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Full Funnel MSP Marketing Methodology: Episode 1 Transcript
Dave (Founder & MD, Wingman): Thanks for joining us. I’m joined by two colleagues to talk through the learnings, pitfalls and opportunities we’ve seen over the years helping MSPs and the IT channel with their marketing and growth. I founded Wingman in 2017 as a dedicated MSP marketing agency, after years working as an MSP sales and marketing person myself.
Bryony (CMO, Wingman): I’m Bryony, Chief Marketing Officer at Wingman. My background is in corporate marketing and comms, specialising in technology and topics people often find hard to get their heads around. I’ve been around since the early days as an external consultant before joining officially a few years ago.
Josh (Channel Manager, Wingman): I’m Josh, Channel Manager at Wingman. I speak to 5–20 MSPs a week about the marketing challenges they’ve faced, where they’ve come from, and where they want to get to.
How MSP marketing has changed
Dave: Back in 2017, MSPs had almost no marketing or brand content – the need was purely lead generation, and most businesses relied on referrals. That works, but referrals come with built-in trust that marketing otherwise has to build from scratch. As referrals became less predictable, MSPs needed to find leads elsewhere, and awareness of proper MSP marketing – storytelling, brand, content, outreach – has matured alongside that need.
Bryony: Marketing doesn’t always work instantly, and we’re upfront about that. Most of the time it’s about layering the right pieces together – like baking a cake, you need every ingredient, not just flour. Clients often leave not because the content was bad, but because their expectations didn’t match reality: passive content alone won’t carry the whole sales and marketing journey.
Overcoming past bad experiences with marketing
Josh: Many MSPs have tried marketing before – a month of SEO, a few social posts or blogs – and expected the phone to ring immediately. It doesn’t work that way. Building trust takes nurturing. If a prospect isn’t ready to buy the moment they see an ad, they need to be kept warm – otherwise, they go quiet, become a “ghost,” and end up buying from a competitor because they’ve forgotten you exist.
Bryony: It’s like consumer retargeting – you see an ad once and it follows you everywhere. MSPs can’t retarget in quite the same way, but the principle holds: keep reaching out and stay front of mind so you’re the first name they think of when they’re ready to buy.
Why trust and touchpoints matter more than ever in MSP marketing
Dave: Every new category goes through an awareness curve – MSPs themselves went through this decades ago, moving from break-fix to managed services. Now, with AI going mainstream, businesses see technology as a growth enabler rather than a cost, which is driving more investment. But the market has also matured: most businesses already have a trusted IT partner, and events like the shift to cloud and remote work during Covid have made those relationships stickier. That makes winning new business harder – you’re not just building trust, you’re eroding someone else’s.
It’s part of why we built our full funnel MSP marketing methodology, which this series will walk through. The number of touchpoints needed before someone considers buying has grown from roughly 3–5, to 7, to an estimated 20–40 today.
What is “full funnel” MSP marketing?
Dave: As buyers ourselves, we intuitively do due diligence before purchasing – but as sellers, we forget prospects go through that same research and consideration process.
MSP marketing is often treated as a set of isolated tactics – like puzzle pieces that need to fit together, rather than one tactic winning alone forever. Most MSPs have never stepped back to map their own buying funnel, largely because referral-based selling skips the early, colder stages of that journey. Reaching a wider market beyond referrals means building trust with people who don’t know you yet – engaging them over weeks and months across multiple tactics, slowly warming them up, like heating an oven to bake that cake.
That’s exactly what this video series will walk through – each stage of the full funnel MSP marketing approach, one step at a time.
