Getting the Most out of Your Cloud-Service Sales Opportunities

The most difficult sale with any customer is the very first one.  A typical cloud service will require 18 to 24 months of revenue in advertising spend to get a customer’s attention. Therefore, maximizing the value of that customer once you have acquired it is incredibly important.

There are several tactics to maximize that sales opportunity. The first is to get your customers to buy as much of the initial offer as possible. This can be accomplished by offering them volume pricing, buy-one/get-one offers, and good/better/best sets of offers. Another is to create service bundles attractive enough to get customers buying multiple products with the initial purchase.

Once you have a committed buyer, you need to look at adding as many other contiguous services as possible. The cheapest customers to advertise to are the ones you already have: You can communicate directly with them.

At Acronis, our service provider partners told us that they were looking for more products that they could add onto, bundle, upsell and cross-sell. So we looked at all of the contiguous markets that our partners could potentially sell into, then spent the last year massively growing our product portfolio. To complement our backup offering, we introduced disaster recovery as a service, file sync-and-share products, IT infrastructure monitoring as a service, and software-defined storage products. All of these provide natural additional sales opportunities.

We also looked at ways to create further synergies with our partners by integrating our products with existing hot-selling products in their portfolios from other vendors. For instance, we added application support to our Acronis Backup flagship product for Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, and mobile operating systems including Apple iOS and Google Android. This makes our backup solution a natural product to sell in addition to any of this solutions.

We have an upcoming webinar on Dec. 13 at 2 p.m. EST (11 a.m. PST) that will cover these topics in depth. Below is our agenda.

Top 10 service provider must-haves to rake in profits in data protection:

If you are interested in partnering with Acronis, please learn more about the Acronis partner program.

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