sales process blueprint - d&h - the technology company · 2018-08-07 · sales process...

This blueprint is your sales guide for finding business opportunities and solving customer problems with high value cloud-based solutions while beating the competition with winning sales strategies.

Sales Process Blueprint 2

Version 1.1 Property of KloudReadiness, LLC - Program Sponsor: D&H Distributing For Internal Use

CLOUD SERVICES OVERVIEW - What are Cloud Services? - The Customer Benefits - Solutions vs. Technology

KNOW YOUR CUSTOMER - Target Markets - Customer Profile - Business Challenges - Cloud Solutions - Elevator Pitch - Value Proposition

CLOUD SOLUTIONS ECOSYSTEM - Cloud Solution Suites - Collaboration & Messaging - Mobility Solutions - Hosted Business Applications - Virtual Infrastructure - Security & Business Continuity - Total Service Management

THE SALES PROCESS - Identifying Opportunities - Discovery Questions - Qualifying Prospects - Managing the Sales Process - Handling Objections

TOOLS AND MATERIALS - Sales Presentation - Quick Reference Guide - Qualification Scorecard - Standard Quotation - TCO/ROI Calculator

The sales process blueprint is organized into the five sections you see listed in the left hand navigation bar. The first section is an introduction to cloud solutions. It will provide you with the major marketing messages that will resonate with your sales prospects regarding the benefits of the cloud. While most IT managers understand the benefits of the cloud, business owners and executives typically do not. So your job is to eliminate their concerns and educate them on the many business benefits enabled by the cloud.

The second section will help you to better understand the potential customers for cloud solutions. We will describe the target markets and customer profiles along with their business challenges and how cloud

services can address them and deliver significant business value. The third section provides an overview of the Cloud Solutions Ecosystem and how you can use this innovative framework to provide the best blend of cloud solution suites for your customers.

The fourth section describes the sales process and provides a roadmap for success when selling cloud solutions. It will show you how to identify sales opportunities, qualify prospects, overcome objections and present winning solutions. The final section describes the tools and materials that are available to assist you during your sales campaign. They include a sales presentation, quick reference guide and tools to qualify and prepare quotations for your prospects.

Welcome Welcome to the KloudReadiness Sales Process Blueprint

This blueprint will help Cloud Solutions Providers understand the sales process and sell a wide variety of customer solutions based on cloud technologies and services provided by your company. Each section of the blueprint will take you through an essential step for understanding the value of cloud solutions and how to identify sales opportunities with your ideal customers and target markets. Read through the material carefully and refer back whenever you need to refresh your understanding.








What are Cloud Solutions?

Quite simply, cloud computing means that premise-based IT systems, applications and databases are hosted in a one or more state-of-the-art data centers managed by a cloud services provider like Microsoft for email and collaboration services, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) or Dynamics for Software as a Service (SaaS).

With the use of advanced virtualization technologies, an experienced technical support staff and a major investment in hosting facilities, a cloud services provider can usually operate more efficiently and deliver hosted IT services more cost-effectively than a company that owns and manages their own dedicated, on-premise data center.

For this reason, cloud services have become enormously popular for companies of all sizes from the small to mid-sized business to large enterprises. The cloud is universally believed to represent the future model for the delivery of IT services.

The Customer Benefits

Cloud services come in many forms – sometimes as point solutions and sometimes as fully integrated applications and services that solve a range of business challenges. A simple example of a cloud service is hosted email. By moving a company’s email service from a dedicated system located on customer premise (such as a Microsoft Exchange Server) into the cloud as a hosted service, a number of benefits are immediately realized by the customer.

Cloud Solutions Overview








First, the server itself is eliminated. No longer will a costly and complex device require floor space, electrical power, cooling, system upgrades, software patching, maintenance and repair. Email service in the cloud removes this costly overhead and replaces it with a hosted service. As a result the heavy and unpredictable capital and operating expenses associated with an on-premise solution are replaced with a predictable monthly or annual service fee that dramatically reduces Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).

Even better, the simplicity of a hosted solution and the reach of the Internet enable untethered and universal access to the service for users located anywhere and using any device. The cloud is not only a cost saver, its an enabler of mobility, information access and device independence.

Now imagine that all of the benefits associated with our simple email example are applied to any and every application or service that migrates to the cloud. The cost savings and organizational benefits become greatly multiplied.

As a Cloud Solutions Provider, your company has assembled a broad range of cloud services to sell to customers and prospects. Think of them as a collection of building blocks that you can use to solve customer problems and enable business objectives.

Later in the Sales Process Blueprint, we will acquaint you with the Cloud Solutions Ecosystem. It’s a framework for you and your customers to understand the services that are available and how to combine them with your company’s added services to deliver complete solutions that maximize customer value.








According to market research firm IDC, worldwide revenue from public IT cloud services exceeded $16 billion in 2009 and is forecast to reach $55.5 billion in 2014, representing a compound annual growth rate of 27.4%. Industry watchers and major players are predicting the next wave of cloud adoption will take place in the SMB segment, the primary market for Cloud Solutions Providers.

We’ve seen IT got through a major transformation during the last two decades. 10 to 15 years ago IT services in mid-sized companies of 50 to 500 employees were provided by internal systems supported by a small and over-worked IT staff that was, at best, reactive to the needs of the business.

These companies purchased their data systems from VARs, phone systems from interconnects and they augmented their internal IT staff with break-fix support and professional services for maintaining their hardware and software. It was a heavy capital investment for systems and a heavy operating expense for labor. Let’s call this phase “IT version 1.0”.

Then an evolution happened known as Managed Services. IT service delivery became far more efficient (and less expensive) when outsourced to an MSP. The MSP was able to achieve greater efficiency with the help of a disruptive technology called the remote monitoring and management (RMM) platform and it

http://www.idc.com/prodserv/idc_cloud.jsp








allowed them to spread their superior expertise across a very large community of companies and end-users.

The MSP model took hold in the industry because it was a win-win for customers (big OPEX savings) and managed service providers (long-term recurring revenue). Let’s call this phase “IT version 2.0”.

And now there is an even more revolutionary evolution taking hold . . . the impact of the cloud on the MSP landscape. Just like RMM, the cloud is a disruptive technology that is ushering in a new evolutionary phase of IT service delivery, only this time the change will be even more profound. Let’s call this phase “IT version 3.0”.

This phase represents the era of cloud services and the dominance of a new kind of IT service provider - the Cloud Solutions Provider (CSP). The CSP will deliver cloud solutions and may continue to offer managed services for on-premise devices. Cloud solutions will dramatically reduce capital expenses for cash conscious mid-sized businesses, a huge advantage over premise-based IT services.

As a Cloud Solutions Provider, you are in a perfect position to profit from the cloud by providing your customers with cloud-based solutions that reduce operating expenses, increase business efficiency and position your customers for growth with technologies that provide them with a competitive edge in the marketplace.

Your company can be an invaluable resource in the design, deployment and delivery of advanced and integrated cloud-based applications and services. The cloud creates a valuable role for your company as a

trusted advisor and a provider of IT services – both now and into the future.

Solutions vs. Technology

As a Cloud Solutions Provider, your company is much more than a reseller of technology. Your integrated portfolio of cloud solutions combined with your added value services will bring significant business value to your customers.

By applying your knowledge and understanding of your customer’s business needs to the deployment and delivery of cloud based IT services, you will become a valuable business partner for many years to come. Customers will rely on your company to know when and how to migrate their expenseive on-premise infrastructure into the cloud in a secure, reliable and non-distruptive way to save money and to provide greater flexibilty and scalability for future growth and expansion.

The value of this business and technology partnership will appeal to companies who seek to eliminate the high cost of hardware and software as they apply cutting edge technology tools to their business that will improve their competitivenes, productivity and cost efficiency while protecting their information assets from data loss or a security breach.

As a Cloud Solutions Provider, you are hlpe your customers to reduce expenses while putting in place advanced IT solutions that will increase business efficiency and enable business growth. This is made possible by the new paradigm of cloud computing combined with the your experience in designing and delivering advanced cloud technologies and delivering








them to customers in a reliable and cost-effective manner.








Target Markets The Small to Mid-sized Business and the Small to Medium Enterprise (SMB/SME) are a very strong target market for cloud services. The SMB/SME is interested in better uses for their capital and staff than buying and managing IT hardware and software. They desire a predictable monthly cost for their IT services.

Look for companies that think of IT as overhead to be minimized – not as their core competence. SMB/SME companies want IT to provide more business agility and enable growth with a predictable and pay-as-you-go monthly expense. Business continuity and data protection are also critical for minimizing risk and ensuring growth.

A number of vertical SMB segments can benefit greatly from cloud services including manufacturing, government, healthcare, retail, distribution and business services (e.g., legal & finance). Information-intensive segments are best.

