Start your

Journey to Cloud

Rahul Bhavsar
 About the Author

Rahul is a Cloud Evangelist and experienced professional in

Enterprise Cloud in small and large enterprise segments. He
has over 15 years of experience in Cloud Computing and
Information Technology with a strong management, sales
and business development Skills. Currently he is leading the
META Region for Ingram Micro as a Director Cloud - Sales, to
build the cloud business and launch the Ingram Micro Cloud
Marketplace in the region. Prior to Ingram Micro since 2009
he has worked on many products in Cloud Computing space focusing on Middle East and Global
markets. His technology direction helped the companies stay ahead in competition and market.

Over last few years he has learnt all the various aspects of building a great company with strong
skills on Leadership, Marketing, Sales, Operations, Development, Understanding the Global
Market and Economics to make a global product, building a self sustainable business model, all
this has enabled Rahul to build products to provide leading solutions and work with partners and
solution providers across the globe.

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Table of Contents

Preface ........................................................................................................................................... 5

Why Am I Writing This Book? .................................................................................................... 7

How I Started My Cloud Journey?.............................................................................................. 7

Chapter 1: Cloud Business Model .................................................................................................. 9

Cloud Services vs Traditional IT business ................................................................................... 9

Understanding Cloud Business terminology ............................................................................ 12

Understanding Various Functions of Cloud Services Business ................................................ 14

Chapter 2 : How to Get Started ................................................................................................... 16

Starting with Economics........................................................................................................... 16

Understanding Your Market and Geography ........................................................................... 17

Segmenting Your Market ......................................................................................................... 18

Identifying Your Cloud Vendors & Partners ............................................................................. 18

Understanding Your Strengths ................................................................................................. 23

Building The Product and Services Portfolio ............................................................................ 23

Building Your Pricing Strategy .................................................................................................. 24

Getting Things in Place ............................................................................................................. 25

Chapter 3 : Building your Team ................................................................................................... 28

Ideal Teams for Cloud Services Business ................................................................................. 29

Minimum Team to start your business .................................................................................... 33

Chapter 4 : Go-To-Market Strategy ............................................................................................. 34

Product Strategy ...................................................................................................................... 34

Marketing Strategy .................................................................................................................. 37

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 Sales Strategy ........................................................................................................................... 45

Chapter 5 : Business Operations .................................................................................................. 49

Customer Records .................................................................................................................... 49

Subscription Records................................................................................................................ 50

Order Fulfilment ....................................................................................................................... 50

Customer Support .................................................................................................................... 51

Billing & Accounts .................................................................................................................... 52

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 Preface

This book is for those who have been thinking about venturing into the cloud business, but don't
know where and how to get started. This book will help you get an initial understanding of the
Cloud business, set your expectations and provide you the right exposure to the various business
challenges you might face during the initial years of operation.

I am writing this book from my personal experience of starting a Cloud Services Business. I have
picked up a lot of things on various aspects of the business-personal, interpersonal,
technological, and more... In this book I will share with you my experience to help you build a
great Cloud Services business in your respective geographic segments. Cloud Services Business
is built on a strong foundation of Cloud technology; therefore it is important to understand the
basics of the same.

Why to Start a Cloud Services Business

Let’s get to the business basics here. Today, if you are planning to venture into any IT business, I
strongly suggest to consider Cloud Services Business. The most important reason being the fact
that you will own the Customer Relationship. In any business, owning your customer relationship
is critical for success. Here, I am referring to IT business. With the market already crowded,
having control over the customer relationship is essential.

Wondering what I mean by ‘owning customer relationship’? Let me explain it to you with few
examples. Consider that you are in Traditional System Integrator Business, where customers are
not compelled to get back to you for an IT Solution. They can always find a new vendor and move
on. I am not negating that possibility in a Cloud Services business, but the probability to lose a
customer during the subscription term is relatively low. This is a huge advantage and a strong
window to build a robust relationship with your customers.

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Another example is in Software Product Business. You will have control over your customers, but
there is always a possibility of customers choosing other technology products for various
competitive benefits.

Now, the situation is slightly different if you have built the credibility of yourself and your
company, as a trusted cloud advisor. . Once you have done this over a period of time, you can
be sure that customer will always approach you first. Let me explain. Cloud services business is
a type of business that revolves around the kind of Cloud solutions you sell, it could be your own
product or someone else’s products that you have the license to sell. And, the beauty of cloud
based solutions is that it is recurring in nature either monthly or yearly. Now, that is the game
changer. In other words once you engage your customer with one cloud product, as long as the
product works well, you provide good support and the customer has the need for that solution,
you can be sure that you will have long term business with this customer. This is the most
important aspect of the cloud services business. It's called Annuity Business or Recurring
Business Model. Simply put, if you manage to regularly win new customers, year over year, your
business is going to experience accelerated growth at a consistent rate.

There are many more reasons why you should get into this business. Cloud technology means
customer service from anywhere, so you can operate in multiple locations or geographic
segments without being present in that region physically. The technology follows the rules of
cloud which is, access the data and application from anywhere, any device, anytime. Today a
startup or a small business can completely operate their IT needs from cloud and they will enjoy
the best of the technology at an affordable Cap-Ex model. And the most important reason for
getting into the business is that it doesn't require a lot of investment to get started and that's
very important for entrepreneurs and Small business owners.

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Why Am I Writing This Book?
After spending close to seven years in establishing and operating Cloud Services Businesses, I've
gained knowledge and experience about the various facets of this business and industry. The key
reason to write this book is to share my knowledge to help you build a better cloud business,
and learn from my mistakes. I have encapsulated my numerous hours learning about ways to
improve the business and products to benefit readers of this book. Over a period of time, I have
defined many Cloud specific processes which might be worth understanding and even
implementing in your own business.

How I Started My Cloud Journey?

The year 2009 marked the beginning of my cloud journey with the establishment of Gulf Infotech
LLC my first Cloud Services Business. My second venture was CloudCodes Software in 2011. In
concurrence with this I developed customer-centric products like gControl, CloudRecur,
Insertable, Attachable, AntiPhish etc. Starting off with a Cloud Services Company, I strongly
believe, is the right thing to do. It teaches you to solve many practical problems and challenges.
It is also important to keep your knowledge up-to-date about the latest developments in
software design. I will share my understanding of both running a Cloud services business and
developing products that use the Cloud technology. Although both are completely different in
its manner of operation but is still part of the same industry.

A Cloud Services company is the one focuses on the delivering services of Cloud along with its
own services like Deployment, Training, Migrations & Support. The cloud services can be of their
own or from Cloud Vendors like Microsoft, Google etc.. The objective of the company and every
team member is to retain every customer of the company and grow the relationship by upselling
and cross selling to each customer. This is way the focus on customer relationship and retention
is of the highest and also to constantly try to sell services around the cloud products.

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The Cloud Product Company is in the same industry but it’s different because it is a product
company, the whole company is focused on developing a great cloud product and sell it to as
many customers across the globe. In this, it is all about your own product, which is the center of
the business. However, there are many similarities in the both the business is that the end
customer is same. The difference is that the product company would sell the product via a Cloud
Services company in that region and country.

Acknowledgement
I would like to dedicate this book to my wife Nitu, and my two wonderful kids Hridha and Ayan.
Nitu has supported me all these years during my difficult times and was part of this journey of
cloud in Gulf Infotech as my partner to build the business.

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 Chapter 1: Cloud Business Model

The very first step is to understand the cloud business model and especially how it is different
from the traditional (On Premise) IT business models. Once you understand difference between
the two business models it will be easy to then to understand the remaining aspects of the cloud
business.

Cloud Services vs Traditional IT business

To understand the key characteristics of the Cloud Services Business model, we will discuss some
of the key characteristics of the cloud services business which will be the basis of the comparison
with the traditional IT business.

