This episode explores the decisions MSPs face when choosing between resellers and distributors for procurement. Vincent, a seasoned industry professional, joins hosts Adam and Daniel to share valuable insights on benefits and risks, pricing strategies, and building trust in supplier relationships. They discuss the importance of efficient service, managing cash flow, and mitigating risks associated with working with partners. Vincent also highlights how to leverage strong relationships and the importance of proactive client interactions to add value. The conversation encompasses various facets of the MSP business, from managing credit to enhancing service delivery through strong, trust-based relationships.
00:00 Introduction and Topic Overview
00:26 Building Trust with Resellers
00:50 Case Study: Overcoming Cash Flow Issues
03:22 Pricing Strategies and Market Dynamics
06:12 Challenges with Distribution and Vendor Relationships
09:29 Value-Added Services and Long-Term Relationships
15:44 Navigating Credit and Payment Terms
20:20 Tips for New Businesses and MSPs
26:37 Conclusion and Contact Information
Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts
Connect with Vincent O’Hanlon on LinkedIn by clicking here – https://www.linkedin.com/in/vohanlon/
Connect with Daniel Welling on LinkedIn by clicking here – https://www.linkedin.com/in/daniel-welling-54659715/
Connect with Adam Morris on LinkedIn by clicking here – linkedin.com/in/adamcmorris
Visit The MSP Finance Team website, simply click here – https://www.mspfinanceteam.com/
We look forward to catching up with you on the next one. Stay tuned!
Transcript:
Daniel: So, Vince, great to have you on the, on the show with, Adam and I today, as we often do before we click record, we talk in the green room about what we’re actually going to talk about and the question we were posing, was when should an MSP buy from a reseller instead of a distributor? So perhaps, Perhaps we could start there
Vince: Yeah, hi, Adam. Hi, Daniel. Thank you for having me today. Yes, well, there’s a few benefits there. one of them, I suppose you need to build trust to make sure that we’re not going to go and steal your customer, but there’s a few advantages. So one of the first MSPs ever sold to the problem he had was where he bought a bunch of equipment have been sitting in his warehouse for a couple of weeks.
Vince: The project got delayed by several months. The distributor was in saying, right time to pay and he’s panicking. So whereas he’s normally working on some decent double digit, maybe 20, 30 percent margins on the, I think it was UPS as it was supplying, single digits and he’s panicking cause he’s not got the cashflow to do it.
Vince: so I just happened to be speaking to him. I said, okay, I’ll buy them off you, and sell them back to you. So I think I gave him 60 days payment terms. It wasn’t very credit worthy, but I took a bit of a punt on it cause he was a nice chap. So, and he brought them back to me and then from then on go and we’ve been doing lots of business for many years and they’re now a very strong partner of ours. Sorry.
Daniel: and that’s certainly probably not a story you’d, you’d hear from someone talking about a mainline distributor, even having a conversation with, with, with a person, if you’re, if you’re not, not a managed account, with a predefined credit limits, so, so how did you end up talking to that, that, that MSP
Vince: Well, funnily enough, I met a few, mutual customers. So we were supplying the IT equipment and they are actually, installing all the equipment to desk for the customers. So they didn’t have the, I think originally they supply bits and bobs to the customer. They didn’t really have the cashflow. The company got very large and it’s a retailer now over 800 outlets.
Vince: when they first came to England, they could deal with it, you know, the odd bit here and there, but then suddenly it was getting into the hundreds of thousands of, every project and cashflow. But I think, funny enough, Daniel, I think the first time I met you was at a go karting event. And, what did we do the next day?
Vince: Sold you loads of equipment.
Daniel: That’s right. Exactly. Right. So that’s over a decade ago then, I
Vince: But that’s the thing that, but one thing we do is we’ll go completely open book with people. We’ll say, look, we’re, because we’ve got all the accreditations, the platinum, platinum gold accreditations for everyone. We’ll just say, rather than give you a price and say, here’s our buy price, go and see what you can do.
