Executive Summary
Most MSPs walk into client meetings with a general sense of what the client needs and a mental list of things they want to sell. The conversation defaults to the familiar: security gaps, infrastructure upgrades, maybe a compliance checkbox. The client listens politely, files the proposal away, and nothing changes.
The Industry Trends report was built to break that pattern. During a recorded working session, Joe Markert shared his perspective on why industry-specific preparation changes the entire dynamic of the MSP-client relationship. His core argument is straightforward: when an MSP shows up with research tailored to a client’s industry, the client starts treating them like a strategic partner.
The report itself is structured around five sections: Industry Overview, Key Technology Trends, Challenges and Risks, Regulatory and Compliance, and Technology Best Practices. Each section is designed to give the MSP a specific layer of context they can bring into the conversation, not as a script, but as preparation that demonstrates genuine understanding of what the client is facing.
This paper walks through the methodology behind that report, explains why each section exists, and captures Joe’s guidance on how MSPs should use industry research to lead conversations that produce real outcomes.
The Problem: Carrots, Sticks, and the Limits of Generic Advice
For years, MSPs have relied on a narrow set of arguments to move clients toward better technology decisions. Security has been the default. The pitch goes something like: you need to do the right thing, it will protect you and your clients, and maybe your cyber insurance premium drops a little. As Joe put it, “We used to just have a stick to swing to try to get people to do the right thing with technology. Can’t really quantify what your risk is, but it’s there.”
The advice itself is sound. But the client cannot connect it to anything tangible. They understand intrinsically that security matters, but parting with money when they cannot quantify the benefit or quantify the risk is a hard ask. The result is inertia. The MSP knows the client needs to act, the client probably agrees, and nothing happens.
Joe framed this as a carrot-and-stick dynamic. For most of the industry’s history, MSPs only had the stick: do this or something bad might happen. What has changed, particularly with the arrival of AI, is that MSPs now have a carrot. “Everybody knows they want it. They probably even have some ideas what they can do because they have been researching it.” AI is one of the few technology trends where clients tend to know more about it than less, and that creates an opening.
But having a carrot is not enough on its own. The MSP still needs to connect it to the client’s specific situation. General recommendations about AI adoption land the same way general recommendations about security always have: the client nods, says it sounds interesting, and moves on. “When we can then take that to the next step and make it industry specific, not just here’s how you use AI, but hey, you could build this to do this thing for you, that’s when the light bulbs really go on.”
The Industry Trends report gives the MSP that industry-specific context.
Why Industry Knowledge Changes the Conversation
The gap between a generic MSP conversation and an industry-tailored one runs deeper than information. It changes how the client perceives the MSP’s role entirely.
Joe has seen the pattern play out repeatedly. “Most clients aren’t necessarily aware of changes in compliance for them. But often it’s general awareness, not deep understanding.” He shared an example of a law firm that was doing work that fell under HIPAA’s business administration requirements but did not believe it applied to them. When Joe’s team raised it, the client’s first instinct was to push back and try to avoid the obligation entirely.
He shared another example involving a firm with government vendor contracts. Joe’s team recognized that CMMC was coming and would directly impact the client. “We had walked out of a conference and realized, wow, this is going to impact them directly. We need to get ahead of it.” The client’s response was to deny the relevance entirely: we are not pursuing more contracts in that space, it will not affect us.
These are not unusual scenarios. They illustrate the default dynamic: clients either do not know what is coming, or they know and would rather not deal with it. In both cases, the MSP who shows up with industry-level research is in a fundamentally different position than the one who shows up with a generic technology assessment.
Joe connected this directly to trust. “Every time we have won a customer from another MSP, it’s because we’re taking a leadership role in the conversation.” That leadership comes from demonstrating that you understand the client’s industry well enough to anticipate what they need before they ask for it.
The Report Structure: Five Layers of Preparation
The Industry Trends report is organized into five sections. Each one serves a specific purpose in the MSP’s preparation, and together they create a comprehensive picture of the client’s industry landscape.
Industry Overview
The report opens with a macro view of the client’s industry: where it is headed, what is driving change, and what the near-term outlook looks like. This section exists to give the MSP the same contextual awareness that a well-read industry insider would have.
The level of specificity matters here. The report does not offer a generic overview of a broad sector. It addresses the specific dynamics facing the client’s type of business: market demand drivers, policy tailwinds or headwinds, and the particular operational challenges that define their corner of the industry.
That specificity signals something to the client. When the MSP can speak to the forces shaping their specific corner of the market, the conversation immediately feels different. The client feels understood.
Key Technology Trends
The second section highlights four technology trends that are specifically relevant to the client’s industry. These are not generic IT trends. The report surfaces things like operational technology segmentation, data governance requirements unique to the client’s sector, supply chain cyber risk, and industry-specific AI governance considerations.
Each trend connects directly to the operational realities of the client’s business. These are items that would never appear on a standard MSP assessment, and that specificity is the point.
Joe’s perspective on why this matters ties back to the carrot-and-stick framework. “When we start talking about those general recommendations in the reframing conversation of ‘that enables AI,’ that’s your carrot, it’s not just a stick.” The technology trends section gives the MSP the material to reframe standard recommendations in terms of what the client actually wants to achieve.
Challenges and Risks
The third section identifies the industry-specific risks that the client may not be tracking. Depending on the industry, these might include intellectual property exposure, regulatory gaps the client has not accounted for, supply chain concentration, or operational vulnerabilities tied to the way the business actually runs.
Joe’s view on how risks should be surfaced challenged the premise of the question itself. “SMBs really shouldn’t be blindsided because you’re their advocate and you’re bringing that information to them.” If the MSP is doing their job, the client hears about industry risks from them first.
