Do you have what it takes to be successful? It is getting more important than ever to have the best practices ready for your customers to use. Luckily, we have created one for you to follow! With this method we can give you the right equipment to serve your customers well. That means that you already must have some experience in selling IaaS products and services, because you want to have the right skills and competence in place which is necessary to succeed in the IaaS world.

In this blog we look at the why, what, and how to profile your IaaS in a right way. With knowing these things, you can learn how to take the best advantages on it. The importance of profiling in today’s channel and the emergence of cloud-based solutions, as well as the recurring revenue model has impact on your customers’ business models.

From transaction to interaction

The importance of making a difference in customer segmentation techniques has become bigger. The customer of today is not the customer of a couple of years ago. Your customers have changed and so must you. By understanding these changes, you can profile the right customers in whom you want to focus on. Your customer knows more, understands more, and does more with IaaS today than ever before.

The capabilities still range from transaction to interaction, and its more about skills that is needed to fulfill these capabilities, which change constantly. Were once you needed to carry and install services; you now need to resell an online virtual infrastructure.

The IT industry has come to a next wave, and that the ways about how IT was developed, deployed, used, and even analyzed has changed. These developments cause some of those major disruptions on the channel landscape. Those traditional segmentation methods do not add more value anymore in this fast changing and growing IaaS market. Experimenting with different segmentation techniques pays off a lot. To help you with that, we can educate and motivate you on how to deploy your current capabilities in the cloud. The profiling tool that we have launched in July will help you to understand your current capabilities and accelerate in today’s IaaS market.

How we help you accelerate in today’s IaaS market

We can streamline your efforts and optimize it with conversations and other types of engagement we have with you. The cloud offers more new opportunities for you, like:

• cloud brokerage,
• cloud service providers,
• cloud audits. 
• cloud security policies
• cloud migration services

If you remove the word cloud from that list, you see that you already have the capabilities but may not fully have the skills to use it on the cloud’s various hyper scaled platforms. That is where the difference lies. We can help you with developing those skills so that you are more able to make a difference for your customers.

Profiling success starts here

New emerging technologies are popping up, and this goes in a faster pace than you can keep up with. We found that profiling success connects on the following 5 best practices.

1. Identify, onboard, and retain the right customers: the ones with the attributes to grow a cloud solutions/services business
2. Implement a quantitative profiling methodology: to rank existing and prospective customers in a consistent manner
3. Prevent subjectivity: as the view of specific customers may infect the scoring process due to long-term work relationships
4. Integrate customer profiling value scoring worksheets with a platform: to create one common customer database containing key data and attributes
5. Follow the guidance: to ensure that your team is well trained in the execution of the profiling process

Who are the right customers? Those are the customers with the right characteristics to grow on IaaS and PaaS solutions, and they are building or having a service business. These customers have the ideal customer profile and must be updated on a yearly basis, because the characteristics that were one’s key such as on-premises technical support are fading right now. Now you are looking for customers that are adopting and managing a recurring revenue model, or a recurring service capability model. You are also looking for customers that are building up their own services. Those customers will be successful in this new channel.

Implementing a quantitative profiling methodology based on best practices where you can rank investing as well as prospect customers in a consistent manner, and even plot them in frameworks. Using a framework shows which customer fits the profile and can have a big impact on your IaaS business.

The benefits of customer profiling for you are huge. A good customer profile drives more efficient customer recruitments, has better growth efforts and is data driven.

The power of profiling

Why is profiling so important? Profiling can increase your sales because it’s important to make your customers more productive. One of the easiest ways to grow your revenue is to figure out how to transform some of those unproductive customers into productive customers. Customer profiling is a good way to unlock this potential. There are 3 primary reasons why some of your customers are unproductive.

One of them is that they lack engagement. If you don’t have the resources to engage with all your customers equally to provide the same level of support, they will become unproductive for you. We see that most organizations only focus on the 20% of their customer base, because those customers bring in the most revenue. With this structure you are leaving behind a significant number of potential productive customers untouched or unengaged.

The second one is that your customers lack business focus. Most of your customers tend to have more areas of focus. To solve this, you really need to understand what category their products are in. Customers buy products in a different way than they buy solutions.

The third reason is your customer skill level. A beginning customer doesn’t have the capital, knowledge, and experience to be a productive customer. The more advanced a customer is, the higher the change is that you can turn them into a productive customer. What you need to do is to identify those customers, because if you do not identify them, it means you are less focusing on your business development.  

You want to create the biggest Impact as possible for your efforts and investments. If you focus on potential customers who not actually fit your message or solutions, you will not succeed as much as you wanted to. You want to focus on the right customers at the right time in this process. With profiling you can do that. A customer profile scan helps your company to find suitable leads that you want. This can be useful for targeted marketing and for your sales activities. You can also use customer profiling for valuable leads in the most effective way as possible. It makes it easier to identify positive and negative customer profiles.

Account Based Marketing 

Customer profiles allows you to focus on the customers that brings the most value into your business. Once you have convinced a customer, you can base product developments and service decisions on customer profiles to optimize your attention. Each customer response differently. By collecting customer information from targeted customers, you can build a detailed overview of the customer journey. With the best approach you can read out different customers during each moment, and highlighting these moments are crucial in this process.

With those processes in place, we come to the stage that we can use inbound and account-based marketing together. Account based marketing is a complex marketing strategy that only can be used if you have your customer profiling ready, in which you serve high quality customers. With all this information inbound and account-based marketing can help you in your customer approach.

With inbound marketing you generate leads by attracting as many visitors as possible to your website, socials, mailing’s or with valuable free content. Try to convert your leads into customers with various forms of premium content, for which visitors must leave their contact information to get access. We offer E-books, events, and other useful information on how you can establish that.

Get your IaaS Edge

By doing this you attract a lot of interesting customers and eventually the top interested customers stay. At that moment it’s time to use account-based marketing because you know your customer profile. Now you know who your customers are, what they need and when they need it. You will also be able to see in which stage your customers are. Are they just beginning? Building or growing their businesses? At this point you can provide information and solutions that they need on that exact moment.

You may by now have notice that inbound and account-based marketing are two different approaches, but they complete each other. As you can see profiling is valuable for you and it is also information that can really make a difference in the way you do business. This makes you also more capable to understand your customers better, and you can increase the support and approach to your customers as well.

How can we deliver more as a service to you?

You have all the information that you need, but you may lack resources to provide for your customers. We can assist you with that. We can provide you with dedicated programs and target each customer group with unique marketing campaigns. It’s important for us to put all the new programs and initiatives that support your business and help you thrive even more!

In our next blog we will tell you more about our approach in creating the perfect customer profile. You will get to know how to create a dedicated portal, and how you can Engage with different types of customers.

More information

Would you like to know how we can support you in your cloud journey? Please contact our IaaS team via iaas@ingrammicro.com or 32 2 254 99 50.

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