Your sales pipeline should be one list, held in your PSA, with every deal on it. Each deal needs four things against it: who owns it, what it’s worth, what stage it’s at, and when it should close. Nothing tracked anywhere else.
Get that right and you can forecast. Get it wrong and you’re guessing.
Most MSPs are guessing and don’t know it. It rarely shows up as a crisis. It shows up as small things you’ve stopped noticing.
– Tracie Orisko, Worldwide Senior Director of Sales Development and Community at Huntress
Six signs your pipeline only lives in your head
- You can name your three biggest deals but not your total pipeline value.
- Two people are working the same prospect and neither knows it.
- Your monthly forecast is a number the owner thinks looks ‘about right.’
- Deals go quiet for weeks and nobody notices until the quarter closes.
- You can’t split next year’s revenue into recurring and one-off.
- Your growth target is £5 million and the plan behind it is just ‘more clients.’
That last one comes up constantly. We hear the same number from MSP owners again and again: £5 million. Ask how they’re getting there, and there’s rarely much substance underneath it.
Why it happens
It isn’t laziness, and it isn’t a tooling problem. The sales process was never written down, because for years it didn’t need to be.
Most MSPs are founded by technical people who sold on relationships and reputation. That works, and it works well, until the owner hires someone else to do it. Then the process has to leave their head, and there’s nothing there to hand over.
The fix is unglamorous. The first ninety days of a new salesperson’s job shouldn’t be selling. It should be documentation and getting what’s in the owner’s head onto paper. Sales reps hate it, which is why it almost never happens.
What good actually looks like
It arrives in three stages, and they only work in this order.
One list, and only one
Every opportunity recorded in the PSA with an owner, a value, a stage and a forecast date. No offline deals, no personal spreadsheets. One pipeline report a month, reviewed with your leadership team against the forecast you gave last month.
The job at this stage is simply to see the pipeline. You cannot manage what you cannot count, and you cannot count what isn’t written down.
Stages that mean the same thing to everyone
Write down what has to be true before a deal moves forward. If ‘Proposal’ means a priced quote has gone out, then a deal sits in ‘Proposal’ when the quote is sent, not when the rep just has a good feeling about it. One rule, same for everyone.
Mark each deal as recurring revenue or one-off work. Winning £12,000 of project work and winning £12,000 a year of recurring revenue are two very different results, and adding them together hides that. Track what’s happening on each deal too, not just what it’s worth.
It’s also what makes the backwards maths possible. 1,000 calls to get 100 opportunities to win 10 clients. Break that down into calls per person per day and you know exactly how many people you need to hire.
That only works if you know how many deals really get through each stage. Fuzzy stages give you fuzzy numbers, and fuzzy numbers are how you end up with a £5 million target and nothing behind it.
Numbers with a name against them
A dashboard per salesperson showing revenue contribution split by MRR and NRR. Commission reporting built from the same PSA data, so there’s one version of the truth. A defined threshold for a stale opportunity, with an automated alert when a deal crosses it. A data hygiene check inside the sales review, not bolted on at quarter end.
The stale-deal rule matters more than it sounds. Deals rarely die loudly. They go quiet, everyone assumes someone else is chasing, and three months later they’re marked lost.
What it unlocks
Sales teams that run this way work to an annual operating plan. They know how many opportunities they need for the year before it starts, and every quarter they have to hit a milestone before they’re allowed to hire more people.
Not just a forecast, but a decision rule, you’ll know in advance what has to be true before you spend money on growth. That only works because every opportunity is recorded, every stage means the same thing to everyone, and the numbers belong to named people.
What to do next
Most MSPs can’t answer that without opening four inboxes.
Knowing what good looks like is the easy part. The MSP Sales System Pack is how you build it.
Get Your MSP Sales System Pack
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Pipeline Register & Forecast Workbook
Every live opportunity on one list, weighted by stage, with stale deals flagged. -
Service Profit Planner
What a client is worth over five years, and how many calls it takes to win one. -
What Every MSP Gets Wrong About Sales
The playbook on who to hire first, and when to add account management.
Where this conversation goes next
This blog is only a snippet of what Tracie Orisko shared about building a sales function inside an MSP.
In the full episode, Tracie and Darren go deeper into:
- Why the first sales hire so often fails, and what to actually look for in the person you bring in
- When to split new business from account management, and why the two rarely work well in the same pair of hands
- Why most MSPs abandon outreach in week three, just before it starts producing anything
- How referrals and community generate more pipeline than cold activity ever will, and the habits that make that happen on purpose
If this blog made you uncomfortable about how much of your sales process still lives in your own head, that’s your cue to watch the full episode.
