MSP Consultative Sales Strategy

January 19, 2025 12:00 AM 10 minute read

In today’s competitive managed service provider (MSP) landscape, you need to close sales faster than ever before or another MSP might snatch up your prospect. But many MSPs are finding sealing the deal increasingly difficult — and traditional techniques like selling on price or innovation just won’t get the job done anymore. To build lasting relationships and win over clients, you need to differentiate your MSP business with a sales approach that goes beyond the surface.

That’s where Consultative Selling comes in. By focusing on uncovering the root causes of your prospects’ challenges and understanding the impact those issues have on both your prospects’ daily life and their business, you can uncover what they want and need to achieve their long-term goals. Consultative Selling positions you not just as a service provider, but as a trusted advisor who genuinely cares about their success.

You can gain an even deeper understanding of Consultative Selling by reading books such as SPIN Selling by Rackham, The Challenger Sale by Dixon and Adamson, and Gap Selling by Keenan. In this article, we will cover concepts from these books that are almost custom-made for MSP selling.

The value lives in the gap: consultative fact-finding

Selling isn’t just about dazzling prospects and pitching products. At its heart, selling is about solving problems — and you can’t solve a problem until you identify it. In the book “Gap Selling” by Keenan, the author explains the value lives in the gap. In a nutshell, the wider the gap, the more value. And the more value, the easier it is to sell your recommendations to your prospects. Finding and demonstrating the gap is core to the consultative selling process. Uncovering the “gap” between a prospect’s current state and their desired future state is the key to Consultative Selling.

When it comes to closing high-value deals, success during the consultative fact-finding process is your secret weapon for closing those deals. Creating an effective, simple, non-technical, and emotionally impactful sales process is pivotal. But in order to create that, you have to do two things. First, have the finest assessment tools available like Network Detective Pro to uncover hidden problems. Second, ask the right questions to expose the business outcomes your prospect desires. Having the right tools is critical for discovering the technical problems that impact their business and get in the way of those outcomes. This is how we identify the gap.

By asking your prospect the right questions, you don’t just get a look at the gap that you can fill. You get a holistic overview of all of the challenges your prospect faces and how those challenges may impact your business relationship. If you get this part right, you’ll not only close deals with greater ease, but you’ll also position yourself as a trusted advisor rather than just another salesperson. To succeed, you must guide your prospect to the root of their challenges through thoughtful, consultative questioning.

In this multi-part blog series on Consultative Selling, we will cover the Consultative Fact-Finding method that MSPs can use to build value and gather what is needed to create winning sales presentations. We will also explore the Gap Selling methodology. In the next blog, we will bring it all together to show you how to create and present your sales presentation and close the sale.

The art and science of asking questions

Effective investigation is both an art and a science. It starts with asking targeted but open-ended questions that encourage the prospect to share more about their challenges. For example:

What’s the biggest challenge your team faces in [specific area] today?
Is this difficulty causing you and your team stress?
How is this issue affecting your bottom line?
When did this problem start?
What possible solutions have you tried to address it?

But don’t stop there. The real dirt lies in the follow-up questions. Base your inquiries on their previous answers and dig deeper. Your goal is to uncover what’s happening beneath the surface. For instance, if a prospect mentions that their network performance is lagging, you could follow up by asking:

What kind of downtime are you experiencing, and how does that affect your daily operations?
What happens if this issue isn’t resolved in the next quarter?
Have you noticed any trends or patterns that could indicate the root cause?

The process requires you to really focus on the customer, not just making the sale. By listening actively and asking smart questions, you can guide your prospect to a place where they trust you enough to share openly. Do not interrupt their flow unless they start to wander seriously, and don’t start pushing solutions at the first opening. Listen and learn.

Bridging the gap to build trust

When prospects feel understood, they begin to see you as someone who cares about solving their problems and making their business more successful. By making your client feel heard, uncovering the full extent of their challenges and expressing genuine concern about the success of their business, you’re positioning yourself as a trustworthy solution-seeking partner.

Set the stage for sales success

The book “Gap Selling” by Keenan is the definitive guide to the concept of gap selling. The gap lives between the problem and the solution. Your value as a consultive advisor shines in that gap. Here’s how MSPs can apply a gap selling framework to build trust, drive urgency and win more deals

Step 1: Understand the prospect’s current state

The first step in gap selling is developing a thorough understanding of the prospect’s existing situation in order to find the gap that you can fill. To do this, you should:

Identify your prospect’s challenges, pain points, attitudes, attachments and current processes.
Use probing questions to dig beyond surface-level issues and uncover the real problems.

You can leverage Network Detective Pro to complete this step. Start by showing your prospect their IT environment with a clear, detailed report they can easily understand and connect with. Each box highlights a problem with the business impacts you uncovered during fact-finding. By presenting it visually, you reinforce what they learned through your questions, showing true value and making them feel genuinely heard - likely for the first time from an MSP. This is an example of an effective report you can pull from Network Detective Pro. Find more examples here: https://www.rapidfiretools.com/products/network-assessment/reports/

transform-your-msp-with-consultative-selling Continue to build the current state by syncing your scan. You can then adjust manually as needed.