Executive Summary
Many MSP founders are brilliant at winning business themselves but struggle when they ask other people to replicate what they do.
The problem is rarely that the sales team is incapable. More often, the founder’s knowledge, experience and instincts have never been documented.
If you want to grow your MSP without remaining involved in every opportunity, you need a clear sales playbook.
A good sales playbook documents who you sell to, why customers choose you, the sales journey prospects should follow, how inbound and outbound leads should be handled and what your team should do when common sales situations arise.
The aim isn’t to turn people into robots. It is to give them a proven starting point.
In this article, I’ll share the three areas I believe every MSP sales playbook needs if you want to create more consistent and scalable growth.
I spend much of my time talking to CEOs, MSP founders and business owners and helping them build plans for growth.
Growth is normally a pretty simple equation:
More customers and/or larger customers + increased prices – lower costs of customer acquisition and delivery = profitable growth.
And…
Profitable growth = smiley-faced CEOs and leaders 🙂
Simple enough.
Except actually achieving it isn’t quite so simple.
Especially when you are a time-poor MSP founder who is already trying to manage people, customers, operations, service delivery, partnerships, finances and everything else that lands on your desk.
At some point, the business needs to be able to win new customers without you being involved in every sales conversation.
That’s where many growing MSPs hit a problem.
Why do MSP founders struggle to hand sales over to someone else?
Founders often underestimate just how much sales knowledge they have accumulated.
You know instinctively:
- Which prospects are worth spending time with.
- Which questions uncover the real problem.
- When someone is genuinely interested and when they are simply being polite.
- How to explain your service without drowning the prospect in technical language.
- How to deal with a pricing concern.
- When to push an opportunity forward.
- When to walk away.
You have built this knowledge over years.
Yet I regularly see founders recruit someone into sales and effectively say:
“There you go. Go and win us some business.”
They then become frustrated when the salesperson doesn’t approach opportunities in the same way they would.
But why would they?
Your sales team aren’t mind readers or psychics.
If the method for winning business only exists inside your head, you haven’t created a scalable sales process.
You have created a dependency on yourself.
What is an MSP sales playbook?
A sales playbook is the documented blueprint for how your business approaches winning new customers.
It should give someone clear guidance on what good selling looks like within your MSP.
That distinction matters.
It isn’t a generic sales manual downloaded from the internet.
Your playbook should contain the knowledge you have built from actually winning and losing business.
It should explain things such as:
- Your ideal customers.
- The problems they typically have.
- Why customers choose you.
- Your qualification criteria.
- Your sales stages.
- The questions your team should ask.
- How inbound enquiries should be handled.
- How outbound prospects should be approached.
- Common objections and how to respond.
- Follow-up expectations.
- When an opportunity should progress.
- When an opportunity should be qualified out.
Salesforce describes a sales playbook as a resource sellers can return to throughout the sales process, helping reduce guesswork and improve consistency.
That’s exactly how I believe MSPs should use one.
Not as a document that gets produced, saved somewhere and forgotten.
It needs to be a living sales tool.
“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”
James Clear
If you want consistent sales results, build the system.
Here are the three areas I would start with.
1. Where has your MSP already been successful?
Don’t begin by trying to reinvent everything.
Start with what has already worked.
Look back at the customers you have won and ask:
Why did they choose us?
What was happening in their business when they started speaking with you?
What problem were they trying to solve?
Why did they decide to move away from their previous IT provider?
What made them trust you?
Were there similarities between your best customers?
You might discover, for example, that your strongest customers tend to be:
- Professional services firms.
- Businesses with 30–100 employees.
- Companies heavily reliant on Microsoft 365.
- Organisations where cybersecurity has become a board-level concern.
- Businesses that have outgrown a smaller IT provider.
- Companies frustrated with slow response times or poor strategic advice.
Those patterns matter.
Don’t tell your salesperson to target everyone
One of the fastest ways to waste sales time is to define your target market as:
“Any business that needs IT support.”
Technically, that might be true.
Commercially, it isn’t useful.
Look at where you have achieved success before.
