You can hire the right people, build genuine relationships, and run a disciplined closing process, and still find that your pipeline is full of noise, your forecast is unreliable, and your close rates are inconsistent quarter to quarter. When I dig into what’s happening in those situations, the root cause is a lack of focus.  

Most MSPs I speak to have an ideal client profile (ICP) or ideal partner profile (IPP), they just haven’t defined it precisely, documented it clearly, or enforced it consistently. When you don’t enforce it, your reps start chasing anything that moves, and that’s when the problems compound. 

Square peg. Round hole. I’ve made this mistake myself, and watching it play out at scale makes the cost very clear. 

The Packaging Lesson 

Early in my ThreatLocker experience, we had four SKUs. They were simple, clean, and easy to communicate. A rep could explain the value proposition in a single conversation. A prospect could understand the options without needing a follow-up meeting to process what they’d heard. That simplicity made the sales motion faster and the close rates more predictable, because both parties knew exactly what was on the table and what it was worth. 

Then the company grew, which brought new features, capabilities, and packaging options. By the time I left, we were close to 15 SKUs. On paper, that signals expanding capability, more options for more customers, and a portfolio that could serve a broader market. 

In practice, what I watched happen was that reps started looking at the full portfolio and trying to work all of it into a single deal. The reasoning made intuitive sense. If a customer could benefit from everything, why not show them everything? But the probability of closing 15 line items in one motion is a fraction of what it is when you’re presenting two or three that genuinely fit the customer’s current maturity and priorities. 

When you try to sell everything, you often lose the opportunity to sell anything.  

You overwhelm the buyer, introduce complexity where clarity should exist, and create a decision environment that’s much harder to navigate than it needs to be. The deal that should have been an easy close disappears into a committee review that takes three months. 

That’s not a talent problem on your rep’s part. That’s a focus problem on the organization’s part. The real fix is tighter packaging discipline combined with a clear, enforced understanding of who you’re selling to and what they’re ready for right now. 

Don’t Force Maturity 

Zero trust is a genuinely powerful security principle. For the right organization at the right stage of their cybersecurity journey, it changes how they think about access, risk, and what it means to protect their environment. But not every organization is ready for it. 

Early in my career, I’d see the bigger picture with a prospect and find myself thinking about where they should be in 18 months, how much better their security posture could become, what they were leaving exposed by not moving faster. I’d try to bring them there in a single conversation. 

Sometimes that landed. More often, it created friction, because what I was really asking them to do wasn’t just buy a product. I was asking them to shift processes, retrain staff, challenge how their leadership thought about security investment, and change internal habits that had been in place for years. That’s a cultural shift, and it can’t be compressed onto a timeline that works for your quarter but not for their organization. 

The approach that’s served me better is to meet prospects where they are and stay close while they develop the readiness to go further. When someone is on the right journey but not at the right stage, forcing the timing often pushes them toward a competitor who promises something simpler, even if that simpler thing is less effective for their actual situation. 

Patience in this channel is a competitive advantage, and it’s the same patience that makes the relationship-building from my previous posts work over time. 

ICP Is Enforceable Focus 

When I talk about an ICP, I’m not talking about a slide in a deck that describes a hypothetical customer type. I’m talking about a set of criteria your entire sales motion is built around. These are criteria your reps can articulate in a deal review, that your marketing team uses to qualify inbound interest, and that your leadership team enforces when pipeline starts drifting outside the lane you’ve defined.  

The three questions I come back to when helping MSPs define their ICP are:  

• Who do you close fastest?  
• Who expands most naturally over time?  
• Who refers you to other customers?  

If you can answer those questions with real specificity, naming the precise profile of the clients where you win consistently and profitably, you have something actionable. 

Those are the accounts your reps should be spending the majority of their time on, and any opportunity that falls outside that profile needs a deliberate decision to pursue, not a default place in the forecast. 

