Partnerships Unraveled
The weekly podcast where we unravel the mysteries of partnerships and channel to help you become more successful.
Partnerships Unraveled
Craig Fulton - Scaling MSP Growth: Breaking the Founder-Led Sales Ceiling
In this episode of Partnerships Unraveled, we sit down with Craig Fulton, industry veteran and M&A advisor at Evergreen, to break down what it takes to scale an MSP beyond founder-led sales.
Craig brings 20+ years of experience building high-impact MSP communities (including IT Nation at ConnectWise) and now advises business owners on driving enterprise value and successful exits.
Here’s what we unravel in this episode:
Why Founder-Led Sales Caps Growth – The hidden bottlenecks in MSP sales and why hiring a dedicated salesperson can double or triple customer acquisition.
Building Scalable Sales & Referral Systems – How top MSPs create repeatable processes for generating consistent inbound business.
The Power of MSP Collaboration – Real-world examples of MSPs working together—even with competitors—to drive growth.
Localizing MSP Marketing for Maximum Impact – Why small businesses buy from people they trust, and how sponsoring local events and sports teams can be a game-changer.
Mastering MDF & Partner Programs – The right way for MSPs to secure and leverage vendor marketing development funds to drive real ROI—and why tracking & reporting is the secret to getting more funding.
Why Vendor Partner Programs Often Fall Short – The gaps in vendor support that are failing MSPs and how vendors can better enable their partners to succeed.
Craig’s insights cut through the noise with hard-earned lessons on MSP growth, sales, and marketing. If you're an MSP leader looking to scale smarter, this is an episode you can’t afford to miss.
Connect with Craig: https://www.linkedin.com/in/craigmfulton/
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Welcome back to Partnerships Unraveled, the podcast where we unravel the mysteries about partnerships, and channel on a weekly basis. My name is Alex Whitford, I'm the VP of Revenue here at Channex and this week I'm very excited to welcome our special guest, craig.
Speaker 1:How are you doing? Hey, I'm good. Thanks for having me, Alex.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we're really excited to have you on. Maybe, for the uninitiated, you could give us a little bit of a rundown of who you are and where you've come from.
Speaker 1:Yeah, my name is Craig Fulton. I'm an M&A advisor at Evergreen. I help a lot of business owners understand what it takes to drive enterprise value in their business and then, when they're ready to take the next step in their entrepreneurial journey, we're here for them. Next step in their entrepreneurial journey, we're here for them. But you know, a lot of people may remember me from ConnectWise. I was with the company about 16 years, helped build the IT nation community, was pretty visible out there, so spent a lot of time in Europe and North America, australia, new Zealand and happy to be here and talk about what I've learned.
Speaker 2:Australia, New Zealand, and I'm happy to be here and talk about what I've learned. Yeah, you were even kind enough yesterday to even give me some insights in terms of how MSPs can and should go to market and some of their strengths and maybe some of their weaknesses as well, which I'm excited to unpick some of that today. You've noticed that a lot of MSPs are founder-led sales teams. You've noticed that a lot of MSPs are founder-led sales teams.
Speaker 1:Explain why that can be a bit of a constraint or a bottleneck when we talk to really becoming successful. Yeah, and it's very common, like. First thing I want to just clarify is there's nothing wrong with it. You know, a lot of people have found success in doing it. But once you get to a certain size, it's like if you're the founder, you're the CEO running the business and you're also going and looking for new business, how much can you really be doing? You can only spread yourself out so far. Um, you know, I tell, I tell founders, when you, when you're ready to break that plateau of growth, that you're stuck at it's time to invest in bringing in a salesperson, you know, a business development, uh, someone going out and hunting for new business.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, uh, the thing about sales and marketing right, it's repeatable process, done every day, and the trouble with being a founder is you end up having to helicopter in and out of situations which doesn't sound particularly repeatable, because I can understand that that's their upper limit, right, that that really becomes a sort of ceiling that you're going to hit. So it's great to hear that, uh, you guys constantly sort of evangelize the benefit of putting dedicated people in seats that then can focus on that all day, every day.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know, and having spent a lot of time in the community gosh, 20 years talking to people the founder led sales again. You know it would be, oh man. I brought in two new clients this year. I'm like that.