1. Subscription Models - Recurring or Annuity Business Model - The key differentiator is

that every offering is subscription based in cloud. A customer has to keep renewing the
service on a yearly or monthly basis in order to ensure continuous service. The
Subscription model makes it very easy for the customer to adopt the service and pay as
they go. This is the economics of OpEx rather than CapEx. So, the same customer who
would have been spending thousands of dollars in buying IT solutions can now spend
few hundreds of dollars to get a better quality of services. This means it's easy to
convince the customer about the benefits. It is even easier. Where as in a traditional
business, a customer has to plan for budget and evaluate various hardware solutions
before choosing the software stack. Which again will be followed by the worry about the
maintenance and availability of the system. You will be able to find hundreds of reason
to move to cloud on internet.

2. Everything as a Service - This the second major factor for cloud to gain strong popularity:
A few dollars per user per month, which is easy to predict and the customer does not
have to worry about the expensive hardware solution. This has a direct impact on your

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 business: the more accessible the services are for customers , higher will be your
customer acquisition rate.. The whole idea is to get as many customers and users (seats)
on your list as this is the start of your customer’s cloud journey, which will only continue
to grow as long as you provide good solution and service value.

3. Easier to Get Started - The Cloud Services Business is relatively easier to get started as
long as you have one person who understands the cloud technology and execution of
the projects very well. You can just get started with one sales and one technical staff and
you will still be able to add customers and build your business. Cloud Services Business
is all about right team and people, so you need to ensure that you have the right people
who can constantly learn the new technology and make it available to your customers
and add value. The best part is that you won’t need an army of staff even with 1000
active customers. Whereas in system integration business the opposite is the case.
Generally it is observed that the Cloud Services Companies are very lean when it comes
to the number of employees, ie. in the range of 5 to 50 employees, whereas Traditional
System Integration company would have 50 - 300 employees.

4. Start from Anywhere - This is the coolest part of Cloud Services Business. All you need
is a laptop, a phone, an active internet connection and some nice coffee. This is
practically all that you need to run your business and team: no services, no network, no
firewalls and no server rooms. You just need a good workplace . This is something
impossible for a system integration business.

5. Limited Investment - This is true, you don’t need a million bucks to get started with
your Cloud Services Business. If you know how to sell and implement the solution for
your customers, you can be the only employee of your company. All you need is a laptop
and internet connection to get started. Another important point is that most of the Cloud
Vendors do not demand a lot of requirements or investment to partner with them. As
long as you give them business, they are fine as the risk involved in this business is very

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 minimum. The customer, cloud vendor, or you will be dealing with a solution which is in
few dollars of subscription per month or year. You should grow and invest more when
your business is growing.

6. Just the beginning - It's just the start of the ‘Cloud Era’ and there are many years to
come for this industry to become saturated, its estimated that only less than 10% of
global business are using cloud services. Players with elaborate clientele are going to win
the market for a limited period of time, while innovative companies will survive in the
industry. Unlike the Traditional IT business that already has stiff competition and a
declining market share with cloud technology slowly taking over.

7. All about Scale and Volume - Cloud Services Business is all about scale and volume; In
simple words, it's the game of getting as many users or seats you can and upselling or
cross selling other services and products. More business volume, the faster will be your
revenue and profits growth. Bear in mind that, to acquire customers at a high speed
might demand more cost of acquisition and may lead to negative profits in the initial
period; the moment you get the critical mass you will be fine. This is not the case with
the Traditional IT business where your focus is on total revenue from any number of
customers; the counter resets at the beginning of the year to run again for the revenue.

8. You have to love SMB - If you want to be in the Cloud Services Business, you will have
to love the small and medium business; they are the first movers to adopt the Cloud
technology and worldwide they have been moving very fast to cloud . The deal size might
be small for SMB but the addressable market is huge. Traditional IT business has a great
focus on enterprise customers which is a different game than SMB.

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Understanding Cloud Business terminology
Before getting into cloud business it is vital to understand few terminologies which are very
common .I will provide you a simple explanation of these words and why you should try to
further understand these terms to better understand your business. Let’s take a look at the few
of them:

● MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue) - This terminology is simple and yet very powerful
in this business. It is the Total Monthly Recurring Revenue you are able to generate.
Every customer you have onboard, irrespective of the type of subscription, will
contribute to your monthly recurring revenue.. Break down all your yearly subscriptions
to monthly revenue and add other monthly subscriptions to get your Monthly Recurring
Revenue (MRR). You may sign a contract in advance and even get paid one year in
advance, but you should split the revenue in monthly basis to get the MRR and it's one
of the right ways to look at your business.

● ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) - This is slightly different method of calculation which
gives the Average Revenue Per User Per Month. This term is very common with
telecommunication providers. It directly applies to the cloud business also. ARPU is your
MRR divided by total monthly active users across the products. Bear in mind that if one
user is using more than one product you will still have to consider the user as one. The
whole idea is to find out the contribution of each user to your revenue. The higher the
value the healthier is your business.

● Churn Rate (100% - Renewal Rate%) - This is a percentage of customers or users who do
not renew or renew with some other reseller/partner. You can calculate this in two ways:
Churn rate for subscription or product is derived by dividing the number of customers
by new users renewing a particular subscription another way is total customer base
against all the products. I would not recommend the second way as it will not give an

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 idea on which product is doing well and which is not. The lower the number, healthier is
your business.

● COA (Cost of Acquisition) - This is a very important term in the cloud business as once
you understand this you will be able to draw a plan, break even, and make the business
a self sustaining engine to generate profits. To obtain the Cost of Acquisition per user,
first you need to add up the cost of sales, marketing, and every cost associated to get
the customer sign the first order with your company. This will include the time effort,
calls, events etc. This sum is then divided by the total number of new users you have
acquired this year. You don’t have to be very accurate but even if you are able to get
close to 80 - 90% then you know what is the Cost to Acquire each new client. Now that
you know this number, you can find out the expectation from each resource. The point
is that in any cloud business the ROI of COA is only from the second and third year of the
users. The whole idea is to go to the same user again to upsell and cross sell as much as
you can, to get your ROI faster and also reinvest to acquire more users.

● Cash Flow vs Accrual Based Accounting - This is the lifeline of your business which can
get tricky and can be misunderstood. Generally, Cloud services business are good in cash
flow for reasons like: firstly, you can collect the money from the customer on a yearly
basis and may pay to the cloud vendor on a monthly basis; Secondly, it has a considerable
amount of services revenue which if managed properly can be a good chunk; finally,
development revenues from the existing customers are also a good source of revenue.
With various sources of revenue, your cash flow should be healthy and you can expand
your business. The challenge is to stay focused on the numbers as good cash flow cannot
be considered as profitable. To stay on top of profitability, you need to have a good
accrual based accounting to get a real picture.

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Understanding Various Functions of Cloud Services Business
Now, let's get into understanding some of the key functions of the cloud services business. I will
explain these functions specifically to Cloud Services Business. You can find tons of material
online on standard business functions across the globe, therefore I want to highlight specific
Cloud Services Business functions. Below are the various functions:
● Marketing - This could be a little tricky and challenging as you will be competing with
cloud vendors like Google, Microsoft and Amazon. These giants will be investing billions
of dollars on their marketing efforts like to top the search results, paid advertisements
etc. I would strongly suggest to invest your money in creating your own content specially
around your value offering and your expertise. Targeting audience with unique content
will be fruitful for your company in the long run. You can ignore this in the early days of
the business but do not forget about it as this plays an important role for the growth of
your company. There is lot to be done to keep up with the fast moving world like,
website building and content development - by the way content is not just text. I am
referring to audio and video content also. (Note : I have a section later in the book to
talk specifically on how you can create more content)

● Lead Generation - Even if you don't have a marketing function in place, ensure that you
have lead generation function This can be done by the sales or business development
team in the initial days, but gradually you should have a dedicated team doing this day
and night to ensure that you reach out to as many as prospects. You should use all the
techniques like email marketing, press release, blogging, cold calling, social media
events, workshops, webinars etc. This is very important to fuel your sales engine.

