Partnerships Unraveled
The weekly podcast where we unravel the mysteries of partnerships and channel to help you become more successful.
Partnerships Unraveled
David Meister - How to Build Programs that MSPs Actually Like
What happens when someone who’s lived the frustrations of the MSP world gets the keys to build a global program from scratch? You get Dave Meister’s approach - pragmatic, partner-first, and built to remove the red tape that vendors too often impose.
In this episode, Dave Meister, Global Head of MSP & MSSP Channel at Check Point, joins us to share how his deep MSP background shaped one of the industry's most intuitive and partner-friendly programs. From avoiding the classic pitfalls that alienate partners, to understanding the consumerization of B2B buying. Dave lays out the strategies that are reshaping how MSPs grow and survive.
We explored:
- Why most MSP programs fail before they start
- The death of the “middle” in channel and the rise of dual extremes: hyper-automation vs. high-touch outcomes
- How Check Point's internal resourcing decisions reflect the changing buying journey
- The AI-native MSP: what it looks like and what it means for traditional support services
- What Dave looks for when scaling a channel team from 4 to 40
This is a must-listen for anyone serious about building meaningful channel relationships, scaling smarter, and staying ahead of the market curve.
Connect with David: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davemeister1/
_________________________
Learn more about Channext 👇
https://channext.com/
Watch on YouTube ►
https://www.youtube.com/@channext
#channelmarketing #channelpartners
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 Chanext and this week I'm very excited to welcome our special guest, dave. How are you doing?
Speaker 2:I'm doing well. Alex, how are you?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm excited for this one. I think the audience knows how much I love everything MSP and we're going to spend a lot of time talking about MSP today. Maybe, if we're uninitiated, you could give us a little bit of an introduction of who you are and what you do.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely so. My name is Dave Meister. I run the global MSP and MSSP channel here at Checkpoint for email security. So a lot of the people in the market probably know us in the MSP market at least still know us as Avanan, but we're all now running under the Checkpoint banner. Now I've been on board for about two and a half years in this specific role. Prior to this I started the Asia Pacific region for email security for Checkpoint, joining just after the acquisition of Avanan. But prior to that I lived and breathed everything MSP. So I was an engineer for a break-fix company which became a managed services company. I then ran technical teams. I then realized the sales guys had a little bit more fun, so I moved over to the sales side, ran go-to-market, ran sales teams and then decided to switch over to the dark side for a vendor.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Yeah, I definitely agree that there are some real upsides to being on this sort of sales arm. I think we're only stressed for two weeks of the quarter, whereas I think engineers are stressed for most days in the quarter. So it's a smart switch. We were sparring on how you sort of optimally build a partner program and you were walking me through your initiative is try not to piss MSPs off or try to take the learnings from maybe poorly designed programs. Talk us through your experience and how that's influenced your strategy.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely so. I've worked for a few different types of MSPs, some that were very vendor-friendly and others who we kept vendors at arm's length, and through both sides of it there was always a laundry list of things that vendors did all the time which drove us insane. It could be undercutting deals, it could be introducing a different partner to a deal, it could be calling up our sales reps five days before the end of quarter to try and push a deal through, really use car salesman type approaches, and so when I came into a vendor role, it was very much that I had that list kind of sitting next to my computer going do not do these things. You know that if you do these things you're going to annoy people. And then when I came into the role, I started my role in Australia, if my accent didn't give me away, and I had an opportunity to kind of sit back and look at what some of the other MSP players were doing in the market, because we were new to the market and it was interesting to see what some of the other vendors were doing in their MSP program. That, I suppose, provided us marker signs of things not to do because they just annoyed partners. So I'd go out and speak to partners and partners would talk about stuff. Like you know, we want to be in a multi-tenanted MSP friendly program.