Customer Profile Size: Up to 500 employees (15 to 100 is the sweet spot)

Locations: Single site or multi-site (multi-site is better)

Mobility: Mobile workforce (with multiple endpoint devices)

Decision Maker: Owner, CEO, COO, CFO or CIO

Know Your Customer








Stakeholders: CFO, Sales/Marketing Executive, Line of Business Manager, Operations Manager or IT Manager

Technology Adoption: Not afraid of new technology but not interested in developing in-house applications and systems.

Buying Criteria: TCO reduction, technology upgrades, productivity enhancement

Sales cycle: 1 to 3 months from qualification to close

Business Challenges Cost of IT: How to reduce the cost of IT and control ongoing expenses for hardware, software, facilities and support staff.

Complexity of IT: How to support business goals with new application development, integration and data migration while supporting users and managing multiple vendors.

Employee Productivity: How to improve communications, collaboration, information access and transaction processing.

Customer Retention: How to improve the quality of customer service and enable greater business expansion opportunities.

Operational Efficiency: How to deliver IT services with high performance and continuous availability on a 24x7 basis.

Information Security: How to protect business-critical systems, applications and data from a catastrophic event or a security breach.

Cloud Solutions To reduce the cost and complexity of IT, the customer can shift capital-intensive IT for desktops and data centers to a managed services model based on cloud services by outsourcing IT to a single reliable solutions provider. This eliminates the need for expensive IT staff and allows the reallocation of investment into growth initiatives, and simplifies the management and delivery of IT to employees.

To increase the productivity with managed cloud services, your customer can utilize collaboration and messaging services that allow employees to interact with each other from any location or device. These services can also be used to communicate more rapidly and directly with customers to improve customer relationships, satisfaction and retention.

To improve the way the business is managed, a number of hosted business applications can be operated as hosted services. They include CRM, ERP, financial accounting and industry-specific applications.

To improve the operational efficiency of IT service delivery, a qualified and experienced managed cloud services provider will design, deploy and deliver a cloud-optimized infrastructure with support services.

To ensure information security and business continuity, critical resources (data, applications and services) should be hosted in a secure, redundant and high availability data center with a comprehensive data backup and disaster recovery plan.








Your Elevator Pitch Based on your target customer described earlier, here is your elevator pitch for introducing the value of your managed cloud solutions . . .

We provide our customers with tailored IT solutions that combine the best use of cloud computing with our deep knowledge, expertise and support services to maximize the business value of IT. We manage the delivery of IT services for our customers so they can focus on their business while we focus on reducing the cost of IT and increasing its business impact.

We do this by understanding your business needs and designing IT solutions that integrate cloud services into your current business environment and then we support your users and manage the delivery of your cloud solutions. As a result, we can reduce your operating expenses and position your business for safe and secure growth by protecting your critical data assets and ensuring business continuity as we deploy IT solutions that increase the productivity of your workforce.

We would like to explain our cloud solutions strategy to you in more detail. It represents cloud technologies and hosted services that we believe are best-in-class and we have combined then with our own service and support plan to provide our customers with secure, high availability and state-of-the-art IT services.

Value Proposition The following are the key elements of a value proposition for a Cloud Solutions Provider and many or all of them can be applied to your sales prospects.

Reduce Cost and Control Expenses

Cloud solutions reduce or eliminate capital expenses for hardware and software systems and upgrades. They also reduce or eliminate monthly operating expenses for facilities, labor and system maintenance.

Increase Productivity and Business Efficiency

Employee productivity is improved by the enhanced mobility offered by the cloud and the enablement of workgroup collaboration from any location and at any time of day or night. Business efficiency is improved by new, hosted applications that automate workflows and business processes and eliminate downtime.

Reduce Business Risk

The risk of a security breach to data privacy or an attack on systems and services can be drastically reduced by hosted services in a secure, SAS 70 compliant and redundant data center. Critical information assets can be stored off-site using a highly secure and reliable cloud backup and recovery service.

Enable Growth

The cloud can enable faster growth for companies who leverage advanced technologies like smart phones, tablets, and netbooks to operate on-demand cloud-based applications and services to gain a competitive edge in the marketplace.








Cloud Solution Suites The sheer number and variety of cloud services are too numerous to count and too confusing for most companies to understand. There are thousands of hosted applications and services from which to choose and a multitude of ways to implement them in a business enviroment.

The most confused business buyers are small to mid-sized companies. They lack the time, staff and technical understanding to reap the rewards of cloud computing. At the same time, they also stand to gain the most, as cloud computing can bring the same sophisticated IT services and resources used by the largest enterprise companies on a smaller scale. Millions of small to midsized companies around the

world are intrigued but also mystified by the concept of cloud computing. They are ready to spend money to unravel this mystery because, for them, an investment in IT solutions that save money and enable growth and profitability is a necessary investment.

That, in a nutshell, is your market opportunity. Your value to the customer is to guide them through the maze of cloud services and help them to implement the best IT solutions offering the highest impact on their business by leveraging the cloud.

How will you do this? By using a solutions framework to group best-fit services into solution suites for your target customer set, then by wrapping your own professional and managed services around them, and finally by using them to solve business problems.

Cloud Solutions Ecosystem








As a cloud solutions provider, your company has established an ecosystem of partners, technologies and services that are unified into deployment-ready IT solutions that maximize the business value of the cloud for your customers. Your ecosystem represents the best-in-class cloud computing services and is combined with your best practices for cloud service deployment (e.g., professional services and project management) and service delivery (e.g., managed services for user support, resource administration and infrastructure management).

The ecosystem is based on six solution suites that address the major trends of cloud computing. The

first and most fundamental of these solutions is using the cloud to improve your customer’s collaboration and messaging capabilities to dramatically improve the workflow and employee productivity. These services can be extended to remote and mobile workers as well. You may also offer hosted business applications such as CRM, ERP and financial accounting systems. Along with hosted business applications, you may also extend IT infrastructure into the cloud with virtual CPU and storage resources.

All applications and databases can be secured and protected from data loss with an information security and business continuity solution. Finally, your








managed and professional services wrap around these solutions with an approach called Total Service Management. In this section, we will have a closer

look at each one of these cloud solution suites.

Collaboration and Messaging The cloud turns mobile devices into web portals that can put a variety of hosted services directly in the hands of the end user. There are many productivity-boosting cloud services that come in the form of application suites to help employees collaborate more easily and effectively.

Workgroup collaboration creates an environment

where employees can create and share documents such as proposals and contracts, presentations to prospective clients, operating budgets and project plans, contact information for customers and suppliers and calendars for scheduling key meetings or reserving company resources.

All of these collaboration services work together to increase worker efficiency and they translate to faster business growth and higher customer satisfaction. Businesses will realize the full productivity benefits of collaboration through cloud computing when they engage with a Cloud Solutions Provider to deploy and deliver a cloud-based productivity solution that is fully optimized to improve the workflow of their business.

The customer will realize the full productivity benefits of collaboration through cloud computing when they deploy a solution that is fully optimized to improve the workflow of their business. Cloud Solutions Providers experts at making this happen. CSPs understand the technology and the best practices for optimizing these tools for improving organizational efficiency. This is done during the deployment phase with services to streamline the installation and setup of all user accounts as well as to integrate these services and migrate the customer’s existing data to the cloud.

After deployment, the CSP provides monthly support services that include a friendly and responsive help desk and administration of user accounts. The CSP can also select a service plan that includes quarterly operational reviews and virtual CIO services.








Be sure that you have a detailed understanding of the professional and managed services offered by your company for deployment of cloud services and post-deployment support services. You will want to map them to the needs of the customer as you learn about their business challenges during the discovery process.

Mobility Solutions As the era of the cloud is unfolding, so is the era of the mobile device. These two technologies are advancing together in a way that is redefining IT services. Smart phones, tablets and netbooks are amazing new technologies that companies are beginning to use in their business and their employees are bringing to the IT environment.

But these new technologies are a double edge sword. On the one hand they offer significant advantages over traditional IT services that use expensive servers and desktop devices by reducing cost and increasing flexibility. On the other hand, they bring a new form of risk to the business.

How will the customer control access to critical information on devices that are outside of their firewall? How can they be sure their data will be protected from data loss if a mobile device is lost or stolen?

To successfully exploit the latest cloud services and mobile devices, companies will need an expert technology partner and a trusted advisor. As a CSP, your company understands how to enable mobile cloud solutions in a secure manner using the latest mobile devices. Your experience comes from the services that you provide to your clients every day. You know how to protect sensitive information from unauthorized access while extending the reach of the IT environment outside the walls of the business.

If you offer deployment services to install and configure secure access to cloud services, then you are in position to add significant value to hosted business applications and collaboration services. And if you help the customer to select the right endpoint devices you are offering value as a trusted advisor for an important technology evaluation and purchasing decision.

