The questions vendors ask me on almost every call, answered the way I’d answer them on the call.
I’m Alec Stanners. I help technology vendors enter, sell into, and market to the MSP channel. Fifteen years of it, across a VAR, Autotask, an enterprise software company, Datto, Tigerpaw, and bvoip/1Stream, plus the companies I work with now.
These are the questions that come up on almost every call. No hedging and no brochure language. If yours isn’t here, send it to consulting@alecstanners.com and I’ll answer it.
Start by accepting the timeline, because everything else follows from it. Plan for eighteen to twenty-four months before the flywheel turns, and fund the whole of it before you spend the first dollar.
Inside that window the work runs in a fixed order. Hire or partner with someone the community already trusts. Pick the few rooms your buyers actually attend and show up to them repeatedly rather than sponsoring broadly once. Write positioning that survives being retold by a customer when you are not there. Build your first partnerships and integrations around a named mutual customer instead of a logo pairing. And give something genuinely useful away, in public, with nothing attached.
What kills most entries is not the strategy, it is the patience. The first six to eight months produce almost no pipeline, which is normal and reads as failure to a board that budgeted two quarters. Have the two-year funding argument before you start, not at month eight when the community is just deciding whether you are different.
Goes deeper in The Channel Is a Community First and a Market Second.
Usefully, in public, without a gate. This channel is not under-marketed, it is over-marketed and under-served, and the gap between those two things is the whole opportunity.
That means volume works against you. An MSP owner gets dozens of vendor emails a day, and more of them does not make you louder, it makes you “that vendor that hammered everyone with cold calls,” which is a label that travels faster than any campaign you will run.
What cuts through is specificity nobody else can offer: the number you learned the hard way, the process you actually run on Monday mornings, the calculator anyone can use without handing over an email address. Then be in the rooms where nobody is buying anything. The only distribution in this channel that compounds is one MSP telling another.
Goes deeper in Nobody Remembers a Leading Provider of Innovative Solutions.
Because it is not really a market, it is a community that happens to buy things. MSP owners sit in peer groups, forums, and group chats that have been running for a decade, and they compare notes on vendors constantly.
That single fact changes everything downstream. Your reputation arrives before your sales team does. A bad support experience in one account becomes a known fact in fifty. And the usual levers of pressure, volume, and quarter-end discounting are visible to everyone at once, where they read as desperation rather than urgency.
The vendors who win here behave like members of the community rather than suppliers to it, and they are rewarded for it faster than in any market I have worked in.
Goes deeper in The Channel Is a Community First and a Market Second.
Plan for eighteen to twenty-four months before the flywheel turns. The first six to eight months produce very little pipeline, and that is normal, not a verdict.
MSPs spend that window watching whether you show up to the second event, whether your support answers, and whether the person you hired is still there. Most vendors who fail in this channel pull back at month eight, which is exactly when the community is deciding whether you are different.
Goes deeper in The Channel Is a Community First and a Market Second.
The honest number is higher than the first draft, and it is mostly people and presence rather than software. Budget for a channel-native hire, a consistent event presence in the rooms your buyers actually attend, and content that keeps showing up whether or not the quarter justified it.
Then commit to funding all of it for a full two years. If leadership will not fund a two-year entry, have that argument before you spend anything, not after you have hired someone the community trusted.
Goes deeper in The Channel Is a Community First and a Market Second.
You need people the community already trusts, whatever you call the title. A channel-native hire arrives with relationships and pattern recognition that take an outsider years to build, and their presence tells MSPs that someone they respect vouched for you.
Understand what you are asking of that person, though. They are lending you a reputation they spent a career earning.
Goes deeper in The Channel Is a Community First and a Market Second.
Because an MSP owner gets dozens of vendor emails a day and yours reads like the rest of them. More volume makes it worse, not better.
In a community this connected, aggressive outbound does not just fail to convert, it brands you. “That vendor that hammered everyone with cold calls” is a label that travels faster than any campaign you will run, and it sticks for years.
Only if you run the math before you sign and work the show after you commit. Most sponsorship disappointment comes from treating the booth as the strategy instead of the introduction.
Decide what winning looks like as a number, book meetings before the doors open, log every conversation within the hour, and grade the show honestly at thirty and ninety days against the number you wrote down.
Goes deeper in The Booth Doesn’t Owe You Anything, and the Event Math calculator runs the numbers for you.
Less than you think, because your first event should be small enough that a miss is a lesson rather than a six-figure hole. Thirty of the right people in a room beats three hundred of the wrong ones and costs a tenth as much.
