Hammond tells MSPs to pick a vertical and one problem

The email came to Stefanie Hammond from an MSP owner whose N-able account she used to manage. His team had grown, he wrote, and he was preparing an outreach effort to win new clients; beyond asking current customers for referrals, he wanted to know which business development strategies and tools to use. Hammond, a Head Nerd at N-able, says she loves getting emails like that.

On the call that followed, she learned the owner had spent years hiring the right people, fixing internal operations and building capacity. He finally had time to work on the business. He had no predictable way to generate new opportunities, and he did not know where to start.

Hammond answered him, and every MSP in the same spot, in a recent video segment produced with MarketScale titled 10 Growth Strategies for MSPs. The timing is deliberate: she is launching the next round of her go-to-market accelerator program this fall, with classes starting in November, and the video reads as its outline. It also lands in a year when The20 wrote in a June 2026 post on its own blog that MSP pipelines dry up because owners market only when business is slow, then stop the moment tickets pile up.

A managed service provider, or MSP, runs IT for client businesses on a recurring contract, and for an owner who has just freed up hours in the week, the question is where those hours should go. Hammond's answer runs to ten steps. Most of them narrow the field before a dollar is spent.

"I just want to grow" is not a strategy

Step one is a definition. Hammond says many MSPs tell her they just want to grow, which she calls not really a strategy. She wants the owner to write down how much revenue the business should add this year, how many new clients that takes, what size of client it needs to pursue and what success looks like twelve months from now.

N-able's own material gives that document a shape. On its site, N-able separates a business plan, a text-heavy document covering three to 10 years that is usually written to secure funding from a bank or investor, from a business roadmap, a one-year plan broken into quarters that spells out what needs to happen, when it needs to happen and who is responsible. N-able says on its site that a roadmap does not guarantee faster growth, but that the companies that achieve consistent growth and profitability year after year do follow an actionable one.

Direction first, Hammond says. Growth becomes much easier once the owner knows exactly what they are aiming for, and the campaigns come after.

Serving six industries reads as serving none

Hammond's second step is the one she calls the single biggest issue among the MSPs she works with. An owner will tell her they serve healthcare and manufacturing, plus some construction, accounting, legal and financial services clients. In other words, she says, they serve everyone.

Her fix is to choose an industry, learn its language, understand its risks and write content about its specific challenges, until the MSP is known for solving a particular business problem for a particular kind of company. Vertical specialization means tailoring services, expertise and the technology stack to one sector. Ironscales, an email security vendor, made the case for it in a February 2025 post on its own blog written by James Savard, who works with the company's MSP partners.

Savard wrote that he now sees MSPs targeting segments as narrow as educational or religious institutions, and that it is working for them. He tied the advantage to regulation: an MSP serving only healthcare knows HIPAA, the federal rule that governs how patient health data is protected, while financial services clients answer to GLBA and PCI DSS, the rules covering customer financial data and card payments, and manufacturers to ITAR and NIST standards covering defense export controls and federal security controls. Clients in those sectors need an MSP who can keep them compliant, he wrote, and cyber insurance underwriters increasingly favor providers who can show industry-specific risk expertise.

Msplaunchpad, an MSP marketing firm, put the same point in plainer terms in an August 2026 post on its own site. It contrasted a firm promising reliable IT support for growing businesses with one that helps multi-location dental practices secure patient data and reduce downtime, and said the second message gives a prospect a faster reason to pay attention. Broad messaging, it said, makes an MSP harder to remember and easier to compare on price.

The20 gives the choice a name. Its June 2026 post lists the lack of a clearly defined ideal customer profile, or ICP, a written description of the type of business a firm serves best, among the reasons MSP pipelines stall, and says the clearer an MSP becomes about who it serves, the easier every sales and marketing activity gets.

None of these sources calls narrower always better. Ironscales lists limited market potential as the first drawback of specializing, and msplaunchpad warns that a positioning strategy can narrow the audience so far that growth becomes difficult, advising owners to review which current clients stay longest, value the service most and are easiest to support before choosing. Hammond's own guard against that risk is that she does not stop at the vertical.

One problem, not eight

When Hammond spoke with the MSP owner, the conversation covered AI and digital transformation, business continuity and resilience, productivity, compliance, identity protection and secure remote work. She lost count somewhere around eight. Trying to market all of those at once, she says, is a common mistake.

The MSPs that win the most first-time conversations are known for solving one problem exceptionally well, Hammond says. The mechanism is word of mouth inside the niche: when someone in that market asks who they should talk to about the problem, one name comes up. Her test for an owner is to ask which single conversation they could own in their chosen market.

Step four turns that choice into proof. Hammond tells owners to inventory the security incidents they prevented, the recoveries they led, the downtime they avoided, the compliance problems they solved and the AI projects with the largest business impact, then turn them into case studies, LinkedIn posts, blog articles, testimonials, webinars and videos. Prospects trust stories far more than a capabilities list, she says, so the MSP should market outcomes it has already produced rather than services.

The dream 100 name traces to 167 newspaper advertisers

Step five is the target list. Hammond says the best MSPs do not wait for random leads; they decide exactly who they want to work with and build three lists.

The third tier, she says, is for businesses the MSP would love to win someday: start nurturing them now and accept it will take time. Once the list exists, the owner knows who to target, where to spend time and who the content is written for.

The name has a documented origin. Chet Holmes International, the training company built on the work of sales trainer Chet Holmes, wrote in a February 2021 post on its own site that Holmes pioneered the Dream 100 while working for investor Charlie Munger's newspaper, when he was handed a database of 2,200 advertisers and told to cold call them. Holmes found that 167 companies, 8% of that database, bought 95% of the advertising.

