There are plenty of people who know the MSP space.
Far fewer helped build one of the category-defining quoting platforms in it.
Marcus McNall has spent more than 20 years in the channel, first as part of the founding team behind Quosal, then as a longtime sales leader at ConnectWise, and now as Head of Sales at TechGrid. That perspective gives him a rare vantage point on how MSP and VAR sales workflows have evolved, where they still break down, and what the next phase of commerce in the channel needs to look like.
His conclusion is straightforward: the market has moved beyond quoting as a standalone problem.
The next challenge is connecting the full commerce workflow — from opportunity to quote to fulfillment — in a way that is repeatable, visible, and easier for the provider, their partners, and the customer.
Quosal Started With a Problem Most MSPs Knew Too Well
Before Quosal, Marcus was working at a point-of-sale hardware and software company where quoting was still happening the way it did in a lot of technology businesses at the time: through spreadsheets, Word documents, and manual copy-paste work. It worked, but it was slow, inconsistent, and hard to scale.
As Marcus puts it: “We did not have a good way to build out quotes or proposals.” He remembers a process built on “Excel spreadsheet or Microsoft Word or copy paste,” and a leadership team that could already see the need for something better.
That became the foundation for Quosal.
When the original team reconnected in 2006, they built a quote and proposal automation platform specifically for technology sellers. The mission was not subtle.
“Our goal in the Quosal days was… we wanna be the best,” Marcus says. “When people think quoting… we wanted them to think Quosal.”
That clarity mattered. So did timing.
“We were also the very first to go cloud,” he says. “That was a huge feather in our cap because no one was there.”
But the bigger reason Quosal worked was simpler than that: it solved a real operational pain point for the channel.
“People had come so far so long by quoting off of spreadsheets or word docs or a hybrid of the two that people didn’t realize that they were driving with three flat tires,” Marcus says. “They had no idea.”
Quosal’s value was not just in producing a cleaner quote. It helped turn quoting into a real sales workflow.
“Let’s simplify the process. Let’s speed up the process. Let’s decrease your time to quote. Let’s increase your average deal size,” Marcus says.
What The IT Channel Gets Wrong About Quoting
One of Marcus’s clearest points is that quoting in the MSP and VAR world has never been just about generating a document.
The real challenge is configuration.
A provider is not simply pricing hardware, software, and services. They are making sure what they sell is technically sound, supportable, compliant, and profitable. They are deciding whether the bundle actually fits the customer and whether they can deliver and manage what they sold.
“What a lot of people miss is… there is a lot of configuration that goes on behind the scenes,” Marcus says. “If we’re gonna sell this bundle to this customer, is it the right fit? Does it check all the technical boxes?”
That is why the channel has always needed more than generic sales tools. It needs workflows that reflect the actual complexity of how MSPs and VARs sell.
ConnectWise Made the Next Problem Obvious
When Quosal became part of ConnectWise, Marcus got a broader view of how partner needs were changing.
The first big shift was complexity. Selling hardware was still relatively simple. But modern MSP sales motions became much more layered, with bundles, services, licensing, options, dependencies, and exceptions becoming normal.
“People’s quoting needs became a lot more complex,” Marcus says. “Hardware sales was the easy part.”
The second shift was what happened after the quote was accepted.
Marcus saw the same pattern repeatedly: the quote got signed, and then the rest of the workflow scattered into other systems. Procurement happened elsewhere. Fulfillment happened elsewhere. Reporting happened elsewhere. Teams were left stitching together a process across multiple platforms, with handoffs and manual work at every stage.
“There was this reliance on other platforms, other solutions to do other functions,” he says. “That was the biggest shift and change for me.”
That is where the limitations of legacy CPQ became harder to ignore.
Even when the quoting layer worked, the full commerce workflow often did not.
“There was certainly a lot we could have done from a workflow standpoint, a reporting standpoint… that would have made Quosal or ConnectWise CPQ a lot more valuable,” Marcus says.
He is also candid that product innovation eventually slowed.
“As far as major releases, as far as things that kept us as the industry leader, that had stopped,” he says. “By 2023 and 2024, I was ready to go pursue other things.”
Why TechGrid Stood Out
Marcus first saw TechGrid during an introductory meeting with CEO, Philip Wegner, that was supposed to last 30 minutes and ran for closer to two hours. The reason it stretched was simple: the platform was showing him ideas he had been waiting to see executed more completely for years.
“I’m not some casual observer that’s gonna look at that and be like, ‘Oh, that looks cool,’” Marcus says. “I’ve got 20 years of history in this exact one part of our world.”
The deeper he got into the platform, the more familiar the opportunity looked.
“The more I saw, the more it was like… that’s something we were looking into doing, but we just never did,” he says. “This is awesome. This is amazing. I’m actually kind of floored that you guys have put all this together.”
What TechGrid represented to him was not just another CPQ tool. It was a more complete commerce platform.
“The workflow inside of TechGrid from a commerce and a selling and fulfillment standpoint… it stands alone as its own sales engine,” Marcus says. “We can plug into almost everywhere.”
That distinction matters because Marcus believes the market is changing in a specific direction: away from rigid all-in-one suites toward more flexible, connected systems.
“Most TSPs wanna be able to kinda pick and choose the platforms that are right for them,” he says. “Not everybody needs the entirety of the Halo stack or the ConnectWise stack.”
That is part of why TechGrid felt timely. It does not depend on forcing partners into one larger stack. It fits into the systems they already use while solving a problem those systems still leave open.
