MSP AI Revolution: Negotiating with Customers – Alex Farling | 7 Figure MSP Q2 2025
In this conference presentation, Alex Farling, co‑founder of Empath, shares his 17‑year experience as an MSP owner and outlines practical negotiation and communication tactics for managed service providers. He opens with humorous anecdotes about difficult customers—ranging from unreasonable volume‑discount demands to emergency calls while on vacation—to illustrate the challenges MSPs face during renewals, scope changes, and priority conflicts. Farling introduces Empath’s growing catalog of soft‑skill courses, emphasizing the importance of training the whole team (technicians, VCOs, account managers) in negotiation, curiosity, and offering options instead of ultimatums. He highlights specific techniques: embracing the pause, asking clarifying questions, and presenting multiple solutions. The talk also showcases how AI tools like ChatGPT can define negotiation, generate role‑play personas, and support practice sessions, while noting the value of live role‑play led by experts such as Robert Gillette. Farling describes Empath’s platform features—trackable career pathways, tier‑based upskilling, and a QR‑code coupon (ChrisWeiserStillSucks) for a discounted trial. Throughout, he stresses that soft‑skill development is a continuous process essential for retaining customers and growing MSP revenue.
I'm really pumped for this next one because the co-founder of Empath is about to come up and he's going to be giving you some tactics on how you can set boundaries, communicate value, and close more win-win deals with consistency. So without further ado, let's welcome to the stage Alex Farling.
How about Tanner, guys? Did you know that guy has not been on stage before today or before this event? This is all new to him. He's freaking killing it. He screwed up. Lindsay didn't train him appropriately because when I come up here, we have to take a picture for social media because we do marketing. So Tanner, get back up here and let's do a marketing selfie. We'll get you trained. We'll get you trained. But you're doing good. You're doing good. All right, let's— everybody say hello. There we go. There we go. Now that the marketing department is satisfied, now we can move forward with the rest of it. How many Empath partners in the room? Look around. You see a few folks, right? We're probably the newest vendor you'll talk to in most cases, although we just had a birthday. We're a year old now. But before Empath, I spent a lot of time with so many folks in this room, and I'm grateful for every last one of you who helped us build Lifecycle Insights. It was a cool product. You can still go visit the Scalepad folks upstairs and learn a lot about what they're doing with Lifecycle Insights and how all that's changing. But I also spent 17 years in your shoes as an MSP owner. So lots of time doing exactly what you guys are doing today. I help translate nerd to English for VCOs, account managers, sales reps, people like that in the channel. We're really good at speaking nerd. Sometimes we carry that into our client conversations, and I really try and help everybody understand how we can change that. So along the way, we tend to run into some difficult folks. I think it was Richard Nixon. ChatGPT told me it was Richard Nixon. I actually checked. I think it was Richard Nixon who first said, "We do not negotiate with terrorists." Now we all know that's a lie. The US negotiates with terrorists. We should not negotiate with toddlers. I believe that was Richard Nixon's coffee mug. I'm not sure. ChatGPT told me that too. But occasionally as an MSP, we wind up in a situation where we feel like we're negotiating with a terrorist. If you haven't been there yet, you will. Sometimes we call that renewal time. We've all got that customer. We've all dealt with it. We've all ruined a slide and hung something off the end of it like that. That's absolutely fantastic. It's not on the version I have upstairs, so I don't know how we screwed that up. But as we work our way through negotiating with customers, anybody got a customer who makes insanely wild demands? I had one call me and tell me, I'll buy 5 seats of your product, but you're gonna give me 5 more for free. What are you talking about? He's like, volume discount. Like, people pay us for 300 licenses and don't get 5 of the license free for every license that they buy. You guys have this problem where they like to hold your schedule hostage. How many of them wanna call you instead of your help desk regardless of where you are, where you're supposed to be, what you're supposed to be doing? And they get mad at you if you don't just drop everything and pick up the phone. I'm on vacation driving down the road when I own my MSP and the phone rings and I look at it and it's a customer. He's the only customer I've ever fired and I hadn't fired him yet. And I answered the phone and said, hey Mike, what's up? He says, I've got a critical emergency. I called your help desk. They told me nobody could get to me for 5 minutes. And I went, Mike, I'm on Route 13 South headed to Virginia Beach through BFE Nowhere, Virginia. There's not much I can do to help you. And you understand you've wasted 3 of that 5 minutes calling me. How many days off do you get a year? He goes, not enough. I said, put me in that list too. And wait for the help desk to call you back. But we've got these customers, they hold really high demands on us, and we have to find ways to negotiate with them, because ultimately, they pay the bills, right? Anybody here got a customer whose failure to plan became your problem? I got a new employee that starts tomorrow, you got a laptop tucked away there somewhere that I can give him? When did you agree to hire him, 14 weeks ago? Thanks for the heads up, buddy. My favorite was a customer that called me and said, we were in a QBR and they said, yeah, thanks for all the information, it was great to have you here today. Oh, by the way, we bought a building. We're moving in 2 weeks and we need about 50 network drops. I went, thanks for the heads up. That's when I realized I sucked at setting agendas for QBRs 'cause I should've asked a question. Has anything major