The same discipline, bent around a different shape of business. Everything above is written from an enterprise‑software vantage point — one product, a few large deals, a big delivery organisation behind you. These eight sheets re‑frame it for managed services and the reseller channel: many small deals running in parallel, a broad vendor stack nobody masters entirely, recurring revenue instead of a licence, and a scope document whose wording you personally own the margin on. Read them if you work in an MSP, a reseller or a systems integrator — or if you are interviewing with one.
Job Description: MSP Pre‑Sales / Solutions Architect
Everything in this manual, written the way it actually shows up in a managed‑service‑provider job. Every duty below links back to the module that teaches it.
A Managed Service Provider sells a relationship, not a project — a client's entire IT estate, supported for a monthly fee, for years. That changes what "pre‑sales architect" means in practice. You're not the deep specialist on one platform working three enterprise deals a year; you're the generalist across an entire vendor stack — identity, endpoint, network, cloud, backup, security, voice — running discovery on a dozen small‑to‑mid‑size environments at once, most of which have never been properly documented before you showed up. The job is equal parts detective, estimator, and trusted advisor, and it rewards someone who's spent a career being handed messy environments and making sense of them fast — which is exactly the muscle a long architecture career builds.
A day in the life
Key responsibilities
Click any duty to jump to the module that teaches it.
- Run on‑site and remote technical discovery across a prospect's environment — identity, network, cloud, backup, security — to find risk and complexity before it becomes a support problem.Mod 08 →
- Translate discovery findings into a scoped statement of work — clear inclusions, exclusions and assumptions — that both the client and the delivery team can be held to.MSP 04 →
- Price and structure managed‑service offerings — recurring MRR, onboarding costs, tiered support levels — so the deal protects margin as well as wins.Mod 14 →
- Qualify inbound and partner‑sourced opportunities hard enough to protect a small pre‑sales team's time from deals that will never close.Mod 06 →
- Demo and present the managed service — not just a product — in language a non‑technical business owner can actually evaluate.Mod 10 →
- Build multi‑year technology roadmaps spanning infrastructure refresh, cloud migration and security maturity for new and existing clients.Mod 17 →
- Act as the deliverability check between what's promised and what the service desk and project team can actually support on the standard stack.Mod 01 →
- Support renewal and quarterly business review conversations with existing clients, using real usage and ticket data to justify the next investment.MSP 02 →
- Maintain standardised discovery templates and assessment checklists so pre‑sales quality doesn't depend on who's free that week.Templates →
- Stay close enough to delivery to act as a technical escalation point on strategic accounts — the pre/post‑sales line blurs constantly at an MSP.Mod 15+ →
- Hold vendor and distributor relationships — deal registration, partner tiers, special pricing — that directly affect what you're able to quote.MSP 06 →
Requirements & qualifications
Technical
- 5–10+ years across MSP, consulting or enterprise IT — depth in more than one of: identity/AD, Microsoft 365 & Azure, networking, backup/DR, security fundamentals
- Comfortable running and interpreting an infrastructure assessment scan (Network Detective‑style tooling is an industry standard)
- Working knowledge of the PSA/RMM tooling an MSP runs on (ConnectWise, Autotask, NinjaOne and similar)
Professional
- Confident leading structured discovery with both technical and non‑technical stakeholders, on‑site and remote
- Clear, defensible written documentation — an SOW and a roadmap slide are legal‑adjacent artefacts, not marketing collateral
- Comfortable owning commercial numbers directly, not just technical recommendations
How this differs from the rest of this manual
Everything through Level 2 was written from an enterprise‑software vantage point — one product, a handful of large deals, a big delivery org behind you. MSP pre‑sales bends the same discipline around a different shape of business:
| Dimension | Enterprise software pre‑sales (this manual's default lens) | MSP pre‑sales architect |
|---|---|---|
| Deal count & size | Few, large, long cycles | Many, smaller, faster cycles, running in parallel |
| Product surface | Deep in one platform | Broad across a whole vendor stack — identity, cloud, network, backup, security, voice |
| Revenue model | Often a one‑time licence plus services | Recurring managed‑services revenue — the proposal is a subscription, not a project |
| Commercial ownership | Often shared with a dedicated deal desk | Frequently owns pricing and margin on the SOW directly |
| Deliverability constraint | A large delivery org can usually flex to what was sold | The solution must fit the MSP's standardised stack, or the service desk inherits the risk |
| Pre/post‑sales boundary | Fairly clean handoff at signature | Blurs constantly — architects get pulled into renewals, QBRs and escalations on accounts they sold years earlier |