Episode No
14

The $18M Upsell Strategy for MSPs

Graham Stead

Sales Coach & former Sales Director at CMI

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You don’t need more leads—you need more sales discipline.

In this episode, former MSP owner and Sales Director Graham Stead breaks down the exact rhythms that helped CMI scale to £18M in revenue—by focusing on the customers they already had.

James and Graham get tactical on how to embed white space reviews, stakeholder mapping, and sales discipline into your MSP's culture so revenue becomes predictable and scalable—not opportunistic.

This is the playbook for MSPs who are serious about building a long-term sales engine that doesn’t rely on marketing miracles.


🎧 Listen now and get that notepad at the ready!

Highlights

  • What “white space” really means in MSP sales
  • How to map your client base to uncover new revenue
  • Stakeholder strategies that reduce churn and increase influence
  • Sales time audits: stop wasting expensive talent
  • Why most discounts are just a lazy sales move

Notable Quotes

“White space needs cadence, or it won’t happen.”
“Every seller should know their target per hour.”
“Discounting is lazy—trade it for value.”

Connect with

Graham Stead

Sales Coach & former Sales Director at CMI

Graham Stead is a seasoned MSP sales strategist who helped grow CMI to £18M in revenue, largely by embedding white space discipline and sales team habits that scale. Former MSP founder, now advising MSPs on how to build sales engines that last.

Resources & Tools Mentioned in the Episode

1. White Space Mapping Tools

While no specific platform was named, Graham references creating matrices of services vs. clients. Tools that support this approach:

2. Stakeholder Mapping

3. Sales Time Audit

4. Referral and Strategic Intro Strategies

Related Industry Episodes

Here are episodes that build on themes from Graham’s interview:

  • Stop Guessing Your Client Needs — Fiona Challis
    Focus on sales conversations, referrals, and understanding buyer psychology
  • Why Most MSP Growth Stalls at £3M — Phil Sansom
    Explores what breaks between early success and true scalability
  • How Sales Culture Shapes Pipeline — Will Barron
    Ideal complement to Graham’s discussion on rhythm, accountability, and culture
  • James Steel (00:00)
    So Graham Stead, welcome to Harvest. It is wonderful to have you along.

    Graham Stead (00:04)
    Thanks for inviting me James. Looking forward to the conversation.

    James Steel (00:07)
    No worries, I'm actually, I'm itching to get into this one and pick your brains. But first of all, we have a tradition to do and that is the misconception about you. So what do people get wrong about you when they first meet you?

    Graham Stead (00:17)
    I guess maybe thinking about it, it's having run the MSP that I had and then selling that to CMI, et cetera. A lot of people that know me now think I've always been a salesperson. Whereas actually I started as a true techie, back right at the start of my career, working for HP before all the mergers, acquisitions, my first job was fixing HP LaserJets and HP NetServ as you remember those things.

    James Steel (00:40)
    Yes, yes.

    Graham Stead (00:40)
    That's what I

    started my career as. But then that's good as well because actually having an understanding of that from my own background is pretty useful as well.

    James Steel (00:49)
    Yeah, definitely. You tick that box of credibility that you've got that sort of technical mindset, but you quite quickly switched into the sales side. listen, so obviously you've worn multiple hats. You've even done a sort bit of sort of SaaS thing as well with the Go Hybrid, I believe. what I'm really keen to chat to you about is the fact that you successfully exited an MSP, but then stayed around to make it successful and really sort of focus on the sales side as sales director, growing it to.

    Graham Stead (00:51)
    Yeah.

    Yeah.

    James Steel (01:13)
    It's 18 million, wasn't it? Which is fantastic.

    So this is all about existing customers, how we can get more out of them. So if there's some of the sort of the specific things that you were looking for to make sure that you were expanding clients as best you could, is there a process to that you went through we can share with the listeners?

    Graham Stead (01:20)
    you

    when we started the business, it wasn't an MSP. It was sort of an IT projects business, once we sort of exited that business and sold to CMI, we had quite a lot of conversations at the board level then about how do we continue our growth?

