Selling storage audits as an MSP: the pitch, the pricing, the playbook

Storage audits are the easiest recurring engagement to add to an M365 practice. Every client tenant has bloat, the reclaimable bytes almost always exceed a year of the audit fee, and the finished deliverable — a branded PDF plus an Excel workbook — is something the CIO forwards to finance without editing. The problem is not demand; it is packaging. This piece is the pitch, the pricing, and the delivery model we see work.

The 90-second pitch

The version that closes in our experience:

“"Microsoft 365 charges you $0.20 per GB per month for storage above your included quota. Every tenant we look at is 20 to 40 percent over-provisioned — old drafts, duplicates, ex-employee OneDrives nobody deleted. We scan your tenant read-only, hand you a branded PDF with the top reclaim opportunities ranked by size, and an Excel workbook your admin can action. Fixed fee, one week to deliver, you keep the savings."”

Notice what the pitch does NOT do: it does not overpromise, it does not badmouth Microsoft, it does not require any client commitment beyond one hour of an admin's time to grant consent. The economics do the selling.

Pricing that works

Three shapes we see MSPs use, in rough size order:

1. One-shot audit — fixed fee £4-8k for tenants up to 500 seats, £8-15k for 500-2000 seats, custom above. Delivered in 5-10 working days. Good margin, low commitment, great door-opener into governance work.
2. Recurring quarterly — £1-3k/month, delivers a fresh PDF quarterly with a delta chart. Sells to CIOs who want the number as a KPI. Higher lifetime value; harder to close on the first meeting.
3. Rebilled per-tenant scan — for MSPs who host many small tenants (typically 10-40 sites each), £150-400/month per tenant tacked onto the existing MSP subscription. Bulk-friendly, minimal delivery overhead once the workflow is templated.

The engagement model

A repeatable one-week delivery cycle:

1. Day 0 — Kickoff. 30 min call. Client Global Admin runs the consent flow from their machine while you watch. Kick off the first scan.
2. Days 1-2 — Scan runs asynchronously. You take a look at the results, filter the noise (auto-generated system libraries, expected large files) and start drafting the executive summary.
3. Day 3 — Second review pass with your senior consultant. Anything that looks anomalous — a site that's 30% of tenant storage — gets a note in the report.
4. Day 4 — Deliverable prep. TSO exports the branded PDF + Excel; you swap the LogiSam wordmark for your own on the Enterprise / MSP tier. Add a cover page with the client's logo and the executive summary.
5. Day 5 — Presentation. 45 minutes with the client, walk them through the PDF, hand them the Excel with the top 10 reclaim actions ready to execute. Book the follow-up.

What to charge for the follow-up

The audit is the wedge; the follow-up is where the account grows. Every audit delivers 3-6 workstreams the client will want help with — retention labels, meeting-recording policy, orphaned-OneDrive cleanup, Purview label rollout, Copilot readiness. Price those as fixed-fee engagements (£3-8k each) or fold them into a managed governance retainer. The audit gives you the specific numbers to justify each one.

Objection handling

Three objections you will hear, and answers we've seen work:

• "Doesn't Microsoft's admin centre already show this?" — It shows totals per site. It does not surface individual duplicates, per-file version bloat, ranked recommendations, or a client-ready report. We've done audits for tenants that were watching the native report weekly and still had 40% reclaim available.
• "We already have a backup / eDiscovery tool that shows storage" — Those tools optimise for their job. Storage optimisation is a specific use case that needs the ranking, the reclaim math, and the branded report. It's not the same thing.
• "We're about to move to a bigger SKU anyway" — Great, but every additional TB you buy is one you will keep paying for. An audit before the upgrade tells you the real number to buy, and often makes the upgrade unnecessary for another year.

The self-hosted option (for regulated verticals)

Some MSP clients — public sector, healthcare, defence — cannot let their tenant data leave their own Azure. On the MSP tier, TSO ships as a self-hosted deployment: LogiSam engineers deploy it into your Azure subscription so client data never crosses into a third-party plane. The client sees your brand, on your infrastructure, running the same tool. Materially useful in RFPs where "data residency" is a scored criterion.