Debunking the Myth: Are MSPs Really Bad at Sales? with Ryan Morris

[00:00:44] I don't talk much about sales on this show, but I want to take a couple of myths on about sales in the MSP space. Are MSPs bad at sales? What about growing beyond owner-led sales? Ryan Morris of Morris Management Partners joins me for what promises to be a lively conversation. Welcome to the Business of Tech Lounge, the live version of the Business of Tech Podcast. It's Wednesday, January 29th, 2025, and I'm Dave Sobel. We'll be taking questions and comments throughout the show.

[00:01:14] We're always happy to answer them, so make sure to put them in chat. If you have a question, we will happily respond to it. Now, I want to thank Sales Builder, our Patreon sponsor whose support makes this show possible. Focus on your IT sales workflow with the power of automation and visit them at salesbuilder.com. That's B-U-I-L-D-R dot com. A reminder, I'll be keeping an eye on that chat. We'll take your questions.

[00:01:39] Ryan Morris is the principal consultant at Morris Management Partners, bringing over 25 years of experience in sales, marketing, and business sectors. His firm specializes in assisting providers in enhancing their services practices to multiply profitability. He's also my co-host on the Killing It podcast and a dear friend of the show. Ryan, welcome back. Thank you very much, sir. Thanks for having me in. I am super excited to do this because we're going to riff a little bit.

[00:02:09] And one of the pieces that kind of almost got us started for listeners, you know, there's always a text thread or an email thread going on about something. And last week I was having some conversations where I was talking about some of the trends in the market. And someone brought to me saying that, well, you know, key profitability is a core concern for MSPs. And I kind of had to step back and pause and say, well, yeah, core profitability is also a problem for anybody who runs a business.

[00:02:38] And I didn't want to identify it. It wasn't a particular market problem that I was focused on. And I thought I wanted to start with you and sort of asking, like, talk to me about this. MSPs are bad at sales myth. Like this just feels like something we keep saying. And I'm not sure it's true. I'm pretty sure you have an opinion here. I do have an opinion. And what I will say to you is the two questions are exactly the right way to approach it.

[00:03:03] In the baseline analysis, you would not be a business, much less an MSP if the human who started it did not possess in their own skill set, a combination of technical, operational and promotional skills. Right? They have to be able to do that because you start as a sole proprietor, you maybe bring along one or two collaborators. You have to go get a client, another, another to get yourself started.

[00:03:32] By definition, that is a requirement or else you just wouldn't be in business. Right. At a baseline level, it's not true that MSPs are not good at selling. It is true that they're not good at scaling the sales motion and making it a machine, but they possess the individual skill.

[00:03:51] But I want to even challenge that a little bit, Ryan, because I feel like this is one of those tropes that we're just kind of holding on to because I can easily point to a large section of this market that is now private equity backed. And you don't get to that sales guys without building a sales engine. Right? And we also know that there are, I mean, there are large regional MSPs that aren't privately equity backed that are now scaling that.

[00:04:17] I'm starting to get to the point where I'm just not comfortable with this conversation of MSPs are bad at sales. No, some are choosing not to invest in that skill set as a business owner for the same reason they may not choose to invest in operations or they may not choose to be good at HR or they may not choose. Like they're choosing that. Yes. Now I get it. Entrepreneurs have to wear every hat. Like I get all that.

[00:04:39] But I feel like we're at the point now where this industry has at least been around long enough that I don't think I'm comfortable with that broad statement anymore. I'm willing to 100% acknowledge the entrepreneurial journey that's required here. Right? That you don't necessarily just immediately learn everything. Totally reasonable.

[00:04:59] But to say you're not good at it or don't understand it is literally the, well, you just haven't gone out and Googled all of the books on the topic or the lectures or the people. You just haven't taken the time to try. Well, there are. Am I wrong? Like, am I oversimplifying this, Ryan? There, I think you are. There's a little bit of oversimplification in there. Okay. It is absolutely true that there are PE backed and venture funded and high scale MSPs in the industry.

[00:05:28] But standard distribution of any population is exactly what we are dealing with here. Top two or 3% very large. We're talking hundreds, if not thousands of employees, a very established marketing and sales engine that produces a continuous pipeline of qualified opportunities that yield growth in revenue in the short term, as well as that long term annuity of lifetime value. Right? That's the top two or 3%.