After deployment, you can provide end-user support and manage mobile devices for customers by ensuring








the proper synchronization of data with centralized databases and simplifying the user experience with single sign on technology and desktop interfaces. As you probe for information during your discovery process, be sure to get a complete understanding of the customer’s mobility requirements in these areas.

Hosted Business Applications Complementing the collaboration services delivered via the cloud, companies are also migrating their business applications to the cloud. Hosted software applications combined with online database storage can dramatically reduce cost and increase business productivity.

Business software can be delivered to end-users more cost-effectively using a Software as a Services (SaaS) deployment model than by running local copies of expensive software on servers and desktops located on the customer’s premise. Under the SaaS model, software revisions are always kept up to date eliminating the expense and disruption of upgrades.








Also, hosted applications are available on-demand to any user with appropriate access rights and their data is instantly updated in a secure, centralized and backed-up location. Common examples of hosted business applications include CRM, ERP, and financial accounting software packages. The challenge for the customer is how to migrate legacy systems to the cloud and how to operate their hosted business applications with the necessary security, performance, availability and user support.

As a CSP, your company will bring the necessary expertise to migrate and manage the customer’s business applications with minimal disruption during the transition and maximum value over the long term.

You can provide deployment services to install and configure all of the user accounts for hosted business applications while integrating the security controls and user privileges. You may also offer migration services for moving legacy systems to a cloud-based environment.

After deployment your company can provide user support and administer all moves, adds and changes associated with hosted business applications. You may also offer premium support services such as vendor management for selecting, budgeting and interfacing with a range of SaaS providers. You can provide a quarterly review of workflow and operational efficiency using their hosted applications and offer CIO services that provide recommendations for deploying new hosted applications or optimizing existing ones.








Virtual Infrastructure Over time, your customer may wish to move their entire premise-based IT infrastructure into a virtual environment in the cloud. When this happens, all of their servers can be decommissioned and the operational expenses required for space, power and support staff can be reinvested in other business-building initiatives.

The benefits of virtual IT infrastructure include the elimination of capital expenses for server hardware, the reduction of operating costs for system upgrades or maintenance and a simplified process for provisioning new users and allocating resources to support their needs.

Virtualized IT infrastructure brings a highly flexible “pay-as-you-go” model in which the customer only pays for the virtual data center resources required and they can scale them up or down according to the needs of the business.

In order to realize the full benefit of virtualizing your IT infrastructure, they will need the help of a trusted and experienced Cloud Solutions Provider to manage their migration, administer the resources, optimize resource utilization, minimize costs and support the users.

As a CSP, your company can develop a migration plan ensuring that project goals are realized, deployment milestones are met, resources are properly utilized and deployment schedule is kept on track.

You may want to start with some basic services such an online storage for users and backup storage capacity to archive an off-site copy of critical on-premise databases. Work with your customer to plan the most appropriate path for their business and add the necessary deployment and monthly support services to meet their needs.

One approach is to formalize a Cloud Migration Plan with a standard set of major milestones to conduct your discovery and assessment process and a staged rollout of services with checkpoints along the way.

After deployment, you provide traditional help desk and user administration services, fault & performance management for virtual resources and premium services like vendor management and CIO services.








Security & Business Continuity Information security is a multi-dimensional problem. It goes well beyond user access control and extends to areas like intrusion detection and prevention for business applications and databases, spam filtering for email services and virus, spyware or malware protection and removal for systems and devices.

Beyond these security measures, your customer’s information assets must also be protected from accidental data loss due to user error, system failures or catastrophic events to ensure business continuity. Therefore, traditional security methods must be accompanied by the right data backup and disaster recovery regimen.

Finally, different industries impose different regulatory and compliance measures for protecting the privacy of customer data. Therefore, a security and business continuity solution that is tailored for the needs of your customer must include any industry-specific requirements for managing their data.

As business information systems move to the cloud, security and business continuity must be ensured. As a CSP, your company will have identified the most appropriate technologies and processes for securing cloud-based IT solutions delivered to your target customers and protecting their business from data loss as they transition to the cloud.

Your company can provide a number of services to address these challenges including email security, endpoint security, information security and business continuity services. You can offer a variety of deployment services to customize and integrate these solutions to meet your customer’s business requirements and to suite their IT environment.

After deployment, you can provide traditional help desk support for any end-user facing applications and monitor the various security systems and services as well as providing remediation for any security threats that are detected or data loss events that transpire.

Security and business continuity is an opportunity for you to turn a common concern about the security of cloud computing into a positive selling point that will help you win more deals and offer additional chargeable services at the same time.








Total Service Management When all is said and done, all elements of a cloud-based IT solution must be delivered to customers and their employees as a secure, reliable, highly available and highly responsive on-line service. In this section of the Sales Process Blueprint, we have described a number of professional services that you can provide to customers during the deployment phase. We have also described a number of support services that you can provide on an ongoing basis.

After you determine the most appropriate and cost-effective deployment services, work closely with your customer to match your services offerings with their

unique business requirements. Then propose the most appropriate and cost-effective deployment and post-deployment support services that will be billed on either a one-time, monthly or annual basis.

Your support services may be packaged as a tiered support plan designated as a Silver, Gold or Platinum services. The Silver plan often provides a complete end-user support plan with resource administration and coverage during normal business hours. The Gold plan builds on this plan by adding quarterly reviews of service utilization, service quality and performance levels with recommendations for enhancing service delivery. It may also extend the hours of coverage to include evening hours and Saturday coverage as well as an accelerated response time commitment.

The Platinum plan is usually the highest level of service and builds on the Gold plan by adding premium services like vendor management and CIO services as well as 7x24 support coverage and a high priority response time. Your CIO services can guide the business owner and his or her IT staff through a confusing array of constantly changing technologies to make the best use of cloud computing in their organization. It can help them to realize even greater value from their IT investment by following your recommended strategies for using new technologies.

Regardless of the support plan a customer may choose, your primary goal should always be providing a total service management approach that meets the needs of the customer, manages the IT experience of the user and maximizes the value of the IT investment








to the business. . Identifying Opportunities

In the “Know Your Customer” section of this sales guide, we covered the target markets and customer profile for managed cloud services. We described the business challenges and potential cloud solutions that you can offer by combining cloud-based applications and services with your own company’s managed and professional services.

In this section, we are going to talk about the sales process – from an unqualified sales lead to closing a deal for a newly acquired customer. We will cover ways for you to generate leads and identify opportunities, what questions to ask during the discovery and lead qualification process, how to manage a pipeline of sales opportunities and some strategies for handling objections along the way.








Let’s begin with some ways to generate leads and identify new opportunities for selling cloud solutions. If your company is a VAR, MSP or CSP with an installed customer base, then the shortest and least expensive path to generating new sales for cloud solutions is just a phone call away. You should start by leveraging the existing relationship, good will and credibility that you have established with your current customers.

Conduct an outreach campaign to all of your current customers to introduce new cloud services that you have added to your portfolio new professional and support services that you have wrapped around existing cloud solutions. You should do this in a very consultative manner by assuming the role of a cloud solutions expert and educator. After all, as a Cloud Solutions Provider, you are one of the few companies providing a comprehensive cloud solutions strategy. You are more than a reseller of cloud services – you

provide solutions to business problems using the cloud. You are not meeting with your customer to sell them something new - although that may be the outcome - you are meeting with them to explore the possibility of improving the value of their IT environment by reducing cost and improving business efficiency.

Customer Outreach Campaign

How will you bring this consultative message to your customer base? There are a number of ways you can build an outreach campaign to your customers. Your outreach can be as formal or informal as you like. Perhaps you want to simply place a phone call to the owner of the company and schedule a face-to-face meeting in the customer’s office or have a casual conversation over lunch. If your customer base is small, the personal touch is usually the best way to go.

The Sales Process








Or perhaps you want to take a more formal approach to communicating the value of managed cloud services to your customer base. Here is a list of some of the more common approaches for executing a customer outreach campaign.

• Use telemarketing and direct mail • Conduct educational webinars/seminars • Publish a customer newsletter article • Create a customer referral program

Lets look at each of these options. One very common approach is to run a direct mail campaign with telemarketing follow-up to set appointments with your customers. The purpose of this meeting is to introduce your new services and to offer an educational overview of cloud solutions and how they have brought benefits to companies that are similar to your customer’s line of business. You will want to be prepared for this meeting by studying your customer presentation carefully in advance of the meeting. A customer presentation designed for Cloud Solutions Providers is provided in the Tools and Materials section of this Sales Process Blueprint.

You can take this approach one step further and hold a series of online webinars or ground-based seminars to present the your approach for delivering cloud solutions to multiple customers at the same time. You can use the same customer presentation described above for these webinar and seminar event presentations.

