Harrison Baron on using AI to scale MSP sales

Harrison Baron, CEO, Growth Generators

⁠MSP Sales & Marketing Expert

⁠The Sales Answer MSPs Have Been Waiting For

⁠Most MSPs have a sales problem. They struggle to articulate value, fail to differentiate from competitors, and end up competing on price, leaving millions on the table. The typical response is to try harder with the same tactics: more cold calls, better brochures, improved websites. But AI is changing the game entirely, offering MSPs a way to multiply their sales and marketing efforts without adding headcount.

⁠Harrison Baron has seen both sides. He started in the MSP trenches as a technician before moving into sales, where he was pulling in $25,000 in monthly recurring revenue each month. After running a digital marketing agency for years, he built Growth Generators and MSP Heroes, one of the only programs offering daily sales and marketing coaching to MSPs worldwide.

⁠As someone who trains MSPs daily on sales and marketing, Baron has a front-row seat to how different companies are adopting AI. The divide is stark. Some MSPs are using AI for basic tasks. Others are fundamentally transforming how they operate. When Baron demonstrates his approach to AI during coaching sessions, the reaction is always the same: "They look at those results and they're like, this is so far away from what I've gotten. We're not even playing the same ball field."

⁠And the gap between MSPs who dabble with AI and those who deeply integrate it isn't closing, it's widening. Fast.

⁠Getting Started: Stop Dabbling, Start Training

⁠The difference between MSPs who get results from AI and those who don't comes down to one thing: treating it like an employee, not a tool. Most MSPs ask AI to write an email or create a social media post and wonder why the results are mediocre. The successful ones are investing hours upfront to train AI on their business, their customers, and their unique value proposition.

⁠Baron's recommendation is straightforward but requires commitment. "An easy starting point is just start playing with it. You're not going to be an expert in it overnight." But playing with it means going much deeper than most MSPs currently do. "The problem I see a lot, and it breaks my heart, is the amount of MSPs that are not treating it like it's an employee that doesn't know anything, right?"

⁠The exercise is simple but powerful: ask the AI to interview you. "Ask me every single question that you need to know to understand more about me and my business, and let it ask you those questions." This upfront investment—which might take a few hours—transforms every subsequent interaction. "When it asks you those questions, then the information that you're going to get back, you may have never been able to figure out before."

⁠Then, tell the AI everything about your business -who you serve, what problems you solve, what makes you different. Then flip the script: "If you're willing to sit down with it and spend the time with it and educate it on who you are, on what you do, on what makes you different, you could have it ask you questions about who you're actually targeting. Why are you actually targeting those people? What are the pain points that they're having?"

⁠Selling Outcomes, Not Technology

⁠This training process forces MSPs to confront a fundamental sales problem: they're selling the wrong thing. This is where AI becomes transformative—not by generating better feature lists, but by helping MSPs identify and articulate real customer outcomes.

⁠The typical MSP sales conversation focuses on technology: backup solutions, security protocols, monitoring systems. But customers don't care about any of that. Baron sees this mistake constantly in his training sessions. "I see this all the time: 'How do I sell this product?' You're doing it wrong right off the bat. It's not selling a product, it's selling an outcome, right?" His analogy is direct: "I don't care if you buy trees from the most amazing forest out there that are going to hold my house up. I want the outcome, right? The customer doesn't care about the technology."

⁠AI trained on your business can identify these emotional drivers and help craft messaging that speaks to them. Instead of explaining what your backup solution does, AI can help you articulate what peace of mind looks like for a specific prospect. The shift from feature-selling to outcome-selling is where most sales breakthroughs happen—and AI accelerates that shift dramatically.

⁠Baron's perspective comes from an unexpected place—his time as a firefighter. "Our goal in the fire department was to make sure fire education has a massive impact on the number of house fires people have. Same thing in the MSP world. It has to start with education." The principle applies directly to AI adoption: educate it properly upfront, and it becomes exponentially more valuable. Rush through the training phase, and you'll get generic results that don't move the needle.

⁠The payoff is substantial. "If you understand sales and you understand marketing, it opens up a tremendous number of doors because cash flow is the lifeblood of every business. Cash allows you to operate. It allows you to hire great talent." AI amplifies this understanding, helping MSPs identify what matters most to prospects and deliver it at scale.

⁠Practical Applications for Scale

⁠Once AI understands your business, the applications extend across every customer-facing function, Baron says. And the real power comes from speed—the ability to iterate and improve faster than any traditional approach allows.

⁠Transforming Sales Through Continuous Feedback: The traditional sales training model is broken. An MSP might get quarterly coaching sessions where someone reviews a handful of calls and provides feedback weeks after the conversation happened. By then, the lessons are stale and the momentum is gone.

⁠AI changes this completely by creating an instant feedback loop after every single conversation. Baron uses recording devices to capture his sales calls, then immediately analyzes them with AI. The question he asks is brutally direct: "What did I suck at?" The AI provides specific, actionable feedback while the conversation is still fresh—what objections were handled poorly, where the value proposition was unclear, which questions should have been asked.

⁠This isn't about becoming a perfect salesperson overnight. Baron acknowledges the reality: "I'd love to have the belief that everyone out there is going to be a world-class salesperson, but I'd also be lying to you, right?" The power is in the iteration speed. Instead of improving over quarters, MSPs improve over days. Each conversation informs the next one. The learning compounds.