● Sales & Business Development - I have come across a lot of technically strong people
who have built their entire company with the least or minimum importance to sales
and business development. Trust me, every business needs a sales and business
development function to grow. I would say, if you cannot sell, no point in investing in

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 technical resource. If you don't have customers then the technical resource has no work
to do. You must have a dedicated team for this function and a sales leader who can drive
the sales and business development team.

● Upselling and Cross Selling - Cloud services is all about upselling and cross selling and
you won't realize this until first few years in the business. In general, everyone gets so
busy in acquiring new customers and growing that customer/user base. They fail to
understand the fact that the ROI of acquiring a new customer comes in the second and
third year of the customer/user. Now, if you keep investing all your money in acquiring
new customers, then you will hit thin profit margins year over year. The way out of this
is simple: Once you have enough customers, you need to build a secondary sales and
business development team dedicated to upsell and cross sell to only existing customers.
The reason being cost to sell to existing customer is significantly very less as compared
to new customers.

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 Chapter 2 : How to Get Started

Now that we discussed about the Cloud Services Business Model in the previous chapter, I would
like to take you through few steps on how to really get started on this business. Let’s get started.

Starting with Economics

Wondering what economics has got to do with Cloud Business? According to me, it has a very
strong correlation with cloud business. Let’s say you want to start your business in a particular
country. At a very high level, there are two things you should consider for any geography and
market :first is the total population and second is the GDP of the country. These are very good
indicators to start with as higher the population the better the future of your cloud business as
it's all about users. And, the higher the GDP of the country indicates the health of the economy
which has a direct impact on the cash flow in the market.
The next thing to dig into is the analysis on the key driver of the market: For example, analysing
the money flow in the country - is it by the Government on public projects or is it manufacturing,
services or export etc.? Eventually, what you need to arrive is the approximate percentage of
economics driven by the private sector. Unless it is in US or Europe which has dedicated Govt
Cloud Services, it will be difficult for you to sell to public sector the Public Cloud Solution. In most
cases, your target customers are going to be in private sector. Going further, you also need to
find out the number of small and medium businesses in your region and this information you can
easily get from your local govt authority.

Now that you have eventually found out the number of SMB businesses in your region, their
growth rate, the economic value of money flowing through the private sector, you will be able
to gauge your addressable market better. Note that small and medium businesses are the fastest
to adopt cloud technology across the world. The definition of small and medium business can be
different in every country. Below is a good scale to define the category

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 ● Very small business - 0 to 20 employees
● Small business - 20 to 100 employees
● Medium business - 100 to 750 employees
● Large enterprise - 750+ employees

To summarize, the following indicators should give you a good insight on the market, before you
plan to start your business
● Total population of the country
● GDP trend of the country
● Total no. of SMB in country & approximate count on the startups every year

You can apply this logic to enter into any new markets or geographies. This exercise will give you
a fair idea to choose a market.

Understanding Your Market and Geography

Every geography and market is different than other. What really differentiates them is the
culture and people. So, it's critical that you have a good understanding of your market and
geography and consider the following points to gain more local knowledge. This will help you to
tweak your business plan and devise a go-to-market strategy

● No of cities and how they differ from each other

● Is it a fast paced market or a slow market? - This will affect your sales cycles
● Modern or traditional- Is your market open to new technology or do they prefer to stick
to the old school method?
● Are you open to meet online instead of personal meeting? This will impact your COA
● Are there any specific rules or regulations with respect to cloud, internet or data in the
country

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 ● Are there any other rules which might affect your business of taking your customers to
cloud?
● Localization: Is language a big consideration? - This could be a challenge with respect to
availability of product in the local language, sales and marketing materials, training and
support documentations etc.

Segmenting Your Market

It refers to the way you should see your market. The simplest way is to look at the market as a
grid with horizontal slicing by size like: Very Small Business, Small Business, Medium Business
and Large Enterprise; and vertical slicing as industries like: Retail, Manufacturing, healthcare etc.
This segmentation grid is very important for your business as you need to know that selling to
each segment calls for a different approach and the same product or service could mean
different to each segment.
Generally, the very small and small business have common characteristics. So selling in that
segments would be fairly similar. It’s also a good place to start. You can get quick success and it
also yields in higher margins. Also once you have enough customer in a segment and industry
vertical, it’s a good idea to focus on that further as it will become easy sell to that industry with
your growing customers and that’s the time you start finding industry specific solutions on cloud
to Upsell and Cross sell.

Identifying Your Cloud Vendors & Partners

In cloud services business, to resell cloud products & platforms, you need to partner with few
companies to start with. You can expand or build your expertise on one specific segment, if you
wish to, over a period of time. You should look for the partnerships in the following areas:
● SaaS - Software as a Services
● IaaS - infrastructure as a Services

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 ● Development Partners
● Implementation partners
● Support partners

SaaS Partners - Software as a Service model is a very widely accepted model by the customers
and that's the first step, there are thousands of SaaS vendors out there, who offer partnership
programs. You need not partner with all of them as it might be overwhelming at the beginning.
But when it comes to selling and generating revenue, it's not that easy for every product. So,
how to select the products you should sell? The answer is simple: Sell what people want to buy
and sell a stable and reputed product to avoid any support issues later on.

Below is my personal recommended list of companies you can partner with for the specific
category of SaaS offerings,

SaaS Category Company Product

Messaging(Emails) & Google, Microsoft Google for Work, Office

Collaboration 365

File Sharing & Sync OneDrive, Box, AWS Box.net, Work Docs,
(Amazon web services), Dropbox for Business
Dropbox

Cloud Email Backup Spanning, Backupify, Spanning for Google,

Cloudfinder Spanning for O365,
Cloudfinder for Google
& Office 365, Backupify
for Google Apps

Cloud Backup Carbonite, Acronis, Carbonite, Acronis,

Veeam Veeam Backup

SSO, Cloud Security CloudCodes, Onelogin gControl for Google

Apps, Onelogin

CRM Microsoft, Salesforce, Dynamics CRM,

Zoho, Apptivo, Salesforce, Zoho CRM,
Prosperworks Apptivo CRM,

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 Prosperwork for Google

Helpdesk Freshdesk, Zendesk, Freshdesk, Zendesk,

Service Now Service Now

Accounting Zoho, Clearbooks, Xero Zoho Books, Zoho

Invoices, Clearbooks,
Xero Accounting

Email Marketing Campaign Monitor, Campaign Monitor,

Mailchimp, Zoho MailChimp, Zoho
Campaigns

Domains Godaddy Godaddy

Note : I have built this list from my experience of working with these products you can add
other brands and products also.

IaaS Partners - Infrastructure as a Service is something you should not ignore as every customer
would require some or the other service or solution from this category. You will find a lot of
players in this space, with their own advantage and disadvantage. At the first place, I would
suggest you to partner with public IaaS providers as you cannot beat them on scalability,
reliability and also price point. On the other hand, you should not ignore any local or regional
IaaS provider as they would have one of the strong differentiator; a local datacenter which could
mean a lot for some customers and few types of workloads.

My recommendations on Public IaaS vendors would be start with AWS (Amazon Web Services),
Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (if you have a partner program available in your
country). There are plenty of others, but I think starting with these will give you one advantage-
their brand name. You can easily convince the customer to trust them.

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Development partners - If you want to succeed in Cloud Services Business, you need to have
some development services in your portfolio to offer your customers and also to execute some
projects. The typical skills of development you should be looking for are Java, .Net, PHP, HTML5,
MySQL, JavaScript, API Methods like GET, POST, Android and iOS Development skills etc.