The post describes the method: Holmes sent those 167 buyers a physical mail piece every two weeks and called each one twice a month. The first four months produced nothing. In the fifth month he closed Xerox on a 15-page full-color spread, closed 28 more of the list over the next five months, and the company says he doubled sales across the nine divisions he ran within 12 to 15 months.

The Holmes page frames this as the Pareto principle, the observation that a small share of inputs produces most of the output, and notes the exact percentages vary widely by industry. That is the number to hold next to Hammond's list: her 100 accounts are a smaller cut than Holmes' 167, and his account waited five months for a first close on a cadence of two mailings and two calls a month. No published benchmark sets an expected conversion rate for a dream 100 program in the managed IT channel, so the newspaper story remains the reference case.

The checklist comes before the meeting

Step six addresses what Hammond calls another big online mistake: asking for a meeting too soon.

Instead she wants something a prospect will engage with: a cybersecurity checklist, an AI readiness assessment, a business resilience scorecard, a cyber insurance readiness report or an industry benchmark report. The offer gives the prospect a reason to hand over contact details, and that hand-off feeds step seven.

Hammond says she sees few MSPs run an email nurture process, meaning a scheduled sequence of messages that educates a prospect over months. The emails should share success stories, answer questions, address concerns and keep demonstrating expertise. The goal is to be the obvious choice when the prospect is ready to buy rather than to force a meeting, and without a consistent follow-up mechanism the MSP is never the one they call.

The20's June 2026 post argues the same case from the buyer's side. It said prospects rarely sign on a first meeting; they see content, hear recommendations and encounter a firm repeatedly before any sales conversation, so a business needs to know an MSP before it needs one. The20 also said five prospecting conversations every week outperform fifty once a quarter, and that an MSP that shows up only when business is slow starts from scratch every time.

Step eight supplies the content for that cadence. Hammond calls writing down every customer question the simplest and most overlooked marketing strategy on earth, because each one becomes a blog article, a LinkedIn post, a newsletter item, a webinar or a video. If one customer asks, she says, hundreds of prospects are probably wondering the same thing, and the video itself began as one MSP's emailed question.

The leak is usually after the lead arrives

Step nine is the one Hammond frames as an uncomfortable truth about lead generation, the work of producing new prospects for the sales team.

Her diagnostic questions are where opportunities stall, where proposals get stuck, whether the MSP qualifies properly, whether the right decision makers are involved and whether next steps are defined. Before spending money on more leads, she says, make sure the process can convert the ones already coming in.

Fox & Crow Group, a channel sales consultancy, reached the same conclusion in a January 2026 guide on its own site, updated in March 2026 and written by co-founder Carrie Richardson. Fox & Crow puts MSP pipeline volatility down to timing and control, not effort or activity volume. It says qualification protects pipeline health by keeping poor-fit deals from absorbing time, and that tools and benchmarks support a defined system but do not create predictability on their own.

That is the closest answer available on tooling. Fox & Crow's guide tells MSPs whose leads stall to start with pipeline architecture and qualification, and its own table of contents puts the tech stack after the ideal client profile, trigger events, inbound, outbound, referrals and qualification. For the operator, the order matters: a CRM records a process, it does not supply one.

N-able's own material gives the process a shape. On its site, N-able says sales at many MSPs is handled ad hoc because founders are technical, and recommends dedicating someone to growth, possibly an account manager focused on existing clients first, while the owner stays the primary salesperson early on. If the MSP hires a sales development representative, a rep whose job is booking appointments, N-able says the owner should set daily call counts and weekly appointment targets so the work can be measured, and hold that rep accountable to them.

Growth is harder to earn than it was a year ago

Market data cuts against the idea that leads are plentiful. Lansweeper, an IT asset management vendor, wrote in a February 2026 post on its own blog recapping a session by Christina Klein, its VP of Global MSPs, at the SITS show at ExCel London. Klein said 71% of MSPs name new customer acquisition as their single largest barrier to growth.

She also said contracts over $25,000 fell from 75% to 41% year over year, and that around 16% of MSPs are breakeven or unprofitable. Her summary was that demand remains strong but growth is harder to earn.

Those figures complicate Hammond's claim, since most MSPs plainly feel acquisition as the constraint. The two readings still fit together for an operator. If deals are smaller and acquisition harder, an unqualified proposal that stalls costs more time per dollar than it did a year ago, which is the case Hammond makes for fixing conversion before buying volume.

Block the time, then answer five questions

Step ten is the discipline that holds the other nine. Hammond tells owners to treat marketing planning time as their most important client appointment. Nothing changes, she says, while the owner stays in reactive mode, and growth does not happen in leftover time.

The block can be an hour every morning, two hours every afternoon or all of Friday, whatever the owner will actually protect. The20 made the same point in June 2026: pipeline work must be scheduled and protected, and when the owner handles every sales conversation it competes with operations and typically loses.

Hammond congratulates any MSP that has built capacity and calls it a huge accomplishment. Capacity alone, she says, does not create growth; using it intentionally does. Her closing challenge is five questions.

• Who is your ideal customer?
• What problem do you solve best for them?
• What story can help prove that for you?
• What offer can you create to attract more prospects just like them?
• What process can turn those prospects into opportunities?

For owners who want help answering them, Hammond says the next round of her go-to-market accelerator program launches this fall, with classes starting in November; registration runs through a direct message to her or through an N-able customer success manager, and N-able has not published a price, a class size or eligibility rules for it. An owner who cannot answer the five questions clearly, Hammond says, starts there, and November is the next fixed date on the calendar.