CRAP, My Customer Needs Cloud! Here’s How to Stay Prepared

What happens when your customer asks for cloud, but you don’t know what to do?

A lot of MSPs call us franticly, looking for a cloud provider but not knowing the first thing about cloud! Their biggest customer usually wants to be in the cloud, but they don’t know how to get them there (and they need to figure it out quickly).

This scrambling is extremely common for MSPs as more businesses require modern solutions. Clients may not call it cloud, but they ask for certain functionalities!

You may sit down in your quarterly business review with your client and they may say, “I need to be able to access my reports while I’m on vacation.” or, “I have an employee that needs to be able to work from home and access our financial and sales information.”

These types of triggers are prime examples of your customers asking for cloud (without even knowing it). From here you want to be able to proactively offer cloud to them and migrate them off their on-premise servers, but where do you even start?

Staying Prepared

Do you remember back when you were a kid and you wanted to learn how to ride a bike? Did you just get up on the bike and fall down until you mastered it, or did you start out with training wheels?

I went through a hierarchy of steps to master riding a bike, beginning with training wheels. The cloud should be approached in the same way! It’s not something that you get the hang of immediately: you need to be prepared.

When your customers find out you don’t have a cloud solution prepared, there’s a good chance you’ll lose them. We’ve seen that more than once…

To make sure that worst case scenario doesn’t happen to your MSP, we want to talk about what we recommend from our experiences!

Understanding the Cloud

It’s not a good feeling when one of your top customers calls and asks a question about that you have no answer for. You’re just stuck! And this is when bad decisions are made.

When you don’t know what to do, you start to scramble. We often hear partners that have, in a pinch, tried Azure because it was the easiest thing to do. They get onboarded, then quickly begin to realize what a mess it is, and then they realize they’re now in an even bigger mess.

There are a ton of poor-quality cloud providers that exist out there, and we’ve had our fair share of experience from when we were an MSP! Some immediate signs of troubling support include:

1. Weak Response: When you call in and can’t get ahold of anyone! Your customer will be as frustrated as you are…
2. Not Specialized in the MSP Industry: You shouldn’t have to call in to your support and explain to them the necessary terminology!
3. Confusing Pricing: If your pricing is constantly frustrating or organized into varying tiers, you should be wary. Additionally, hidden costs can add up quickly if your provider is attaching them. We’ve had partners call us almost in tears because they’re getting a bill that they just can’t possibly pass off to their customer due to costs that they weren’t expecting.

Overall, putting your customers with a cloud provider that you know nothing about is a bad idea!

Do your homework and talk to providers ahead of time so you can determine what your best options are. Ask questions, evaluate their responses, and if they have a demo or trial, try it out!

Understanding Your Customer

As we mentioned earlier, you need to understand what your customer is asking for before they ask.

When we got into cloud, no one really knew about it yet: we had to sell it based on functionality! Customers didn’t really care what it was called or where the servers were, they just knew what they wanted.

Cloud is different today. Customers may not understand the technical aspects of the cloud, but they understand what it can do (due to advertising, the pandemic, etc.). This means you need to be more prepared than ever when customers ask a trigger question: you can’t sit like a deer in the headlights with no idea what to do! You need to have the necessary information to educate your customers and easily control the conversation.

So, where do you go to educate yourself? Well, you want to have a reliable cloud partner! This goes back to selecting a partner that you can rely on for any questions or concerns your clients may have.

Educating Your Customer

Businesses are competitive and are out there looking, especially today, for any information that can give them a leg up on the competition. They need to grow their businesses, lower their costs, stay productive, etc.

Because of this pressure, your clients are likely out there Googling this kind of stuff. Some of that information might be right and some of that information might be wrong!

If you have educated your clients ahead of time, the chances of them retaining incorrect information are much lower. Becoming the authority on cloud is a massive benefit and will certainly lead to new clients!

It also helps with answering objections: since cloud requires financial investment, there is a good chance that prospects will search for articles that prove their own stance (that cloud is too expensive, ineffective, etc.) Proper education will alleviate these scenarios and make selling cloud much easier!

My Customer Needs Cloud… Great!

If you don’t have anybody asking for cloud right now, we’ve given you what you need to be prepared to offer it. If you currently have a customer that needs cloud but you don’t have a solution lined up, reach out to us! We’d be more than happy to talk to you about it.

Feel free to check out the rest of our website first to make sure we are a good fit for your MSP. As Doc Brown once said, “Your future is whatever you make it, so make it a good one.” Thanks for reading!