Vince: We’ll give you our buy price and say, you know, we’ve got a bid, this is our price on it. We work on what margin you want to pay us because we’re looking for long term relationships. We don’t want to make a quick buck if I give you a price of say 100 a unit and you’re trying to sell it for 110 when my buy price is 80.
Vince: It’s better if I tell you my buy price and you can do a deal and then come back to me and because it’s a business we wouldn’t have got so we appreciate it and some of those have worked into you know turning some really great relationships where people have left and gone off to other organizations and they’ve taken us with them but it’s building the trust.
Vince: You know, you need to have the trust here to make sure that one, we’re going to deliver it to. We’re going to be, you know, we deliver it on time every time. obviously the courier is a bit of a bane of most of our people’s lives. when people buy stuff isn’t turned up, they seem to think it’s reseller, but it’s the courier that’s having a bad day and decided to go home rather than deliver your item. But we got fixed for that as well. We send a courier to the courier. I’ve done that many times before.
Adam: So, so Vince, can we just hover over this pricing conundrum? cause, cause this is obviously going to be top of mind for a lot of buyers, especially when margins are thin. So, let’s go back to play school. So step, you know, ordinarily you’d expect a Disney to provide a more of a margin than a reseller if you’re an MSP, am I right, first of all, with that assumption?
Vince: So can you say that again?
Adam: just as an overall assumption, because disties are buying in larger quantities and their role is different to a reseller ordinarily, I’d expect a larger margin from a disti compared to reseller for the same product.
Vince: I suppose it would depends on volume. 11 thing we’ve got the beauty of because we’re shifting lots of equipment all the time. We get to gauge where the pricing should be. So one thing we can see is that we know roughly when someone asked for a certain item, we know where, based on that road map, how much equipment they’ve got, where we can gauge it and what the price should be.
Vince: And one thing we do see is especially when people are buying direct from vendors as well. people get into a relationship with a vendor. They’re buying direct. They’ve got nowhere to gauge it. Really, they can probably gauge it against Google and the price they can find there. But when you’re buying volume, one thing we do is we look at the bigger picture.
Vince: I’ve just chatted to a guy a minute ago. he wants 50 laptops and we’re saying, okay, what’s your refresh policy? it’s four years. Okay. Let’s play for a bid based on the full year. rather than just the 50 units you want now. So, and it’s making sure that one, we’ve got the roadmap for the client so that, one thing I said to him is that, you know, if you, if buy some machines now and you want some in January and February, let’s just make sure those machines are still going to be available rather than you have to recreate a new image, and maybe we’ll give you some extended payment term so you can buy them now, we’ll sort them for you and you can call them off as and when you want them.
Adam: and so, so I’m hearing, obviously there’s a lot of value add. Then that you’re providing to, to your client. and I absolutely can understand how in several circumstances, you know, that value is worth a few points of margin. are you saying on the pricing part then that sometimes you’ll be the same.
Adam: Sometimes you might be a little bit higher, or a lower margin rather, but on some occasions you might even beat the Disti from a pricing perspective.
Vince: well, if we’re buying direct from the vendor, then yes, but most of the time, a lot of the product we are now buying from distribution, but it’s because we’re buying so much more than an MSP would be buying. you know, so they’re looking at the bigger picture. It may be that, you know, we’ve got a deal now today for a client and they ask for a favour, you know, can we do this pricing point for a client?
Vince: it may be, we don’t make any money on it. We even make a loss on it, but we look at the bigger picture, you know, down, down the line, we’ve got some surfers come in and listen. But the margin there, you probably into double digits if you’re lucky on some servers, whereas the day to day stuff, laptop screens, it’s all single digits, but we’re just based on volume.
Vince: We just to shift a lot of it to make money.
Adam: Well, one of the, bugbears of my, my, my time with the disties was that, you know, you’d phone up, for a certain, laptop, you know, screen, whatever it was. And, they’d say, what’s the part number. And you go, well, I haven’t a chuffing clue what the part number is. That’s your job, isn’t it?
Adam: But I guess, I guess that they would, that might be a sort of key, key difference.
