Matt Koenig shares winning MSP event strategies for new IT channel vendors

Hi, good afternoon, everybody. Welcome back to WIN. This is our first episode of WIN for Fall 2026. We took a year off to, regroup and refocus on sales and marketing for the IT channel, and no one is more recognizable in the IT channel than Matt Koenig. He's worked with dozens of vendors and MSPs on go-to-market strategy, and he's just launched his own consulting business, White Tiger Consulting. Matt, thank you for being guest number one on our relaunch. So nice to see you again.

You too. Thanks so much for having me. It's been a while. I can't wait to see you next week again. We've been friends forever.

When was the last time you were in San Diego?

Probably two years ago now. I think it was a TeamLogic event. I think it's actually in the same hotel.

At the Renaissance?

Yeah. Yeah, right on the water.

Any excuse to go to San Diego I'm gonna take.

Oh, it wasn't the worst place to be.

No, it's not a bad place to do some time, for sure. Tell me a little bit about what you're going to be doing at ChannelCon now. You're still working part-time with Nodeware, but you're also representing your new business for the first time. So tell us a little bit about what we can expect to see from Matt and White Tiger.

Sure. I'm working part-time for Nodeware still, so I'll be in the booth at Nodeware representing both companies. Nodeware knows what I'm doing, and they've given me permission to do

so.

the rest of the time I'll be walking around with my new logo T-shirts with White Tiger Channel Consulting on them. I'll have a one-pager that I can give out that kind of describes in a summary what I bring to the table. And White Tiger was really developed out of this. I've worked with tons of MSPs while working for vendors. I've managed the sales forces for vendors, forever, all the way back to RapidFire Tools, and helped grow that where I had 45 direct reports. And what I found over time was MSPs were struggling with sales. Sales process, doing an effective discovery. I heard over and over again that, they go out, they talk to someone, they get ghosted, and they do the same thing over and over again. So White Tiger was born out of me talking to MSPs and them saying, "Hey, do you consult?" And me doing it a little bit on the side here and there, and finally taking the plunge because it's a problem that needs to be solved, and I'm excited about, going out there and helping them. And my big difference is I don't have a package I'm gonna hand you. Everything's bespoke. Now, I have my own ideas of the way things should be done, but we're gonna sit down, we're gonna talk about your problem, talk about why you see it as a problem, where you're trying to go, and we're gonna create a solution that hopefully solves that problem. So that's why White Tiger was born. I really want to give back to the channel that's made me who I am at this point in time over the years that I've been here, and I wanna help people. I wanna see how I can help them grow and make a difference for their businesses.

So what is White Tiger doing for the vendor side of the channel? You mentioned what you did for MSPs. What should vendors expect?

So with the vendor side of the channel, one of the challenges I always see is newer, small to medium-sized vendors, they're getting their sales stuff together, but they have no idea how to truly go to market. So some of the stuff that I wanna talk to them about is everybody knows you need to go do shows. You need to get out in front of people, especially if they don't know you. That's the way MSPs buy. one of the things I always hear from vendors is, "I went to this show and it stunk. I didn't get anything out of it." That's because you were expecting leads out of a branding show or you were expecting branding out of something that you should have just expected leads out of. So helping them understand what shows to attend for what reason. What should your go-to-market look like? What should your talk track be? How do you make sure your demo is effectively pulling in someone to make them want to do a trial or something like that? How do you sign up leads at the booth? How do you classify them and follow up with them afterwards? Do you speak at shows? If so, what do you speak about? What's your presentation look like? And in some cases, training someone in the organization to speak at shows because they're not used to doing it. The big vendors, I've worked with. I've helped in reference to working for them as a VP of sales and stuff. I really wanna go to the up-and-coming vendors and really help them be successful in how they go to market. Cause there are a lot of vendors that get chewed up and spit out, unfortunately. But what I find a lot of times, it's not the product, it's not the people, it's how they approach the market.

Yeah, you can run through a lot of your marketing budget attending shows that maybe weren't the right fit for where you are in your development or maybe don't have the right size MSPs for your target market. Let's talk a little strategy. Let's give some people some actionable advice if they're a new vendor in the IT space. Let's talk about new AI vendors, because there seem to be a lot of them. Where do you start? What's show number one and why?

