Tomer Schwaitzer, CEO, Y-tech

Selling IT solutions is not an easy work. You have to pass many thresholds in order to negotiate a deal seriously, let alone close a deal. Selling cloud computing services solutions is not an exception.

When you are approaching customers with your cloud computing solution, you are probably asking yourself how to help customers prefer your solution. Your customer is often not an IT professional, let alone a cloud computing expert, but he does know when you, as a professional give him peace of mind. The way to do it is be sure that you yourself know that you have all the required functions in place. Once you have belief and confidence in your solution, you will transfer the same feelings to your customer without even knowing you do. Authenticity and transparency is all you need.

Since we at Y-tech Group are supplying IT and cloud computing services to around 10,000 end users in around 200 organizations in Israel, we have gained some insights we would like to share with you.

There are obviously many factors that the potential customer is examining, but we have come up with 4 factors which are the most critical for the purchasing decision.

Show price / performance

There are many cloud solutions around, including very cheap and low quality one. The customers have a hard time comparing prices of competing cloud computing solutions. To overcome this, smart customers demand suppliers to show them an equivalent cloud solution in terms of performance, and then move on to compare the prices.

Both sellers and buyers have to think in terms of price / performance ratio. Since cloud is vital for the customer’s business and compromising on performance is not an option. Your own challenge is to offer a high performance cloud computing solution, which will allow you to beat comparable solutions in price. The term performance relates to all the required components in a high quality cloud solution.

Ensure uptime: Don’t let the customer down

At Y-tech, we tell customers that we won’t let them down, meaning that we’ll supply a very high uptime rate. Your customer does not want to be out of business because of long or recurring downtimes, no matter what the reasons are. You have to show that your uptime rate is as close to 100% as possible. Show that you can deliver this promise, and the customer will find it easier to move forward in the negotiation.

Ensure cloud data security

Buying a cloud computing solution relies on trust and trust relies on protecting your customer’s business. Do everything you can in order to relieve any doubt regarding information security and cybersecurity, external and internal. For example, you have to prove you can intercept DDoS attacks, provide firewalls at all the necessary locations in the cloud, ensure that servers don’t get exposed to the internet without a proper security mechanism and prove that other companies you’re hosting don’t threat that data of your new customer.

Backup and recovery

Not backing up your entire customer’s data is not an option, but you have to show him that you would not fail in this. To gain the customer’s trust in this issue, you have to give many evidence, but one critical factor is this: Show the customer he can manage backup and recovery by himself, if needed. In other words, he has to see for himself that all the information is not only backed-up, but is recovered fully, quickly and easily, and if he wishes, he has the option of doing it by himself.

To sum up, many of the points we have raised boil down to one principle: ensure your customer’s business continuity – a theme that I am going to develop in one of upcoming posts. 

Tomer Schwaitzer is the CEO and Founder of Y-tech