K7 Insights

MSP Marketing Is a Budget Line, Not a Tactic

By Kyle Christensen · September 7, 2026

Part of Grow Your MSP

Let me ask you this. What did your MSP spend on marketing last year, as a percent of revenue? Most owners I ask can’t answer, and that’s the whole problem. MSP marketing is a budget line before it’s anything else: the share of revenue you commit to sales and marketing sets your growth ceiling before a single tactic gets picked. Growing 20 to 25% a year takes roughly 9 to 11% of revenue on that line. Most shops spend 3 to 4% and then wonder why the growth never shows up. So the plan is three things: a budget line, a message a CFO understands, and your own calendar. Everything past that is somebody’s agency pitch. Here’s how to set all three, and where they sit inside the larger job of how you grow your MSP.

How much should an MSP spend on marketing?

Roughly 9 to 11% of total revenue on sales and marketing combined, if you want to grow 20 to 25% a year. Hold that up against what most MSPs actually spend, somewhere around 3 to 4%, and you’ve found the reason the industry’s average growth rate looks the way it does.

I’ll tell you where I got confident in that number. In spring 2025 I spent a week with several very successful MSPs and wrote the numbers down on LinkedIn while they were fresh: 20 to 25% revenue growth, sales and marketing spend at 10 to 13% of revenue, EBITDA around 8 to 10%. What struck me was this: “They outpace growth and spend by almost 2x the ‘best in class’ with minimal ‘loss’ on the bottom line.” They weren’t using the bottom line to make decisions at all. They saw the money they’d earned as capital to put back in.

Mark Roberge, who built HubSpot’s original sales organization, has the line I keep coming back to: “Maximizing EBITDA too early is like starving a growing kid to save on groceries. You’ll stunt your growth and lose in the long run.” The MSP that spends 3% on marketing and banks 18% EBITDA is a well-fed owner running a hungry business.

Here’s the model I coach to. It’s one line, sales and marketing together, because at your size they’re one motion: the marketing budget pays for what the seller walks into. The dollar column assumes a $3M MSP, so scale it to yours. These are my operating numbers from the shops I’ve run and coached, so hold them loosely and hold the order tightly.

Be honest about the split inside that line, too. For most MSPs, “marketing” should be brand, fit and finish: a site that looks like you charge what you charge, and a name people recognize when the seller calls. The growth itself is a relationship game. Networking, referrals, and plain old outbound business development are where the money goes. Fund the seller’s calendar before you fund a campaign.

Two things to notice. The top row is a real choice. Plenty of owners are happy at their size, and 3 to 5% is the honest cost of standing still. The problem is spending 3% and expecting the third row’s result. And the last row is why so few shops ever get there. As I wrote in that same post, the first year “might be more than 13%,” because you’re paying for a seat before it produces.

To see what your own growth number costs in calls, proposals, and hours, run it through the MSP sales funnel calculator before you read on. The next question is where the money comes from.

Where does the marketing budget come from?

Gross margin. Leave EBITDA alone, lift the margin on the work you sell, and let the margin pay for the engine. Service Leadership’s Q2 2024 index put the average managed-service gross margin at 46.2% (ConnectWise, August 2024), and in my experience new work priced deliberately sells closer to 55 to 60%. That spread is your marketing budget, sitting there in the deals you’re already closing.

The reason this needs saying is that the EBITDA reflex is trained into you. Every peer group, every valuation conversation, every vendor deck says EBITDA, EBITDA, EBITDA, so when a quarter gets tight the marketing spend is what gets pulled, and the growth you were counting on quietly caps. Tom Peters put it as flat as it can be put, right on the cover of his 1997 book The Circle of Innovation: “You can’t shrink your way to greatness.” McKinsey’s 2022 growth research found the same thing at a much bigger scale: the companies that kept growing in seven of ten years between 2010 and 2019 strongly outperformed their peers on shareholder returns (The ten rules of growth, McKinsey, August 2022). Consistent growth is the asset. EBITDA is what consistent growth eventually throws off.

I’ve lived both sides of this. When I ran an MSP as its hired operator, we took it from $2M to $20M in under four years, and the spend that made everyone nervous was the spend that built the sales team. Later, coaching an MSP that was already hard-charging at around $8M, the whole play was funding sales at 10 to 12% of revenue when the industry was spending 3 to 4%, paid for by higher gross margins and a leaner service desk. That client grew to about $25M in three years and never ran a month in the red. Their win, and the same lever every time: lift margin, buy growth with it, and let EBITDA become the scoreboard only once an exit is in sight.

Nobody argues when you hire a tech at 300 endpoints. Hire a seller and the same owner wants to see the ROI first. As I put it in that 2025 post, “you need to add help in sales and marketing as quotas get more demanding,” and the budget line is what ends the argument, because it makes the hire a plan you already funded.

What should your MSP marketing message actually say?

Their vision for next year, and how you help with it. That’s the whole message. It says nothing about your stack, your certifications, your response times, or the tool you just rolled out, because your prospect is a non-technical owner and none of that means anything to them.

