7 Questions Prospective Customers will ask about Your Cloud Services
Prospective customers will come to you armed with many questions and in order to close the deal, you must be prepared with the answers.
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Let’s assume your prospective customer has already decided that the cloud is for them by evaluating the business objectives and deciding how many resources they have to dedicate to their cloud initiatives. These prospective customers will come to you armed with many questions and in order to close the deal, you must be prepared with the answers. Here are 7 questions a prospective customer will likely ask about your cloud services.
This slideshow is based on information from a CIO.com article which outlined 50 questions to ask before engaging in cloud services.
Service Level Agreements (SLAs) can be very complex and overwhelming for customers. They will want to know what is included in the SLA, how they are measured, and what they will receive (credits, etc.) in the event of downtime. They will also ask about recovery point objectives (RPOs) and recovery time objectives (RTOs). Be sure your salespeople know the SLA inside and out so they can answer any question that may arise.
Security is still a barrier preventing some companies from adopting the cloud, despite the advances in this area. What is important for a customer to understand is who is responsible for the security of the data when it’s stored in the cloud and when it’s in transmission. Is it a shared-responsibility model? Prospects will want to know so they can invest in additional security protections as needed. Along with security, prospects will want to know how you monitor access to cloud environments and whether the cloud infrastructure is single tenant or multi-tenant.
This area of questioning is particularly important if the prospective client is in a highly compliant vertical such as healthcare or financial services. These prospects will want to know what kind of approach you take towards governance and risk management. They will also ask what your requirements are for compliance and whether they match up with their own requirements, and the requirements of their end-users. It’s not enough to tell prospects that you meet these compliance requirements – be prepared to prove it with audit results and supporting documents. These prospects will want to know how you maintain compliance, and who owns the data in the cloud.
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After performing a cloud readiness assessment, a prospective client will want to know how the new cloud platform will support the technical requirements and interdependencies of their machines and applications. How will the actual migration take place? Will there need to be additional resources put in place to move workloads? Will the migration require data and applications to be moved over to new machines, and failover in stages? What will happen if something fails? These are just a few of the questions to expect from a prospective customer who is planning to move workloads to your cloud environment. Having case studies and examples on hand that can assure a client you know what you’re doing and have done it before successfully is important.
Although you haven’t even turned this prospect into a customer – yet – they are going to want to know what happens if they want to terminate the service. Do they have to notify you via email or a written notice? When will billing cease? How can data be moved? Expect these questions and more.
Money – you didn’t think we’d skip this one did you? Many people believe that the cloud will offer them some degree of cost savings. And in many ways this proves to be true. But it is important for customers to understand how they will be billed and if there are any upfront capital expenses. Also if they will certainly have questions around bursting; if you offer a cloud cost management tool as a value-added service, this might be the perfect time to talk about that with your prospect.
Money – you didn’t think we’d skip this one did you? Many people believe that the cloud will offer them some degree of cost savings. And in many ways this proves to be true. But it is important for customers to understand how they will be billed and if there are any upfront capital expenses. Also if they will certainly have questions around bursting; if you offer a cloud cost management tool as a value-added service, this might be the perfect time to talk about that with your prospect.
Prospective customers will come to you armed with many questions and in order to close the deal, you must be prepared with the answers.
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