[00:05:56] Then there's ish 12% where you're going to find people who they've hired a couple and they do okay, but they still don't have a really accurate predictability on what sales will be in what I will call the medium term, right? Anything beyond 90 days out. Do you know what things currently in your pipeline are actually going to convert and begin to pay? I'd say ish on about 12%.

[00:06:24] Outside of that, 85% of the industry, sole proprietor or owner led exclusive in the revenue operation. That is not a lack of capability. You are 100% correct. It's not something that we can't do. It is something that we have voluntarily chosen not to do. And it's not just because we haven't processed the time. There's a risk and a fear factor associated with it.

[00:06:52] Beyond the comfort zone of the typical techie in this world, those of us that came up through the technology side usually prefer to talk to the software than to talk to the humans. And especially when it comes to asking for money, right? So it is true that they can learn. I believe literally 100% of us can learn to sell individually as well as organizationally very effectively. But about 85% of us have not.

[00:07:22] Okay, cool. Like, so let's acknowledge that. Like, but again, I want to make this a little bit more of the responsibility of the owners. They've, this is choice. These are all active choices, right? It's how you spend your time. Now, I also want to get a little bit of your sense of the linkage between those businesses that have chosen an operational growth plan that is more about, you know, of sort of value creation for their own ownership. Right? So there are some organizations that say, I want to be over led.

[00:07:51] I only want to have a sales pipe that allows me to grow at a very controllable rate, kind of steady linear growth or just enough to grow this business. Do it. That is a very legitimate sales strategy as opposed to you can also legitimately choose to say, I want to invest in this. I want to process oriented. I need it to scale up. Do you have some figures on the linkage between that investment in sales and intentionality of goal? Yeah. In fact, it's exactly the right way to think about this.

[00:08:21] Quality of sales is not directly the same as volume of sales, right? There are plenty of very large organizations out there that I would argue are bad at selling because they rely on pricing, discounting and other profit eroding techniques in order to win a high volume of business. You can say you closed a lot of deals, but if you close them all at single digit margin, are you really good at selling? I would argue no. It is not about volume.

[00:08:50] It's about predictability, reliability, profitability. Okay. In other words, I make it a machine part of the business so that I devote the correct amount of effort and energy in the correct types of activities to cause the outcome that I can predict 90 days in advance. I can rely on that revenue coming in and that's what gives me the freedom as a business operator to make other investment decisions.

[00:09:17] But volume is a very intentional thing, right? Some of the most profitable margin calculation businesses in our industry are 10 employees. They do a few million in top line and you wouldn't believe the lake house that the owner enjoys on the weekends, right? They are phenomenally effective and they go at exactly the pace they want to go. Think of it this way. There's two basic kinds of animals in every business category.

[00:09:47] There is an operational effectiveness animal and there is a scale or volume animal. It is necessary to eventually, you know, think of it like a four box matrix. It's eventually necessary to be good at both of those things. But we begin with the intention of I want to run this well and therefore generate a profit as opposed to I want to make it large and therefore make a profit.

[00:10:15] Those two types of animals are both out there and they can coexist. Both of them could be good at selling. Both of them could also be bad at selling. A reminder for what I know we've got a few people watching live. You can put questions into the chat window. We'll take them all. We will also have a dedicated question section for those. If you feel like the top of your question may be slightly off topic, that's okay. We're here. We really will answer sort of anything. So right.

[00:10:41] I kind of before I want to move into a little bit more of complexity, like I really kind of want to look at this myth itself as we move on from the MSPs are bad at sales. I actually think that I've come to the conclusion, having done this for enough to have gray hairs over it, that I think I'm no longer willing to accept that. I think I'm willing because I think it's an excuse that one of two groups is making. Either the MSPs themselves are going, oh, I'm just bad at sales. Okay.

[00:11:09] You're choosing not to learn that skill. I also think vendors reinforce that because it is a good excuse up the pipe of the ineffectiveness of some vendor programs. Like, so for example, they can just sort of, oh, we put this together, but you know, MSPs are bad at sales. Like it's a good way of kind of cap. So both sides in a way have real motivation for this myth to stick around. We're both guys that are not invested in the myth.

[00:11:39] Am I off base? React to my premise a little bit. No, you see me chuckle here because I will argue to you. I'll go a step beyond where you just went. I'll go a step beyond that. Not only is it a laziness factor for some people to go, oh, it's just too hard. I don't know how to do that. So I won't even try. Sit ups are also hard, right? So are pushers, but that doesn't mean you can't learn to do them. But it is also a lazy way out from a vendor's perspective of you can't blame me. It's those guys over there. They're not the ones who are good at it.

