I talk to sales leaders on a weekly basis and one constant theme I hear from them – and heard while at Enterprise Connect – is around “Hybrid Cloud”. As we’ve seen, the hybrid cloud solution for voice services continues to evolve.
It is interesting that many resellers are still not comfortable in this cloud world. They may say they are a cloud provider but the solutions they put in front of a client do not tell this story. The traditional premise proposals they put on the street tell their story well but the cloud version of that proposal is weak, consisting of mostly stock pdf oriented outputs from the provider.
Some things to consider:
- Does your proposal for a cloud offering have the same look and feel as the premise offer does?
- Does your proposal for a cloud offering have a full complement of information telling the story of you the reseller organization or mostly of the provider/manufacturer?
- Does your proposal for a cloud offering have a Scope of Work document that is as robust as your premise offerings?
These are great questions if we are talking about a pure cloud offering but we are talking about hybrid cloud solutions. Perhaps the better questions to ask during the proposal generation process are:
- Does your proposal for the overall customer engagement fully encapsulate all the offerings you have in front of the client?
- Does the proposal demonstrate your expertise and explain what you are offering?
- Does the proposal contrast and compare the different options you can deliver?
- Are you properly providing the customer with a financial breakdown of the different offers?
- And certainly, does your proposal and executive summary provide a recommendation and explanation of why your discoveries lead your team there?
Each organization will come at these from different viewpoints. The more comfortable you are with these answers, the higher the likelihood you have of signing a new and probably long-term customer.
Take the time to look at all your customer deliverables. Are they consistent with the same look and feel to tell your story properly? Is your team able to create them in a consistent methodology or do they use different processes for each solution? Does your scope of work have a process that ensures they have answered all the appropriate questions for the project scope?
Organizations work hard to get customers, make sure your story is told fully to win over those new customers.
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