Speaker 2:But the product that this vendor that we're using at the moment, the product they use isn't their enterprise product. It's a cut-down version to support the SMB. But we know that the threats that we're seeing in SMB are the exact same the threats we're seeing in enterprise. We know that we've got enterprise sellers who don't get paid on MSP deals. So they'll come in and they'll cut us out of deals or they'll go and log non-standard pricing and they'll undercut our MSP pricing. We have players from multinational players that play in our market that we didn't know about.
Speaker 2:There was all these types of things that would come up that just frustrated partners, and so when I had an opportunity to take over the global MSP program here at Checkpoint, that was one of the first things that I focused on was, if we're going to build a program, we're going to build a program with the partner in mind first and their style of business. It's not just about growing our revenue, it's about enabling their go-to-market in the way that they want to do it and so avoiding the pitfalls of creating an MSP product that has cut down security. Things like making sure that our enterprise sellers are actually paid on MSP deals so that we don't have channel competition. Making sure that and just removing things that annoyed partners, like artificial barriers that don't provide any value. Simple things like giving enough NFR licenses to allow partners to actually try the product and be comfortable with it. All of those types of things came front of mind when we started to design it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think the channel is a wonderful place to sort of learn lessons about life. Um, and we had a couple of uh people from theme through and they were talking me through their, their sort of strategy and, uh, in terms of world-class fundamentals, where I think we sort of get hyper fixated on like we're going to build this really innovative and like very clever strategy and it's like or we just do the basics really well and that's actually going to get you like 98% of the way there and the really innovative stuff actually doesn't make as much difference as most people think. And I think that can't be more true in the MSP space right, where we're talking about typically small businesses that just want a good level of service, really easy to do business with, both operationally a pleasure to deal with, automated billing, like just a good infrastructure wrapped around them, and we can sort of forego the very shiny packages that tie everything together.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. I mean, we've seen it where you know, when we were designing the program for the other Checkpoint products, we went through a lot of discourse and discussion around the things that we wanted to do to get MSPs on board and when we went out and evaluated other vendor programs, we saw that there were just barriers to entry which made it difficult to work with. So, like things, like you know, you can reach out to us on our website, but you've got to go through this certification, have this certification, this certification. Then you can get access to our partner portal, then you can start trialing the product and just silly things like that. We're like, no, don't do any of that.
Speaker 2:We know that MSPs don't have a huge amount of time. We know that if we've got your attention, we've probably only got your attention for a couple of minutes. And so getting on that first phone call, not doing a pitch, but understanding what their problems are, getting straight into the product and then giving access to them straight away I mean my partner recruitment team as an example. One of the KPIs that I track with them is how many partners can we get onto an NFR and a POC, a proof of concept on that first call Because it's just like I don't want to go through all of this other rubbish. Like you're, obviously you've got an interest in the product. Let's try it out. Let's see if it fits what you're looking for. If it doesn't, we'll just move on. I don't want to waste your time or convince you of something that's not going to actually add value to your business.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think that we speak a lot on this podcast about meeting partners where they actually are, not where we want them to be, and I think it'd be great if they jumped through a thousand hoops. But why bother? If the product's really good and there is mutual buy in, it'll work itself out, like don't worry guys, and if it doesn't, hey, who cares? Right, we're, rather than putting these artificial barriers in place, I think, maybe looking slightly forward into where the market's headed. I think you have an interesting view in terms of one very sort of high value service led engagement all the way through to hyper-optimization and hyper-automation. Talk to me about how you see channel developing, especially in this MSP space.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely so. I mean, the first thing to start off with is that this is coming back to what the experience is that the buyer wants. So we're seeing more and more in a consumer level that people are wanting to purchase from marketplaces. People want to go marketplaces, people want to go into Amazon, people want to go into an online web store to go and purchase things, and we're starting to see that filter into the corporate world as well, where we have the traditional model of buying. Things was built around selling appliances. You would go to a distributor who would help you spec out a server or a switch stack or a firewall or something like that. They would then go to take it to a vendor. You log a deal reg. The vendor would then provide, get a pricing approved, which come back to the disti, back to the partner, back to the customer, and that's been the way we've been doing it for decades now. But it doesn't work in the SaaS world, and so the traditional VAR model or value-added reseller model, in my mind, is dying and we're getting.