Identify two or three common characteristics amongst those customers and use them as the starting point for your playbook.
Ask:
Who were they?
What problem did they have?
Why did they choose us?
What made the opportunity progress?
That gives your salespeople a much stronger starting point than simply handing them a database and asking them to make calls.
2. What does your MSP sales journey actually look like?
Whilst you would probably like to think you won every opportunity you ever worked on…
We both know you didn’t.
Neither did I.
You had successful meetings that led nowhere.
You sent proposals that weren’t accepted.
Prospects chose competitors.
Some people disappeared.
Others turned out never to have been genuine opportunities in the first place.
And that’s fine.
Those experiences taught you something.
The question is:
Have you documented what you learned so that somebody else doesn’t have to learn every lesson from scratch?
Map how your successful MSP deals progress
Look at several customers you have won and work backwards.
Your process might look something like this:
Sales Stage | What needs to happen? | Evidence to progress |
Initial enquiry | Establish why they have made contact | Clear reason for change |
Qualification | Understand fit, urgency and decision process | Genuine business problem identified |
Discovery | Understand the commercial and technical situation | Agreed priorities and desired outcomes |
Solution | Present the recommended approach | Prospect understands how the solution addresses the problem |
Proposal | Confirm scope, commercials and next steps | Decision process and timeframe understood |
Decision | Resolve final concerns | Clear yes/no decision |
Onboarding | Transition from sales into delivery | Agreed implementation plan |
Your exact stages will be different.
That’s the point.
Document your journey.
Salesforce also recommends defining a sales process rather than relying on individual improvisation because it gives sellers clearer guidance on how and when opportunities should progress.
Document your conversion rates as well
This is another area founders often overlook.
You didn’t convert every call into a meeting.
You didn’t convert every meeting into a proposal.
And you didn’t convert every proposal into a new customer.
So don’t expect your team to.
Understand the numbers.
If you historically need:
50 conversations → 15 meetings → 6 qualified opportunities → 2 new customers
then you can start building realistic activity targets.
It also stops a salesperson having five conversations and concluding:
“Outbound doesn’t work.”
Your sales playbook should help the team understand that sales is a process, not a series of isolated events.
3. How should your team handle inbound and outbound sales?
This is the nuts and bolts of your sales playbook.
And it’s where detail matters.
How should inbound MSP leads be handled?
Imagine someone completes a form on your website asking about managed IT support.
What happens next?
Does somebody call within ten minutes?
An hour?
Tomorrow?
What should they say?
What information should they gather?
What questions should they ask before agreeing to a meeting?
What information needs to go into your CRM?
What determines whether the prospect is worth progressing?
If you haven’t defined these things, every member of the team will develop their own process.
What about outbound prospecting?
Outbound is different.
Someone completing an enquiry has already indicated some level of interest.
Someone receiving a cold call or email may have:
- Never heard of you.
- Never considered changing MSP.
- No immediate problem.
- No idea why they should give you their time.
Your approach therefore needs to be different.
If you allow everyone to make up their own process, you quickly end up with the business version of the Wild West.
Different messages.
Different questions.
Different follow-up.
Different qualification.
Different promises.
And potentially a very inconsistent impression of your business.
Your playbook should define the behaviours and standards you expect.
What should an MSP sales playbook include?
The MSP Sales Playbook Framework
Area | Your playbook should answer |
Target | Who are we trying to win? |
Problems | What problems do these companies typically have? |
Positioning | Why should they choose us rather than another MSP? |
Qualification | What makes an opportunity worth pursuing? |
Discovery | What questions should we ask? |
Process | What stages should an opportunity go through? |
Inbound | How should new enquiries be handled? |
Outbound | How should cold prospects be approached? |
Objections | What common concerns will we hear and how should we respond? |
Follow-up | What happens when someone doesn’t respond? |
Metrics | What activity and conversion numbers should we track? |
Resources | What case studies, guides, proposals or proof should the team use? |
You don’t need a 100-page document.
You need something people will actually use.
Don't forget the small sales situations
This is one of the most important parts.