A third approach is to announce your new service in a customer newsletter. Be sure that your newsletter article describes the nature of the services, the business

value that can be realized and then provide a “call-to-action” that will generate an inquiry by the reader as well as a follow-up action by you or someone in your company.

An additional outreach idea is a customer referral program. You may want to create an incentive program for your customers to refer other business owners in their personal and professional network to you. Ideas for a referral reward include a cash incentive, executive gift, a credit applied to service fees or a charitable donation for an organization in your local community.

New Prospect Lead Generation

After you have completed your customer base outreach campaign, it will be time to turn your attention to generating sales leads for new prospects. There is no magic formula for lead generation. However, it doesn’t have to be hard or expensive to build a lead funnel to support your sales effort. It just requires some consistent and dedicated effort to keep a steady stream of leads flowing. We will show you how to combine some very easy and cost-effective lead generation activities with a proven lead qualification process for producing the highest quality leads to pursue.

Lets start by covering some ways to generate leads and then we will cover the lead qualification process. Here are some of the most effective methods for generating new prospect leads – two of them involve activities used in your customer outreach campaign, so you will already be familiar with the approach. They are followed by two additional lead generation








approaches that are different.

• Use telemarketing and direct mail • Hold educational webinars/seminars • Attend industry events & conferences • Leverage your website & internet marketing

In your customer outreach campaign, you may have used a telemarketing and direct mail campaign to canvas a database of customer contacts. Sending out an email with a follow-up phone call is a good way to set appointments with new prospects, just as it was effective for current customers. However, as you reach out to new sales prospects, you will not have the benefit of an existing relationship with a decision-maker and your company may be completely unknown to him or her. So your introductory email must be engaging and sharply focused on the business benefits of cloud computing. You will need a “door-opener” to get that all-important first appointment. Don’t worry, cloud computing is probably the hottest technology topic in the world of IT at the moment and realizing business value from the cloud is on the mind of every business owner and IT manager. You can use the same presentation that you used during your customer outreach campaign for these one-to-one meetings.

You can also use this presentation to hold educational webinars and ground seminars. In fact, you may decide that your direct mail and telemarketing campaign should be used to invite multiple decision-makers to attend one of these events. This will allow you to reach more suspects in a shorter span of time.

And because you have delivered your cloud solutions presentation many times before in the friendly and familiar environment of your current customers, you will be more than adequately prepared to become an expert presenter to your new suspects and prospects.

Attending industry events and conferences is a great strategy for building your network of business contacts. Many of these newly established contacts will become suspects and prospects, while others will be a source of new introductions. If your company rents exhibit space at the event, be sure to look for an opportunity to present your educational cloud solutions presentation to an audience of attendees. The benefits of speaking at an industry event include building awareness and brand identity for your company as well as generating interest for your solutions among the attendees.

Finally, be sure to leverage your website and the many Internet marketing techniques available to drive web traffic and generate website inquiries. Make sure that a full description of the business value of your cloud solutions is posted on your website. If you have a press service, issue a press release over the news wire and post the release on your website, newsfeed and social media outlets. All of these promotional activities work together to get the word out and generate leads.

How to Indentify Sales Opportunities

The best way to identify new opportunities is to understand and address the primary business concerns of the companies in your target markets and then qualify them as viable sales opportunities. Ask yourself… What is their pain? What problems are they








trying to solve? What is motivating them to buy? You must gain an understanding of what triggers their buying decision. These decision drivers, often called impending events, can include any of the following:

• Rapid expansion of users or the roll-out of new branch office locations

• An expiring service contract with another provider

• A major event like a service outage or system downtime

• Support for new applications or services that are coming online

• Cost reduction and better cost controls over IT and network resources

We have found that since the economic downturn, almost every business sector is motivated to reduce and/or control costs in the area of IT and network services. Increasingly, businesses of all sizes are looking to outsource the management of technology while taking advantage of new applications and resource virtualization. These market conditions could not be better for managed cloud service providers!

Focusing on strategies for reducing the cost of information systems and technology management would be an excellent customer concern to focus on when prospecting for new opportunities. It’s not the only topic you should consider, but it’s a very good place to start. Here are some others.

Your managed cloud services will:

• Allow customers to cost-effectively modernize their IT infrastructure

• Increase employee productivity and streamline both company and customer communications

• Raise business efficiency with improvements to processes and organizational workflow

• Reduce the company’s operating expenses and/or capital outlay for IT services

• Be supported by technology expertise that most customers do not possess internally

These are all important business benefits that can be enabled by your managed service. As a managed cloud solutions sales representative, your job will be to identify the pain that your prospects are experiencing and provide a solution that will take that pain away.

Discovery Questions When you meet with your prospect, don’t just present slides and don’t just sell services. Ask good questions and be a good listener. More often than not, you will successfully make the sale by understanding the business goals and the IT challengers that are confronting your decision-maker. Use the information that you gather during the discovery process as the basis for your proposed managed cloud solution.

Here are some discovery questions that are designed to frame a consultative sales dialogue between you and your prospect:

1. Do you struggle to deploy new technology while supporting users or legacy systems within your operating budget?








2. Do you allocate more IT resources for maintenance & support than for business or growth initiatives?

3. Do you have to manage multiple technology vendors and find it difficult to resolve problems that cross technology domains?

4. Do you have sufficient staff to manage IT expansion as your business grows

5. Do your IT resource requirements fluctuate with business trends?

6. Do you have to manage remote users and remote office locations?

7. Do you have a mobile workforce and do you have to manage multiple devices such as smart phones, tablets and laptop computers?

8. Do these users need to collaborate, share documents, process transactions or access information remotely?

9. Do you have any hosted services such as an exchange server (for email, contacts and calendars) or applications (for collaboration, document sharing and office productivity)?

10. When do you plan to modernize your IT infrastructure (servers, storage and network)

11. Do you have all of your centrally housed or remotely distributed data backed up?

12. What would happen to your business if you had a catastrophic data loss or a security breach?








Qualifying Prospects We talk about the lead funnel and sales pipeline as separate entities because having a dividing line to separate how you measure marketing and sales effectiveness is very helpful. It allows you to apply marketing metrics to the programs designed to generate leads separate from the sales metrics you will want to use to assess the progress of moving opportunities through the sales pipeline.

So, while they are fundamentally related to one

another as the fuel that drives your business, they represent different processes with different criteria for success measurement. The lead funnel is used to track the lead generation results from your marketing programs. It’s called a funnel because at the entrance to the funnel, you pour in all of the unqualified leads generated by all of your marketing programs.

As your leads move through the qualification process, they will be classified according to rigid criteria and their numbers will diminish as you separate the not-








so-good leads from the pretty good leads from the

really great leads.

Managing your lead funnel will provide a wealth of information about the quality of your marketing campaigns. More importantly, it ensures that only the highest quality leads will survive the qualification process and be converted into sales opportunities.

After all, you don’t want to chase unqualified or poorly qualified opportunities. Your efforts should be focused on deals that have the highest potential to close in the shortest period of time. Managing your

lead funnel with an effective qualification process will

prevent wasted sales efforts and improve your sales efficiency overall. The illustration above shows the lead funnel and the qualification process in action. On the left hand side of the diagram are the marketing programs that create leads for the funnel. Each program might be targeted at a different audience and make use of a different type of campaign. Perhaps one campaign is a webinar, another is a telemarketing campaign and a third is web leads from registrations on your website. There are many types of marketing programs and lead sources that feed the funnel.








As sales leads are generated by marketing programs, they enter the funnel as unqualified leads. They should be immediately classified into three categories by going through your qualification process.








The three categories are:

• Disqualified leads – All leads that fail to meet the most basic qualification criteria

• Qualified Leads –All leads that meet your minimum lead qualification criteria

• Highly Qualified Leads – All leads that meet your strictest lead qualification criteria

Pretty basic, don’t you agree? This approach allows you to group your leads into three buckets so that you can (a) avoid wasting any time on poor quality leads, (b) focus your sales resources on the best leads while they are hot, and (c) take all of the rest of your leads that meet your minimum criteria and put them through a lead nurturing program. Many of these “marketing leads” will become highly qualified leads down the road.

After you create a lead generation program with appropriate follow-through you will begin to generate responses from your campaign that must be qualified. It is important that lead qualification becomes a process that is applied consistently and categorizes your leads accurately. Leads must be sorted into buckets as either high quality actionable sales leads or as marketing leads that will become potential future sales leads after a lead-nurturing program. Otherwise they should be disqualified and not pursued.

We have developed a formula for qualifying your leads and it employs a rating system based on our Qualifiers That Matter for measuring lead quality. If you apply this rating system to the leads generated by your

campaign, then you will know exactly how many qualified leads were produced and which qualified leads you should pursue first. Another benefit of using the 5 qualifiers is to remind your sales people to ask the right questions and to think objectively about the viability of winning business from their sales prospects. This qualification process is exactly that. . .a process. You can’t ask five questions and then be done. You must constantly probe for new insights into each of the 5 qualifiers throughout the sales cycle. With that in mind, following are the 5 qualifiers used in our lead qualification process.

