Episode 85: Thinking Bigger

Erick and Rich discuss why LLMs, chatbots, and MCP could combine to revolutionize the way technicians interact with RMM, PSA, and other line-of-business systems, as well as how delivering business resilience rather mere uptime can be a ticket to sticky, profitable client relationships. Then they’re joined by Ryan Morris, who serves MSP Chat parent company Channel Mastered as chief channel program strategist, for an insightful expert look at why and how partner programs are changing in response to a newly complex channel ecosystem. And finally, one last thing we can summarize in three simple words: Radioactive. Wasp. Nest.

Discussed in this episode:

Is Your Next Help Desk Tech Named Claude?

Slide is Living in the MCP Future

Radioactive wasp nest found at site where US once made nuclear bombs

 

Transcript:

Rich: [00:00:00] And 3, 2, 1. . Blast off. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome another episode of the MSP Chat podcast, your weekly visit with two talking heads, talking with you about the services, strategies, and success tips you need to make it big and manage services. My name is Rich Freeman. I’m Chief analyst at Channel Mastered, the organization responsible for the show.

I am joined this week from a far side by side, unlike our last episode by our chief strategist and CEO at Channel Mastered. His name is Erick Simpson. Erick, how goes

Erick: It’s going well, rich. I’m back at home base this week after traveling with you to GTIA channel con last week, but you. Have not gotten home since that trip.

[00:01:00] You are somewhere else entirely. How are you doing? And where are you at?

Rich: And the funny thing is, of course members of our audience who watch the show on YouTube are thinking he’s in the same damn place he is every week. ’cause we’ve got this same virtual backdrop. But I, in fact instead of flying home to Seattle after the GTIA Channel Con conference from Nashville, I just went Na Nashville to New York for the weekend, which was a lot of fun.

And now I am in Jersey City, New Jersey, attending it by designs Build It Live conference, which has been really interesting.

Erick: Awesome. You know what? It’s great that we have the technology to make us look our best with a backdrop that, allows us to do this podcast from wherever we happen to be.

So look, looking forward to today’s news and tip of the week and our really great interview that we hosted.

Rich: Yeah. And we were just touching on the fact that the two of us were at the GTIA conference last week. We’re actually gonna be [00:02:00] revisiting that conference a little bit because the interview with Ryan Morris was actually recorded during that show.

So we’ll get to that a little bit later on the show. He’s, unbelievably smart and experience on partner programs, and he’s gonna talk a little bit about how that landscape is changing. And then our story of the week touches on something that you and I experienced together on the show floor at Channel Con.

So let me set that up a little bit. For people. In addition to being part of Channel Mastered, I have an online publication called Channel Holic. I was working on an article for Channel Holic recently about the implications of AI for MSP workforces. And I was focusing in a lot on the fact that a few years down the road, a.

Agents. So Agentic AI will be doing a lot of the work that technicians are doing today, and that has huge implications, obviously for how an MSP staffs up the roles their people are in. But there are near term implications that we’ve already seen. This is nothing new in terms of using ai, generative AI in particular, but not exclusively to [00:03:00] augment the work that technicians are doing today.

And just as an off the top of my head example, it’s been close to two years, I believe since ConnectWise introduced Sidekick which is their augmentation tool. They’ve got the Cooper Bots at at Kase. So we’re seeing a lot of these kind of tools roll out. Those tools though, are all they, they come out of a very traditional model of how a technician goes about their job.

I’ve got an RMM tool. That tool has an interface. I’m interacting with that interface. AI is maybe doing some of that work for me. It’s helping me get information faster. It’s streamlining, but fundamentally it’s, TE technician work the way it’s always been done. And when I was researching this AG agentic AI and MSP workforce story, I was speaking with Elliot Hyman who is the CEO in charge of a IRA technology group.

So if you’re familiar with Evergreen Services group, one of these really big MSP Rollups that, he’s acquiring a a lot of MSPs out there right now. Lyra is the holding [00:04:00] company for their many MSP businesses. And Elliot was telling me about this really interesting demo, just experiment that one of his MSP owners conducted for him recently.

And this guy, his name is Tim GWIM as it happens. Erick, I got to meet him last night. I’ve been hearing about Tim for the past two weeks. And here he is at the the Build It Live conference, we got to speak last night. He’s very interested in MCP model context protocol. This very IM important sort of widely accepted protocol that is to an increasing de degree, allowing AI to connect to data sources and use that data for various functions.

And so Tim was playing around connecting his RMM system. To Claude Anthropics front end via MCP, and he’s showing Elliot, what this experiment looks like. And he said, watch this. And he just told Claude I’m a new MSP, I’ve got my first client [00:05:00] what’s out there in that client’s environment.

And Claude just pulls together this complete view of everything that this this imaginary end user has on the network, all of the devices and so on, just pulls it all together. And then he asks how many of those systems are patched? And Claude answers that question.

Can you patch the unpatched ones? You bet I can. And all of a sudden, Elliot, and by, by virtue of my hearing this story from Elliot, I’m starting. As well to think bigger about what ai, just the generative AI that we have today. Forget about the agent stuff could mean for technicians. You can easily imagine a future in which technicians no longer have to spend any time out there learning new interfaces.

Like in, in training courses, just how to use an RMM system when it gets updated and so on. Because the control surface essentially is your voice and your fingers. You’re just interacting natural language with a chat box like [00:06:00] Philanthropics Quad. Super interesting concept, Erick. And then the two of us are at Channel Con last week and I’m in a conversation with Carlson Choi.