[00:12:09] What I will say flat out in both of these cases, it is, it is not just in our interest. For MSPs to be good at selling. It is from a vendor's point of view, literally the only way they will ever achieve their revenue and margin targets. In other words, if I'm an MSP and I sell what makes me comfortable, I'm good at it. I can predict this stuff.

[00:12:38] I'm good at selling, right? Right. And you are my vendor and you say, you know, I get paid based on the number of seats that you install. It would be in my best interest for you to sell some more of those seats. It is, it's not enough to just look across the aisle and go, it's his fault. He's not good at it. That's why I can't grow. But if you would like to have any sort of influence on your own destiny as a vendor, it is in your

[00:13:04] own direct self-interest to teach, to empower, to enable, to give tools and programs and resources, coaching, training, whatever it takes to assist that population, to learn how to sell more effectively. Because they are your revenue engine. And if you're a channel company, they're literally a hundred percent of your revenue. So Ryan, I'm going to direct you to Shiloh, who's watching, who brought up the, you know,

[00:13:31] a bit of a reaction to our statements, you know, saying in his opinion there, most MSPs aren't good at sales. He thinks the larger problem is linking finance with sales. He is all, he's now working on becoming the director of sales and marketing as well as CEO. He's acknowledged as being a born sales guy or born tech guy. You've worked with a number of solution providers in the, who have that reaction. Talk me through the education that is useful to help like Shiloh specifically,

[00:13:59] and that sort of example, broadly for people who face that problem. What is, what are the skill sets or investment in training or reading? How do you progress to do that? I'm trying struggling to link finances to sales. See, and that, that, that's exactly the mentality that we've learned. We've learned through all of our interactions. We've learned that you do begin with finance and that makes sales the logical next step, right? Think of it like this.

[00:14:28] Success in our business is, is defined by two things. Number one, the quality of customer experience that makes them want to be here and stick around. And number two, the scoreboard, the end result of net income that we can consistently and reliably generate from the organization. Okay? I need to treat my customers well, such that they will buy from me at a price that generates a margin and I can do profitability. Okay. Net income is that success metric.

[00:14:58] Well, where does net income come from? Well, it's a finance calculation. Revenue minus cost of goods equals gross margin minus SG&A equals net income. That is the, the essential operating mechanism of any business under the sun. The question you got to ask yourself when you put that, that finance hat on is, okay, what could I do to make that number go in my favor? I could make revenue go up. I could make cost of goods go down per revenue unit.

[00:15:27] I could make my multiplier in sales, general and administrative investments produce more effectively. Right? There's people always sit around and go, Oh, growing a business, it's hard. No, it's not. The strategy of growing a business is as clear as the nose on our face, right? It is, you increase revenue, you decrease cost of operations, you multiply the productivity

[00:15:54] of your expense line items and the business gets bigger. The question is how, how do you actually do that? Number one, there has to be two basic things, whether you are sole proprietor learning it for yourself or whether you are trying to build or teach an organization to do this at your organization. There has to be the combination of selling tactics techniques like the traditional stuff you would read in a book.

[00:16:23] And then there has to be the psychological element of engagement, connection, trust and persuasion. Okay? If you think about it, you can cold call 44 times, you can schedule 14 meetings, you can have five initial proposal conversations, you can submit three statements of work and still come out of that with absolutely nothing if you don't have the humanity on the other side of the conversation.

[00:16:51] I think almost all sales training is almost all about the tactics, the techniques, like let's get down to, how do you write the email? What's the headline? If you don't have the confidence in yourself that when you send that out, the human will go, you know what? I believe what he just said. I feel like he actually understands what I'm trying to accomplish. I feel like he has my interests at heart. I would be willing to listen to what he has to say.

[00:17:20] That is not salesmanship. You'll notice that the best school teachers also have that. The best doctors also have that. The best HR managers, finance managers have the ability to make another human go, you know what? I wasn't going to do the thing you asked, but because you asked me and I felt that way, now I'm going to do that. People think that's salesmanship. It's not psychology.

