Sales Strategy Shift in the Cloud Services Market

The fact that enterprises are making a strategic intent shift to cloud and as-a-service models changes more than the service delivery model. It also changes the value proposition and therefore causes implications for provider’s sales strategies. For starters, the focus turns away from the provider’s capabilities.

Sure, those capabilities are still important. But with the new models the focus shifts to the customer’s needs.

The old strategic intent and value proposition was to achieve cost savings. Providers presented offer-based solutions touting the provider’s services. For example, a provider selling to a potential client in the P&C insurance industry might describe the kind of clients it services and how many clients it has, as follows:

“We have 25 clients in the P&C space with five million policies, 1000 analytics professionals with advanced statistical knowledge. We have 5,000 FTEs in eight offshore, nearshore and onshore locations. And we have a platform-based solution.”

Competition would take place on which provider’s offer is the most compelling to the customer. Typically in an offer-based solution the winning provider would be the firm with the most experience in the industry that targets the customer’s areas at appropriate price points.

But cloud and as-a-service solutions focus on the customer’s needs. This gives providers the opportunity to shift to needs-based messaging, as in the following example for a P&C insurance company:

“P&C insurers are battling high expense ratios, coupled with low interest rates globally. This is putting strains on their finances. Our solution can help you automate underwriting and shorten quote times by up to 60 percent, improve fraud detection by over 40 percent and facilitate early identification for subrogation helping improve overall margins.”

One of the most significant implications of the enterprise shift to the cloud is that focusing on needs-based messaging instead of the provider’s capabilities offer-based messaging will change the brute force product-selling mechanism that has come to define the market as we know it.