He is these days the the CEOO. Slide, which is a company many folks in our audience will be familiar with. It’s a data protection vendor. It was founded by, among other people by Austin McCord of Datto fame. And he starts talking to me. Carlson starts talking to me about how Austin McCord and his spare time created an MCP based client for the slide backend using Philanthropics Quad.

And he said, furthermore, we’re demoing it to people on the show floor at channel Con. Come on by, take a look at it, which we did. This was not a concept, this was not something, that Tim was doing experimentally. This is something that slide partners have access to today. And in the demo that we saw doing all the stuff that you do with data protection was super, [00:07:00] super easy in terms of saying, what virtual machines are active out there right now?

What’s the RDP bookmark for this one? Give me create and give me the RDP and it was all natural, right? Which we’re watching him do all this work without having to use a traditional management interface. And slide by the way, has a very pretty, a very good looking carefully designed traditional management interface.

But I guess the question I’m asking here are just based on the demo that we saw. And and again, this actually, I shouldn’t say demo. This is like something. Slide people are using in production today, as of the last few weeks, based on that tool, based on the demo that Tim showed Elliot this idea that particularly at a time when, you know labor is not cheap and you want your technicians to be doing work for clients to the maximum extent possible and not mired in training and figuring out how to use these systems.

Wouldn’t it be great if [00:08:00] Claude and Chat GPT and in connection with MCP makes it much, much easier for technicians who continue to support clients directly themselves to do that work? And are we, and by extension, Erick ConnectWise and Kaseya and Ninja enable, are we not thinking big enough about where things.

Can go, should go and will go in terms of marrying generative AI with the tools that MSPs rely on today.

Erick: Rich, I think the first thing that comes to mind is yes, we saw that demonstration at the slide booth together and just hearing, what you just described or what you saw last night, I think that MCP changes everything.

I think MCP changes everything and Anthropic Quad seems to be very capable at going out and doing what we need as an MSP [00:09:00] to make our jobs easier. We know that there are many types of LLMs out there and the different types of LLMs are either good at, a couple of things and not too good at other things.

Like they all have their. They’re, best feature and benefits. So it’s kinda having, a different, a bunch of different knives. You’ve got, a sed knife to, to slice bread, you’ve got steak knives to slice, steak, you’ve got butcher knives and chop. So each one of these l LLMs is really good in some areas where others may not be.

What was interested interesting in speaking with Carlson at the booth was really understanding because he got into it a little bit with us at the Channel Con event and indicating, yes, there are different LLMs that do different things and it’s important for us to identify the right ones.

So what I think now, rich, is we are thinking really small. And, if I think back on, what I did in my speaking session at Channel Con, [00:10:00] which was a great session, it got really great feedback. It was talking about how to use chat bots to do lead gen. Prospecting and appointment setting for MSPs.

Very opposite spectrum to what philanthropic Claude and MCP are able to do. The thing that I, my first question after we saw the demo, if you recall, rich, was, Hey, when can you get it to be voice activated? Because you still had to type in the query right into the into the platform so that it could then, work just chat GPT, but without the voice activated feature.

So I think we’re thinking a little bit small. I think that the next kind of breakthrough is going to be maximizing how we can use MCP and connect it to all these different various systems and give us. Can you imagine a technician coming into work that day and having it prioritize all the tickets, having it prioritize all the maintenance that needs to be done, have it [00:11:00] prioritize what all the patching that needs to be done, have it prioritized, oh, we’ve gotta remount these these volumes because they were in order, the backup didn’t run.

Things like that. And just basically responding in one gooey interface and managing all of that. Imagine a world rich where that’s possible.

Rich: And an extremely easy interface, basically. We’re all familiar with interfaces like Claude and Chat, GPT and so on. And you don’t necessarily need the giant cockpit full of it.

It’s, and, the ConnectWise tool is called Sidekick. What we’re imagining is truly having an assistant basically there to do more and more of the work for you based on your instructions. That yeah you’re right. Today, you’ve gotta type those instructions. Do you remember we were talking with someone from slide named Nick Jory?

He’s the guy who he did the the, did the

Erick: demo for us.

Rich: Yeah. Yeah. And I don’t know if you remember what he said when [00:12:00] you asked, when to do when does voice mode come? And he basically said if Austin was in the booth with us and heard you ask that question, he’d go back to his hotel room right now and you’d have it by breakfast tomorrow morning.

They’re not necessarily thinking about it right now, but yeah. That’s coming for sure. And yeah, being a technician, being on the help desk, resolving tickets, it’s gonna be talking to the RMM system. And as the agents become more and more powerful and more and more of them come online the RMM system is going to be doing more and more of the work with less and less of, of your input.

It’ll be up to you how much input, but to the degree you, you want to supervise to be what Microsoft calls an agent boss, that’s how you’ll do it. You’ll do it in voice mode through a very simple interface, and you’ll just explain here’s what’s, show me this, show me that, okay, I see the problem.

Here’s how to fix it. Go fix it. And then you’re onto something else.

Erick: Yeah. I just had a crazy thought in my brain listening to you just now, and I, it’s kinda today’s automobiles like, [00:13:00] internal combustion engine automobiles, not electric vehicles, but there, this kind of maybe applies there too.

But you’ve got an engine management system that basically can tell whether you’re what grade of what grade of fuel you’re using. It adjusts for altitude, it adjusts for air density. And it optimize the performance of the engine automatically in the background. I think that’s what I’m thinking of is, what this ingen AI in the future looks like is the MSP will be coming in, but all of the agents and the platforms are basically optimizing and managing the engine, which is their client’s infrastructure and applications and security and things like that within the parameters that the engine management, take your card, folks that are familiar with a dyno.

