NexGen Panel: Here's How To Boost Cloud Sales And Marketing
Submitted by Joseph Tsidulko on
Brown spoke to that point, telling attendees, "We've basically avoided hiring long-tenured, experienced IT professionals" for sales. Instead of traditional sales agents, he finds "IT consultant types" are more successful at winning business.
That was an unusually informative point for Pete Zarras, CEO of Morristown, N.J.-based solution provider CloudStrategies.
Zarras asked the panel a question about effective sales strategy, but first recounted for the audience an interesting anecdote: After he unexpectedly lost his last sales pro, his business accelerated. Comments from the panel, he later told CRN, helped crystalize in his mind why that happened.
Zarras told CRN after the session that he believes that question gets to the crux of the transformational issue.
"Probably our biggest problem as born-in-the-cloud is we were trying to use a traditional sales model, and failed at it with persistence," Zarras said.
None of his senior sellers were doing particularly well. Then his last sales agent left without warning, "and yet our sales have been better than they have been in three years."
That development led him to think about how CloudStrategies really was closing business, and to realize it wasn't through the sales staff.
"What really worked was most of our inbound business comes from referrals and reputation and partners," Zarras told CRN.
He had started investing more heavily in marketing a year earlier, and eventually it was clear to him that "it's the marketing engine that's fueling the inbound stuff."
In those cases where business originated outside of the sales unit, it was Zarras' technical and business staff that ended up closing the deals, and they were surprisingly well-suited to do so.
"We can have and complete that transformation conversation about where are you and where do you want to be," he told CRN.
Brown of 10th Magnitude told CRN that Zarras' story about how he stumbled into a more productive sales model is illustrative of larger changes in the industry, and has put CloudStrategies ahead of the curve.
As for 10th Magnitude, the biggest challenge to growing the business at the moment is recruiting talented employees who know how to engage the customer.
"Demand is not a challenge right now," Brown told the audience.
