‘We’re building towards curating and collecting a bunch of information to be able to provide back intelligence and insights on the industry,’ says Colin Knox, CEO of Gradient MSP. ‘Benchmarking was just the number one thing that kept coming back to us from everybody saying, ‘Can we get pricing and cost benchmarking so that we know where we should go.’’

Gradient MSP has released a new pricing benchmark assessment tool to help MSPs compare resale prices, costs and adoption rates.

The tool covers benchmarking across seven product categories and 85 subcategories commonly used and is backed by data from more than 1,000 MSPs and more than $7 billion in MSP sales data.

Colin Knox, co-founder and CEO of Gradient, said the tool was created “to give to the community.”

“We’re building towards curating and collecting a bunch of information to be able to provide back intelligence and insights on the industry,” Knox (pictured) told CRN. “Benchmarking was just the number one thing that kept coming back to us from everybody saying, ‘Can we get pricing and cost benchmarking so that we know where we should go.’”

[Related: CRN Asks A CEO: Colin Knox, Gradient MSP]

The tool addresses concerns and uncertainty for MSPs surrounding pricing services, industry standard costs and product adoption trends by providing clear and actionable insights.

Knox said the amount of solutions MSPs are reselling are “expanding at an enormous pace.” When they go to vendors and ask what others are charging, he said the answers fall all over the place and “there’s no commitment.”

“It’s really because we had no idea,” he said. “We always said, ‘Here’s what we recommend that you should charge.’ But we had no idea what the market was actually bearing for our products and it’s still the number-one question these vendors get hammered with by their partners all the time.

“We’ve got a wealth of intelligence available in our platform to say, ‘This is an MSP who does $5 million in revenue and they sell 12 different products. Those products are in these categories and here’s what they make,’” he added. “As far as I’m aware, it’s the first data-backed survey, not a researcher survey, benchmarking tool that comes from data straight from the source to give that level of confidence that people need.”

In April Gradient launched StackTracker, a SaaS product giving MSPs insights into product category coverage, vendor spend, resale revenue and profitability on both product and client levels.

Paul Havens, CEO of Washington-based managed service provider IT Haven said knowing that his cost is standard and that he is charging the correct markup is huge.

“I get metrics from a peer group I’m a member of, but it’s not actual data from the vendors and other MSPs, which makes it hard to trust,” he said.

And the tool is free for MSPs due to support from a host of vendors in the channel.

“A lot of vendors really stepped up and said that they want to sponsor this, they want to be able to help provide this out to the industry,” Knox said. “It just made a lot of sense for us to partner with all of these companies and vendors to really get the message out to the MSPs and give them that clarity.”