Language alignment is where most MSPs leave value on the table, even when they’ve done the work to define their ICP. If you serve healthcare clients, your conversations should be about compliance frameworks and patient safety. If you are selling into manufacturing, the language should revolve around downtime, operational disruption, and supply chain risk.  

When you speak the language of the business problems your clients face, you stop being a cybersecurity vendor and start being a business advisor who happens to have the right answer. That shift changes how you’re perceived in a deal and how hard you have to work to reach a decision. 

Pipeline Discipline and the Habit of Growth 

One practice I’ve found consistently valuable is dissecting the pipeline every week and being honest about what’s in it. Not every opportunity in the forecast is genuinely inside the ICP. Some are there because a rep spotted something interesting and ran with it before anyone asked whether it fit. 

Those are different kinds of opportunities, and they need to be treated differently. An opportunity outside your ICP isn’t necessarily a bad one, but it needs a deliberate decision to pursue, not a default place in the forecast that distorts your view of what’s closing. 

Growth magnifies whatever systems and disciplines you have in place, good and bad. If your billing process works at 100 clients but takes 10 hours a week to manage, the math gets difficult at 500 clients. If your sales motion only works because a sales leader personally inspects every deal, you’ve built a ceiling on your own capacity. The same logic applies to ICP discipline. Small deviations that feel harmless in an early-stage pipeline compound into major noise when the pipeline is 10 times larger. What feels like flexibility early on becomes a structural problem at scale. 

Predictable growth is the cumulative result of consistent, disciplined decisions. Saying no to deals that don’t fit. Keeping packaging simple enough that your reps can articulate value without overwhelming a buyer. Letting customers mature into deeper commitments rather than pushing them there before they’re ready. 

When your reps are operating within a clearly defined lane, they’re more confident, their messaging is sharper, and the deals they bring forward close. Your forecast starts to reflect reality. And forecasting reality consistently is what separates companies that scale from companies that scramble. 

Putting It All Together 

The common thread across this blog series is clear. Sustainable growth in the MSP channel is a system, not a series of lucky quarters. Hire people with genuine hunger and the emotional foundation to build real trust with customers. Give them a relationship-first approach to the market and the patience to let timing work in their favor rather than against them. Teach them to close through alignment and process rather than pressure and theater. And give them a clearly defined ICP so that all of that energy goes toward customers where they can win consistently. 

When those four elements are working together, you don’t have to manage your team into performance. The right people, in the right market, with the right process, focused on the right customers. That combination produces results that hold up quarter after quarter. That’s the goal, and it’s reachable.  

If you’re ready to get concrete about your ICP and the rest of your sales motion, the GTM Academy Sales Kit is a good place to start. It includes an ICP Strategic Framework, client targeting tools, and the full set of resources we’ve built for MSPs who want a repeatable, profitable approach to selling cybersecurity services. 

To your growth and success, 

Shane 

I grew up in Ireland, where the kind of aggressive, hard-close selling that American sales culture tends to celebrate would feel almost rude. In the U.S., selling is part of everyday life. Everyone has been sold to, most people have sold something at some point, and the expectation that a salesperson will push for a decision is baked into how commerce works. 

In parts of Europe, particularly where I’m from, cold calling and pushing for the close can feel almost taboo. So when I entered SaaS and cybersecurity sales, I leaned hard into what felt natural: building relationships.  

I would build incredible rapport with prospects. I’d know their kids’ names, understand their business inside and out, and be on weekly calls during extended POCs, sometimes back-to-back, and half the time those calls weren’t even about the solution. 

The problem was that when it came time to ask for the business, I felt like I was disrupting something I’d carefully built. I had become so entrenched in the relationship that introducing a closing moment felt transactional. 

So instead of fixing the real issue, I created a workaround.  

The Good Cop/Bad Cop Phase 

Early in my career, when it was time to move a deal forward, I would make myself unavailable—a trade show, a travel conflict, a vague scheduling issue. My team lead would then step in to do what I wouldn’t: push for a decision. We fell into a good cop/bad cop dynamic that, while effective, was a workaround for my discomfort with the closing conversation. 

