We heard today from our friend and contributing writer Anurag Agrawal, CEO, Techaisle, regarding his firm’s most recent study results. The survey, which was developed to understand the winning strategies for selling Cloud to SMBs, uncovered 15 best practices and critical differences between the activities and approaches of successful and unsuccessful SMB Cloud computing channel partners.
· Corporate priorities and allocations:
1. There is no organizational recipe for cloud success.
2. Familiarity breeds success
3. The “why” behind the cloud initiative often helps explain success.
4. Recurring revenue is not the sole indicator of cloud business success.
· Technology and offering definition:
5. Cloud rewards suppliers that focus on providing best-of-breed.
6. Branded solutions are a key element of channel cloud success.
7. Industry expertise is a more important differentiator than technical prowess.
8. Cloud portfolios need to extend beyond basic IaaS, SaaS to also encompass verticals.
9. Data integration linking on-premise and cloud environments is non-optional.
10. The future is hybrid, not private.
· Sales and marketing strategies and tactic:
11. The nature of sales relationship is a critical determinant of cloud success.
12. Profit is driven by product/service balance.
13. Partner-to-partner relationships are important to cloud business success.
14. A distinctive approach to budget and resource allocation creates differentiation.
15. Creating a cost-effective, scalable approach to lead generation is imperative.
Full details of the study and report deliverables can be found here.
