Let’s look at how to market your MSP to manufacturers and whether this vertical is even right for you. Also this week, good/better/best pricing for MSPs, and how this 40 technician strong MSP wins clients.

Welcome to Episode 333 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

How to market your MSP to manufacturers

Do you want more manufacturer clients for your MSP? Manufacturers are one of those love it or hate it verticals in the channel. Some MSPs absolutely thrive working with manufacturers. Others hear the word and breakout in a cold sweat. And honestly, both reactions are completely valid. So right now, I want to do a proper, balanced, deep dive into how to market your MSP to manufacturers, starting with whether this vertical is even right for you, and then looking at what manufacturers actually care about when they choose an MSP.

So let’s start with the reality. If you enjoy complexity, manufacturers can be a fantastic fit. They often have expensive production machines, specialist software, bespoke setups, and critical systems that simply cannot go down. And yes, somewhere in most factories, there’s usually a machine still running on an old XP box that hasn’t been rebooted for 10 years because if it stops, the whole place stops. That’s the joke I always make, but it’s funny because it’s true.

The upside of this is obvious. There are lots of large, complicated, high revenue projects. There’s specialist work that you can charge properly for. There’s a real value in what you do because downtime costs manufacturers serious money. When production stops, it’s not a few annoyed users. It’s lost output, missed deadlines, idle staff, and very stressed owners. That makes manufacturers willing to invest when the risk is clearly explained.

But let’s be honest about the downside. Manufacturers rarely have standard setups. There’s very little cookie cutter IT. Every environment is different. Every site has its own quirks. And that means that often you need your most senior technical people involved a lot more often than you would in a nice tidy professional services business. If your MSP is built around highly standardised stacks, minimum variation, and keeping senior techs away from day-to-day firefighting, then manufacturers will feel like chaos to you.

Before you even think about marketing to manufacturers, you need to answer a simple question internally… do you enjoy this kind of work?

Assuming you do want to go after manufacturers, the next mistake MSPs make is marketing to them like they’re any other business, because they are not. Manufacturers think differently. Their world revolves around production, reliability, safety and efficiency. They don’t care about shiny tools or buzzwords. They care about one thing above all else – keeping the production line running. From their point of view, the best MSP is not the most innovative or the most cutting edge, it’s the one that feels the safest. The one that understands their environment, the one that won’t casually suggest upgrades that risk stopping production.

So when you market to manufacturers, your messaging needs to shift. You’re not selling IT support, you’re selling risk reduction. You’re selling uptime, stability, you’re selling calm. Manufacturers choose MSPs who demonstrate that they understand the consequences of failure. Talk about downtime in terms they understand… lost output, missed delivery slots, idle machines, wasted labour. Show that you respect legacy systems, even if you don’t love them and that you know how to work around them safely.

One of the most powerful things you can do in your marketing is to talk about how you approach change. Manufacturers are often change averse for very good reasons. So explain how you test, how you plan, how you schedule work outside production hours, and how you build rollback plans. That builds trust fast. Case studies are especially important here. Manufacturers want proof, real examples. Stories of similar environments, similar risks, and similar complexity. So even if you only have one manufacturing client, that case study will do more heavy lifting than 10 general testimonials.

You should also lean into onsite presence a lot more than you might in other verticals. Manufacturers value MSPs who show up and walk the floor and understand the physical environment as well as the digital one. So talking about site visits, audits, and physical awareness during your marketing and your sales process immediately differentiates you from MSPs who just kind of want to be very much remote based.

And finally, remember that manufacturers don’t choose MSPs emotionally in the same way say as creative or professional services businesses do. Their decision is grounded in risk, responsibility, and consequence. So your marketing should reflect that tone. Be calm, be reassuring, be very competent. There’s no hype needed. There’s no drama. You need to show that you understand their world, you respect their constraints, and you can keep the machines running safely. If you can do this, you will stand out very quickly. Marketing to manufacturers, you know, it’s not about being flashy. It’s all about being credible. And for the right MSP, that can be an extremely profitable place to be.

Good, better, best pricing for MSPs: Why it works

Why is good, better, best pricing so controversial for MSPs? I hear MSPs say things like it’s too complex or it adds noise to an already long sales process, or maybe even just prospects will get confused. And I think that focuses far too much on a small number of perceived downsides while completely missing the much bigger upside. Because when good, better, best pricing, also known as three-tier pricing, when it’s done properly, it doesn’t complicate the sale at all. It actually guides it and helps prospects to make a decision. And it shifts the conversation away from whether they should buy from you and towards which option that you offer is right for them. Does that make sense?

So let’s break this down properly. First, what do we actually mean by good, better, best? Well, at its simplest, you already have a bundle of services that you sell. With three-tier pricing, you still have that bundle. You just offer it in three different flavours. So the good package is the essentials. What they genuinely need to keep things running. The better package builds on that with perhaps more protection, more resilience, more support, and the best package is exactly that. It’s everything you offer at the highest level for the businesses that are more risk averse, more regulated, or just want the most comprehensive offering that they can get.

Now, if it helps you to visualise this, you might label them something like bronze, silver, and gold. Bronze being essential protection, silver the business grade resilience and of course the most popular choice, that’s what you want it to be, more on that in a second, and gold being the premium protection plus strategy for businesses that want that highest, highest level. And that most popular label I just mentioned in the middle, that’s not an accident. In fact, a common and very effective approach is to place the package that you most want to sell in the middle. And that way, prospects can compare it.

They can see something cheaper that offers less and something more expensive that offers more. And this allows them to feel like they are choosing the option that fits them best rather than being pushed into something. And that feeling, that sense of control is a critical part of buyer psychology. You’ll know you’ve got good, better, best pricing, broadly right when around about three quarters of your new sales, your new clients land in the middle package. Now, let’s talk about why this works from a psychological point of view, but without getting academic.

A huge amount of buying behaviour is driven by how we feel, not just what makes logical sense on paper.

And there are three psychological principles quietly doing a lot of heavy lifting here. The first is something called price anchoring. The top package sets a reference point, which makes the other options feel more affordable by comparison. The second is the compromise effect. Most people naturally avoid extremes, so when presented with three options they tend to gravitate towards the middle one because that feels safer and it feels more reasonable, especially when it’s labeled as the most popular choice. And the third is something called choice architecture, which sounds like it’s out of the matrix.

But actually, instead of asking prospects to design a solution from scratch, which is stressful and overwhelming for them, you’re giving them a small number of clearly defined options that align with different risk tolerances and different budgets. And the combined effect of putting these three together, that is so powerful. Price sensitive buyers are no longer scared off because there’s a sensible entry level option. Buyers who want more protection or faster response have a clear upgrade path. And crucially, the sales conversation becomes about which package to choose, not deciding whether or not to buy from you. That is a very different conversation to be in.

Now, when it comes to structuring the three tiers themselves, and these are not prescriptions, they’re just starting points. Every MSP’s tech stack and service model is, of course, highly different. But as a general guide, a good or bronze package might include things like remote help desk during business hours, monitoring and patching, a baseline AV or EDR, basic backups such as Microsoft 365, and of course a standard response SLA,