Speaker 1:I mean, it was great but it's you know how far are you really going to go there. And you know, while we're on this subject of expanding in the sales, you know a common thing that would happen is, you know, the first sales hire it's like, yeah, get ready. You'll probably end up letting that person go first year because you're learning a lot, right, how to manage a salesperson, um, and, and what it takes, you know, cause there's a. There's a lot of salespeople out there that are great at selling things Like I have this. Look, it's a phone and there's no buttons on it and you can do everything you need Uh, but selling the value of managed services where it gets tough. And and that's where you know founders, when they're going through their first hire, they learn that. They learn they have to actually manage sales because they hadn't been doing it before. Those are some of the learning curves that they're going to go through.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think maybe you touched there that, like a lot of MSPs will be particularly pleased that, hey, we brought on two customers in the last sort of 12 months, maybe to give an indication. We have lots of msps who listen to this. What if you put a dedicated salesperson in place and you've got I don't know, 20 fte, typical, typical msp size? What would you say is a sort of normal sort of rate of customer acquisition once you have that dedicated person?
Speaker 1:normal sort of rate of customer acquisition once you have that dedicated person. Yeah, and you know it's hard to say a specific number of customers. You know a lot of people focus on they should be bringing in X amount of MRR with a balance of new customer in there. You know, and everybody's KPI and goal is different, but I would think they would be bringing on four to six new clients a year, bringing in three times their salary at least in ARR or MRR, and that's where I'd be focused at and that's where I'd be focused at.
Speaker 1:And look, one thing that's important too to think about here is not everything's about the recurring revenue. They should be doing project work too. Right, there should be a good balance. I always like to see a business that's doing 60% to 70% revenue is recurring, 20% or so is project work, because you know, because you got to have the projects going, you should be refreshing hardware, bringing in new clients, getting them onboarded. Those are projects cloud migration, cybersecurity, build outs. I'd love to see that too, because that means it's a good, healthy balance of different revenue streams.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it sounds like we're double to triple the NetNew logo acquisition for 12 months. Right, that's certainly a reason that MSPs should be investing in those dedicated leaders. You mentioned the values previously of MSPs almost collaborating, sometimes with their competitors, and sharing best practices. Can you share some examples where this kind of collaboration led to huge upside for the MSPs involved?
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, you know, I was just with a group earlier this week and they were sharing how they have like pragmatically build out the referral program. You know, most IT businesses go through referral and that's great. And you know, and it gets knocked a lot Like, oh, you're only doing referrals, like what's wrong with that? It's working. But what I really loved seeing is the first time I really saw this was a system for it, right, not just waiting for a referral to come along. Now that's where I would probably criticize if if you're just running your business and a referral just fell right in my lap, um, make a system out of it, right? This? This MSP had said okay, when we do bring on a new client, 30 days in we sit down with them and we ask them for a referral. Hey, can you tell us someone that you know that we could go talk to? Can you make an introduction or just give us a name? And then after six months, hey, how are things going? Is there anyone you can refer us to? And then incentivizing referrals. And then after two years, hey, we're going to re-onboard you. You know, a good experience for a customer. A whole separate topic, the re-onboarding, which I love because things change in a customer business. But engaging in the referral again, right. So having a system there, you know, I really love that. It's like seeing someone share that and then others in the room going wait, I haven't thought of doing that. Let's, let's, let's, let's, let's, let's, let's, let's, let's, let's, let's, let's, let's, let's, let's, let's, let's, let's, let's, let's, let's, let's, let's, let's, let's, let's, let's, let's, let's, let's, let's, let's, let's, let's, let's, let's, let's, let's, let's, let's, let's, let's, let's, let. Specific strategy driving retention, leveraging AI.
Speaker 1:You know the one MSP knew all right, this customer is coming up for renewal in a couple months. We're already hearing word that they may be out on the market looking for a new provider. So they proactively started visiting them. Hey, how are things going? We know it's coming up for renewal. What are you dealing with in your business? That's tough.
Speaker 1:The customer explained a situation that's really efficient, inefficient in their business, and they sat down and figured out a way to automate a lot of those steps for them Leveraging Copilot, some workflow streams inside of Azure. They deployed that. By the way, they were all doing this free of charge at the time. Deployed it. Customers said they had a statistic that saved them 50 hours a month, customer renewed and then, once they renewed, they ended up adding that service in as something they were going to manage for them. So you know, it's coming together and sharing ideas to help grow the business. You know, this is why this community in the MSP world has been so great and I think it's something we really need to get back to. It's like it doesn't happen enough, you know.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, building building business is really really hard, right, and I think one thing is building an enterprise business where you can, you're consistently bringing in all this new talent and the new talent can add to the ideas. But the trouble with building a business that's 20 FTE is you get almost no turnover of people, which means it's really hard to get fresh ideas Right. So, collaboration, msp to msp to share best practices you know we call this podcast, partnerships unraveled and I really do believe channel is about building those partnerships, because that's what really drives the economy forward is that consistent ability for for peers to share context. Yeah, yeah now you've talked a lot about um, how localized marketing is a really important first step when it comes to marketing to help MSPs be successful. Talk to me about the importance of localization.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know, when it comes to MSPs, what are we doing? It's small business, helping small business, right? It's?