[00:17:47] Well, first of all, I want to make sure it's Skyler. I want to get that right. So my apologies to that, but I did ask to check because I am horrible at this. Ryan, I want to get your, because I also think that there's something, an element of this that I want to get your reaction to. And I think most providers, particularly those that are sort of sub, let's say 1.5 million, right? I'm essentially trying to say where size of deal is generally smaller. I think they also make this process a whole lot more complicated than it needs to be in certain elements of it,

[00:18:17] because they're techies, because they're leaning into, I've got to build a process. I've got to like, my advice for any small business owner, if you consider yourself a small business owner is to never do a proposal, never do like complicate. Like everything should be, we can sit down in a meeting, we can talk about it. And then if we agree on it, I just need to write it down and send you a bill. Like it literally has to be that simple. Now there is a, I absolutely want to have, there needs to be a services agreement.

[00:18:46] There needs to be for the legal stuff, but the, all the extra stuff of proposals and requests for proposals and RFP responses. And all of that, I think is actually a distraction from getting to the business that if you, that most people, if they literally just focus on, I just need to be better at talking to people, asking what them, they need agreeing on it.

[00:19:10] And then us getting to a verbal close will make most of these problems go away. Ryan again, react a little bit and tell me how am I, am I oversimplifying here? No, no. In fact, I have said this literally countless times to salespeople in a training or in a consulting environment. Everybody thinks that the most difficult part of selling is closing, right? How to get them to sign on the line, which is dotted. Everybody thinks that's the difficult thing.

[00:19:40] And I will tell you, if you targeted the right person and you actually understood what they need and you recognize that you can provide value and you have a way to connect with empathy and have a conversation about, you need this. That's what we do. Here's the benefit that I could deliver. Literally, the most effective closing technique in sales is so you're good, right? Let's go. And I'm not exaggerating that at all.

[00:20:10] Literally, it should be so we're on the same page. Let's go. Okay, cool. Here's the first step. Here's the second step. Closing is not about tricks. It's not about learning the techniques and the secrets of selling. It's not about pressure. It's not about leverage or power. Closing is about connection.

[00:20:28] And if you did the first part of it right, I believe there's far more value in qualified openings than there will ever be in aggressive closings, right? It's just at the end of it, you get down to metrics, right? I believe there's 5,000 metrics you can track in a sales organization. Most of them are not actually all that effective. The one thing that matters most of all is at bats.

[00:20:57] In other words, qualified first meetings with a potential client, right? Whatever it takes to get there, whatever you do after there, if you are just constantly in conversations with people who might want to buy the thing that you sell because they need it, and you knew that, that's why you targeted them. And you can have a first conversation, whether you want to sell one a month or one a day in your organization.

[00:21:27] Qualified first meetings is the metric that rules all the other metrics. Yeah. And Skylar's also pointing out the confidence in all of these. It goes a very long way. It does. Just literally being confident on it. Now, I want to also talk a little bit about the myth of MSP only, right? I think I want to bring this up a little bit because it's another area where I, in particular, am starting to look at where this market is going.

[00:21:52] And I'm starting to say, like, I actually think not only is it not realistic and not what actually is happening on the ground, I think it's actually pretty dangerous. And let me talk a little bit about where my thinking is and get you a little bit of your reaction as somebody who's studying this. You know, as I look at what's happening, right? I'm a believer in the MSP model, right?

[00:22:13] I believe in the idea of trying to align your business as delivering technology service to be much more based on outcomes and uptime. And that puts you in alignment with your customer who also wants uptime. Now, we can deliver that a bunch of different ways. I can just fix your problems, right? That is a way of doing it. And I can charge a certain amount for that.

[00:22:35] But what I also will look at is, is that a lot of the work that's now going that we have traditionally hung our hats on when we talk about managed services and technology, it's actually going away with an element of automation and certainly an element of artificial intelligence. And I use that broadly. The example I'm using right now is I literally just watched two business owners talk about interaction on LinkedIn, where they were both MSPs and one was visiting the other.

[00:23:04] And these are both of size. They both run world class help desk organizations. And they were having trouble, one CEO having trouble connecting to the host's Wi-Fi network. And rather than call his own health help desk, he fired up ChatGPT, asked for questions, solutions to the problem and was dialed and his own laptop was fixed by the bot.

[00:23:25] And if you don't think your own services are going to get destroyed by that ability by the bots to solve this problem, you're not paying attention because two world class MSPs did not use their own help desk to get this solved. And so what else, but what I'll also say is like all of the interesting stuff around productivity layer and business process automation, it's really difficult to put that into MSP-ish services.