To me, it depends on their product and where they're at. So a brand-new vendor, to me, branding is critical, and branding means MSPs have to know who you are and they have to know what you do. You can't go into sales mode immediately. They have to get used to you. So I think shows like ASCII and Channel Pro are ideal places to get the word out. Yeah, they're smaller MSPs, but that doesn't mean they don't have needs and won't buy. But your ability to get a speaking opportunity in front of everybody in the room and really get your message out there, what you do and how it could benefit them, is just so big at these shows. Plus, here's the cool part. They give out awards, and if you can win one of those awards, you've now got great marketing to go out there with and say, "Look, we won Best in Show. Look, we won Best New Product," which makes people go, "Huh, I wonder what they do?" So as far as I'm concerned, the first step with any new vendor is getting out there, getting in front of people, and getting your brand and what you do known. The sales will come, but if you try to go out and just start selling, MSPs don't buy from people they don't know.

So let's talk about timeline. Let's say a new vendor's made a plan, and they're going to attend one of these ASCII events or one of these Channel Pro events, what do they absolutely need to have ready to go before they can commit sponsorship dollars?

In order to get ready for a show, first thing you need to do is you need to find out from the show when stuff must be delivered by. They're gonna have it in the contract. They're gonna say, "Things must be here by this date and time to this location." That's number one. Next, you need to make sure you have plenty of lead time. So I always say make sure you start at least eight weeks out. Maybe longer depending on what the timeframes are. You wanna give extra time and not be just in time. So I would say trade show stuff, a lot of them will ship it in three days. Guess what? Don't take that chance. Start eight weeks ahead of time. Swag, a lot of them will get it done and get it to you within 10 days. Let's not do that. Get it there. What I always like to say, have everything shipped to your house, because you want to check everything ahead of time. Did everything come out right? Is anything broken? Then take it yourself and ship it to the show. Or here's another trick for, vendors that are just starting out. Nine out of 10 times where shows are happening, there's a UPS or FedEx office right in the hotel or literally next door. It's usually a lot less expensive to ship there and for you to pick it up, so you can do that also. But I will tell you this, make sure you start well ahead of time on the booth, the swag, and everything else to make sure that you have it, everything's right, and you have time if something comes in broken or incorrectly to get that fixed before you ship it to the show. So start with the contract, when do things have to be where, and, how. They're gonna tell you how you can ship it in. Secondly, see if there is a UPS or FedEx office in the building. You could save a bunch of money a lot of times. Next, at least eight weeks out, order anything you need for your booth. Make sure that's taken care of. Make sure to get a decent case for your booth also. Don't try to carry these banners in the little cases they come in, 'cause I promise they will break. There are plenty of hard plastic cases out there, and I got news for you, when you're first starting out, you know what works great? One of those plastic golf carrying cases, the ones where you put your golf clubs in They're not a fortune, and they work just fine. But make sure that you get everything. Make sure you get your swag done. Make sure it's at your place at least four weeks ahead of time. That way you can check everything, make sure everything's good, make sure everything is exactly the way you want it, and then it's ready to ship to the show on time. Because here's the other thing, things will get delayed at times. Things will get screwed up, and you know what you don't want? To do like I did in Canada. Everything got caught in customs. I literally had a blank table with nothing. Good news is I had been in the channel long enough that I'd stop people. I grabbed one of my customers and said, "For every set you sell, I'll give you the product free for three months." We sold a ton, which was awesome. He got it free for a year. You think I cared? No, I did not. But that's why you do it, because you never know what's going to happen. One of the things that vendors that are going to their first shows, need to have ready is, a clear marketing strategy. Meaning, what does your product do? How does it benefit them? What is the solution? Don't ever talk about the technology. Nobody cares. What do you do, and what is the problem it solve for an MSP?. How do they use it? So you need to have your talk track down, where an MSP says, "Oh, I wanna learn more." The next thing that you need to have is your go-to-market strategy, and that is, again, what shows shall I attend? At these shows, what am I gonna do? If someone comes to my booth, first of all, what's my ICP? Not saying you don't talk to everybody, but if they're not your ICP, even if you put them on your list, they're not gonna be a fit. Spend your time on targeted, customer profiles that make sense to what you're doing. Next thing, be prepared and speak at these events. It's not a lot of money. When you're speaking, though, think about what are you giving to them? Cause remember, you need to give before you take. So going up there and just giving a talk about your product, it's not gonna work. People are gonna get bored, go do other stuff, people are gonna be looking at their phones. What is it that you can talk about based on your knowledge that would excite people and feel like they're walking away with things that they can look at differently tomorrow when they walk out of there, and then ask them to come by the booth? I have found that's worked very well. I talk about how to sell cybersecurity services and make it fun, is one of the presentations. Last time at ASCII, I had 88 people in my breakout because that's something that resonated. But the cool part is, at the end, I gave a three-slide overview of Nodeware, and guess what? Out of curiosity, I had my sales rep count. We had over 55 of them come to the booth. The other thing is, as you're gathering leads, what do they need? I always like to categorize them As, Bs and Cs, right? A, they want something. They've made a football move. Please call me, I want a demo, et cetera. B, they know who we are, they're not ready yet. C, I got them on a list or a registered list or something like that. They didn't come by the booth, they don't know who we are. And after the show, you have to go after them completely differently

