Webinar with Justin Gray on reselling cloud services

1. Best Practices in Reselling Cloud
Services
Featuring
Craig Rosenberg, TOPO
Justin Gray, LeadMD

2. Bios
Justin Gray
CEO, LeadMD (www.leadmd.com)
@jgraymatter
Craig Rosenberg
Co-founder, TOPO (www.topohq.com)
@funnelholic

3. Agenda
• The Cloud Opportunity
• Cloud versus Traditional Reselling
• Best Practices in Re-selling Cloud Services
• The “Gotchas” - What to watch out for
• Eight Steps for Getting Started

4. The Cloud Computing Market is in
Hyper-Growth Mode
• Seventy-seven percent of
respondents expect to
increase spending on SaaS
(Gartner 2012 SaaS survey)
• Seventy-four percent of
organizations were
projected to increase cloud
computing services in 2012
(ESG)
• Over the next four years the
Cloud Computing market is
going to double. In fact,
according to IDC, the cloud
computing market is going
to move from $28.4B to
$67.3B.

5. The Growth in SaaS Revenue
2011-2016

6. Cloud versus Traditional
Reselling Models
• Recurring Revenue
versus the big, upfront
payday
• Open, standardized API’s
• The transition to cloud is
just beginning and the
opportunity is huge

7. The Recurring Revenue Model versus
the Big, Upfront Payout
Traditional
Reselling
Cloud Services
Initial Deal
Size
High Lower
Recurring
Revenue
None On-going
Predictable
Revenue
Model
No Yes

8. Renewal Acquisition Costs are
Extremely Compelling
• Every dollar of gross
margin a seller
receives from a new
customer costs $1 to
acquire, while renewal
revenue only costs
12.5 cents to acquire.
(Scout Analytics)

9. Open, Standardized API’s = Multiple
Opportunities

10. The transition to cloud is just
beginning and the opportunity is huge
Cloud computing will increase from $23.8B to $39.4B
(66%) world-wide between 2013 and 2015 (Gartner)
• Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) will grow from
$8.1B to $15.5B (91%)
• Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) will grow from $1.2B to
$1.8B (50%)
• Software-as-a-service (SaaS) will grow from $14.5B
to $22.1B (52%).

11. Twelve Best Practices for
Reselling Cloud Services
1. Understand your target buyer persona
2. Become a trusted advisor
3. Focus heavily on customer satisfaction and post-sale relationship building
4. Target prospects who are growing
5. Work within you buyers’ constraints
6. Land and expand
7. Avoid corporate IT and sell to business units or divisions
8. Mobilize for more deals at lower deal sizes
9. Sell “best of breed” or “best of feature”
10. Use a free, relevant offer to get in the door
11. Lead with a wide-solution to quickly build your customer base
12. Develop a specialty to build deeper relationships with the vendor partners

12. Understand the Target Buyer Persona
A buyer persona is a description of a specific person for whom your
products and services are intended. It goes beyond statistics and
demographics, and defines behaviors, motivations, likes/dislikes, traits, etc.
Its intent is to help you reach your customers on a human level. (Jeremy
Victor)
“(A buyer persona is) a short biography of the
typical customer, not just a job description but
a person description. The buyer persona
profile gives you a chance to truly empathize
with target buyers, to step out of your role as
someone who wants to promote a product and
see, through your buyers' eyes, the
circumstances that drive their decision
process.“ (Adelle Revella)

13. 10 Buyer Persona Questions
1 What do they do in their job every day? (responsibilities and activities)
2 What keeps them awake at night? (list 3-6)
3 What are their organizations biggest challenges?
4 How are they measured?
5 What do their buying processes typically look like?
6 Who else is on the buying committee?
7 Why would this persona buy your solution?
8 Why haven’t they bought your solution?
9 Where do they educate themselves?(online/offline)
10 How do they prefer to educate themselves? (eg. Webinars)

14. Become a Trusted Advisor to your
Target Market

15. Pay Attention to your Customers
“In our time you need to know that if you sold it, you own it. You’re
going to help that customer get that outcome. If you disappear,
then your relationship disappears with you.”
Anthony Iannarino

16. Target Customers who are growing
“One of the benefits of
selling cloud solutions is
that a growing, happy
customer means
incremental revenue to
the reseller”

17. Work within buyer constraints
“Smart resellers won't force their prospects to
rip everything out. Instead they understand
where the customer is in their cloud evolution
and work within their current technology
constraints. “

18. Land and Expand
Start with smaller, sensible
deals to get in the door

19. Sell to Business Units before IT
CDW State of the Cloud Report 2013

20. Mobilize for more deals at
lower deal sizes
Potential Sales Models
1. Direct Reps
2. Combination of Direct and
Inside
3. Inside Sales Only
4. Hybrid (75-80% inside, 20-
25% face-to-face)

21. The Case for Inside Sales
• 75% of customer would prefer not to spend time meeting face to face in
sales situations.
• 150% more efficiency in your sales force by eliminating travel time.
• Re-align your team by vertical, by tier, or by type of product sold because
you are not geographically constrained.
• Drive Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) out of your business model
• Increase profitability
• Average Sales Price (ASP) so you can gain entry into the marketplace
• Engage inbound leads instantly.
• The data shows that if you do not contact an inbound lead before it is 30
minutes old, the likelihood of converting it to a Sales Qualified Lead (SQL)
plunges to near zero. Reaching out to leads at the end of the day does not
work.
http://www.salesbenchmarkindex.com/bid/88
402/Your-Customers-Are-Telling-You-to-
Reconsider-Inside-Sales

22. Offer Best of Breed or Best of Feature
Last twenty years
“Cloud computing provides the opportunity to leverage best-of-breed application offerings…You
can pick the world’s best application for every need, every user, and every business case. You can
deploy exactly the number of seats you need, where and when you need them.”
Bessemer Venture Partner’s Top 10 Laws of Cloud Computing
Suites
Now

23. Use free, relevant offers to start the
conversation
Examples of free offers:
• Audits
• Technology Assessments
• Data/Research Presentations
• Vulnerability Tests

24. Lead with a solution that gets your
foot in the door
“Prospects receive
something of value
and sellers get the
opportunity to build
trust and
understand the
prospect’s
technology
environment.”

25. Develop a specialty that makes you
indispensable to your partners
“Once we became Google’s Lotus Notes conversion go-to partner, their sales
reps were calling us into deals” – David Politis

26. Three “Gotchas” to Watch out For
1. Trying to take too
much money upfront
and scaring the
customers away
2. Offering too many
services and solutions
3. Choosing the wrong
vendors and service
providers to partner
with

27. Eight Steps for Getting Started
1. Reach out to your existing
customer base
2. Develop your cloud strategy
3. Partner with vendors
4. Start selling to the companies
that are looking into moving to
the cloud
5. Build case studies and
references
6. Build your content
7. Market to your database of
leads
8. Sell and market wide

28. Question and Answer
Questions?
Follow Justin Gray - @jgraymatter
Follow Craig Rosenberg - @funnelholic
Follow AppNeta - @appneta

29. Thank you!
Follow Justin Gray - @jgraymatter
Follow Craig Rosenberg - @funnelholic
Follow AppNeta - @appneta