Let me ask you a blunt question.
Why does it feel like nothing in your marketing gets done unless you do it yourself?
Why do campaigns stall the moment you get busy? Why does prospecting happen in fits and starts, then disappear completely? Why does it feel like you’re still carrying the entire revenue engine on your back, no matter how many people you hire?
If your answer is time, you’re not alone. Almost every MSP owner I talk to says the same thing.
But here’s the uncomfortable truth: your problem isn’t time. Its structure.
More specifically, you don’t have a real money team.
Until you stop operating like a tech with helpers and start building a true sales and marketing department designed to produce revenue, you’re going to stay stuck in the same cycle. Marketing gets pushed to the back burner. Prospecting happens in bursts. Growth depends entirely on the owner.
And here’s the reality that most MSP owners know but don’t want to face:
Without a sale, nothing else matters.
You can have the best engineers, the tightest SOPs, the most advanced tech stack in the market. None of it means anything until someone writes you a check. That only happens when you have a team whose job, every single day, is to generate opportunities, fill the pipeline and drive revenue.
So, let’s talk about how to build that team.
The 5 Fundamentals Of Building A High-Performing Sales & Marketing Team
After years of building, breaking, and rebuilding my own team and watching thousands of MSPs do the same thing, I’ve identified five fundamentals that separate the businesses that grow from the ones that spin their wheels.
1. A strategic goal and an achievable plan. Your people cannot perform in a vacuum. They need to know where the company is going and how you plan to get there. If you don’t have a clearly defined marketing plan with measurable goals, start there, before you hire a single person.
2. Clear job scorecards and proper compensation. People need to know what they’re responsible for, how their performance will be measured, and how they’ll be paid. Vague expectations produce vague results, every single time.
3. The right people. Even the best strategy and the clearest scorecards can be completely derailed by one bad hire. The wrong person in a revenue role doesn’t just slow growth… it stops it cold.
4. Good management and leadership. This doesn’t mean micromanaging. It means staying involved, informed, and connected to your strategy, your pipeline, and your results. Great leadership means constantly re-evaluating your people, your process and your approach as the business evolves.
5. Always under construction. If you’re growing, you’re changing. New markets, new messaging, new roles. Don’t confuse constant evolution with dysfunction. It’s simply the price of progress.
Start With A Plan — Before You Hire Anyone
One of the most common and costly mistakes I see is an MSP owner hiring a marketing person before they’ve defined what marketing should actually do. No plan. No goals. No budget. Just: “Here. Go do marketing.”
That’s not a strategy. That’s a setup for failure.
Every productive sales and marketing team starts with a well-defined marketing plan and clear goals. That’s why I put together the MSP Go-To-Market Plan Template, linked below, which walks you through defining your target market, building your USP, structuring your team and creating a realistic budget and campaign calendar.
One benchmark worth knowing: best-in-class MSPs spend about 11% of top-line revenue on sales and marketing combined. That includes salaries, your CRM, website, campaigns, events and everything in between. If you haven’t mapped out where those dollars are going and what you expect them to produce, that’s the first conversation you need to have, before anything else.
Strategy Alone Won’t Save You
Here’s something most people don’t want to hear: strategy is overrated.
People think if they can just find the right plan or the right secret to business growth, the results will follow. But the truth is simple — execution beats strategy every single time. A mediocre plan executed brilliantly will outperform a perfect plan executed poorly.
That’s why when someone says my programs don’t work, I’ll say it plainly: the program works. What fails is execution, usually because the wrong people were hired, the owner stepped away completely, or nobody was tracking what was actually happening.
I was on a call with an MSP around this time last year who wanted to cancel his program because “nothing was working.” Thirty minutes of questions revealed the real problem: the owner had completely handed things off to his sales and marketing guy with zero oversight. He couldn’t tell me how many emails had gone out, what the pipeline looked like or how many prospect calls were being made. His answer? “Robin, I’m busy running a company… that’s why I hired this guy.”
I understand the intent. But here’s the reality: complete abdication never works. Ever.
I know a half-billion-dollar MSSP CEO who can recite the exact scripts his SDRs use to get in the door. Why? Because he pays attention. You can (and should) hire great people. But you must stay connected to your go-to-market strategy, your pipeline and your results. The goal is informed oversight, not micromanagement.
Who Do You Hire First And When?