Talk to me about getting ready for the show. What's bare bones budget. I'm a brand new vendor, I'm self-funding this. What do I have to buy?

You need to make sure you have a booth. It doesn't have to be a large booth, but you need a tablecloth, you need a minimum of two banners pulled up by your table, and for the smaller shows, that's enough. You don't necessarily need to spend the money on a huge background. Remember something, nobody's gonna read the entire banner. They're just not. So what you want is someone sitting across the aisle, what are they gonna see on your banner that's gonna make them go, "I wanna know more"? So what you wanna do is you want to put what are the problems you solve, and make it stand out, so if I'm away from you, I will look at your banner and wanna come talk to you. The next thing you have to do to be ready is, what's your talk track? You need to know your talk track backwards, forwards, and inside out. It should introduce your product, it should introduce the problem you solve, and there should be a call to action. And that call to action should be to set up a demo. You should have a laptop right there with your demo calendar on it, because if someone's truly interested, they will have no problem picking up their phone right there and putting it on the calendar. If someone says, "Oh, follow up with me," don't consider that a lead yet. Now, they're a B lead. They know you exist, they know who you are, they've talked to you. It's fine. You'll follow up with them. But what I see vendors do is get excited about following up with someone. Look, when you talk to someone, if someone is not on the demo calendar or you don't have a scheduled meeting on the calendar, guess what? They're not an A lead. Don't get overexcited about it. Cause o- because what you're gonna do is chase people for two weeks, three weeks, four weeks, because they did not show a true interest, or what I call a buying mechanism. Next thing is when you're speaking. What's your presentation about? Don't make the slides where every word you're gonna say is on the slide. Make the slides like the banner. If I'm looking at your slide while you're talking, what does it say to me? What does it tell me? And I'm not saying it can't be about whatever that section is, but don't read your slide. Role play, practice. There's nothing wrong with it. Get someone to look at your presentation and hear you speak ahead of time, one of the reason Ian won is two reasons. One, the content is great. You're giving before you're getting. But two, Ian is a dynamic speaker. Ian gets up there and talks to MSPs, not rudely, in their face, but authoritatively. And that comes across. And if you come across as knowing your stuff, and not stumbling over your words, and as an authority, you win every time. You're not getting their attention standing behind the podium.

Make sure you've looked at that stage before you go up there.

Yeah.

Go see how many steps can you take to each side? Really gotta be present there.

