Gradient MSP launched MSP Studio today, a hub designed with a comprehensive set of resources for MSP growth.
MSP Studio is an evolution of the MSP Price Benchmarking tool, which Gradient rolled out in August and offered free to MSPs. Since the rollout, more than 500 MSPs have used the tool, which is now powered by nearly $10 billion in MSP sales data, according to Colin Knox, CEO and cofounder of Gradient MSP.
Growth Takes More Than Perfect Pricing
“For us, it’s always been about helping MSPs make more money,” Knox tell MSP Success. “It was helping illuminate to [MSPs] what they can charge for services, how much profit they can make off of services, where they can find success. But having perfect pricing doesn’t bring customers to your door. It doesn’t help you sign more customers necessarily. So we wanted to build this into a broader hub of resources for MSPs … with some expert advice around how to sell, how to market, how to package your business, how to round out and build security offerings as a virtual CISO, thing like that.”
In addition to the benchmarking tool, MSP Studio includes other resources for MSP growth, including 12 marketing toolkits from the hub’s sponsors. These include Sherweb, Augmentt, Barracuda, Breach Secure Now, CyberFOX, Enclave, Hudu, Huntress, and Keeper.
“MSPs have long said that their number one challenges are customer acquisition, which comes down to their ability to sell and to market,” Knox says. “Most of them don’t have internal creative resources and marketing resources so it often falls by the wayside. For us, when we’re looking at how we can outfit an MSP to be successful, we can’t just lean on one part of the equation and say, ‘Hey, here’s how much you can charge.’”
MSP Studio also includes educational webinars and special offers and discounts from vendors. Like the benchmarking tool, MSP Studio is available free of charge, but MSPs do have to fill out a form to get access.
Knox says they will continually refresh the resources for MSP Studio. “It’s not going to be a dormant or stale resource. New marketing kits are getting added monthly. New expert videos are getting added, probably weekly for a while, but we’ll just constantly be adding more content and more resources. It was no small endeavor for us, and so I’m very grateful for the various other channel vendors that have stepped up to the plate to help us be able to provide this free to MSPs.”
Asked if there is any overlap between MSP Studio and the Channel Program offering, which includes product reviews, market research, and tools for MSP businesses, Knox says no. “They’ve focused in a lot on PRM [partner relationship management] and almost being a unified partner portal.” He says MSP Studio does not provide reviews or vendor rankings. “This is purely categorical data on the data side [and] marketing materials and turnkey campaigns for people to market across anything. I don’t really see it as any type of overlap with them.”
Vision and Road Map
The overall vision for the hub, Knox says, is to help level up the industry by providing resources for MSP growth. “We still hear industry reports where upwards of half of MSPs aren’t making money today, and that doesn’t behoove anybody in this space,” he says. “That isn’t good for the end customers and SMBs that are outsourcing their IT, because if you’re not making money and you go out of business, they’re [left] trying to get new IT coverage. And it’s obviously not good for the MSP owners if they’re not able to be profitable.”
In essence, he says, for Gradient MSP and the vendor sponsors behind the hub, it’s “put our money where our mouth is as a collection of vendors that are saying, ‘Our success is their success.’”
As for what’s on the roadmap for Gradient MSP, Knox says they will continue to put resources toward the recently announced managed billing reconciliation (MBR) offering. “And obviously, on the core software side of what we do, accelerating the breadth and depth of the integrations that we offer for our platform … and just continuing to find ways to help MSPs and help the industry be more successful as a business. That’s our core goal.”