Experienced founders deal with hundreds of small situations almost without thinking.
Your new salesperson may have no idea what to do.
For example:
What happens when a prospect doesn’t answer their call?
Should they leave a voicemail?
Send an email?
Try again tomorrow?
Wait a week?
What happens when somebody doesn’t turn up for a meeting?
What happens when a prospect says:
“Your price is too high.”
Or:
“Just send me something over.”
Or:
“We’re happy with our existing MSP.”
Or:
“Call me again in six months.”
Your salesperson needs to know how your business expects them to react.
These sound like small details.
They aren’t.
They happen every day.
And the quality of the response can determine whether an opportunity progresses or disappears.
A sales playbook shouldn't turn your team into robots
There is an important distinction here.
A playbook isn’t about forcing people to read scripts word for word.
Great sales conversations are human.
People need to listen.
Adapt.
Ask follow-up questions.
Build rapport.
Think.
The playbook provides the framework, not every word of the conversation.
HubSpot makes a similar distinction when describing sales plays as repeatable actions that provide structure while still being adapted according to the situation.
Think of your playbook as giving somebody the route.
They can still choose how they drive.
Your sales playbook should never really be finished
One final point.
Don’t create your sales playbook and think:
“Great. That’s done.”
It isn’t.
Treat it as a live, iterative document.
Your team will learn things.
A salesperson might discover a fantastic question that consistently gets prospects talking.
Add it.
A new objection might start appearing.
Add it.
A particular case study might work brilliantly within a certain sector.
Add it.
You might discover that one qualification criterion isn’t nearly as important as you thought.
Change it.
The playbook should get better as your team gets better.
If the founder is still required to sell everything, you haven't scaled sales
This is ultimately what it comes down to.
You cannot genuinely scale your MSP if the founder still needs to appear every time an important sales opportunity arrives.
Yes, you may always want to be involved in major strategic deals.
That’s different.
But if routine sales opportunities stall whenever you step away, the business is too dependent on your personal knowledge.
Get that knowledge out of your head.
Document where you have been successful.
Define your ideal sales journey.
Explain how inbound and outbound opportunities should be approached.
Document the questions, behaviours, objections and follow-up processes that work.
Then coach your team to use it.
A good sales playbook doesn’t guarantee that your team will win every deal.
Nothing does.
But it gives them a far better chance of replicating the things that made you successful in the first place.
And that is how you start turning founder-led sales into a sales function that can genuinely scale.
Want to build a more consistent sales process for your MSP?
If your MSP is still heavily reliant on you to win new business, or your sales team doesn’t yet have a clear process to follow, this is exactly the sort of challenge I help MSP founders solve.
My team and I can review how you’re currently approaching sales, identify the gaps and help you build a clearer, more repeatable approach.
Book a 15-minute call with me and let’s talk through where your sales approach may be holding back your growth.
Frequently asked questions
What is a sales playbook for an MSP?
An MSP sales playbook is a documented guide that explains how your managed service provider approaches winning new business. It normally covers your target market, qualification criteria, discovery questions, sales stages, inbound and outbound processes, objection handling, follow-up and the resources your salespeople should use.
Why does an MSP need a sales playbook?
A sales playbook helps turn the founder’s sales knowledge into a repeatable process other people can follow. This can create greater consistency, improve training and reduce the business’s reliance on the owner to personally manage every sales opportunity.
What should be included in an MSP sales playbook?
At a minimum, include your ideal customer profile, common customer problems, positioning, qualification criteria, discovery questions, sales process, inbound and outbound approaches, common objections, follow-up expectations and the metrics you use to measure performance.
Should salespeople follow a sales playbook word for word?
No. A good playbook provides guidance and structure rather than forcing salespeople to use rigid scripts. Your team should still listen carefully, build rapport and adapt their approach to the person and situation in front of them.
How often should an MSP update its sales playbook?
Treat it as a living document. Review and update it whenever your team identifies better questions, new objections, changes to your ideal customer, new proof or case studies, or improvements to your sales process.
