Ask ten MSP owners to describe their sales process and nine of them will start in the same place: “Well, I walk them through our stack, our tools, our service levels…”
And right there, in the first sentence, you can see why the close rate isn’t what it should be.
The mistake isn’t what they’re saying. It’s the order they’re saying it in.
One of the most important, and most misunderstood, principles in MSP sales is something the team at Bering McKinley teaches on the BMK Vision Podcast: there’s a correct order of selling. Get it right, and trust compounds from the first handshake. Get it wrong, and you’re the sixth MSP this quarter who sounded exactly like the other five.
The Correct Order: You, Your Company, Your Services
The order BMK teaches is deceptively simple:
- Sell yourself first.
- Sell your company second.
- Sell your services last.
That sequence is not a preference or a personality thing. It’s a reflection of how people actually buy.
Nearly every buying decision, especially in a long-term, high-trust engagement like a managed services agreement, is driven by emotional trust before it’s ever justified by logic.
The prospect has to believe in you as a person before they’ll believe in your company, and they have to believe in your company before the details of your service stack matter at all.
When an MSP leads with services, the stack, the SLA tiers, the backup retention, the monitoring tools, they’re trying to win the deal with logic before trust has been established.
Logic without trust feels like pressure.
Why “Selling Yourself” Isn’t What You Think
“Selling yourself” doesn’t mean bragging, posturing, or listing certifications. It means giving the prospect a reason to believe that the person across the table, you, actually understands their world, listens carefully, and is going to tell them the truth.
Most MSP owners are, in fact, exactly that kind of person. The problem is they never get to that part of the conversation.
They’re so eager to prove competence that they skip straight to the services slide, and the prospect never meets the human who would have earned the trust.
What does “selling yourself” look like in practice?
It looks like curiosity.
Curiosity-Driven Discovery
The fastest way to establish yourself as different from every other MSP the prospect has talked to is to not do what they all do.
Instead of pitching, ask.
Instead of presenting, probe.
Instead of demonstrating expertise by talking, demonstrate it by asking questions no one else has asked.
A few examples of questions that do real work in a first conversation:
- “What made you decide to take this meeting today, specifically?”
- “If nothing changes in the next twelve months, what do you think the cost of that looks like?”
- “When you’ve worked with an IT provider in the past and it went badly, what did that actually look like?”
- “Who else inside your organization is feeling this problem, and what are they saying about it?”
Those questions accomplish two things at once.
They give the prospect the experience of being understood (which is the single most persuasive thing you can offer a decision maker), and they give you the information you’ll need later to make a relevant recommendation.
Pitching doesn’t do either of those things.
What Changes When You Get the Order Right
When the order of selling is right, the entire feel of the sales conversation shifts.
The prospect stops bracing for a pitch.
They start opening up about real problems.
They volunteer budget context.
They reveal who else is involved in the decision.
They give you the map to winning the deal because they finally trust the person they’re drawing it for.
And when you finally do get to the services conversation, it’s not a cold presentation.
It’s the natural answer to questions the prospect has already told you matter.
That’s the difference between a pitch and a fit.
The Uncomfortable Part
Here’s the part that trips up most MSP owners: this approach requires you to not talk about your services for longer than feels natural.
It requires discipline.
It requires trusting that curiosity is doing the work, even when your instinct is screaming to prove value by reciting your capabilities.
Most owners who try this for the first time say the same thing afterwards: the meeting felt calmer, shorter, and somehow more productive, and the prospect asked for the next step instead of the owner having to push for it.
That’s the correct order of selling doing its job.
Up Next in Part 2
Getting the mindset right is step one.
But a great first meeting also has to accomplish four very specific things before you walk out the door, or the momentum you just built goes nowhere.
In Part 2, we’ll unpack the four essentials of a strong First-Time Appointment: budget, timeframe, next steps, and referral confidence, and why most MSP owners leave at least two of them on the table.
This series is informed by the BMK Vision Podcast and Bering McKinley’s published MSP sales frameworks. Visit bmkcommunity.com for more.
