5 Essential Factors to Consider When Transitioning to a Cloud Services Model

As more and more organizations want to rent rather than buy technology products, you may be considering transitioning to a cloud services business model to meet customer and market demand. If you are a “born in the cloud” services provider, you have probably already implemented these practices for success.  However, if you are a service provider considering or are in the process of transitioning to a cloud services model, you may have already figured out there are several obstacles that need to be addressed otherwise they will continue to be roadblocks to your success. 

Getting all hands on deck from marketing, sales, client services, training, technical support and services to steer the business in the right direction can be difficult if you have not defined the overall business objectives, hired the right team and provided them with the necessary tools.  Below are five factors that you should consider when transitioning to a cloud services model.

  1. Charting your course for success requires defining your core business objectives for adding cloud services to your portfolio of solutions. Why are you adding cloud services to your existing product portfolio? Is it to increase your top line revenue, improve customer retention, and move into new markets and/or geographies?  There could be multiple reasons why you want to offer cloud services, the key is to identify and communicate to your team the overall corporate objectives for making the transition so everyone is working towards the same goals. Charting the course should be a priority.
  1. Identify how you are going to achieve your core objectives by looking within your organization to determine if you have the right skills, talent and knowledge within your existing sales, marketing and technical teams.  Does your existing sales team have the right skills to sell your new services offering or do you need to hire a dedicated sales professional or team to sell your services?  Does your existing team have the ability to exercise solution selling practices? Do you have a marketing professional or the means to market your services?  How many marketing leads will you need to generate to convert into sales wins that meet your revenue or customer acquisition targets? Do you have sales enablement tools and marketing materials that your sales team can use to promote your services?  Do you have the right technical skills to support your sales efforts, to deploy and manage your service offerings?  How will you differentiate your services from those of your competition?  What is your secret sauce?
  1. Develop an effective sales compensation plan that motivates your sales crew to promote and sell you cloud services. If your team has not been selling services in the past, you need to incent them to sell your services and to ensure that their compensation plan adequately fosters growth and achievement of the company’s business objectives.  Compensating your sales team and ensuring the compensation plan fosters the desired behaviour to meet your objectives should be a top priority for all service providers transitioning to the cloud.  Without the right compensation plan, your sales team will not be motivated to sell your recurring revenue services. This is the number one reason that Service Providers struggle with increasing adoption of their cloud services.  It does not matter if it is security, networking, print, and/or cloud backup services – without the right compensation plan – achieving adoption of your services will be doomed if your sales team has not interest in promoting your cloud services.
  1. Hire an inbound marketing professional.  If you do not already have a full-time marketing professional on staff or working with your business in a full-time capacity, then you need to focus on hiring an individual immediately.  Proactively promoting your services to your target market is vital to successfully meeting or exceeding your core objectives.  Hiring a mature marketing professional that is digitally savvy, funnel-minded and understands inbound marketing concepts including knowledge of marketing automation tools should be at the top of your to do list.  Next is developing an integrated marketing plan that includes social media, content development and syndication, email, webinars, website optimization, and sales enablement.
  1. Find a technology partner that provides value beyond the technology.  Discovering the technology for your cloud services is only half of the equation.  You need to ensure that the technology partner can provide you with the business support that you need to launch and grow your cloud services. The support should be in the form of sales and marketing tools like content assets that can be co-branded, ready-made lead generation campaign materials, MDF, deal registration; BANT qualified sales leads, competitive intelligence, roadmap insights, professional services, ongoing deal and sales support.  Working with a technology partner that provides you with value beyond the technology, is 100% channel focused and is motivated by your success is key to a long successful relationship. 

You may be asking yourself how to find the ideal marketing professional or how to develop the right compensation plan that cultivates and fosters the sales behaviours you need, well your technology partners should be able to provide you with insights into how other providers have made these transitions within their organizations.  Or you may want to consider leveraging the services of a Sales Compensation or HR consultant who have the expertise and experience of working with other similar organizations.   Your technology partner should also be able to provide you with sample marketing job descriptions that you can publish to your website and to other marketing focused websites like MarketingSherpa, MarketingProfs, your local college job boards, and share with marketing focused recruiting firms.

If you are thinking of adding cloud backup services to your portfolio, download this free guide How to Choose a Cloud Backup Delivery Platform.or find out how using cloud backup and recovery services can help you achieve different business outcomes.

 

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