In the first five articles (1, 2, 3, 4 & 5) of this MSP GLOBAL series, guest editor Mark Crall worked through why vendors with solid products still stall in the MSP channel, explained the weight sitting underneath every one of those decisions, named the customer standing behind every MSP in the room, and traced why vendors get their route to market wrong in the first place: they misread how MSPs actually come to trust a new name, through peers and events rather than cold outreach.
In this sixth article, the first of a two-part close to the series, Mark tackles vendors who lead their pitch with the wrong thing entirely: profitability, before the MSP has any reason to believe it. He lays out the order MSPs actually evaluate a new vendor in, and why leading with margin gets the sequence backwards.
Take it from here, Mark!
Profit is the conclusion, not the pitch
There’s a slide I’ve seen in more MSP partner recruitment decks than I can count. You’ve probably seen it too: it usually shows up right after the logo wall, and it says some version of the same thing: here’s the margin, here’s the recurring revenue, here’s what this does for your bottom line. The vendor is proud of that slide. It took real work to get the economics right. I watched a version of it again last week, on a launch webinar run by people who have been in this channel long enough to know better, which tells me it’s an easy habit to slip back into even after the trust has been earned.
The trouble is that in the MSP channel, that slide tends to land as a pitch before the MSP has any reason to believe it. Not because the numbers are wrong, but because it arrived at the wrong time. Delivered too early, it can even stir up a little “sales resistance” in the prospective partner’s mind.
This article is the sixth piece in a series about the three most common mistakes I see vendors make as they go to market in the MSP channel: the wrong route to market, the wrong value proposition, and the wrong read on the buyer.
If you missed them, the earlier pieces covered why MSPs evaluate differently: they carry their customers’ risk under recurring service agreements, they act more like buyer representatives than resellers, and they tend to find trust in new vendors through peers and events. The last one ended on the question that comes before any of that pays off: who is your MSP, and what can you actually deliver that they care about? This piece takes the first half of that answer. If your deck opens with a “margin slide,” I suggest you keep reading.
The value proposition mistake catches vendors more often than the other two because it feels like the work has already been done. There’s a story. There’s a deck. There’s an audience of MSPs who agreed to listen. None of that was easy or cheap. The issue is rarely the effort, though. It’s the sequence.
In the MSP channel, profitability is the conclusion of the value proposition, not its opening line
It has to be built in the order the MSP actually evaluates it, and that order starts with the customer’s problem. Not the solution’s features and benefits, and not the unique architecture (the things the engineering team is most proud of). And definitely not the margin an MSP will make on a solution they haven’t had time to understand yet. Those things are important, but they DON’T come first.
What an MSP usually weighs first isn’t your solution at all. It’s their customer. What breaks in that customer’s business when the problem you solve goes unsolved, who takes the call when it does, and what changes for that customer once the fix is in place. MSPs are accountable for those outcomes, contractually, and the customer’s problem lands on their desk long before it ever lands on yours.
A vendor who can show they understand the MSP’s customer’s problem, and what it costs that customer to leave it unsolved, stated as a business outcome, has given the MSP a reason to keep listening. One who leads with margin or the feature set has not.
Once the MSP sees that you understand what they care about, and that you might actually have a solution for it, their next question is almost always the same: what does this cost me operationally? Every solution either creates work or removes it. Reassure them that you’ve done the work to minimize the impact on how they already operate, and ideally that the net effect is more efficiency, not less, through cost, consolidation, or both. Are you one more process to manage, or are you going to make this easy? Easy to sell, easy to implement, easy to support, easy to bill, and easy to show value. If a solution adds a layer without clearly removing something else, my experience is that it will not scale in this channel, however strong the customer story is.
The sequence, in order:
– Customer problem first. Name what’s broken for the MSP’s customer and the business outcome of fixing it, together.
– Operational burden second. Show what adoption costs in deployment, support, billing, and technician time, and prove it’s easy, or clearly worth the effort.
– Profitability third. Margin, new revenue, competitive edge, or the savings that come from consolidation and efficiency, once the first two are believable.
Don’t get me wrong, margin matters to MSPs. They run businesses. But plenty of what sits in an MSP’s stack never added a dollar of new revenue. It earned its place by taking risk off the table or by making an existing service cheaper to deliver. The analysis that decides whether a solution even gets a serious look starts there, with risk and burden. Profitability, in whatever form it takes, is what the MSP concludes for themselves once those two are credible. If you lead with profit, it sounds like a pitch. If you earn trust first, profit becomes obvious.
The margin-first instinct isn’t careless. In the VAR channel and most direct enterprise motions, leading with the economics is often right, and many of the vendors I’m describing earned real market share doing it. That’s what makes the habit hard to see. It isn’t wrong where it came from. It’s contextual.
Getting the sequence right fixes the pitch. It doesn’t yet fix the vendor, because the value proposition isn’t just a deck. It’s the foundation under the website, the booth, the talk tracks, and the fine print on the promotional offer. When the same sequence holds up across all of it, a vendor who was invisible becomes relevant, and one who is consistently relevant becomes repeatable. That’s the next piece.
For now, the recalibration is small enough to do before the next deck revision. Take the three questions in order, customer problem, operational burden, then profit, and ask whether your value proposition answers them in that sequence or in reverse. If it’s in reverse, the MSPs who walked past your booth weren’t ignoring your margin. They just never got far enough to hear it.