Qualifier #1: Managed Services Appetite or “Pain Level”

The first thing you will want to determine is your prospect’s appetite for managed services. No matter what form of managed services you offer, there is a fundamental value that you provide to small and mid-sized companies: the value of managed services - your prospect will either recognize this value or not.

How much pain is your prospect experiencing? If they are not feeling pain, then they will not be motivated to make a change. Pain comes in many forms so you, or your rep, will have to do some detective work to identify it. The prospect may be feeling the pain of an IT environment that is out of control with lots of user complaints, system downtime, slow network performance or poor integration between applications.

Another form of pain might be spiraling hardware and software costs or the number of technical employees








needed to support them. These costs might be in the form of capital expenses to acquire new technology or operating expenses to keep everything running.

Still another source of pain might be the need for expertise to help them develop an IT strategy to support the growth of their business. If their information systems are not keeping pace with the needs of the business, then the business will suffer.

In addition to identifying the source of the pain your prospect is feeling, you must gauge the level of pain as well. What is impact of the pain on their company? What is the level of urgency to find a solution for this pain? If you understand the nature and severity of your prospect’s pain, you will be prepared to formulate the best solution, and to position the value of that solution at the same time.

Then rate your prospect on a scale of 1 to 5, where a score of 1 represents minor pain with minimum business impact and a score of 5 represents severe pain and significant impact. Use a score of 2, 3 or 4 if the pain level is somewhere in the middle.

Qualifier #2: Solution Fit:

The next criterion used to qualify your prospect is to assess the value of your managed service as a potential solution that will remove the pain identified in the first qualification step. Resist the urge to break into a full presentation of your products and services. This is not the time for presenting. This is a time to be asking critical questions and listening.

You should ask just enough questions about their current environment, and how they would like to improve it, to allow you to objectively measure the value of your solution for their business. You are trying to understand how well your value proposition lines up with their need for managed services.

In some cases you will find the matchup is very strong and compelling. In other cases you will find the matchup is not as compelling. Be objective. Wishful thinking will not help you close a sale…focusing your time on prospects that have a need and desire for your service will. Be flexible and open-minded. This matchup will be different for each selling situation and over time you and your reps will become very proficient in asking the right questions to evaluate this matchup.

Be honest with yourself and you will avoid wasting time pushing a solution that is not highly valued by your prospect. Then devote your time and energy to those opportunities representing a great fit between their pain and your ability to remove that pain with a managed services solution.

Do some very surgical information gathering with a few well-placed needs analysis questions. Then assess the value of your managed service as a solution that will address those needs and eliminate the pain level associated with them.

Rate your prospect on a scale of 1 to 5. Assign a score of 1 to represent low business value and a weak alignment of your value proposition to their pain.








Use a score of 5 to represent perfect alignment of your value proposition and use a score of 2, 3 or 4 to rate your prospect somewhere in between.

Qualifier #3: Business Value:

The next step in the qualification process is to understand the financial position of your opportunity in as much detail as you can. Early on in the discussion, you should determine the source of funding available for a new IT or network infrastructure project. Is there a monthly budget to cover the cost of managed services or will you have to cost-justify your solution by showing a reduction in expenses? What does their current IT environment look like? Is there a data center with in-house systems and software in place? What are the total monthly operating expenses for this infrastructure? How big is the technical staff that supports it? Does the current staffing level support future growth?

Of course, you won’t be asking all of these questions during the opening conversation. As the sales process develops, you will gradually develop a clear understanding of the current environment that will enable you to demonstrate the financial benefits of your proposed solution.

Let’s summarize the financial facts you are going to gather. First, you want to understand their ability to pay for your service. Second, you want to determine the cost structure of their current IT or network environment, including labor, and how it will be projected to support future growth. Third, you want to develop an ROI model that quantifies the value of

your managed service solution as an attractive alternative to their current environment. You should begin your fact-finding during the qualification process to test your prospect’s appetite for managed services.

If they are philosophically opposed to managed services even in the face of a strong financial benefit, then don’t waste your time pushing a rock up a hill. On the other hand, if they appreciate the cost-benefit analysis that you are undertaking, you will build tremendous credibility during the sales process and this will set you apart from your competitors.

Qualify your prospects by asking questions about whether or not they have a budget for managed services. Determine if they are interested in seeing a cost comparison of in-house infrastructure versus managed services and/or virtual data center resources.

Then rate your prospect on a scale of 1 to 5. Assign a score of 1 if there is no visible ROI or budget available and no interest or desire for managed services. Assign a score of 5 if there is a visible ROI and budget available for managed services and a score of 2, 3 or 4 if there is no budget for managed services, but you see real potential to cost justify your solution.

Qualifier #4: Decision Process:

The next qualification criterion is to understand your prospect’s decision process. This includes determining who makes the final decision versus who are the recommenders, influencers and stakeholders. Recommenders, influencers and stakeholders have a








less critical role than a decision-maker but you cannot overlook them on your way to the top.

During the sales process, you must address the needs of all constituents with some aspect of your solution to strengthen your position and to avoid an unexpected veto from any one of them. Over time you will develop a thorough understanding of the company’s organization, what players are involved in the decision process and each person’s role in making the final selection.

Start by identifying the role of the person who responded to your campaign. Why did this person respond? Was he or she simply gathering information on behalf of someone else, or was there something about your marketing message that resonated? Is this person your ultimate decision-maker, or will he or she become your internal advocate as the buying process unfolds? Figure this out right away and plan your sales campaign accordingly.

Again, don’t try to answer every question on the first call. Continue the process by understanding the role of the responder in the decision process and identifying the ultimate decision-maker. Your objective is to get in front of the decision-maker as soon as possible and develop a relationship with this person. If the responder is not the decision maker, then ask for a meeting with both the responder and the decision-maker at the same time. This will allow you to directly engage both players.

You may find that you are dealing with a gatekeeper - someone who is shielding the decision-maker from

pesky sales reps. If that is the case, then use the information you have already gathered about pain, solution value and financial benefits to propose a meeting with the decision-maker to discuss these concepts in more detail. Suggest that you will need this meeting in order to prepare the most accurate proposal possible. Then meet with all other players in the process to understand and address their concerns as well.

Understanding the decision process is fundamental to managing a successful sales campaign. It starts during the very first call when you are qualifying your campaign responder. Learn this person’s role and why they responded to your campaign. Then identify the decision-maker and work towards a meeting with that person as soon as possible.

Rate your prospect on a scale of 1 to 5. Assign a score of 1 if a gatekeeper is blocking you, a score of 5 if you are talking to the decision-maker and a score of 2, 3 or 4 if you are talking to a stakeholder, influencer or a technical recommender and in that order.

Qualifier #5: Timeframe to Close:

The last criterion for qualifying your prospect is to determine when they plan to make their final buying decision. Understanding their decision timeframe will be a key factor for you in prioritizing the time you spend on this prospect versus others. A prospect with a decision timeframe of 9 months is far less attractive to you than a prospect making a decision in 30 days – regardless of the order size. As they say, a bird in hand is worth two in the bush. Use this qualifier to








establish a threshold for classifying a prospect as a sales lead versus a marketing lead.

Decision time frames up to 6 months can be classified as actionable sales leads. This is the longest timeframe you should allow for prospects that will demand valuable sales time and effort to close. Decision time frames of 6 months or more should be classified as marketing leads and put into a lead nurturing program to be cultivated as future sales leads.

Remember, everything takes longer in practice than in theory so be conservative in estimating the length of a sales cycle for any opportunity. Regardless of what the prospect tells you, assume there will be extra time required to justify the solution, allocate the budget, secure all of the approvals and negotiate the final contract. However, if you are diligent in working the details associated with all of the qualification steps, then your time to close will be accelerated.

During your initial qualification call, get the best understanding you can for the prospect’s decision time frame. Estimating the time to close a deal is difficult at the very beginning of the sales process, so listen to what the prospect has to say and then factor in your own experience and intuition. The sales cycle can go very fast if your prospect has a very high level of pain or a deadline to hit. On the other hand, a lack of clear objectives, a need to analyze multiple alternatives or a decision-by-committee can add weeks or months to the sales process.

To recap the five qualifiers that matter when measuring lead quality include:

• Qualifier #1: Managed Services Appetite or “Pain Level” Determine your prospect’s appetite for managed services

• Qualifier #2: Solution Fit Assess the value of your managed service as a potential solution that will remove the pain identified in the first qualification step

• Qualifier #3: Business Value Understand the financial position of your opportunity and the source and timing related to funding

• Qualifier #4: Decision Process Understand your prospect’s decision process; who is the decision maker vs. the recommenders, influencers and stakeholders.