[00:23:51] It's really hard to build an all you can eat consulting model. It's really hard, really hard to do fixed price engagements on this kind of stuff, particularly if you don't know it. But if you're completely allergic to time and materials and you're not valuing your expert advice, if in a world where your expert advice is the value. Yeah. I see trouble ahead. Now, talk to me about what's happening in the reality or your reaction to this change.

[00:24:20] Yeah, no, you're exactly right. And I noticed the comment from Skylar there that came by. We need to stop talking about the tools and the toys that we sell and operate and start talking about the business challenges and the outcomes that we address. Right. That has to be the shift in the conversation, but it goes a step further than that.

[00:24:40] If you are only managing the systems that a customer already has, the A number one metric for your margin control is going to be consistency and static control of the stack of technology. Right. We all want all of our customers to standardize on our tools, our stacks. They will a buy everything we sell and be never buy anything that we don't sell. And we do. Well, guess what? That's the opposite of cutting edge technology.

[00:25:09] That's the opposite of new and innovative systems that did not used to be standardized. We have to embrace a make today's stuff work while at the same time embracing invent and improve tomorrow's stuff to do things that we cannot currently do. If we're not doing both of those at the same time, then we are by definition yesterday's news. Right. We are servicing yesterday's stuff.

[00:25:37] I look at it from just a question of like put on raw sales guy hat and think about it this way. The enemy of a sales guy is a competitor having a qualified first meeting with my decision maker inside my install base. Right. Account control where my customer asks me about every question, takes my advice on every solution and purchases everything that I recommend.

[00:26:06] That's account control. That's the holy grail from a sales perspective. But if I say and I get why people do this contract based recurring revenue on a naturally aligned set of metrics, that's the definition of MSP. That's the most profitable, most reliable business model in the world.

[00:26:25] But if you don't add to that the new products that they purchase, the new projects that they deploy, the changes, the customizations, the integrations that keep that thing modern and going. Then by definition, they're not going to stop doing that stuff. They're going to go talk to somebody else about doing that for them. When you say I only manage the stuff, you should go to any three letter acronym DMR out there in the world.

[00:26:53] Just buy it. You acquire it. I will manage it for you. I don't want to take the hardware or whatever because it's super low margin. Okay. You might maintain a higher level of margin on your net revenue, but you're going to have less and less net revenue because those customers are going to buy from other people. Right. You can't invite the wolf into the sheep's den.

[00:27:17] You just you can't do that. You have to be able to control the conversation and lead the customer where they need to go. Don't try to be everything to everyone. Don't try to sell literally everything under the sun, but have a logical, conclusive understanding. This is what my customer is trying to accomplish. These are all the pieces and parts.

[00:27:41] Some of it will be buying it. Some of it will be deploying it. Some of it will be managing it. I should get paid for technical and professional services and product transactions in all three of those buckets. If I'm not, they're buying from somebody else. Right. It's kind of brings up a good point there. Like this is the this is the transformation. I'm going to write everyone, you know, keep throwing those questions and comments in that we'll take them.

[00:28:07] Now, right. I think I'm starting to becoming increasingly concerned that there's a real focus on too much on like the fundamentals and not enough of the ability to transform here. And I think that I'm playing a little bit on something you've commented on, you know, to me and I want you to expand on it for listeners here. You know, one of the concerns is, you know, we know that all the vendors need to go through channel partners to deliver their solutions.

[00:28:34] But ultimately, let's also point out that they want to sell product and software. Right. Which is a thing that is a subset of the solution that the customer wants to get. And if we focus too much on just the fundamentals and moving those bits, we're missing out on all the solution portion that's going to be important. And ultimately, a lot of the technical concerns are kind of starting to go away in a lot of ways.

[00:29:00] You know, I think there's a lot of room to go on this, but my statement of most technology just sort of works if you implement it right. It just sort of works. And so like making it useful and implementable and then like, you know, making customers really embrace it to be effective with it. That's the interesting stuff. But ultimately, actually, a lot of vendors are not going to be able to really help you there. You've got as a provider of those solutions, you need to be beyond just the fundamentals running your business.

[00:29:28] You've got to be focused on that. Right. And give me a little bit of the way you're thinking about what's necessary for that transformation and, you know, what the risks are for providers and in fact, like kind of the risks to vendors of not helping them transform. Yeah. See, again, this is to raise up three levels. Right. There's the fundamentals. How do you run your business? And then how do you populate that thing with revenue? A couple more steps above that in the in the conversation.