Quoting is One Step. Commerce is the Bigger Opportunity.
Marcus makes this distinction clearly: quoting and commerce are not the same thing.
Quoting is a task. Commerce is the full operating model around how an MSP or VAR does business with its customers.
“How do you wanna do business with your end customers?” Marcus says. “More importantly, how you want your end customers to do business with you.”
That question changes the frame.
It means the buyer experience, pricing and packaging, and guided selling matter because it helps teams create consistent, accurate, supportable solutions. And it means post-signature workflows should not be treated as disconnected operational cleanup. They are part of the same commerce motion.
This is also where Marcus sees many MSPs still carrying unnecessary friction.
Having manual touch points” is one of the biggest bottlenecks he still sees, whether that means “pulling in pricing from the website and hoping it doesn’t change,” waiting for purchasing to batch orders later, or lacking visibility into where deals sit in the sales cycle.
“These are the kinds of things that a lot of people have just gone this far this long without having that extra layer of visibility and that extra layer of accountability,” he says.
That kind of friction is easy to normalize. It is much harder to scale.
What MSPs & VARs Should Focus On Now
Marcus does not reduce the current market to one trend.
Yes, AI and automation are becoming must-have capabiliites for MSPs. Yes, buyer expectations are changing. But for leaders running MSP businesses today, the more immediate question is how to make the selling motion more consistent and more profitable.
He points to three areas in particular.
The first is margin discipline.
“One of them is making sure we have an established margin profile,” Marcus says. “What are we charging our customers? What kind of markup? What kind of margins are we looking at?”
The second is repeatable configuration.
“What do we sell, and how do we sell it?” he says. “What information do we need from the end customer to make sure we’re putting together an accurate quote or proposal?”
The third is guided selling.
“That’s where guided selling comes into play,” Marcus says.
In practice, that means building workflows that reduce guesswork, protect margins, and help teams create better outcomes without relying on tribal knowledge or heroics from a few experienced reps.
Why This Moment Feels Different
Marcus has lived through several waves of channel software innovation, so he is careful about overstating what is truly new.
But he does think this moment is different.
Part of that is the pace, another is the uncertainty, and part of it is that AI is not arriving as just another feature category. It is forcing vendors and MSPs alike to think more carefully about what should be automated, how fast they should move, and where they need clearer guardrails.
As Marcus puts it, “Especially with AI, there isn’t a lot of regulation.” That lack of clarity, he says, is part of what is “keeping people a little bit uneasy,” even as vendors race to figure out how to make AI useful inside their platforms.
That is why, in his mind, the real opportunity is not just adding AI for the sake of it. The harder and more important question is how to apply it in ways that improve actual workflows.
“The ability to harness AI and get it into your platform and get it working for you is, I think, every vendor out there, I think it’s all their dream,” Marcus says. “But then how can we tie it to automation? How can we do it responsibly? Is an incredibly big thing that nobody out there in the world, I don’t think, really has a grasp on just yet.”
He also believes companies need to be deliberate about where they start.
“I do feel like there has to be a push to say, okay, hey, that is certainly something we wanna do,” he says. “We do have to stay true to our mission, our platform. We wanna consistently grow, but we also wanna make sure, a, we don’t get left behind, but, b, if we do wanna bake in something like AI to the platform, what is our goal? Where do we wanna start? Where do we want that to grow into?”
That same thinking is part of why he is especially excited about Storefront and AI-assisted workflow generation inside TechGrid.
“I’m incredibly excited for Storefront,” Marcus says. “When we get Storefront right, that’s gonna be one of those things where a lot of our partners already and then a lot of service providers out there in the world are gonna sit there and say, ‘Hey. We want that. We’ve been looking to get this built out for a long time. What do we have to do to make it a reality?’”
For Marcus, that is what makes this moment different. The technology is moving fast, but the real winners will not be the ones who move fastest without direction. They will be the ones who apply new capabilities in ways that are useful, responsible, and clearly tied to how MSPs and VARs actually operate.
What Has Validated the Move?
Joining a growth-stage company after more than a decade at an established platform business is a real bet.
Marcus says two things have validated that decision: the team and the reaction from the market.
“Everybody on this team knows their job, knows their responsibility, knows their role,” he says. “It is the development team all working together for the greater good.”
Then there is the external response.
“You can’t buy this. You can’t fake this. You just know when you feel it,” Marcus says. “Everybody is beyond incredibly excited with what they see.”
He has seen that show up in demos, where prospects stop and need a moment to process what the platform is doing.
“I’ve had more people be like, ‘Okay… I’m sorry. That’s incredible. I need just give me a second to think,’” he says. “That’s when you know you’re on the cusp of something special.”
The Bigger Picture
Marcus does not talk about TechGrid like someone who simply took a new role.
He talks about it like someone who sees the next stage of a problem he has spent most of his career around.
He also sees it as something bigger than one vendor’s product roadmap. For him, the long-term opportunity is to create a commerce layer that works across the broader channel ecosystem.
“I do very much value our partners and prospects’ feedback because, again, we’re not gonna grow without it,” he says.
That orientation is part of the point.
For years, MSPs and VARs have had to piece together quoting, procurement, invoicing, and customer workflows across disconnected systems. The next phase is not about adding more disconnected tools. It is about making the commerce motion work as one.
That is why Marcus joined TechGrid. And that is why he believes the future of commerce for MSPs and VARs will be connected.
