Before stepping into a chief executive role, I earned my stripes in sales.
When I joined TenHats as chief sales and marketing officer, the business was steady, but its growth was slow and unintentional, coming primarily through relationships, referrals and whichever prospects happened to knock on the door. TenHats lacked structure and the expectation that serious growth was achievable. I knew having an intentional sales formula worked because I had run one myself. My challenge was to take what I had learned in the field and teach it to other people.
After I was named CEO, we refined that approach. Within the first five years, TenHats grew from roughly $2 million to $19 million in annual revenue without acquisitions. Leading that journey showed me what it takes to move beyond individual sales success and build an outside sales organization.
Turning personal experience into a repeatable process
The sales system I brought to TenHats grew out of years spent running real deals against real competitors. That experience taught me what worked and what did not.
At its core is a six-step process:
- Agenda
- Impact
- Economics
- Decision
- The Close
- Resolution
Each step has a specific purpose and builds the foundation required for the next. That structure keeps a representative from winging it based on how a conversation feels. They know where they are in the process, what they are trying to accomplish and what they need before moving forward.
Of course, I did not walk into a founder-led sales situation and dismantle it. What changed was everything underneath the surface. The conversations that sales reps were having with prospects started to look different. The qualification process changed. The way we ran first meetings changed. The expectations I put around activity, pipeline discipline and follow-through all changed.
The team did not change overnight. The standard did.
Brian Strong
Looking beyond enthusiasm when hiring
A common hiring mistake in our industry is confusing communication ability with sales ability. The MSP space often treats sales like a personality trait. Find someone friendly who lights up a room and assume that the rest follows. It does not.
When I started training the TenHats team, I experienced two very different reactions. One rep was skeptical. He listened, asked pointed questions and made it clear he was not convinced. Meanwhile, another rep nodded along in every session, saying he was on board.
After the training, the skeptical rep just quietly put the process into practice. A few weeks later, he came back and reluctantly admitted that it was working. But the enthusiastic rep did not apply any of it. I appreciated the skeptic because he was being realistic. The best salespeople balance optimism with an ability to recognize when a prospect is pulling back, when the energy shifts or when something they said lands wrong.
Do not hire solely for enthusiasm. Hire for discipline and coachability.
Watch the metric that predicts what comes next
When it comes to sales, one metric sits above everything else: the number of qualified first-time appointments (FTAs). An FTA for TenHats is an hourlong, in-person meeting with a qualified prospect’s decision maker. The goal is to uncover a genuine business problem and better understand the prospect’s business.
Many MSPs believe that the solution to their growth problem is more appointments. But focusing on quantity often results in a rep who is so busy attending low-quality meetings that they never develop the skills to run an effective one. The number of qualified FTAs in one quarter has a direct effect on closings in the next. When the number is healthy, the pipeline has fuel.
A rep who is not booking enough qualified FTAs is not in a sales slump. They are in a prospecting slump. Those problems require different solutions.
Strong competes on stage in a game show at a ChannelPro event.
What rapid growth taught me about leadership
Growing fast is fun and painful, often in the same week.
I never doubted we would get there. I talked about our goal constantly and everyone around me knew it was not a wish but a destination. That certainty matters more than most leaders realize. When the people around you believe you, the whole company operates differently.
The hardest part was the mistakes. When you are growing fast, you often make quick decisions based on incomplete information. Some of those decisions will not work out, be they hiring the wrong person or onboarding a client that is not a good fit. Moving too fast on structural changes can create confusion for your team. To recover, you must be willing to have honest conversations about what went wrong. Cover it up or explain it away and it festers. Own it and fix it. You’ll find that people trust you more on the other side of it.
3 ways to shift your sales strategy
In my experience, most MSPs generating more than $10 million in annual revenue have outside sales organizations. Owner-led sales can become a trap. It often works well in the early stages but eventually limits the company’s ability to scale. Relying on the owner’s personality, relationships and status as the founder to drive sales does not transfer to a salesperson.
Here are some things for MSP owners to consider before they make the move to outside sales:
- The rep will not sell like you. As the owner, you walk into a meeting with built-in credibility. A rep does not have that. If you evaluate your rep’s performance by expecting that person to sell exactly as you do, you will burn through salespeople who could succeed under realistic expectations.
- Commit to the timeline. Fully developing an outside sales rep can take 12 to 18 months. Owners who accept that timeline make patient, deliberate investments and see them pay off. Owners who expect results in six months will cycle through salespeople, conclude that the right person does not exist and never build what they set out to build. Stay involved in sales until the rep is truly ramped. Do not disappear at month three.
- Get proper coaching and support. Seek out someone who has previously sold MSP services successfully. Look at their track record. What did they produce? What company did they work for? Is that a company you aspire to be? The ROI on genuine sales coaching is difficult to overstate. Do the math before you decide you cannot afford it.
One final thought: Protect the role
To be effective, outside sales needs to be the only job. Not sales and marketing or sales and project management. Whatever the second role is, that will get done first because it is easier.
Sales is hard. Prospecting is stressful no matter how long you have been doing it. If you want a real outside sales organization, you must protect the role from everything else that will compete with it.
I have experienced MSP sales as a representative, a sales leader and a CEO. Each role taught me something different. Selling taught me the process. Leadership taught me how to transfer it to other people. Becoming CEO taught me why owners must build that capability before they desperately need it.
The MSPs that thrive are led by people willing to keep evolving alongside their businesses.
BRIAN STRONG
CEO, TenHats
- Founded: 2016; named change to TenHats in 2022
- Headquarters: Knoxville, Tennessee
- No. of employees: 35
- Website: tenhats.com
- Company focus: Service small to mid-size businesses in the East Tennessee region
- Recommended book: “Unreasonable Hospitality”
- Favorite part of my job: Teaching/mentoring. I like to help people grow to become the best version of themself. It also pushes me to continue to improve myself.
- Least favorite part of my job: Dealing with drama. Drama hurts culture and burns a lot of unnecessary energy.
- What people are surprised to learn about me: I’m slightly more introverted than extroverted.
Images: Brian Strong