It worked. Deals closed. Revenue came in. And I felt genuinely uncomfortable about it, because it revealed something about my own process that I hadn’t fixed. 

I had built exceptional relationships with these prospects. I knew their businesses, their teams, and their pressures, but I checked out when it came time to ask for a commitment. As a sales leader, this was a problem I couldn’t ignore.  

The good cop/bad cop approach was a symptom of a deeper issue: I had mentally separated the close from the rest of the relationship. By treating it as a distinct, high-stakes moment rather than a natural next step, the close felt transactional even when the relationship wasn’t. Fixing this required rethinking the entire arc of the sales conversation. 

The Real Shift: Starting the Close Earlier 

The breakthrough didn’t come from learning a better closing line or a new objection-handling framework. It came from realizing that the close isn’t a conversation you have at the end of the sales cycle. It’s a thread you weave throughout. 

Once genuine value is established and the prospect understands what changes for their business if they move forward, the conversation about budget, packaging, and commitment is a natural extension of that value discussion, not a jarring pivot into commercial territory. 

Once we’ve aligned on need and outcome, I move toward something practical and collaborative with questions like:  

• Do you see this fitting into a core package, or are you thinking about a more comprehensive build-out?  
• How many clients would you put on this in the first 90 days?  
• How does that forecast as you grow your base over the next year? 

These questions normalize budget discussions, frame commitment as collaborative, and surface misalignment on scope and investment before it becomes a last-minute objection. 

When a quote causes the energy in the room to shift, it’s almost always because the budget was never anchored to value early in the process. The prospect was excited about the solution, but received a number that felt disconnected from the conversation.  

This isn’t an objection problem. It’s a sequencing problem. The only way to make uncomfortable conversations comfortable is to have them early and openly. 

Why the MSP Channel Demands This Approach 

In enterprise SaaS, you can sometimes get away with more transactional pressure. Budget cycles, procurement timelines, and competitive dynamics can create genuine urgency that a well-timed push can capitalize on. The MSP channel doesn’t work that way. 

MSPs talk to each other constantly. If you force a deal that wasn’t ready, and a customer goes live feeling pushed into something before they were operationally prepared for it, that story travels through the peer groups, the Slack channels, and the conference hallways where your next 20 prospects are already forming opinions about you. 

That’s why the philosophy from my last post, “it’s not if, it’s when,” is more than a patience strategy. It’s a reputation strategy. When you tell a prospect who isn’t quite ready, “I appreciate where you are in your journey. Let’s stay close and revisit when the timing makes sense,” and then you follow through on that, something happens. The prospect doesn’t forget. 

When they’re ready, when the budget aligns, and internal priorities shift, they call you first. Not because you had the best deck, but because you were the person who respected where they were instead of trying to drag them somewhere they weren’t. 

Closing in this channel is about creating clarity together, not extracting a commitment. When the buyer feels like they’re making a decision with you rather than being talked into a decision by you, the close is clean, the onboarding is smoother, and the retention is better. All of that compounds over time. 

What Closing Should Actually Feel Like 

When you’ve built the relationship, sequenced the conversation correctly, anchored budget expectations to value early, and aligned on packaging and scope as part of the process, the final step isn’t dramatic. The buyer has been part of building the decision throughout. They’re not being asked to commit to something new. They’re being asked to formalize something they’ve already been working toward together. 

The moment I knew my process had genuinely shifted was when prospects started ending calls with “Alright, what’s next?” They weren’t waiting to be asked. They’d already decided. No good cop needed. No bad cop needed. No manufacturing urgency from a trade show I suddenly needed to attend. 

Just a process that had been pointing clearly in one direction from the beginning, built on a relationship that made the decision feel obvious rather than forced. That’s teachable and scalable. And in a channel built on reputation, it’s the only kind of closing that actually holds. 