Stage at the front and look down at everybody because I find that everybody pays more attention then. But when you're on the same level, do you stay at the front? Do you walk up and down the aisle? What do you do to make sure that you're not getting nervous? Plan it out. There's nothing wrong with that. On webinars, this is what I talk to. I put Snoopy in front of my screen, and I talk to Snoopy. Explain to Snoopy? That's a really good tip. Because the reality is it takes me down a notch, first of all. Second of all, it almost makes me feel like I'm practicing, and I love Snoopy. So talking to Snoopy makes me very calm, so there are all kinds of tricks you can use, and you can't be afraid. Look, the MSP channel as a vendor is not that uptight. You can't go in there and think suit and tie, right? It's a different presentation. I do videos in my presentation to capture our attention. In my MSP sales process, the first slide is called Lion Mentality, and it's a Ray Lewis speech in the locker room, and it is awesome, and it talks about lion mode. And when I tested MSPs that were sitting there with their arms crossed were literally on the edge of their seat by the time it was done, going, Ah." And that's the whole purpose, right? Get everybody in the mood, everybody excited, get the walls down so they're ready to talk. There are so many tricks of the trade, and that's some of the stuff I try to teach vendors, right? How to go in there and hit a home run if you're gonna spend the money.

Let's talk about the money for a minute.

Yeah. I'd love to tell you that you should have a million dollars for the first year, but what I'd say is 50,000. Have 50,000. If you can have 100, pick out your shows carefully because here's the thing. You wanna do branding shows, but if you can do one larger show where you know you're gonna get leads, one of my favorites is Xchange to be honest. And the reason why is, they curate that list. They're paying to bring those people in. They give you a list of who they are, what they are, what they're interested in, phone numbers, emails, addresses. You can't ask for a better list after the show. It'd be great if you could do three branding shows. Maybe you do a Channel Pro, you do an ASCII, and you do an Xchange. So it's a matter of picking out those shows, doing a couple of tier twos. Let's say you only have 50 grand. Doing a couple tier twos, and then doing one that's lead generation, right? 'Cause those are branding. You're not gonna get a ton of leads out of it. You can't expect that. Then do one show where you're gonna get leads, and that's your goal. Because there are 2,000 MSPs there, and if you can't get leads of any kind, you need to rethink your go-to-market strategy, your product, what you're saying, your talk track, or whatever the case may be. Any brand new vendor is gonna walk away with 20 demos at something like that Talk to

Me about what you do when you're not on the floor at those events, lots of time in between sessions and you're gonna be there for almost a week. How do you fill your time as a vendor in between booth time? What should you be doing?

Sure. One, you should be walking around. Do not sit in your hotel room and think you're gonna get business. Don't go to the lobby and sit there. If you don't have time to be at a show, don't be at a show. So if you're an AI vendor like we talked about, and there's a session on AI, hey, guess what? Go. Sit in the audience. Two reasons. One, you're gonna find out what people are actually saying about AI so you can position yourself. Two, you know there's an audience full of people right there that are interested in AI that you can go find later to talk to.

Here's my card, here's my card-

hey, I've done it before. On the way out said, "Hey, by the way, I'm a new AI vendor. If you're interested in what they're talking about we do this and solve this problem. Would you mind coming by the booth?" Nobody's gonna get mad at you for that. You're there to get new customers. That is your job. Make sure that you go to all the meals. Sit at a different table with different people. Go talk to people. Go introduce yourself. There's nothing wrong with sitting down and saying, "Hey- I'm a new vendor. Do you mind if I quickly tell you what I do and can you give me feedback on what you think? Present it like that. MSPs are nice people if you present it like that. If you're not coming at them, they're always willing to talk to you and understand. Get feedback, see if your talk track's working, meet as many people as humanly possible. And here's another thing. Are there vendors you could partner with? Could you do a webinar with them? Could you integrate with them. NodeWare, for instance, integrates with a bunch of different platforms where they pull our information in, and it's been great, 'cause when the customer says, How do I get the rest of that?" They go, "Oh, call Matthew," and we make a sale off of it. So you just have to go in thinking, "I'm at a show, I'm not doing anything else." And one of the things we've done recently, one of the things we've done recently is I didn't pay for Kaseya Connect last year. You know what I did? I got with two other vendors and we did a Korean barbecue dinner. We invited 50 MSPs out, we got party buses to take them there and back so they could drink, and we all had dinner, and we talked, and we walked around. And, their entry fee, if you will, we made a page where they signed up, so we had all their information, and they had to agree to a demo. That was it. All they had to do was agree to a demo, no hard sales pitch, and we had a blast. And guess what? My, out of my pocket, because I had three vendors there, 1,000 bucks.