I’ve been saying this to MSPs for years and it still needs saying: “Your Clients and Prospects do NOT care about the details and your methods around their technology! They simply want it to work, add efficiencies to their business, and aid in driving up THEIR bottom line.” Keeping the network online, managing the risk, and running current tools is what they expect from a professional. It’s table stakes. So why do we spend the marketing budget bragging about it?

Here’s the test, and it takes thirty seconds. Ask yourself, “What is my client’s vision and goal for next year?” If you can’t answer it for your top ten accounts, your message can’t be about them, so it ends up being about you. If you can answer it, the message writes itself: “here’s how we help with that.” That’s what a CFO understands, because a CFO doesn’t buy uptime. They buy a year that goes the way they planned it, with IT never once being the reason it didn’t.

A message about outcomes gives your seller something to say on the call and your marketing something to say the other 167 hours of the week. How it moves through a funnel is in the selling managed services guide.

What is the owner’s job in the marketing plan?

Conversations. The owner’s number, the one that belongs on your calendar before it belongs in a CRM, is how many real conversations you held with people outside the company this week. Everything an agency does is downstream of that.

I wrote it this way for a new MSP asking Reddit for growth strategies: “In your early days, you don’t have funds to just pay people to build relationships. Your #1 KPI is # of Conversations held. A close #2 is # of New Friends.” The early days end, and the KPI doesn’t. I facilitated annual planning for an MSP that has grown at a 20% compound rate for years, and when I asked for their secret sauce, the answer was discipline. Discipline to keep meeting people every week, through the rejection and the weirdos and the ick, so that when they needed a customer, a connector, or a candidate, they were one phone call away from one.

You know the voice in your head, because I’ve had it in mine. “I’ll get to networking when the tickets calm down.” “I’m a technical founder, I don’t do sales.” Both true, and neither changes the math. When you started the company you signed up to do what it takes, when it’s needed, whether you’re naturally good at it or you’d rather be behind a screen. You don’t have an option here. The pipeline you’re staring at in March came from the conversations you did or didn’t have in December.

So the plan’s third piece is a standing block on your calendar, weekly, with a number attached. Most of the owners I coach start at ten conversations a week and a couple of new friends. The list, the give-first opener, and the three-touch rhythm are in the MSP prospecting guide, and the warmest version of the number, asking a happy client for one specific introduction, is the referral engine. Neither of those runs without the block.

Should you hire an agency, a marketer, or just buy the dialer?

The dialer is the one to skip. An agency or a marketer can earn their line in the budget. The automated outreach play mostly spends it on training your market to avoid you.

Last spring an automated dialer hit us at Empath, and it had done zero homework: it pitched us as if we were an MSP, and we sell software to MSPs. Somebody paid for lead credits and a machine so it could annoy a company that could never buy from them. I understand the pull. Outreach done properly at Empath has meant paying for booths, events, and salespeople who research before they call, and the shortcut only looks cheaper until you count what it costs you.

The buyers have said this out loud. Gartner’s 2025 sales survey of 632 B2B buyers found 61% would rather have a rep-free buying experience, and 73% actively avoid suppliers who send them irrelevant outreach (Gartner, June 2025). Read that as an MSP owner. Seven in ten of the businesses you’d like to sign are filtering out the exact thing the dialer vendor is selling you. Your first touch is the market’s first impression, and a lazy one trains people to delete you.

So here’s the decision rule for the rest of the line. Pay for what you can’t do and shouldn’t learn: a website that turns a visitor into a booked call, content that shows up when someone searches, the event calendar, the design work. Keep what only you can do: the conversation, the relationship, the ask. Measure the agency by the conversations it feeds you, because a lead that never becomes a conversation is a report, and you can’t invoice a report. Use the tools if you want, as long as they make each touch better researched. The moment they make it louder, you’re paying to be ignored.

Where MSP marketing plans fall apart

The same handful of places, and none of them is a tactic:

• The budget is whatever’s left after EBITDA. That’s the top row of the table with the third row’s expectations attached, and it’s the most common plan in the industry.
• The message is the stack. Certifications, response times, the new security platform. The prospect can’t hear any of it.
• The line gets cut in the first tight quarter. Marketing pays two to three quarters out, so a cut in Q2 shows up as a thin Q4, and the owner blames the market.
• The agency gets measured by leads. Leads are cheap to manufacture. Ask how many turned into a conversation you personally had.
• The owner’s calendar has no block. When the owner’s number is zero, the line underperforms no matter who’s spending it.

Fix the one that’s yours. Most owners have one or two of these, and the first on the list is usually the root of the rest.

Write the line before you pick the tactic

If one idea survives this piece, make it the first one: MSP marketing is a budget line, and the size of that line decides your growth before any tactic does. Set it as a percent of revenue against the growth you actually want, fund it by lifting margin, point the message at the client’s year, and put your own conversations on the calendar with a number attached. That’s the plan. It fits on an index card, and it’s the difference between the MSPs growing 20% a year and the ones that will be the same size in 2028. It’s also the engine under everything else on the grow your MSP hub.

Your first swing at it is this week. Run your revenue goal through the MSP sales funnel calculator so you can see what the number costs in real activity, then set the line in next year’s budget before anything else in that budget gets touched. If you’d rather set it alongside someone who has run this budget before, bring next year’s numbers to a free call and we’ll size the line together.