    Do we do that through acquisition? we just focus purely on existing customers, et cetera? And ultimately the conclusion was, it's a mixture of both. So they had this reasonably sizable group of customers that they hadn't really gone after. So I said, We don't really need to spend too much money investing in marketing, et cetera.

    James Steel (02:02)
    just sold like one or two services

    to them kind of thing and they wanted to expand those.

    Graham Stead (02:04)
    Yeah, exactly that. And that's

    actually because we'd acquired businesses that either didn't have the capability, didn't have the sales or engine with them. And so they had a core of good customers, but they just hadn't really hit that Y space. So that's what we'd really focused on.

    James Steel (02:16)
    Okay.

    Graham Stead (02:18)
    But for me, it's more around the habits and actually making sure you're embedding those things is all well and good having a white space, don't know, spreadsheet tool, whatever you use, but unless you're actually doing that consistently and building that habit into the organisation, you're only going to get short term gains out of that. Yeah, exactly that.

    James Steel (02:34)
    It's just a document that sits there that you check occasionally. Yeah. Okay.

    Graham Stead (02:38)
    We had a small number of salespeople and the way we operate, we allocate or split our, I guess, commercial-facing part of the business into sales and then the client services, so much more the customer success team.

    James Steel (02:51)
    Okay,

    is it those guys, because this varies from MSP to MSP, is it those guys that concentrate on the expansion and retention side of things then?

    Graham Stead (02:54)
    Hmm.

    No, guess the way we did, is the sales side of things was the sales account management and the client success team, client services team was very much more around the service review and the day-to-day point of contact. What we did do was those transactional sales, I need a new laptop or I just need an engineer to come in to move some kit for half a day. Those things that the customer is going to do anyway and don't really need sales effort.

    we allocated to the Cloud Success team. So they did do some.

    James Steel (03:26)
    Why is that important,

    Graham? Because that's an interesting point, I think, is that that sort of transactional stuff, why is it important that goes somewhere else other than the sales team?

    Graham Stead (03:29)
    Yeah.

    that

    time, I'm a big believer in time. And again, it's not something new you're hear. But a salesperson has a target, for example, say, that target is sitting there for, the annual target, if you chunk that down into months and you chunk that down into days, you can chunk that down into an hour. Every person responsible for selling should know what they need to sell per hour. And if you've then got,

    really expensive salespeople, being focused or distracted on, you know, having to transact the sale of a laptop, for example, that might take a couple of hours with the sort of to and froing, building a quote conversations, you know, they're never going to get that return. So for me, it was about time, you know, making sure you've got the structure of your commercial face in part of the organisation focused in the right way, right things.

    James Steel (04:21)
    That makes total sense to me. So you've got the inside sales team that are concentrating on that side of things. So then when you're thinking about going out there in terms of the, talked about the behaviors, we've got the white space, which is just for those listening, if you're not familiar with this idea, it's just simply mapping all of your services and all of your customers and looking for where those gaps are. And so that gives you then the information, but how do you then turn that into the business?

    potential that is there.

    Graham Stead (04:46)
    It's just making sure you've got the the right relationships, the right connections, and you're having those discussions. just say 10 years ago, you're...

    James Steel (04:46)
    Mm-hmm.

    Graham Stead (04:53)
    your primary point of contact may have been the MD, it may have been the FD, it could have been the office manager or a sort PA or somebody like that. But they were typically the only point of contact you had. So it's really about expanding that out. you need to have a relationship with the head of marketing or the marketing director because they need to use technology just as much as any other part of organisation.

    you have to make sure you're those conversations with the right people and expanding that stakeholder relationship and actually looking

    James Steel (05:18)
    were you sort of advising your account managers then to ensure they had like a certain number of touch points and that they just to ensure that they had that enough roots into the companies?

    Graham Stead (05:24)
    Yeah, yeah,

    Yeah, totally. establish more points of contact if people change, you've got that sort of you de-risked a little bit, which happens a lot. Absolutely.

