In this conversational presentation, the speakers dissect the underlying revenue anxieties that Managed Service Providers (MSPs) often mask as tactical marketing questions. Drawing on six months of sales and consulting calls, they reveal that most MSPs lack clear visibility into their revenue engine, misidentify their ideal customer profile (ICP), and fall into commodity positioning. The discussion walks through ten critical questions: (1) distinguishing revenue visibility from lead generation, (2) defining a true ICP based on profitability and strategic fit, (3) crafting differentiated messaging to avoid commoditization, (4) deciding when and whom to hire—salespeople, SDRs, agencies, or fractional leaders—and why hiring before system readiness leads to disappointment, (5) constructing a repeatable sales process that removes founder dependency, (6) choosing marketing channels that align with a solid sales engine, (7) evaluating client profitability, (8) packaging AI services as a concrete offer, (9) extracting the founder from every deal to enable scaling, and (10) clarifying what working with a growth consultant looks like. Throughout, the speakers stress the importance of diagnosing the business before buying solutions, establishing accountability, and building a revenue system that can sustain growth.
Chapters
Hey, yo.
I just reviewed 6 months of sales calls, client calls, and consulting conversations, and the questions MSPs are asking me behind closed doors are not really about marketing. They're about revenue panic. On the surface, they sound tactical. How do we get more leads? Should we hire an SDR? Should we use an agency? Should we redo the website? Should we go harder on outbound? But when I listen to the actual conversations, the real question underneath is usually this. We know growth needs to change, but we do not know whether the problem is leads, messaging, sales process, pricing, client fit, people, or accountability. That's the problem. Most MSPs are trying to buy answers before they've diagnosed the business, and that is how you waste a terrifying amount of money. So I wanna walk through the 10 questions I hear most about from MSP owners, sales leaders, and vendors trying to grow in this space. Not the polished version. The real shit. How do we get more leads? Number 1, this is the big one. Almost every growth conversation starts here. The owner says, we need more leads.
But most of the time when I start asking follow-up questions, we find out they don't actually know if leads are the constraint. They don't know their close rate. They don't know which lead sources produce profitable clients. They don't know how fast they follow up. They don't know what happens after a lead comes in or where deals stall or which prospects are actually qualified. And none of that's a lead problem. It's a revenue visibility problem. And before you spend more money getting leads, you need to know whether your existing opportunities are being worked properly.
Because if your sales process is weak, more leads are just creating more leakage, and you can't outlead gen a broken revenue engine. Number 2, who should we actually be selling to? A lot of MSPs define their ICP as something like small to mid-sized businesses with 10 to 100 users. That's not an ICP. That's a mailing list. And an ICP should tell you who is most likely to buy, stay, expand, and respect your process, value your expertise, and generate profitable work.
That means you have to look at more than just MRR.
You need to ask which clients are profitable, which ones are easy to support, which ones value strategic guidance, which ones refer, which ones expand, which ones create constant noise, which ones destroy the team. Most MSPs have never actually done that analysis. They know who pays them the most. They don't always know who is worth the most, and those aren't the same thing. Number 3, how do we stop sounding like every other MSP? That's where a lot of MSP marketing falls apart.
Most MSP websites say some version of, we are your trusted technology partner.
We offer proactive IT support. We provide cybersecurity, cloud, help desk, and strategic guidance.
Uh, great. So does everyone else. I think my new website will just say, I do revenue.
But when buyers can't tell the difference between providers, they start comparing price. And that's not because your buyers are stupid, although maybe they're a little stupid about IT. It's because you train them to shop you like a commodity. If your messaging sounds like every other MSP in your market, your pricing will feel interchangeable too. The fastest way to become a commodity is to sound like one. Number 4, should we hire a salesperson, SDR, BDR, agency, or fractional leader? Oh, this conversation comes up constantly. And my answer's usually pretty annoying. Maybe. But first, are you ready for that person to succeed? A salesperson cannot fix unclear positioning. An SDR cannot fix a bad list. A BDR cannot fix a weak offer. An agency cannot fix an owner who doesn't know what they want to— who they wanna sell to.
A fractional leader cannot create accountability in a company that refuses to execute. Hiring a revenue person before building the revenue system is how MSPs create expensive disappointment. If you hire someone into chaos, you do not get growth. You get a new person to blame.
5. What should our sales process actually look like? This one matters because a lot of MSPs don't have a sales process. They have founder charisma.
They have referrals.
They have random follow-up. They have good intentions in a CRM nobody trusts, but they don't have a real process. A real sales process answers who qualifies the lead, what makes someone qualified, what happens after the first call, what questions do we ask in discovery, how do we identify urgency, how do we handle bad fit prospects, when do we stop chasing, who owns follow-up, what does a real next step look like? And in every meaningful deal, It should not still depend on the owner personally pushing it across the line. If you're doing that, you don't have a sales engine. You have founder dependency. The next 5 questions. Which marketing channel should we choose? Are our clients actually profitable?
How do we turn AI into a real offer? This one's got money in it. How do we get the founder out of every deal? And what would working with you actually look like? You want the answers to those, you're just gonna have to follow me because I am all out of energy to talk about this right now.
