Take the guesswork out of selling Cloud services BDR -
Regarding the sale of services and solutions based on the cloud for small and medium enterprises, many resellers, integrators and managed service providers struggling to make the business case. Part of the reason is that customers and sometimes solutions providers, just are not sure where cloud offerings fit into the composition of solutions.
To help clear up the confusion, at least in part, I would like to suggest some ways in which many of our distribution partners have overcome or prospects "tepid customers answers to the cloud backup sales pitches. These practical advice and will help you gain clarity on where, precisely, the cloud can help your customers and provide a couple of proven practices for selling successful cloud backup and recovery.
Start with an assessment BDR
My first advice to existing customers is as follows: consider a backup recovery and disaster assessment before pitching your products and services a BDR assessment examines all. how your company currently supports its customer data and the comparison with what the company is expected to back up its data, based on the best practices of other companies in its sector in particular.
For example, many companies commonly use tape backup. If you discover that a health care client is safeguarding its data to tape, this knowledge can lead to good follow-up questions from you, such as:
1. How does your process the band management? Essentially, you want to determine which manages the band and how often they are rotated. You should also know if the tapes are stored outside the premises, and if so, what process is used from start to finish. This series of questions may reveal issues of security and reliability which the client may not be aware of. If the tapes are stored outside the premises and they are not guaranteed, for example, it could lead to a fine, in addition to undermining the company's reputation. Also, if the tape backup process is automated, there is a good chance that the backups are not performed on a regular basis, making the threat of even greater data loss.
2. When was the last time you tried to do a restore from tape? This question can help a client to self-discover how expensive tape backup can be for a few days on the corporate network will be down while a new server is under construction and all the assets of data is being retrieved from tape. Furthermore, corruption of silent data, also known as the corruption of undetected data can be a major concern with the tape media.
You can offer this type of backup and recovery consultation disaster as a promotion for more serious outlook, well qualified. A BDR evaluation allows you to perform in-depth exploration of the computing environment of a customer and inevitably be one, if not several, it emits which the company may not even be aware of. The evaluation results will help you engage in a much more consultative discussion with your client, beyond the problem of the week IT surface level and the overall health of the IT infrastructure. The BDR assessment is the catalyst that allows you to sit down and talk about the business objectives of your customer and barriers to the growth of the business is facing.
Many SMEs make IT decisions blindly, so the time to invest in evaluations and consultations provided an excellent opportunity for solution providers to educate customers and become trusted business advisors in process. As business quarterly reviews, the BDR assessments provide resellers and MSPs with an open door through which to engage customers about their current and future needs.
Do not make assumptions
Even if your customer has some kind of backup system in place, do not assume it is to provide all protection needs, especially your client if the client operates in a regulated vertical markets such as health care. Maryland health care provider Cignet Health illustrates why. The practice has been fined more than $ 4.3 million for failing to provide patient records to 41 people who had requested them. The company health care shrank its data to tape and the tape media has become corrupted or the files were accidentally deleted out of their server, one of these situations could have been easily solved with a BDR solution for a cost monthly negligible compared to the cost of the fine.
encryption is also a big problem in the vertical health and other highly regulated industries such as banking / finance and legal. Yet, according to the latest data from security researcher Ponemon Institute LLC, less than a third of organizations encrypt their data. Adding this layer of protection to your customers "on the site and cloud backups is a great differentiator that will distinguish your business from the average IT services company.
Consider adjacent cloud services
As you start having more consultative discussions with your SMB customer base, be sure to also explore how and where the adjacent cloud technologies can deliver value. If your client is already comfortable with cloud backup, present the benefits of spending more commercial business environment in the cloud, such as taking advantage of hosted unified communications solutions to solve the problems of collaboration or SaaS development of custom applications to drive customer engagement.
In some cases, the understanding of the value that cloud solutions and services offer a particular vertical can go a long way in helping you engage policymakers. After the sale of a cloud backup solution to a health care customer, for example, you should discuss the value of access to electronic medical records in the cloud and protection of the IT infrastructure of your customer with a hosted security solution.
One last tip: Never itemize your cloud solutions. Instead, roll all your cloud offering starting with the backup, service and support, a managed services contract that presents customers with a monthly subscription, not a figure of capital expenditure. Remember, it is not about individual products that you sell; it is about the overall commercial advantage that you can provide your customers that their IT and business advisor confidence.
NEAL BRADBURY is a co-founder and vice president of development channel Intronis Inc., a cloud backup and disaster recovery solutions-based provider Massachusetts Chelmsford, for the SMB iT channel.
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