Vince: No, definitely. And that’s the thing. We get people out and they say, Oh, we have a TV thing and we know what they want. But the other thing is we because we sell to customers on volume, they may get a temp in there or something. They ring up. We don’t really know what they want, but we know based on that company, that profile, we know that they will buy a certain item.
Vince: So it’s just making sure they’ve got consistency and that and maybe advise that you need to buy this one because that’s the standard for your organization, rather than one you just actually asked for
Daniel: think, just going back to Adam’s first assumption, was the, if I’m, further on in the value chain, you know, I’m a, an MSP slash reseller, buying from distribution should be less than buying from one of my peers. yeah. Or indeed, I would expect the vendor not to be selling to the end user at the same price that they’re quoting me, which is something that happens a lot with, certainly tier one vendors that have, a, an end user direct, a channel as well as a, as well as a channel.
Daniel: is that right? like is it Channel? Channel Anyway, but, but yeah. and, a common gripe from a lot of MSPs I know is, that the end user can very easily find. the same product online from the vendor director, not even from a, an untrustworthy source.
Daniel: it’s from the vendor that they know. And, and it just, it undervalues what the MSP’s position is at that point, because it looks like the, they’re being, you know, they’re not being well served by their MSP.
Vince: exactly what we find is that when a product coming to the end of life, typically, a lot of the product won’t go out to distribution, it will appear on the vendor’s website. So they just want to clear the stock. So they do deals. and it’s, you know, we found that we can with the relationships we got with the vendors, we can get that matched or beaten a lot of the time.
Vince: Just because it happens with all vendors and has done for many years. There’s always a deal on there when they will try and do it cheaper. But it’s normally on small quantity. If you want to, if you’re looking to buy a couple of 100 units, it’s probably just whatever they’ve got left and then left in stock.
Vince: And then next time around, you can’t buy the same item for some companies doesn’t matter. But there’s a lot of consistency, a lot of equipment. We. Supply is configured to order. So it will be built specific for that client to make sure we’ve got the maximum, you know, we’ve got the deal registration in place.
Vince: We’ve got the bid there and it is the best possible price they can do. And we engage the, the vendor as well to make sure that, you know, they’re talking to the client and the client is getting exactly what is fit for purpose and their requirements.
Daniel: And I guess there’s a question there. I have around a volume and size of the end client. So I know from our conversations that you’re dealing with some pretty sizable end user businesses selling thousands of units, whereas a good deal of the MSP community are dealing with SMEs and therefore tens and hundreds of the sort of typical volumes.
Daniel: so in, in effect, are we saying here that, the difference between buying tens and hundreds, and buying thousands gives you additional margin that then effectively you can share, with the MSP and still make a margin yourself.
Vince: And the other thing is, a lot of MSPs are probably maybe sitting in the unmanaged team. So they’re called distribution. They’re not dealing with the same person each time. They haven’t got consistency. So what happens? You speak to some guy and he’s brilliant. Next day you get someone else that’s not particularly good.
Vince: No one seems to know what’s happened with your order. You’re ringing the next day and you know, Was it shipped? Wasn’t it shipped? Suddenly we’ve had a, we had an instance, when we first started, we went through so many account managers because we don’t take passengers, you know, if we shift in a lot of volume, we want someone who’s going to give us a high level of service.
Vince: And I don’t know what it is. You always seem to get in the old days, we used to get a brilliant account manager and then suddenly get promoted to a team leader and suddenly you get the new kid who’s just. Clipped off his skateboard to, to help me out. So it is, and that’s the thing, because we’re doing lots of volume, we do get taken seriously by a lot of distributors.
Vince: And we’ve got some great relationships. You know, if we don’t get the level that we feel we have, we sometimes boycott them for a little while. You know, it’s only, where’s the business? But we do now have those relationships where we can, you know, if we need to, press the right buttons at the senior level and Get the resource there to make sure that the deal is done.
Vince: Anyone can shift boxes is when things go wrong. And he said, what do you do to fix it? And because we’ve got long term relationships, so one client we’ve been dealing with for 26 years, I think, but it’s the trust is knowing that when you order it, it’s like Amazon, you know, 99 percent of the time you order Amazon, it’s going to turn up.
