Josh Peterson opens this conversation with a pattern he has watched for years. Some MSP owners insist they are terrible at selling, and many of them are quietly good at it. Others insist they are excellent, and many of them are not. The strange part is that both groups tend to end up with the same pipeline: a handful of prospects who said they would call back, a few quotes sitting unanswered, and a lot of time spent chasing people who have stopped responding. Josh's explanation is that talent was never the variable. Process was. Owners who sell well usually follow the order of selling by instinct, and owners who struggle skip the same few steps every time. The problem is sharpest in owner-led sales, where the person running the meeting is also the person least likely to have been taught how one should end, and where the habit of jumping to firewalls and backup before the prospect has finished talking undoes the patience that customer discovery is supposed to protect.
The steps that get skipped are not obscure. A first appointment with a prospect has four jobs: establish a budget, establish a time frame, set the next meeting date, and ask for a referral. An owner who leaves without the next meeting on the calendar has, in Josh's blunt assessment, nothing at all, only a pleasant conversation and a future of follow-up emails. This is a leadership question before it is a sales technique, because an owner who cannot run a first meeting to a defined outcome is teaching every future salesperson that a pipeline is something you hope for rather than something you build. What follows is how BMK thinks about the order of selling, the four jobs of a first appointment, how to set the next meeting at the end of a sales call without asking permission, how to get a budget and a deadline before you write anything, and why a proposal should never be the moment a prospect first sees the price.
Josh asked Gary, on the recording, whether he could recite the order of selling. Gary, who has spent years on the client side and the consulting side of BMK's work, said he knew the framework existed and could not repeat it on the spot, and joked that this was probably why he does not call himself a salesperson. The framework itself is short. You sell yourself first, the company second, and the goods and services third. Josh's advice for anyone hearing it for the first time is not to try to define the first two. Focus on the third, and ask an uncomfortable question about your last few sales calls: how quickly did the conversation reach the network, the firewall, the backup product the prospect mentioned in their inquiry? For most owners the honest answer is within minutes.
Leading with solutions still wins deals, which is why the habit survives. What it changes is everything after the first meeting. A prospect who has been sold a product compares products, and a prospect who has been sold a person extends that person trust. Selling yourself, in Josh's description, looks like curiosity: meaningful rapport building that gives the prospect a reason to feel the time was well spent. Not a question about the golf trophy on the shelf, but a question about the work they do and how they came to do it. He describes a forty-five minute conversation with a stranger in a diner that started with a single question about why the man was eating a full Sunday dinner at eleven thirty in the morning. Nothing was sold. The man left better off, and that is the standard a first meeting should meet. The owner who can create value in a human before talking about technology has earned the right to ask the harder questions that follow, including questions about money.
Gary's contribution to the episode is a story about a BMK client who did the hard thing and was punished for it. The client had an existing customer, a CEO he considered a friend, and a large, complicated proposal worth several hundred thousand dollars. Gary suggested that before presenting it, the client ask the CEO about his goals for the business over the next five years. The client was reluctant, did it anyway, and the CEO answered with irritation: he just wanted a firewall, and how much would it cost. Gary's reading of that moment is precise. The CEO trusted the MSP to quote equipment and did not yet trust it with anything more important. The relationship was an order-taking relationship, and one brave question had exposed it.
That gap is what the four jobs of a first appointment are designed to close from the beginning. By the end of the first meeting with a prospect, Josh wants four things settled: a budget, a time frame, the next meeting date with its purpose, and a referral request. He starts with the referral because it is the one nobody does. At the end of a first meeting, ask who else they know who might need help like yours. If that request feels impossible because the prospect barely knows you, Josh's argument is that the feeling is the diagnosis. Your confidence to ask is the signal that you sold yourself well enough to be two people trying to help each other. If it is not there, the useful question is what you needed to do at the start of the meeting to earn it. Josh says several clients who tried the request had the prospect pick up the phone on the spot, call a peer, and tell them to take the MSP's call.
Of the four jobs, this is the one Josh treats as non-negotiable. Think about your pipeline, he says, probably undocumented and living in your head, and count the prospects you are chasing: the one who said he would call back, the one you are waiting to hear from. The answer to every one of them was available in the last two minutes of the first meeting. If you leave without the next meeting date, you have not built a pipeline. You met somebody and chatted. You can spend the next decade chasing people, or you can end the chase in one moment, and that moment is how you close the meeting.
The script Josh uses is simple enough to sound generic, and that is the point. As the meeting winds down, you lead. You recap who is doing what, then you say: go ahead and open your calendar and let's put something on it, I'll send the invite right now so we don't lose track of each other. How is next Tuesday at three, or next Wednesday at four? When Josh asked Gary what the subtlety was, Gary named it: the prospect never agreed to a meeting. Josh had given a command rather than asked a question. He did not ask what the next steps should be, whether they should meet, or whether the prospect would be willing to. Josh credits Andrew Morgan, who worked alongside Arnie Bellini at ConnectWise in its early years, with teaching him the technique. Two refinements make it work. The next meeting needs a purpose, such as bringing back solution ideas or bringing a technician to answer the questions the prospect raised. And the rule does not end at the signature. When a client signs, Josh books a meeting ninety days out, so that when the MSP makes mistakes, and it will, he hears about it directly and early.