Here’s the roadmap I recommend based on where you are in your growth:
Under $1M in revenue: Your first hire should be a Marketing Coordinator or Sales Support Admin. Before consistent selling can happen, someone needs to handle the operational work, pulling prospect lists, coordinating campaigns, managing the CRM and following up. This person frees you up to focus on the activities that actually generate revenue.
$1M–$5M: Now you add an SDR (Sales Development Representative) to book qualified appointments. You also need an Account Manager, roughly one for every 20–25 clients. If you’re doing QBRs properly with 25 customers, that’s over 100 client meetings a year. There’s no way a CEO should be handling all of that alone.
$5M and above: Now it’s time for a more experienced Marketing Manager and a Sales Manager once you’ve got three or more salespeople. This is where your sales and marketing operation starts functioning like a real revenue department.
Could you build it differently? Sure. Some of the strongest MSP growth stories I’ve seen started with the owner hiring salespeople first and building the service team as revenue came in. This is a roadmap, not a rulebook.
What To Outsource (And What To Keep In-House)
Early on, many MSPs try to have one person do everything. That’s a setup for mediocrity across the board.
Some functions are almost always better outsourced, at least early on: web design and development, SEO, paid digital advertising, graphic design and advanced copywriting. Your marketing coordinator’s job is to manage and coordinate those vendors, not master every discipline.
That said, AI is rapidly changing what’s possible in-house. A capable coordinator today can handle basic design, video editing, and content creation with the right tools. Just make sure they have the skill, the will and the capacity to actually do it well.
Two Things You Can Never Delegate
No matter how strong your team becomes, two things will always belong to you as the owner.
1. Your chosen target market. AI is commoditizing low-level IT support. Customers are under economic pressure. Price competition is intensifying. If your value proposition is simply “we respond to tickets fast,” you’re in a race to the bottom. Picking a sustainable market, one that won’t be eroded by automation or cheaper competition, requires strategic thinking that only the owner can provide. Your marketing manager can’t make that call for you. Your salespeople can’t either.
2. Your unique selling proposition. What makes your company different? Who do you serve best, and why should they choose you over every other option available to them? You have to set that vision. Then your team executes it. But it starts with you.
These decisions require you to be at the helm — attending events, having honest conversations, constantly re-evaluating your market and your positioning. It’s ongoing work, not a one-time exercise.
The Job Scorecard: Stop Winging It
When I get on Q&A calls and ask marketing managers what they were hired to do, the answer is almost always the same: “Marketing.”
So I push: Are you responsible for the website? Lead generation? Campaign execution? How is your performance being measured?
Most of the time, they genuinely don’t know. No scorecard. No defined results. No clear mission. Just “do marketing” and hope for the best.
Every position on your team needs a job scorecard that includes at minimum: the mission of the role, who they report to, key measurable results they’re accountable for and their day-to-day responsibilities.
And yes, in today’s hiring environment, you need to spell out things like show up on time and work a full eight-hour day. I know that sounds ridiculous. But if you don’t define expectations, you have no right to be surprised when they aren’t met.
The MSP Sales Management Manifesto linked below has complete, ready-to-use scorecards for both the SDR and Marketing Coordinator roles, you can copy, paste, and customize them today. It also includes job ads, interview guides, comp plan examples and onboarding checklists. If you haven’t gone through that document, you’re leaving a lot on the table.
Key Results: Make Them Real
Key results have to be quantifiable, aspirational but attainable, and tied to outcomes — not activities.
“Post five times per week on social media” is a task. “Generate 10 marketing-qualified leads per month” is a result. There’s a big difference.
When building key results, always ask: does this person have the will, the skill and the capacity to achieve them? Someone willing but untrained needs support and tools. Someone capable but overloaded needs bandwidth, not more goals. And sometimes the honest answer is that you simply hired the wrong person for the role.
If you’re not sure what the right targets are yet, set your best estimate and revisit it in 30 to 90 days. You can always refine. But you need a starting point, because you can’t manage what you don’t measure.
Coming Up In Part 2…
In Part 2, we’re going deep into the two roles that are most critical to getting your marketing engine running: the SDR and the Marketing Coordinator.
We’ll cover exactly what they should be doing every day, realistic performance benchmarks with real numbers, compensation structures that work for MSPs, and how to hire someone who can genuinely perform, not just interview well.
If you’ve been struggling to get consistent prospecting and marketing execution in your business, Part 2 is going to give you the playbook.
Stay tuned.
Building Your Sales And Marketing Team (Part 1)