Vince: So it’s making sure you’ve got that trust. the way in our life, as I said before, it’s the career. Yeah. We’re really good at processing things, really proactive and making sure the customer gets consistency each time.
Daniel: really interesting. You should mention Amazon as well. because again, I know a good number of MSPs that, that, that are buying from Amazon and, so, as you say, it’s reliable. it’s consistent. the price is keen. so, of course that, that isn’t necessarily gonna serve, the, you know, all deal, formats and profiles, but, but again, if MSPs are buying from Amazon the same way an end user could buy from Amazon, then again, buying from other resellers and from their peers certainly, you know, is, I think it’s more acceptable than it perhaps would have been, you know, the traditional hierarchy of I buy from the distributor and sell to the end user is, is no longer valid.
Vince: Well, funnily enough, in lockdown, people were, as you know, a lot of people were selling MS, they were selling masks and PPE, all the stuff just to, a lot of people were cashing in. We didn’t do it because I know a lot of people got slated for doing that, but we’ve got two companies. One was a data center.
Vince: We sold him three quarters of a million pounds worth of, screens. He was selling them on Amazon. It’s a lot of hassle when you’re selling to Joe Bloggs because he’s going to take it out of the box, throw the box away, and then want to send it back. But you’ve got the protection that comes when you’re dealing with consumers.
Vince: So, we kept it at an arm’s length, but he bought a lot from us. And funnily enough, he paid for more than his American Express card as well. We offered to do a credit limit for him, but he said, no, I want to get the air miles. So, well, he’s making a profit. I’ll just get into my miles. I don’t know. But also the other funny thing is I’ve got a friend who’s got a company and he’s selling ladders and in lockdown he wasn’t selling many ladders.
Vince: So, he spoke to my friend who’s got a cleaning company and just said, you know, can I sell some of your cleaning products? He said, we don’t really sell them. They just. do lots of big cleaning projects. But he said, I’ve got a friend that sells monitors. He’s selling a lot of them at the moment. So he bought, he didn’t do by hundreds, but he did buy hundreds, but he bought quite a lot of pallet loads of monitors and started selling loads of them.
Vince: It was quite successful as well. But I think it’s because there was a shortage. People weren’t necessarily buying them because they were great prices. The fact that there was such a shortage of stuff. this guy was putting some really. Big margins on there. We were working on tiny margins, but it made him some money and got him some holidays as well, I think.
Daniel: And we’ve pretty much covered then the sort of different. Aspects you might consider when you’re buying or selling something. We’ve talked about price. we’ve talked about level of service, availability, as you say, there, is, is, is a factor. and, interestingly, you mentioned about, paying by Amex, because again, I know a number of MSPs that, doing do enjoy that, that benefit.
Daniel: So, in effect, it sounds like you can emulate a good. Distribution relationship, even though you are a reseller,
Vince: Well, that’s the thing. It’s all about efficiency. And one thing we’ve done is we spent a lot of, invested a lot of money and time into an automated system. So it’s very slick. You create a quote, we’ve got livestock price and availability straight into our quote that converts to an order. And from an order, it’s all linked to the invoices.
Vince: So our invoices, you know, if the quote’s right, the invoice will be correct as well. and that’s what people gauge you on. I think I’ve spoken to some of the sales guys before and I said, you know, people aren’t just buying from you, it’s the whole of the back office and how efficient is it because they’re the people that made you look good.
Vince: There’s loads of sales guys out there that can promise you, yeah, that’s installed, you can have it tomorrow. And then, you know, customers ringing going, where is it? So you need to be constant, I think, a high level of service, making sure that people will, build that trust you. When you go meet a customer, one, they need to like you and need to trust you.
Vince: But until you’ve started doing business, they don’t. They haven’t got that trust.
Adam: Yeah, I mean, I was just going to say, you know, that the level of service is, if it’s not number one, maybe price is number one, but it’s certainly a very close second, to, to the price, you know, when you’re making promises and looking to manage the expectations of end clients, it’s really vital to know, you know, what, when the laptop will arrive, you know, if there’s an issue with it.
