Know who on your team can actually sell to MSPs.
An assessment for vendor sales teams, about 25 minutes per rep: channel knowledge across seven areas, written scenarios, and two live role-plays with an MSP owner. It flags the enterprise habits that cost partner deals, gives each rep a training plan, and runs again after training so you can show the before and after. Reps get one attempt and never see their score.
Try one.
This question is in the same style as the assessment but is not in the bank, so you are not spoiling anything for your reps.
An MSP owner says, "We're a Kaseya shop." What does that tell you about their stack?
Seven things an MSP owner will test your rep on in the first ten minutes.
32 multiple choice questions drawn from a bank of 71, 4 written scenarios mixed through the test, and two role-plays at the end: a phone call with an MSP owner played live, and an email or text thread, chosen from eight situations a channel rep actually meets, from the owner who got burned on terms to the PE platform's vendor manager. 25 of the items are identical for every company, which is what makes teams comparable. The rest follow the weights: when a company is set up, its sales leader rates how much each area matters to that team, and the mix of questions follows: a phone vendor gets one security question and more on economics and terms; a security vendor gets the reverse. Seven of the questions act as tripwires for specific habits: not knowing what a PSA is, selling around a partner, hiding pricing, committed minimums, missing PSA integration, misreading a PE platform, and per-endpoint cost math. A miss on one is named on the scorecard.
- MSP economics
- What a $2 per endpoint increase costs a 2,000-endpoint MSP on fixed-price agreements, and why the owner books your product as cost of goods.
- Stack & integration
- What breaks inside the MSP when your tool cannot open PSA tickets or sync billable quantities.
- Buyers & buying
- How a PE-backed platform with fourteen acquired brands buys differently from a twelve-person owner-led shop.
- Channel terms & trust
- Why committed seat minimums turn an MSP's client churn into your guaranteed revenue, and what they remember about auto-renewals.
- Security, compliance & AI
- Why cyber insurance requirements are the lever MSPs use to sell security, and what the 2021 VSA incident changed.
- Motion & community
- Where a dropped support ticket gets discussed first, and what to say when an owner says their clients will not pay for it.
- Channel vocabulary
- PSA, RMM, EDR, MDR, MRR, vCIO, QBR. The tools at the core of how an MSP runs, and the words an owner will not stop to explain.
How it runs.
- 1Monday. Paste your roster or upload a CSV. Everyone gets a personal link by email. You can see who has opened it.
- 2During the week. Reps take it once, about 25 minutes, autosaved. A reminder goes to anyone who has not finished. Nobody sees a score, so nobody plays to it.
- 3Friday. Each rep has a scorecard: flags, the role-play transcripts with a grader's read, a training plan with real resources, a coaching guide for your next one-on-one, and a note if the attempt looked like it had outside help. You have a team report: weakest areas, outliers, the questions most of the team missed, how the team compares with others, and a numbered plan. Walk through it with us.
- 4In between. Reps rerun the role-plays they were weakest on, by voice or typing, with feedback each time. Paste in a real call and it is graded the same way, so you can see whether how they test matches how they sell. Hiring? Recruiters send candidates the same assessment; anyone over your bar goes straight to the hiring manager, and the decision comes straight back.
- 5A quarter later. Run it again. The report shows the change per person and for the team, with the training you logged in between, and the MSP partners each rep works with can weigh in anonymously. Reps who reach the top level earn Channel Ready Certified. Connect HubSpot and the report puts closed-won and win rate next to the rounds and the training. That is the renewal conversation, with numbers.
Where the questions come from.
The benchmarks are drawn from published channel research: the Service Leadership Index annual profitability reports (ConnectWise), Kaseya's State of the MSP and Global MSP Benchmark surveys for 2025 and 2026, ScalePad's 2026 MSP Trends report, and Canalys and Omdia market and M&A data. Where sources disagree, the question avoids the disputed number.
The scenarios come from fifteen years of selling to and alongside MSPs, at Autotask, Datto and 1Stream, and from the conversations that happen in peer groups and on r/msp when a vendor gets it wrong.
A caution we put in the product too: most MSP survey data is vendor-sponsored. It is directional, and the assessment treats it that way.
Why I built it.
Fifteen years in the MSP channel, at a couple of scrappy startups and a couple of the behemoths, teaches you one thing fast: the rep who was great at selling to a Fortune 500 IT department is usually lost in front of a twelve-person MSP.
I have hired that rep more than once. Sharp, experienced, closed big deals somewhere else. Then watched them stall for two quarters because they showed up with a 30-page proposal, hid the price until the demo, and talked about digital transformation to an owner doing seats-per-tech math in his head.
Every one of those habits is learnable and every one is fixable. The hard part is knowing which ones a given rep has before your partners find out. That is what this measures.
Alec Stanners
Run it on your team.
Tell me about the team and I will set up your company and managers. Links can be out to your reps the same day.
Or email alec@mspchannelready.com