An Open Letter to Vendors from Your Friendly MSP Customer

An Open Letter to Vendors from your Friendly MSP Customer

All vendors want their customers to be raving fans. I am a true raving fan of a few vendors, like Rewst and Kirkpatrick Price, who have made a lasting impact on my business for the better. These vendors started strong with excellent kickoff engagements, tailored their outreach to meet our needs, and steadily deepened our use of their services. We believe every vendor relationship can be just as terrific, and we feel it’s absolutely possible if they follow these simple steps.

Help Me Safely Innovate with AI

The writing is on the wall: generative and agentic Artificial Intelligence will revolutionize our industry. We fully expect to rely on our vendors for AI solutions, especially the seamless integrations woven into your platform. We need vendors who can help us reduce risks as we increase our utilization of AI. As MSPs, we have a sacred duty to our clients to avoid creating disruptions or data leakage. Your role as a vendor is to help us protect our clients.

All the while, we do not want our clients to be treated as guinea pigs and test subjects for your AI experimentations. We also cannot expose our critical workflows to your beta-versions or fresh-off-the-line code. We want robust AI solutions built for us, not through us.

Help Me Understand Your Vulnerabilities

MSPs require a lot of tools to do our job. We understand that these tools will have security flaws or issues that are discovered and need to be patched. These shortcomings might be due to design or coding errors, or simply shifts in attack tactics by the threat actors we’re all fighting, day in and day out. What we need from you is clarity about what vulnerabilities need to be prioritized. We also want the simplest process you can think of for addressing the known issues with minimal disruption or operational impact.

Help Me Optimally Engage with Your Platform

As MSPs, we are looking for vendors who build platforms and tools with us in mind. The base package should at least include:

• Single Sign-on (SSO)
• Only 1 interface we need to authenticate into
• Robust Application Programing Interface (API)
• Encryption of all data, and backups of all data, in your platform
• SOC 2 Type II audit reports or similar

A good rule of thumb when designing your API is to match the functionality of your standard web interface. Any metric, field, or data point displayed on your platform or in your reports should be accessible from your API interface as well. Related to this, please make sure that our Team has a direct way to get responsive support from your engineers, specifically the individuals who are intimately versed in your API and can troubleshoot common SSO issues.

Help Me Attract New Customers

Every MSP needs help attracting actual leads. We want opportunities to connect with prospective customers. This doesn’t mean sales enablement materials like 1-page brochures that we can co-brand. We aren’t excited about pre-made pitch decks, helpful explainer videos, or even Market Development Funds. These resources are fine, but what every MSP craves most is help getting actual leads. High-quality leads that want our MSP services. A vendor that can actually produce leads through a list of businesses and contacts will be a rare standout. Work directly with us to help land at least one deal.

We would sing that vendor’s praise from every available rooftop if they got shoulder to shoulder with us and directly helped us grow their business.

Help us identify, nurture, and land a lead, and we are on a fast track to becoming raving fans.

Help Me Solve My Core Need First

When I engage with a vendor for a solution, I am well aware that there are multiple features and capabilities that will impress me. However, I’m almost always only interested in a single aspect of your solution when I’m ready to buy your services. I just need to know if you’re providing the solution I need, what the price is, and how to get started. Nearly every MSP is a tinkerer or a Readme.txt reader (in other words, we read the manual), and would prefer to dig into the tool on our own terms. So even if you think a demo is needed, and even if you know that there’s some real dazzle in the other cool features, save it until I have had at least a few weeks working with your solution on my own terms. I’m super busy and stretched thin, and you likely have one really good shot to show me the extras. Save it until I’m already content that your solution is what I was looking for, then I’ll be receptive to additional things it can do for my business.

We want to land on your website, assess whether you are what we are looking for in a matter of seconds, get a price, and begin spinning up a full-featured trial. That’s our ideal. Remove as many hoops to jump through as possible. Don’t make your sales team gatekeepers that I feel I have to tolerate or trick to get past. That just isn’t a healthy dynamic for either of us to be in. Don’t try to upsell me to a bigger offer and delay me into budget expansion discussions with my board.

Help me buy your solution with peace of mind… I'm not looking for upgraded leather seats and aftermarket detailing.

Help Me by First Finding What’s Unique About Me

Want my attention? Show me what you noticed that is unique about my MSP. Ensure your sales reps and account managers take the time to check out our website and social media to identify something that resonated and stood out. This tells me what stands out from the thousands of other MSPs, which helps me sharpen my message and differentiators. That kind of insight sticks, and we won’t soon forget who gave it to us.

Just as importantly, don’t treat all MSPs as the same. Our industry is relatively young, having formed only about 20 years ago. Unlike dentists or accountants, MSPs don’t have formal education paths, a regulatory body, or standard pricing. There are efforts towards standardization, but as an industry we are still far from alignment. If prospects struggle to tell MSPs apart, your ice-breaker feedback doesn’t just flatter us: it helps us cut through the noise and win.  

Help Me in My Quest to Bring Value

All MSPs want to provide a breadth and depth of technology services and expertise at affordable, predictable rates. We want to serve businesses at a reasonable price and with clear terms.

Help me find ways to bring delight to our customers, to speak to business outcomes that my MSP can achieve through leveraging your tools and solutions. Help me help my customers with their needs for technology services.  

Please do not just sell through my business. Please do not appeal to what you think is my desire to exit the business and sell out.

Be the Best Vendor Checklist

If you want MSPs like me to become a raving fan, here’s the items to check off the list:

1. Respectful buying process
2. Strong kickoff
3. Design with MSPs in mind
4. Treat me as unique
5. Fuel our growth
6. Reduce risks
7. Bring value to our customers

If you do these things for my MSP, we will continue to expand our business with you, give you referral business, act as a reference, and make everyone who works for you feel like a hero as we give you shout-outs and high-fives every chance we get. It’s a small circle of partners who can earn our loyalty and love, but there’s always room for another celebrated vendor!

I welcome your thoughts and engagement on this open letter. Reach out to me on LinkedIn and let's chat!