Recently they let me escape the office and go abroad to a trade show where I got to interact with the indigenous population and hear about their problems and challenges. For the billionth time on Vladville: what your clients are buying is you.
Every day I get to talk to a bunch of people who don’t understand the cloud or even worse, willingly buy into the marketing hype that surrounds it. Instead on focusing on the solution, folks focus on the product, features and tons of other stuff that their clients both don’t care about and don’t understand.
Quick math question: What is the value of something I don’t understand, don’t care about and don’t think I need? Exactly.
Longer math question: Do you often find yourself in your office, bored, with nothing better to do? Or perhaps you’re just slammed dealing with orders, clients and tons to be done? In either situation, I’m guessing that talking to someone that is trying to tell you something is pretty much dead last on the list of things you would want to do. Now flip the table as a service provider trying to sell the cloud – someone has just decided to give you their time to sell them the cloud. Why? What have you heard about the cloud? What is driving the decision? Is everyone that is making this decision here? What are your needs and major goals with the move to the cloud?
They are still sitting there, still listening to you and still answering your questions. Which goes against just about all the sales training you’ll ever get – where you’re supposed to drown your prospect with information, confidence, pressure them to close and so on.
If time is money… What do you do for a living again?
If your clients and prospects wanted Gmail or Office 365, trust me, they wouldn’t be talking to you. They would have signed up and would have been working not sitting around chatting about stuff you want to sell them that they don’t care about.
That said, how do you make money on things you cannot charge for?
The answer is simple. Our company provides service and support end-to-end and we have several platforms that would meet your requirements. Here are the options and they vary but our support service is $20 per month per user. Whichever platform you choose is up to you and I’ll demo the few but we handle your onboarding, training, support, backups, escalation, implementation, upgrades and virtually all other IT services related to the cloud. Yes, the small monthly fee you saw advertised covers the cloud service but there is a lot more to using it effectively and we’ll make sure we take care of that while you do what you love.
Bam. Done. You’ve just made the money in the cloud.
The wiser alternative is of course to design your own bundle with your own tiers and actually structure the solution in a way that maximizes your potential revenue. But if you suck at sales and you’re dealing with clients that are more business savvy and want to be in control.. this is a way to do all that other stuff that the cloud doesn’t.
While yes the cloud is in certain cases cheaper, easier, more reliable, more scalable and more effective and backed better financially – it is only a part of the puzzle – and IT Solution Providers complete that puzzle with the services to consume the cloud properly.
Sure, smaller businesses may not need a partner for IT and may just DIY it. Larger companies don’t have dedicated IT staff and when there is a problem they either deal with it themselves or the problem cripples the business.
The only questions the prospective client has to ask themselves is if they value your service and if they trust you to do the job. It’s really no different than their hiring process for any other role – full time, part time, contractor or intern – is your task valuable to them and do they trust you to do it. So long as you can sell yourself on that – and not the irrelevant stuff – it doesn’t matter who bills, how, when and where – or how much.
Like that? Hop on over here and we’ll teach you the rest.
For the less coherent, more grammatically correct realtime insight, follow me on Twitter at