In this special episode of MSP Chat, sponsored by Quoter, Erick and Rich discuss a vision of the MSP of tomorrow based on Rich’s recent conversation with Janet Schijns of JS Group and how to gain competitive advantage by automating and integrating your sales quoting and payment collection platforms in response to changed buying expectations since the arrival of Covid.

Then Scott Bauer, director of marketing at Quoter, joins in to explore best practices and underleveraged opportunities for MSPs in their quoting, approval, and payment processes.

And finally, one last thing. Or rather, *two*: a river of wine in Portugal to go with last week’s $32,000 wheel of cheese, and a profane road sign in Houston that invited motorists to…well, listen to the show to find out.

Discussed in this episode:

• Why Stephen Jay Gould is the New Face of the Channel
• Quoter home page
• Distillery spill floods streets of Portuguese town with wine
• Electronic construction sign displays profanity in Houston

Machine Generated Transcription

And, three, two, one, blast off! Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to another episode of the MSP Chat Podcast, your weekly visit with two talking heads talking with you about the services, strategies, and success tips you need. to make it big and manage services. This is a sponsored episode of the show. It's sponsored by our friends at Quoter.We'll tell you a little bit more about Quoter, a little bit later on in the program. We'll have a visit with one of their executives as well, as a matter of fact. Um, but this, uh, I am one of your co hosts for the show. My name is Rich Freeman. I am Chief Content Officer at Channel Master, the organization responsible for this broadcast.Your other co host is our Chief Strategist. at Channel Mastered. He is also my friend of many years, my co worker, my colleague, Eric Simpson, a man who knows how to catch a cold and never let it go. Eric, how you doing?Well, Rich, I'm doing better than I was earlier this week, and hopefully by next show I'll be completely past This little cold struggle challenge that I've been dealing with for quite a bit now.Thanks for asking.You bet. And for folks who don't know, actually, um, Eric had this cold when we were recording the last episode. We didn't talk about it at all, but that's, you know, it's been at least a week, it's been over that, um, basically, that this lingering cold has been with you. But yes, I am, I am confident, Eric, by the next time we record a show, this will not be an issue for you anymore.I'm not a quitter, Rich. That's, that's why I'm hanging on to the call.Exactly. Alright, well let's dive into our story of the week here. Um, and this was inspired by a couple of different things, Eric. Um, uh, a blog post that I wrote on Channelholic, my blog, and also a, uh, an interview I did. I was a podcast guest.Um, uh, and this was recorded earlier this week. I was a guest on a podcast called Start, Manage, Grow, um, for MSPs. It's hosted by Joe Rojas and Jeff Lair. Great show, um, by the way, go check it out. Um, they were talking with me about something that I wrote. For Channel Pro Magazine, um, a few years back when I was over there and it was about the attributes that the most successful, fastest growing MSPs tend to have in common.And I flagged three particular things that conveniently for me all began with the letter S. Um, and that was scale, specialization, and standardization. So, scale, you know, you, you, uh, build the business to grow from the get go, so that's never a barrier. Um, specialization, like in a vertical industry, for example, is going to differentiate you.And standardization in what you sell and your, your workflows and so on is going to make you more efficient. And the more I was talking about this with Joe and Jeff, the more it occurred to me that it might be time to add a fourth S to that list, Eric. That S being... Strategy. And the thinking behind that was inspired by this blog post that I alluded to before, which was about this giant change that's taking place in the channel right now.And this is not, not a small sort of evolution of the channel. This is a big change. Thank you. break a sea change. And the essence of it is for many, many years, for about as long as there's been a chat channel, you as a channel partner, as an MSP, an IT provider, you did a lot of things for your customers.But if you were to stack rank those things, particularly in the mind of the customer, top on the list is you were the person who sold them their software and their hardware. I mean, they, they didn't have a distribution relationship. Even when, you know, Dell. com

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