So I’ve got a car, it’s got a little bit of performance in it. I took it to a shop a tuner, and they put it on a dyno and they optimized it within the parameters that we set for safety, right? So the MSP then uses [00:14:00] this philosophy to instruct it’s their agents, they’re the agent boss, right?

And within the parameters that they set, going to give those agents the ability to optimize things and fix things and patch and repair things within those set parameters. Bringing that MSP to be much more strategic for their client relationships and work on their business. More than in their business maybe.

What do you think, Carl,

Rich: specifically in terms of interfaces, it’s going to be fascinating to see if the RMM vendors and the PSA vendors for that matter, often the same people. If they do move and, as they become aware of what companies like Slide are beginning to play around with, to what extent do they start talking to their partners?

Is this what you want? Does this work? It, this is not, I think, a near term thing, but it’ll be interesting to see how many of those R-M-M-P-S-A companies. Head in that direction. And instead of investing big money in, [00:15:00] in, the next big rev of their old school ey, do they just throw that out and go with something totally new That in theory could make technicians a lot more productive time will tell Erick.

But for now, let’s dive into your tip of the week. Now, I remember a few years back when I was writing articles about something that a number of vendors started talking about called cyber resilience, which was the idea that you combine security with backup and you’ve got full blown cyber resilience, but you’re gonna expand the resilience concept a little bit here in a way that I think will be useful for MSPs.

Erick: Yeah. Talk about, thinking big, right? And repositioning your value proposition rich as an MSP to your customers. We’re still seeing a lot of. The unique value proposition and the marketing and the sales approach from MSPs to prospects and customers [00:16:00] to be more siloed. Hey we’re going to deliver, like you said, cyber resilience.

We’re gonna deliver 24 7 monitoring. We’re gonna deliver help desk service. We’re gonna bundle all these things in these tiers. I want us to think a little bit differently and fly a little bit higher than all of these disparate maybe solutions or tiers or portfolios within our service delivery.

Go to market motions and talk about business resilience. So everything that a, that an MSP does in my mind, can be. Described as business resilience. And I think when we start breaking it apart into these disparate pieces oh, we’re going to, upgrade this platform, or we’re going to migrate this over here, or we’re gonna do this with this workload, or we’re gonna, enhance your cybersecurity.

If we said that we’re gonna come in and provide [00:17:00] business resilience for our clients, then that allows us to take those BCIO conversations those quarterly business review meetings in a completely different direction, which means that we’re going to talk about everything that happens within that organization and not break it apart into these, cybersecurity or AI conversations or infrastructure conversations or backup and disaster recovery conversations.

It all comes under this. Promise of enhancing and strengthening an organization’s business resilience, which includes things that normally business owners that hire MSPs as their outsourced IT service provider wouldn’t think of and allows the outsourced IT service provider that is the SP to present themselves in a much more valuable po position for their clients.

So now we’re talking about individual workflows within an [00:18:00] organization. We’re talking about ai, we’re talking about cyber, we’re talking about all these things. But think about the scorecard now and the roadmap that a partner can put together with all the categories that fall under business resilience and then adding more strategic value because you’re having different conversations with your client and you’re pricing your services.

Appropriately, typically at a higher margin because you’re managing more than just the IT aspect of the business for those clients.

Rich: Yeah, I I think as you as you’re talking about that, I think back to the old saying, the classic saying at IBM basically, which is if you’re talking to a customer about anything other than making more or spending less, you’re wasting their time, right?

Ultimately what you as an MSP are doing as an IT service provider or a service provider more broadly to the end user is setting them up to make more and spend less and be [00:19:00] more profitable. But the resilience factor, as you define it, is a precondition for all of that. Basically, it, you, you cannot grow the business.

You cannot grow the bottom line if you cannot count on being continuously operational in, in every sense. And not even just in that, that, strictly speaking, it of sense ev e everything that it takes for that business to be up and running is something that you as the trusted strategic advisor can be helping them with and, that, that’s a very valuable and strategic service that absolutely you should be handsomely compensated for basically, and it should be part of the conversation with every client you’re working with.

Erick: And Rich, think about the conversations that the MSP is having now and having access to more data to, to assess.

Because remember, business resilience is focused completely, like you said, around business [00:20:00] outcomes. So now my job becomes, how do I help this organization become more profitable? How do I help this organization maximize their operational business continuity? How do I help them reduce costs? How do I leverage different strategies to help?

Simplify the complexity and the sprawl that they’re dealing with, not only from technology, but from in other areas. Like the same things that affect an MSP affect that business owner. So now we’re talking about business resilience, which means that everything that we recommend is going to be positioned to deliver a positive or improved business outcome, not a technology outcome not a transactional outcome.

So now we’re really having those ac, those boardroom kind of meetings with clients and asking more questions about things like [00:21:00] their financials their cost of doing business, and how we can help with that because, and it does punch a little bit above the weight class of maybe some MSPs, but you ease into it and expand over time as you, get a grasp.

For how to become much more strategically valuable from a business advisory position rather than just a technical or cybersecurity advisory position.

Rich: Yeah. In a sense, what we’re talking about here is a different sort of elevated risk management, risk assessment kind of conversation.

When MSPs and when we, talk about risk management, typically we’re thinking about security risk. And that’s a big part of this resilience theme, but it goes beyond that to anything that can negatively impact the business. And so you think about supply chain risk, you think about, things that you may be aware of that the end user isn’t in terms of the shaky financial condition of this or that vendor that they’re relying on for [00:22:00] some critical service.

