Executive Summary
The increasing shift of decision making to business users for cloud services, as well as their growing influence, is creating challenges for service providers. These providers typically sell their traditional and cloud offerings to enterprise IT, or at best, the Line-of-Business (LOB) IT. They understand this segment and are comfortable in selling to this buyer group.
However, with the increasing spend on cloud solutions by the business users, these providers are facing challenges that require them to tweak their sales strategy to better address this segment. Their go-to-market strategy still focuses on the existing sales methods, and therefore, they are witnessing very limited success.
Everest Group’s discussion with the business users buying cloud services reveals that service providers lack a meaningful message for this segment. Their traditional approach of focusing on “IT-related” parameters does not impress the business users.
We believe service providers need to transform their sales strategy to target business users buying cloud services. However, they still have to maintain a fine balance between their sales strategies for the traditional and next-generation services. They need to evolve their sales approach, focus, and invest suitably. For example, rather than focusing on the total cost of ownership, they need to position their offerings based on the return on investments (RoI).
Service providers need to undergo three key sales transformations to effectively serve cloud services demand from the business buyers:
- Sales approach: Focusing more on “business parameters” than “IT dimensions”. Therefore, creating messages around the ease-of-use, accessibility, and quick time to market.
- Sales focus: Focusing more on return on investments, alignment with business opportunities, and creating competitive advantage for buyers.
- Sales investments: Focusing on training resources and even hiring/creating different sales team for cloud initiatives.
This research focuses on the increasing role of business users in buying cloud services and an effective sales strategy for service providers to serve this segment. It provides insights on:
- Influence and decision-making role of business users in buying cloud services
- Challenges faced by service providers in selling to business users
- Sales transformation strategy for service providers to target business users