Speaker 2:the SMB market.
Speaker 1:The whole thing's built on trust. It's who small business, right. It's the SMB market. The whole thing's built on trust. It's who you know, right. This is why referral is so effective and, you know, profitable. It does seem like you know the big advertising and going big. You know I haven't really seen a lot of people have success with that. But what I hear about is you know google's got their highly localized marketing that they do right. It's when, when people are searching, you're returned at a higher level. Um, you know, when people are searching and it's showing up on a map, you're coming back more often. You're being showcased higher. I've had people had success in that in their communities.
Speaker 1:But other, like highly localized marketing would be attending events in the community, right, find out what events are going on there, you know. I've I've had SPs, you know, and so in the United States we have these farmers markets on the weekend, right, and it's like all right, go down there, get a booth set up and just do some brand building. Right, hand out some branded merch, talk about some things. I know you're not selling flowers or food or donuts and coffee, but you're making the community aware that you're there.
Speaker 1:Another one I've seen you know Pax8's doing. They're providing a lot of marketing development funds sponsoring local sports teams. Right, we know those are the big national sports teams but who's really attending those? A lot of consumers, right. But when you get into those smaller local sports teams, like in the United States, we have like our amateur leagues and you know communities tend to go to those. Business owners and communities go to those those events right, get your name on a billboard there, get, get your business talked about during the timeouts and the sports events or you know the downtime when the they're they're talking over the speaker. I've seen stuff like that be very effective.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I, I really, you know, we we talk a lot on this podcast around meet the customer where they're at, and sometimes that's a lot of what marketing is right, which is, how do I just get my message in front of the right customer, whether that's SEO, whether that's through a referral, or I love your sports event example, right, because I think that's exactly where you will find those people go. Well, yeah, I do own a 30, I go and watch, you know, this team on a regular basis. Um, one of the things that's, uh, really complicated, I think, for msps, uh, when we talk about marketing, though, is they go okay, how much is this going to cost me and when am I going to see a return? Right and getting out of that? You know, but I put five in now, so I get 10 tomorrow, right, that's. That's that sort of how do you guide businesses to adopt that more sort of long-term vision in terms of what marketing is going to drive?
Speaker 1:Yeah, you're right. You know technical people have that instant gratification need. I bought this thing, I set it up. Now it's working. Look at this, I played with this, now it's going.
Speaker 1:Yeah, marketing is the gift that keeps on giving. You know, I always say marketing campaigns really never end, because you know you're planting a seed there and how long is it going to take for that seed to grow? It's going to take a while. You know, to me, an effective marketing campaign like a really good one, really good one is going to take three months, could take a year, could take two, right? Um, a lot of it is about just the grind and like brand building, brand awareness. Um, you know, I've, I've done that at evergreen, where I'm at. You know, when I joined it was hey, I've talked to a lot of my friends. A lot of people know who we are, um, so I started going on the events. Right, you just got to get out there on your feet, get in front of people, talk about your business with passion.
Speaker 1:And again, if someone's running a campaign, don't switch it a lot. That's something else I'd like to bring up. Don't think, oh, I ran this campaign on Microsoft Copilot to get people that upgrade and a month in, you're like oh, I ran this campaign on Microsoft Copilot to get people that upgrade. And you know, a month in, you're like, oh, it didn't work, I'm going to try it again, but with a different message. Like, no, no, no, no, you got it consistent, repeatable, simple. Don't change it a lot, because you're really going to confuse people because it takes a while for it to get out there.
Speaker 2:Right Again.
Speaker 1:it's like planting a seed. You plant corn in the spring, right six months you can't harvest it. Uh, it's the same marketing and a lot of people think, no, no, no, but the world's connected people are getting this? Nah, they're not. It takes a while to set in. People are bombarded with a lot of stuff. So, yeah, I'd say marketing, it never ends.