Or, you’re aware of data centers that are overloaded and potentially that’s the view into what it takes to keep this business resilient and continuously operational that you have that they don’t. And it goes beyond cyber.

Erick: Bingo, rich.

Rich: All right. Folks, Erick and I are gonna take a quick break When we come back, we’re gonna go back in time to G Tia’s channel Con show last week for an interview that you recorded there with Ryan Morriss.

He is the Chief Channel program strategist on the team here at Channel Mastered. And if you’re thinking, I over promised before when I said he’s the smartest guy we know when it comes to designing and running partner programs. Judge for yourself in a few minutes, we took advantage of the fact that he was at the conference physically with us to sit him down and pick his brain a little bit about some of the changes that are happening in vendor partner programs right now, why they’re happening and what they mean both for the vendors and for the partners.

It is all coming your [00:23:00] way in just a moment after the break. Stick around. We’ll be right back

and welcome back to part two. This episode of the MSP Chat podcast, our Spotlight Interviews segment. And folks, we don’t toot our own horn. All that often at Channel Mastereds, the organization are responsible for this podcast. But now and again, we like to bring on a member of the team here to join us on the show and quite frankly take advantage of and show off their expertise.

And we are recording here from the GTIA channel Con event in Nashville. And when you know it, a member of our team, in addition to Erick and myself, is with us here. He is Ryan Morris. He is our Chief Channel program strategist at Channel Mastered. And I say this not just because he’s part of the team, he is truly one of the biggest thinkers the smartest channel program thinkers I know in the industry right now.

And I’ve been really looking forward to the [00:24:00] opportunity to pick your brain a little bit. And you, I haven’t mentioned this off the air, Ryan, but I’ve got a post coming up from my blog channel hall. About the changing evolution in the nature of partner programs. So this is a twofer for me.

Excellent. I’m collecting information I can use in in my article before we get into it. For folks in the audience who don’t know you, the many interesting things you do beyond channel mastered talk a

Ryan : little bit about yourself. Absolutely. Thank you. And thank you guys for letting me join the conversation because behind the scenes, there’s all these conversations going on.

It’s really good to let people know that we’re actually working on these things. Ryan Morris we, I’ve been in the industry for a little over 25 years in the channel. Originally born in the vendor side world, managing and selling through channel programs. And then I went to the analyst research consulting side, used to run the consulting practice that everybody knows around the I ped organization.

And then have been independent for about 15 years now doing the [00:25:00] analysis and consulting and program development. But when we look at it from the work we actually do, half of our time is facing vendors. To answer the question how do I go to market and most effectively leverage the channel and all of its capabilities.

But then the other half is you gotta go across the aisle and talk to the partner community and actually say, how do we run these businesses so they thrive and they grow and they’re rewarding for the participants? Because I dunno about you guys. I learned a long time ago you could have the best channel program in the world and the best technology in the world and still not sell anything if the partners in your program aren’t engaged and motivated and capable of scale.

If the partners can’t thrive, then by extension, neither can the vendors who rely on them for access to market. So I spend my time equally talking to the [00:26:00] vendors and saying, but this is what your partners say about you when you’re not in the room. And then talking to the partners and going, okay, so this is what they actually meant when they said, here’s my new program and here’s what I want you to do.

Here’s why that’s good for you, and how you can actually take advantage. So it’s good to be the translator in between the two layers of the industry.

Rich: And it makes you the perfect person for this particular conversation here. ’cause you can see it from both perspectives. We wanna get into how partner programs are changing.

That’ll be the bulk of the conversation, but before we get there, let’s talk about the why a little bit. The know the old school model was you offered a you offer a tiered set of benefits and rewards based mostly on sales and maybe training and certifications and so on. What is it about the changing nature of the sales life cycle and the customer life cycle that is requiring the partner programs to adapt?

Ryan : Yep. That, see, that’s I think the most important reason. We are not changing [00:27:00] programs because it’s interesting or because it’s fun or it might squeeze a few extra dollars out for all the players. It, the change is happening because of the complexity of adoption for the end user. It’s not enough anymore to just know the part number and the skew and the price and the availability, and then pass that product along to somebody who already knows what it is and how to use it.

In the good old days of selling devices or peripheral technologies, immature technologies, to move things from point A to point B was enough, and the customer said, thank you very much went on their way, right? That’s just not what we sell anymore. We sell complicated, integrated dependent solutions that have not just a nice to have impact on part on the customer.

They are mission critical. We like to say, Hey, this is vital to your organization. Careful what you wish for, because now that it is vital, the customer. [00:28:00] Cannot tolerate downtime, they cannot tolerate disintegration of functional system parts. Because we sell complicated things and because customers struggle to adopt and get all of the potential value from those investments, we have to engage them differently.

And that requires the vendors who sell through the marketplace they have to modernize in order to bring the customer the right set of resources, the right expertise, the right personalization across every vertical, across every size of organization. The way we used to do CH channel models, they were very linear, they were very sales pipeline oriented.

They were perfectly appropriate when I had a thing to sell and an audience to sell it to linear. That was great. It’s just not enough anymore. And so we have to [00:29:00] go back and say, because the customer wants what we sell more than ever. That’s good news, right? They spend more on technology as a share of their overall revenue.

They’re adopting new and emerging technologies at a faster pace than they ever have. The market is huge, but the market simply isn’t qualified to buy what we sell the way we used to sell it. So we have to surround them and support them before, during, and after the acquisition so that they can actually get value from this stuff.