    James Steel (05:33)
    happens a lot these days. More than it used to,

    yeah.

    Graham Stead (05:36)
    Yeah, but it's you know, that is still absolutely relevant, you've just got to make sure you're having those relationships, to understand what the head of marketing or the head of HR or head of operations requires out of their use of technology or their team's use of technology and even taking that next step and thinking about actually partners,

    let's just use marketing, for example, your customer may not have a marketing team, they may have outsourced that. So actually having the relationship with those strategic partners that are external to your customer to understand what they're requiring. it's establishing the habit, but it's changing the mindset a little bit. So you're not just focused on the people that are paid directly as employees by your customer, but actually looking at the wider supply chain.

    James Steel (06:19)
    Right, I love this. Okay, cool. it's mapping as many people within the accounts as you can. Also thinking about external vendors, which is great. I've not heard that sort of mentioned before. Can I ask you in terms of sort of the types of conversations, do you have any advice for people that perhaps are sort of thinking, well, know, we're in touch with our customers and I feel like I know who they are. But in terms of how to approach, whether it's the...

    Graham Stead (06:23)
    Yep. Yep.

    Yeah. Good.

    James Steel (06:40)
    the conversation to expand or how to sort of prioritize what you're expanding. You know where your gaps are.

    Graham Stead (06:45)
    it's about from actually just making sure you talk about time, but give yourself the time and the discipline to do that.

    So in our context, there's lots of activities, tactical things you need to do, but the outcome is increased sales or whatever, from that side of things.

    James Steel (07:01)
    Right, let's get tactical

    on that. Let's think about those activities then. What would you recommend? What should people be doing?

    Graham Stead (07:04)
    Well,

    it's just first of all, making sure I mean, it's a spreadsheet. I just understand what activities I need to do. it's what you have to do on a sort of a weekly daily basis in order to make sure you're getting those conversations, trying to get to outcomes of conversations now with the customers that are going to uncover the new opportunities. making sure that.

    You you set yourself the target of, you know, one or five, and it depends on the scale of the business and number of customers, but you're going to make one, say five new stakeholder contacts a week within your customer base. we talk about referrals, but when we talk about referrals in MSP context, a lot of people think about people referring business to us so we can go and sell more services.

    James Steel (07:35)
    Okay, yeah,

    Yeah.

    Yeah.

    Graham Stead (07:43)
    But

    being a connector to your customer, referring to them, you've got lots of customers and there's probably quite a lot of opportunity within your network of customers where you can introduce people to each other. So each can sell their service to each or they can partner up and hit their target market because they're working similar target markets. it's making sure you're making those introductions.

    You know, so you're helping your clients, you know

    James Steel (08:11)
    Give us an

    example of one those. That's quite an interesting concept actually. We did have, Yuri Vanderschleis was on the show and he was talking about building community and doing that and bringing people into a room together to make sure that actually happens and there's value in that. Why is that important to your business? How does that actually help you? What's the net?

    Graham Stead (08:17)
    you

    I mean.

    Well, think it's about making sure that your clients are seeing you more than just a supplier of service into them. It sounds a bit corny, doesn't it? A bit cliché to become that more strategic sort of provider. I look back over the time with the business I've involved in, I can count probably comfortably on one hand how many of our suppliers partners that I really felt really valued.

    James Steel (08:38)
    No, don't think so. guess that's fine. Yeah.

    Graham Stead (08:53)
    our relationship and actually really try to help us grow. If you can get to that level of relationship, where I perceive sort of that perception that actually you're not just that sort of customer and supplier, that there is a genuine interest in helping your customer.

    James Steel (08:55)
    Mmm.

    Graham Stead (09:09)
    be better, be more successful. And that's not just through selling your IT MSP services, but it might be through helping other introductions or other ways you can do that. because then you start to see your customers start to understand that you're in this not for your own sort of selfish reasons entirely. because then when you come back to your question a moment ago is when you have the conversation about

    Hey Mr. customer, I'd love to speak to your head of marketing or your head of HR or your partner that does your outsource finance for you. They're going to be more receptive to facilitating those engagements because they know you're not in it for making that sort of hard sell and they're not worried about what you're going to do when you have that conversation.