Speaker 2:It never ends yeah, we uh I'm sort of giggling because I had a really uh, I had one of my marketers internally and before christmas had a conversation to be like Alex, this isn't working, like we're not, this just, we have to pivot. We have to pivot our strategy. I'm telling you it's not working. We're like I don't think there's been enough volume. I think you'll be surprised how much volume is required to make an impact. And then we come back into the new year and first week, three conversions immediately and we're like oh, turns out, uh, turns out was working. It's just, it takes. I'm just constantly amazed, no matter what it is in sales or marketing, how much volume is required to make something work. And marketing's absolutely that. In fact, it in some. In some ways, it's the most volume, right, because it's the most like touch. So you've got to keep communicating same message, tying your brand to the outcome, and and that done from a long perspective. That's why it's compound interest, right.
Speaker 1:That's why it's a miracle yeah, and it's just you know, I saw there was a speaker at a recent conference and he he called it the attention economy getting someone's attention so hard, it's so valuable. Um, that's why you just got to keep over and over and it can't be a one and done it's again in their face. In their face, in their face, and if they got a lot coming at them right, Especially on the phones. Now I can't get on social media anymore and just see what my friends are doing. It's just ad after ad after ad after ad, and I'm sure there's ads that have been in my face for a year and then all of a sudden, suddenly one time I'm like, oh, look at this thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the example I always use because everyone's been there it's you never see the car until you're about to buy the car and then you see them everywhere. It's like oh, and another one, and they've always been there. They didn't just manufacture another 3,000 and put them in your town, right, but yeah, until you're switched onto it, you just don't see it. You touched on Pax8 MDF for sporting events.
Speaker 2:MDF is an amazing tool when deployed properly. I think a lot of partners misunderstand just how big an impact MDF can have and why it's such an important thing to sort of understand and utilize effectively. In your opinion, what steps are most optimal for an MSP to take to better leverage MDF?
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, and you know every vendor has an MDF program, some kind of program. Right, they have a solution. They want you to get it out there just as bad as you want to get it out there, so they're willing to help fund that. You might be able to go to a vendor and get MDF right out of the gate because, look, you're kind of proving to them all right, I'm ready to do something. I know people that use this regularly and they just so happen to have healthy, growing businesses. So I'm sure there's a correlation there. But just start out and say, hey, look, we want to run a marketing campaign, an email campaign. You know, contact your Microsoft rep for co-pilot. What kind of funds can I get? Go do it. And what I'd say is make sure you're reporting and recording everything that's going on right. Every psa on the market um can help track this. Every marketing um platform that's out there can track it. If you're doing in-person stuff, keep track of the attendees that are coming and how many conversations you're having. Like what's key to MDF and keeping it going is tracking what you're doing and then showing it to the vendors so that you can get more right. We did this stuff with your money. We talked to this many people. We had this many follow-up calls. We converted this much. We're billing this much and, at the pace we're going, we're going to continue to buy this much from you and beyond. That's what's going to keep them giving you more money. Right, they're going to want to see that something's happening.
Speaker 1:So many times MSPs get the money, do an event Well, that didn't work, and the vendor's like what happened with it? Oh, we did this stuff and we didn't get anything out of it. Let me get some more. So I try again. They're not going to do it. They're going to want to know what you did. So, uh, you know and and and. Don't think like all this reporting. It's going to slow it down, it's going to make it hard for me to execute. You got to do it. You got to do it.
Speaker 2:Figure out how to work it in there yeah, yeah, obviously I've sat in Vendorland, I've sat in Distyland as well, so I've had a lot of close friends who are marketing managers and general account managers and I can tell you MDF admin is like at the bottom of the pile of things that people enjoy, like they hate it.
Speaker 2:And so I've always sort of chuckled to myself because I've been sat in those rooms where people are going oh my god, look at this vendor submission, look at this mdf submission. Just make it easy for them to give you more money, right, which is, hey, even if it didn't work, hey, here's why it didn't work, here's what we think about it. Here's how we're going to change for next time. That nine times out of ten is good enough to get you more money. Because they're like oh, we can continue to fund this person because eventually they're going to work out, and then we can just give them the money continuously and so just make their life easy and you get free money to drive marketing, to drive revenue, right, it's like it's just, it's about that roi and communication. If you do that properly, I mean, msps are going to fly yeah, yeah and look, there's great marketing providers that are out there.
Speaker 1:You know I'm not saying take the MDF and do everything yourself. Take the MDF and hire a third party outsource marketer to help you, but make sure you communicate to them. You need everything tracked and scored and reported on so that you can go back to that vendor and show what you did. That's the key. You've got to show what you're doing.
