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A vendor gets a call from one of its biggest MSP partners who needs something the vendor can’t supply. The vendor knows a competitor can, so it points them there.
That sounds like a good way to lose a partner, but it wasn’t. They stayed, and they spent even more over the next few years.
The person at the vendor was Jason Douglas, now founder of Channel Captain. I asked him why he took the risk, and his answer says a lot about how MSPs should choose the vendors they work with.
Relationships are the best due diligence
Jason says vendors now have less room to hide than they used to. He thinks recurring revenue has made it harder for anyone to keep “getting away with selling nonsense to people.”
So, when he wants to know whether to trust someone, he doesn’t start with a feature list.
Relationships for me are the best form of due diligence.
He asks two questions. “Who have you worked with? Would they work with you again?”
Jason holds himself to the same test.
Don’t take my word for it. Talk to the people that I’ve worked with in the industry.
This works for any kind of business and you can run that check on any vendor before you sign. Ask for references and ask whether those customers would buy again.
In many cases the experience a customer or partner had when working with the vendor is just as important as the quality of the product.
The power of being helpful
Jason’s first job was at Homebase, where the rules were simple. If you didn’t have something in stock, you sent the customer to B&Q. It wasn’t just about selling a product, he remembers.
It was about doing the right thing by the customer and focusing on the relationship and helping someone out.
Years later, he still believes the job doesn’t end when you can’t fill the order.
It stops at the point of have you done everything in your power to help.
At RealVNC, Jason handled renewals and customer success, mostly through US resellers When he asked the reseller reps what they provided for their clients, they told him, “Whatever they need, we’ll provide to them.” This approach kept customers loyal.
Jason spent five years speaking to the same account managers at larger US resellers, about the same clients, year after year. He says loyalty wasn’t necessarily about price, and it wasn’t necessarily about the product. It was about the reseller coming through for the client.
That’s what gave him the idea of becoming “that person that someone could trust to come to in a pinch.”
Help comes back to you
Jason says he opens every conversation the same way.
The first thing I do now when I have a conversation with anybody new is how can I help you?
Experience taught him that being helpful is a solid foundation for long-term relationships. And sooner or later, people tend to return that help.
I love the fact that things go kind of full circle,” he says. “There’s gonna be a time when I need a hand.
He told me this story to explain how helping early “just pays for itself tenfold.”
A technology vendor in Cambridge recommended him for a role at IT Governance, and “they didn’t take a fee for it.” Jason “ended up there for five years.”
A decade on, he says, “I’m able to go back and help that company discover their partner program.”
Alignment beats the quick sale
Jason’s next example comes from DigitalXRAID, an MSSP where he built a channel from scratch. His rule for who to recruit was clear.
We didn’t want to go for volume, we wanted to go for the right partners.
The channel grew from two partners when he arrived to over 80.
We attracted numerous enterprise grade clients who are happy to choose DigitalXRAID as their vendor of choice and trust them to deliver for their clients.
Some partners arrived with a single urgent need, and Jason was happy to fulfill it. The conversation didn’t stop there.
His aim was to find a way to help partners achieve goals through their products or services.
How do we go from this point to providing continuous value for you and your clients?
The sales conversations have shifted towards helping an MSP reach its goals.
He’s been part of plenty of sales where the solution looks right on paper but doesn’t really solve the customer’s need, and he wants to avoid that.
It fits for the most part. But it doesn’t align in certain areas. I wanted to get away from that misalignment, whether it’s in delivery, whether it’s in pricing, whether it’s in features. I wanted to make sure that everything that we did within that channel aligned very carefully to the needs of the MSP and the end client.
Winning a new customer isn’t the finish line. Jason wanted to “enable them to be successful continuously.” That means even after the contract expires.
Why go vendor neutral
Channel Captain, the company that Jason runs today, puts these ideas to work for MSPs. Its aim is to “quieten down the noise of vendor selection for MSPs and for value added resellers.”
Jason wants an MSP to succeed beyond the first deal, all the way to “engagement number 99 and 100.”
Working outside any vendor helps. Jason says he brings knowledge of “all the wonderful tricks that salespeople pull”, so he can help MSPs dodge them.
MSPs come to him needing everything from penetration testing and cyber incident response to Cyber Essentials, ISO 27001, and SOC 2. In each case, he says the value is in being able to “find a great vendor quickly that aligns with them.”
Because Channel Captain is vendor neutral, Jason’s triage method is simple. Does it fit? Does it provide value to you?
This way of working also allows him to say, “It’s not about the money, it’s about doing the right thing for that partner, for that vendor.”
He expects the money to follow, because “commercially, it’s going to come back round.”
Your clients’ success measures your own
Jason’s 10-year goal has nothing to do with revenue. He wants Channel Captain “to have been the catalyst for some of the most successful partnerships in the industry.”
The alternative is what he’s trying to avoid, which is “ramming a partnership down everybody’s throats.”
Jason describes the reputation he wants with three questions.
Will Jason pick up the phone? Will he find me a solution that makes sense for me? Will he put my needs before money?
They work just as well as questions for your next vendor.
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