Sales Insights

Technology is a marvelous thing. If you think about the business world, be it SMB, SME, Enterprise, or MSP, we all encounter technological challenges. Now, the question is, “how good do you feel when you’ve implemented technology that really solved a pain point?”

Just 2 days ago I was on the phone with a customer and I asked him the following questions. How did you look to solve your challenges? How did your search begin to find a suitable solution? Did you start online? Call your favorite account manager at your go-to reseller? Ask some friends or colleagues in the industry? The answer was not surprising. YES to all.

When it comes time to engaging with suitable solutions that may solve current challenges, what’s truly needed is the sharing of information. Today’s technology manufacturers should not be ‘sales people’. They should be acting as consultants. They should be willing to open the floor up to you. The more information that you (as a prospect) can share with technology vendors/solution providers, the more they can help determine whether or not their solution is a fit for you. By informing them of the challenges you are facing, and allowing them to address how their solution will help alleviate them, you will have the ability to make a much more informed choice.

At the end of the day, we’re all consumers. Think of how you like your buying process to be and seek out those organizations that will allow you to make the most efficient choices for your technology needs.

Those of you who know me well know that I’m a very inquisitive guy. I very much enjoy being a fly on the wall while listening to a nearby conversation that could potentially add some comedic value to my day.

I was on the commuter train early last month going to lovely downtown Toronto and became a fly to an IT conversation. It seemed as though the two gentlemen that were talking were mid-level IT management that were facing challenges with something that I talk about every day. You guessed it, backup and recovery. Their conversation revolved around the removal of tape from their environment and replacing it with disk, both for primary and long term archival. There were even talks of them archiving it off to the cloud. Raised my eyebrows as I immediately classified them as early mass adopters of the cloud computing explosion.

Rather than go into more lengthy detail of how their conversation evolved, it made me think about how I enjoy hearing the day to day challenges that IT people face, and why I like working from the solutions side of things to solve the pain points.

So I’ve compiled a short list of topics and the ultimate goal is to get your feedback. Comment and elaborate on the topics below. Create your own and fill us all in.

Do you:

- have a heavy reliance on backups?

- have the inability to consistently test and verify backup integrity?

- have outright backup failure?

- have poor or incomplete backups?

- have too many incremental backups?

- have too many full backups stored on tape offsite?

- have age and deterioration of media?

- have dated technology that cannot support the onslaught of data?

- have point solutions proving to be time consuming and ineffective in protecting your distributed network.

- have challenges with your current backup/recovery infrastructure and cannot support ongoing regulations being set forth?

- not have the ability to replicate data securely off-site?

This is just the stepping stone, and again, we want to hear from you.

At the end of every year, most businesses (well at least the better ones) will generally make a plan on how to achieve growth for the next year. More often than not, companies look to achieve this growth through new customer acquisition. Now, in order to have a thriving business, new customer acquisition is imperative. However, what about the ones (customers) you already have? For example, if you are an MSP (Managed Service Provider) offering a range of services, you need to ask yourself – how many of my existing customers are buying more than 50% of the services I offer?

Let’s look at an example of an MSP that has 5 services to offer, with 200 paying customers using 1 or more of these services. To keep this example simple, let’s say that each of the 5 services cost $100/month. Now, if less than 100 of these customers are using 3 services or less, would we not want to know why? Even if 20% of these 100 ended up buying an additional service, it would translate into $2000/month in additional revenue to the business.

Unfortunately, through past experience I’ve realized that in many cases customers don’t even know that you offer a particular type of service and hence end up buying from someone else. It’s quite a shot to the ego I know, but a good learning experience nonetheless.

At the end of the day, businesses are often surprised at the opportunity they have on hand. So remember to ask yourself – Are we maximizing the potential of our existing offerings with each and every one of our current customers? Do they know we offer additional services? Imagine the results you can achieve when you bundle such a strategy along with one of acquiring new customers!