How to Offer Teams Direct Routing as a Managed Service: An MSP Playbook

Most managed service providers already sit on the answer to one of their best growth opportunities. The same SMB clients buying Microsoft 365 licenses every month would happily route their voice through the same vendor if the offer were on the rate card. Teams Direct Routing is what makes that possible, and a growing share of MSPs are turning it into a recurring revenue line that compounds with the rest of the IT stack.

What is less obvious is how to productize the demand. The protocol mechanics of Direct Routing are well documented. The commercial mechanics, including what to charge, how to package, who owns regulatory responsibility, and when to walk away, are where most new entrants underprice the offering and burn margin on accounts that should have been referred out. This piece walks through those four questions in order, so an MSP planning a Teams voice service can move from idea to launch without learning the costly lessons firsthand.

Why Teams voice is the highest-yield MSP service right now

Voice attaches to an existing relationship. The MSP that already provisions M365 tenants, manages Endpoint, and handles SharePoint is the natural counterparty for the voice question every CIO eventually asks. Teams Direct Routing lets that MSP keep the customer on Teams as the user experience while delivering the dial tone, and the bill, themselves.

The demand signal is concrete. Among service providers running ProSBC, MSPs make up just over half of all deployed sessions, and Teams Direct Routing is the single most common trigger for those deployments. The recurring-revenue profile reads well on a P&L: monthly per-user billing tied to a license the customer already pays for, with switching costs that grow every time you add a feature on top.

Two trust mechanics make voice particularly sticky. First, the customer’s phone numbers live with the MSP’s chosen carrier, so a competing IT provider cannot just port the M365 tenant and walk off with the voice. Second, anyone who has migrated a 200-seat phone system knows the audit, port, and validation work involved; once you have done it once for a client, it is nobody’s idea of a fun second project.

Should you resell Teams Direct Routing, or refer it out?

The temptation when adding voice is to sell it to every M365 customer on the book. That is the most common way to lose money on a Teams voice line of business. The first decision to make is a commercial one, before any technical setup. For each prospective client, one of three answers should fit.

Sell Direct Routing yourself applies when the client already buys M365 management from you, has roughly ten seats or more, wants to keep its existing carrier or DID inventory, or operates in a country where Microsoft’s first-party Calling Plans are weak or unavailable. This is the sweet spot. Margin scales with seat count, and the MSP earns on both the recurring service and the underlying carrier markup.

Refer to an Operator Connect provider covers customers that are small, prefer a single-vendor experience that puts dial tone on Microsoft’s invoice, and do not care which carrier sits behind the service. Operator Connect is faster to provision and removes the SBC question entirely. The trade-off is loss of margin and limited flexibility on numbers or routing. The Operator Connect vs. Direct Routing comparison covers the technical differences in detail.

Refer to Microsoft Calling Plans fits when the client only needs basic dial tone in a country Microsoft serves directly, has no number-porting requirements, and runs fewer than 25 seats. Calling Plans wins on simplicity for very small accounts, and trying to undercut it at low volume rarely pencils out.

Treat this as a go/no-go gate, not a default. Sales reps under quota will try to sell Direct Routing to everyone, and the support burden of a 5-seat client paying a low monthly rate compounds fast.

The three pricing models MSPs use

Once an account belongs in the “sell it ourselves” column, the next decision is how to price. Most successful MSP Teams DR offerings settle into one of three models.

Per-seat flat pricing charges a fixed amount per Teams-licensed user per month, with calls included up to a fair-use ceiling. It is the easiest to sell because it mirrors how the customer already buys M365, and it produces the cleanest invoice. Margin is highest when the customer has many low-utilization seats, since the unit economics favor the seller when actual call minutes fall below the bundle.

Per-channel or per-session pricing covers concurrent call paths rather than user count. This model sits closer to how the MSP pays its own SBC vendor and PSTN carrier, so it produces predictable cost coverage. It is the better fit for customers with low concurrency-to-seat ratios such as back-office teams or knowledge workers who rarely make external calls, because they end up paying for what they use, not for the headcount of the directory.

Tiered packaging is the pricing model that grows ARPU. A basic tier covers domestic dialing and a fair-use minute pool. A business tier adds call recording, attendant console, advanced analytics, and a higher fair-use ceiling. An enterprise tier adds international dial, contact-center handoff, premium support response, and dedicated trunks. Each tier sells against a different buyer inside the customer, and the upgrade path is what turns a $X-per-seat account into a $3X-per-seat account over the following year.

For the SBC pricing inputs that feed your cost basis on any of these models, the SBC pricing reference for MSPs covers the per-session and per-server licensing economics.

Your service stack: what to operate, not just resell

A Teams Direct Routing managed service rests on four pieces: the customer’s Microsoft 365 tenants, the SBC capacity that bridges Teams to the PSTN, the underlying carrier or carriers, and the monitoring and support operation that keeps the lights on. The SBC question is where MSPs make the most consequential commercial choice.