[00:29:58] We have to say, how does technology actually accomplish the intended purpose for which it was designed and built and sold? How does that actually happen? When a customer acquires the technology, it is effectively and successfully implemented. They use it well and correctly and achieve the outcome that they want.

[00:30:18] Okay. Statistics will say that ish 90% of all vendors sell with to or through a channel partner for at least a portion of their revenue. The statistics will show that 75% of all marketplace transactions involve at least one solution provider, non vendor who is in there doing value added work.

[00:30:41] All of this speaks to the fact that we live in a world where we are inventing continually new technology that is above and beyond what our current capabilities are. It cannot arrive in the customer's hands successfully implemented, deployed, managed and utilized.

[00:31:03] It cannot accomplish that without the assistance, the helping hand of qualified professionals who take it from point A to point B. That job in the middle, that's more difficult, right? It's not just I understand your product. I can tell people about it. And it's also not just I understand IT department operations and I could outsource that for you and save some money. It's literally the space in between. It is I understand your business and what you're trying to accomplish.

[00:31:31] I understand all the technologies that are available that need to be deployed to achieve your intended outcome. And I'm the one who can take a non technical business conversation and stitch it together with a purely product technical conversation and actually make this stuff work, right? I have to be aware of business. I have to be aware of technology.

[00:31:54] And I have to be the one who thinks carefully about how do you actually use this stuff to accomplish your end objective. Just one escalator that I'll put on that. We all know that end user organizations are under cost pressure. There's not enough qualified people. IT departments are shrinking across the board. Companies are spending a higher percent of total revenue than ever before on acquiring new technology.

[00:32:23] The technologies are more deeply integrated with baseline business operations than they have ever been. They have fewer humans on staff who are trained and qualified or even have the hours in the day to deal with all of that. How do you solve that problem? You need channel partners who A know how to understand the needs and connect the dots from a sales perspective, but they also have to be profitable, right?

[00:32:51] If I am a reseller of your technology and I make ish margin on it and I struggle to survive, you know what I won't do that would benefit you? I won't hire any more salespeople. I can't afford them. I won't run five more marketing campaigns. That's too expensive. I won't hire more service technicians. Who can afford that overhead and fixed costs? I cannot, will not grow my organization unless I am profitable.

[00:33:17] The only way the vendors, not just the pure play 100% channel guys, literally every vendor of every technology on the planet, the only way you grow is if your channel causes you to grow. The only way your channel can cause you to grow is if they actually are profitable. If you do not actively assist them in making that change to become less product, more outcome, more business savvy.

[00:33:45] If you are not the one who teaches them that, A, direct hit to your revenue pipeline and B, do you know who they are going to respect and prefer to do business with in the future? Your competitor who did invest that time and effort to make them more successful. So let's put our partner hat on for a moment, right? Yeah. So your partner, you're trying to own this problem yourself. Your vendor may not be like, in a perfect world, a vendor is going to step in and help you, right? That would be, that's great, right?

[00:34:15] And I'll say with a smile, Ryan, you help vendors do that. But let's actually help, let's help the provider here for a minute. Like what if they're a provider who has the challenges you've just outlined and they're saying, I got to figure this out because I'm not going to get rescued by my vendors. What do you tell them the first one or two steps are that they need to be thinking about for that transformation? Content and tactics, right? There's the two sides of things.

[00:34:42] On the content side, you do need to learn the process of selling the steps and the tactics and whatnot. But you need to be able to learn the reasons why people say yes, the reasons why they say no, and be able to identify people who are most likely to say yes, and then go have a lot of first conversations with those people, right? That's the content of being a salesperson.

[00:35:07] And the outside of that activity is all the paperwork, all the process, all the forms, all the hopefully data in CRM, all of the things that go on around issuing proposals and We've lost Ryan there, who I know has some tons of tons to say. Now, in the interest of time, oh, he's back. He's back. Look at that. So Ryan, we lost you there for a moment. I'm going to back you up.

[00:35:34] And I'm going to say start for the let's give, let's make sure we got the whole complete answer for everyone that can hear it. Yep. Now, absolutely. What is what what is those first starting points for a solution provider to really tackle this problem? Absolutely. So two sides of the conversation. One side is what I would call the inside game, the content of being a salesperson.

