In the first four articles (1, 2, 3 & 4) of this MSP GLOBAL series, guest editor Mark Crall laid out why vendors with solid products still fail to gain traction in the MSP channel, then unpacked the weight sitting underneath every one of those decisions, before asking who’s really being pitched when a vendor walks into an MSP meeting: not the MSP alone, but every customer standing behind them.
In this fifth piece, he turns to the mistake that follows directly from that buyer psychology. Vendors get the route to market wrong because they misread how MSPs actually discover and come to trust a vendor in the first place, not through cold outreach, but through peers, influencers, and events.
Take it from here, Mark!
The watering hole effect
Every vendor eventually asks some version of the same question: how do we get in front of more MSPs? It’s a reasonable question, and it’s also the wrong one, or at least it’s asked in the wrong order. The question we need to answer first is how MSPs find the vendors they end up trusting in the first place. Get that backwards, and everything built on top of it, the events plan, the outreach cadence, the booth budget, is built on sand.
This is the fifth piece in a series about the three mistakes vendors make going to market in the MSP channel: the wrong route to market, the wrong value proposition, and the wrong read on the buyer. The first two pieces covered why MSPs evaluate differently in the first place, essentially acting as buyer representatives for their own customers, weighing risk before almost anything else. This piece is where that shapes the first mistake directly, starting with the part most vendors skip past: how the discovery actually happens.
It doesn’t start with a salesperson’s call. It doesn’t start with a cold email or a LinkedIn connection request. In most cases I’ve seen, it starts with a peer conversation: someone at another MSP mentioning something that worked, or warning about something that didn’t. That conversation creates awareness. The awareness leads the MSP toward influencers and community voices who have already formed opinions on the vendor or the category. And those conversations tend to converge at events, where peer trust concentrates and community opinion gets tested in real time.
Jay McBain (Chief Analyst at Omdia and a featured speaker at MSP GLOBAL 2026) has made this case consistently across the MSP channel conversations I’ve followed. In research he and Jessica C. Davis published through Canalys, they tracked every vendor sponsor across the top 40 MSP events and confirmed what the data had been pointing at for years: partner influence in the managed services industry is strongly driven by events. I heard him make the same case again, more recently and in person, at a PitchIT finalist training call, where he put the market at $650 billion and described the landscape through what he calls “watering holes,” roughly 1,000 of them across 15 spheres of influence where MSPs form their opinions about vendors. He framed the discovery pattern around three questions:
What do you read?
Where do you go?
Who do you follow?
For most MSPs, the answers to those three questions are where vendor discovery actually starts, and where vendor trust either builds or doesn’t. With over 350 events in this channel to choose from, the research conclusion is direct: vendors who treat event participation as a strategic investment in community influence, rather than a line item in a marketing budget, are the ones building the kind of position that compounds.
The burden that places on vendors isn’t about showing up at more watering holes. It’s about already having a reputation at the one you’re standing in before you arrive. That reputation is built somewhere else first: the peer mention, the influencer who’s noticed you, the pattern of showing up consistently enough that an event appearance reads as confirmation instead of a cold introduction.
The vendor who skips that groundwork and leads with the pitch isn’t entering the MSP’s discovery journey: they’re interrupting it. In a channel built on trust and peer proof, that kind of interruption rarely turns into a relationship.
This asymmetry is where the first mistake actually lives. Even vendors who understand this discovery pattern intellectually still get the route wrong in practice, not because they skip events, but because they treat them like any other marketing channel: invest in presence, measure leads, calculate cost per contact, and repeat whatever performs. (It’s a perfectly good playbook. It’s just from a different game.)
That approach may work in most enterprise sales and VAR-supported mid-market environments, where presence reliably creates pipeline on its own. It doesn’t transfer here. A vendor who arrives at an event without the community presence already described, the peer mentions, the influencer awareness, is asking a single booth conversation to do work that should have started months earlier.
None of this is an argument against events. The research consistently points to events as among the most concentrated influence points in this channel. The argument is about what surrounds them: approaching that presence as an investment in community standing, not as transaction volume.
Getting the route right creates the opportunity, but even then, not every event serves the same audience. The buyers who attend a ConnectWise IT Nation aren’t necessarily the same as the ones who show up at an ASCII Edge conference or an MSSP-focused security event. Picking the right room for where you actually operate is its own conversation, and we’ll get there later in this series. The closer question, the one that has to be answered before you choose the room, is this: who is your MSP, what do they actually care about at their stage, and what can you genuinely deliver that maps to it?
That’s the second mistake we cover next, and it’s also what eventually points to which room is right.
