There are dozens of reasons that companies want to grow their hosted and managed services business, and there are even more reasons that explain their struggles with achieving this goal. Although companies have different explanations to their disappointing hosted and managed services numbers, there is one challenge that everyone shares… and overcoming this one obstacle is the core to successful selling in this space.
When businesses create an initiative to grow their hosted and managed services, they don’t think about the significant change it will cause for end-user customers. To us, it looks the same – the same video, access control, or whatever – it’s just hosted and/or managed by someone else. We see the benefits and think it should be a no-brainer. However, from our customers’ perspectives, the benefits are clouded by the change that these services bring to their organization. Whether it’s a small business moving from no access control system to a hosted system, or a larger business moving from an on-premise system to a hosted set-up, these scenarios present change … and no one likes change.
So, the one common obstacle every sales person has in selling hosted and managed services is that it’s not about selling benefits of the system, it’s about managing change with your customers’ personnel. If you can do this, you’ll have an advantage over your competition and will begin to own your customers.