Selling data centers and sales strategy for conversations with CFO and IT manager
What is the best sales strategy for selling data center space convincing the IT manager and CFO? These are questions that we will help you with in this article. Discover 3 sales strategy examples how you can position your employer’s data center with the IT manager and CFO to help you win new customers.
Selling data center space to the CFO and IT Manager: Stakeholders and their interests
Unfortunately, there is no single sales strategy and fixed playbook with sales arguments, that you can always apply when selling data center space and additional services. Customers will consider a data center for various reasons and these will be unique for every business and or company.
For example: One business may wish to achieve cost savings by outsourcing the data center, compared to managing and operating their own in-house data center. Another business may wish to benefit from economies of scale and efficiency improvements by adding more data center power, flexible infrastructure, and improved connectivity. And there may also be businesses that will select an external data center to minimize the risk of service interruption, downtime and loss of critical company data.
Like always when working in sales, you as a salesperson must deal and work with various companies and stakeholders. Each with their own unique interests. It is therefore important that you discover the following early on in the sales process:
- What is the current situation?
- What are the consequences if your customer does not act on time, based on developments in the market?
- What are the consequences for the various stakeholders on the customer’s side?
3 sales examples for selling data center space to the CFO and IT manager
Here are 3 examples of how you as a salesperson can convince both the IT manager and CFO. The primary business goals are always the same: Achieving cost savings, increasing efficiency and mitigating risk. But the personal interests of the IT manager and the CFO are different compared to these primary business goals.
1. Cost savings
Your customer is considering renting an external data center for cost reduction purposes. For example: Cost savings achieved by outsourcing, compared to managing and maintaining their own server room or an in-house data center.
The IT manager’s interests:
The IT manager will have more money to spend in his IT budget, however by outsourcing the data center, some of the members in his team may become redundant. Besides this, there is also a concern whether the data center will still be the right solution 5 years from now, as more applications are moved and made available in the public cloud.
The CFO’s interests:
The CFO looks at IT and data centers in general as just a cost. He has little to no knowledge about the importance of data centers and how they function. It just needs to work right and shouldn’t be too expensive. The CFO leans heavily on the experience and recommendations of the IT manager, but he is also keeping a close eye on the new costs compared to the current situation.
Your message for the IT manager:
The data center is fully scalable at any time. If it is a better fit for you, we could discuss options for flexible upgrading and downgrading space and power throughout the terms of the agreement. Your employees will always have access to the data center to conduct work. You may also use our data center’s skilled engineers and supporting services. Our data center offers opportunities to connect to various public cloud providers from within your private server racks. This ensures that your data center space with us, will remain a future proof solution, regardless of how your cloud strategy evolves over time.
Your message for the CFO:
Demonstrate examples of potential cost savings by renting external data center. Ask the CFO, what could be the financial consequences if his company’s critical applications are unavailable for a certain amount of time. For example: Due to interruptions and unexpected downtime, caused by poor data center maintenance. Show the CFO how much money your company invests in preventive data center maintenance every month. This will be the best way to justify the higher monthly operating costs for renting an external data center, compared to their current in-house solution.
2. Productivity and efficiency
Your customer is considering an external data center, which will help their business to use IT efficiently, enable colleagues to work together everywhere and increase overall productivity.
The IT manager’s interests:
Outsourcing sounds great but he is concerned about the investments in new hardware. Besides this, not all corporate applications are suitable for outsourcing. And what about the connectivity from the office to the data center? Will the company not be at risk if all servers and IT assets are located in a single provider’s data center (vendor lock-in)?
The CFO’s interests:
He wants to reduce the number of suppliers and create synergies. Outsourcing the current data center to an external facility is a strategic long-term decision. As a company, they wish to have access to new technological innovations in the future. He wants the data center to help them in realizing both time and cost savings. But he thinks that the monthly recurring costs are quite high compared to the current situation.
Your message for the IT manager:
Existing hardware can be moved to your new external data center. We can even support you with the migration and physical moving of servers. We can offer dedicated project management together with an experienced partner. You can keep certain applications in the current situation, migrate them to your new data center, or use them instantly via a managed service or public cloud provider in the same data center. Like this your business will remain fully flexible. There is no risk for a single provider vendor lock-in, since our facility is entirely cloud and carrier neutral.
Your message for the CFO:
By opting for outsourcing to your data center, the customer will benefit from having a single provider responsible for managing, operating, and securing the data center. Besides this, the customer may also procure additional value-added services available from you. All with just one provider. For example: Installation support and connectivity services. The data center takes care of all certifications, deals with audits and shares all the reports with the customer. The customer will have peace of mind, knowing that their data and IT related processes are always fully compliant. Furthermore, the customer will be able to save a significant amount of time and money as managing complicated and expensive audits is no longer required.
3. Risk mitigation
Your customer is considering an external data center to mitigate the security risks related to theft and disasters.
The IT manager’s interests:
The IT manager gets the blame for everything that goes wrong if the website is offline, email is not working or when files and applications cannot be reached. The IT manager will be very interested in making a safe decision, without handing over full control to someone else entirely.
The CFO’s interests:
Although the CFO has less knowledge of IT and data centers, he knows exactly what it means to the business if customers are unable to place any orders.
Your message to the IT manager:
Your data center offers excellent security. Additional control mechanisms are in place during maintenance and the data center components are concurrently maintainable. Only the IT manager and certain team members are allowed to decide over which persons or goods are granted access to the data center. The customer is in full control remotely, thanks to your online customer portal. But the customer always has the option to immediately visit the data center. Your company or your dedicated partners can offer instant support for backup and disaster recovery services in case there is an incident. There is even an option to rent flexible workstations and office space in a dedicated zone of the data center facility.
Also, consider asking the IT manager what it would mean to his position and that of his team members, in case there is a long term outage and the company’s IT systems are unavailable. The IT manager must make the right decision and he must be able to justify it to the management. If not, his own career and that if his team members could be on the line and at risk.
Your message to the CFO:
Ask the CFO what it would mean to the business (financially) if they don’t have access to IT services, for anything ranging from 1 hour up to multiple days. What impact does it have on the company’s turnover? What does it mean for their corporate image and customer trust, if their business is suffering from interruption caused by data center incidents? For example, a scenario where their most important customer order portal is offline?
By showing the CFO, the daunting image of a doomsday scenario and calculating what it could all potentially cost, you will be able to justify the potential higher monthly costs of your data center. The CFO will suddenly realize why your data center is an amazing choice and absolutely worth the money, to mitigate the risks for loss of turnover and corporate image damage.
What are your best data center sales tips for selling to the CFO and IT manager?
We hope that this article was useful and that these 3 examples inspired you. What are your sales strategies to convince the CFO and IT manager to order your data center services? Contact us and let’s have a talk to see if we can help each other?