    James Steel (09:51)
    Yeah, that's really good. love that idea. So that's something nice and nice and tactical you can do. I've just constantly got an automation head on these days. you could cross reference sort of the CRM notes and that sort of stuff. And almost like suggestions of like, this company's doing this and maybe they should be speaking to these guys or whatever. Try and take some of the legwork out of it for you, you know.

    Graham Stead (10:05)
    Yeah, totally.

    Yeah, all that hunting. Yeah, exactly. So much time you sort of trying to understand and you sort of connecting the sort of the common commonality between them. But yeah, yeah, absolutely right. All about that. There must be must be some great potential there. I'm thinking now. Note yourself.

    James Steel (10:15)
    Yeah.

    Yeah, I think that probably is.

    notice, yeah, yeah, there's always a better way of doing things these days, it's just how it is. So listen, you're involved in obviously helping other MSPs now sort of up their game, do a much better job on the sales front. From those that you speak to, there any common things that you think these are like, if you had to just single out, let's say two things maybe that, okay, these are the common mistakes of like, I can see they're underperforming.

    Graham Stead (10:33)
    you

    James Steel (10:46)
    what are the mistakes they're making and what are the signs to look for.

    Graham Stead (10:49)
    Yes, that's a great question.

    James Steel (10:50)
    We're thinking in the context

    of existing customers as well, so I'll totally put you on the spot there, but if you do have something come to

    Graham Stead (10:54)
    Yeah, no, that's fine.

    I've just been getting a couple of customers I'm working with at the moment and speaking to, you know, they've probably gone from that sort of 6, 700k revenue with existing customers, but not really got much growth out of those. And one in particular has managed to double his business, you know, touching the one and half million at the moment, just from expanding his existing customers.

    And I think the mistake people make is thinking that they have to go with the new customer approach and go on with that.

    we all know marketing doesn't happen overnight.

    I touched on the time thing and put on earlier, but the reason, growth habits, it's about those 1 % incremental gains, day after day, week after week, et cetera. You have to have the confidence and the commitment to continue doing what you're doing. If you're enough of the right activities and the right behaviors in the right way, consistently enough and well enough, you will get the results.

    It's about having that commitment and confidence and belief that you're doing the right thing and that will deliver what it does.

    James Steel (11:58)
    What are some of the mistakes you see? I'm just trying to think of sort of almost giving people a bit of a plan there. So they've got like, they've got the white space, they've got the making multiple contacts, they've got structure, got some great stuff there. Is there anything else that you see sort of the mistakes that people make? I mean, I think investing solely in new business is a big one.

    Graham Stead (12:08)
    Yeah.

    Mm.

    James Steel (12:17)
    Any signs

    Graham Stead (12:17)
    Mm.

    James Steel (12:18)
    there that you're going astray that you come across any others to look for?

    Graham Stead (12:22)
    it's about making sure you've got the right measures in place. So maybe that's exactly it, is actually pushing ahead into doing whatever it is you've chosen to do for whatever reason you've chosen to do it. But it's making sure you've got that baseline.

    sort of analytics, measurements, KPIs, whatever you want to call them. So you can understand whether they are actually, know, whether the dial really is moving, you know.

    if you haven't actually measured understanding, you know, how, how your metrics have changed, the meaningful metrics that are demonstrating that your audience is growing and that your brand's getting greater awareness, then it's by having those metrics that give you the confidence that actually what you're doing

    James Steel (12:55)
    Yes.

    Graham Stead (13:03)
    is providing the incremental gains and if you keep doing it then the results will come. yeah I think that's probably the direct answer to your question is just making sure you've got the right metrics in place, simple metrics and monitor them.

    James Steel (13:09)
    Yeah, I think that's great advice.

    Yeah, and

    that's so true of so many, well, any business essentially, isn't it? You gotta be measuring the right elements to it. You definitely need to have the whole thing singing together. yeah.