But even with the right hire, the right relationships, and a clean closing process in place, there’s one more piece that determines whether all of it produces predictable results. That’s what we’ll dig into next blog. Stay tuned! 

If you want to build the scaffolding for the kind of process I’ve described here, the GTM Academy Sales Kit includes pipeline qualification tools, objection-handling resources, and sales process frameworks designed for cybersecurity sales. It gives your whole team a shared foundation to work from. 

To your growth and success, 

Shane 

Our world is built on trust. Peer groups, conferences, community Slack channels, vendor roundtables, and quiet side conversations that start with, “I know a guy.” 

If you are selling like this is a one-call transaction, if you think the win happens because you ran a great demo and handled a few objections, you are missing the bigger opportunity entirely. 

This channel does not reward transactional sellers. It rewards relationship builders. 

I learned that lesson very early in my cybersecurity career. 

My First Cybersecurity Conference 

When I walked into my first peer group conference three weeks into the job, I was completely out of my depth. I could barely spell MSP, never mind understand the intricacies of cybersecurity frameworks and compliance discussions. 

I met a guy named Pete Peterson, a Boston Irishman, so naturally, we hit it off. 

We talked about Ireland, about being immigrants, about what opportunity looks like in America, about whiskey and sports, and where we came from. We talked for hours, and in none of that conversation did I once pitch him on what I was there to sell. 

Not because I was running some calculated soft-sell strategy. I genuinely found him interesting, and the relationship felt more valuable than any short-term sales move I could have made. 

What I didn’t know at the time was that Pete was a connector inside that peer group. He was the one people trusted and listened to. 

Because of the relationship we built, he introduced me to subgroups within that group. That exposure led to one of the largest group deals the company had seen at that time. Millions of dollars in revenue. Not because I pushed or pressured or had an impressive sales deck. But because I built trust. 

The lesson landed hard. Trust is built before the business conversation even starts. 

“It’s Not If, But When” 

One of the biggest shifts in my selling philosophy was understanding that timing matters. Early in my career, I tried to force maturity. I would see the bigger picture and try to drag the prospect toward it. Sometimes that worked, but more often, it created resistance. 

Now when I encounter a prospect who’s on the right journey but not at the right stage, my response is straightforward: “I understand where you are. Let’s stay close. When it makes sense, we’ll revisit.” 

Then I actually stay close. I follow them on LinkedIn. If I see them at conferences, I make a point of going over, grabbing a drink, and having a real conversation. I keep a genuine cadence, not a lazy drip email that says “just checking in.” 

When you do that consistently over months or even years, something interesting happens. They start reaching out to you. 

The Calls That Matter 

Prospects have called me for recommendations on backup vendors, EDR tools, or other solutions I wasn’t selling. I’ve even had people call because they were traveling to Ireland and wanted a bucket list. 

Those calls don’t happen because you ran a clean demo three months earlier. They happen because you built a genuine connection. 

When a prospect reaches out with a question unrelated to your product, you’ve already won. When budget, timing, and priorities eventually align, they remember the person who showed up consistently and authentically.  

They don’t shop around. They call you. 

This connects to my last post on building a sales team. The best salespeople build these relationships naturally because they genuinely care about customer outcomes. That authenticity builds real trust, making the eventual close feel like a natural conclusion instead of a hard-fought battle. 

Practical Application for MSP Leaders 

For MSPs building a sales motion, a relationship-first philosophy has concrete operational implications. 

1. Be present in your community: This means more than sponsoring a conference booth. It means identifying key connectors in your target peer groups, attending the right events, and investing in conversations without immediate commercial upside. When you earn a place in a trusted network, the introductions that follow are more valuable than any cold outreach campaign. 

2. Speak your clients’ language: If you serve healthcare clients, your conversations must center on patient trust and HIPAA compliance. If you serve manufacturing, the focus is on uptime and supply chain disruption.  