Whatever your first budget draft says, the real all-in number usually lands forty to sixty percent higher once AV, shipping, staff travel, and follow-up are counted.
Goes deeper in Your First Event Doesn’t Need to Be Big, and the First Event Worksheet builds the plan with you.
Write the number down before the doors open, then grade against it. If the goal was twenty of the right people in the room and five deals out of it, fewer than three is a failure, three to five is passable but needs work, and five or more is a win you now have to explain so you can repeat it.
The grading matters more than the result. A win you cannot explain is luck, and a loss you cannot diagnose will happen again at the next show with a bigger invoice attached.
Goes deeper in The Event’s Over. Did You Actually Win?, and the Show Grader scores it against your own targets.
MSPs are owner-operators who run on margin and MRR, and they talk to each other constantly. That changes three things.
Your positioning has to survive being retold by a customer when you are not in the room. Your pricing has to make sense in their unit economics, per seat or per endpoint, not in your feature list. And your reputation precedes your sales team into every conversation, which means the enterprise playbook of pressure and volume actively works against you here.
Goes deeper in Nobody Remembers a Leading Provider of Innovative Solutions.
Define what a partnership means to you first, because most of what gets called a partnership is actually co-marketing. A partnership is resale or integration. Everything else is a joint webinar or an ebook, which is worth doing as long as you market it honestly as that.
Build the program around the first few real relationships rather than building a program and hoping relationships fill it.
Goes deeper in The Press Release Is Not the Partnership.
Because launching it is the starting line, not the finish. Integrations go on a shelf when the next initiative pulls the same people and everyone assumes the thing will sell itself now that it exists.
Nobody enabled the sales teams, no customer was told why it matters, and months of engineering sit there fully paid for and producing nothing. Put as much effort into the six months after launch as you put into building it.
Goes deeper in The Press Release Is Not the Partnership.
Send a person, repeatedly, before you send a budget. Until you have a trusted local face, the trusted face has to be you, and you cannot identify who is actually respected in a market from a LinkedIn search in another time zone.
Find the MSPs already using your product there, pay them for their time, and ask them how you win in their territory. Then commit for longer than a year, because owner-operators will not bet their business on a vendor who might leave.
Goes deeper in A Brand Doesn’t Cross an Ocean. A Person Does.
Every zero you add to the budget shrinks the margin for error, because the things that go wrong at a large event are the same things that go wrong at a small one, just more expensive and more public.
Scale the operational discipline at the same rate you scale the spend: a real run of show, named owners for every moving part, shipping and freight tracked like inventory, and a written definition of the win that finance and marketing both signed off on.
Goes deeper in The Budget Gets Another Zero. The Margin for Error Doesn’t.
Not with the booth. Booths are table stakes and nobody describes one to a peer three weeks later. What gets retold is the experience you built around the show: the dinner, the small room, the thing that was genuinely worth the attendee's evening.
The test is simple. Walk your attendee's day hour by hour and ask whether you would buy this for yourself on a normal day. If the answer is no, you have made an expensive impression nobody will repeat.
Goes deeper in Nobody Remembers the Booth. Everyone Remembers the Night.
Shipping it was the easy half. Adoption stalls because nobody changed the workflow around it, nobody retrained the people expected to use it, and nobody measured what good looked like before launch.
Treat it like a product launch into your own building: define the behavior you want, enable the team that has to change, and measure ramp against what the old way actually cost you.
Goes deeper in You Built Your Sales Team an AI Copilot. Now What?, and the Ramp Cost calculator puts a number on it.
Start by finding out how much of it there is, because most companies underestimate it badly. The answer is almost never a documentation project nobody finishes. It is a habit: capture the knowledge at the moment it is used, in the tool the team already works in, and make the person who holds it the editor rather than the author.
The risk is not that they leave. It is that everything they know scales at exactly the speed of their calendar.
Goes deeper in Your Company’s Most Valuable Asset Is Trapped in Someone’s Head, and the Knowledge Score sizes the exposure.
No. I take a handful of engagements a year alongside my operating role, which keeps the advice current and keeps me honest about what actually works right now.
Most engagements are project shaped: an entry plan, an event program, a go-to-market rebuild, or a sales process overhaul.
The consulting page has the detail on how that works.
Send it over. If it’s a good one it probably becomes a Field Note, and you’ll get the answer either way. I publish one of these a week on go-to-market, events, partnerships, and the lessons this channel keeps teaching me.
Working on one of these right now? Here’s where I help, or read the Field Notes and use the free tools.