3 steps for building a world-class MSP program: Dispatches from the Channel Focus Conference

To build a great channel program, it’s not enough to just sell a product anymore

Recently, I spoke at the Channel Focus Conference, an event bringing together channel professionals in the IT and telecom industry. The topic of my presentation on best practices to employ when launching or tweaking an  MSP program, drawing from my experience doing that at Accedian since joining in 2018. 

When the company was founded over 15 years ago, we were almost squarely focused on the telco market, offering our solution for service providers looking to better understand their network traffic. With this as our foundation, we established a solid footing with telcos, worked closely with service providers to understand the key challenges that their customers faced, and incorporated that knowledge to better improves every aspect of our business, including product, sales and marketing operations. 

But to accelerate growth and penetrate new markets such as the enterprise space, we needed to embrace partners and put the foundation in place to scale through our ecosystem. Our old structure didn’t allow for that. So five years ago, we began a three-pronged transformation to achieve this: we branched out to the enterprise market, virtualized our entire portfolio, and rebuilt our product from a one-off sale to a cloud-based, hosted and managed to offer. Throughout this process, here’s what we learned:

1. Start with empathy

For many, the approach to enhancing a channel program might include tactics such as offering new or refreshed benefits, introducing or enhancing behavioral-based incentives, or establishing and/or increasing partner support. All of these are very valid, and will undoubtedly help engage a number of existing or new partners. But to truly build a world-class MSP program, you need to start from a place of empathy. Understand the details of your partner’s strategy, their customer target, how they sell, and what challenges they are trying to solve. That means really embedding within the prospect’s organization and speaking with people across every department — product, marketing, sales, IT, and R&D — to show them the direct value your solution can have on their work. This also involves drawing connections both from a revenue standpoint by aligning your solution to continuous profit generation and highlighting the soft value your organization can bring to the table, like market insight, business development, or industry connections. 

2. Offer an experience, not just a product

When you sell a product to the MSP, the MSP then has to sell it to its end-user. This traditional approach puts the burden on the MSP to find the right market, buyer persona and price to make a successful sale. Instead, help them with the end-to-end business model: don’t just sell them a product, sell them an experience. With your industry knowledge, build the context around what you’re selling: explain how your product fits into larger market trends, and how it can propel prospective end-users into becoming leaders in their industry. Give the MSPs the tools and the knowledge to successfully sell your product to other companies. A consultative approach leads naturally to a more continuous relationship where you’re not just seen as a product-pusher, but an industry expert who can provide relevant market context and industry knowledge that is just as valuable as the product itself. 

3. Maintain connections, improve your offering

The third and most important part of a successful channel program is developing ongoing connections with relevant MSPs, not just approaching conversations or deals as one-off sales. Both of the above tactics — deeply understanding both the market and the MSP’s challenges, and offering your knowledge as a resource can help with addressing overarching industry trends — will position you as a leading partner. This also provides invaluable insights into our own product strategy and roadmap, keeps the vendor closer to the ever-changing customer needs and allows us to adapt quickly to market and industry changes, enhance solution capabilities based on market trends and continuously improve your channel programs.

A great product is not enough to build meaningful relationships. There will always be alternative vendors that our partners can work with. Differentiating from the competition requires not only having a great solution but also the providing of insights, consultancy, knowledge and expertise. It’s with this true empathy and understanding that you’ll build a world-class MSP program.