I presented a webinar for Cloud Services Community today about Selling Cloud Services as an agent. The take aways were as follows:
- Where do I start when thinking about selling cloud services?
- Is there criteria for choosing a cloud vendor?
- What pitfalls are there in cloud for an Agent?
- How to choose a cloud provider?
- What steps to take as you move to cloud services?
Can agents even sell cloud services? Sure but as a sales engine, not an install and deployment shop. That will be the hard part: who does all the pre-sales and post-sales engineering if an agent just wants to ink contracts for you?
That being said, if you can afford to paid for a VAR or IT shop to do the provisioning and also pay the agent, it might work out well. The cloud provider will need to have a thorough order form and pre-sales packaging though.
Do agents even want to sell cloud? Not really. It's like chicken wings: a lot of work for a little bit of meat and it's messy. But it's just bar food.