The best thing to start with is to go with freelancers if you have small projects. There are plenty
of websites from where you can hire freelancers. I would recommend www.upwork.com and
www.fiverr.com. And, if you have a large project which involves more than one developer, it is
advisable to identify two or three development companies who can take the complete
ownership of the project including the UI and Project Management. Going for a fixed bid project
model will allow you to put all your energy on requirement scoping with the customer and once
it is done you can handover the same to the development partner. The hourly or monthly model
may not work in the initial days. As you don't have the experience in managing a development
project and you may eventually burn your hands. If you get a lot of development projects from
your customers then it would be nice idea to have your own business analyst and project
manager.

Some of the good type of projects to start with using an outsourced development team are web
based Applications like CRM, or any business automation app and client portal. Try not to pick
up a product development project, there is a lot of difference between product development
and application development.

Implementation Partners - As a cloud services company, you should build all your skills for an in
house implementation services. However in the initial days, you can get the bigger
implementations done by partners who have experience with large projects. You should look for
partners specially in the areas of IaaS like AWS, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud platform. The
skills for the cloud infrastructure implementation can be tricky and requires some level of
expertise and experience. I would suggest to get few large implementations done by a good
expert and learn from them for the next projects to be done by yourself.

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You can find many specialized partners of Amazon or Microsoft Azure across the world. The
thumb rule to find a partner is to look for someone from a low-cost country like India, Philippines,
Sri Lanka etc. Agree on the scope before awarding the project to a partner.

Support Partners - Support services are the backbone of any business. In case you do not have
the right people to support your customers, then it might be good idea to outsource the support
to partner. In the cloud business, the support is generally given over the phone, email, or chat.
This makes it easier for outsourcing irrespective of the location.

Before building partnerships with any company, do your due diligence to ensure that you have
done proper documentation for partnership agreement, reseller agreement, non-disclosure
agreement and the non competition agreement. Maintain a central record of all the documents,
contact details for future; when you grow in your business, your employees will be able to find
all partner detail from the documentation easily.

Also, you can spend a little bit more money and give your domains’ email accounts to these
partners. This will allow them to interface with your customers as your own employee.

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Understanding Your Strengths
Understand your strengths so that you can focus on building that further. I'm referring to your
skill strength for services and product technologies; For example: development skills, or
Implementation skills or IaaS implementation, Migration etc. This is important to identify at the
early stage so that you can build your own value in your market and outsource the other skills
which are not important for you from a long term goal perspective. So, for instance, if you think
development is not what you want to do in the long run, then it is advisable not to invest in
development resources and continue to keep it in the outsource model.

This will not only help you in investing in the right place but also in the way you position your
company from a sales and marketing points of view.

Building The Product and Services Portfolio

I've recommended the companies in the products you should get started with both in SAAS and
IAAS. Get started with a small products portfolio and carefully build your services portfolio
around those products. Following are the services which you can build around the SaaS
products:,

● Consultation Services
● Implementation Services
● Training Services
● Migration Services
● Development Services
● Support Services

In the IaaS category, following are some of the services you can offer in your market:
● Consultation Services

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 ● Deployment Services
● Migration Services
● Managed Support Services
● Support Services

Building Your Pricing Strategy

The tricky question regarding the services would be: ‘how to price the services? The answer
really depends on your market and how they have been accepting the prices. Generally, the best
way to price is on the effort-basis: it is easy to negotiate with the customers on the efforts rather
than on the price. On the other hand, not every offering can be measured on effort basis. Prices
for support services should either be: ‘per users’, ‘per year’, or ‘per month’, ‘price per ticket’
raised by the customer

The product pricing will not be a big issue because it is generally defined by the cloud vendor. I
would advice not to reduce the proposed list price, unless the deal is a bigger deal or there is a
lot of competition in the same market. Always draw the attention of the customers to the value
of your knowledge and experience in the cloud. And, it is good to remind the customers that
good service comes at a price.

I would not recommend to put any of the services prices on your website as it is subjective.
However to make it easier for your customers to understand, you can put some bundles on
website. For example: Listing a package of 10 email accounts with deployment and support
services for a year. This will give your customers a fair idea on the total cost.

Having an internal rate card on all your services is also highly recommended. This can help
salespersons to calculate the prices without individually explaining.

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Getting Things in Place
It goes without saying that you need to register your company with your local government and
have bank account and a company credit card. But, before you do that It's a good idea to
brainstorm on the name of your Cloud Services Business. A good name should explain about
your business , preferably with a ‘Cloud’ word. Once you have the name of your company, the
following things you need to be considered for registration of the company with your local
authorities.

Domain Name - Don't worry on the domain name that you need to have. A short and a simple
name preferably something which is specific to your country like .in for India .us for United States
etc. It should be easy to print on the business card or to communicate to someone over the
phone.

Website - The biggest and the most important part is website. Without any further research just
go out and build your website on WordPress. Choose a nice theme and start building simple
pages which explains who you are, what you do and what are the services and products you
offer. As I mentioned earlier, you have to create a lot of new and relevant content. I would
specifically recommend you to create video content which you can directly upload to your
website. This will have a bigger impact. I will be covering a specific topic later in the book on:
‘how to create video and audio content’ and the tools required. Adding a blog is a must on your
website, do not ignore it.

Email & Collaboration Platform - The most important is: ‘which platform you are going to use’?
I would always recommend you to use what you are selling. So if you are a Microsoft Partner,
then ensure that your entire team is using ‘Office 365’, and if you are a Google partner, then
ensure that your team is using ‘Google for work tools’. Push your team to use all the tools in the
platform and specially the web versions rather than the installable version of the software.
Encourage collaboration on the cloud: for example, creating documents and presentations

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together on the collaboration platform is extremely important to gain confidence within your
team.

Communication Tools - Identify the communication tools that is going to work best in your
country, your environment, and within your team. Tools like Skype, Google hangout etc. It is a
good idea to use the tools which are accepted by your customers and prospects so that you can
extend your communication tools to your customers.

Marketing Tools - Building a good contact list of prospects and customers from day one within
marketing tool is very important. There are plenty of options available for marketing tools;
starting from few dollars a month to thousands of dollars a month. I would recommend you to
start with simple email marketing tools like MailChimp or Campaign Monitor. Later, you can
integrate them with your CRM tool and website to ensure that the contacts are constantly
updated.

CRM - With plenty of options, It's easy to get lost while choosing a CRM for your cloud business.
I would recommend you to begin with anything which is user friendly. Do not make the mistake
of getting started on a spreadsheet. If you are on a Google platform, you can use Prosperworks
CRM, Zoho or Apptivo. If you are a Microsoft Partner, you can consider investing on Microsoft
Dynamics CRM or Salesforce.

Support Desk or Helpdesk Tool - Implement and utilize your Helpdesk Tool before your first
customer comes on board. There are plenty of options again on the cloud. I would recommend
you to use Freshdesk which is very cost effective and one of the best in the market.

Invoicing or Billing Tools - You can easily lose track of your dollars if you do not have a good
system to control it. if you just want to do the invoicing and manage your account separate,
which is the case with most companies, you can use Zoho invoice or any other invoicing system
which is a part of a CRM tool. You can also use or consider CloudRecur (www.cloudrecur.com),

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a billing platform built specifically for cloud services companies. And, I can vouch for CloudRecur
as it is my brainchild.

