truly differentiate or measure, or C, cares about, right?

So again, my advice here is take a step back, zoom out, get away from sales, and go back to the strategy drawing board. Because everything downstream of this one thing is what matters, and it is what makes you different.

Say you come into our program. We act as your fractional sales manager. We want to sit down and write your sales process and your sales playbooks for your outside sales rep, your full-cycle sales rep, or we're going to write scripts for your SDR. Cool. You know where we're going to start? What's your value prop? What makes you different? How can I arm this seller? How can I arm this setter with a script, with verbiage, with collateral, with enablement? Something that says, this is why you should choose us versus them. This is what everybody else does. This is what we do. This is how everybody else does it. This is how we do it. And this is why it matters to you.

When you get to that point and you can clearly articulate what separates you or what makes you unique, you've now armed the sellers, the people downstream of those strategic decisions, with the ammunition they need to get the maximum conversion rates, to get the maximum prices, to get everything you really want, which is going to drive the sales you want, which is going to build the business you want. It all hinges on being able to differentiate yourself.

Here's what happens if you don't differentiate yourself. First of all, your setters aren't going to be able to get appointments. They're going to sound like everybody else, making the same freaking phone calls, doing the same outbound with the same half-assed script, with the same standard cybersecurity assessment, in the same market. Nothing in the script is going to say, we're unique, we're different, you should have a conversation with us. So you're not going to get as many appointments.

The people you do get appointments with are going to be tire kickers. They're going to be price shoppers. They're going to be commodity shoppers, because they're not going to be buying on differentiation, because they didn't think there was any in the first place.

So as those people go into your pipeline, your conversion rate is going to suck, because those people are going to end up going out to RFP. Those people are going to go with the cheapest service offering, and that's probably not you. So you're going to lose those deals. Your conversion rate's going to suck.

Fourth, if you do win those deals, you're going to win them at lower margins, which is going to eat away at your profits. And profits are what you use to reinvest into the business, to create more differentiation and better branding, hire better people, build better processes, and build better systems. So you lack the investment you need to continue to create more differentiation.

So it's a cycle, one way or the other. If you create the differentiation, you get more appointments, you get better appointments, you get appointments with the right people, you get higher conversion rates, and you can sell at a higher rate. That gives you higher margins, which allows you to reinvest into the business, which makes the business better, which allows you to create more differentiation. And if you don't do those things, it's the opposite.

So again, upstream of everything we work on, from the scripts, from the playbooks, from the processes, from the recruiting, from all of it, the thing that's upstream of all of it is a strategic decision about what we're going to do that makes us different. How are we going to position it? How are we going to describe it? How are we going to set ourselves apart?

If we have our unique selling points, then when we make this call, it's with a higher degree of relevance. That person's going to have a higher degree of receptivity. We're going to bring the right people in. And then, like I said, everything downstream of that helps.

So, one big meta decision. This came from several conversations this morning with MSPs: writing scripts, looking at playbooks, looking at numbers, people who are getting results, people who aren't getting results. And the one big thing that is fully within your control is taking a step back and identifying what it is that we do differently. And if it's not much, then start making some strategic decisions about what you can do differently, so that you can market it differently, so that you can sell more and sell better.

Hope it helps. Adios.