• Qualifier #5: Timeframe to Close Determine the timeframe for your prospect’s final buying decision

Use these qualification criteria and your lead qualification scorecard to rate every unqualified lead that is generated by your marketing initiatives.








Managing the Sales Process Now that you understand how to manage your lead funnel, you will have full control over the quality of leads that become part of your sales opportunity pipeline. The sales pipeline is the most fundamental sales management and revenue-forecasting tool at your disposal. It is meant to be a representation of your sales cycle, so you must do a good job of defining the stages of the sales cycle and the probability of closing a deal based on its stage.

Each stage of the sales cycle is assigned a win probability that is appropriate for that stage. As your sales opportunities move through the sales cycle, they are tracked as deals that progress through the sales cycle one stage at a time. Just like the lead funnel, the number of opportunities in the sales pipeline will diminish as they either move forward or fall out of the pipeline. As we know, many deals will be delayed, unfunded or lost to the competition along the way. However, many deals will also survive all of these obstacles and move closer toward a final sale.








For this reason, we have developed a simple four-stage model of the sales process to define how many deals are in what stage. The definitions of these four stages are as follows:

• Stage 1: A quotation has been prepared which means that you have conducted a discovery process with the prospect and have defined a solution that will deliver business value to the customer. We suggest rating this stage at a 20% win probability. On average you will win one in five of your stage 1 opportunities.

• Stage 2: Your deal has made the short list. This doesn’t have to be a formal bidding process with a short list of selected vendors, but this stage should reflect a situation where funding for a solution has been approved and you are a realistic contender for the business. We suggest rating this stage at 50%. On average you will win half of your stage 2 opportunities.

• Stage 3: You are the selected vendor. This is equivalent to getting a verbal order. It does not mean the deal is done. There is often a contract review, price negotiation or configuration refinement to complete before there are signed agreements. We suggest rating this stage at 75%. Deals can still go away at this stage, or get delayed, but you should close at least three out of four of your stage 3 deals.

• Stage 4: You have a signed contract. Congratulations! Now you can celebrate. You have closed the deal and brought signed paperwork

back to your company. Now you just have to get the order accepted and booked (assuming everything was priced and configured accurately). We suggest rating this stage at 90%. On average nine out of ten stage 4 deals are accepted within the time frame projected by your pipeline.

This simple approach to defining your sales process can become a very powerful and effective tool for projecting your sales 30, 60 and 90 days out. It provides a logical framework for discussing deals in a consistent manner. It creates transparency in the sales process between the sales rep and his or her manager.

As you begin to manage your sales process by tracking deals in the pipeline, you will gain extremely valuable knowledge about your sales productivity. At any point in time you will know the total value of your pipeline in terms of deal volume and total revenue. You will know how these values compare to your baseline performance. And you will know when you need to add more leads to build up your pipeline of future sales opportunities.

Finally, by tracking your deals in this manner you will be able to measure your sales efficiency in a number of ways. The most obvious metric you will want to monitor is your close ratio. What percentage of the deals in your pipeline do you close every month or quarter? Does it vary by the size of the deal?

You can also track your conversion rates from stage to stage. Recall that we provided you with recommended values for the win probabilities for each stage (20%, 50%, 75% and 90% respectively).








These are very general percentages and are only meant to provide a rough estimate for the value of your pipeline.

Multiplying the win probability by the revenue associated with the deals in each stage will give you a factored revenue value that provides a general estimate of the value of closed deals within a specified time frame. You can adjust these win probabilities based on your own history to get a more accurate projection of future revenue.

This approach to managing the sales process is used by some of the largest and most successful high technology businesses – including both vendors and IT service providers. It’s an approach that aligns your revenue goals with your lead generation objectives. It provides a common language for understanding the status of every deal in the pipeline. It will provide you with the indicators you need to determine whether you are on a path to meeting your objectives or falling behind the pace and need some assistance.

Handling Objections Handling objections is a natural part of the sales process. Whenever a prospect is raising a concern in the form of an objection, they are really providing you with an opportunity to address their concern in a very positive manner - turning a potential threat to your sale into a potential reason to buy. So whenever you get an objection, start by validating the concern and then clearly and confidently provide your response.

If there is a concern about, or a request for, something that your company cannot provide, then be open and honest with the customer. When it comes to making a commitment to the customer, always “under-promise and over-deliver”. We think you will find that for the most part, your managed cloud solution will be more comprehensive than the competition and will provide stronger security, faster performance and higher availability as well.

Here are some typical objections that you might hear from prospects during the sales process. After each one, we have provided a possible response that you can provide to address each concern.

Objection: Our in-house staff is handling all of our support needs at the present time.

Your Response: That may be true, but with cloud services you can use those resources for new business-building initiatives while you leverage the cloud to reduce cost and increase scalability.

Objection: Will your company really be able to support all of our cloud services and their support requirements?

Your Response: Without question – Cloud-based applications are constantly managed by the hosting provider using their expert operational and support staff. Our company manages all of these vendor relationships for you. Then we add our experienced staff providing you with a tailored support plan, a single point of contact and a local presence as well.








Objection: Your solution seems expensive – Why should I pay a fee for services every month whether I need them or not?

Your Response: If you compare our fees on an annual basis with the cost of internal IT resources and facilities, I think you will find that we offer a much lower total cost of ownership. Shall I calculate this for you?

Objection: How can I be sure that my data will be secure in the cloud?

Your Response: Our cloud vendor partners operate highly secure and redundant data centers that comply with strict industry standards such as SAS70 Type II. Your data will very likely be more secure in these facilities than in your own data center.

Objection: If the cloud goes down, all of our systems will be down – this seems like a risky approach to me.

Your Response: All of our cloud vendor partners have a long track record for delivering reliable hosting services. Microsoft for example maintains a 99.9% uptime rating. They achieve this by operating multiple redundant data centers to ensure continuous operation.

Objection: We are considering purchasing our cloud services directly from the hosting company to save money – what is the downside of this approach?

Your Response: As a Cloud Solutions Provider, our value is to provide services that tailor these applications to your business processes, integrate them with the proper security and data backup services, administer user accounts and support your user community with our help desk service and also provide a single point of responsibility for all of your IT solutions. This allows you focus on your business and not spend time and resources focusing on technology.

Objection: What if you go out of business in a year or two – what happens to our data and applications?

Your Response: Your data, systems and applications will be safe. Think of us as the IT department that you didn’t have to hire and think of our cloud services vendor partners as the data center that you didn’t have to build - only we provide more experience and our partners provide world-class facilities without a heavy capital investment.








Sales Presentation

In this last section of the Sales Process Blueprint we will describe some of the sales tools and materials that are available to help you conduct a consultative and solutions-oriented sales campaign. We will start with your standard sales presentation that you can give to new sales prospects. This presentation is a 15-slide overview of your company, its capabilities and your approach to providing IT solutions based on cloud services and traditional managed services.

The presentation is scripted so that you can study the key messages that should be delivered for each of the slides. Be sure to adapt the presentation to accurately reflect the offerings of your company. Our goal is to provide you with a starting point that has the right

ingredients for an effective customer presentation and will serve as a very solid foundation for you to deliver your own personalized version.

Following the presentation, we will then cover some additional materials to assist you during the sales process. A Quick Reference guide for you to keep with you at all times will serve as a reminder for the key points to raise in your sales meetings with new prospects. To qualify your new sales prospects, we have included a Lead Qualification Scorecard that you can use to quickly and easily carry out the qualification process described in the last chapter. Finally, we have included a standard quotation form that you can use to quote pricing to your new prospects for the various cloud services that are described in the sales guide.

Tools and Materials








This presentation provides an overview of CloudPRO Technology Solutions – an imaginary company name that we have created serve as a placeholder for the name of your own company. Whenever you see the name “CloudPRO” in the presentation, simply substitute the name or logo of your company. The text that follows is a script for you to practice delivering your own version of this presentation. So let’s get started…

Thank you for your time Mr. Prospect. I would like to provide you with an introduction to our company, our experience and our approach to solving business problems with the latest cloud computing technology.

Our company has been in business for many years and during that time we have established a strong local presence in our community by serving the needs of our customers with a commitment to service quality and world-class customer support.

For many of our customers, we represent their IT department and for others, we provide IT resources to support their internal IT function. Our customer base contains dozens of companies ranging in size from just few employees to many hundreds.








We design, deliver and support IT services and we also guide our customers through the confusing array of cloud computing services and help them to select and utilize the combination of hardware, software and hosted services that will result in the best solution for their business.

CloudPRO manages the delivery of IT services for our customers so they can focus on their business while we focus on reducing the cost of IT and maximizing its business impact.