He also challenged what most MSPs default to when they talk about risk. “The risk is more business related than just technical. Falling behind in your market, not staying ahead of the competition, not bending the arc of innovation in your favor, not enabling your people to be more creative and to have more meaningful human engagements. Those are all risks to the business.” When the MSP can articulate risks in those terms, the client engages differently because they recognize the stakes.
Regulatory and Compliance
The fourth section maps the regulatory frameworks and compliance obligations that apply to the client’s industry. Depending on the client’s sector, geography, and the nature of the data they handle, the report identifies which frameworks are relevant and why.
The report deliberately tiers these obligations. Baseline good practices apply broadly. Customer-driven requirements emerge from the expectations of the clients and investors the company serves. Conditional obligations kick in only when specific triggers are met, such as handling CUI or meeting CCPA privacy thresholds.
This tiering matters because it prevents the compliance section from becoming a wall of acronyms. It gives the MSP a way to walk the client through what applies to them and why, which is far more useful than handing them a checklist.
Technology Best Practices
The final section translates everything above into four concrete best practices. These are tailored to the client’s industry and designed to connect back to the trends, risks, and compliance items from earlier sections. The thread is intentional: each best practice is a natural response to something the report has already surfaced.
The best practices section is where the report moves from research into recommendation. Each action flows directly from the client’s industry context, and the MSP can present them that way.
How MSPs Should Use the Report
The report is preparation. Joe was emphatic about that. The worst thing an MSP can do is walk into a meeting and read the report to the client. “The shopping list is going to get filed away every single time.”
Instead, the report should function as what Joe called a bingo card. “You did your research, you found out what the customer wanted, are they hitting any of the things on the bingo card? Likely they’re not going to hit all of them. You may not even get a straight row across. But they’re going to get one, two, or three things in there where you can find some connectivity and you’re ready for the conversation.”
The preparation gives the MSP a set of informed starting points. The conversation itself should be led by the client. “Come to the call prepared with some solutions, with some solves, but let the client lead the conversation. What are your biggest issues? Are they checking any of the boxes that you found in your research? If they are, double-click on those.”
This approach requires a specific kind of discipline. The MSP has to resist the urge to present everything they know. Instead, they listen for the moments where the client’s concerns overlap with the research, and then they go deeper on those specific areas.
Lead with Humility, Not Expertise
Joe was direct about the temptation that comes with having this kind of research in hand. “Don’t come in as the expert. Don’t let it replace knowledge. Let it enhance knowledge.” He went further. “We don’t pretend to necessarily know every company’s full industry risks and opportunities, but we can use AI and tools like our industry trends tool to elevate ourselves to be ready for the conversation. But come in with humility.”
The practical application is in the questions you ask. Rather than declaring what the client’s risks are, the MSP should ask whether the research resonates. “Does this feel right to you? Are these issues you’re seeing? Is this something we should be worried about? It shows that you’ve done some research, you care enough to know about their industry and to try to educate yourself. It sets them up to be the hero. They get to tell you and educate you, and people tend to like to be put in that position.”
This dynamic creates a feedback loop. The client shares what actually matters to them. The MSP listens for overlap with their research. New opportunities surface naturally from the conversation rather than being forced into it.
Reframe General Recommendations as Enablers
Joe repeatedly returned to the idea that general IT recommendations become easier to sell when they are framed as prerequisites for something the client already wants. Moving to SharePoint, implementing data loss prevention, getting devices managed, and establishing data governance: these are all standard MSP recommendations that clients typically resist because they feel like overhead.
But when those same recommendations are positioned as the foundation for AI adoption, or for achieving a specific industry outcome the client cares about, the dynamic shifts. “We just frame up as that’s stuff we have to do to achieve this. Most clients are ready to have that conversation.” The Industry Trends report provides the industry-specific context that makes this reframing credible.
Joe described this as backing into a more difficult conversation instead of starting with a difficult laundry list. The tailored outcome goes first. The general recommendations follow as the path to get there.
Build Vertical Depth Over Time
Joe also emphasized the compounding value of vertical focus. “If we have verticals we’re really good at, it’s easier for us to have that leadership conversation in the first place, but it’s easier for us to probably find an industry-specific solution we can share.” He described working with Microsoft on Copilot go-to-market, where the strategy is to explicitly pick verticals, identify a problem, solve it for one client, and then repeat that solution across the vertical.
The Industry Trends report accelerates this process. Each time an MSP uses the report for a client in a specific vertical, they deepen their understanding of that industry’s dynamics. The research compounds. The conversations get sharper. The MSP’s credibility in that vertical grows with each engagement.
From Research to Tool
To make this methodology accessible and repeatable, MSP2MVP has developed the Industry Trends app. The tool generates a tailored report based on the client’s industry, covering outlook, technology trends, risks, compliance frameworks, and best practices.
The app is designed to reduce the preparation burden while maintaining the depth and specificity that makes industry-tailored conversations effective. Instead of spending hours researching a client’s industry before a meeting, MSPs can generate a comprehensive briefing in minutes and walk into the conversation prepared.
Conclusion
The difference between an MSP that gets filed away and one that earns a seat at the table comes down to preparation. Not generic preparation, but the kind that demonstrates genuine understanding of what the client’s industry is facing and where it is headed.
Joe summarized what this preparation produces in practice. “Showing up and being fully prepared creates that credibility and trust. It illuminates risks that the clients may not have seen coming, sets you up to be in that position of leadership, tailors the conversation to needs specific, and really helps you to fill in those knowledge gaps you might have around your clients’ industry.”
The Industry Trends report gives MSPs a structured way to do exactly that. Think of it as a bingo card: a set of informed, industry-specific starting points that prepare the MSP to meet the client where they are and guide the conversation toward outcomes that matter. The MSP who shows up with this kind of preparation earns a different title. They become the advisor who understands the business.
