I recently chatted with someone who had been in the IT industry for a very long time, and as our conversation moved away from his personal experiences and towards what I do, he made a statement that left my jaw on the floor. “Oh, Cloud’s not really that big. I don’t think I’ll bother with…
We live in a noisy world. Each day, we are exposed to more than 5,000 advertisements. As a managed service provider, how do you reach your audience and break through the clutter? And if you do have the opportunity to capture a prospect’s attention, how do you then convince them to buy? Simply pushing your…
The Roman philosopher Cicero once said, “If you wish to persuade me, you must think my thoughts, feel my feelings, and speak my words.” No matter how sure you are that Cloud services can improve a company’s productivity, conserve its capital and save it time, you’ll likely have difficulty convincing customers to move to the…
Many MSPs and VARs are great at marketing, but for some, marketing continues to be a daunting and nebulous affair filled with buzzwords and hype. Love it or hate it, the reality is marketing is a fundamental (and dare I say fun) part of business. And as the competition among service providers heats up in…
For value added resellers (or VARs) entering the Cloud market, the saying “differentiate or die” holds true now more than ever. In an era of increasing competition, it is easy to spend all your time on day-to-day operations and neglect marketing strategy. Don’t make the mistake of being slow to act on marketing your services:…
There is no denying the significance of the role channel marketing partners play in today’s IT sector. As Cloud services adoption continues to experience exponential growth, master sellers are searching for new ways to expand their reach and end users are struggling to make sense of rapidly evolving technology and services. The Cloud boom demands…
An ever-increasing proliferation of endpoint devices coupled with the rise of the Cloud and the consumerization of IT has made desktop management more complicated than ever before. Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS), initially offered up by Cloud service providers, offers Managed Service Providers (MSPs) an unprecedented opportunity to expand their businesses. In this post, I’ll describe the key elements…
“By 2020, a corporate “No Cloud” policy will be as rare as a “No Internet” policy is today.” — Gartner, 2015 In the past, you may have heard the phrase, “Don’t sell the steak, sell the sizzle”. Well, the same rings true for MSPs selling Cloud. In a deeply competitive industry, selling the service isn’t no…
The hosting industry is comprised of close to 50,000 companies worldwide – with 10,000 companies in North America alone – all competing for market share. With few dominant players and 80% of the market consisting of small- and medium-sized businesses, there’s no doubt that the industry has become very competitive. Enter the Cloud, and now…
I’ve attended countless events, presentations and webinars on selling Cloud computing — some good, some bad, and some were… well… let’s say “unappealing” is as polite as I can get. One in particular sticks in my mind: a presentation I was really looking forward to last year by a top executive of a huge IT…