Is your MSP strategy actually built to win?

Is your Strategy and Business Plan delivering what you need as a Managed Service Provider?

As a managed service provider (MSP), having a reactive, ticket-driven operation might keep the lights on today—but it rarely fuels sustainable acceleration. Many MSPs hit plateaus due to unclear direction, misaligned teams, undefined offerings, or weak marketing positioning.

These capabilities described below draw from real workshop discussions and reveal common gaps. If your response to whether these are in place for you are "no," "unclear," or "not recently reviewed," these represent opportunities to strengthen your plan. Use this as a checklist to audit your current strategy and build a stronger roadmap.

1. Customer Propensity and Market Readiness

Many MSPs assume demand exists without validating how ready or willing prospects are to adopt managed services. Have you evaluated your target clients to see if they are still happy with break-fix models, or are they actively seeking outcome-based partnerships? Do you have 'permission' from your clients to promote managed services? Sometimes, that brand you have spent time building with your clients becomes a barrier to offering new services. Vendors positioned in the market as PC manufacturers failed to branch into other segments, whilst Apple, which had always positioned itself as delivering a lifestyle, succeeded as this mindset drove the consumer experience that they built.

2. Clear, Aligned Business Plan for the Next 2–5 Years

A vague vision or one that is not clearly executed on leads to scattered efforts. Leading MSPs treat strategy as a living document with explicit choices. Using frameworks such as "Playing to Win" (from A.G. Lafley and Roger Martin): Define winning aspiration, where to play (markets/segments), how to win (differentiation), required capabilities, and management systems. Using the cascaded approach to this strategy helps to align the MSP business with the broader company goals when the MSP is a part of a larger business. Which framework is used is not critical, what is important is that the goals are clear, measurable, agreed and communicated to everyone in the business. A Centre of Excellence bringing together all of the different parts of the organisation to drive this forward is perceived by partners who have adopted this approach to be beneficial. Understanding whether compliance to industry standards such as ISO27001 or attaining Partner accreditation within key technology partner programs, and the required investments to be made, should be a key part of the business plan.

3. Marketing and Sales Capabilities for Positioning Managed Services

Selling managed services requires a different skill set than project work—yet many MSPs rely on technical teams or generic marketing without dedicated positioning expertise. Training the sales team to focus on business outcomes is important. To be able to confidently work with the different functional leads within the target customer organisation, where decisions on technology are now often made, is critical. Many MSPs have been able to successfully grow to date without investing in marketing, relying on referrals and technical skills which are in their comfort zone. This is often not sufficient to scale or find new markets, which requires investment in lead generation, thought leadership content creation and partnerships to build pipelines. Neglecting marketing can stifle growth.

4. Clearly Defined Service Portfolio

Ambiguous offerings confuse clients and teams, leading to scope creep, pricing issues, and poor margins. Armed with the business plan and market analysis from the previous steps, defining a tiered set of services that meet the needs of the target market is needed. These could be based on customer outcomes such as meeting compliance needs, providing vertical solutions such as retail or banking, or key service needs such as security or connectivity. Customers want to have a clear understanding of each service, be able to select and pay for only what they need, and adapt to changing needs. The creation of 'building blocks' of core capabilities, such as patching or backups, tiered service levels e.g. for development and production environments, can be combined to provide the customer with the feeling that they are getting a tailored service, but using repeatable processes and tools to enable scale. Services also need to evolve over time, adding in new capabilities such as AI or retiring when they are no longer relevant to the market. All of this requires careful planning, ownership and resources to achieve.

5. Resource requirements

Now you have a clear plan, the services defined to deliver that plan, but without effective resourcing this will stay on paper. MSPs often underestimate people, processes, tools, and budget needs for growth. These new services, perhaps targeting specialist areas such as ERP workloads or application modernisation, will require new investments. The plan for each new service needs to consider the investments that need to be made to upskill existing staff or recruit new, identify new tools required and anything else needed to deliver the service effectively at scale. Automation should be a primary focus, looking at ways to improve the customer experience or internal process efficiency.

6. Continuous review and optimisation

Without KPIs, progress is subjective. Track leading and lagging indicators across the business. How will you know whether a service has been effective without having such measures in place?. These metrics should span the entire business lifecycle, from customer acquisition costs to lifetime value, financials such as MRR and margin, to customer surveys and service desk performance. Some of these are internal metrics and some can be shared with customers during the regular business reviews. These reviews are often run by the Customer success function, which is responsible for the customer experience across all functions impacting the customer. This team requires specialist skills and most MSPs have set up or are in the process of setting up a dedicated team for this. Moving on from measuring the current business, looking at the industry trends is also critical to stay ahead of fast-moving areas such as AI. MSPs often create the role or function of a 'Chief Innovation Officer' that is tasked with identifying these trends, understanding their impact on the current business and opportunities to build new capabilities within the business.

Summary:

Start small—pick 2–3 questions where your answers feel weakest, then workshop solutions. Many MSPs can see quick wins by formalising their portfolio or aligning marketing skills to buyer propensity. Your 2–5 year plan should be bold yet realistic, using frameworks like Play to Win to make tough choices. When strategy, resources, positioning, and measurement align, growth accelerates naturally.

If you're ready for a deeper dive, run through these in a team session or reach out—many MSPs transform after addressing just a handful of these gaps. What's one question from above that hits home for your business right now?