    Graham Stead (13:25)
    Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

    And I think maybe another better of mine is discounting. You know, this is clearly just as relevant as it is to sort of new customers, existing customers. But, you know, why are we discounting? And do we understand, you know, that there might be there might be reasons or strategic reasons why you're going to make a decision to discount something. But do you do you actually understand what the impact of that is?

    James Steel (13:33)
    right, okay.

    Graham Stead (13:52)
    down the line. know, this is what. Well, yeah, I think I'm exactly that. And that's that's, in my opinion, lazy salesmanship to some extent, can be poor sales leadership or, you know, a whole host of reasons why it happens. But, you know, if you if you just let's just some numbers, let's just say we're doing five orders a month of 5k, let's just say 5k gross profit. If you discount on each one of those by 10%, that's two and a half grand a month in

    James Steel (13:54)
    Do think that happens too easily? Do you people just fall back on that straight away?

    Graham Stead (14:20)
    lost margin. You multiply that, that's 30k a year. And that's just based on five orders a month at that 5k. That's 30k that would go straight to the bottom line. I see that so often. And that's one thing we tried to fight hard against, discounting in the MSPs we had.

    James Steel (14:35)
    Interesting, no, that's a point I really like actually. I've worked in both businesses where actually many moons ago we would never discount. And they actually make things very, very simple. mean, sometimes it's difficult to do if you're in the early stages of growing your MSP. can understand that. yeah, it can be nice to work in a business where you just don't do it.

    Graham Stead (14:53)
    It

    doesn't necessarily mean if you've got an existing customer or a new customer that's asking for a discount or for whatever reasons need it done at a lower price. It doesn't necessarily mean it's just a no, but it shouldn't be a default yes. It shouldn't just be caving into it. Making sure you're getting some of what was I told before, the phrase

    James Steel (15:04)
    Yes.

    Graham Stead (15:11)
    of equal or greater value. So more than happy to give you a discount or a free day, something of equal or greater value. That's a great segue into asking for a referral, a testimony or a case study or something there. So you're actually getting something in return that's going to help you grow your business.

    James Steel (15:25)
    you

    Yeah, because it's going to be huge value attached to a case study. be amazed, know, if you can use that correctly, can generate a lot of business from it. So tell me, are there any other areas you'd like to talk about in terms of, so your current methodology and what you'd like to work through customers? Let's say I've got Steel, Steel MSP Enterprises, and I've come to you and I've said, you know, Graham, this is like, sort of, I'm stuck right in the middle. We're doing okay, but I can't really grow. Where would you be looking first? We've covered some great points already. Any others to think about?

    Graham Stead (15:41)
    Yeah.

    Yeah.

    Well,

    So one thing I found that was really, really successful was, and this came out actually of COVID times, funny enough, because when we were all in remote work here and you didn't see your teams and you weren't in the office anymore, I I'm sure every business started to have that sort of start up.

    Monday to Friday, half hour little huddles with the teams. So that's what we did. But we continued that on. We dropped it down to sort of a Monday, Wednesday and Friday thing, but we made sure we had that half hour. And we themed each one of those days. So I remember rightly, Monday was about goals and lessons. So we looked back on the previous week, did we achieve our goals?

    come back to that daily sales target. Did we achieve that? Did we close the deal with what we're do? Or do we have the discovery call? Do we make the new stakeholder connections? How have we done on that? And then we take lessons. Everything has a lesson. It could be a positive, it can be learning. It's like, we did that, that worked really well. Make sure we keep doing that. Or it can be, didn't. Yeah, we, I guess.

    James Steel (16:44)
    You document that at the time? this is you, this might be you with the sales team, you just making a note of it or bringing it up again.

    Graham Stead (16:51)
    We tried, we weren't very good at it. when we just in sort of like team sites and things like that, sort of tried to, but it's like, you know, just there's that sprawl of information.

    James Steel (16:55)
    Tricky thing to do that, isn't it?

