MSP Marching Orders for 2024: Realize It's All About You

Have you read the recent article about how many billionaires the channel has created? It's a perfect distillation of the core skill that channel analysts, pundits and journalists use to remain in business: misdirection. Get people to look one way while the real action is happening in another. Properly practiced, it's an amazing skill. Items disappear and reappear elsewhere. Things that were torn to pieces are suddenly whole again.

But apply it to your MSP business and it doesn't help you much. In fact, it can easily direct your attention and your focus away from where it really needs to be.

Many channel publications we've all known for years -- RCPmag.com, of course, being an exception -- are now gone. Some have been acquired and absorbed by others. Some are sourcing their content from overseas at little or no cost or value. Many make more of their money producing excellent events. What I'm concerned about is what is not showing up in these publications: you, the partner.

Why Do You Invest Your Scarce, Precious Time in Reading What You Read?
For the 35 years I spent running MSP and SI channel companies, 80-hour weeks were considered "part-time." I didn't have any "free" time, much less time to read. If I did read something, I read it because it held the promise of helping me build a bigger, better business. Back then, our business depended less and less every year on the profit realized from the sale of products, and more and more on sales of our own services. (I'm told that is still the case.)

Reading about which companies were acquiring others was not on my menu; I would hear about it in the course of conversation each day, anyway. The details weren't important to me until they were. When I entered leadership in a channel association, I started asking my peers what they read and what they wanted to see in our association newsletter. The answers were consistent: best practices, things that were working for my colleagues in the channel, strategies they were embracing that were really paying off, case studies that described how they overcame customer challenges to deliver excellent solutions.

What they were most interested in weren't stories about billionaires, but in stories about those who were just like them.

More Than Ever Before, It's All About You
As we look ahead into 2024, it has never been more important to fully embrace and appreciate what our customers are buying today. They can buy the same products anywhere and, even if they buy them from you, that doesn't mean much to your bottom line. Our own channel colleagues continue to discount so severely that product profit is, more often than not, basis points.

What customers buy from you is you. They buy into your expertise, your knowledge, your experience, your methodology and your professionalism. They buy from you instead of your competitors because they are impressed by the way you present yourself and the services you are proposing to provide. Assuming your services are superior, the more you invest in improving the way your people present those services, the more customers will choose you and the more customers you will add to your portfolio. Isn't that what you're in business to do?

Professionalism
It's a powerful word, one that we all want to apply to ourselves. Those who recognize the need to earn the right to call themselves professionals make the investments, put in the work and constantly strive to be recognized for their professionalism. In pursuit of that, they look to the industry publications they read to contribute to their efforts.

So, what can you do in 2024 to contribute to the effort to help the channel earn its reputation for being a community of professionals? Focus on your team. Evaluate how you present your practice and your offerings. Evaluate the quality of your collateral and promotional materials. Evaluate the content of your customer contact strategies.

How do you follow up on prospective customers? How do you follow up on project progress and completion? Are you building extraordinary customer experiences? Are your employees enjoying extraordinary experiences working on the team? Are you participating in activities that improve your professionalism and profitability? Are you consuming content that helps you improve?

Participation
One thing that has consistently contributed to my professional growth has been my participation in many of the great organizations, associations, societies and other groups that support the channel. I've learned much from members I've met in many of them. I've been proud to contribute my time, energy and talent to help grow some of them. Every investment has returned many times over.

"Marching Orders" was a series we published yearly back when this column was called "The Changing Channel." When the channel had changed completely enough, we shifted the focus to where it now belongs, to you the MSP. But this annual tradition hasn't changed. So, my "marching orders" for this year are simpler than ever before.

Focus on you. Your work must be totally focused on delivering value to your customer, but your ability to earn that business totally comes from you. Promote you. Show up at local and regional events to share your insights. Write for local publications to share your insight and let potential customers see it. Be very clear and specific about who you are, what you offer and why customers should choose you to help solve their IT challenges. You've carefully built your preferred stack of technologies that you include in your projects. When the makers of those products offer to co-market or co-sell with you, be sure there's as much emphasis on you and your services as there is on their products. It's all about what you do with those products, so make sure the messaging reflects that.

Learn more about the organizations that are out there to help and support you. Choose the ones that contribute most to your resolve to elevate your professionalism and your customers' perception of that professionalism.

Two things I'll ask you to do to get started. The first is to carefully and thoughtfully evaluate your own professional posture. Does your practice show up as professionally as you want it to? The second is to share your thoughts about this with me. I want to hear from you about how you're amping up your professional presence. What do you think about what I've said here. Let's launch a dialogue and get ready for an amazing new year.

Posted by Howard M. Cohen on January 09, 2024