You’re in a meeting with a prospect and everything feels fine… until they pull out a spreadsheet. Three MSPs side by side. You’re in column A. The cheap competitor is in column B. And the only row they’re really looking at is the last one: price.
So you do what most technical founders do. You start explaining your stack. SentinelOne. 24/7 helpdesk. Tools. Process. They nod politely… and point back at the price.
Here’s what’s really happening. The buyer isn’t an expert in managed services. They don’t know how to distinguish a robust MSP from a risky one. So they default to the only metric they feel qualified to judge: money.
If you allow them to compare you solely on price, you’re treating your own service like a commodity. You’re effectively saying you’re the same as the “one-man band”, just more expensive.
The fix is simple, but most founders skip it: you must teach them how to buy. Your job is to insert new criteria into their spreadsheet, the rows your cheap competitor can’t tick.
This is why the person who defines the criteria usually wins the deal. Not because they’re louder, but because they change what the buyer pays attention to.
Before price is discussed, you earn the right to ask questions that shift the comparison from “cheapest” to “safest”. For example:
- “How do the other options handle out-of-hours ransomware incidents, in-house SOC, or an alert to someone’s mobile?”
- “When they quote their SLA, are they measuring response time or resolution time? Because an auto-reply counts as a response.”
Notice what happens when you ask this. The buyer stops thinking about cost and starts thinking about risk. The cheap competitor doesn’t look cost-effective anymore. They look dangerous.
Don’t wait for buyers to ask the right questions. Tell them what questions they should be asking. Stop hoping they’ll “see your value”. Show them what good looks like.
What to do next: pick 3–5 criteria you want every prospect to use when evaluating an MSP (risk, response vs resolution, escalation coverage, compliance exposure, outage impact). Then build those into your discovery process before pricing is ever discussed.
If you’re tired of losing deals to cheaper competitors and want to take control of the buying criteria, you’re ready for the 16-week coaching programme.