The Cloud is opening up a world of possibilities to help you efficiently expand, penetrate new markets, and fill your sales pipeline. However, the digital era has changed the way companies choose cloud services. The global public cloud computing market is set to exceed $330 billion in 2020.
Sales organizations need to change the way they sell to adapt effectively to this new and ever-changing buyer’s journey. Cloud sales involve every aspect of your team – including strategy, who are your target audience, the skills of your sales team, and the technologies you employ to generate revenue – to re-align to the modern paradigm.
Let us look at how to sell cloud services by creating a winning cloud sales strategy to achieve a steady sales funnel.
Look at a Trend, Not Just a Blip.
A go-to-market strategy for selling cloud services should start by defining the business drivers. Business drivers are the primary reasons for developing and launching your new cloud solution. These drivers Include sales expectations, customer expectations, trends in the industry – or simply everything that refers to why you are developing and selling the product.
You want business drivers to benefit you for long-term rather than random blips. For instance, if you are rolling out a cloud solution, the related drivers should involve generating recurring revenue based on your core business and sustained demand, not just because you want to keep up with your competitor.
Land and Expand
Cloud customers are hard to keep. Moving beyond acquisition to concentrate on continued consumption and expansion, you need to adopt a ‘land and expand’ cloud sales strategy. The rapid rise in cloud sales has put the ‘land and expand’ approach on its ear.
You can nurture new customers into recurring customers by incorporating specific approaches to build a long-term relationship with your clients. Capitalize on upselling and cross-selling opportunities by understanding the buyer’s journey inside and out.
Measure the lifetime value of the consumer rather than the initial size of the deal and establish the importance of product/service adoption and continuous consumption.
Rework Your Target Audience
Don’t assume that you only have opportunities with enterprises. Today, SMBs may represent higher value as they increasingly shift to cloud services.
As cloud computing requires little or no upfront costs, it offers more flexible adoption. The average savings from a cloud migration comes to around 15% on all IT spending. Small and medium businesses benefit the most, as they spend 36% less money on IT that way. With the flexibility to easily improve cash flow, SMBs, who financially operate fluidly, can pay for what they need when they need it.
While selling cloud services, your sales team must consider the expectations and decision-making criteria of the business divisions such as marketing, accounting, and human resources. Every buyer persona will think differently. For instance IT departments will focus on the product functionality and other technical parts.
Customization is Critical
Every business wants technology that can bring their vision to life. Just like enterprise customers, SMB customers have high expectations of the technology they use to run their business. The needs and priorities of each SMB client differ based on the company’s size, sophistication, and industry segment, but they all want solutions that are customized exclusively to their needs.
But how can you move beyond the general to offer your clients exactly the right cloud solutions?
A deep understanding of your SMB clients and the issues they face daily will help you connect the dots between their business needs and the technology that’s available. Once you’ve established that degree of understanding, you can offer guidance in choosing and implementing the best cloud solutions. Focus on solving your clients’ specific needs, and you’ll give them the tools to revolutionize their business.
Employ the Right Technology
To ensure the success of your sales team, arm them with the right sales tools to do their jobs effectively. Provide technical instruction, offerings, and selling strategies. Conduct certifications, continuous education, and train your team to learn a mix of sales and technical skills. Determine the buyers’ journey, tactics, lead score, and lead assignment of the buyers. As you ramp up a team, identify how all of this is going to help accelerate the sales cycle.
Additionally, a sales intelligence tool combined with well-defined demand creation and account-based marketing strategies can drive the right actions at the right time. It can also help you to automate marketing activities to achieve efficiencies, monitor consumer behavior for refining targeting and provide lead scoring to optimize business organization value.
You should have a solid B2B database, an engagement marketing engine, and an analytics engine so you can generate, measure, and optimize marketing ROI and impact on revenue.
Wrapping Things Up
If you have made it this far, chances are your efforts for selling cloud services to your clients will give you the expected outcome. Not every client you work with will embrace the cloud, however, if you take some time on prospecting and filtering the ideal customer profiles using the right B2B data, you will see better results.
