Price shopping often doesn’t start with the prospect, it starts with the MSP… find out why. Also this week, why MSPs feel overwhelmed even when things are good, and clever marketing ideas from outside the channel.

Welcome to Episode 330 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

Why prospects price shop MSPs (& how to end it forever)

Have you ever had a prospect say no to you because they believed your MSP was just too expensive? Lots of MSPs think that prospects default to price shopping because they’re cheap, difficult, or just not serious buyers. And it’s so easy to blame the economy or your competition or how the market is right now. But here’s the uncomfortable truth… prospects usually aren’t born price shoppers… they’re trained. And more often than not, they’re trained by the MSP itself through marketing and sales behaviour that’s well-intentioned, but hits in the totally wrong way.

Let me give you some examples so you can see if you are doing this by accident. I believe the problem of price shopping doesn’t start with the prospect, it starts with the MSP. In fact, it starts with the signals that you send through your marketing and your sales process, often without even realising it. Every interaction either trains a prospect to compare or it trains them to trust. And most MSPs accidentally train comparison, price comparison especially. Let me show you how.

One of the biggest ways that MSPs create price shoppers is by leading with services instead of leading with outcomes.

So when you talk about monitoring, patching, backups, antivirus, response times and tickets and stuff like that, you’re just listing features and that makes you look identical to every other MSP. And when things look identical, you’re just making it too difficult for the prospect to differentiate you from all the other MSPs. So the only logical way to choose is price from their point of view. You’ve taught the prospect that MSPs are interchangeable, bad, bad, bad.

Another big one is quoting too early. MSPs do rush in sometimes to give a price because they want to be helpful or they want to keep momentum or they want to avoid awkward conversations. But when you give a big number before establishing value, context, and fit, you’re effectively saying this decision is mostly about cost. So the prospect does exactly what you’d expect a rational human to do… they shop around. And by the way, that’s not a reason to not have a price estimator on your website. A price estimator that gives them a rough price in seconds is good, but jumping straight from initial conversation to quote, that’s bad. You’ve got to give them a specific quote at the very end of the process when you’ve got to know them and what they’re looking for and their outcomes and whether or not you guys are a good fit.

Then there’s the problem of treating every lead the same. If you have the same proposal template, the same pitch, you’re using the same language, it’s the same packages for everyone. If there’s no sense of personalisation, how can it feel relevant to your prospect? There’s no emotional anchor there. And when there’s no emotional anchor, again, price just floats to the top.

MSPs also train price shoppers by apologising for their pricing. People say phrases like, “Oh, I know we’re not the cheapest…” or, “Oh, we might be a bit more expensive, but…” why would you do that? ” In fact, the moment that you say that, you have framed price as the objection, you’ve invited the prospect to challenge it, which is crazy.

Another subtle one is overexplaining and justifying. When you feel the need to defend your price, line by line, then you kind of signal uncertainty and that encourages comparison.

And then there’s websites. So if your website focuses really heavily on your packages, your plans and your prices, but without anchoring value, outcomes or consequences of not doing what you suggest, then again, you’ve just built a comparison tool and not a trust building asset. You’re helping prospects to shop you by price.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth, price shoppers are rarely the problem, they are the symptom. They are the result of marketing and sales processes that remove differentiation and replace it with comparison. And the fix isn’t any kind of clever pricing tactics or discounting or handling objections better or something like that. The fix is training prospects differently from their very first touchpoint with you. That means anchoring outcomes before costs. It means talking about risk, disruption, peace of mind, predictability, and the value of sleeping well at night. It means actually slowing down sales conversations instead of rushing to get a quote out and in front of them. It means qualifying them more, making sure that the fit is right. A good fit is more important than speed. It means positioning yourself as a guide, as a trusted expert, and not a vendor.

When prospects trust you, they don’t shop you. When they believe that you understand their world, they will never compare you line by line. And when they see you as the safe choice, price becomes secondary. The MSPs who struggle the most with price shoppers are usually the ones trying the hardest to be easy to buy from. And ironically, the MSPs who make buying feel more deliberate, more thoughtful, more slower, more selective. They’re the ones who tend to attract better clients and fewer comparisons.

So if prospects are always asking you for price, always shopping around, always disappearing after proposals, don’t ask what’s wrong with them. Ask, “What have I accidentally trained them to do? ” Because once you change the training, the behaviour changes too.

Why MSPs feel overwhelmed even when things are good

Every MSP, in fact, every business owner walks around with a hassle bucket inside their head. And when that bucket overflows, everything suddenly feels harder than it should. Decisions take longer, small problems feel bigger and even tiny extra demands can tip us over the edge. If you felt that recently, you need to hear what I’ve got to say in the next three minutes.

So let me explain what I mean by the hassle bucket, because once you understand this, it does change how you look at work, stress, and leadership. The hassle bucket is simply a measure of how much hassle you can deal with at any one time. And some people seem to have very, very deep buckets. They can take on enormous amounts of pressure before they start to struggle. Other people have shallower buckets and they reach their limit much faster. And here’s the important thing. You’re not born with a fixed bucket. You can deepen it over time. And equally, it can become more shallow sometimes without you even realising. But whenever that bucket overflows, your ability to cope drops dramatically.

As business owners, especially in the channel, we tend to have deep hassle buckets. We learned that in the first few years of running a business. In fact, the depth of your bucket is often what separates people who can run a business for decades from those who burn out early. But here’s the catch. Even if your bucket is deep, it’s usually about 80% full most of the time. Just think about everything you’re juggling right now. Cashflow… which when it’s not right can be mentally destructive, staff… which is a bit like having extra children who all look to you for answers, winning new business, keeping existing clients happy, solving problems, making big decisions, and carrying responsibility. If a completely sane person looked at that list, they’d run a mile. And yet you and I, we don’t run a mile, we take it on willingly because the positives outweigh the negatives by a massive margin.

We get freedom, flexibility, and personal growth, and the opportunity to build something meaningful, the chance to change your family’s future. All of that makes it worth it. But there are points in the year, often around now actually, as we’re sort of a few months past Christmas, when the hassle bucket gets dangerously close to the top. And I know this. And the reason I wanted to talk about this in this video and on this podcast is because my hassle bucket is right near the brim right now, and it’s completely self-inflicted. Right now, I’ve got too many projects on. I’ve done too much travel. And on top of that, there’s the emotional and the time pressure of accompanying my daughter to a whole load of open days and auditions because she’s working towards going to drama school in September.

So normally I’d say my hassle bucket sits at around about 80% full, and I’ve got to be honest right now, it feels like 95% full. So here’s a simple but powerful question for you… how full is your hassle bucket today? In fact, it might be a question that you might ask yourself every single morning because when the bucket overflows, it’s rarely the big things that cause that overflow, it’s the small extra straw that breaks the camel’s back.

The answer is not to try and stop more stuff coming into the bucket, that’s unrealistic, the real answer is to install a relief tap further down the bucket.

Now, I call this the DOA relief tap, and we usually hear that acronym, DOA, on crime shows, where it means “dead on arrival”. Well, that’s not what we want as business owners. For us, DOA means delegate, outsource, automate. It’s about acknowledging that even though you’re capable, even though you’re very good at what you do, and even though part of you believes that no one can do it as well as you, there are still many things you don’t personally need to do anymore. A great mantra to live by is this… You should only do wha