[00:35:55] We need to learn how it is that people make decisions, why they say yes, why they say no, and target those people in quantity to have a lot of those conversations. The other side, I'll call it the outside game, right? It's the paperwork, it's the forms, it's the data in CRM, it's issuing proposals and tracking down pricing from a distributor.

[00:36:17] A, the person if you are small, especially the person who has the authority in the organization to commit the resources to a customer and say, yes, we will do that. And it will be done by this time. That human is the one who needs to learn how to have those persuasive conversations. That person is the very last one in the organization who should be doing the outside game.

[00:36:41] Okay, that is not that is not just me pandering to sales guys saying don't make me fill out paperwork. Being good at paperwork is very different from being good at persuading humans to give you money. You need more time in persuasion to engage. That's where the senior people should be focused. All the tactics, all the paperwork, all the systemizing of it, you need to hire somebody.

[00:37:08] Either take someone on your team who has the bandwidth and the wherewithal and assign them to do that. Or go hire an admin who can come in and do that stuff for you. Because if you don't free yourself from all of that busy work, it is remarkably easy for even professional salespeople to go, yeah, you know, I was going to call call. I was going to go to that event. I was going to have five more meetings with customers.

[00:37:34] But I had to work on the proposal and I was focused on the paperwork and I needed to capture my data. It's the world's most greedy excuse, right? Well, I was working on too much paperwork, so I didn't have any time to sell. Separate those two activities. You go learn how to sell some things and persuade humans to give you money. Hire somebody to take care of the admin stuff for you. And as we said earlier, and minimize that too.

[00:38:02] Oftentimes, particularly for small companies, they overdo what's required to get this right. You need a standard services agreement and sometimes you just put on a piece of paper the list of things you agreed to do. And that's the statement of work. It doesn't have to be more complicated. Well, Ryan, you and I can do this for hours, but we don't have that much time. If people are interested in asking you questions afterwards, what's the best way to get in touch with you? Probably two ways, right? So you can find me on LinkedIn.

[00:38:29] I am ryanmorris303 on LinkedIn. And I am also at email. I am rmorris at morrismp.com. So both of those are good and efficient ways to get in touch with me. And if you can't tell, I love talking about this stuff. So reach out. I'd love to have a conversation. And I know I will have you back in the future and I will see you also on Killing It, which we're recording soon and will be coming out shortly. Ryan, thanks for joining me today.

[00:38:59] Now, I want to preview an interview that I've got coming out this weekend. Eric Solomon is the CEO of Cypago discussed the critical intersection of cybersecurity and governance risk and compliance. And he shed a lot of light on how automation and AI are enhancing the compliance process. He really talked to me about the importance of human expertise in that area, particularly about navigating the complexity of regulatory requirements. And I was really interested in what he had to say. Here's a preview of that interview.

[00:39:29] And I sort of want to say like over the next 18 months, what are the things that you're thinking about that are major trends that you're keeping an eye on? I think the number one, and that's imminent, not just imminent. I think that that has already started like a year or a year and a half ago, increased scrutiny. Regulators all across globally in the US in specific, but not just North America.

[00:39:52] Governments and other governing bodies, they want to, in Europe just now, turn DORA and NIST in effect starting January 2025. So these type of governing bodies, they would like to make sure to ensure that companies, financial institutions and other type of organizations are formally following the requirements. So that's not just you mentioned tick the box earlier in this conversation. This is no more tick the box type of exercise.

[00:40:21] Now, my Patreon supporters already have this. If you want to listen now, it'll drop on the weekend on YouTube and the podcast feed. If you're interested, I really do encourage you to reach out and listen to it. You can visit patreon.com slash MSP radio to get access right now. Now, I want to thank Sales Builder, who's our Patreon sponsor, whose support makes this show possible. Focus on your IT sales workflow with the power of automation and visit them at salesbuilder.com. That's B-U-I-L-D-R dot com.

[00:40:50] Now, vendors, you too can get your name mentioned on the live show. It's a simple monthly subscription. Visit patreon.com slash MSP radio to learn more. And listeners, the best way you can support the show is to like, share and follow on your favorite platforms. If you want to support directly, you can do so with our give what you want model. You set what you think this content is worth and you get access to all the videos early.

[00:41:16] Now, if you have a question and are listening to the recording, send it in at question at MSP radio dot com. I'll answer it live on air. Thanks for joining me for the Business of Tech Lounge, and I will see you next time. .