10 questions that drive higher MSP revenue multipliers

In Part 1 of our blog series we explored why some MSPs earn 18x more revenue than others selling the same technology. According to the Opentext Partner Ecosystem Multiplier study, the difference comes down to how they engage clients. The most mature partners in the research (categorized as "Expert" partners) earn $6.73 for every dollar their clients spend on OpenText solutions, compared to $0.37 for partners focused primarily on resale.

So what exactly do these Expert MSPs do differently in their client conversations? The answer starts before you ever mention your products.

The questions that change everything

Here's what happens in many initial client meetings. The MSP asks about current technology, pain points, and what's not working. The client describes their existing setup, mentions a few frustrations, and waits for a proposal. The conversation stays tactical.

Expert MSPs open differently. They ask about business objectives, growth plans, and strategic challenges. The client talks about market expansion, regulatory pressures, competitive threats, and operational goals. The conversation reaches beyond IT into boardroom priorities.

That difference matters. Partners who position themselves early in the customer journey—before technology decisions are made—capture the majority of the revenue opportunity. They're not waiting for clients to define their requirements. They're helping clients discover what they actually need.

Here are ten questions Expert MSPs use to guide that discovery process:

Question 1: What are your top business goals?

Most technology projects start as reactions to problems: a breach prompts an EDR purchase, an audit triggers governance, and downtime drives a backup investment.

Instead, start with where your client wants to go, not on what’s broken.

Asking about business goals surfaces initiatives that haven’t yet made it to a technology roadmap. A client planning to expand into healthcare mentions new regulatory requirements. Another acquiring a competitor needs to integrate two IT environments. A third preparing for growth worries about scalability.

Each client has different needs—HIPAA compliance for the healthcare expansion, merger integration for the acquisition, cloud migration for the scaling business. But none of them walked in asking for these specific solutions.

This approach uncovers opportunities your competing MSPs never see. While they’re quoting endpoint protection, you’re designing the security architecture for a market expansion. While they’re responding to backup RFPs, you’re building the continuity plan for a merger.

The revenue difference shows up immediately. Strategic projects are bigger and far more valuable than one-off purchases.

Question 2: What business processes are breaking down?

Ask about IT, and clients say, “Everything’s running fine.” Ask about business processes, and they say, “Our compliance reporting takes three people two weeks every quarter—and we’re never confident the data is accurate.”

That’s not an IT problem. That’s a business problem with a technology solution. Manual processes that drain hours, bottlenecks that slow revenue, workflows that introduce risk—these are the pain points executives care about. And most tie back to technology, even if your client hasn’t made that initial connection.

When you help quantify these problems in business terms, the conversation changes.

• A three-week manual process becomes measurable opportunity cost.
• A workflow bottleneck becomes lost revenue.
• A compliance risk becomes potential penalties and brand damage.

Suddenly, technology isn’t a cost center—it’s a business investment with clear ROI. Expert MSPs guide this discovery process and ask about approvals, reporting, data management, and cross-departmental collaboration. Each answer reveals opportunities for automation, AI-powered optimization, integration, or optimization that translate directly into business value.

Question 3: What would a three-day outage cost your business?

Most clients can't answer this question off the top of their head. But watching them think through it changes how they view their technology investments.

Revenue they can't collect. Customer commitments they can't fulfill. Regulatory penalties they might incur. Reputation damage they'd have to repair. Staff productivity they'd lose. The mental math adds up quickly—and it's almost always higher than they expected.

This question reframes risk as business impact.
“We need better security” becomes “We’re exposed to six-figure losses if systems go down.”
“We should improve resilience” becomes “Three days of downtime could put us out of business.”

The OpenText study shows that 76.8% of partner revenue happens after initial procurement.[i] The first sale is only the entry point. When you help clients understand their true business risk, they don’t simply buy technology — they’re investing in clarity, resilience, and long-term confidence.

Question 4: What compliance frameworks apply to your business?

Compliance is one of the most overlooked doorways to long-term partnership. Ask about compliance requirements, and you'll hear about regulations the client barely understands, audit processes they're dreading, and certifications they need to win certain contracts.

Each creates multiple revenue opportunities. The immediate need is achieving compliance like implementing controls, documentation, and monitoring. The larger opportunity is becoming the partner who keeps them compliant year-round.

Compliance requires ongoing attention. Regulations change. Audit standards evolve. New business initiatives trigger new compliance obligations. When you help your client understand their compliance landscape, you become essential to their ability to operate in regulated markets.

This is particularly powerful in industries with strict requirements:

• In financial services, that means SOC 2.
• In healthcare, HIPAA.
• In government, FedRAMP or CMMC.
• In manufacturing, GDPR.

Each framework represents a business requirement and a competitive advantage. Clients who can prove compliance win contracts competitors can’t—and MSPs who deliver it are indispensable.

Question 5: What’s blocking your growth?

This question gets to what clients truly care about—not uptime or backups, but growth.

Ask what’s preventing scale, and you’ll hear about capacity constraints, market barriers, and operational challenges. Many of these have technology components that the client hasn't connected yet.

For example,

• A financial services firm wants to expand into new regions but worries about protecting sensitive client data across multiple locations. That’s a growth challenge—until you show how comprehensive security architecture and secure collaboration tools enable safe expansion.
• A professional services company wants to take on larger clients but lacks confidence in its backup and recovery capabilities. That’s a risk management issue—until you demonstrate how robust data protection and business continuity planning provide the resilience to pursue bigger opportunities.
• A healthcare organization wants to increase patient volume but struggles with secure communication and compliance across a growing team. That’s an operational bottleneck—until you map how integrated security, email protection, and collaboration solutions within their Microsoft 365 environment support expansion while maintaining HIPAA compliance.

