Key takeaways
- Match on company words: managed services, managed IT, help desk, network support.
- The owner decides under about thirty staff. Above that, ask for the service delivery lead.
- Email tends to work better than the published line, which is a support queue and is answered as one.
Step by step
- Describe the people in one sentence. Type something like owners of managed IT providers in Texas with a work email, and BuzzAI reads the company description and the real titles rather than trusting the industry code. On the Free plan, build the same list with the filters in the table.
- Separate MSPs from the look-alikes. Break-fix shops, hardware resellers, web agencies and IT staffing firms share the same code. Company words such as managed services, monitoring, help desk and recurring support are what tell them apart.
- Use the right titles. Owner, president, CEO, managing partner and founder at small firms. At thirty staff and above add vCIO, director of service delivery, service manager and CTO.
- Set the company size. Most MSPs run 1 to 19 staff and the owner signs. From 20 to 99 there is usually a service delivery lead who tests the tool before the owner pays for it.
- Save, reveal and reach out. Save the list, reveal only the people you will write to, and export to a spreadsheet or your CRM. Buzzlist writes four emails for each person and you approve them before they go.
| Filter | What to use |
|---|---|
| Titles | Owner, President, vCIO, Director of Service Delivery |
| Company words | managed services, managed IT, help desk, network support |
| Size | 1 to 19, then 20 to 99 |
| Exclude | IT staffing, web design, hardware resale only |
What to know
MSP is a business model. It is not a job title and it is not an industry code. A firm selling monthly monitoring and a help desk sits under the same heading as the agency that built your website, so a code-first list comes back wrong. Reading the company description is the whole job here.
Owners of small MSPs came up as technicians. They will read a specific message about ticket volume, stack consolidation or a vendor they already run, and they will delete anything that opens with a compliment. Peer groups and vendor communities are common in this trade, so a tool one owner rates gets mentioned to the next.
If you only sell to firms carrying recurring contracts, put that in the search. Plenty of one-person consultancies describe themselves as IT support, bill by the hour and buy nothing.
