The pitch is too small: why MSP sellers confuse technique with scope
AuthorMSP Late NightPublished on:The pitch is too small, says my seven-year-old when he cannot get past me in the garden. I hear the same thing back at least three times a month from MSP owners about their sales team: the market is too narrow, the segment too limited, the competition too crowded. It is rarely the pitch. In almost every case it is what happens inside that pitch. Or rather: what does not happen, because the technique to get past a prospect was never properly learned, practised or kept up.
What happens in an MSP that gets stuck on growth is nearly always the same pattern. The commercial figures stagnate for a few quarters in a row. The sales manager comes with an analysis and the conclusion is: we have to look more broadly. More sectors, a larger geographical area, a new service for a group we do not serve yet. Enlarging the pitch, in other words.
That sounds logical and it is exactly the reflex you do not want. An owner is creative by nature, so when something does not work they go and think up something new. The problem: you leave the ground where you know how to win. You end up in business development while your sales problem is still sitting on the table. Two quarters later you have half a new proposition, a diluted positioning and the same stagnating figures. The question was never whether the pitch was too small. The question was whether your sellers could get past a defender on the pitch you already have.
Why keeping the pitch small is the smartest choice for your MSP
What works in practice is the opposite of what most owners do. You keep the pitch deliberately small. You do not go looking for a new vertical, a new segment or a new service. You accept that your ideal client profile is right and that the repeatable sales conversation exists inside it. And then you put all your energy into the technique your sellers use to move in that conversation.
Technique here is the concrete craft: how you open a conversation with a prospect who already has an MSP, how you handle the objection “we are happy”, how you move a conversation from price to risk, how you ask the question that makes a director think instead of disengage. Those are the moves that get you past. Not inspiring, but repeatable. And repeatability is what makes an MSP commercially mature, not creativity on the proposition.
What a playbook actually is, and what it is not
In nine out of ten MSPs a playbook is a document written once, sitting on a shared drive and opened by nobody. That is not a playbook, that is a dead word processor file. A working playbook is a living conversation between sellers about which technique works to get past which type of prospect. It changes every quarter, it contains the word-for-word openings that work best this month and it is actively used in weekly sessions.
“A dead document is not a playbook, a living conversation is”
The difference between a dead and a living playbook is not in the formatting, but in who keeps it up and how. At MSPs that do this well, the playbook is owned by the sellers themselves, not by the marketing manager or the director. Every week two or three observations are added from real conversations: an opening that worked, an objection that was new, a close that just missed. And every week things disappear from it as well, because they no longer work in today market. That sounds like a lot of work and it is, but it is exactly that maintenance which makes the difference between a team that stays sharp and a team that slowly slides back into improvisation.
The three kinds of move that make the difference
There are more, but in MSP sales these three nearly always make the difference. One: the opening with a prospect who is already somewhere. Most sellers ask whether there is “room to get acquainted”. That is not a move past anyone, that is an invitation to be turned down. The move is a concrete hook from the operational reality of that prospect, in the first two sentences. Two: the shift from price to risk. If a director starts on rates, you do not defend. You move to what it costs when something does not work. Three: the close in which you do not ask for a signature but for the next concrete step that can be taken this week.
At an MSP we worked with last year, the average number of sales conversations a month was not the problem. That number was fine. The conversion from first conversation to second sat at around 20 per cent. After a quarter in which the team sat together for 45 minutes every Friday to practise only those three moves on real cases from their week, that sat at 38 per cent. Same market, same proposition, same sellers. The pitch was never too small, the technique was too thin.
What happened in those sessions is more interesting than the number, by the way. In week one the sellers mainly told each other what they had done. In week three they started really questioning each other on word choice for the first time. In week six there were role plays on the table in which they played each other hardest prospect. Only from that moment did the playbook really start to change, because material was coming in that nobody had thought up behind a desk. That order, first share, then question, then practise, then write down, turns out to be nearly always the same. Skip one of those steps and you get a team that goes along politely but changes nothing in the conversations on Monday.
Why this feels uncomfortable for the owner
The uncomfortable part of this route is that it is not glamorous. Opening up a new vertical feels like progress. Practising objections weekly feels like school. Yet it is the second that distinguishes the MSPs growing structurally above inflation from the rest. They have the patience to learn to hold the same conversation better, instead of thinking up a new conversation. For an owner who once started as a seller it also feels unnatural, because they intuitively know how they get past and can hardly imagine their people not seeing it. But the founder intuition is not the team technique. Those two have to be built separately.
“The pitch was never too small, the technique was too thin”
The temptation to enlarge the pitch mostly comes back in quiet moments in the market. That is exactly the wrong moment to give in to it. Anyone who now keeps their ideal client profile narrow, has their sales team practise three or four concrete moves every week and treats their playbook as a living document will be at a different level in two quarters. Not because they are playing a bigger pitch, but because their players have finally learned how to get past the defender on the pitch they already have.