⁠The same rapid iteration applies to marketing assets. Baron asks AI to audit everything: "Does this landing page look good? What am I missing on this landing page? What should I change on the landing page?" The speed of improvement is what creates the multiplier effect. Where traditional marketing consultants might take weeks to review and suggest changes, AI provides instant analysis. More importantly, you can run dozens of variations without additional cost.

⁠Reworking Marketing Strategy: Baron uses AI extensively across email marketing, social media, and content creation. "I'd be crazy to tell people I'm not using it for email marketing and for social media marketing and all of that," he says. But it's not just about generating more content faster—it's about forcing strategic clarity.

⁠The uncomfortable truth is that AI often reveals fundamental gaps in messaging and positioning. "Sometimes it makes me take a large step back and say, I gotta rework a lot of what I have. And I'm not gonna lie, it sucks." When AI asks questions about target audiences, value propositions, and differentiation, many MSPs realize their messaging has been vague or generic. The benefits that come from fixing these foundational issues are substantial—"especially from a sales and marketing standpoint."

⁠The discomfort is worth it. AI forces the strategic clarity that most MSPs have been avoiding. The alternative—continuing with mediocre, unclear marketing—is far more expensive than the short-term pain of reworking everything.

⁠
Revolutionizing Service Delivery: Beyond sales and marketing, Baron sees AI transforming how MSPs deliver and improve their core services. The potential here is massive but largely untapped.

⁠Imagine AI continuously analyzing service tickets to identify patterns most humans would miss. Baron envisions systems that proactively flag issues before they become problems: "I can't wait when it can start to go through and find—we've scanned the internet, or we've done research for your MSP, and we found that the series of Brother printers that you've been installing happen to have the largest number of issues among all printers, whatever it is."

⁠The applications extend to security and training. AI could identify which employees consistently fail phishing tests and analyze what makes those emails effective: "There's a lot of opportunity for AI to be used to diagnose tickets, to show trends in businesses. Like this person is consistently clicking on our phishing training. What about these emails are they clicking on that makes it enticing for them?"

⁠Most significantly, AI can detect threats and understand attack patterns far faster than manual analysis. "We could find out problems and understand how problems and attacks happen way before a human actually goes through and says, this is what happened." This shifts MSPs from reactive support to proactive protection—a fundamental change in value delivery that justifies premium pricing.

⁠The Training Investment

⁠He's honest about the learning curve: "I don't even think my brain is fully capable of figuring out all the benefits that we can get out of AI. I feel like even I use it at what a lot of other people would call an advanced level, and I still don't feel like I'm using it to its full advantage."

⁠His commitment to continuous learning is evident: "I'm in different Facebook groups and Reddit groups and all this to try to absorb and learn more, and I look at it sometimes and I'm like, I am an idiot. There's people way smarter than me out there."

⁠The Pricing Problem AI Solves

⁠AI also changes the value equation. "If we can understand that the benefit that we actually provide is tremendous for businesses, and if we can understand that and we could charge more money, and by charging more money it allows us to buy better software, allowing us to hire better employees, and it fixes our cash flow problems."

⁠The logic is straightforward: "You're not hurting your customer as long as you're providing equal or greater value to them."

⁠With AI enabling MSPs to deliver more value without proportionally increasing costs, pricing resistance becomes harder to justify. "Every MSP out there understands that they're leaving money on the table."

⁠From Service to Solutions

⁠This future vision isn't abstract—it requires MSPs to make a concrete shift in how they see themselves today. For MSPs, going forward, he believes "the companies that are innovating the most and are going to be the fastest to create and to make things and to build and transform and implement are going to be the ones that move the fastest."

⁠Baron's ultimate advice centers on identity transformation. "The most important thing for MSPs is to spend the time, do the right thing by our customers, raise your damn prices, and start to figure out and change the idea that you're not just a managed service provider—you're a managed solutions provider."

⁠He explains what this means practically: "If you can start to figure out what solutions you can help businesses figure out, you can help them understand and you can roll out for them, or you can see things that they can't see and you help them with it, you'll be infinitely more successful than all your competition out there."

⁠Baron acknowledges everyone has their reasons for not jumping into the AI bandwagon, but is firm about the consequences: "If you're not on board with it, you're gonna miss the train. If you're not one of the early adopters of it, you're gonna have a very hard time keeping up with everyone that did invest the time and the energy to learn it and understand it and make the most of it."

⁠The Bottom Line

⁠The opportunity AI presents to MSPs is unprecedented. As Baron puts it, the ability to multiply efforts "has never been possible before."

⁠The path forward is clear: understand that you're selling outcomes, not technology. Invest time training AI on your business. Use it to iterate faster on sales calls, marketing materials, and service delivery. Charge appropriately for the value you provide. And transform from a service provider into a solutions provider.

⁠"The ROI that you're going to get out of it is far more superior than most people actually think is possible," Baron says. But only for those willing to move beyond dabbling and commit to deep integration.

⁠The train is leaving the station. The companies that move fastest—that invest in training, embrace the discomfort of change, and leverage AI to deliver exponentially more value—will define the next generation of successful MSPs. The question isn't whether this transformation is coming. It's whether you'll be leading it or chasing it.