Channel Ready

Know who on your team can actually sell to MSPs.

A 25-minute assessment of channel knowledge, written scenarios and two live role-plays with an MSP owner. Use it to train the team you have and to screen the reps you are about to hire.

Request accessTry a question
A rep's scorecard across two rounds: 59 at the baseline, 86 and Channel ready after training, with what changed and which habits were coached out
A rep's scorecard from the sample company, before and after training.

The team you have

  • A baseline in a week. Every rep scored across seven areas, with the enterprise habits that cost partner deals named.
  • A plan for every rep. Training modules with real resources, a coaching guide for each one-on-one, and practice role-plays they can rerun.
  • Proof it worked. Run it again a quarter later and see the change per rep, next to closed-won from HubSpot.

The reps you hire next

  • Screen before the offer. Recruiters send candidates the same assessment your team takes, so you compare them against people you already know.
  • Routed on its own. Over your bar goes straight to the hiring manager. Under it goes back to the recruiter. Nobody is rejected automatically.
  • Decided in one click. Hire, hold or pass goes back to the recruiter and into your ATS, with interview questions built from the candidate's answers.

Seven things an MSP owner will test your rep on in the first ten minutes.

An owner decides early whether your rep is worth the rest of the call. These are the areas they probe, and what the assessment asks about each one.

MSP economics
What a $2 per endpoint increase costs a 2,000-endpoint MSP on fixed-price agreements, and why the owner books your product as cost of goods.
Stack & integration
What breaks inside the MSP when your tool cannot open PSA tickets or sync billable quantities.
Buyers & buying
How a PE-backed platform with fourteen acquired brands buys differently from a twelve-person owner-led shop.
Channel terms & trust
Why committed seat minimums turn an MSP's client churn into your guaranteed revenue, and what they remember about auto-renewals.
Security, compliance & AI
Why cyber insurance requirements are the lever MSPs use to sell security, and what the 2021 VSA incident changed.
Motion & community
Where a dropped support ticket gets talked about first, and what to say when an owner says their clients will not pay for your product.
Channel vocabulary
PSA, RMM, EDR, MDR, MRR, vCIO, QBR. The tools at the core of how an MSP runs, and the words an owner will not stop to explain.
32 questionsMultiple choice, drawn from a bank of 71, so nobody can memorize their way through.
4 written scenariosObjections they will hear in the first month, answered in their own words.
2 live role-playsA call with an owner and an email or text thread, picked from 8 real channel situations. The other side pushes back.

Built around what you sell. Your sales leader rates which areas matter most, and the question mix follows. 25 items stay the same for every company, so your team can still be benchmarked against others.

Tripwires for the habits that lose deals. 7 questions catch the habits that get a vendor talked about in peer groups: not knowing what a PSA is, selling around a partner, hiding pricing, pushing committed minimums. Miss one and it is named on the scorecard.

Try one.

Same style as the assessment, but not in the bank, so you are not spoiling anything for your reps. Pick an answer to see why it is right or wrong.

An MSP owner says, "We're a Kaseya shop." What does that tell you about their stack?

How a round runs.

One week to a baseline. One quarter to proof.

  1. Monday

    Send the links

    Paste the roster or upload a CSV. Every rep gets a personal link, and you see who has opened it.

  2. This week

    Reps take it once

    About 25 minutes, autosaved, with reminders. Nobody sees a score, so nobody plays to it.

  3. Friday

    Read the results

    A scorecard per rep with flags, transcripts, a training plan and a coaching guide. A team report with the plan, in order.

  4. In between

    Practice

    Reps rerun their weakest role-plays by voice or typing. Paste in a real call and it is graded the same way.

  5. A quarter later

    Show the change

    Run it again. See the change per rep and for the team, next to the training you logged and the deals they closed.

The team report before and after training: team average by area in both rounds, the training logged in between, and the change in average, tiers and flags
The sample team report: eight reps at a security vendor, before and after two training sessions.See the full sample report

Why I built it.

Fifteen years in the MSP channel, at a couple of scrappy startups and a couple of the behemoths, teaches you one thing fast: the rep who was great at selling to a Fortune 500 IT department is usually lost in front of a twelve-person MSP.

I have hired that rep more than once. Sharp, experienced, closed big deals somewhere else. Then watched them stall for two quarters because they showed up with a 30-page proposal, hid the price until the demo, and talked about digital transformation to an owner doing seats-per-tech math in his head.

Every one of those habits is learnable and every one is fixable. The hard part is knowing which ones a given rep has before your partners find out. That is what this measures.

Alec Stanners

Run it on your team.

Tell me about the team, or the roles you are hiring for, and I will set up your company and managers. Links can be out the same day.

Or email alec@mspchannelready.com