changed in your business? Maybe you bought a building, I don't know. So I started to ask that question. But these guys are the ones who pay the bills, right? Your customers ultimately at the end of the day are the folks who keep your doors open, are the folks who keep you and your employees employed, they're the folks who allow you to come here and learn things like this. And that's why we have to negotiate with them. So something that we're working on at Empath is an entire series of courses about how to communicate with your customers. But I can't bring a conversation about negotiation and communication without bringing in ChatGPT. So I asked ChatGPT, what the hell is negotiation anyway? How do we define it? And my favorite part of this is ChatGPT says negotiation is a conversation where two or more people are working forward towards agreements, right? We have to originally start not on the same page. Everybody feel like you've walked into some meetings with your customers where you've started not on the same page? Net Lynch teaches this from a VCIO perspective. She had a team of 50 VCIOs at her last job that she led, and she taught all of them how to negotiate with their own terrorists. So as we work our way through it, I want you guys to just think, it's not just you that has to negotiate with your customers. It's not just you who has to negotiate with your prospects. Every single person on your team has to do negotiation. How many of you feel like you've prepared the rest of the folks in your team to negotiate with difficult customers? Every month in Empath, we go back and pull a report and say, what were the most popular 5 courses in the platform? Would you believe me if I told you 3 of the most 5 every single month for the last year have been soft skills? MSPs are reasonably confident that we've hired the right kids that can go out and learn to do the nerdy stuff. Somehow they're not real good at talking to people. But throughout the day, we have to agree on timelines, we have to agree on project scopes, we have to agree on pricing and even priorities. When we get into things like priorities, imagine dispatch gets a call and says, "Hey, customer's building is down, nobody can work, there's 74 people in the building." and another tech's working on a printer ticket that's impacted one user. What do you have to do? We have to reschedule that non-urgent thing. We have to go deal with what's on fire. You or your account manager or your salespeople, you're out talking through with your customers, what does it look like to renew an agreement to make sure that one of those customers that we spent $10,000 or $15,000 or $20,000 to onboard and bring into the business, what does it mean to make sure that they come back and do business with us again and again? We've gotta negotiate these complicated renewal terms. Maybe sometimes it's just that tech going, "Hey, while the color printer's down, can you use the black and white printer and we'll get to it before the end of the business day?" And sometimes it's just the VCIO having a conversation with a customer to say, "You haven't spent enough money, you carry too much risk, and we have to talk about when and how you're gonna make some changes to make sure that you can absorb this risk because I can't afford to." I can't be the risk mitigation factor for you. So we've gotta spend some money. But all of this is negotiation, and sometimes that's uncomfortable. Does anybody in the room get uncomfortable when you get ready to negotiate? I got a text message from one of my employees yesterday that made me realize I was gonna negotiate, and I went, "Shit, I don't wanna have this conversation. I don't wanna do this. This isn't gonna be fun." It's not what I signed up for. I'm a bad manager. If you don't know me, I'm a terrible manager. So negotiating with my employees is not fun. It's not something I want to do. It makes me uncomfortable. If it makes me uncomfortable, I can imagine I'm not the only one. So there's a few hacks that Nat Lynch teaches in this course that I want to share with you guys today. First is embracing the power of the pause. Does silence make anybody else uncomfortable? When a customer makes an unreasonable demand of you, the first thing you can do is just pause and let it sink in. Sometimes it lets them just hear what kind of an asinine thing they just said to you and ponder it for a second. But the real value is to just hold on a second and let 'em think about what you said, what they said, and let them realize that you're thinking about what they said. 'Cause our next step is going to be to make sure that we don't assume we understand why they came to us this way or that we know what a fix is, and to just be curious. Being curious is a salesman's secret weapon. The same for account managers and VCOs. When we're having a conversation with our customer, the most important thing we can do is just ask clarifying questions. Anything from "Tell me more," to "How did you come to that conclusion?" "What is it that makes you feel that way?" And let them explain it. Because for all we know, they're just having a shitty day. I went to Starbucks this morning, and I watched a kid, when I ordered an iced coffee, I watched him pour hot coffee and then pour ice into it and then hand it to me across the counter. I'm having a shitty day. All right? You don't wanna negotiate with me today, but you might have to, okay? So don't assume that we know what's going on in the person's life. Don't assume we understand how they got to where they are. Ask a clarifying question. Dive into their business and try and figure out what is it about the thing that we're negotiating about really has an impact on their business? And then finally, give 'em options, not ultimatums. When I teach MSPs how to budget with their customers, I always tell them, we never ask a customer, do you want to do something about this problem? Do you want to do something about this risk? Will you sign my contract? Will you sign my agreement? Will you buy this hardware? No, we ask, when would you like to do something about this? I know you're gonna— when it catches on fire, or proactively when we decide to do something ahead of time. It's up to you.