These conversations uncover opportunities that go far beyond the initial question. You’re not selling technology. Instead, you’re enabling the outcomes that drive their business forward.

Question 6: How does technology factor into your customer experience strategy?

This question elevates the conversation from operations to differentiation.

It moves the focus from keeping systems online to using technology as a lever for brand loyalty and growth. For example, a client wants to improve customer engagement but struggles with siloed data. By unifying information management and ensuring backup continuity, you help them deliver consistent, personalized experiences across every channel.

When technology strengthens how customers interact with the business—protecting data, enabling collaboration, and ensuring reliability—it drives measurable outcomes in loyalty and growth.

That’s where OpenText partners capture the multiplier: turning operational excellence into customer-experience advantage.

Question 7: What KPIs matter most to your leadership team this year?

Leaders don’t measure success by uptime; they measure it by profitability, market share, and customer satisfaction.

Understanding those KPIs lets you align your services to what leadership reports to the board. If their goal is margin improvement, you can show how automation reduces cost. If it’s growth, you can tie your work to revenue enablement.

This question shows you speak the language of the business. It also makes it easy to prove value during quarterly reviews because you’re already tracking the same metrics as your clients.

Question 8: Where do you see the biggest risks to profitability or reputation?

Every executive has an answer, but few have quantified it.

This question surfaces the real fears driving decision-making like data exposure, supply chain disruption, compliance failures, talent loss, or system downtime. Each is an opportunity for you to connect cybersecurity, governance, and resilience to the outcomes that the leadership actually worry about.

The best MSPs translate technical risk into financial exposure. When you do that well, your clients start asking you to brief their board.

Question 9: Which functions or workflows consume the most time but add the least value?

This question uncovers where automation and process optimization can make a measurable impact on efficiency and morale.

It shifts the focus from “fixing IT issues” to transforming how work gets done. When routine reporting, manual approvals, or document handoffs slow operations, automation can reclaim time, reduce error rates, and free staff for higher-value work.

For example, a client buried in repetitive compliance reporting might streamline documentation and audit preparation with OpenText workflow automation. Another struggling with disjointed collaboration in Microsoft 365 could consolidate content and task management through integrated OpenText solutions. This consolidation creates smoother information flow across departments and reduces the friction that slows down project completion.

These gains compound quickly: hours saved translate to faster cycles, lower costs, and greater employee satisfaction. And as you help clients modernize processes across teams, you naturally expand your role from IT support to their operational partner.

Question 10: What’s your vision for the next phase of your business model?

This question moves beyond quarterly targets and immediate challenges. You're asking about the company's trajectory—what the business is becoming, not strictly what it needs to fix today.

Clients may talk about shifting from project work to recurring revenue models. Some are exploring how AI can transform their service delivery or create new revenue streams. Others are positioning to enter new industries or international markets that require entirely different operational frameworks.

When you ask this question, you move from delivering solutions to co-architecting the future. Clients see you as part of the leadership team's strategic planning process, someone who helps translate business vision into executable technology strategy. This is where the deepest advisory relationships form, and where the longest-term revenue opportunities emerge.

The discovery process that follows

Of course, these questions are simply the starting point. The real value comes in the conversations they create.

When a client shares their business goals, you ask how they'll measure success. When they describe process breakdowns, you explore the downstream impact. When they calculate outage costs, you discuss their risk tolerance. When they mention compliance requirements, you investigate their audit timeline. When they identify growth blockers, you help them envision what's possible.

Each answer leads to deeper questions. Each discussion reveals opportunities that weren't visible before. This is how Expert MSPs uncover projects that competitors never see: projects that haven't been budgeted, requirements that haven't been written, needs that clients didn't know they had.

By the time you're ready to discuss technology solutions, you're no longer one of several MSPs competing for a defined project. You're the business service advisor who helped your client understand what they actually need to achieve their business objectives.

What comes next

You’ve shifted your approach. You’re asking better questions. You’re uncovering opportunities others miss. Now it’s time to capture that value.

In Part 3, we'll explore how Expert MSPs structure their service offerings to maximize the multiplier—the journey from $0.37 to $6.73. You'll see where revenue concentrates across the customer lifecycle and how bundling and vendor partnerships create sustainable competitive advantages.

Read on for Part 3:

Building your service stack for a $6.73X revenue multiplier

The maturity journey, service architecture, and how to structure offerings that capture the full opportunity.

10 questions that drive higher MSP revenue

MSPs that achieve the $6.73 multiplier for every dollar of OpenText solutions their clients buy ask questions that reveal what really drives a client’s business.

Use this checklist to shift your client conversations from IT to impact.

1. What are your top business goals?
   Uncovers near-term priorities and aligns technology to measurable outcomes.

2. What business processes are breaking down?
   Reveals inefficiencies, bottlenecks, and automation opportunities.

3. What would a three-day outage cost your business?
   Turns abstract risk into tangible financial impact.

4. What compliance frameworks apply to your business?
   Opens the door to ongoing governance, monitoring, and advisory work.

5. What’s blocking your growth?
   Surfaces strategic barriers that technology can remove.

6. How does technology factor into your customer experience strategy?
   Connects IT investment directly to brand loyalty and revenue.

7. What KPIs matter most to your leadership team this year?
   Aligns your value with the metrics executives track.

8. Where do you see the biggest risks to profitability or reputation?
   Translates cybersecurity and resilience into board-level language.

9. Which functions or workflows consume the most time but add the least value?
   Highlights quick wins for automation and productivity.

10. What’s your vision for the next phase of your business model?
    Positions you as a long-term partner shaping transformation.

 

[i] OpenText, OpenText Partner Ecosystem Multiplier study, 2025