Selling Managed Services in Germany: Why MSP Growth Stays Unpredictable

Most systems integrators that offer managed services today have accomplished a lot on the technical side. RMM is in place, service catalogs exist, monitoring and patch management run automatically, services and prices are calculated.

What’s often missing is that same repeatability in sales.

New managed service contracts arise irregularly: through existing customers, referrals or individual opportunities. What can still work at ten or twenty new contracts a year becomes a problem once growth needs to become predictable.

It’s not a lack of demand. Bitkom expects revenue of €54.3 billion in the IT services segment for 2026, up 3.5 percent year over year. The need for external expertise is documented too: an international survey of more than 1,000 managed service providers, picked up by heise Business Services in 2025, shows that 61 percent of customers choose an MSP because it offers more technical expertise than they have in-house.

So the market is there. Yet ChannelPartner, looking at the MSP transformation, finds that many systems integrators only partially succeed at it, or far more slowly than planned. The cause named is less technical shortfalls than internal structures.

That’s exactly where the sales problem begins.

1. Sales is a referral business — until referrals stop being enough

Almost every systems integrator that has grown built its customer base through referrals, personal networks and existing business.

That’s not bad sales. On the contrary: in a regional market with long-term customer relationships, this model can work excellently for years.

The break comes when the number of new customers needed grows larger than the number your own network reliably delivers. Suddenly, active acquisition is expected to do what relationships and reputation used to handle.

What often follows is described very directly by ChannelPartner in an analysis of MSP sales: under acquisition pressure, IT service providers fall into “desperate activism” — cold outreach with no clear plan, trade show activity, or short-term marketing pushes.

That activism conceals the actual cause.

The problem isn’t necessarily any one tactic. Cold outreach can work. Events can work. Content and campaigns can work.

But a company that has never needed a systematic sales process doesn’t automatically build one by launching more activity. It buys activity and hopes structure emerges from it.

The result is sales whose success depends heavily on individual people, contacts and opportunities. In good months, several chances appear at once. In bad months, the pipeline stays empty.

For recurring revenue, that irregularity is exactly the problem.

2. The technology gets sold, but the decision is about the business model

For the customer, a managed services contract is not a pure product decision.

It changes who is responsible for parts of IT availability, which tasks stay in-house, which are delivered externally, and how IT services get budgeted. Individual projects and one-off purchases become, at least in part, a lasting service relationship with ongoing cost.

Little of that usually comes across in the sales conversation. Instead, monitoring, backup, patch management, endpoint security, response times and included services get explained.

Technically, that’s correct. From a sales point of view, though, the conversation often starts one level too deep.

The same analysis names the overfocus on technical detail as a typical mistake: “Customers generally don’t want to deal with the technical details of the MSP’s tooling — that’s exactly what they’re paying their provider for.”

The real sales conversation would need to start earlier.

What happens when critical systems fail? Who is responsible today for updates, backup and security? Which tasks hang on individual employees? What does it actually cost to keep these capabilities in-house? And what risk arises when necessary tasks are assigned on paper but don’t reliably happen in day-to-day business?

Only once these questions are answered do the individual components of a managed services offer get an economic context. Whoever explains scope of service first is answering questions the customer may not even be asking yet.

The sales logic still comes from project business

This is rarely just a problem with the individual salesperson. Often the sales routines still come from classic project business.

There, a technical sales logic works well: capture requirements, configure the solution, price the quote, negotiate, close. Once the order is placed, the sale is largely over.

With managed services, the economically decisive phase only begins at close. Revenue and margin accrue over months and years. At the same time, the provider commits long-term to service levels, processes and delivery obligations.

ChannelPartner describes the path from project-driven IT service provider to scalable MSP as more complex than many companies initially assume.

This change doesn’t only affect service delivery. It also changes what has to be sold. Whoever keeps the old sales conversation and simply switches the price tag from one-off to monthly is selling a subscription with the arguments of a project.

3. Price becomes a substitute for positioning

When three providers essentially promise the customer the same thing, price remains one of the few directly comparable variables.

