The news is awash with stuff being pushed into the Cloud. Everything is going hosted. Reading press releases, it seems that conferencing is changing and everyone is rolling out a hosted PBX solution. It's a frenzy of zombies following the crowd.

Here are the problems: How do you stand out in the crowd? and How do you get Agents to sell your stuff?

I get approached all the time to sell stuff. It's usually heavy-handed, one-sided, and all wrong. Why? It's a Relationship. All sales are based on a Relationship. Moreso technology sales because it's often Selling the Invisible.

For an agent to sell Cloud based services, he has to trust that your company can deliver the promise and will be around long enough to take care of the customer and pay the agent.

You will need to train your agents on the product and more importantly on how to sell it. You have to have a Value Proposition. Why Acme and not Smash?

I get why everything is moving to the Cloud - mobile workforce, almost ubiquious internet access, business being done on Internet speed, and the need to be connected 24/7. However, without some secret sauce, how do you attract attention for your Hosted service through the noise? (And there is a lot of noise out there - and many con artists).

We live in a world of social media, platforms built for story telling. Unfortunately, you have to design that story to differentiate your service. Most companies don't do that; they bet on selling cheap.

"Low price is a great way to sell a commodity. That's not marketing, that's efficiency." - Seth Godin. (More here).

If you want margin - and you need margin to pay agents and salespeople - then you can't sell a commodity. It becomes like DSL and T1, get 3 quotes and pick the lowest price. You have to find your Value and put together the story about the special sauce.

Best way to train other Agents: have an agent who gets it, explain to the other agents Why and how he introduced your services to her client base.

FYI... Social Media Strategy for Service Providers on Friday, June 04, 2010 from 3:00 PM - 4:00 PM (ET) - Register here.