Adam: you know, who’s going to deal with it being kept up, kept abreast of changes in, in expectations. All of those things are absolutely vital. and there really is, you know, significant value in my view in having those with which, whichever, you know, partner you have in terms of procurement.
Vince: It’s like, well, that’s the thing. It’s time, isn’t it? At the end of the day, people want to order stuff. They want it to be delivered. If there’s a problem, they just want it fixed. You don’t have to, be on the phone for ages. and the good thing here is you can deal with one person. in Vitrx, a pre sales person, the sales guy’s pre sales, post sales.
Vince: He’ll do everything for you. They’ll bend over backwards. And because they’re all coin operated, you can probably ring them at midnight, and they’ll answer the phone and sort your problem out for you.
Daniel: I’ve got a, a funny picture in my mind now of, of your office and, we’ll, we’ll see if I can, can generate that image for us. Um, so we’ve, I mean, we’ve covered quite a. Quite a few areas there. my, next question, though, is to try and pick out some of the negatives here because we talked about a really positive, opportunity that there will be risk.
Daniel: and there will be MSPs listening to this conversation saying, Oh, but what about? so my first question is, question. you know, is there a risk, or how do you mitigate the risk of an MSP being concerned that maybe, maybe they’re introducing a, a competitor into their customer environment?
Daniel: that would be my first query.
Vince: Well, the first thing I did is I found this guy that does MSP. He’s going to give me a fantastic review. that’s the thing that we don’t offer any services ourself. We do offer services, but we use partners because what we wouldn’t be able to do is turn the tap on and off when we want them. And obviously, you know. You can’t be experts in every field and I think if you even if you look at the some of the really big resellers out there they’re using partners.
Vince: You can’t be a cyber expert and a core network putting CNS networks in. You can’t be an expert in every field but lots of people need to offer that but when we do work with partners we don’t say Vitrix are doing it. We’ll tell you that you know that partner and that’s the name they are doing it so they appreciate that and I think it for us it can it’s rare you may get an issue but if we use a partner to deliver a project and for some reason it goes wrong we can put a new partner in there and Maintain our relationship still, and I appreciate that.
Vince: Funnily enough, we did use a partner once to go and install a load of IT equipment at a load of sites for us. And, the partner decided to try and go direct to our customer, who we’ve had a relationship for a very long time. And, and the, The customer said, get rid of him. I don’t want to use him now.
Vince: We did manage to sort the problem out and get him to do it in the end. Exactly. And that’s
Daniel: So the query I had has happened to you and, you were protected by the strength of relationship you had with your customer.
Vince: the thing that it’s, it comes down to relationships, doesn’t it? And the sales guy would never do that again. I know the owner of that business. the sales guy was given a slap for doing that because he was trying to do it because they don’t normally do that. You know, we’ll sign an NDA with people, but you don’t bite the hand that feeds you.
Daniel: And I keep saying to my sales guys, you know, it, MSPs are the an easy bet. You know, you can go and bring a customer and sell him five laptops. So you can bring an MSP who’s got 100 customers in the five laptops. It’s a lot easier and they’ve got the relationship and you can bring a new client. You can sell him a toner and if you’re in one of the certain resellers, it will probably ring a bell and everyone’s cheering.
Vince: or you can go and sell to an MSP and he’s got all those, he can fast track you in there with a relationship. And funnily enough, we work very closely with leasing companies. I previously worked for a leasing company for 24 years, and I just identified all the invoices coming in and how much different the price was on every invoice.
Vince: So, we’ve got a close relationship with them now. So it’s making sure the customers getting a fair deal. But when you get an intro into the FD, an FD can sometimes be a better bet because IT guys don’t really care where it comes from. They’ve got a relationship, been buying from the same people for years.
Vince: They don’t like change. You get in front of an FD and they’ll whip your arm off, you can save them some money. And then you get a nice hostile introduction into the IT guy, who’s going, who’s this guy?
Daniel: and, it sounds like there might also be an opportunity in reverse then for MSPs, that you work with insofar as you’d be able potentially to introduce MSPs into. Some of your clients if they weren’t already, owned, associated to another one of your MSP clients?