Speaker 2:We're at this fork in the road where we're going one of two directions. On the one side, we're seeing that if they do just want to procure licenses or procure a device. There's hyper-automation in marketplaces. I can go onto an AWS marketplace, an Azure marketplace there's a lot of other marketplaces as well where I can just go in and I can hit go and it's going to procure it for me. I don't have to talk to anyone Particularly important if you've got millennial sorry, if you've got Gen Zs or Gen Alphas working in your procurement team who do not want to pick up the phone, but you can go down that hyper-automated marketplace route.
Speaker 2:Or the other direction is particularly in the SMB mid-market space. People want high touch, they want high valued services. So, rather than just buying a device that they have to manage, configure and things like that, they want to go down the route of I want to buy an outcome from you and so that traditional VAR model is changing now and splitting down this road of I want hyper-automation marketplace or I want high value, outcome-based services and for looking forward onto the way the partners deliver over the next few years. That's the way it's going to go, in my opinion anyway, is that people need to. Partners need to innovate to go down the marketplace automation route, or they need to innovate to go down the high-value services route, or, if they're really good, do both.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think the way this sort of works right, the middle always dies. Because I think if you, this sort of works right, the middle always dies. Because I think if you want to just self-procure and you've got your own in-house team and this is sort of where AWS came from, right in terms of marketplace hey, we've got these internal devs who know what they want to do. They want easy procurement that they can control and at the best possible price. Then automation works brilliantly.
Speaker 1:The other side of that spectrum is exactly the opposite, which is, hey, we want high touch, outcome based decision making, but where this really struggles is being somewhere in the middle, where it's like, hey, we are complex to deal with but we're not really buying outcomes. You sort of have to decide what your route to market is and really index on that, because I do think the consumer starts to really deeply understand and we see it today, right, this is why Amazon, the actual distribution business, as opposed to AWS, does so well, because we as consumers go no, no, I've done my research and I just want to procure that methodology works for us as consumers. Or if we want catered support, then we can also go and find that, and I just I'm constantly seeing that the consumer space is starting to indicate where this b2b space is headed absolutely my um, uh, my, my, uh, vp, uh, here at checkpoint.
Speaker 2:We're having a conversation about this earlier in the year and, uh, you know the comparison between uh, you know an enterprise sales approach versus an MSP sales approach, where it is much more automated and services-driven. And he gave me an analogy which I thought was really good and relevant to this conversation. He's like I see it like buying a pair of Nikes. If I know my size, I'm going to go buy it on the web store. I'm just going to go order it and it's done. Size, I'm going to go buy it on the web store. I'm just going to go order it and it's done. If I don't know my size, I'm probably going to go into a store and have somebody measure me up and purchase it from the store and have that little bit of high interaction.
Speaker 1:But they're the options yeah, exactly going in to the middle, it just dies right, and you can see from the high street. Today no one is procuring that way, because we understand, as consumers, what we need and I think it becomes. This is where the channel and msps get really interesting is how you then interconnect all of those pieces right, because it's not just nike's, it's now the entire outfit and it's down to the vendors themselves to work on. Okay, what's our integration strategy? What's our joint communication? What's our joint value prop? Because that's where educating the consumer, or educating the buyer on what's important in terms of holistic solutions, becomes so important is what businesses spend so much time and resource on educating customers so that their unified go-to-market is procured via a marketplace that that's right and it changes from a business point of view.
