Why Cloud Sales Pitches Fail

Every sales person understands that selling is a process. This post is about what can wrong during this process — and the ONE thing you can do to ensure that you not only close your current sale, but have the customer begging for more. That’s right, the customer will want you to do other projects that you weren’t even being considered for!

Disclaimer — I am NOT officially in ‘sales’, nor have I ever been in sales. However, running your own technical consulting practice, automatically involves wearing the ‘sales cap’. To that end, this post builds on over 20 years of conversations with prospects and repeat customers. With that disclaimer out of the way….

Focus on the tech part of your cloud sales conversation .  Be a nerd (or take one with you)!

Customers are more sophisticated than we give them credit for. They may not understand the latest advances in tech, but they understand their own I.T. landscape better than most.

Once you get a customer talking about their specific technology landscape, you are half way done with your sales process. If you are able to respond with a few broad options (Some of my past clients have used this service on this cloud to accomplish this…), you are ready to close (more appropriately, you DO NOT need to close, as explained below).

In fact, the closing has already occurred in the customer’s mind. You just don’t know it. Only the logistics around getting started remain.

How, you ask, did that happen? Because you focused on the technology part of the sales. And that showed the customer two things:

a) That you were listening and

b) That you have the chops to navigate their difficult landscape

You showed your competence without talking about budgets, timelines or scopes.

It bears repetition — focus on the technology part of the sale and the business part will take care of itself.

But EVERY sales book I’ve read talks about focusing on the 3 BIG items (Budget, Timeline and Scope)

True. Budget, Timeline and Scope are all crucial. So crucial that you want to do your best to turn them from a ‘fixed budget’ to a ‘flexible budget’ (or a fixed timeline to a malleable timeline).

Think about the last handyman/repairman that you hired. Did you pick the candidate that said they could fix your problem (ALL of them promise they can do that), or did you go with the person who thought beyond your immediate issue? And perhaps, made you think about things that you HADN’T considered? And were you willing to expand your budget (and even stretch your timeline) to get those additional items addressed?

In the same way, if you have conceptually won over your prospect, all of the big 3 business items will take care of themselves. The timeline will expand. The budget will flex. And the scope can widen.

The ONLY way I know of stretching all these business objectives is by going deep technically. Go deep into their technical challenge. As deep as you can.

The Closing (you don’t need  one)!

As mentioned earlier, the closing is not a physical event.

The closing is something that happens in the mind of a prospect. You DO NOT have to actually close anything.

If you were successful in getting the customer talking about their specific problems, and were able to offer a couple of potential solutions, the closing has already taken place.

If the customer actually pulled in their I.T. staff to further the conversation, you can rest assured that you can start the paperwork to get the logistics moving.

The deeper the conversation gets into their tech, the closer you are to NOT worrying about ‘the close’. The ‘close’ is already happening in your customer’s mind.

Doesn’t that require that I stay up to date with ALL recent technologies?

Yes. Especially those that are meaningful for your customer’s biggest pain point.

For e.g. — they may be considering hosting some key apps in the public cloud. They know all the benefits (cost savings, elasticity…). Their main concern is the security of their hosted app.

Will they have the same level of infrastructure monitoring, threat detection and event alerting that they are accustomed to on premises? What will the security guardrails look like and how granular can those guardrails get? Can you restrict access to a specific set of IP addresses…can you log and audit every single resource that is accessed?

You don’t need to be an expert on all the 160 plus services that the public cloud offers. But you DO NEED to be an expert on the options centered around infrastructure security, cloud native monitoring and alerting.

To assist you in your quest, there are plenty of youtube videos, hands-on labs and other training resources. In today’s day and age, high quality training is inexpensive and readily streamable (yea, I made that word up).

More importantly, your new found security knowledge, like any other knowledge base, is reusable.

Your deep security knowledge should allow you to get your prospect talking — and should get them excited to find ‘you’ — the ONE guy or gal that knows the MOST about THEIR specific security concerns!

What’s wrong with a canned sales script? Or a canned close?

A canned script is the exact opposite of ‘getting the customer talking’. YOU are doing all the talking and none of the listening.

Apart from sounding like a ‘know it all’, you also make the customer feel like an outsider.

I still encounter sales folks who want me to ‘compile a canned list of scoping questions’. Their rationale is that it will save them time and also the customer time.

My response is that you DON’T want to save the customer time!

Not when they are talking about their problems. You WANT to PROLONG and STRETCH that one on one time as much as possible. The more they talk, the more business you are potentially getting.

So, in brief, eliminate every bit of canned pitch or material or closing pitch that you have used in the past. Simply go in armed with your technical knowledge and a listening attitude.

Summary and why cloud sales pitches fail

The public cloud is a $250 billion market (as I write this today, Microsoft’s Azure cloud grew by 40% Y.o.Y. 40 percent! And that’s typical — both AWS and GCP are also experiencing similar growth spurts). There’s a LOT of business to be done!

The trouble is that, if you simply approach it like any other sale, you will lose to the competition.

Most people selling in this space are both business savvy AND technically literate. (I am using the public cloud as an example, but this applies to any other technical arena, including packaged software, bigdata analytics, machine learning, AI etc.).

Ensure that you are able to keep both those checkboxes checked — the technical depth and the business savvy — and prep (I mean, prep like you did before taking that killer final exam in college), before meeting with any prospect.

Even if you were to not win this particular encounter, you will come away with the chops to land your next client.

Do you need help with your cloud sales efforts? Would you benefit from taking a seasoned cloud architect along with you?

Do you need assistance with your next cloud sales or technical sales effort?