Vince: Yeah, no, definitely. That’s the thing, we’ve got a handful of different ones. And that’s the thing, because people, buy on relationships. So I’ve, we’ve, we’re busy recruiting at the moment. We’ve had Five new sales guys coming this year, but they’ve all come from different backgrounds. They’ve all got relationships.
Vince: And one of them, funnily enough, has come from a reseller, but they’ve got services on that do some brilliant cyber stuff. So we’re actually using them to do the cyber stuff, although they’re a competitor, but it’s the trust, isn’t it?
Daniel: . Okay. really interesting. so, there are somewhere between four and 12,000 MSPs in the uk, subject to who you believe, including the government, offering one , one of those numbers. and, pro, probably not every one of those will. be in a position where they can buy from, from you or have a relationship.
Daniel: so, for those listeners that, that maybe won’t pick up the phone and get in contact and start a relationship with you. perhaps there’s some general, tips, suggestions that we can sort of summarise for. for our listeners that they could take away from this, from this podcast and implementing their business.
Daniel: we’ve talked, for example, about, the importance of that, having that level of service, in terms of following up. but any other tips that spring to mind?
Vince: Yeah, I’d say that, you know, for a new business, cash flows, key really, it’s keeping an eye on your people on your clients, making sure they’re paying you and keep an eye on your bank balance as well. So, I was quite fortunate when I started Vitrix, I started, had a business partner and he had 100 people.
Vince: Plus in his business. So I’d already made MDFD. So I could grow, scale the business quite easily. quite fortunately, cause he had a good reputation. We had good banking terms, implemented straight away. I’ve now bought him out, but without that, it would be quite tough to get going and scale the business up when, yeah, I think it’s because I had the reputation before.
Vince: I think we, had an order within the first week for about a quarter million pound. And, And that’s actually, funnily enough, was a lead for a big client I was dealing with before, but they just gave me the credit. We had another one for 160 grand, the credit was just given to me straight away. So I think it’s, yeah, reputation, who you know, isn’t it, really?
Daniel: Absolutely. and, I mean, one of the. One of the topics around credit that Adam and I often talk about, probably more in the services side than the product supply side, is that we think the solution to credit management is not to give any credit in the first place, but of course, that’s not always practical or possible.
Vince: the ability to offer credit presumably is key to, to, to doing some of these, some of these larger product sales that you’re involved in. give someone 30 days payment terms, and they’ll probably pay on 60. We’ve had one before, he’s like, can you send my payment terms? It’s like, well, you’ve got 30, you’re paying on 60. If I give you 60, when will you be paying? Will it be 90 or 120? So, but you’ve almost become in a bank a lot of the time.
Vince: And some of the deals that we’ve turned down before where there’s just crazy, I think we’re going to make two and a half thousand pound or a quarter million pounds. and that was from our rebate. They expect us to sell at cost and, that company’s just gone bust recently. At least I’m glad I didn’t do that one.
Vince: But people do expect you to be a bank a lot of the time. And, and we do have instances where there’s certain sectors that, you know, renowned for just knocking each other. They quote, of course, would knock each other and the construction industry we found before. I was even told that by the bank when it first started.
Vince: But, there’s quite a few companies have been struggling in that industry recently. I think they’ve been, gone to the wall, but hopefully it will pick up soon. But it’s just, I think it comes down to how well do you know your customer and you trust them. Because, you know, everyone wants credit, but then when it comes to paying you, my poor finance girl is just ringing people over and over again to hear the same thing, but you’ll find there’s a pattern emerges when someone doesn’t pay you once.
Vince: It’s normally the same customers that don’t pay you, and then we’ve got some other ones. You know, we, one thing we built up some really good trust with our suppliers. You know, one of one of the distributors gave me a 2. 7 million credit limit, probably about five years ago. Our customer paid on Proforma, so we paid the, paid them next day.
Vince: I said, you know, hopefully you’ll need five million pounds. You’ll, you’ll give me the money.
