Share with the world 🙏Most MSPs don’t struggle with doing marketing.
They struggle with knowing what’s actually working.
Blogs are published. Ads are run. Emails go out. Events happen. Leads arrive… somewhere.
Then the fog rolls in.
- Who actually engaged with that campaign?
- Which prospects are warming up and which have gone cold?
- Are we following up at the right time, or just when someone remembers?
For many MSPs, the confusion doesn’t come from a lack of effort. It comes from using the wrong system for the wrong job.
That’s where a CRM should sit – right at the heart of your marketing strategy.
PSA systems are brilliant… but they’re not built for prospecting.
Let’s clear something up early.
Professional Services Automation (PSA) platforms are excellent at what they’re designed to do:
- Managing clients
- Tracking contracts, tickets, projects, and orders
- Forecasting revenue
- Supporting service delivery and operations
What they’re not designed for is early-stage marketing and prospecting.
Many MSPs force prospect activity into their PSA – and it almost always creates confusion. Suddenly, you can’t clearly tell who’s cold, who’s warming up, and who’s actually a customer.
The result?
Less clarity, more friction, and teams slowly ignoring the system because it’s full of information that isn’t actionable yet.
This is exactly where a CRM earns its place – before sales, before revenue, and before delivery.
So what is the role of a CRM?
A CRM shouldn’t replace your PSA. It should protect it.
Think of it this way:
CRM = marketing, intent, relationships, nurturing, visibility
PSA = delivery, revenue, contracts, support, execution
Your CRM is where:
- Suspects live
- Prospects warm up
- Engagement is tracked over time
- Follow-up is informed by behaviour, not guesswork
And yes – if you don’t run a PSA, a well-built CRM can absolutely take on more responsibility.
Marketing isn’t a one-off, it’s a journey
While we’d all love prospects to come in ready to buy, the reality is that this is unlikely for most – and usually only happens with a small number of inbound enquiries or referrals.
The classic funnel diagram looks neat on a slide. But real MSP marketing rarely behaves that way consistently.
Prospects don’t move in straight lines. They read a blog, then disappear; click an ad months later; attend an event but don’t enquire until they have a major issue a year later; or quietly compare providers while “happy enough” where they are… until they aren’t.
Industry data suggests that while consumer purchases generally take 6–10 touchpoints for a prospect to buy from cold (leaning into the old “rule of seven”), more complex B2B sales in today’s noisy digital marketplace often need something more like 20–50 touchpoints before someone is willing to engage – especially when contract values are tens or hundreds of thousands.
With that many touchpoints in play, a CRM becomes the only practical way to maintain context – who this person is, what they’ve engaged with, and how close they really are to buying.
Who owns the CRM?
A CRM is important whether you have a marketing agency supporting you – particularly if ownership is split between in-house and external teams – or whether you handle everything internally.
One of the biggest mistakes we see is MSPs treating marketing and follow-ups as separate disciplines. In reality, growth doesn’t live in marketing or sales – it lives in the overlap between them.
A full-funnel marketing approach actually looks like:
- Marketing provides insights to the potential target audience
- Omnichannel engagement creates intent signals from interested parties
- Follow-ups move prospects further through the funnel
- Nurture programmes keep engagement up and build intent
- Strong calls to action (events, demos, webinars, etc.) move them from prospect to lead
- Sales nurtures that lead to close, or re-engages marketing to keep them on the journey
Without a CRM at the centre, that loop breaks – or can’t happen at all.
Not all CRMs are equal
We didn’t build our own CRM because it sounded impressive. We built it because many off-the-shelf solutions were too complex in some ways and not detailed enough in others to handle what we needed in the MSP sales environment.
Most CRMs are too sales-led, too linear, or too disconnected between marketing and sales – and that just doesn’t support effective marketing in the modern world.
So we built RADAR.
RADAR runs our entire delivery process at Wingman – not just CRM, but operations, task management, HR, and more.
Since creating it, we’ve not only licensed it as a more affordable and accessible tool for many of our clients, but also built custom environments for them to work in line with their business processes.
But this isn’t (entirely) a sales pitch for our system.
It’s about having a CRM and making sure the tool is the right one for you and your business.
- Does it give you the full picture you need?
- Is it beneficial to both sales and marketing?
- Can it integrate with other systems you use?
- Will it add value to your business?
Dashboards tell a story, not just report numbers
Having data isn’t the goal. Making decisions with confidence is.
A CRM at the heart of your marketing should help you answer:
- Do we know who we’re talking to – and who we’re not?
- Are we nurturing relationships or just broadcasting noise?
- Can we see intent forming before a sales conversion starts?
- Are we relying on memory, or systems?
When everything is visible in one place, dashboards stop being vanity metrics and start becoming decision-making tools.
Keep your systems (and teams) honest
MSPs are excellent at designing systems for clients. Their own systems are often the least intentional.
A CRM sitting at the heart of your marketing strategy isn’t about adding more software – it’s about clarity and control.
Let the CRM handle the prospecting, intent, and nurturing. Let the PSA focus on delivery and revenue. Let sales and marketing communicate in one place.
When each system and each department has a clear role, marketing becomes calmer, follow-up becomes smarter, and growth becomes far more predictable.
And that’s when marketing stops feeling busy – and starts feeling purposeful.
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Fancy a chat? Book a meeting with us to talk about your systems, your marketing headaches, or your wish list for a full-funnel programme.
