Or “How to focus on talent and techniques that will actually make a difference”

Are you looking for a way to slash your sales and marketing budgets? Why not try our CSiaB solution (Cloud Salesperson in a Box). Contents of the box include a life-size cardboard cut-out of a cloud sales person with a winning smile. Also included are audio files and presentation materials to enable your CSiaB to recite the cloud mantra as follows:

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1. The worlds of business and IT are changing!
2. New disruptive players like Uber and AirBNB are a threat to us all.
3. The future is cloud – but right now you have legacy systems so we’ll focus on Hybrid Cloud.
4. The answer to your Hybrid Cloud needs is an integrated solution that links public and private clouds seamlessly.
5. We have the answer. A new Cloud offering that does this all and does it better than everyone else’s cloud offering in some undefined way.

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For even better results try the deluxe CMiaB solution (Cloud Marketeer in a Box). Contents of this box include a life-size cardboard cut-out of a cloud marketeer with an ever bigger smile. The deluxe CMiaB solution also includes audio files that last longer and presentation materials in brighter colours to recite the cloud mantra with even greater impact.

[easy-tweet tweet=”Purchase your CMiaB solution from @Comparethecloud today! Free Lifetime No #BS guarantee!” user=”billmew” usehashtags=”no”]

Also available for budget conscious clients that lack storage space for these life-size cardboard cut-outs are CSaaS (Cloud Salesperson as a Service) and CMaaS (Cloud Marketeer as a Service). Included in these packages are videos that can be streamed live and projected onto screens to look and sound like sales or marketing staff – again with winning smiles!

As a special promotion this month bundled with all these solutions we are including CEaaS (Cloud Education as a Service) – this service provides unlimited access to the Compare the Cloud podcast library (WARNING: listening to too much Andrew McLean and Neil Cattermull can be hazardous to your sanity).

Seriously though, how many events and conferences have you been to recently where almost all the keynote speakers have been delivering variations on the same cloud mantra – the one cited above – without clearly explaining what their differentiation is.

At least with the large public cloud providers you have some clear differentiation. On top of this with the array of services from the AWS marketplace you have plenty of choice while with AWS Glacier at only $0.007 per gigabit per year (yes that’s right – less than a cent!) you’ve got some amazing value services as well.

In the private cloud camp all the vendors are converging on VMware or, as is increasingly the case, OpenStack (CloudStack and Eucalyptus having both bitten the dust). With all these vendors offering the same cloud mantra with the same technology stack, understanding the differentiating between their competitive offerings is sometimes hard to do.

The unfortunate truth is that in all probability:

• Your value proposition and differentiation isn’t all that well understood.
• What you do isn’t necessarily seen as unique by you target market.
• Others could copy you if they were motivated to do so.

When was the last time you got an independent third party to quiz your clients and prospects to get a real idea of how well they understand you and value you?

Indeed what kind of competitive intelligence do you have on your market?

[easy-tweet tweet=”What kind of competitive intelligence do you have on your market?” user=”billmew @comparethecloud”]

The truth is that intelligence-based marketing is the ONLY way that you are going to create and sustain a differentiated brand. However, this doesn’t mean investing more in traditional marketing techniques or in marketing headcount.

Instead you need to focus on:

• Influencer Marketing: if you don’t know who the main influencers are then start by looking at our monthly #CloudInfluence Rankings. If you don’t have similar intelligence for the markets that you serve then you are competing at a disadvantage.
• Content Marketing: note that “90% of all content marketing gets NO reaction. That’s massive wasted effort and opportunity cost.” So you need to stop wasting your effort and resources on tactics that don’t work and start applying rigorous data-driven intelligence to fine tune your content creation and targeting.
• Social Selling: if your sales teams aren’t active on social media and actively building their following and social connections then they simply aren’t present in the same circles as your prospects.
• Talent Acquisition: with marketing automation tools you don’t need a large marketing headcount. You are better of focusing on a small number of really talented individuals that can really make a difference. The reality is that anyone who isn’t top talent in one or all of the key areas above is little better than a cardboard cut-out!