This is part seven in MSP-industry GTM expert Mark Crall’s series (first six articles 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 & 6) about the all-too-common pitfalls that vendors face as they seek new MSP customers. We recommend starting at the beginning, because Mark goes into lots of detail!
There’s a moment in the MSP channel that most vendors never see, because it happens after they’ve stopped watching. The booth conversation went well. The MSP asked good questions, took the one-pager, and said they’d look into it. Then they did. They opened the website that night. They read the follow-up email two days later. They asked a peer about you. Somewhere in that stretch, a solution that sounded relevant in person started to sound like something else. (Nobody sends a note to tell you that. They just don’t reply.)
I’ve watched enough of these play out to believe the vendor usually isn’t losing the MSP at the booth. They’re losing them at the third or fourth place the MSP looks.
This is the seventh piece in a series about the three most common mistakes I see vendors make when going to market in the MSP channel: the wrong route to market, the wrong value proposition, and the wrong read on the buyer. The last piece made the case that the value proposition has to be built in the order the MSP evaluates it: the customer’s problem first, the operational burden second, and profitability third. This piece is about what happens to that order once it leaves the deck. If your booth story and your website tell two different stories, and nobody has put them side by side, the rest is for you.
In the MSP channel, the value proposition isn’t the pitch. It’s the foundation for everything the vendor builds; and the MSP tests it everywhere it shows up, not only where you rehearsed it.
Where MSP Marketing Actually Gets Judged
That means the sequence has to survive the website copy, the trade show collateral, the partner talk tracks, the portal, the promotional offer and its fine print, and the follow-up email that marketing wrote long before the booth staff was hired. Every one of those is a place the MSP decides whether you understand what they carry. In my experience they don’t average those impressions. They tend to believe the weakest one, because the weakest one looks the least rehearsed.
A Go-to-Market Test You Can Run Before the Next Event
The way I’ve come to describe it to vendors is a short progression: “invisible, relevant, repeatable.”
A vendor whose value proposition answers the wrong questions is invisible. Not because the solution is weak, but because the MSP in front of it was weighing risk and burden and heard features and margin. That’s the vendor from the last piece, and if you’ve read that far, you know the fix.
Get the sequence right in one place and the vendor becomes relevant. The MSP leans in. The conversation gets longer. It’s also fragile, because relevance earned in one conversation is only as durable as the next thing the MSP reads.
Repeatable is what happens when the sequence holds everywhere. The website says what the booth said. The follow-up email leads with the customer problem instead of the feature list. The peer the MSP asks describes you in the same terms you used, because those were the only terms you ever used. At that point the vendor isn’t relying on a great booth day. They’ve built something that keeps working when they’re not in the room.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting every piece of collateral should be a rewrite of the same paragraph. The website has a job the booth doesn’t. What I’m suggesting is that each piece should carry its own portion of the same value proposition, tied to the same business outcomes, in the same order. When the pieces ladder back to one sequence, they connect. When they don’t, they read like three different vendors.
Why Channel Marketing Drifts as Vendors Scale
The irony is that this gets harder, not easier, as a vendor gets more established. A company with one deck and a founder doing every demo tends to be consistent by accident. A vendor with a marketing team, a partner program, and a VAR channel already running has far more surfaces to keep aligned, and far more places for the old channel’s message to drift back in. The margin slide reappears. The features creep up the page. From what I’ve seen, nobody decided that. It just wasn’t anyone’s job to notice.
A Go-to-Market Test You Can Run Before the Next Event
Here’s a test that doesn’t require a rewrite. Walk your own surfaces in the order the MSP would. Start where they start, which is usually a peer mention or an event, not your homepage. Then the website. Then the follow-up email your team actually sends. Then the partner portal and the promotional offer, fine print included. At each stop, ask the three questions in order: what’s broken for the MSP’s customer, what does this cost them to run, and only then, what do they make. If the answers arrive in that order at every stop, you’re repeatable. If not, you’ve found where the relevance is leaking out.
You don’t need to fix all of it before the next event. Fix the surface the MSP hits right after the conversation you’re already winning. That’s usually the website or the follow-up email, and it’s where I’d start.
There’s one thing this piece can’t settle on its own: even a sequence that holds everywhere lands differently depending on who’s reading it. The MSP still building their processes and the MSP who has standardized a platform across every customer are not the same buyer, and the same value proposition doesn’t land the same with both. Knowing which one a vendor is actually talking to, and at what stage, is the third mistake. That’s where this series goes next.