An offer then looks roughly like this: monitoring, patch management, backup, endpoint security, helpdesk, response times, a monthly price per seat.

The next systems integrator offers nearly the same list. And so does the one after that.

In that situation, price pressure isn’t a surprising customer behavior — it’s the logical consequence of insufficient differentiation. ChannelPartner puts it bluntly: “Anyone who presents themselves as generically and interchangeably as an average systems integrator will have to stand out through below-average prices.”

The apparent price problem is therefore often a positioning problem.

What matters isn’t just what an MSP runs technically, but who it solves which business problem for, particularly well.

A manufacturing company with 120 employees, several sites and high availability requirements doesn’t buy managed services for the same reasons as a tax firm with 25 workstations. Both need IT operations. The risks, decision paths and relevant arguments still differ considerably.

The more generic the positioning, the harder it becomes to reflect that difference in sales.

4. Nobody is leading sales — it happens on the side

The structural core often sits one level deeper still.

At many Mittelstand IT service providers, sales is not an independently managed function. The management team sells alongside running the business. Technicians are supposed to spot opportunities during service visits. One or two salespeople handle quotes, existing customers and new-business meetings. Marketing occasionally generates leads. A CRM may or may not be in place.

What’s missing is an instance that turns these activities into a system.

The problem can therefore rarely be pinned on one person. A salesperson can run good conversations and still work inside a bad system. A managing director can sell brilliantly and still become the bottleneck, because decisive opportunities depend on their personal involvement. A CRM can be perfectly maintained and still not produce a reliable pipeline.

Sales leadership, therefore, doesn’t start with the CRM. It starts with a few fundamental decisions:

Which companies do we actually want to win? Which problem opens the conversation? When is an opportunity qualified? What information needs to be known before a quote goes out? What is the binding next step? When does an opportunity get closed out? And which numbers tell us early whether enough business is coming?

As long as these decisions get made fresh by every salesperson and every opportunity, there is no repeatable sales process. And without a repeatable process, there’s nothing that can be systematically measured and improved.

That’s what separates sales activity from sales leadership.

What’s striking is how little industry-specific support exists on exactly this question. Search for “selling managed services” or “building MSP sales” and you’ll mainly find two categories: trade press that frames the topic journalistically, and content from RMM vendors and distributors that naturally stops where their own product begins.

The technical side of the MSP transformation is well documented. The sales side isn’t.

The four patterns form a loop

Looked at individually, these patterns quickly turn into isolated fixes: more leads, a new CRM, better sales training, tougher price discipline, one more salesperson.

Each of these can be worthwhile. None automatically solves the structural problem, though, because the four patterns are connected.

Without sales leadership, no reliable process emerges. Without a process, new-business generation stays dependent on referrals, personal contacts and individual salespeople. Without continuous market engagement, there’s little systematic learning about which customers fit particularly well, which problems actually drive the purchase decision, and what sets your own offer apart from the competition. Without that sharpening, positioning stays generic. And a generic offer reliably ends up in a price comparison.

Shrinking margins, in turn, reduce the room to build sales leadership, specialization and systematic market engagement.

The loop closes.

That’s why a common entry point into building sales only works to a point: a systems integrator hires a salesperson and expects them to bring the missing process with them.

An experienced salesperson can improve a lot. But they too need decisions to orient by — the same ones left open above. Without them, no company process emerges, just the personal sales style of a new hire.

That can work. It just remains hard to scale.

Managed services rest on the idea of turning recurring services into standardized, manageable processes. Monitoring shouldn’t depend on whether a technician happens to think of it. Patches shouldn’t be rolled out at personal discretion. Tickets should have traceable ownership and escalation.

The same principle applies on the sales side. Recurring revenue requires recurring sales.

At many established systems integrators, the decisive bottleneck is no longer technical execution. The next stage of maturity lies in freeing new-business generation, qualification and closing from dependence on individuals and chance, too.

Not through more activity. Through a sales process that is actually led, in day-to-day business.