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 Chapter 3 : Building your Team

In cloud services business, your team is your biggest asset. So building a right team is the
foundation of your business. I will be talking about the best practices in building a cloud services
team based on my 7 years of cloud services experience. Let's go over some of the common
characteristics that you should be looking in your team members:

● Fresh Graduates or 1 - 3 years of Experience - It's important to have a very young and
fairly less experienced team members. With a highly experienced team, in addition to
learning about cloud business, and in the process of that they will have to unlearn the
traditional IT business. Another reason to get fresh team, i.e a less experienced team, is
because of lack of experienced cloud resources since Cloud by itself is fairly young
industry which is in existence since 2008.. So it's easy to get fresher’s and young team
members who can easily be molded in your business. I have personally seen that young
people learn quickly about the cloud business model and outperform highly experienced
(traditional IT experience) people. Infact, I have seen highly experienced candidates
failing badly in the cloud business model.

● Willing to learn new technology - This is very important because you don't want to
spend all your time and energy to teach your team on ‘how technology works’. If they
resist or are not willing to adopt to new technology, it will be very challenging. Cloud
Technology is all about constant change. There are no versions in cloud, with new
updates releasing frequently on both web and mobile. So you really need a dynamic
team who can adopt to a fast constantly changing technology environment.

● Highly collaborative - It's very important that the team is highly collaborative and are
making use of all the collaboration tools available to make your business more and more
efficient.

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 ● Work from anywhere - This is another important point. Your team should be willing to
work from anywhere as mobility is one of the strong characteristics of the cloud
technology.. From a business point of view, you can have your team members
geographically disbursed in various locations but can still effectively work together using
the cloud technology. This adds a completely different kind of team management
challenge. If you team members are build for that environment then it should not be a
challenge. When you hire a new member, be sure that they can fit in this culture.

● Work in Small Teams - This is also related to Culture fit; if you get someone from a large
company, the person might find himself in state of cultural shock- working in a small
team, the collaboration tools, and work from anywhere models.

● Good Communication Skills - Everyone in the cloud services company should have good
communication skills as almost everyone interfaces with customers and have to talk
about the technology in some way or the other. Specially the sales and technical team
should be having good communication skills both verbal and nonverbal..

Ideal Teams for Cloud Services Business

Now that we have understood about few common characteristics of the team members, let’s
go to specific type of resources you should have on board. Following functions of the business

● Marketing
● Sales and business development
● Sales engineers or pre-sales team
● Technical or customer success team
● Training or change management team

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 ● Customer support
● Billing and finance
● Development team

Marketing Team - You should look for someone who has worked in a startup or specifically
focused or experienced with content generation, social media, Search Engine Optimization
(SEO), email marketing, WordPress. Again, you do not need a very highly experienced person
here, as long as the person has some good understanding of the above terms, at least one or
two years of experience and is willing to learn to meet the expectations, then the candidate is
good for marketing.

Sales and Business Development - First, the difference between sales and business
development; Sales is generally the function after lead or demand generation of enough
qualified leads.. On the other hand, business development resources generate their own leads
and close the sales all the way from start to end. If you are starting new, then I would strongly
suggest to set the expectations from business development. Hire a team that can generate their
own leads and close them. Start hiring sales team only when you have a fully functional
marketing team and lead or demand generation engine working to generate qualified leads. . I
have personally had good success with young and freshers in the business development as
opposed to a very experienced sales person. The important part is to have a experienced sales
leader who understands the cloud business very well and can motivate & drive the young sales
team or business development team. Another point to consider is your focus on i business
applications. If you are going to focus more, then it's good to have some members with software
selling background specially from some sort of CRM and or ERP kind of application selling.

Sales Engineers or Pre Sales Team - Sales engineers or pre sales team will help the sales and
business development team on the field to close the deal. Their job is to help the customer get
answers for all their questions. This team is also responsible for building a proof-of-concept or
pilot to prove that the solution is the best fit for the customer. They are also responsible to

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document a very clear scope of work so that the technical team can implement correctly and
sales team can charge the customer for the services. This function is not really required in the
initial days of the business. It is good to have this team when you are hitting the fast growth at
a later stage. You can use your technical team to do this job in the initial days. The way to build
this team is by identifying members of your technical team with good communication skills. Once
identified, you can teach them some sales skills and eventually groom them into sales engineers
or pre-sales team.

Technical or Customer Success Team - Technical or customer success team are responsible to
execute the projects closed by the sales team. This team should be very organized and should
have hands-on experience on all the applications for service by your company. It is important to
have this team always practice, learn and improve their skills on a constant basis as the cloud
technology keeps constantly changing. It is definitely a good idea to have a mix of fresh and
experienced members in this team. Try to emphasize on communication skills for this team; they
should be able to communicate effectively to the customers on what they know and how the
customer should use the systems. If your primary business is about emails, collaboration tools
and infrastructure-as-a-service, then you may want to get the technical team with some email
or hosting backgrounds. If you have an active line of business with business applications, then
you should get your team members with application implementation like CRM & ERP
background.

Training or Change Management Team - Cloud business is all about the user using the cloud
products and using it in the right way. To make this happen you really need to train them very
well. Training or change management is a big service revenue for many of the cloud services
business in the market. And, you do not want to miss out on this. During the initial days, e
technical team can provide training or change management to your customers during the project
but if your business is growing faster, it is worth to have at least one resource in training or
change management practice. You should hire an experienced trainer; especially someone with
software training background and sometimes management background.

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Customer Support - Customer support is extremely critical as this is the factor which is going to
decide if the customer is going to rein with you or some other partners for service of the
products you sold to the customer. If you can afford to have one dedicated person, at least after
about 50 customers, then it will be a good point to start with your customer support function.
You can gradually add more team members when you grow the number of customers or users.
The customer support team should also be trained on doing remote deployment or
implementations because if they understand this very well they can not only provide better
support to customers but also can become the extended team for the technical or
implementation team. It's okay to have someone with as low as one year of experience to join
your support team as typically most of the products are backed up with the vendors support and
you can manage with a junior on the support side.

Billing and Finance - Billing can be simple in the initial few customers. The moment you grow in
the number of customers and the more number of products you start up-selling or cross selling
to the same customers, it becomes highly challenging due to the simple fact that the customers
would expect invoice for every individual subscription. The more the number of invoices you
generate, the bigger is the collection hassle. The highest number of invoices also adds the
pressure of tracking these invoices and tracking the revenue. If your customers are happy to pay
using their credit card online, then you can have a considerably low pressure on the collection.
Even in that scenario, if you have crossed 100 customers, you will need to have one dedicated
resource for this.

Development team - I've mentioned in the previous topics that you can outsource development
to a freelancer or development partners. However, if development is going to be one of your
core services in future, then it is good to to start investing in a small development team from the
beginning. You can start with one or two team members and then gradually grow as the demand
comes from the customer. Ensure that your team members are having a good understanding
and skills on the web technologies like java, .net, PHP. They should also have a good

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understanding on how to handle a API’s. Always have one experienced developer and then assign
him some fresher’s or juniors so that he can train them over a period of time. It is not necessary
for your development team to sit with you in your primary location. They can operate out of a
low-cost location or in different country where the development cost is very low.

Minimum Team to start your business

Though, I have elaborated on various team members and functions of the business, you can
start the business with just one sales and one technical person and then gradually build your
team and business or period of time. In the initial days you may have to wear multiple hats and
perform roles like billing, accounts, finance, marketing, sales and even customer support.

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 Chapter 4 : Go-To-Market Strategy

In this chapter, I would like to take you through some of the go-to-market strategies, which you
can put it in practice while starting or running your Cloud Services Business. We will be going
over few different strategies as follows,

● Product strategy
● Marketing strategy
● Sales strategy

Product Strategy
What is product strategy in Cloud Services Business?. I would like to throw light on mix of
products and services which will help you acquire the customers faster. This will also leave room
for effective upsell and cross sell opportunities. I would recommend you to identify all the
products which has shorter sales cycles and low resistance from the customer in the buying
process. I always recommend to have the following products as your first line of customer
acquisition products:

● Messaging and Collaboration

○ Google for Work
○ Microsoft Office 365
● Document & File sharing
○ Microsoft One Drive
○ Box.net
○ Google Drive for Work
○ Amazon Workdocs
● Backup on Cloud

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 ○ Carbonite Backup Tool
● Infrastructure as a Service
○ Basic Servers on Cloud from AWS or Azure
○ Storage on Cloud from AWS or Azure

The above list of the products could be your products to go-to-market for a quick customer
acquisition as it takes short sales cycles if you have a qualified opportunity. It is also likely that
these are in demand by your customers as it is fairly a need solution by any typical customer.

