In the first article of this new MSP GLOBAL series, guest editor Mark Crall introduced a familiar problem: vendors entering the MSP channel with solid products, credible experience, and playbooks that still fail to gain traction.
In this second piece, Mark takes you deeper—into the premise behind the series. Before vendors can fix their route to market, value proposition, or read on the buyer, they need to understand what makes the MSP channel different in the first place, and why assumptions carried over from enterprise, VAR, or direct-sales models often break down.
Enjoy!
The Premise Underneath
Every vendor I’ve watched hit a wall in the MSP channel eventually asks the same question: what did we actually get wrong? Six months in, adoption is thin, the pipeline’s gone quiet, and the honest answer is rarely “we didn’t work hard enough.” It’s almost always something nobody on the team knew to look for going in, one of three fundamental mistakes that show up again and again: the wrong route to market, the wrong value proposition, or the wrong read on the buyer.
This piece is part of a series built around those three mistakes, and around one idea that sits underneath all of them: fixing this doesn’t require a new playbook. It requires walking through the one you already have, honestly, and finding where it’s built on an assumption about the MSP channel instead of a fact about it.
There are plenty of legitimate reasons a vendor launch can miss at six months: partner program design, pricing strategy, and a handful of other variables that live outside what I’m covering here. I’m focused on something narrower and earlier in the process: the pre-enablement decisions, the initial go-to-market moves, where the budget actually gets committed and the rubber meets the road. Those are the calls that shape what a company becomes; and in my experience, they’re also where the same three mistakes keep showing up, even among vendors who’ve done real research and have real track records elsewhere: direct enterprise sales, VAR-supported mid-market, corporate deployments.
A playbook that worked in those environments isn’t wrong there. It’s contextual, and the MSP channel runs on different rules:
• The buying psychology is different.
• The trust model is different.
• The path to earning a place in the stack is different.
• Where and how you show up to build that position is different, too.
The narrow sample of MSPs willing to take an early call doesn’t close that gap. It’s real validation, but it describes the most reachable segment of the channel, not the one that has to move for the strategy to actually scale. That gap is quiet, and it rarely shows up until the budget is already spent.
The MSP channel has operating principles that aren’t obvious from the outside, and most standard vendor preparation doesn’t surface them.
That line is the premise of this whole series, which is why it’s in bold. Over the next several pieces, I’m going to walk through each of the three mistakes individually and in detail: why good vendors make them, and what actually corrects for them. This isn’t a checklist and it isn’t a how-to guide. It’s closer to the why behind the how, because in my experience, a vendor who understands why this channel behaves the way it does tends to get the how right without much prompting. My hope is that vendors who understand these core principles, and who take the three mistakes seriously, end up better positioned to succeed than the playbook alone would have gotten them.
Before any of the three mistakes, though, there’s one thing worth establishing first, because it’s the thing underneath all of them. MSPs evaluate vendors differently than almost any other buyer type in technology, and most vendors coming from enterprise, VAR, or direct-sales backgrounds don’t know that walking in. That’s where this series picks up next: why MSPs buy the way they do, and what it takes for a vendor to even get into the game.
Entering the MSP channel with the wrong assumptions can cost vendors months of momentum.
Watch out for more from GTM advice, coming soon.
