Maybe you’ve seen this before. The partner campaign looks perfect on paper. Sharp messaging, clear value proposition, all the specs in the right places, addressing a real ITSP or MSP need. You launch it into the channel and wait for responses that never come. You follow up with incentives, but too few partners show interest.
Welcome to the moment where vendors might need to take a breath, look your partners in the eye and say, “It’s not you. It’s me.”
We will be digging into why that is during my session, “Out of Your Mind: What MSPs Wish You Knew” at ChannelCon this year. After years working every angle of the vendor-MSP relationship and countless conversations with channel folks willing to share what they really think, some interesting patterns have emerged. A peek into the mind of your average MSP leader and how they experience your relationship, explains why even well-intentioned vendor marketing just doesn’t land.
The Trust Problem
MSPs live in the trust business, yet they’ve developed remarkable skepticism toward their technology partners. I believe this wariness runs deeper than most vendors realize and stems from a very specific accountability that shapes every MSP decision.
The skepticism makes sense once you consider who MSPs really answer to. When an MSP deploys your solution and something goes wrong, they’re the ones facing their client’s frustration. They’re the ones who must explain why the promised seamless integration created three days of downtime. Most vendor messaging completely misses this dynamic, focusing on features and capabilities while ignoring the real pressures MSP leaders face daily.
The Noise Dilemma
MSPs describe feeling overwhelmed by vendor communications, but the problem runs deeper than volume. Something fundamental has shifted in how MSPs process and prioritize vendor outreach. Even genuinely valuable opportunities get lost in this shift.
Many MSPs have learned from experience that vendor communications can sometimes require more time investment than they deliver in value. They’ve developed sophisticated filtering mechanisms that screen out anything that doesn’t immediately demonstrate relevance to their specific challenges. This creates a frustrating cycle where vendors increase outreach frequency to break through, which only makes the underlying problem worse.
The Reality Disconnect
Perhaps the most telling finding is how wide the gap has grown between vendor assumptions and MSP reality. Take return on investment, for instance. Of course, MSPs are always thinking about profits. But while vendors rightfully obsess over ROI calculations, they underestimate the other factor that often matters more in an MSP’s day-to-day operations: Headaches, both real and metaphorical.
This disconnect shows up everywhere. It’s why billions in marketing development funds sit unused, how MSPs actually think about emerging technologies like AI, what they need to hear about integration capabilities versus features. The result is messaging that sounds compelling in vendor conference rooms but feels irrelevant to MSPs managing real client relationships or struggling to win business. MSPs increasingly filter out vendors who don’t demonstrate genuine understanding of their world.
What This Means for You
The channel is becoming more selective. MSPs increasingly filter out vendors who don’t demonstrate genuine understanding of their world. The old spray-and-pray approach now actively damages relationships. The good news is, there are tons of opportunities to get it right, from targeting your messaging, to supporting marketing, to enabling professional development.
During the session, I’ll walk through specific examples of what works and what doesn’t, plus share some genuinely entertaining observations about MSP behavior that might change how you view your partners entirely. Fair warning: You might immediately want to revise your next campaign.
You'll also get a practical framework for MSP communications based on how these partners actually make decisions rather than how vendors hope they decide.
Jennifer Oladipo is principal and founder of Jenno Co.
