Deal registration
Deal registration is you telling a vendor about a deal before you close it, in exchange for protection and better margin. The vendor promises not to hand the opportunity to their direct sales team or another partner for a set window, and typically adds 5-15 margin points over an unregistered sale. Some programmes attach further benefits to registered deals: MDF eligibility, co-sell support, or credit toward tier advancement.
What it means for your MSP
The maths is blunt. Every unregistered deal is a voluntary pay cut, and the size of the cut is set by the vendor's programme terms, not by your effort on the deal. The catch is process. Each vendor runs its own portal, its own required fields, its own approval queue and its own deadlines - and a deal registered one day after the customer signs usually earns nothing. Most MSPs with 8-15 vendor relationships register consistently with two or three vendors and sporadically with the rest, which means the margin uplift is being earned on a minority of eligible revenue. Registration discipline - every qualified deal, every vendor, inside the window - is one of the few levers that improves margin without touching price or cost.