Not a bad go. Okay. All right, so we've determined that you've got to mix up your spend between shows that you would use to develop leads versus shows that you would use for branding. Yep. We talked about what you would do with a $50,000 marketing budget for the how much do people spend on a booth? Pull-up

banners, a tablecloth, and some swag, under 1,000.

What kind of swag?

It's funny, I have a strong opinion about swag. When a vendor buys swag, there should be a goal. The goal is that after the show, it's going to stay with them. It's going to stay in front of them, to keep your name in front. At NodeWare, I came up with this little dude called the Node, right? Cartoon character, put him on T-shirts and baseball hats, but nice baseball hats. The jean baseball hats that adjust in the back- not those cheap trucker hats. It wasn't obnoxious branding. I could not keep a T-shirt or a hat on the table. But, you know what was even cooler? People were coming back a year later for more because they wore it playing tennis, or they wore it when they were going to the beach. So it stayed in front of them, and I'd see people, MSPs actually, wearing my T-shirts at shows. So when you do swag- Come up with something that's not obnoxious, that doesn't have your logo and your name, and that's it. If you're new, what are you gonna come up with that people are gonna want to take, want to either wear or keep in front of them? So the point is, no matter how much money you're spending, a lot, a little, be thoughtful about your swag. Don't get stuff that people are going to give to their kids.

Oh, and how much swag? Do you need 100 of something? 20 of something? Do you need 5,000?

Yeah, it depends on the show. I would say for the regional shows, you wanna bring 100, right? Because if you've got good swag, vendors are gonna want it also. If somebody says something about, "I need this," I've gotten referrals because of that. For the bigger shows- You're gonna probably want at least 500, 'cause people will take your swag if it's decent swag. And, if you're gonna get T-shirts, don't get crap. Don't. Because you get these full cotton ones that once you dry them, they shrink or they become hard and crusty. If you're gonna give out T-shirts, give out good T-shirts. I think we spent $10 a T-shirt, so they're expensive. But here's something you can do, right? Depending on the minimums, go get 25 T-shirts go get 50 T-shirts made up. I just got some for White Tiger at this place called Custom Ink. I got three of them with my logo on it. I think it cost me a whopping $50 for the three of them, and they're nice shirts. They're and then give them to people that sign up for a demo only. The baseball hats were, like, three bucks a pop, if I remember correctly. Be thoughtful about your swag. And that's because if you're going to do it, it's better to do nothing than to do crap. That's my opinion.

So if you don't have swag what are you doing instead? How do you get people to swing on by the booth if there's nothing there for trick-or-treating?

There are all kinds of things you can do with your product to give them incentive to sign up for a demo. Also, if your product resonates, it's gonna resonate. Okay? You don't always have to have swag if what you're saying solves an actual problem. They're not gonna not talk to you if you solve a problem or a pain point for them because you don't have swag. At least that's what I've found. I've gotten to shows before where the swag didn't show up, and I just had to do my thing. And you know what? Again, if your talk track's good, you're solving a problem, there's a solution, not software, right? You're not selling the software, you're selling the solution. Guess what? You'll do okay.

All right. We're gonna see Matt 1,000 of our closest Channel buddies at ChannelCon in San Diego, August 3rd to 5th, 2026, and that's not very long from now. This time next week, I think we're gonna be hanging out on the beach.

Absolutely.

Or, at the booth. We'll definitely meet at the booth. Oh, yeah, at the booth, not

the beach. Not

the beach. We will not be at the beach. We will be working.

Yes.

Definitely working. All right. Matt, congratulations, and where can people go to learn more about White Tiger?

Sure. I appreciate it. So you can go to whitigercc.com, and also on the site, look, if you want to sign up for a 30-minute no charge consultation, do it. Bring a problem with you. If we can solve your problem in 30 minutes, great. No charge. Have fun. Bye. And I'm flexible. We can do hourly. We can do weekly. We can do daily. Whatever you need, we can do to make sure you're getting where you want to go. So I promise, no hard sales pitch from me, just advice, just my knowledge of doing this for so long.

All right. Matt, it was great catching up with you. Thanks so much for being on WIN, and I will talk to you very soon.