The whole idea is to quickly acquire customers on board and nurture them for any other service
or products you want to sell. This does not mean that you should not talk about your company's
full portfolio when you meet a prospect or customer. The above list has some specific
characteristics which will help you to close the sales faster and also gives you an opportunity to
spend more quality time with the customer to do an upsell or cross-sell.

Up-Sell and Cross-Sell Products & Services

Once you have a customer on board, and after completion of implementation and training, you
focus on upselling and cross selling products to get maximum revenue out of an existing
customer. This will help you to achieve the following,

● Increase the ARPU

● Increase the MRR
● Reduce the COA
● Increase the profitability

The products you should consider as Upsell and Cross Sell are
● Email Security & Backup
○ gControl for Google Apps
○ BetterCloud

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 ○ CloudLock
○ Spanning Backup
○ etc
● CRM
○ Zoho CRM
○ Apptivo
○ Microsoft Dynamics CRM
● Helpdesk
○ Freshdesk
○ Zendesk
● IaaS
○ AWS advance solutions
○ Azure Solutions
● Development Services
○ App Development
○ Application Integration Services
○ Mobile Development Services
○ Managed Support

Again, your list should not be limited only to this. I am striving to help you strategize your
approach to your market so that you can gain maximum out of the time, effort and investment.
Also, ensure that you individually focus on Customer acquisition products and upsell / cross sell
products from a marketing, lead generation and sales point of view.

Services - Remember, it’s a Cloud Services Business. So, ensure that you have a clearly defined
services around each product. Some services may be similar for few products, but ensure that
you define it and even try to document the scope of services. Also, try to put some pricing
structure to make it easier for your team and customers to understand the sales process.

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Marketing Strategy
Contacts - One of the most important thing you need understand about marketing is your
audience: Real people (prospects & customers)whose contact information should be secured
like precious diamonds. Start with a simple contact management tool like mailchimp or campaign
monitor. Get the primary contact database with all the basic information and start adding them
with some attributes like:

● Type of customers - Customer / Prospects

● Size - SMB (Small Business) / MM (Mid Market) / Enterprise
● Industry
● No of Employees
● Existing Products
● Interested products

With some of the above attributes, you can build and generate a marketing contact list to
nurture the lead and upsell / cross sell your existing customers.

Consistency - Whether you are using the most expensive marketing platform or simple cost
effective tool, consistency is the key .That will help you achieve success. The only way you can
succeed in marketing is by being consistent and figuring out what does not work for your
business and your market.

A good rule is to touch base once in every two weeks over email marketing tools. Gone are the
days when only sales related emails about your products and services were sent to customers,
In today's time, it’s all about education and knowledge sharing . So, if you really want to engage
with your customer and prospects, ensure that you share valuable information and knowledge
with them. Trust me, they will stick to you. In this method, there is a very high chance to increase
the acceptance of various engagement channels like emails, social media, YouTube, blog etc.

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Following are some of the suggested timelines from a marketing consistency point of view:
● Email - Fortnightly
● Email Newsletter - Monthly
● Blog - Weekly or once in 2 - 3 weeks
● YouTube Video - Upload a marketing video and it can be followed by a blog post to get
maximum visibility out of it
● Social Media update - Every alternate day: update some post or information (BTW, you
can use tools like bufferapp and hootsuite which are great tools for social media
consolidation)
● Webinar or Hangout on Air - Monthly once to interact with your prospects and
customers

Have packed calendar created for three months, and stick to the plan. You don’t have to do all
the above as it would consume time, unless you have a full time marketing person to plan and
execute the same.

Content - This is big, really big! You have to focus on this if you want to succeed in your business
and marketing in today's world. Generating your own content can be a daunting task for you if
you haven’t done this before. I will provide you various tips from my experience on the ways to
get started and the tools that I have learned over a period of time. Let’s go deeper into it. Your
content can be of various times and following is the list:
1. Blog post
2. Website content - product & services details
3. Case study
4. Infographics
5. Photos, Videos & Podcast
6. Screencast
7. Social Media

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Don’t get scared with the list of the types of content. It’s easy to identify the best fit for your
specific need. which one fits where, let’s understand each of it.

1. Blog - This is the most simple to understand and easy to start with. Of course, you need
someone to write on a weekly basis for about 400 - 500 words per blog post on a topic which
will get the interest of your readers, prospects and customers. Choosing the topic to write can
be easier with the following tips.

● Help customers discover their problems or challenges

● Help in evaluating the right solution and don’t be hesitant to talk about competitors and
their products. This will help build trust with your customer
● How your product can help or solve the problem of a customer
● How to make use of a solution / product
● Things to consider before choosing a product or solution
● How to choose a vendor or a product
● Product Comparison
● Product Reviews
● Top products for a particular needs

Being in the Cloud Services Business you talk about these on a daily basis to your customers, it’s
just that you have to put it on a blog and publish it. It has many benefits: it will help build traffic
(Google loves new and fresh content), visitors will stay longer on your website, build credibility
and confidence among your audience, higher conversion rates of leads to customers. You can
find many ways on ‘how to structure your blog’ or ‘how to write a good blog online’. Just research
and get started.

Best place to put your blog is WordPress. It’s the most popular and one of the best platforms to
publish your blog. You need not get into the hassle of setting up Just spend few dollars on sites

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like upwork.com or fiverr.com, and you will get some good experts finishing the job in few days.
You can type your blog post in WordPress directly but that could involve little bit more steps.. I
would strongly recommend you to use Google Docs for these three reasons: 1) it’s online and
can be accessed and edited from anywhere and it saves your content automatically; 2)You can
dictate to speedup your typing process with built in voice technology of Google (I love that
feature, infact more than 70% of this book was voice dictation);3) lastly, you can collaborate with
others to edit, proof read or even contribute on the content.

2. Website Content - It goes without saying that you need to constantly update your website
with as much as relevant information as possible like information about your company, products
and services. As today’s customers are different and they want to know every detail before they
make any purchase or talking to someone. You can find tons of information on ‘how to build a
good website’, but I will focus on something you should not miss out on. You should structure
your website content in way that you cater to 3 different type of audience,

● Type 1 - Someone who does not know what is the problem. In this scenario, your
content should educate the user on ways to improve their business with your products
/solutions This type of visitor may not buy anything but would want to read or watch
some content. Your goal should be to provide him some useful content and try to make
him sign up for newsletter, blog or follow you on social media. This type of visitor is
someone who is not feeling well on but does not know if it's due to headache or stomach
or something else. A typical purchase cycle for such type visitor is about 6 months to 1
year.

● Type 2 - Someone who has understood his problem or need to but haven't found the
solution for the problem. This type of visitors again look for content to educate and also
want to know how it can help them to solve the problem. They, typically, would like to
know more details of the product or solution, how it can help, technical documentation,
customer case studies, reviews and testimonials. The typical decision making time frame

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 for this type of visitor is about 3 - 6 months. This person is someone who has understood
that the problem is the headache but does not know the remedy:, whether to take a pill,
or rest or just leave it to heal with time.

● Type 3 - Someone who knows what he wants to buy and trying to find details like
specifications or pricing or reviews or testimonials and would be making the decision in
less than 1 - 2 months. An example of this type of person is, someone who has identified
that it's the headache which is causing the problem and he also know that he needs to
take a pill, and deciding between brands, size or dosage.

