Selling cloud services and avoiding culture clash

Ian Masters talks about migration to cloud and long-term customer opportunities

Offering cloud services to customers means more than simply marketing a new set of offerings via the company website and updating your presentation documents. It often means a bigger investment in terms of keeping a business going until the revenue that is due actually comes through.

The move to smaller, monthly revenue can have a big impact on cashflow, which may take a long time to recover.

So should you concentrate on building up cloud revenue, or stick to traditional sales for as long as possible?

And once you do make the move to cloud, the whole approach to both sales and customer retention has to change as well.

Sales teams that are rewarded according to the volume of business they bring in, will always think first of standard product sales.

Even splitting up their targets into traditional and cloud sales is not an ideal solution, as the emphasis will still be on volume in the here and now, rather than longer-term revenue.

I suggest instead allocating part of your sales team to cloud sales alone. Not only does this create more certainty on what should be offered, it also gets sales staff to focus on some of the bigger problems that exist during the cloud sales process, such as migration and ongoing support.

It is then time to work on the process for convincing customers to move. Even once customers have bought into cloud, actually getting their data across to that new platform is a large potential pitfall.

The last thing that a customer wants to hear is that they will have to take their systems offline during the cloud migration.

You are asking them to turn off IT systems that are working perfectly well and on which users rely, while also asking them to commit themselves to an as-yet-unproven cloud strategy.

Staff used to delegating responsibility after a deal has been won may need to develop their account management and handling skills.

Within cloud-based companies, each sale is a continuous process as there is less potential to lock customers into deals.

Customers will obviously take their business elsewhere if they do not feel they are getting good value for money.

At the same time, they may be receiving other offers, so reminding them of the value you deliver is also necessary.

Therefore, reducing the potential downtime is one way to both improve the chances of closing a deal and speed up the sales process.

Existing workloads can be replicated in the cloud, with the final switchover happening only when the customer is ready.

All the time the migration is taking place in the background, users should still be able to work normally.

Cloud systems should be tested before they go live. Also, this onboarding process is far faster for the service provider – meaning more opportunities can be targeted – and the new cloud installation can be filled faster too.

Potential gains from reduced costs and reduced management overheads should provide the economic incentive, while the ease of testing disaster-recovery scenarios and proving that workloads are protected will also impress potential customers.

In the longer term, prospects should be looking at how they can use the cloud to protect all their workloads, from surviving physical servers through to virtual machines running on many different hypervisors.

Resellers obviously should be able to support this heterogeneous mix of workloads.

Cloud sales are about the long-term fit and the ability to support anything without imposing lock-in.

The quality of service, technical understanding and value proposition are all equally important in ensuring that, once customers move over to a cloud service, they stay there.

Ian Masters is Northern Europe sales director at Vision Solutions