When I talk about community, I am not talking about a Slack channel or a user conference. I am not talking about quarterly peer groups or an affinity newsletter. I am talking about something my Huntress team calls a feeling, and about the specific behaviors that turn a vendor relationship into a professional home.
Community is a feeling. It’s not a destination. It’s why we don’t get flamed on Reddit. It’s why people call us before they make decisions to go somewhere else. It’s why they will recommend us to their friends.
For an MSP, the idea is not academic. Community is the moat that keeps your best clients from shopping your contract. It is the reason warm introductions keep showing up in your inbox. It is what makes a five-person shop feel like a place a client wants to stay, even when a national competitor shows up with a lower price. The question is how you build it deliberately.
This post is for MSP owners and sales leaders who want their client base to feel like more than a customer list. The Huntress model is worth studying because it is exceptionally effective, and because the mechanics translate directly to the way an MSP can build community with its own clients and peers.
Community Is Everyone’s Job
The first thing my team does differently is refuse to treat community as a department. Inside Huntress, community is not a function handed to a specialist while the rest of the company focuses on pipeline and product. Everybody owns it.
A huge part of our offsites is around community, and why sales is everyone’s job and community is everyone’s job. I want to figure out how everybody in the organization who is involved in the sales cycle anywhere is doing the things that they are the best at.
For an MSP, that translates into a specific operating decision. Your account managers, your technicians, your help desk team, and your founder are all part of the community you are building. The technician who remembers a client’s spouse is sick and asks about them on the next call is doing community work. The founder who shows up at a client’s open house is doing community work. If only the sales team is building relationships, your community has one door, and that door closes when the sales rep leaves.
Imprint Early, Build the Team Around It
My second principle is that every client imprints on one person inside your company. That person becomes the one they call, regardless of what the org chart says. The mistake most providers make is trying to redirect the client to the person on the org chart. The better move is to accept the imprint and build a team around it.
If an account is in a rep’s ownership and that person comes to me, I figure out how to help them, and then I bring them back around to say, you also have this person, I’m not your only. I build a team around them. Even though they continue to come back to me, I need to make sure that they’re engaging in other parts of the org.
The logic is simple. If the client’s imprint person leaves, the relationship cannot go with them. The client needs multiple warm connections inside your company. You do not force the connections by cutting off access to the original person. You add connections alongside. Over time, the client learns that the whole team is trustworthy, not just one face.
For an MSP, that means when a client’s technical champion builds a relationship with one of your engineers, you do not treat that as a problem to be managed. You treat it as an asset, and you quietly introduce a second engineer, an account lead, a virtual CISO into the same account so the relationship graph thickens.
Surprise, Delight, and Show Up on the Worst Day
At Huntress we run a program I call “surprising delight.” It has a simple operating principle: on the worst day and the best day, we show up. The bad day is usually what wins the loyalty. When a client loses a large account, has a family emergency, or gets hit with a breach that was not their fault, the vendor who shows up with something small and specific becomes impossible to unseat.
You cannot manufacture that kind of moment from a CRM. It requires that someone on your team is paying attention to the human side of the client’s business closely enough to notice when it matters. My test: I want to know when the babies are coming, when the kids are getting married. I want to understand when the business is in trouble, are they losing a client, how do I help them?
That posture costs time. It does not produce attributable revenue in a clean quarterly report. And every MSP who commits to it reports that their retention and referral numbers creep up over the following year.
Put the Card Down
My most repeated phrase is a metaphor about a bar tab. In community, we strive to be the person who, when someone wants to buy a drink for the bar, we put our card down. The distinction I am drawing is between inviting someone into your organization and inviting them to pay the bill.
A community where everyone is trying to get something becomes transactional in a week. A community where one or two people consistently give more than they take becomes a gravitational field. People come back because they feel welcomed, not leveraged. For a vendor, being the person who puts the card down looks like answering questions in a peer community without tagging every answer with a pitch, hosting events without a sales qualification gate, and offering help to clients who will never buy from you.
That last one is the hardest. MSP owners will intuitively invest in the relationships that could turn into revenue. The best community builders also invest in the ones that cannot. Those people become your evangelists, and their referrals are the highest-quality leads you will ever see.
Lead From the Front
One warning I repeat. You have to lead from the front in anything that is community-oriented. If I don’t do it, no one on my team will.
Community behavior is culture, and culture is always driven from the top. If the MSP owner is not visibly investing in peer relationships, client check-ins that do not have an agenda, and the small unseen acts that make community feel real, nobody else in the company will do it either. The discipline cannot be delegated. It can be systematized, but only after the owner models it.
Where to Start
If you are building community from a standing start, pick one move and run it weekly for a quarter. Send a short, personal check-in message to five clients you have not spoken with in thirty days. Offer to introduce two clients to each other where the fit is good. Host one small event, in person or online, with no sales motion attached.
The pattern will teach you more in a quarter than any strategy document.
Cynomi’s GTM Academy Sales Kit includes frameworks for community-driven growth, partner relationship plays, and the kind of structured relationship work that makes these motions repeatable. If you want the supporting tooling, you can grab it here.