This shift in perception makes the sales process easier. And when a client isn’t ready, don’t force it.  

There are a lot of technically strong vendors and MSPs in this space. There are many good decks, demos, and pricing strategies.  

What separates you is authenticity. If you are authentic, consistent, and human, the rest will follow.  

If you’re building a relationship-first sales motion, the GTM Academy Sales Kit has resources built for client engagement and trust-based selling. It’s the playbook for making this approach repeatable across your team. 

To your growth and success, 

Shane 

I’m going to say something that’ll upset a few people: most “sales culture” talk is just vibes with a nice hoodie. And listen, I am big on energy. I love momentum. But when you’re trying to build something that scales, “good vibes” won’t save you. 

A high-performing sales culture should have enforced expectations.  

It’s what you measure. 
It’s what you tolerate. 
It’s what you call out. 
It’s what you repeat until it becomes normal. 

When I joined ThreatLocker, I was employee number 30. By the time I left, my sales organization alone was around 250 people. What worked at 10 reps doesn’t work at 100 unless you build the right foundation from day one. 

What a Strong Sales Culture Looks Like 

Culture is clarity. Your reps should know: 

• What good looks like: Meeting baseline expectations consistently. Your team hits their call counts, creates a predictable number of new deals, and maintains stable sit ratios and close rates. 
• What great looks like: Exceeding expectations through proactive, strategic action. Call counts translate directly to a higher volume of new deals, sit ratios and close rates improve month-over-month, and the team actively identifies high-value expansion opportunities. 
• What unacceptable looks like: Falling short of defined standards. Call counts are missed, deal creation is inconsistent, sit ratios decline, and expansion opportunities are overlooked without a clear plan for remediation. 

A successful sales culture should review pipeline on a weekly basis to dissect what’s real from what’s fantasy. Because salespeople are optimistic by nature, some over-project out of fear or under-project because they’ve been burned before. Your job as a leader isn’t to yell louder but to make the truth visible. 

Activity Creates Opportunity 

The smoothest talker in the room doesn’t always win. The hardest worker often does. 

That’s because activity creates looks, looks creates conversations, and conversations create new service engagements. 

When your service pipeline starts to dry up, it’s easy to assume you have a talent problem. But it’s rarely a talent issue. It’s almost always an activity issue. Consistent, purposeful action is the engine of any successful service-based business. It’s the daily work of reaching out, following up, and assessing client and prospect needs that keeps the pipeline full and the business moving forward. Without that steady drumbeat of activity, even the most skilled team will struggle to find opportunities. 

The Scalable Culture Checklist 

Building a sales team that scales effectively requires more than hiring the right people. It demands processes, culture, and standards that drive sustainable revenue growth.  

Here are key principles for building a high-performing, scalable sales team in your MSP: 

• Review your sales pipeline weekly, not monthly: A weekly review keeps your team agile and proactive. Waiting a full month to assess the pipeline leads to missed opportunities and reactive selling. Weekly check-ins allow you to adapt your strategy and forecast more accurately. 
• Remove ambiguity in key performance indicators (KPIs): Clear, measurable KPIs are essential for sales alignment and accountability. When your team knows exactly what success looks like, from lead generation to closed deals, they can focus on the metrics that grow the business. 
• Align compensation with sustainable client outcomes: Reward your sales team for securing profitable, long-term contracts, not just for the volume of deals closed. Incentivizing high-value, quality partnerships ensures your sales efforts contribute directly to sustainable business growth. 
• Kill the “not my job” mentality immediately: Teamwork should be the foundation of your sales culture. When salespeople hoard leads or client information, it creates silos, reduces collaboration, and hinders overall growth. Address these issues quickly and foster an environment where shared goals and communication are prioritized. 

My fundamental belief is you can’t scale vibes, but you can scale standards. Focus on building a team dynamic that thrives on accountability, innovation, and a shared commitment to client success. 