Erick: So Ryan, in today’s kind of modern MSP ecosystem, where do you see the mismatch? Between what these new partners need and what these kind of traditional old school partners programs deliver? Yep. I think the

Ryan : most essential change [00:30:00] is in compensation planning, basically. If you think about it from a sales manager’s point of view, we create, I have a product to sell.

I have a customer that I want to reach. I have a sales team that I want to go get that. So I set up a scheme that will motivate and reward them to do the thing I want them to do. Go sell a whole bunch of my stuff. In a nutshell, channel programs are compensation plans writ large, right? Not teams within an organization or individual contributors, but the structure of multi-organ partnerships, it’s all comp planned, right?

The way we used to compensate partners, as you said, was you sell my thing and I will pay you a margin, and that’s great. The more you sell, the more margin you will make. We’ll tier that and accelerate that so there’s a more, more compounding, right? You don’t just make 20% of a larger number. Now you make 25 points of the larger number, right?

That [00:31:00] historically was what we did. You sold my thing, I will compensate you for that and give you an incentive to do that more often. That was good. Now what we’re seeing is it’s functionally, it’s just not possible to deliver what we would call a solution to a customer with a single piece of technology, right?

An MSP stack. For all the vendors who have tried this, there is no platform or stack or single ven vendor solution that actually solves the problem, right? We need monitoring, we need remote capability, we need data management and backup and disaster recovery. We need cybersecurity, we need all of these things.

We can’t get that from a single vendor. So what we have to do now is to say, I used to just pay you when you sold my stuff. Now I have to admit that there’s value that needs to be added before that transaction or else the customer will never even consider. There has to be value in the transaction so that the customer [00:32:00] buys the correct thing and gets the right investment and leverage.

And then there’s the aftermarket where if the customer isn’t significantly confident that after I buy this, everything’s gonna go awesome. They’ll not start right, like they’ll check out of the sales process before they even consider the offer because they need to know that it’s this mission critical.

It’s gonna last forever. It’s always on technology. We have to go out there and support this afterwards. Transactional product, resale programs simply could not recognize or reward the value that an MSP brings to the table, right? They just, we did the aftermarket stuff and we didn’t necessarily, sometimes we sold the product, not always right, but if we sold the product and then we continued all of that ongoing value service that’s not just good for the customer, that’s [00:33:00] also good for the vendor retention, expansion, contract renewal, all of those things happened because the customer had a good post-sales experience.

So the channel programs have to adapt to recognize the work that gets done and reward the value before the transaction, during the sales cycle, after the implementation. That change alone is, it’s flummoxing. Everybody in the industry, everybody talks about ecosystem and points-based programs, right?

Everybody’s got the idea. Everybody agrees this is the right thing to do, but we are seeing so far very few vendors who figured it out gracefully at scale.

Erick: Can I throw a curve ball? Yeah. Follow up in, go for it. So yes to all that. And now give us your take on this, the platformization kind of movement and [00:34:00] the complexity that’s being added from these larger vendors, basically acquiring.

All of these new solutions to fill the gaps that you just mentioned? Yep. How much more complicated does that make things for the vendor and for the partner now? Yep.

Ryan : See, if you think of, if you put your vendor hat on and you think of how will I solve the problem, it was complicated enough when I said, I have one product to sell to one customer profile, right?

I need to set up all the programs, the incentives, the enablements, the, all of the recognition, the rewards, the tracking, management. All of that was hard enough. But then when I expand my portfolio in whether just adding pieces to my platform or adding the foundational part that is required for everything to operate, as soon as I do that.

Number one, I have to now measure partner capability across all of my solutions and then provide enablement. And that enablement needs to be tuned to [00:35:00] who they are as a partner. Are you an MSP? Are you a systems integrator? Are you enterprise focused? Are you SMB focused? Are you this vertical or that vertical?

I can’t just have one flavor of my program with one set of tears. I almost have to have a tiering philosophy across every dimension of my portfolio. And God forbid, you also sell to more than one target audience. We all want to, right? But if you sell to the government, if you sell to the SMB, if you sell to highly regulated industries.

Every one of those requires different capabilities. And so you think of, I’ve got 10 products in my portfolio and then I’ve got 10 different types of partners who participate across the lifecycle, and then I go to 10 different target audiences. The iterations just mushroom, they just go completely insane.

That’s why nobody’s figured it out yet. [00:36:00] But the answer is it doesn’t. Like you don’t have to be infinite in your iterations. You just have to be relevant to the one partner that you’re talking to. An MSP appreciates that the vendor has complexity with all of their other partner types, but I don’t want to hear about that.

And it’s don’t trouble me with all of your complexities. Just say, are you relevant to me? Do you get my business model? And how will you support enable? Reward me for the value that I bring.

Erick: And you said reward right there, because now how complicated does that become now? ’cause now you’ve got all these different products, you’re acquiring things, you’re trying to integrate things.

Yep. And then the incentive and compensation is just another complexity that needs to be solved to attract the MSPs and influence them to transact.

Ryan : Yeah,

Erick: absolutely.

Ryan : And it is, we all began, I think, years ago with understanding, it’s just not reasonable for one solution provider to be the [00:37:00] world’s foremost expert on everything that could exist in a technology portfolio.

That’s too much to ask, especially if we support multiple customer profiles. So what we have to admit is just because you have a dedicated program, you have an engaged and enthusiastic community of MSPs. Then you go out and acquire a new piece of technology there it’s completely unreasonable to just expect that because you acquired it, that means all of your partners will now just pick it up and run with it.