Daniel: and that’s exactly the, the perfect scenario that we’d be, we’d be recommending if you can, if you can get paid in advance by your client and get credit from your supplier, then, then you’re, that’s actually giving you positive cashflow, and, you know, is the utopia
Adam: and I was just gonna, say to you Vince, you know, so, so in terms of, you know, MSP clients out there that you work with, obviously, prompt payment is probably near the top of the list of the behaviours that you like to see what would be those other things though, that, You like to see in terms of a working relationship with MSPs, because ultimately this is a partnership.
Adam: and, you know, so I guess what are the, some of those things that, they can do to help themselves if you like.
Vince: I think one thing some of my sales guys do is go and work in their office for a day just to, because one thing you don’t notice is what business you’re missing out on. So I’ve got a few sales guys again sitting customer sites can sit in their I. T. Department. You can see what’s going on there. So we’ve got one customer 300 people in their I.
Vince: T. Departments. Very large. So, you know, we don’t necessarily supply everything in there, but when he goes along and sits in the office, you know, I didn’t identify where we can help them, where we can add value and on the same note, it’s like, Oh, I didn’t realize you do that. You know, maybe you can, you do audio visual, you can screw some stuff to the wall for us.
Vince: We’ve got a few projects coming up with that. So, I think definitely helps when you sit inside the customer’s business or even just go along for a meeting and identify it. I was with one of my sales guys recently walked into reception. There was like the Samson screens. I was like, why are you not buying Samson screens?
Vince: We were by the time we left.
Adam: Yeah. So, so that whole realization that. For a partner or reseller to help you, you need to be open about your business, what you’re doing, what type of customers you’re working with, what type of services and products you’re looking to resell, and sort of meet you halfway in building that relationship.
Vince: Yeah. And we like it to make it like to make it a two way relationship as well. You know, it’s not just selling everyone things. It’s nice where I spend my life introducing people to each other. So I’m not actually making anything out of it, but that guy would be ideal for you. I’m just a network as well as is Daniel.
Vince: So it’s just thinking where people can add value. and help each other
Daniel: and, what a great way to summarize the whole sales, topic is it’s, it’s helping not selling.
Vince: exactly. Well, that’s the thing that I’ve had many clients and prospects for years. There’s one customer to me when I left the last company, it took me eight years to get back in there. But what I was doing off to sending information every now and again to the guy going, I think this be useful for you.
Vince: You know, I get nothing out of it, but it’s great product for him. so eventually it’s maintaining that relationship. It’s a bit like leasing companies. Some of the leasing companies, they’ll do a lease for something. How many times can you ring a guy and ask him how his leasing is going on? He’s photocopier.
Vince: They introduce us in there and we’re supplying stuff day to day. Keyboards, mice, you know, all the stuff. We’ve got an ongoing relationship and a project pops up and we go, Oh, by the way, you might want to ring your chap. He’s got an opportunity coming up for a load of storage or servers.
Daniel: And, and, of course, that really dovetails into the, the MSP topic of, of, having regular client contact, being proactive, having a road map, knowing what’s going on in their business, to be able to position. your business to, to help them, along their journey.
Daniel: So, so yeah. in interesting, interesting stuff. we’re probably around about the optimum episode length. so, and I think we’ve covered a huge amount of ground, to today more than I thought we might. so, we normally offer our guests the opportunity for it for a shameless plug, although I kind of feel like we’ve been doing that all the way through.
Daniel: but, yeah, maybe, if anyone wants to carry on the conversation, how best to get in touch.
Vince: if you look at the Vitrx website, it’s, v i t r x. co. uk, not with an extra i, everyone puts the extra i in there, so we had to buy that domain as well, them to the software company, so, or the phone number is 0800 849 0849, or you can find me on LinkedIn, Vincent O’Hanlon, and the company is Vitrx.
Daniel: Super. Vince, as always, really enjoy talking to you and, here’s to another decade or so of, of, interesting conversations, and, and working together in, in, well, what’s, what’s proven to be a really interesting, industry for us both to be a part of.
Daniel: So, thank you very much for, for your time today and, speak to you very soon.
Vince: Well, thank you very much, I appreciate the opportunity to be on here. Good luck.