Fake Customers of Cloud. Why Most of Potential Clients Never Buy.

Sales are a simple thing. Any business school may teach you how to sell, and even give you a certificate.
The general theory is quite basic, if your product is more or less good, then you need to somehow tell potential customers about it and work deeply with those who asked for details.
However, in Cloud this scheme does not work well. Customers often listen to your story, participate in your events, submit positive feedback forms, but buy nothing. Using an actual wording from modern US politics, there are a lot of Fake Customers in the Cloud market.
My first Sales team in Cloud provider was all the time overloaded and spent not less than ten hours in the office making proposals for customers who would never buy.
Another issue was our marketing events dedicated to Cloud. We never had empty rooms and had a lot of customers who joined us in webcasts. These customers attentively listened, asked specific questions and after events explained why they cannot buy Cloud. The reasons were strong and the only question I had, why these customers came up with these reasons after but not before taking part in the events.
So, I started asking customers. Why if you have a ban from your Security Office for moving to Cloud, you are spending half of the day at a Cloud event? Why do you request a proposal for Cloud immediately after you made an order for your own hardware? Why do you ask to calculate full outsourcing if you do not have a plan to fire internal personnel?
The answer was ‘Education’. People believe that they know everything about servers, laptops or software, so willingness to spend time to learn about it is an adequate sign of their interest in buying. However, many clients admit that their knowledge of Cloud is not good enough and they just use pre-sale resources for filling in this gap.
Also, CIO often feels that management of his organization already heard at least something about Cloud, and proposal from a Cloud provider is used for preparing a ‘justification’ why Cloud is worse.
Such Fake customers would like to know about Cloud but have no intention of buying it:
· They don’t know what exactly they need to migrate
· They ask to propose as much scenarios as possible
· The requests often are unique and require research from pre-sale teams.
Fake Customers are also Future customers, but in the long term. And working in the same manner with them and clients who need Cloud next month is too expensive. A more effective approach is to identify such clients and prepare for them a special track of marketing/sales events without deep involvement
Let me finish with an example. We worked with one of regional administrations in an Eastern European country. They asked us to make a proposal for ‘regional Cloud’. They wanted to build a dedicated datacenter, set-up Cloud infrastructure and then to migrate all regional officials to virtual desktops and virtual servers, getting rid of all existing computers and servers. All what they asked were in our portfolio, and my sales team started pre-sales activities involving more and more technical experts. Surprisingly, the customer was not afraid of the project cost and asked to add more and more technologies that we mentioned.
No, we did not sell and did not participate in digital transformation of the whole region. The CIO just needed a good concept to present at an event called ‘Modernization through Cloud’.