The almighty tech stack. The best EDR, rock solid email security. “Enterprise technology for the SMB.” I could go on for a while with all the clichés, and I used many of them. I was a technical buyer, especially in the start of my tech journey.
Still today, as a huge nerd, I’m naturally inclined to dig into the “bits and bytes” of the tech I’m looking at. I’m still generally a technical buyer. Whether it’s ChatGPT or a new EDR, I want to understand it on a nerdy level before I buy it. And, as an MSP decision maker, so should you. But here’s the thing, 99% of your small business clients do not care about your stack. Most small business owners are not technical buyers. They are economic buyers.
Economic Buyers (Business Leaders) Chase Business Results
As an MSP, it is your job to be interested in the bits and bytes. You need to be confident that the tools in your stack are the right tools. You need to build mature operational frameworks around how you use the tools you have. Your results rely on the effective delivery of technology.
Your customers, by contrast, are most-likely economic buyers. They are focused on business outcomes. Their job isn’t to understand your stack, it is to understand how your work impacts revenue, efficiency, or strategic outcomes.
The economic buyer needs economic results. This doesn’t mean they are cheap. This means they want to spend the right amount of money for the right results. They’re looking for that magical ROI.
Here’s an analogy for you: When your surgeon is talking to you, they aren’t going to tell you they are using the latest Swann-Morton scalpel. You care that your doctor uses their scalpel safely and effectively to achieve the desired outcome, not what kind of scalpel it is. With a focus on improving your health (your desired outcome), they are much more likely to explain the benefits of the surgery. They will probably also calm your nerves by describing the procedures they will perform. They are talking to you, the medical equivalent to the economic buyer.
By contrast (assuming your surgeon is in private practice, I suppose), your doctor is more likely to be the technical buyer. They want to use a scalpel that stays sharp, feels good in their hands. They want tools that add efficiency and manage their risk, the right tool for the right job.
Talking to the economic buyer about your “fancy brand name” tool isn’t going to get you anywhere if that conversation doesn’t lead to how you’re going to use a fancy brand name tool to attain their results.
When you obsess about your stack and center your pitch on it, you risk missing the entire business problem that got you invited to the table. The economic or business outcomes that are currently missing.
IT Products are a Commodity
We have access to some incredible technology. In fact, we often really are bringing some “enterprise” tech to small businesses. But here’s the thing: products are a commodity. A tool, a means to an end. The product itself isn’t the value driver, the way that product is applied is the value driver.
Take Microsoft Azure for instance. When you buy Azure, you don’t value it for its existence. You value Azure for the deliverables you can build on top of it. Your clients think the same way — they’re not buying your tools, they’re buying the business outcomes your tools enable.
The inherent value of Azure isn’t Azure itself. It’s what you build on Azure and the results that technology delivers.
We need to abandon the notion that the brand names of the latest EDRs are top-of-mind for our prospects. They simply aren’t. If customers are contemplating products, they are far more inclined to be considering line-of-business solutions. The finance department, for instance, is focused on ERPs, while the operations team is concerned with operations software (which, naturally, varies by industry).
Business Results are Valuable
Our discussions with clients should focus on business outcomes, not on the latest products and their 0.01% detection advantage over yesterday’s hotness. Your doctor’s scalpel is part of your toolset. Your doctor’s “stack” is the suite of tools they use to get the job done, supported by the surgical team.
Your MSP is similar. You have tools that make a stack, and you and your team use that stack to get the job done. It is your job to take that stack, wrap it in services and a team, and create an offering that drives business results. Most clients aren’t interested in how the soup is made. Your time with clients is much better spent communicating what the job is, and how it impacts the client in a positive way. How it aligns with their goals. This means you need to understand their goals at an executive level. When you’re invited to the room, invest in understanding why you’re invited into the room before you craft a pitch. This is where frameworks like Pax8’s Results Selling Framework come into play.
Pax8 Academy has made a fantastic framework for having these conversations, a full sales strategy. We call it the Results Selling Framework, and it’s definitely something you should check out. I won’t steal the thunder, but it revolves around unpacking the status quo and its negative impact, and guiding the client to their positive business outcomes.
When you have these conversations (I found at least), you establish yourself in a different light. You aren’t the “tech people” anymore. You’re a business partner pursuing a shared mutual interest in the client’s business. And that is the basis of a valuable relationship. It sets you apart from all the meaningless tech pitches, it takes you from Geek Squad tech to advisor.
Technical Buyers DO Exist
This isn’t meant to say you’ll never run into a technical buyer. When you get into the mid-sized arena, you’re more likely to be having co-managed IT conversations which means you need to win the technical and economic buyers in the conversation. But even when technical buyers are in the room, the economic buyer is likely the one signing the checks.
You’re also going to need to appease a different kind of technical buyer. One that isn’t worried about IT, but about operations. When you get more into the business, become that advisor, you’re likely to find yourself on the receiving end of new and critical questions. Questions about things like ERP or Accounting platforms, line of business applications, etc. To maintain your position as that trusted advisor, you need to take these head on and be prepared to guide the client through these very technical decisions – even though they lie outside your technical domain. This often became a source of consulting revenue, and it became an opportunity to become deeper entrenched in the customer’s business.
Whether they come from IT or operations, technical buyers still evaluate features, but economic buyers still evaluate outcomes. You need to win both without losing sight of who ultimately defines value.
AI Doubles Down Commoditization
AI makes this divide more pronounced: technical buyers may be fascinated by capabilities, but economic buyers will only move forward if you can prove ROI. Both traditional and agentic automation workflows demand significant business acumen, as their core purpose is to boost business efficiency, profitability, or mission success.
Even for smaller point solutions like Copilot for M365, you need to be able to illustrate how the tool drives acceptable ROI. This means both understanding what the desired outcome is and being able to measure and show how that ROI was (or was not) achieved. By extension, you need to understand how your client does what they do. You need to be able to observe how people work, peel back the onion, and identify steps ripe for automation.
You also need to be in tune with the organization’s grander strategy and goals and identify business risk (we’ll cover risk in a future post). Are they looking to trim payroll costs, or are they looking to get more from their existing payroll costs by increasing efficiency and productivity? You need to know the answer to these questions, so that you can wrap your technical genius (and that of your team) around the problem in a way that comes back with a clear alignment to that mission.
Adding even more complexity to this is the fact that you need to take this economic buyer down the technical journey. A lot of these AI tools are new, and many SMB customers simply haven’t gone down the workflow automation route. You need to leverage both your technical prowess and your business acumen into one pitch so that this economic buyer can make an informed decision about something they now know about (because you taught them).
This makes now the time to master these business conversations if you have not already.
In Conclusion
Your stack matters — to you. You need to know it, master it, and build reliable services around it. But to your clients, the stack is invisible. They care about outcomes: revenue, efficiency, mission success. That’s why you must always translate technical detail into business value.
AI raises the stakes, accelerating commoditization and spotlighting the gap between technical fascination and economic requirements. Clients don’t just want to see that you can deploy AI, they want to know how you can help them use it to move the needle.
The MSPs who thrive at this will be the ones who bridge the gap between these buyers. They can speak in bits and bytes but can also speak to economic outcomes with grace and expertise. They don’t just deploy the new hotness, they teach, guide, and align to strategy. We (Pax8) have taken to calling this new generation of MSP the “Managed Intelligence Provider.”
So don’t sell your stack. Don’t even sell AI. Sell the results that you and your team can deliver. Sell top and bottom line results. That’s the difference between “the tech people” and a trusted business advisor who is invited into the room for the hard conversations.