Build the culture that wins, not just the one that feels good. 

To take your sales team’s performance to the next level, check out our GTM Academy  Sales Kit  for tools and resources to effectively sell cybersecurity and compliance services. 

To your growth and success, 
Shane 

I’m going to say something that’ll upset a few people: most “sales culture” talk is just vibes with a nice hoodie. And listen, I am big on energy. I love momentum. But when you’re trying to build something that scales, “good vibes” won’t save you. 

A high-performing sales culture should have enforced expectations.  

It’s what you measure. 
It’s what you tolerate. 
It’s what you call out. 
It’s what you repeat until it becomes normal. 

When I joined ThreatLocker, I was employee number 30. By the time I left, my sales organization alone was around 250 people. What worked at 10 reps doesn’t work at 100 unless you build the right foundation from day one. 

What a Strong Sales Culture Looks Like 

Culture is clarity. Your reps should know: 

• What good looks like: Meeting baseline expectations consistently. Your team hits their call counts, creates a predictable number of new deals, and maintains stable sit ratios and close rates. 

• What great looks like: Exceeding expectations through proactive, strategic action. Call counts translate directly to a higher volume of new deals, sit ratios and close rates improve month-over-month, and the team actively identifies high-value expansion opportunities. 

• What unacceptable looks like: Falling short of defined standards. Call counts are missed, deal creation is inconsistent, sit ratios decline, and expansion opportunities are overlooked without a clear plan for remediation. 

A successful sales culture should review pipeline on a weekly basis to dissect what’s real from what’s fantasy. Because salespeople are optimistic by nature, some over-project out of fear or under-project because they’ve been burned before. Your job as a leader isn’t to yell louder but to make the truth visible. 

Activity Creates Opportunity 

The smoothest talker in the room doesn’t always win. The hardest worker often does. 

That’s because activity creates looks, looks creates conversations, and conversations create new service engagements. 

When your service pipeline starts to dry up, it’s easy to assume you have a talent problem. But it’s rarely a talent issue. It’s almost always an activity issue. Consistent, purposeful action is the engine of any successful service-based business. It’s the daily work of reaching out, following up, and assessing client and prospect needs that keeps the pipeline full and the business moving forward. Without that steady drumbeat of activity, even the most skilled team will struggle to find opportunities. 

The Scalable Culture Checklist 

Building a sales team that scales effectively requires more than hiring the right people. It demands processes, culture, and standards that drive sustainable revenue growth.  

Here are key principles for building a high-performing, scalable sales team in your MSP: 

• Review your sales pipeline weekly, not monthly: A weekly review keeps your team agile and proactive. Waiting a full month to assess the pipeline leads to missed opportunities and reactive selling. Weekly check-ins allow you to adapt your strategy and forecast more accurately. 

• Remove ambiguity in key performance indicators (KPIs): Clear, measurable KPIs are essential for sales alignment and accountability. When your team knows exactly what success looks like, from lead generation to closed deals, they can focus on the metrics that grow the business. 

• Align compensation with sustainable client outcomes: Reward your sales team for securing profitable, long-term contracts, not just for the volume of deals closed. Incentivizing high-value, quality partnerships ensures your sales efforts contribute directly to sustainable business growth. 

• Kill the “not my job” mentality immediately: Teamwork should be the foundation of your sales culture. When salespeople hoard leads or client information, it creates silos, reduces collaboration, and hinders overall growth. Address these issues quickly and foster an environment where shared goals and communication are prioritized. 

My fundamental belief is you can’t scale vibes, but you can scale standards. Focus on building a team dynamic that thrives on accountability, innovation, and a shared commitment to client success. 

Build the culture that wins, not just the one that feels good. 

To take your sales team’s performance to the next level, check out our GTM Academy  Sales Kit  for tools and resources to effectively sell cybersecurity and compliance services. 

To your growth and success, 
Shane