We do this by understanding your business needs and designing IT solutions that integrate cloud services with your business environment and then we help you to manage the delivery of these services to your user community. As a result, we can reduce your operating expenses and position your business for safe and secure growth as we deploy solutions that increase the efficiency of your business and the productivity of your workforce.








We would like to explain our approach to delivering cloud solutions in more detail. We are guided by three fundamental goals: The first is reducing cost and simplifying the use of IT services, the second is improving employee productivity and using cloud solutions to increase the efficiency and agility of your business, and the third is leverage the cloud to provide you with a competitive edge that will position your company for growth.

Our commitment is to provide your company with secure, high availability, state-of-the-art services and full support for your user community as we manage your journey to the cloud.








Our cloud solutions are designed to maximize business value. We achieve this by combining best-in-class cloud services with our own managed services to build an enterprise-class IT environment for your company. We focus on delivering the following business benefits:

• Reducing both capital expenses for hardware and software and operating expenses for IT service delivery and support

• Improving organizational effectiveness with on-demand business applications, collaboration and messaging services

• Enabling greater mobility for your workforce so they can immediately respond to business opportunities and customer service requests

• Helping you to optimize your investment in IT infrastructure so that the highest level of performance and availability are maintained.








• And, of course, we take great care to manage the end-user’s IT experience by simplifying their access to information from anywhere and at anytime

Here is a list of partners and technologies we have included in our service portfolio and a description of the managed services we offer to unify them into business solutions.

We provide the most advanced cloud solutions available and we manage the deployment and delivery of these services to your business. Based on your needs, we will provide the necessary application

integration and data migration to ensure that your transition to the cloud is both seamless and non-disruptive.

Other services we provide include mobilizing your workforce and securing their mobile data. In fact, we can enhance the security of all corporate information and provide backup and restoration services that will ensure business continuity even in the event of a catastrophic data loss.

Our training programs for your end-users and IT staff are very comprehensive and can administer your cloud applications, services and resources for you – or








we can train your IT staff to do this as well. Our support services operate around the clock so we can structure a support plan to fit your needs and your budget. Finally, we can provide you with virtual CIO services that will add our knowledge and experience with the latest developments in cloud computing to our ongoing IT strategy.

Our customers span a wide variety of industry segments and, as a result, their business needs differ. Some of them are small firms with a single centralized office while others are large, distributed organizations with a highly mobile workforce.

Some of them have regulatory compliance requirements and others are just concerned about instituting best practices for protecting their company information from unexpected data loss or a security breach as they expand their use of IT.

However, all of them share a common theme. They view information as a critical company asset and IT as a means to process information quickly and securely to grow the business or streamline the operation of

the organization. We help companies in both the private and public sector to realize these goals and we are very successful at doing so. This slide also contains a couple of comments from two of our satisfied customers and there are many more similar testimonials that we can share with you.








Here is a sample of the companies that we have helped, either through past engagements to improve their IT environment or currently with our ongoing managed IT services.

You probably recognize many of the logos on this slide.

Let me tell you about just a few of them to provide a clearer picture of the role we play as an IT solutions partner with our customers.

And on the left-hand side of the slide, you will see another testimonial from one of our very satisfied customers.








To design, deploy and deliver the most effective cloud solutions for our customers, we have established an ecosystem of partners, technologies and services that are unified into deployment-ready IT solutions that maximize the business value of the cloud. We deliver IT solutions that use best-in-class cloud computing technologies and services and we combined them with our best practices for service deployment and service delivery.

The ecosystem is based on six solution suites that address the major trends of cloud computing. The first and most fundamental of these solutions leverages the cloud to improve your company’s collaboration and messaging capabilities. These services dramatically improve the workflow and productivity of your employees and we can extend these services to remote/mobile workers with our mobility solutions.








We also offer a variety of hosted business applications such as CRM, ERP and financial accounting systems – all hosted in the cloud. If desired, we can also help you to migrate legacy systems and applications to the cloud to ensure a seamless transition. Along with hosting your business applications, we can also extend your IT infrastructure into the cloud with virtual resources for compute power and storage.

All of these applications and their databases must be secured and protected from data loss and so we offer a complete information security and business continuity solution tailored for your business. And we wrap our managed and professional services around

all of these solutions with an approach we call “total service management”. Lets have a closer look at each of these areas.

The cloud turns any device with browser into a portal that connects users to a variety of on-demand hosted services. The most direct path to improving the productivity of your workforce is to equip them with a state-of-the-art collaboration and messaging solution hosted in the cloud. We have chosen Microsoft for Business and business-grade implementation of Microsoft's M365 email service with this goal in mind.








Workgroup collaboration creates an environment where employees can create and share documents such as proposals and contracts, presentations to prospective clients, operating budgets and project plans, contact information for customers and suppliers and calendars for scheduling key meetings or reserving company resources.

Your company will realize the full productivity benefits of collaboration through cloud computing when you deploy a Microsoft solution that is fully optimized to improve the workflow of you business. We are experts at making this happen. We understand the technology and the best practices for optimizing these tools for your organization. We do this during the deployment phase with services to streamline the installation and setup of all user accounts

as well as to integrate these services and migrate your existing data to the Microsoft environment.

After deployment, we provide monthly support services that include a friendly and responsive help desk and administration of user accounts. You can also select a service plan that includes quarterly operational reviews and virtual CIO services.

As the era of the cloud is unfolding, so is the era of the mobile device. These two technologies are advancing together in a way that is redefining IT services. Smart phones, tablets and netbooks are amazing new technologies that companies are beginning to use in their business and their employees are bringing to the IT environment.








But these new technologies are a double edge sword. On the one hand they offer significant advantages over traditional IT services that use expensive servers and desktop devices by reducing cost and increasing flexibility. On the other hand, they bring a new form of risk to the business. How will you control access to critical information on devices that are outside your firewall? How can you be sure your data will be protected from data loss if a mobile device is lost or stolen?

To successfully exploit the latest cloud services and mobile devices, you will need an expert technology partner and a trusted advisor.

We understand how to enable mobile cloud solutions in a secure manner using the latest mobile devices and we provide these services to our clients every day. We know how to protect your information from unauthorized access while extending the reach of your IT environment.

We offer deployment services to install and configure secure access to your cloud services and we can help you to select the right endpoint devices. After deployment, we will provide end-user support as we manage your mobile devices and synchronize data with your centralized databases in the cloud.








Complementing the collaboration services delivered via the cloud, companies are also migrating their business applications to the cloud. Hosted software applications and online database storage can dramatically reduce cost and increase productivity. Business software can be delivered to end-users more cost-effectively using a Software as a Services (SaaS) deployment model than by running local copies of expensive software on servers and desktops located on the customer’s premise. Also, hosted applications are available on-demand to any user with appropriate access rights and their data is instantly updated in a secure, centralized and backed-up location.

Common examples of hosted business applications include CRM, ERP, and financial accounting software packages. The challenge for the customer is how to migrate legacy systems to the cloud and how to deliver hosted business applications with the necessary security, performance, availability and user support. Our company will bring the necessary expertise to migrate and manage your business applications with minimal disruption during the transition and maximum value over the long term.

We can provide deployment services to install and configure user accounts for all hosted business applications while integrating the security controls and user privileges. We can also help you to migrate legacy








systems to a cloud-based applications environment. After deployment we can provide user support and administration services as well review the operational efficiency of the solution and identity ways to further optimize your implementation.

Over time, your company may wish to move your entire premise-based IT infrastructure into a virtual environment in the cloud. When this happens, all of your servers can be decommissioned and the operational expenses required for space, power and support staff can be reinvested in other business-building initiatives. The benefits of virtual IT infrastructure include the elimination of capital expenses for server hardware, the reduction of

operating costs for system maintenance or upgrades and a simplified process for provisioning new users and allocating resources to support their needs.

Virtualized IT infrastructure brings a highly flexible “pay-as-you-go” model in which the customer only pays for the virtual data center resources required and they can scale them up or down according to the needs of the business. In order to realize the full benefit of virtualizing your IT infrastructure, you will need the help of a trusted and experienced cloud solutions provider to manage the migration, administer the resources, optimize resource utilization, minimize costs and support the users. We can develop a migration plan to ensure that properly








defined goals, project milestones, resources and deployment schedule are achieved.

In the meantime, we can start with some basic services such an online storage for your users and backup storage capacity for a redundant, off-site copy of your critical on-premise databases. Together, we will plan the most appropriate path for your business and add the necessary deployment and monthly support services to meet your needs.

Information security is a multi-dimensional problem. It goes beyond user access control and extends to intrusion detection and prevention for your databases and business applications, spam filtering for email services

and virus, spyware and malware protection and removal for your user devices.