Speaker 2:But it's not all MSPs Fop. There are plenty of partner programs which fall wildly short of MSP expectations. Talk to me about where you see the gap from the other side.
Speaker 1:From the vendors programs.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, exactly Because I think it's really easy to turn around to an MSP and say, hey, your MDF submissions are really crap. There are plenty of channel programs which fall really short on actually helping and driving MSPs forward. Talk to me where you see some of those gaps.
Speaker 1:Yeah, this one is. I've actually experienced what you know. When I was at ConnectWise and we said, look, we're gonna be a cybersecurity company, it was, people were like, no, you're a PSA, you're an R&M company, you're not a cybersecurity company. It was a little slow out of the gate and the leaders at the time said, look, let's build a. And the leaders at the time said, look, let's build a partner program. We need to educate on cybersecurity. We need to educate the MSP. We need to educate their customer. The program was set up to teach how to do events, how to communicate to the customer. Any vendor or ConnectWise would get on the phone with a customer to help land a sale. If they were doing an event, connectwise would fly a subject matter expert out there. I know Kaseya does this. I know PacState does this. Those really high-touch partner programs are becoming pretty popular. But just everything we have said applies to everybody right.
Speaker 1:Then I sometimes look at a vendor. I'm like, hey, this is going to take time. This isn't we gave them the MDF. Where's the returns? Like, yeah, marketing is a gift that keeps on giving. This could take six months, this could take a year. We got to hit our sales goals. What's going on? I think sometimes it's too much pressure applied and that causes a lot of issues. Sometimes it's just. We all have to remind ourselves of the essence of marketing and what are the basics of marketing? Right, marketing's whole job is to generate leads. It's the gift that keeps giving. Marketing never ends and people always look at it as some linear thing that starts and stops, and it's the gift that keeps giving. Marketing never ends. Um, and people always look at it as some linear thing that starts and stops, and it's just not. And sometimes the people handing out the mdf need to remember that too yeah, I, I completely agree.
Speaker 2:I think I I've recorded a podcast with a few, uh, channel marketing leaders and they always talk about the conflict that happens between sales and marketing within vendors right. Which is like no, no but I need to hit my goal in three weeks and they're like, yeah, we understand that, but we need to hit our pipeline goals so that we can hit in nine months. Right, there is a balancing act, so you've got to have that sort of understanding of short-term pressure but also understanding of long-term gain.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Maybe thinking, oh, go on, sorry, you brought up something that kind of got my memory right, because I've heard the vendors say they don't know how to land these deals and it's probably true, right, I think I would challenge vendors handing out MDF like, hey, do you have a good program teaching them the sales techniques for landing leads? Because, again, a lot of these MSPs are familiar with referral. These are warmed up people coming Right. Those are easy to land. But when you're just when you run a let's say you do run an effective marketing campaign and you have cold leads coming in, that's something new to a lot of people, right, having to explain everything and get to a desired outcome and build the relationship.
Speaker 1:You know, sometimes we have to teach a lot of this stuff. If we have to teach a lot of this stuff, again, when I was at ConnectWise and we were trying to get the PSA to really take hold, it was like, well, the PSA really isn't going to go anywhere. A lot of these people don't know how to run a business. These are technical people that just ended up with a business. Let's start by teaching that business. It's the same here, like if you're doing an MDF program, remember you have to teach sales too. A lot of people don't know like how to do it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, craig, we started the conversation with meet the customer where they are and I think we'll finish the conversation on meet the MSP where they are right, which is, hey, it's amazing and we were speaking yesterday and sort of chuckling. I think it's incredible. Msp is in some way like the most perfect business, because if you're winning all of your business via referral and word of mouth that you're not even pushing and you've got customers that continue to buy with you all the time, the mechanics of your business are amazing. Companies like that, I know, work really hard on that bit alone. Almost all of their value is. Here's how we're going to help you scale, because those businesses intrinsically are great at retaining customers. We think we're pretty good at retaining guests here as well, which is why we always ask our current guests to recommend who our next guest should be. Craig, who did you have in mind?
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, Nigel Moore, the tech tribe. You know I love seeing what the Tech Tribe's doing. They're teaching business. They've got a nice kit for it. You know a phenomenal community I was. I actually met Nigel last year down in Australia. I think he'd be a great guest to have on here.
Speaker 2:Awesome, nigel, we're coming for you. Craig, thank you so much for sharing your experience.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you're welcome.