It’s, when you think about it from a vendor’s point of view, that kind of portfolio expansion, everything you add is a new product launch requires market segmentation and coverage and capacity calculations, branding, communications, enablement, all of that product launch stuff has to happen every time one of these vendors brings in a new acquisition of technology.

[00:38:00] That’s why it’s hard, right? We and we respect the complexity. It is difficult to do that work, but if you don’t get it right, then why in the world would a channel partner. Do your go-to-market job for you. They wouldn’t, unless they’re rewarded and they’re not going to get rewarded unless you can enable them and support and motivate them to do the thing you’re asking.

I, it’s hard enough when you say, I sell backup. Cool. That’s complicated enough. There’s layers, but if you sell backup and then you acquired 17 other things in your portfolio, you just have to appreciate if I’m the vendor, I have to look at my MSP community and go, wow, I just made their jobs harder.

A little recognition, a little a little respect for the difficulty that I added to your world goes a long way, right? When the vendor comes to you and goes, I know this is not easy. I [00:39:00] respect that I’m asking you for extra work. Thank you for what you’re doing, but. Boy, I’m I appreciate that. This is gonna be difficult for you to do, just acknowledging that buys you goodwill for years, and then the runway to get good at it before they get pissed and throw up their arms and run away.

Rich: Let’s talk tiering philosophy tease the term that you invoked there just a few minutes ago. One of the things that I’m seeing is partner programs either reducing or altogether eliminating tiers. This might be a specific example of how the old school partner program model isn’t suited to current conditions and is evolving needs to evolve.

How well suited is the classic precious metals tiering scheme to current conditions? And if it’s not well suited,

Ryan : how

Rich: does

Ryan : it need to adapt? Yeah, I agree with you. It’s. The trend right now is that people are flattening and [00:40:00] just saying transaction is transaction. Pre-sales is different. Post-sales is different.

We’ll subdivide the available compensation and we’ll do what we call points systems, right? If you do this piece of the implementation, you get paid for that. If you do that piece of the transaction, you get paid for that, right? That right now, the trend is that everybody says, oh, we wanna reward you for the types of work you do, not just for the volume of transaction.

That is easier, but that is very shortsighted. You still have to respect volume, commitment, not just in product transaction, across all of those dimensions of your points program. If I do one a year, I earn a certain amount of value from that relationship and I deserve a certain amount of recognition from that vendor.

If I do a million a year, I deserve more. That’s, if you take that away, [00:41:00] it will reward the average and it will punish the elite performers. And what will happen as a result of that is the elite performers will go, oh so I don’t get any extra recognition for doubling down and driving 20% growth year over year and adding headcount to my sales organization and running marketing campaigns.

There’s no additional reward for that. Cool. I’m gonna go find a reward from somebody who will reward me for that. It will flatten your overall channel. So the complicated answer is if all you have is tears, then the only thing you reward is transaction and that just leaves gaping holes in. The pre-sales and post-sales responsibilities.

So you have to diversify across that value chain, but you still have to reward people for volume, commitment, and performance, right? If you do you do a hundred for me? Cool. If you do a million for me, I love you [00:42:00] even more, and I have to give that more reward within the structure of the program.

What that means is that it’s no longer as easy as you did a million dollars of volume and you get 35 points of margin, therefore three 50 k, cool. That’s your transactional reward. Now, it’s points that get allocated and accrued across each of these things that get multiplied by volume. It’s hard to look at a partner and go, if you’re in business with me and you do a million dollars, here’s how much you will make.

Anytime the vendor says to the partner. How much will I make? It’s complicated. You, we have just ended the conversation whether or not they actually physically walked out on you at that point. It’s complicated emotionally, psychologically, they just stopped listening to you. So we have to find a way to calculate that and make it predictable and [00:43:00] reliable.

But it has to recognize that diversity of contribution. If we only pay people for transactions, then people are just resellers and then it’s I need you to also do the managed services so that the customer doesn’t unhook the subscription in the future. I’d love to do that value for you.

What’s in it for me? Partnership means mutual commitment and mutual reward. If we ha if we as vendors benefit from the work you do before, during, and after. We need to recognize and reward people for that effort. So it’s, it is right now very murky. And some of the household names in our industry that have been early movers into points-based systems, one year, two years into those programs, partners are freaking out about, wait a minute, what happened to my platinum status?

And my customers wonder why I’m not respected anymore in the [00:44:00] industry. And also it’s gotten really complicated to forecast what the compensation will be. And so partners are starting to pull back and not pre-commit budgets and resources. So those vendors are making, they’re undoing a lot of the original structural changes that they made.

They gotta create that hybrid of, I need you to do all the work, but I want you to do a lot of the work and I will reward you according.

Erick: So on that topic, we had a two part question. If vendors should stop measuring simply sales volume from their partners to create these incentive and rewards programs to motivate them to go to market and really kill it, what should they additionally be measuring?

And the second part of the question is for the vendors now, what do the partners feel they should [00:45:00] be rewarded for? And observed and measured by? Yeah, because it’s too that there’s

Ryan : the rub, right? It is. And so the best way I understand it, the way we kind of shape all of our consulting advice to the vendor community it’s.

Because you couldn’t be a consultant unless you have a matrix, right? You gotta have a matrix. It’s a nine box matrix. It’s crafted against the timeline of engaging the customer before, during, and after the transaction, and also against the type of work that needs to be done. Business, technical and operational.

