Ask ten MSP owners what’s in their sales stack and you’ll get ten different answers, and every one of them is a number nobody’s added up.
Here’s my bias, up front: I sell an MSP CRM. Take that for what it’s worth. But before I tell you what I think you should do about your sales stack, I want to do the boring thing first — put real numbers on the table.
Because most MSPs aren’t running one system. They’re running four or five tools duct-taped together, held up by whoever configured them last, and priced high enough that it should scare you — except nobody’s ever sat down and added it up in one sitting. So let’s do that.
The empty box problem
Here’s what nobody tells you when you buy a general CRM: it’s empty. Not empty of features, empty of context and customization. Empty of the things that every MSP needs in their CRM.
The tool doesn’t know what a true MSP prospect is. It doesn’t know what must be true before a deal becomes an opportunity. It doesn’t know the difference between a cold outbound call and an account management conversation. So somebody on your team spends a weekend building all of that by hand — custom fields, custom stages, custom pipelines. It works, kind of, for a while.
Then that person leaves.
The next rep doesn’t know why the stages are named what they’re named, so they skip the ones that don’t make sense to them. Deals pile up where they don’t belong. Your pipeline report turns into fiction, and nobody can tell you what’s real.
Ian Richardson calls this the tribal knowledge problem — the whole methodology lives in one person’s head, and when they walk out the door, it walks with them. I’ve watched this happen at MSP after MSP. The process wasn’t broken. The person who understood it just quit.
The fix isn’t a better configuration job. The fix is not needing to configure it in the first place.
What an MSP sales process has to do
Strip away the sales pitches (including mine) and there are only four jobs a sales system has to do for an MSP:
- find the right prospects
- run a process reps can’t skip steps in
- capture what happens on every call
- and tell reps what to fix before it costs you a deal
Most MSPs are buying those four jobs from four different vendors, plus a CRM to hold it all, and have never once added up what that costs. I did. Here’s the math, job by job.
Finding people to call
You set your ideal customer once — company size, industry, geography, tech stack — and something has to go find companies that match, confirm they’re a real fit, and drop them into your pipeline without anyone asking it to.
Buy that separately and you need a list vendor, an enrichment tool, and someone on your team importing and deduplicating records by hand every week. Call it $500 to $1,500 a month, and that’s before you count the staff time. And it’s 40% junk.
Running a process reps can’t skip
A guided pipeline means reps physically can’t skip qualification. Every stage has a gate, and nothing moves forward until the gate is met — whether the rep feels like it or not.
Buy that separately and you need a sales methodology subscription ($200 to $500 a month), a pipeline visualization tool if your CRM doesn’t already draw you the picture, and a manager burning ten hours every week just to figure out where deals stand.
Capturing what happens on the phone
Every call should record itself, transcribe itself, and fill in the CRM fields itself. Reps just talk. They don’t take notes, they don’t log the call, they don’t forget to update the record — because nothing was ever waiting on them to remember it.
A standalone VoIP tool that plugs into your CRM runs around $150 per user per month. A conversation intelligence tool that transcribes calls and pulls the useful bits out adds another $100 to $200 per user per month.
Telling reps what to fix
Every call needs to get scored, and the gap needs a name — this week, not in a quarterly review where the manager is working off a fuzzy memory of a call from six weeks ago.
Standalone coaching platforms with call scoring run $100 to $300 per user per month. For three reps, $300 to $900.
One bill instead of four
A good VoIP tool is a good VoIP tool. A good coaching platform is a good coaching platform. The problem is you’re paying full freight to use a quarter of four separate products to do jobs a single MSP-built CRM should already do as one feature each — and you’re paying consultants, coaches and developers (or doing the integration work yourself, in your spare time, for free.)
And none of those four tools will know what a real prospect for an MSP is out of the box. You’ll configure that part yourself, too.
Where this leaves you
The math doesn’t change based on who’s telling you about it.
If you’re currently paying for multiple pieces of your sales stack separately, you already know most of this number. Go add up the rest of it. Then give us a call to find out if there’s a better solution for your MSP.
Photo: Sorapop Udomsri / Shutterstock