Mr.
Customer, when does it make sense to deal with this? So we always wanna give our customer the option versus an ultimatum. If a customer comes back to me and says, hey, I have a really unrealistic expectation of you, this is what I want, and I go, pfft, that's not gonna happen, what you're gonna get is this, they're immediately going to get defensive and walk out of the room. But if we ask what's going on, understand where they're coming from, try not to assume anything, and then give them options on how we can move forward, we're way more likely to get to an amazing deal. And then I heard folks talking about this morning, there's ChatGPTs out there or tools out there around ChatGPT. I was on a sales leadership call upstairs while you guys were doing some other exercises this morning, and a bunch of the revenue leaders in the channel, they're practicing for you, are using a, a paid product that lets their cold callers literally pick up the phone, talk to a GPT, and try and set an appointment with them. And the GPTs have 27 different personas that will argue back and forth whether or not they want to have an appointment with them. Practice makes perfect. If you don't know Robert Gillette, he teaches a course on building a culture of practice in your MSP. He's a masochist. He likes to get out there and role-play sales with people. It's a terrible thing, but it's super important. It's awkward, it's uncomfortable, I hate it, but I have a ton of, of, of appreciation for what Robert does. And he teaches a course in Empath on it. So if you hadn't noticed, there's a thread here that Empath is continuing to build a list of courses that help MSPs train their teams. We're trying to make sure that you come out here and you learn all this amazing stuff. You spend time with all these smart people up here telling you how you can improve your business, what you can do better and different, and then you go home. Your technician who just closed 16 tickets before lunch, gets told, "Hey man, when you find some time, go do some training." And then you go, "I don't know why they don't do it." If it's not in ConnectWise, it didn't happen, but the training's over there in the corner. Go ahead, when you find some time, when your ticket queue's empty. And the point at Empath is that we're continuing to build new and interesting and exciting courses. Fundamentals of Incident Response is one of my personal favorites, so I threw it up there. How many of you teach your techs what to do for incident response? We'll help you teach it, we'll help you reinforce it, 'cause sometimes they just need to hear it from somebody who's not you. Alex Weintraub, the guy that does that, literally has, has been in chat messages with terrorists who have encrypted networks, and he's having conversations with them about ransomwares and things like that. He's literally lived that world. He even tells some stories about some of the inappropriate pictures they've sent him when he sent too low an offer back and forth. Yeah, you'll get some weird and fun stuff apparently. Hopefully you guys don't wind up in that boat. But Empath is basically designed to continue to build new courses, put things out where you can actually track and see where your team is. And even build career pathways for your team. Anybody got somebody on your team who's stuck at Tier 1.5 and they've been there way too long? All right, 4 people are honest and the rest of you are lying. Get it, get it. We all— somebody's— a picture came into everybody's head when I said that, right? We all know that kid. Empath is designed around the ability to make it easy for us to build out these pathways and make sure that when you hire that kid from Starbucks next week, you can make the barista a functional member of your team just a little bit faster. And that's what we do. So if you'd like to learn more, Dean will be up there somewhere in the blinding lights. Yeah, he's in the back. You can come back and see us. We're all the way in the back, in the back left-hand side. Come back and hang out with us at the tables. There are some things that we really shouldn't negotiate about. Training your team is one of them. We live in a world where there's way too much risk. We wanna make sure that you upskill every single person on your team. If you wanna check out Empath, you can scan that QR code. We have a copy of the QR code at the table as well. And if you use the coupon code, ChrisWeiserStillSucks, you get half off your first 2 months. Thanks for your time, everybody. I appreciate y'all.
I absolutely love that. And he's right. Sometimes you see people who get plateaued in their career and they'll say they have 5 years of experience when really they just have 1 year of experience 5 times. And one thing I heard somebody say is training isn't something that you did, it's something that you do. And if you don't have a process in place to be able to track someone's improvement, then you're just leaving yourself in a, at risk.