So if you separate that into the nine boxes you recognize that there is, there’s business development and pre-sales and awareness and marketing that needs to be done. And then there’s the actual sales cycle administration and pricing and configuration and quoting and all of that stuff. And then there’s license management and renewals and whatever, right?

That’s, those are business, it’s one segment. It’s the business sales part of the relationship [00:46:00] before, during, and after. The technical part also has before, during, and after. And so does the operational level when you think of it in that context. Vendors must understand from the end user’s perspective, not just from the partner’s perspective, what work needs to get done.

In other words, in order for that customer to voluntarily acquire and adopt and commit to my technology, what work needs to be done and what are they not capable of doing themselves. So they need help from a specialized service provider, right? There is an answer to that. In every one of those nine boxes, there’s work the customer needs that they cannot do on their own in business, in technical and operational.

Before, during, and after. The second part of your question, if you asked the channel community and you said, okay, for all the work that you do and you currently get paid for, what is the most valuable thing you do that you don’t currently get paid for? [00:47:00] That you really want recognition and reward for?

The research stacks this out. We ask a bunch of different questions. The top three or four on the list of these are the things that I want fit into the pre before category, right? It’s I want to be recognized and rewarded for even before the sales cycle got started and there was budget, authority, need, and timeline, right?

Before it was a qualified opportunity, somebody had to say to a decision maker, this might want to think about doing something differently. The way you run your workflow, the way that you leverage technology, the way you manage your data, you might want to think about doing something a little differently at that point.

That is not a sales cycle, but if that conversation does not point the customer in the direction of your product as a vendor, you’ve already lost the deal. That’s the

Erick: VCs. The VCs or QBR process.

Ryan : Absolutely that. And that’s the thing, right? Vcso [00:48:00] is top left. That is before business.

You need to be the brain that can show the customer what is the value you could be getting from technology QBR operational after, right? So that’s bottom yeah. When you think about those kinds of work,

Erick: I meant VCIO, VCTO, but also VC O because it’s all part of it.

Ryan : Yep. It is all of that, that outsourced strategic direction and planning that the customer needs in order to want and get value from the technology That work has to be done.

And if I do that work and the result of that project or that engagement is that I recommend your technology as a vendor. That’s called marketing. That’s called demand creation. Not just demand capture that I created demand in the marketplace. I wanna be recognized and rewarded for that. The presales, technical part of things, right?

There’s a lot of rocket science that must go into the [00:49:00] proper design and configuration of a complicated multi-vendor, multi-layer, multi-phase solution. None of that’s easy. We should probably recognize that. Reward partners for bringing that genius there. And in the sense of you should get paid for doing complex configurations in the pre-sales process.

Everybody in the world will look at me sideways and go you can’t charge for that. Just ’cause some people can’t charge for it. Doesn’t mean it can’t be charged for because everybody went to school. They got a thousand hours of training and layers of certification to be qualified to do that work.

It’s worth money. You should recognize and reward that stuff.

Erick: That sounds

Ryan : different than a POC or a pilot. Yep. It is. And that’s the thing. The pilot is what I would say that’s passing the baton before, between the before and the during. When you think about the timeline of it, the customer must recognize the need and understand that this solution that they had no idea what it is, [00:50:00] could be the way to solve that problem.

And then they need to come back together and say, okay if we understand the technology, recognize the value proposition. Now you can scope it for me and give me an understanding of what would this animal even look like. Okay, cool. Now I’m willing to do a test deployment and test it, feel it, see how it might work in my environment.

That is simultaneously the last step in the. Before stage and the first step in the during stage, right? So that work should also be compensated, that should be recognized, right? Our friend Jay McBain, he often says there are 28 moments in the presales journey that gets to the point where the customer would say, I agree with you.

Here’s my money. I would like your product in return. Those 28 things have to be mapped. They have to be measured, they have to be trained and enabled, and you need to recognize and [00:51:00] reward somebody who, the best example of this is somebody who never books a deal, never transacts a single dollar of product, but does mountains of work in the before category.

That person also deserves to be recognized as platinum because they created the opportunity that somebody later on captured and then supported and serviced over time. So it all fits together in that concept, partners want to be recognized for the work they do to even create the conversation to begin with.

Not just the transaction, not just the post-sales.

Rich: Ryan Morris fascinating conversation. We could go another half an hour talking about this stuff with you. We’ve got a whole list of questions here we didn’t even get to and we covered a ton of ground. Thanks very much for joining us here on the show.

For folks in the audience who wanna get in touch with you wanna see your writing and your podcasts and all that sort of stuff, where should they go?

Ryan : The very best place, the most central access would be LinkedIn. [00:52:00] So my profile’s Ryan Morris, 3 0 3 on LinkedIn. Eventually everything that I write will show up there and it’s the most reliable way to actually reach out and contact me ’cause it might be on an airplane.

So that’s the best place where people can go. I’d love to continue the conversation ’cause you guys know it’s, there is a list of questions. This is complicated stuff, but the good news is we’re gonna be okay. We got this stuff going, we can figure it out. We understand it’s change and people feel the disruption.

We’re gonna figure this out.

Rich: Ryan Morris, chief Channel Program strategist at Channel Mastered Luff. Pleased and proud to have you on the team. Thanks for. Being part of Channel Mastered being part of this episode of the MSP Chat podcast. Folks, Erick and I are gonna take a quick break right now. We come back on the other side, we’re gonna share a few final thoughts about this very interesting conversation with Ryan.