Three paths for the SBC are viable: run a multi-tenant SBC yourself for the lowest marginal cost and highest margin ceiling, buy a managed SBC service and resell the voice layer to shed the operational burden, or a hybrid that self-hosts the largest accounts and uses a managed SBC for the long tail. The managed vs. self-hosted SBC framework weighs the trade-off, and the technical requirements the SBC itself has to meet, from Microsoft’s mandatory TLS, SRTP, and OPTIONS behavior to multi-tenancy and edge security, are laid out in the guide to becoming a Direct Routing provider. This playbook stays on the commercial side of that decision.

The economics of the multi-tenant approach are where reselling Teams DR pays for itself. A single multi-tenant SBC platform can host dozens of independent client trunks, each with its own number range, carrier, and routing rules. With 30 clients averaging 25 Teams users each at a typical per-seat resale price, the gross revenue line sits in the mid five figures per month. Subtract the SBC platform cost, the wholesale PSTN cost, the carrier-attestation fee, and the labor allocation for monitoring and support, and a well-run multi-tenant platform produces gross margins in the 50 to 70 percent range. The technical setup for that platform is covered in multi-tenant SBC for Teams Direct Routing. What matters here is the commercial flywheel: every additional client added to the same SBC instance adds revenue without adding proportional infrastructure cost.

Who owns STIR/SHAKEN attestation when you are the reseller?

The single compliance question new Teams DR MSPs most often miss is who signs the outbound calls. When an MSP becomes the originating service provider for a client’s outbound traffic, the MSP inherits attestation responsibility under the STIR/SHAKEN framework mandated by the FCC. The wrong answer leads to A-level attestation downgrades that show up as “Spam Likely” on the recipient’s caller ID, which destroys the value of the service the customer just paid for.

Three practical options apply. The first, having the wholesale carrier sign on the MSP’s behalf with B-level attestation, is the most common starting path. The carrier inserts the Identity header on outbound calls based on its trust relationship with the MSP, and the MSP avoids running a signing service. B-level attestation is acceptable for most enterprise outbound calling. The second, integrating a signing service directly such as TransNexus ClearIP or Neustar, gives the MSP control over A-level attestation. This is the path for MSPs that want to sign on behalf of multiple carriers, or whose customers complain about call labeling. The third, defaulting to C-level attestation, is acceptable only for terminating-only or pure-gateway use cases and is not viable for an outbound Direct Routing service in North America over the long term.

Positioning the offer against Calling Plans on the customer’s invoice

The M365 admin in every prospect already sees a Teams Phone Standard plus Calling Plan line item available on Microsoft’s quote. The offer the MSP places next to it needs to beat Microsoft on at least one dimension that matters to the buyer.

Three angles consistently win. Price per user is the most defensible angle at scale: Calling Plans pricing flattens out, and a tiered Direct Routing offer at 25 seats or more usually undercuts the Microsoft rate while including more minutes. Carrier choice and DID preservation wins with any customer who has a long-standing number range, a regional carrier preference, or an existing relationship with a wholesale provider, because moving those numbers to Calling Plans is either impossible or operationally painful. Geographic coverage wins for any customer with offices in countries Calling Plans does not serve directly, which is most of Latin America, much of Africa, and parts of Asia.

The honest answer on simplicity is that Calling Plans is hard to beat for very small accounts that need three lines and basic dial tone. Sell against simplicity only when you have a clear margin reason to.

Building the service: a 90-day launch plan

A clean launch sequence keeps the team from learning every lesson on the first customer.

In the first 30 days, choose the SBC path and validate it. A free SBC lab license is enough to run a working proof of concept against a single Teams tenant and a wholesale carrier. Sign the wholesale carrier contract, lock the attestation policy with that carrier, and draft a three-tier service description with a published rate card.

In the next 30 days, onboard two pilot customers. Existing M365 management accounts are the right candidates, because the change-management surface is smallest and the MSP already owns the tenant. Build the monitoring on the SBC, set up the on-call rotation, and write the escalation runbook. Document the failure modes the pilots surface, especially anything related to carrier behavior or Microsoft’s Teams tenant configuration quirks.

In the final 30 days, standardize. Convert the manual onboarding into a repeatable workflow: PowerShell scripts for Teams tenant configuration, SBC trunk templates for each carrier, a porting playbook, a customer welcome packet. Move from per-deal pricing to a published rate card the sales team can quote without engineering approval. The VoIP troubleshooting guide is a useful reference for the production-readiness gate at this stage.

Common failure modes, and how to avoid them

Underpricing the support load on small accounts is the most common way MSPs lose money on Teams voice. A 5-seat client at a low monthly rate covers maybe one helpdesk ticket per quarter before the account turns unprofitable. Set a seat minimum, or refer small accounts to Calling Plans.

Skipping the attestation conversation with the carrier produces the labeling crisis four months in, when the first customer notices that their outbound calls appear as “Spam Likely” on receiving handsets. Lock the policy before launch.

Treating the SBC as a one-time install rather than a quarterly maintenance line item is the other reliable failure mode. The platform needs patches, certificate rotations, and version upgrades on a regular cadence. Microsoft periodically changes the TLS root CAs that Teams trusts; the most recent cutover requires SBC certificates issued by an updated CA before mid-2026. Build the maintenance budget into the service price from day one.

Frequently Asked Questions