Let me tell you what’s really stalling out growth for a lot of small MSPs: it’s not the economy, the competition or even your marketing. It’s your sales department—or more accurately, the dysfunction inside it.
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I see five big problems repeatedly when working with IT business owners trying to build a sales engine. These aren’t just minor oversights. These are deal-breaking dysfunctions that keep you stuck, frustrated and far from hitting your revenue goals.
1. Hiring Salespeople With No Shot At Success
Too many MSPs hire the wrong people for sales roles. They bring in someone with zero relevant experience—maybe they sold shoes at a department store and now they’re expected to pitch managed services contracts.
Now, I’m not saying that background automatically disqualifies someone. But let’s get real—the probability of success is extremely low if they’ve never sold anything remotely close to B2B IT services. Hope is not a strategy. You need to hire based on a clear set of criteria that ties directly to your sales process and the demands of this industry.
2. No Quotas, No Goals, No Accountability
It still shocks me how many MSPs bring on a salesperson and give them… nothing. No quota. No activity expectations. No defined outcomes.
If you’re hiring a salesperson, they need a sales goal. Period. They need a quota, they need activity benchmarks and you need to hold them to it. If they’re not meeting expectations, there has to be a process for review, correction and if necessary—termination. Not a year later. Not six months later. Immediately.
This isn’t about being mean. It’s about being real. If you’re not setting expectations from the beginning, then you’re the one setting the stage for failure.
3. Zero Training And Dumping Them Into Non-Sales Tasks
Another killer is putting someone in a sales seat and then doing nothing to train or coach them. Or worse—bogging them down with admin work, customer service or tech tasks. Your salespeople need to be selling. Period.
Before anyone even starts, I go over their job scorecard in detail. I tell them exactly what’s expected: Five focused calling hours a day. A minimum of 100 dials per day. That’s 500 per week. We measure it, we track it and we have a conversation the minute they fall short.
Week one, it’s a warning. Week two, they’re gone. Why? Because if they won’t even do the activity, they’re not going to get results. Appointments don’t just magically show up on the calendar. And if they’re not picking up the phone, they’re not producing.
4. Hiring Without Full Transparency On Expectations
This is where many IT business owners drop the ball. They get someone all the way to the job offer without being fully transparent. And then when the new hire finds out what’s really expected—like using a CRM, hitting dial targets, having calls recorded—they’re shocked.
About 20% to 30% of candidates disappear when I lay out the truth. They’ll say I’m micromanaging. They don’t want to be “under a magnifying glass.”
Good. Let them go. I don’t want to babysit anybody. I need people who want to follow a proven recipe, get better and win.
Great salespeople want coaching. They want to get better. They want feedback. But if you hire someone who’s not coachable—someone who “likes doing it their own way”—they’re going to crash your process.
5. Letting Free-Range Chickens Loose In Your Sales Department
You wouldn’t let an engineer “wing it” with a firewall install or try to troubleshoot a server with zero documentation. So why let salespeople do whatever they want?
Sales is a process. There are scripts, systems and steps for a reason. Yes, I’m open to improving things, but not until you’ve demonstrated you can work within the system. You’ve got to imitate before you innovate.
We’re not hiring cowboys. We’re hiring people who can work a proven process—and then help us refine it. Just like you wouldn’t want a pilot saying, “Eh, I’ll try my own way of flying this thing,” you shouldn’t tolerate a rogue salesperson going off-script and ignoring the fundamentals.
Final Thought: You Need Discipline, Not Drama
Look, I know a lot of MSPs are small businesses. You’re wearing multiple hats. You’re hustling. But if you want to scale, you must get serious about building a disciplined, accountable sales department. This is where you move from being just another IT guy to a real business owner with real growth.
Don’t fall into the trap of thinking you’re being “nice” by not holding people accountable. You’re not. You’re setting them—and your business—up to fail.
Start with the right people. Set crystal-clear expectations. Track the activity. Train, coach, and be firm. It’s not micromanaging. It’s management. And if you want to build a seven-figure MSP, you need to get damn good at it.
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