Speaker 2:it then starts to change the way you put your investment from a resources point of view, Like, if you are marketplace driven. As an example, are you going to go invest very heavily in a massive sales force or are you going to reduce the size of your sales force and invest a bit heavier into development from your go-to-market, invest heavier in marketing and things like that to be able to achieve what you want to achieve? Because in this day and age I don't know what the exact statistic is, because I've heard a few float around but by the time you speak to a buyer, they've already made a lot of their decision. I think it's something like 60% or 70% of the decision is made before you actually speak to somebody.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think Jay McBain's latest, I think it's 11 out of 14 touch points are done ahead, right, that's marketing influences all the way to 11, and then I think it's two to three more touch points required to actually close and we see that growing right. So more self-education, more self-nurture, so that buyers are extremely well informed, and then that's where the msp I and I think where marketing and MSP really comes together tightly is I believe it's the role of brands to support MSPs, to take that marketing to their end user, because MSPs are there to help. Just with those last few steps, it's down to marketing, I think, again, learning from how we service consumers to how we service SMB, as opposed to diluting enterprise strategy and trying to bring that down. We want to take the lessons from consumer and bring them up into that SMB space and that's obviously where marketing plays a critical role.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. I think one of the pivotal points for myself as we were building out this program or building out the MSP program for Checkpoint, is that I got to a point where I sat down with my VP when we were going through some budgets for the next year and I said to him look, I know we budget for this many headcount, but I'm going to take these headcount out and I actually want to go hire developers dedicated to our MSP program and I want a product manager dedicated to the MSP program. Because it comes down to that again, taking the understanding of that 11 out of the 14 touch points are done before you speak to them. That means I need to invest in things that are a force multiplier. If I can develop a feature, if I can develop a marketing platform, it's going to affect more people than just the one-to-one selling motion.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, how do we influence the decision-making criteria between one to 11, as opposed to what I see so many channels doing, which is indexing on 12 to 14, not realizing that, hey, we might have already missed the window by a long, long way, right, if we weren't going to touch on AI. And we're talking about forward vision. I think we're probably missing a trick. We saw MSPs shift from on-prem to born-in-the-cloud MSPs, and that was a wave that left some MSPs behind. We saw MSPs natively born-in-the-cloud. We were discussing how MSPs I think are natively going to be born in AI. Talk to me about how you see those two worlds coming together.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's an interesting comparison. I was really fortunate to witness a couple of MSPs that started as born-in-the-cloud MSPs and it was amazing to see how rapidly they grew and how they were able to address the needs of the customers a lot quicker than some of the bigger players in the market that I was in at the time, because they didn't have this legacy approach that needed to be refined. They just came in and did it from scratch and so you know they would come in, for example, and say, all right, well, we're going to start you in 365. We're not going to give you servers, Everything's going to be SaaS-based. And then their entire support process and their entire security stack was built around that, without this legacy that needed to be updated.
Speaker 2:And we're definitely coming into, as you mentioned, into that next phase with AI, I think with MSPs and this is just my opinion, my forward-looking view on this but I think that MSPs over the next five years maybe even less, depending on the speed that AI develops are going to change dramatically, in that a lot of the traditional processes and software that we deployed is going to become unified, is, at the moment, as an MSP, you're going to run out an RMM agent, a remote access agent. You're going to run out an endpoint security tool, You're going to run out all of these different platforms, but I think, and then you manage them. And if you've got a SIEM or a SOC or you've got an integration to your PSA, yeah, you can manage them from a single platform. But I think where we're heading, the direction that we're heading, is that the MSP will become it'll be a single agent that will be deployed, that will do everything. It'll be a self-learning AI agent, agentic AI agent that the MSP's responsibility is to consult, deploy, manage and update that agent, but that agent's going to do everything that's required. And so I see that that's where we're going.