Josh admits the time frame is the step he is weakest at, because his own services rarely feel urgent to the people he sells to. For an MSP the step is easier to frame. If a prospect is considering leaving their provider, ask when, here in September, they could truly imagine making that change. Josh credits Gary Pica, the founder of TruMethods, with a more dramatic version: ask the prospect to close their eyes and walk through telling their current provider they are leaving, so their own objections surface before yours have to. On project work the move is to anchor the completion date and reason backwards in front of the prospect. If it has to be live by November first and the work takes four weeks, it has to start October first, which means ordering equipment by mid-September, which means the prospect is already behind. From there the next steps write themselves: the solution tomorrow, the proposal that afternoon, the deposit invoice, and a team that starts ordering on time.
Budget is where most owners believe they cannot get an answer, and Gary voiced the usual objection: prospects say they do not have one, will not share it, or do not know. Josh's answer is that the budget conversation starts in the first five minutes, before anyone has mentioned a budget. He asks how many people the business employs and then estimates revenue out loud, using roughly $200,000 per employee as a waypoint: ten people, so somewhere around two million or two and a half? Prospects either confirm, correct him, or boast a little, which he enjoys. Across what he puts, as a rough count, at about a thousand first appointments, he says fewer than five people have declined to discuss revenue, and he reads that refusal as a sign of a poor fit. Later, when the prospect admits they do not really budget for IT, he can frame a range as a share of revenue. Josh cites a figure of roughly 1.25 to 1.5 percent of revenue going toward hardware, software, support and projects, and asks how that lands. The answer, whether it is that they should be so lucky or that they would never spend that much, is the budget conversation.
The final part of the episode is about the chase that follows a sent quote, and Josh starts with vocabulary. Quotes are for one-off items, a laptop or a hard drive. Anything with a service component is a proposal, and proposals are delivered with the expectation of a signature, not sent. Then he asks the question that matters most: on the last three or four proposals you put out, was that document the first time the prospect saw the price? If it was, the proposal was doing work that should have been done in the meeting. A proposal should be a formality, a written record of what both sides already agreed, which is where trial closing and handling objections up front come in.
Josh's image for the alternative is deliberately unflattering. Many buyers want your proposal more than your partnership, so they can compare it, share it, or use it to justify standing still, and an MSP that hands proposals to everyone who asks teaches the market that its proposals are free. His standard is to give proposals only to people who have earned one, who have promised to call the next day, and who look like a relationship that will last years. The practical sequence is to present options, perhaps a version that fits the budget, a fancier one and a stripped-down one, isolate the right choice with the prospect, and then trial close before writing anything: if I came back tomorrow with a proposal for $8,500 that meets the date you told me matters, is there any reason you would not sign it? Every objection surfaces while you can still address it in the room. Wait until after the proposal goes out and you are handling objections from a position of weakness, if the prospect gives you the chance at all.
Recap what each side has agreed to do, then ask the prospect to open their calendar and offer two specific times, for example next Tuesday at three or next Wednesday at four. Send the invite while you are still in the meeting. Frame it as the natural next step rather than a question about whether they want to meet again, and give the meeting a clear purpose.
Four things: establish a budget, establish a time frame for the decision or project, set the next meeting date and its purpose, and ask for a referral. A first meeting that ends without the next meeting on the calendar has not created a real opportunity.
Sell yourself first, the company second, and goods and services third. In practice that means starting with genuine curiosity about the prospect and their business, and holding back the technology discussion until trust has been established.
Start early by asking how many employees they have and estimating revenue out loud. If they do not budget for IT, offer a range framed as a share of revenue, for example about 1.25 to 1.5 percent, and ask how that compares with what they expected. Their reaction tells you where the budget sits.
A quote prices a one-off item such as a laptop or a hard drive. A proposal covers anything with a service component and is delivered with the expectation of a signature. A good proposal documents what the prospect has already agreed to rather than introducing the price for the first time.
Do the work before the proposal exists. Agree on the budget and time frame, present options, isolate the right one, and ask a trial close question such as whether there is any reason the prospect would not sign a proposal at that price and date. Objections raised in the meeting can be answered. Objections raised after the proposal often turn into silence.
Gary Boyle is a Partner for Strategy & Business Development at Bering McKinley. With a background spanning network engineering, entrepreneurship, and strategic consulting, Gary brings real-world operator experience to helping MSP owners build stronger, more profitable businesses. On the Vision roundtable he co-hosts with Josh Peterson, working through the decisions that determine how an MSP grows, sells and runs.
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Josh Peterson is the CEO of Bering McKinley and host of The BMK Vision Podcast. Since 2004, Josh has worked with hundreds of MSP owners to build operationally sound, profitable businesses through consulting, peer teams, and direct coaching.
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A sales process an owner can follow, measure and teach is what turns a few good meetings into a pipeline the business can plan around. Building that kind of repeatable discipline into how the company runs is what the Vision Operating System is designed to do.