    Graham Stead (16:59)
    They may not have achieved goals or something, or they may have smashed the goals, but it's actually about understanding a lesson because that's what gives you the incremental gain from that sort of thing.

    James Steel (16:59)
    Yes.

    Yeah, yeah.

    Mmm.

    Graham Stead (17:08)
    So what new opportunities and what's progressed this month or this week?

    it's actually about establishing those habits. So it's the cadence of meetings and the accountability and that sort of shared collaboration and not being scared of accepting a failure or a mistake because then we can learn from that and we share that.

    James Steel (17:29)
    So I mean communication but learnings throughout and do you think that was key to why you managed to hit the level you did with your MSP? Because I think that's you know, it's probably one of the larger ends of the scale I'd say for the people listening maybe.

    Graham Stead (17:32)
    time.

    Hmm.

    Yeah,

    yeah, absolutely. I'm a great believer in in sales culture.

    It's not about shouting at the end when we're not making target or whatever it may be.

    James Steel (17:53)
    Excellent. Listen, I think that's a really nice segue. We've got loads of tactical stuff out there, which that's brilliant. We have this section in the show, is industry manure. And this is stuff that you hear where you just think, yeah.

    Graham Stead (17:59)
    Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm, okay.

    James Steel (18:04)
    That doesn't sit well with me at all. Everyone's the same thing or getting this advice, but yeah, doesn't ring true for me when I've lived it.

    Graham Stead (18:06)
    Yeah. Yeah.

    Yeah, there's several probably.

    My experience as an MSP was, unfortunately, there's lots where it's just really about selling that product.

    and we all know the MSP community is a great community. MSP is a very collaborative, know, typically, and the vendor community around that. But the manure piece is when you get a maybe a sort of lazy partner that comes and thinks they can just use the word community and MSP is going to start to work for them. You know, we all have to work hard at what we're trying to do. ⁓

    James Steel (18:38)
    Yes.

    Yeah, that's a good one. That's

    a good one. Sometimes you feel like you are, you know, hang on a minute, I've just left and I've just had a full sales pitch throughout the whole event, but and other others, it's total collaboration sharing and you know, your problems shared and half, et cetera. Brilliant. Listen, so we have a final section for you kind of broken into two bits. So it's past the pitchfork. So this is where we get to ask you a question from a previous guest. So Amy Luby was on the last episode.

    Graham Stead (18:49)
    Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

    James Steel (19:10)
    And she's got a question for you. So this is around AI, so it's AI and sales. So she said, I'd love to know, and if so, how are they leveraging the AI sales tools today? So it's kind of a where does AI sit? There's some great stuff out there, but how does it actually help in terms of conversations, targeting, closing, what they're actually using that can really help in the sales process, if anything.

    Graham Stead (19:10)
    Okay.

    and

    James Steel (19:33)
    Or is it just stuff that seems to be on the the peripherals? There's only you think, OK, that's really probably going to help with the methodologies that I believe in.

    Graham Stead (19:40)
    that's the really early days of when Copilot was first released to the market a couple of years or so back. So I think it's using it to understand a lot more about the time saving around creating

    your content and your proposals and bits and pieces like that. But it's not about it's not about just sort of go into a chat GPT and just copy and paste in. But it is really around actually trying to inspire, I guess. That's how I've used it is, OK, you sit there and you got a bit of writer's block, etc. You don't know how to articulate a point you're trying to get across. You can't get it from here onto the paper. So that's how I've used it.

    James Steel (20:15)
    Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

    Graham Stead (20:20)
    that's no more than sort of process automation,

    one is really around actually you know the amount of time organisations have to almost recreate or respond to questions from customers and prospects that are always asked in slightly different ways but ultimately trying to get to the same

    know, understanding of something that we do.

    James Steel (20:41)
    totally agree with you. It really feels like knowledge is power at the moment and you can get that from know, cool transcripts and that kind of stuff. There's some of the sentiment that we get through it in the business. But we understand that we may have missed otherwise through transcripts and things and analyzing those is huge. It's really cool.

    Graham Stead (20:45)
    Yeah.