Beyond these security controls, information assets must also be protected from accidental data loss due to user error, system failures or catastrophic events. Therefore, traditional security methods must be accompanied by the right data backup and disaster recovery regimen. Finally, different industries impose different regulatory and compliance measures for protecting the privacy of customer data.

As business information systems move to the cloud, security and business continuity must be ensured. Our company has identified the best technologies and








processes for securing a cloud-based IT environment and protecting your business from data loss as you migrate your IT environment to the cloud.

We provide a number of services to address these challenges including email security, endpoint security, information security and business continuity. We offer a number of deployment services to customize and integrate them to meet your business needs and to suite your IT environment. After deployment, we provide help desk support for any end-user facing applications and we can monitor all security systems or services and provide remediation for any security threats that are detected.

When all is said and done, all elements of a cloud-based IT solution must be delivered to our customers and their

employees as a secure, reliable, highly available and highly responsive on-line service. In this presentation, we have described a number of professional services that we can perform during the deployment phase. We have also described a number of support services that we can provide on an ongoing basis. We will work with you to define the most appropriate and cost-effective services.

Our support services are packaged as a tiered support plan designated as a silver, gold or platinum service plan. The silver plan provides a complete end-user support plan with resource administration and provides coverage during normal business hours. The gold plan builds on this plan by adding quarterly reviews of your service delivery operation and ways to enhance service








delivery. It also extends the hours of coverage to include evening hours and Saturday coverage as well as a faster response time commitment.

The Platinum plan is our highest level of service. It builds on the Gold plan by adding vendor management and CIO services as well as 7x24 coverage and 2 hour accelerated response time. Our CIO services guide the business owner and IT staff through a confusing array of constantly changing technologies to make the best use of cloud computing in their organization.

Regardless of the support plan a customer may choose, our goal is to provide a total service management approach that meets the needs of the customer,

manages the IT experience of the user and maximizes the value of the IT investment to the business.








Our company adds value to the cloud solutions we provide by combining them with the best practices for service deployment and delivery. Starting with service deployment, we will define a structured approach for migrating your IT environment to the cloud.

Our deployment plan is based on a repeatable process that we have refined over the years and allows us manage a simple or highly complex deployment process with predictable and successful results.

This structured approach is use to deploy new cloud services or to migrate the customer from a premise-based to the cloud. The process is tailored to meet the needs of each customer based on the scope and complexity of their deployment.

As a result the deployment fee charged to the customer will reflect the scope of the deployment or migration project.

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In the area of service delivery, we implement best practices for managing the cloud services delivered to our customers. We apply them to the applications and services used by the customer for collaboration and messaging or hosted business applications. We will work to automate or improve organizational workflow, customer communications and worker productivity.

How these hosted applications are configured and which ones are used in the work environment can

greatly effect the efficiency of the organization and quality of user experience.

Similarly, establishing good corporate policies for how information security and customer privacy will be protected as these collaboration tools are used is equally critical.

And finally, making sure the IT and network infrastructure for supporting hosted services is a high performance and high availability environment is another important factor in your successful transition to the cloud. These best practices for service








deployment and service delivery are offered for all of the cloud solutions in our ecosystem.

Let’s conclude this overview presentation with a summary of our customer engagement process. Listed here are the steps we take from the point that we first engage with a prospective customer through the point that we deploy and deliver an IT solution.

We start by understanding your business in as much detail as possible. Then we assess the state of your network and IT infrastructure to determine what you have today and how to optimize it for the future. We will design a technology solution that will address your business requirements and we’ll demonstrate that solution in a proof of concept.

Once all elements of the solution are identified and validated, we will propose pricing for all services to be performed or delivered and formalize them in a managed services contract with guaranteed service levels.

Then we will deploy the solution by following our proven process for implementing an integrated cloud and/or premise-based IT services. After final testing of systems and training of users and staff, we will cutover the new services and begin the process of supporting your company with our comprehensive customer support services.








Thank you for your time today.

I hope that you found this introduction to our company and our approach to managed cloud solutions to be informative.

May I suggest that we continue our dialog by starting with the business requirements discovery phase?

I would be happy to meet with you and others in your company to gather information leading to a preliminary design and pricing proposal for the right IT solution for your business.

After you have adapted this presentation to reflect the capabilities of your company and the customer value delivered by your solutions, then rehearse the material until it becomes second nature. You will want to be prepared to deliver this presentation – with or without slides – to customers and prospects at a moment’s notice. You never know when or where the next sales lead will appear and you will want to be ready for it.

You can use many of the slides contained in this presentation for sales calls, webinars and face-to-face seminars. Getting very comfortable with its content will be time well spent.








Quick Reference Guide To help you remember some of the key facts, important questions and major messages, a “Quick Reference Guide” for selling Managed Cloud Services has been created. Use this quick reference guide as a refresher before you go into a sales call so that all of the information you will need to conduct a successful meeting will be top of mind.

The Quick Reference Guide contains a summary of the target market and customer profile as well as the

common business challenges and how cloud solutions can address those challenges. It also has a standard elevator pitch that articulates the principle value proposition of manage cloud services. On the revese side you will find the top 10 discovery questions, your lead qualification criteria and some of the more common sales objections you will hear accompanied by a recommended response for each one.








Qualification Scorecard As soom as you get a new sales lead, you will want to begin the lead qualification process to quickly determine which leads to pursue and which ones to defer or discard.

In the last chapter (The Sales Process), we described a standardized approach for qualifying your prospects by using a 25 point rating system.

The process is based on 5 criteria for rating a highly qualified lead, where each criteria is assigned a score, by you, on a scale of 1 to 5.

If all five criteria receive a score of 5 then your total score for the prospect will be a perfect score of 25. As you assign lower scores for each criteria, the total lead quality score will be reduced accordingly.

If the total lead quality score totals less than 20, then your prospect is probably not worthy of an all-out sales campaign. You should “nurture” this lead until it is more qualified and you should set a tickler date to re-qualify the opportunity.

It the total lead quality score totals less than 10, then your prospect is probably not even worthy of a nurturing campaign. It should be disqualified and purged from your lead database.

After all, you don’t want to build a database of prospects that will never buy anything from you. Your time will be much better served if you apply some rigid criteria to the leads that are entered into your prospect database. Then act on the high quality leads and nurture the ones that have future sales potential.

The picture above shows the Lead Qualification Scorecard that is provided as a sales tool for you to use when qualifying prospects. It can be used as an interactive spreadsheet to capture your lead quality scores electronically or printed out and








used as a blank form when you are away from your computer.

Standard Quotation After you have qualified your prospect and completed the discovery process, you will be ready to provide pricing for a proposed cloud solution for your new sales opportunity.

Putting a quotation in front of a new prospect is the first and most inportant step in closing a sale. It says

that you have learned everything you need to know about the prospect’s business, that you have translated those business requirements into a solution and you have priced that solution according to your company’s pricing plan for managed cloud services.








It is very important that you design a solution that will meet or exceed your new customer’s expectations and that you price your services accurately. So make sure your quoatation is reviewed both technically and financially by someone in your company that has the knowledge and authority to approve your quotation before presenting it to your prospect. We have provided a standard quotation for managed services to serve as a template that will help you to create your own customized version using your own pricing, your own terms and conditions and featuring your specific portfolio of managed services.

If you don’t already have a managed services quotation form, take a look at the template. It has all of the important elements for quoting managed services already formatted on a spreadsheet that itemizes your services and calculates your one-time and recurring service fees.

Page 1 of the quotation template is for non-recurring fees to cover any equipment or software that is required for your solution as well as the up-front fees that will be charged for your one-time services. One time services may include device installation, user configuration and provisioning, professional services (for application integration and customization), user training and project management.

Page 2 of the quotation template is for monthly recurring fees to cover any of the cloud services described in this sales guide (i.e., continuous data protection, virtual IT infrastructure and hosted applications or services). Monthly recurring services also refers to any of your own company’s managed

services that are added to these cloud services. Your company’s managed services may include end-user help desk, IT resource administration, fault and performance management, or CIO services. Page 3 of the template is a signature page and can be used to define the terms and conditions of the sale.

TCO/ROI Calculator

We have also provided an ROI calculator as a sales tool to help sell the value of your managed cloud solutions. The ROI calculator is a spreadsheet that allows you to enter information about your prospect, such as the number of users, devices and their current IT expenses and it compare the cost of your proposed solution against them. The spreadsheet will then calculate the cost savings your solution will produce.

We hope that you have found this Sales Process Blueprint to be a useful reference guide for managing the cloud solutions sales process. You are now ready








to identify sale opportunities, qualify prospects, discover customer needs and solve them with cloud-based IT solutions. There is a major opportunity for you and your company to win new customers and keep them as loyal business partners for many years to come.

Let’s get started right away!

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sales process blueprint - d&h - the technology company · 2018-08-07 · sales process...

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