MSP GLOBAL is kicking off a new guest editor series with Mark Crall, an MSP/MSSP channel strategist and long-time trusted voice in the managed services ecosystem. Across this series, Mark will unpack why otherwise-strong vendors often struggle when entering the MSP channel, and why the issue is rarely the product itself. (Spoiler alert: it’s usually the playbook.)
Mark sets the stage for the series by identifying the recurring go-to-market (GTM) mistakes that cause vendors to lose momentum: the route to market, the value proposition, and the read on the buyer.
Enjoy!
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Those of us who have spent serious time in the MSP channel recognize a familiar pattern.
A vendor arrives with a solid product and a playbook that’s worked for them before, a go-to-market plan built on real experience, the kind that holds together internally. They’ve talked to MSPs, typically the ones who show up at events; engage on LinkedIn, and agree to take the call. Those conversations confirmed the direction. Six months in, adoption is thin. The pipeline is sparse. The partners they recruited have gone quiet. So what went wrong?
The MSP channel didn’t fail them. Their playbook did, or more precisely, three specific mistakes built into it did, mistakes I’ve watched vendors make often enough that I can usually name them before I even see their materials:
• The route to market
• The value proposition
• The read on the buyer
When I read through the Spring 2026 MSP GLOBAL State of the Industry Report, the data put real numbers behind breaks I’d already been watching across years of work with vendors in the MSP channel. If any part of that opening scenario sounds familiar, this series is worth your time.
Here’s the part worth holding onto before we go further: fixing this doesn’t require throwing out the playbook and starting over. It requires walking through the one you already have, with clear eyes, one mistake at a time, and finding where it’s actually built on an assumption about this channel rather than a fact about it. That’s the work the rest of this series is built to do. This first piece names the pattern, and what follows is you doing the finding.
For what it’s worth, the vendors I’m describing aren’t careless. Most of them are building something real, with products that solve genuine problems, often better than what’s already available in the channel. I want to see them win, and that’s part of what makes this pattern so painful to watch.
It’s also part of why I’m finally putting this in writing. This series is a deep dive into a talk I’ve given vendors in one form or another for years, most recently on stage at CloudFest 2026 in Germany, and it’s based directly on the engagement playbooks I use to help vendors get this right in real consulting work. I’ll apologize in advance if this runs a little long but it’s worth digging into properly because everything a vendor builds with a partner afterward means nothing if they never engage the MSPs who could actually use their solution to serve their customers.
Six months of thin adoption is also six months of budget, headcount, and event spend that didn’t come back. The runway didn’t pause while the team figured out what it was missing. Neither did the competition. The fear that lives inside most vendor founders at this stage is specific: the channel they came to build in is moving on without them, a competitor with better channel intelligence is reaching the same accounts first, and the capital to fix any of it is limited.
None of that is inevitable, and none of it requires starting over. It requires that the three key mistakes get identified honestly and worked through, one at a time, starting with what’s actually underneath them: not the tactics, but the assumptions baked into the playbook that make otherwise smart, capable teams walk straight into them. That’s where I want to go next: first principles.
MSP vendors: is your channel playbook helping you grow—or quietly holding you back?
Follow Mark Crall’s guest editor series to uncover the GTM assumptions that stall MSP channel momentum, then continue the conversation live with the MSP community at MSP GLOBAL 2026.
