Developing a Marketing plan that grows your cloud business
Recently I sat down with some successful cloud partners who referenced how changing their approach on customer acquisition, increased their volume of sales. Their message was clear - increasing the volume of leads wasn’t enough and ensuring that they invested time on the right opportunities was the key to their success. By the time customers engaged with them directly, in most cases they had already conducted significant research and were well-educated on what they needed and wanted. In addition, with budgets shifting from IT into the hands of the line of business managers, prospects were less likely to be looking for a technical solution and more likely to be searching for a solution to a business problem - this is a continuing shift in buying behavior we're seeing across the channel. Understanding the key pain points their customers were facing, and then developing a solution that could help address those issues, with technology playing the final piece into that solution, was an approach they quoted as being the key to growing their marketing and sales practice.
A critical element of growing a profitable business with cloud services is evolving your marketing strategy. On May 4th Phil Sorgen will deliver a keynote to partners in Vancouver on how to accelerate your success in a cloud world. A few sessions will follow this keynote* especially amongst them is our Digital Marketing session open to Partners in the western region on May 4th and Toronto on the 28th of April.
The session is built to deliver on how by engaging effectively with your “self-educated” prospects you can increase your close rate and shorten your sales cycle. How do you ensure that they find you as they are searching for a resolution to their business problem? How do you incorporate social and digital marketing effectively to engage customers early in their buying cycle? How do you position yourself as a thought-leader and differentiate yourself from the competition?
Learn how Microsoft partners can leverage digital marketing to drive awareness‚ engagement‚ leads and profitability This half day workshop will go over the evolved customer decision journey. Led by transformational Microsoft partners and Microsoft digital marketing experts‚ this workshop will not only clearly demonstrate the value of digital marketing and its best practices‚ but will also provide attendees with the next steps and resources needed to get started. This session was designed for Microsoft SMB partners seeking to strengthen their digital marketing knowledge & lead generation insights.
Our objective is to share best practices and provide actionable insights while generating new leads & incremental revenues to our growing Cloud Partners.
Join me over the next few weeks as we continue our journey on building a successful cloud business - and always, feel free to share your feedback, best practices, experiences.
Jason Brommet
@jbrommet
*please note that the keynote and the digital marketing session will be available to partners digitally on a later date