Speaker 2:And so I think for MSPs, what that means is that and this has been happening with it happened with cloud, it happened with security, it's now happening with AI and then any MSP that's relying today wholly on technical support services, I think is in a bit of danger over the next couple of years. They need to innovate massively to get up to speed, because the support tier one, tier two, tier three, support, server patching, maintenance, uptime that's so commoditized now. There's always going to be a cheaper way to do it and a lot of that can get replaced by AI, either now or in the coming years. I mean, we've already seen some organizations pop up in the channel who are augmenting that. Level one. Level two support with AI, particularly with the growth of large language models over the last 18 months. So that's where I think it's going to go is that MSPs are going to be much more consultancy-based around this singular agent or this unified agent that does kind of everything.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I completely agree. I think we touched on it earlier, right, customers want to buy outcomes, and if we're talking about downtime, it's not an outcome, right? And so I think what AI allows us to do is to embed stronger correlation causation into outcomes that we're driving towards, and that can't just be hey, we'll make sure that the lights are on all the time. And I think where I'm really interested to see these niche MSPs almost collaborating together within one customer, where one's providing an outcome and another one's providing another outcome, because they're extremely focused on the sort of value props that they deliver.
Speaker 1:Maybe zooming out slightly, I think one of the things that I'm always fascinated when I speak to channel leaders is, I think hiring people in channel teams is complicated, because you're not just worried about your own culture, you're worried about the culture that you disseminate out into your channel and then what that does into the end users. You've scaled your team, I think, from four-ish to 40. What are some of the cultural markers you look for to help bring the talent in, drive the performance that you need out into your channel?
Speaker 2:So there's a couple of key things that we look for. I think I try and avoid traditional salespeople a lot, and so I've had a lot of really, really amazing people who have been enterprise sellers or end-user sellers for 15-plus years come and talk to me and, to be honest, they don't quite understand the motion. What I look for when I'm looking from a cultural point of view is that if we're ever going to step in front of a partner, we have a very short period of time to make an impression and we have a very short period of time to deliver an outcome. And if I have a seller that comes in and is pushing their own agenda without understanding the go-to-market and understanding the business, the MSP themselves and what they're trying to deliver, it's going to cause problems. And so I'm always looking for people who are curious, who are looking to understand the way the partners go to market and then have enough innovation and entrepreneurial background or personality to look at ways to help the partner go to market. So you know, for example, one of the questions we get asked quite a bit selling email security.
Speaker 2:You know, email security is something that's been around for decades and, quite frankly, most channel partners think it's pretty boring because it hasn't been a growth area for a number of years and the traditional legacy gateway style of doing email security is long in the tooth. It misses phishing emails, it takes a long time, it's not a sexy sell, and so when we come in with a completely different approach to doing it that's easy to set up, it's got a high catch rate. Going in and talking to the partner about that, the first question that they ask is okay, how do I wrap services around this? And so my salespeople need to not only be able to go and convince them on the product and help them go through the process of understanding the capabilities and things like that, but they need to be able to help the partner build a service, build a go-to-market motion. And that comes back to that entrepreneurial background, that curiosity and, to be honest, not having the arrogance of thinking that we know how to do everything.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you touched on. I've worked both on the vendor side and in distribution and on the partner side, and the bit that I'm always fascinated is I think you said the perfect word, which is build. I have seen people who've come from engineering backgrounds. I've seen the smoothest and most charming salespeople who have been wildly successful in the channel, but I think the thing that really unifies them is their builders, because I think, even within when the most slick operation, we are repeatedly going back into partners to understand what's broken and how to fix it, and I always look for those people who do you run towards the problem as fast as humanly possible or did we just try and operate what we're doing today by day?
Speaker 2:And I think the common characteristic or trait that I'm looking for is yeah, I want to see someone who's fascinated by the problem and wants to continue to iterate and fix it, and when you get those and I love that, it's so true and when you get those people, what you start to get is passion, and that's probably the last thing that I'm always looking for is passion about what we're doing, passion about MSPs, passion about email security. I remember early on, when I started at Checkpoint, I had a bit of feedback from a few different partners about we haven't met somebody who's as passionate about email security as you, and it's a bit of a laugh because I get excited about it and, like I said, for most partners it's a boring sell. But when you've got passion about something and you want to build something, you can create something amazing. And our program's nowhere near perfect. We've still got a long way to go, a lot of things to build and a lot of growth to come, and we're continually trying to mature and grow the program, but it's fun to build and it's fun to deliver outcomes.
