Selling isn’t an easy job, and no one likes to be sold to! While adoption to the cloud services has been growing in popularity, some business leaders are still hesitant to make the jump from their existing on-premise infrastructure and services to solutions hosted in the cloud. For clients that are new to cloud technology, understandably, they might be wondering how secure their data will be, how often data backups run and if the platform can integrate easily with their existing infrastructure and services. In this blog post, we look at how can you convince your clients to move to Microsoft Azure. We discuss the features and benefits you can present to clients and how you can sell the merits of the Azure platform to make it easier for you to convince your clients to migrate to the cloud.

You’ve heard about the CSP program and how it will make it easier for you to resell Microsoft Azure. But, do you really understand how it works? Learn more.

Educate your clients

Some of your clients may not be familiar with cloud technology, and with that in mind, it’s important to explain to these clients what cloud technology is and what it can do for them. You can show how much of a positive impact cloud infrastructure and services can have on their organization. You can also explain how you can provision infrastructure and services in just a few clicks – all from a web dashboard. No more server rooms!

Some clients might not be ready to migrate their entire infrastructure to Azure, and that’s ok. If you experience this, you can talk about Hybrid Cloud solutions and how you can integrate public cloud services and solutions with their existing IT infrastructure.

Identify their pain-points

Your clients no doubt have pain points with their existing IT infrastructure and services; maybe they’re just not aware of the benefits that cloud technology can bring, or you might hear: “we’ve always done it like that.” Try to identify customer pain points early, then map these back to solutions and services in the Azure platform that can help alleviate if not remove their pain points. Present these options to the customer to help illustrate how the platform will be a benefit to their business.

Address Security Concerns

One of the most pressing concerns your clients could have may be about security; don’t shy away from this topic. Talk to your clients about their security concerns and explain how the security features in Azure can help mitigate all their security risks. For example, you can talk about how Azure can help manage and control identities and user access.

You can explain how Microsoft continually monitors servers, services, and networks to protect and defend against incoming attacks. You can find more detailed information here regarding all of Azure’s security features.

Scale on-demand and high-availability

For clients that run and support mission-critical applications or applications and services that deal with torrents of data, they will be concerned with scalability and high-availability. Talk about these concerns with your client and explain how Microsoft Azure is a stable, reliable platform with high availability that can scale on demand. Let them know that Azure has a 99.95% monthly SLA that receives automatic operations system and service patches. Explaining these features will help put your client’s minds at rest and alleviate worries they might have.

Integrates easily with existing Microsoft products and services

Being a Microsoft platform, Azure integrates very nicely with existing Microsoft products and services, that said, the platform also lets you provision Linux servers as well! Microsoft integration is seamless, for example, when using a product like Microsoft Visual Studio. It’s an excellent choice for software development companies and developers! You can explain to software development houses how simple it is to publish to Azure from Visual Studio, configure continued integration and delivery services thereby optimizing and accelerating their development process!

Rich ecosystem

We touched on this in an earlier blog post, but it is worth mentioning again; the Azure platform has a very rich ecosystem. Using a web dashboard, you can provision infrastructure and services that include, but are not limited to:

• Servers and virtual machines
• Database instances (relational and NoSQL)
• Artificial intelligence services
• Network load balancers
• Analytics services
• Data lakes
• Active directories and much more!

With such an abundance of infrastructure and services available in the platform, you have many potential solutions to address most, if not all of your client’s concerns and objections when it comes to migrating to the cloud.

Summary

In this blog post, we’ve explored several reasons that can help you convince your clients to move to Microsoft Azure. We’ve looked at why educating your clients is important and how addressing their security concerns up-front is essential to help alleviate those worries. We’ve also seen that by mapping their concerns and questions back to Azure products and services, you can make your job of convincing them a little easier. We hope you’ve enjoyed this post and good luck!