3. Case Study - Case studies should be done when you have a considerable size of happy
customers who are willing to give a good reference for your company. Enough information on
‘how to create case studies ‘ is available online, but I would suggest you create a simple one or
two pages documented case studies with some testimonials of your customers and preferably a
photo of your customer. If the customer is extremely satisfied, he may even contribute to a
video case study. Your investment will be more for a video case study, but it's worth it. Case
studies will help in building confidence among visitors, prospective decision makers and
customers visiting your website. About one to two case studies for quarter is a good number.
Also, note that the cloud vendors will also be able to find customers to create such case studies
which involves their products.

4. Infographics - Infographics is a great way to express and explain something visually if it is done
right. I strongly suggest to have at least few infographics created specifically for your company,
your services, and the solutions that you provide. If infographics is illustrated well, it can get
viral on social networks. This can get you a lot more attention than a blog post or video. It is not
easy to create infographics on your own and even if you know how to do it it will take up a lot of
time, which is not worth it. It is better to outsource on upwork.com or fiverr.com

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5. Photos & Videos & Podcast - Why are you building the company? It is important to know that
your customers or prospects are interacting with people not just the company. One of the ways
to connect to your customers is by reaching out to real people with your messages. I would
strongly suggest to use photos, videos and podcast to send out a very strong message. This is a
content model which will build confidence and a deeper connection between your customers,
your company and people.

● Photos - What photos to take and share with your customers? Take photos of your
employees, your office, your customers, success stories of your customers,
implementation, training work, support staff etc. This will really show your customers
and prospects your culture, work environment which is very important.
● Videos - Videos are one of the best ways to educate and put your message out to your
customers and prospects and those millions of people on YouTube. You should create
videos on what you think about this technology, what you think about the market, why
are you passionate about this business, how you are different etc. All your marketing
messages should be recorded in the form of short videos and published on YouTube so
that you can use it on your website, social media, blogs & everywhere. Ensure that you
create videos of the key people in the company like the founder, CEO, CTO, Marketing
Officer Employees, and anyone who can speak well in-front of the camera.
● Podcast - Podcast will also do the same as videos but it's much more comfortable in
creating podcast; People who can talk efficiently are not necessarily comfortable in front
of a camera. You can actually create many podcasts and either publish it on iTunes or
SoundCloud and link it to your website and social media. You will find that people are
consuming that media as well. Podcasts can be at the pace of your blog. In fact, I would
suggest that the person who is writing the blog can record a 10 minutes podcast and link
it to the blog. This blog podcast can talk about what you have expressed in your blog
but in an audio format which is more easy to consume. You can podcast with 2 or more
people together to make it more interesting.

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● Tools and Equipment - You might be wondering about the tools to use for creating a
professional podcast videos and photos. The answer is simple: you can get started with
your powerful smartphone for all three options or m, or buy some equipment treating
it as a long term investment for your business. I have listed down some of the tools and
equipments you will need:

○ Audio (For Professional Grade Audio Quality)

■ Samson Meteorite USB Microphone (Under $50)
■ Samson Meteor USB Microphone (Under $100)
■ Rode NT USB Microphone (Under $200)
■ Tascam DR22WL Handy Recorder (under $125)
■ Zoom H2n Handy Recorder (under $200)
■ Audio Technical ATR3350 Lav Mic (under $35)
■ Vidpro XM-L Lav Microphone (under $35)
■ Rode Lav+ Mic (under $100)
○ Video (For Good 1080p)
■ iPhone or Smartphone with good camera
■ Canon G7x Point in Time Camera (Approx $700)
■ Canon 70d DSLR (Approx $1350)
■ Logitech c920 Webcam (Under $100)
○ Tools for Post production
■ Camtasia for Windows or Mac (Video and Audio Editing)
■ Adobe Premier Pro (Video and Audio Editing)
■ Adobe Audition (Audio)

Now, the above list of the equipments are the ones you can pick based on your budget.
You also need to have one good USB Mic for your computer, one handy recorder and
one lav mic for your videos. Remember audio is more important than the video. You can
find many reviews on YouTube before you buy them.

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6. Screencast - Being in the Cloud Business, screencasting is one the most important part. Not
just for training and support, its highly useful for sales and marketing too. You can screencast
product demo, features, and product reviews etc. You should even strongly consider to do
presentation cast so that instead of just sending presentation slides.You can attach videos which
can convey a lot more than plain presentation slides. You should make a point that there is a
regular screencast done by at least one of your teams and keep building the channel on YouTube.
This by itself will give you so much content to post on your social media. I recommend you to
use Camtasia if you want something very professional. You can even start with Screencast-o-
matic or Techsmith's Snagit. Do not forget to use USB microphone for audio and enable noise
reduction before casting. Another point to note that you should record all your videos on a 1080p
Display (1920 x 1080 resolution) and if you are recording on Mac then you have to be careful on
the export settings with either 1080p or 720p resolution outputs. Also, keep your videos under
10 mins.

7. Social Media - This again can be very daunting especially if you have not used it. From a
business and marketing point of view, to get started, have all the accounts of social media like
Facebook, Google+, twitter, Linkedin, Youtube. Link most of them to a Social Media Management
tools like Buffer App or Hootsuite and schedule to push the post in advance for about a week.
This application will smartly keep posting on the social media on behalf of you. Also, when
someone interact respond to them in a day. Use #tags relevant to your business and product to
engage with users globally. I would also suggest you to take some basic course on YouTube on
Udemy.com on ‘how to manage social media for business’.

Now that we have gone through each and every content type, you don't have to do all of them
from the beginning, you can take it one at a time but do it regularly. Following is how I would
like you to plan the content workflow for maximum benefit;

Content Generation

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 ● Blog
● Video
● Photos
● Podcast
● Screencast
● Infographics

Sequence of Channel to publish

● First Step - Put all these content online and then write a blog on it.
○ Blog Post
○ Videos
○ Photos
○ Podcast
○ Screencast
○ Infographics
● Second Step - Once you have a blog post of each type of content
○ Publish Blog post on social media

This way you will first divert the traffic to your website blog and then they will consume the
different content. This is very important for higher conversion and leads from the website.

Sales Strategy
In Cloud Services Business, sales is the most important function of all. If you're not able to get
sales nothing will move. I'll be discussing some of the topics in sales strategy which you should
apply when you're running your Cloud Services Business.

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● Go Product by Product - It can be overwhelming when you get started with your Cloud
Services Business and build a big portfolio of products and services. Note that it is not
easy to sell all of them at the same time. My suggestion would be to take a step-by-step
approach. Try out some of the customer acquisition processes recommended in the
previous topics. Once you start feeling the acceptance level of products in a given
segment of your market, you can focus on that product for sometime and build a
customer base. Remember that each product requires substantial efforts not only to
market but to also sell, implement and support. You have to be very careful in choosing
the product that you want to market as its your name and reputation as a trusted cloud
advisor which is at stake.

● Fail Fast - There is no magic formula or a strategy that is foolproof. So it's very important
that you keep trying new strategies and try to fail fast on a particular strategy if it doesn't
work. Also, keep tweaking your overall market strategy for your business with your
products and services on a regular basis to be on top of what needs to be done.

● Herd Effect - As the name suggests, herd is a verb which literally means following the
one before. . The herd effect is a way where you have to continue to go deeper in a
particular industry or segment with the product that worked well in the market. . In
simple terms, let’s say if you have got about 5 - 10 customers in manufacturing segment,
then ensure that you go all out to approach all the manufacturing prospects with the
reference of those initial customers who are happy with you for that product. The
benefits of approaching the same segment and industry is that the sales cycles generally
reduces in time as customers can easily relate to each other and your Cost Of Acquisition
reduces with faster sales cycles.

