116
The Buyer’s Journey
First of all, you need to make sure that they can find what you want but
then, crucially, you need to differentiate what you have to offer. In the
Cloud world, you differentiate or you die. If you offer exactly what everyone
else is providing, you won’t last long.
You also need to make sure that you can offer great service, management
and support after you have made the sale, and this is much more important
with the Cloud than it is with the old linear model. In the past, when you
sold a system or software, you would only usually have to intervene when,
or if, it went wrong. With the Cloud you need to be on top of the service
delivery full‐time.
Service is not only something you need to focus on in order to keep
customers, in the Cloud market it’s your most important selling tool. Most
new business will come from recommendation marketing, you need to
migrate from models that are product or license sales‐dependent, to one
that is focused on service.
Figure 8: The Buyers Journey (Sales Channel)
The Cloud purchasing cycle does not look that different a product cycle, but
it
is
different as it’s the customer that’s driving the process. The decisions
that are being made, as they are being made largely by individuals, are often
instantaneous and emotional. We are witnessing the emergence of the
