Cloud Services Enablement

There is a lot of buzz right now around enablement; specifically around cloud enablement and what does it look like?   Do a quick Google search and you can immediately be taken in one of many directions depending on if you’re a vendor, an analyst or even some flavor of a service provider.  Clearly there isn’t a magic recipe or set of ‘rules’ you need to follow.  In the years of practicing enablement with partner engagements, I’ve learned it boils down to a couple of fundamental ideas:

• Sales - What is the specific opportunity and whom do I sell it to?
• Technical – How do I support what is being or has been sold?
• Marketing – What is the message and how do I reach a new/potential client outside my existing base?
• Operations - How do I reduce risk and make it a repeatable process?

 If you look at the analyst reviews and predictions, everyone is doing cloud, right?  A leading consulting firm is forecasting global SaaS revenue will be $106B in 2016.   The question for a lot of partners I work with is how can I capture my fair share?? 

 If we break this down a bit more, you can see that peeling the ‘onion’ can lead to a lot more questions.  If there is one thing I have seen with cloud enablement, it’s that there are always more questions, the trick is to focus on the main points.   Sales are a key lynch pin in being successful, as the business top line and bottom line success depends on them.  Everything from having a solutions sales mindset (think insurance or telecom sales where annuity models are the norm) to compensation plans and how you can drive a specific behavior are all important ideas to consider.  A ‘potential client’ can be in any line of the business not just in the IT department anymore.  Today’s potential customer is looking for a quick solution and has a corporate credit card in their name.  Having the skill sets and the ability to build rapport at ALL levels of the business is paramount. 

 On the technical front, is there a specific cloud solution that fits nicely into your current portfolio offering today?   If you currently are a leader in virtualization, it might be a logical next step to adding a IaaS cloud solution to your portfolio.   If you are known in the marketplace for security, some type of SaaS offering in the security space would be a natural fit. The key is to do something you are known for and bring credibility to the marketplace today already.

 The third piece of the puzzle is marketing, how do you get the message out to your existing customer base while adding net new customers??  Leveraging a distributor is vital to help you accomplish this most efficiently.  They can be invaluable and have the resources necessary  in helping you do the groundwork  on marketing a new cloud offering, helping create  end user focus campaigns and an overall go to market strategy. 

 Lastly, how do you make this a repeatable process and reduce the risks?  While some of these annuity based services can be lower margin, they don’t have to be.  Focus on creating ‘bundled’ solutions that not only leverage what you are already known for, but things that are repeatable and can add true value and efficiency to the customer.  The more complex the solution and the more pieces you try and offer, the more risk you introduce into the equation. Reducing complexity and the amount of pieces necessary to engineer a solution reduces risk and creates a true partnership/trusted adviser relationship that will last longer and will be more rewarding long term.  It helps take the pricing discussion off the table and creates a long term customer.  

 In the end, you can’t be everything to everybody.   Solution providers must understand their target market and create specific value to be in the game long term.  The specific solutions offer must align to their heritage and be complimentary to help gain assurances for potentially new clients.  Reaching out to a distribution partner to leverage their knowledge and to inquire if they have possible enablement programs can be huge.  Distribution can help you accelerate your time to market and differentiate you from your competitors and ultimately can reduce your risk exposure.