Speaker 2:I mean building something. I mean, as you mentioned, we're so much bigger than what we were two and a half years ago from a people count, from a revenue count, from a partner count, and it's been an amazing journey. You've got to have the passion to back that up, though, because it takes and you and I spoke about this a little bit building something from the ground up takes a pound of flesh Like it doesn't come easy. There's a cost, an intrinsic cost, associated with building something, and so if you don't have that passion to be able to stick it through, when it could be a long night, it could be a difficult conversation. It could be an unexpected barrier that comes up. It could be needing to go fight for what you need to fight for, be it budget, be it the headcount, whatever it is. There's just a cost associated with it and you're not going to be able to pay that if you don't have the passion behind it to deliver something big.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I always know when I'm about to hire like an absolute rock star. I was always taught that, hey, alex, in an interview, frame it worse than it is and sometimes frame it much worse than the status quo is today. And then you just see someone's eyes like light up because they are excited by how bad the current situation is. And whenever I see that, I'm like, oh, we're going to have a lot of fun because you're right, this is taxing, right. I can't tell you how many days I walk in like, oh, everything's going to go. And then you get that email and you're like, oh, my God, how are we going to deal with this? But it is that you know, I always think discipline and resilience I think those words are actually lies the is do you enjoy it? And then discipline and resilience will come anyway, because you're enjoying the process of building and I just think enjoyment.
Speaker 2:If you can find people who enjoy that, that process, then everything gets a lot easier from there yeah, that's right, and I think you know we're all, we're all very privileged to be able to work in the industry that we work in.
Speaker 2:Like it's if you think back to our you know, our parents generations, our grandparents generations, to, if you actually take a zoom right back, we're so lucky to get to do what we do, like the fact that we get to travel around, speak to so many different people, you know, drive these outcomes, do exciting things like it's.
Speaker 2:It's awesome and it's really exciting. And I so I'm based out of utah now and we, um, we have a little service office and there's a couple of us, uh, in the email security team here at checkpoint who work out of the service office, and one of our elite engineers is here and and he, he has this amazing ability to when, when things hit the fan and things are always going to hit the fan um, when things hit the fan, he, he, he'll come up with some anecdote or or some. He'll say something like, well, you know, when it comes down to, we're so lucky. Or, you know, isn't it great that we have jobs and and stuff like that? It's like, man, you, you get it, you've got, you've got the right perspective here because when it comes down to it, I mean we have those days it takes a pan of flesh and stuff like that, but when you zoom out and look at perspective, it, in the perspective of life, it doesn't matter that much no, no, I uh.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I was sharing with uh, with one of my team. We had a bit of a tough week and he was asking me how, uh, how I deal with it, and I went well, it's quite easy at the moment, to be honest. I've got a four month old uh son at home and you just pick him up and he starts giggling and you're like, oh, there you go.
Speaker 1:None of none of that stress it doesn't matter no, this is just we're doing this because it's good fun and hey, and it turns out also, you can earn a really good salary doing stuff that's good fun and that that is a privileged position to be absolutely so most of the channel is obviously, uh, panic building relationships, good restaurants, good bars, um, but it is also building a network that I think continues to be valuable. We like to cheat in network building on this podcast by asking our current guest to recommend our next guest. Dave, who did you have in mind?
Speaker 2:So my recommendation is a gentleman by the name of James Burgle. So, James Burgle, he's currently working as a recruiter in Australia. He was previously the VP of sales at Pax8 for HPAC when it started and prior to that he started Datto, or was one of the first employees in Datto for the APAC region and grew it out to 100 plus team Nose channel like the back of his hands. You're not going to find very many other people who know MSP as well as he does, and he's got a really cool accent.
Speaker 1:Awesome, james, we're coming for you. We actually use Bluebird, who's his recruitment firm. They're actually based out there. Fantastic, we use them a lot. So that's good, dave, thank you so much for sharing your knowledge. It's been awesome. Thanks, alex, appreciate it.