● Bundles & Online Presence - To make it easier for your customers and your sales team,
come up with some bundles which could be the typical size of deals for SMBs. Here,
what I mean by bundles is packaging products and the required Services to finish a small

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 project so that it's easier for the customer to understand. Keep in mind that the simpler
you keep it, the easier it will be for your customers to understand. So do not come up
with multiple options of your bundles. Once you have finalized your bundles put it online
and if possible make it an online store so that someone who wants to go for it, can
purchase it online.

● Competition - Keep a close watch on your competition and understand their strategy.
The right way to beat competition is to have a better understanding of what is your
competition’s capability.. To be prepared for competition, you should ensure that you
have a very good reference list of your customers, strong services portfolio, a good
team with the right skills and certifications from the clouds vendors. This will prove that
you know what you are doing. Set up some good systems and processes and document
it and present it to the customers whenever you get an opportunity. Keep in mind that
sharing knowledge and being transparent is also one of the strongest way to beat the
competition. So continue creating lot of content which will educate your customers on
their problem, the solution, choosing the right solution, choosing the right vendor and
so on. This knowledge sharing is one of the strongest confidence builder in the
customers, the more transparent you are about the business, the better chances you
have to win the customers.

● Sales champions by Segments - I mentioned in previous chapter about the segmentation

of the market. It is important to know that each segment has a specific approach and I
would strongly recommend to not to mix the sales teams for different segments. What
I mean is to have a dedicated salesperson or a team for a particular segment like SMBs
and enterprise business. The same person may not necessarily be successful in different
segments. It takes a completely different approach sales cycle and strategy to focus on
a particular segment.

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● Upsell, Cross-Sell & Renewal Team - Once you get started with your Cloud Services
business it would be easy to manage with the same team for the first few customers. If
you want to scale up your business to a new level, I would strongly suggest to build
specific teams focusing on their specific objective. With 50-100 customers, you should
be having at least one person dedicated for upsell and cross sell to the existing
customers, and one dedicated person to focus on renewals. By offloading this from your
core sales team, you will be able to scale the business on both acquisition of new
customers and increasing the revenue from existing customers ,and also to ensure a
consistent high level of renewals.

● Leveraging on Partner Resources - There is no point in reinventing the wheels. So do not

spend a lot of time in figuring out the collaterals, new marketing materials of your own;
just leverage on the partner resources from this cloud vendors. Almost all of them have
a good amount of ready-to-use partner resources or materials which you can
incorporate in your marketing, sales and support directly with minimum modifications.
Also, it is important to have someone to constantly check these partner resources and
update it into a central place where your entire team can use it effectively.

● Tools for effective sales - Apart from having a good sales team it is important to have
the right tools to help yourself do smart work. Some mandatory tools would be a good
CRM tool, email tracker like yesware, email template tools like yesware, proposal
templates, mail merge tools and research tools. These tools will help your sales teams
to work better.
● Training for new Sales member - Sales is a constant evolving function; new people in
the system, new updates from products and technology, market conditions etc. So,
ensure that you have a structured sales training process not only for the newcomers but
also for your existing sales team to constantly improve from your learning.

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 Chapter 5 : Business Operations

Now, I would like to discuss about business operations with respect to Cloud Services Business.
Operations is the livewire of any business with various functions contributing for a long term
sustainable business in the cloud. The key difference in the business operations of a traditional
IT business and Cloud Services Business is that everything in cloud business is recurring, which
means you have to be very careful about all your records. It will be very important and useful
in the future, be it customer contacts, orders, contracts, subscription details and pricing .

Customer Records
Customer Records are your assets, ensure that you put all your effort to maintain it well using
the right tool or application. A good tool would be a CRM. You should differentiate clearly
between the customers and prospects in CRM, to avoid trouble at the later stage. Also, if
everything is not going in CRM, then you need to consider having a system like (CloudRecur.com)
to maintain all your records in a central place. You need to maintain the following details of the
customers in a very organized way:

● Company details
● Customer profile
● Contact details
● Order History
● Invoice history
● Subscription Details
● Notes about the customers
● Documentations like agreements, contracts, NDA, PO and anything which is related to
customer

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Most of you would start with a spreadsheet but take my word, it is not a solution. In fact it will
be the biggest nightmare at the later stage when you grow . Also, note that it’s very important
to define user based permissions and provide access to customer records for all your employees.

Subscription Records
Maintaining subscription records perfectly covering all the packages, bundles sounds easy only
until you multiply the existing subscriptions with your growing customer base and the products
and services you sell to your customers. Since it is directly related to your revenue, it is super
critical to have this accurately recorded. It is vital to have each and every record of user license
properly recorded with the billing information to avoid any revenue loss. Your typical system
should be able to handle the following
● Active and discontinued subscription details
● New subscription
● Change of subscription
● Additional user license records
● Renewal of subscription

You should have these records maintained carefully and accurately as it involves revenue and
information regarding renewals. This will help you to remind your customers and your sales team
at the right time. As you have to effectively remind your customers about subscription due date
and get the renewal confirmation.

Order Fulfilment
It sounds very simple but if you do not have a process for this function from the day one, the
workflow and execution of order will become cluttered and unmanageable. You should have a
simple but effective way of order processing where all the concerned people are aware of the

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order execution. This will help in performing functions like invoicing, ordering to vendors, update
marketing contact database etc.
Technical - Also, you should have standard procedures for implementation based on segment
and products for your technical team. This will make it easier for everyone to know the status
of the order. This will also help you to expand your team, and a new team member can follow
the right steps.He would be able to handle projects just like one of your experienced team
member.

Project Management - Not every project requires a project management and a project manager;
your large deployments should have a structured deployment with some project management
methodology. You can use any of the good tools in the market. A simple one that I would
recommend is Trello.com.: a great tool to manage and track projects. Having said that even small
projects should have some basic standard process and steps so that it is executed professionally.
Remember it's a services driven business. The higher the quality you bring in delivering your
services, the better will be your relationships and customer satisfaction.

Customer Support
Do not underestimate the importance of customer support based on the brand value of the
products you are selling. Google, Microsoft and Amazon, are undoubtedly big brands, but
remember that your customer is giving you business because you are their trusted advisor and
you are locally available to them. You should definitely charge the customer for the support
services. And your customers will pay you if they see value in that. You should improve the
customer support by having some proactive actions like constantly communicating to customers
about some new updates. Implement a good helpdesk or support desk to track every ticket
raised by your customers. If you are doing business in different timezones, then invest in more
resource to support customer in extended hours. Investment in good customer support will
surely pay-off over a long term.

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Billing & Accounts
Billing is one of most important functions after sales in Cloud Services Business as it is directly
related to your revenue. You should note that in cloud services business customers have a choice
to go for monthly plan. This can add a real load on your billing team. So, ensure that you select
a good billing or invoicing system which can give you a accurate high level view of everything
happening in your business. There should be defined processes which allows your billing team
and your order processing team in talking to each other. This will ensure that you don't miss any
invoices. The one to watch for is additional licenses because it is going to grow in your number;
all small transactions that can be easily missed for billing and collection. As your business grows,
the number of invoice transactions will just keep growing and there would be a point where you
will have a full time job of billing and collection. I would suggest to use the tools like Zoho,
CloudRecur or any other cloud based invoicing tools. The most important thing to track is the
billed outstanding amount and the unbilled amount.

Once you have a billing system in place, it’s time to look at the accounting. Cloud Services
Business is always subject to a high cash flow which is very good for the business, but it can
potentially mislead you to think that you are highly profitable. So having a good accounting book
is vital. Also, what makes this business different as compared to traditional IT business is that
you have to use an accrual based accounting, which means you have recognize the revenue and
expense over a period of a year to get the exact profitability of the business.

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