    Yeah, I totally, yeah. mean,

    for the service desk, must be game changing, just sort of the tonality of emails coming in or even voice recordings, you know, must be absolutely huge. So yeah.

    James Steel (20:58)
    Yes.

    Yeah, times. Graham, listen,

    thanks. It's been awesome talking to you. I need to get one question for you though, so I know who the next guest is. It's my man Joe Rojas from Start, Manage. So, similar kind of role to yourself over in the States actually. So I reckon you got to make this a sales one. Have you got a sales question you can put to him? And he's a bit of guru, so you have to try and challenge him. See what you got.

    Graham Stead (21:11)
    Okay.

    Okay. Okay.

    Think about this now

    So how does he overcome? the

    barriers that he will come across when trying to actually encourage MSPs to invest for the long term in their sales and marketing operation.

    James Steel (21:39)
    Oh, that's a good one. I'm just gonna push you slightly further on that. What do you see? What's the barriers that you see? Give us one. What's one of the...

    Graham Stead (21:46)
    I think it's the, if you look at the financials, when an organisation is looking at the financials and needing that sort ROI type thing, they're very short term. We talked earlier about sales and marketing needing to be a longer term view. So guess, how do you overcome, I guess, those buyers that may be more financially driven expecting shorter term ROI?

    James Steel (22:00)
    Yes.

    Graham Stead (22:09)
    we all know sitting from the sales side that it takes a long game.

    James Steel (22:14)
    Excellent, okay, Joe's gonna have some fun with that one. Brilliant, so listen. Hey,

    so time finally for a yell from the barn. So tell us about what you're up to these days. So we're only just recently bidding each other's networks and so I feel like you've been around the industry for a long time and just so often the case, you work within this sort of bubble of people that sort of go to the events and stuff, you haven't been, but I feel like you're really putting a push on now and.

    Graham Stead (22:34)
    you

    James Steel (22:38)
    getting known and so what is it you're what's the message you're looking to take out there and what you ought to what value can you offer

    Graham Stead (22:40)
    in

    I've been IT all straight out of school when I talked about the HP, you know, being on this sort of fixing the kit. So, you know, having taken the of the leap from sort of the MSP side into more sort of the MSP advisory side, you know, what I really reflected on, you when I made that change was what makes me tick, what makes me happy.

    James Steel (22:49)
    Yeah.

    Graham Stead (23:04)
    It's seeing the success, you know, it's seeing how that impacts other people, whether that's just more enjoyment in their job or the likes, higher income or greater success, peer recognition, So that's really what I'm trying to do.

    taking all those experiences and trying to help in a very hands on way MSPs overcome.

    I don't want to give somebody a blueprint or some

    some documents and some structure and sort of touch base every hour, every month or something. If they get a call or an email in from a prospect or a customer they're trying to work with and there's a bit of an objection, they don't know how to it. I want them to able to call me and what's that mean? And we'll work through it together. We might have to do some role play or some coaching or the like there, so it's very hands on. The biggest thing really is that, you

    through working with me or other sales coaches that are around, then our success, we can only be deemed successful if we do grow your sales. And so I'm quite happy to put a guarantee bar on that. So any retained fees, I do, there's a chunk of that that actually is success only because I genuinely believe that there's always something, there's always some little nugget, something that's been overlooked or not found within a business that gives you the potential to grow.

    James Steel (24:18)
    and you've got the experience to spot it. Graham, it's been wonderful. Thank you so much. Where's the best place to get hold of you? Is it a LinkedIn request or, yeah?

    Graham Stead (24:19)
    Thank you.

    Yeah,

    yeah, LinkedIn. So yeah, these are linked in and there's a calendar link on there as well for sort of one to one free one to one advisory. So yeah.

    James Steel (24:34)
    I hope we get to do some more content together in the future and thank you so much for your time. That's been mega valuable for people listening.

    Graham Stead (24:38)
    That's

    been great. Glad you enjoyed it, James. Thanks for the invite. All right, thank you.

    James Steel (24:42)
    Cheers, all the best.

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