SaaS Product and Company strategy
MSP Strategy

Post #5 Forums, Peer groups and Shows

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This is the fifth post in this series, if you’ve not read the first post I’d recommend you skim it first for context. As a reminder, here is what I’m covering in this series:

Research, Analysts, consultants

I mentioned in my first post that when I was trying to learn more about the MSP market as a whole I did what most people would do who have built tech products for business and turned to ‘world-leading’ enterprise analyst firms for more information. This was a pointless exercise at the time as they simply did not cover MSP’s to the detail I was looking for.

This kind of makes sense when you look at the primary target for these analyst firms; they get the majority of their business from medium-large enterprises, and as I mentioned throughout, MSP’s serve the small business market – so why would an analyst firm put resources in to cover a market that their customers were not a part of?

The primary reasons for engaging analysts was to validate key assumptions about the market size/growth, ways to access the MSP and technology trends. As we were internally toying with multiple strategies and wanted to de-risk our efforts as much as possible as well as show the market/investors/board our own growth potential.

Nowadays, there are a couple of exceptions where given the market growth there is a little more coverage of the MSP space by top analyst firms, but some still seem to often blur the lines between VAR’s/SI’s/Service Providers/MSSP’s and MSP’s.

After realising the traditional analysts route was fruitless, we started to engage with several consultancies dedicated to the MSP space, these included the likes of TruMethods and Service Leadership as well as some SMB and Channel centric firms such as TechAisle and CRN. These engagements were very much worth our time and money as we learned a bunch about the sophististication of the MSP’s and the TAM/SAM/SOM which supported the persona grid I shared in the second post. 

Should you want to dive further into the MSP space, I’d be happy to point you in the right direction of a few folks who cover your tech area well.

Forums and Peer groups

MSP’s are an interesting bunch, a good portion of their decision making comes from recommendations in peer groups, events and forums. The traditional routes for acquiring customers via online marketing campaigns in a direct B2B (vendor to SMB) are not as effective as with vendor to MSP, the sooner you realise this the less time and money you will waste.

A couple of go-to forums to see what is top of mind for MSP’s are Reddit and Discord channels, below are the most popular forums (if there are others, LMK):

 

A few things I’ve learned over the years on these forums/groups:

  • Once you hit scale, you will see more commentary on your products/company and be sure to have a plan to you’d like to engage with clients and prospects via these channels 
  • Don’t be the vendor that pretends to be an MSP to either promote their product or shoot down competition, MSP’s see straight through this!
  • Don’t feel you need to respond to every comment about your product in the forum, you can get into a long winded back and forth and if it’s a negative comment quite often the MSP won’t let it drop – take it offline
  • Sophisitication of MSP’s on these forums varies – so take this into consideration when getting feedback
  • Managing/monitoring these channels is a pain and doesn’t has easily measurable ROI, but don’t be absent as MSP’s love vendor engagement

A step beyond these open online forums are several MSP-centric peer groups, these groups typically operate in a more structured framework where they run a membership program with access to documentation/training materials, expert advice/networking with peers and consultants and quite often preferential product rates from a selection of vendors.

As a vendor, I think it is worth considering engaging with a few peer groups as they can offer ways to access their membership base very easily – just be aware that there are no secrets with pricing/discounting in the MSP world (as you can see via the spreadsheet I shared earlier in the series). Quite often Peer groups will meet around a certain topic, you should see if you can bring value to the conversation whilst (discreetly) promoting your services.

MSP360 has a good article on Peer groups and lists a few of them along with sound advice about engaging with them: https://www.msp360.com/resources/blog/msp-peer-groups/

Marketing and Shows

MSP’s love shows and events, RMM/PSA vendors and Peer groups love to host these events. Your sales and marketing teams should be all over this.

The beauty of these events is that if you are focussing on the Medium/Large MSP’s, you will see these folks almost exclusively at shows. The small folks don’t typically have the budget or sophistication to attend these – nor will they get the free tickets from the hosts to attend and woo them.

There is no better opportunity to speak to so many MSP’s in such a short space of time and you can quite often sell on the show floor so ensure you have the right folks to close deal attend.  Product execs, make sure you send your PM’s to shows to help with the Discovery and feedback process! – MSP’s also love talking with the products decision makers and it can often help with the deal process.

COVID forced most events online, but it just wasn’t the same and as a vendor, the only benefit was that they were comparably cheaper to take part in, but leads and deal closures were down from in person shows.

I may sound like I like shows, but as a vendor, there are a few things you should be made aware of:

  • They are expensive! Both from a sponsorship and show floor attendance perspective
  • Sellers, SE’s and PM’s are tied up all week and it can impact the rest of the business whilst they are out 
  • There are a bunch of “SWAG hunters” that got a free ticket to a show and they just want your merch
  • Most importantly, the hosts are not your best friends, they often compete with you – so don’t expect any favours!

The last point is becoming more and more evident with RMM’s moving from an open marketplace of 3rd party vendor offerings, to acquiring more and more of the suite of technologies the MSP’s use and pushing them to their base. There have been a few times where the host openly competed with top-tier sponsors during shows, bad mouthing them during keynotes/presentations – even more shady tactics have been exhibited by hosts, but I won’t go into these here!

I touched on ‘traditional’ online marketing not being as effective with MSP’s and what I have covered so far in this post alludes to the alternatives, however, you should dedicate budget to online marketing but don’t expect to use the same tactics as when you are dealing with direct sales to business.

Webinars and regular thought leadership on MSP topics are often well received and there are good examples of companies that nail this and have great success over competitors, despite having inferior products and services.

Beyond shows, forums and online marketing, from my experience, the most effective way to access MSP’s is through an integration with their chosen RMM or PSA. I’m not saying that “if you build it they will come”, but would say if you don’t have an integration you will severely hamper your chances on accessing the MSP market at scale – more on this in the next post!

Paul Barnes
Author: Paul Barnes

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