ScalePad Evangelist To MSPs: ‘The Questions You Ask Determine The Relationship You Have’

‘If clients can’t articulate the business outcomes you’re helping them achieve, they probably don’t see you as strategic. They see you as a vendor,’ says Luis Giraldo, chief evangelist at ScalePad.

As AI accelerates efficiencies, it also may drive up pricing pressures unless MSPs change how they position themselves with clients.

That’s the message Luis Giraldo conveyed to a room full of MSPs at CRN parent company The Channel Company’s XChange March conference in Orlando, Fla., this week as he said commoditization has crept in over the last 20 years.

To combat those pressures, MSPs must pivot from tactical and technical conversations to strategic business partnerships.

“If clients can’t articulate the business outcomes you’re helping them achieve, they probably don’t see you as strategic. They see you as a vendor,” said Giraldo, chief evangelist at Vancouver, Canada-based vendor ScalePad.

[Related: ScalePad CEO On New Lifecycle Manager X: ‘It’s Time To Put The Customer At The Center’]

Yet many MSPs still communicate with customers using technical language, he added. In practice, that means talking primarily with office managers or internal IT contacts instead of leadership teams responsible for business strategy.

“What we’ve effectively done over the years is allow clients to abdicate their accountability for IT,” he said. “Now we’re trying to bring them back into the equation.”

The solution isn’t abandoning operational efficiency or standardization but rather reframing how those capabilities are presented to customers.

“The questions you ask determine the relationship you have,” he said. “If you’re always asking about firewalls, Wi-Fi and servers, the conversation immediately funnels into a technical place.”

And sometimes the most revealing question is also the simplest. One question Giraldo suggested is simply asking the client how their company makes money. “It sounds obvious, but that’s the kind of curiosity that keeps you at the boardroom table.”

From there, MSPs can align technology projects with business goals.

Jim Thrall said Giraldo gave “concrete suggestions and strategies” focused on addressing the business challenges clients are facing, rather than just the technology.

“For many MSPs, it’s easy to default to talking about the blinking lights instead of positioning themselves as business advisers, but making that shift is difficult,” Thrall, owner of Elma, Wash.-based Twin Harbors Technology Solutions, told CRN. “The feedback offered useful guidance on how to move along that journey.”