Have a little fun wrap up the show. Stick around. We’re gonna be right back[00:53:00]

and welcome back to Court three of this episode of the MSP Chat podcast. You know what did I tell you listeners and viewers. Ryan is the guy to go to, if you wanna understand where it’s at with partner programs right now. I will say for folks in the audience, Eagle Eye alert members of our audience may have noticed what felt like a slightly odd, maybe slightly abrupt cut towards the end of that interview.

We experienced technical difficulties onsite while we were recording. And the unfortunate effect for you is actually, there was a whole part of that conversation that Erick and I got to enjoy with Ryan that we did not actually capture. On video or audio. And you didn’t get that, but you know what, Erick, that’s just fine because there was so much information to absorb in what we did capture that may maybe it’s better that we gave people a break and gave him a chance to absorb all that good information from from Ryan and I will just say, there, there is actually a lot to think about and absorb there.[00:54:00]

I will just say that if I’m looking for some big picture takeaways from that conversation, I would say the landscape that we’re in right now is a very complicated one for a vendor because there are so many different points along the sales path and within the customer lifecycle for a partner to influence.

And as a vendor, you want to be aware of, you want to track, you wanna recognize and reward all of them. And it in all the ways Ryan was talking about, that gets very complicated for the vendors. But it’s good news, all of this for the MSPs and the solution providers, the partners of these vendors, because it means work that you’ve been doing already.

Will be recognized and rewarded. Then there will be more ways for you to partner with these companies and that the benefits of partnering with them will be more properly tailored to the work that you do. These, Dave will be moving out of an older old fashioned model of working with with vendors into one that’s more suited to the way the world [00:55:00] works right now that benefits you entirely.

It’s gonna be an interesting transition for a lot of vendors. But it’s a good one for the MSPs in the audience.

Erick: Yeah. And you and I have firsthand experience working with Ryan in helping modernize channel programs and go to market strategies for the clients that we work with at Channel Mastered.

So we’re in the middle of this kind of transition and more and more. Vendors in the channel Rich are looking to optimize and evolve their programs to meet the changing needs and requirements of the MSPs and the changing direction of the channel itself. So it was great having Ryan sit with us and explore that in the way that only he can.

So I really enjoyed that conversation.

Rich: And at some point down the road we’ll have him back on the show again, and we will get in an entire conversation with him, start to finish [00:56:00] uninterrupted. But we thank him for taking some time out with us last week before he dashed off to the airport to have that conversation with us which leaves us, Erick, with time for just one last thing and we spoke recently on the show about my personal nightmare which was a container full of tarantulas showing up at customs I think in the Netherlands, if I’m remembering right.

There’s another sort of creature related nightmare that you may have heard about folks that came up recently. And I can explain it in three words. Radioactive wasp nest, because wasps. On their own aren’t something to be concerned about. Erick? No. No. If you are working in South Carolina at the Savannah River site which is run by the Department of Energy and nuclear power, et cetera, there is some radio activity around there.

Apparently they found they wasp nest had a radiation level 10 times what is allowed by federal regulations [00:57:00] and, as you were saying off the air, this could have been a Spider-Man scenario brought to life. Somebody gets stung by a radioactive wasp and acquire superpowers and a comic book franchise, and they wind up in the movies.

But actually the federal government stepped in there and took care of the nest. And it’s not gonna be, it’s not gonna pose a risk to, and so no need to lose any sleep, no need to have any nightmares about radioactive wasps if you’re in South Carolina anywhere near the Savannah River site.

But holy cow, that’s not a discovery that you wanna be involved in making

Erick: two thoughts rich. Yeah. So again, superhero stuff aside, but what is 10? What is the acceptable level of radiation so that we know that it’s 10 times higher than that? Shouldn’t it be like zero? Like how do you get 10 times more than zero?

That’s weird. And the other thought is, just thank goodness they weren’t murder hornets. We don’t need radioactive murder. Hornets ’cause wasps, I think they sting you once and they die. But murder [00:58:00] hornets, I think they can sting you repeatedly. So anyway, just following our trend of, creepy crawly insects that pose threats.

Humans.

Rich: And I like that you found a silver lining. You’re letting people go on a positive note. Hey, it could have been worse, could have been a radioactive murder, Hornet Nest. It was merely wasp. So good news folks and they’re not gonna be an issue apparently for anyone anymore.

Folks, that is all the time we’ve got for you this week on the show. We thank you so much for joining us. We’re gonna be back in a week’s time. There’s another episode for you. Until then, I will just remind you, this is both a video and an audio podcast, which means that if you’re listening to us right now, but you’d like to check us out on video, go to YouTube, look up MSP chat.

You’ll find us there If you’re watching us on YouTube, but you’re into audio podcasts, go to Spotify, Google, apple, wherever it is, you get. Your audio podcast, you’re gonna find us there too. And however it is, you’ll find us. Please subscribe, rate review. It’s gonna help other people discover and enjoy the show just like you do.[00:59:00]

This program is produced by the great Russ Johns. It is edited by the great Riley Simpson. They’re both part of the team with us here at Channel Mastered. They are already willing and able to create a podcast for you. If you’d like to explore that possibility or if you want to talk about a partner program or if you wanna talk about the many other things we do for our clients at Channel Mastered.

Why don’t you go look up all those things that we do at www.channel Mastered.com. Channel Mastered has a sister organization. It is called MSP Mastered, that is Erick working one-to-one with MSPs to help them grow and optimize their business. You can learn more about that at www.mspMastered.com. So again, we thank you for joining us.

We’ll be back in a week. Until then, please allow me to remind you that you cannot spell channel. Without [01:00:00] MSP.