Are You Complete? Solution Selling Is the Key to Deep Customer Relationships

By Acronis Guest Blog

This is Part 2 of a three-part series on how to offer great cloud services. In our first post here on MSPmentor, we asked, “Are you easy?” In the blog, we discussed how to reduce the friction in the customer experience and how to automate processes. In this post we ask, “Are you complete?”

Unlike many products, cloud services are a beautiful recurring money machine. However, because providers rely heavily on the goodwill of their offerings to keep the customer plugged in, they must also make every effort to mitigate churn. Churn is the number of customers that leave a cloud service in any given month. Because many partners offer the same or very similar offers, the service provider must find ways to differentiate themselves to prevent the customer from leaving for the lower-priced competitor down the road with a 5 cent discount.

One of the best ways to overcome churn is by turning your individual silos of products into complete solutions. Many industry reports show that when a customer has two products with a cloud service provider, retention increases by over 40 percent.  Three products uplifts retention to 60 percent. Four or more products improves the number to 70 percent.

There are a number of reasons why this is the case. First, once the customer’s data is involved with more than one service, it is far harder to start anew with someone else. Second, customers likely received a bundled discount in their complete solution that cannot easily be compared to another offer. Finally, customers will have to find vendors to replace all of the individual products in your solution. 

In addition to customer retention, being a complete solution provider allows your company to differentiate its offers from competitors. Customers may choose a particular provider on the strength of the total offer rather than on any one component.ackup

As an example, if a customer is interested in a set of Microsoft products for its office, adding a backup solution into the package along with monitoring and disaster recovery is a simple up-sell or cross-sell. Once the conversation happens, closing gets far easier.

Bundled offers are also smart business as acquiring a new customer is far more expensive than cross-selling an existing prospect or client. Many cloud services require 12 to 24 months of revenue to acquire the customer.

At Acronis, we would love to help you with your solution sales for complete data protection.  We have great marketing materials to help you in our cloud partner program. If you would like to join us or even just check out the ways we can help, you can learn more about the Acronis partner program here.

You can also get a taste of how easy Acronis cloud solutions really are by signing up for a free trial of Acronis Backup Cloud here.

In our next post we will ask, “Are you secure?” We will discuss the importance to being proactive in overcoming customer fear around security issues. Stay tuned!

Jon McCarrick is Acronis Partner Technology Evangelist. Jon is a veteran in the cloud service provider space, having worked for Parallels and Open-xchange prior to joining Acronis. Jon’s mission is to create an active community of service providers around the Acronis product line.  Expect to visit with Jon at your favorite trade show or find him on your favorite social media platform. 

Guest blogs such as this one are published monthly and are part of MSPmentor’s annual platinum sponsorship.