
• Introduction to the sales lifecycle (with illustration of funnel/pipeline of leads)
• Ask your sales manager questions about churn rations (retention rate)
• Better understand common compensation structures for SaaS account executives
• Learn about the optional assignments for all 16 lectures
• Defining a market and segments
• Understanding each stage of the sales pipeline
• Seeing where leads come from
• Considering five ways to generate leads
• Sales forecasting
• Campaigns
• Marketing automation
• Web analytics
• The right time to follow-up
• Intelligence & insights
• Reports & dashboards
• Learn about lead qualifications models such as Budget, Authority, Need, and Timing
• Don't talk about technology before you qualify a suspect or prospect
• Qualify prospects by phone, email, and videoconference
• Calculate the actual costs for meetings
• If you can understand the strategy of the prospect's company, it will allow you to have a context for their business model
• This is one of the most important lectures in the series, because it will help you ask more strategic questions, and so you can provide more than just technology solutions
• As a result of the intelligence you gather, your proposals will be able to describe the problem and solution in terms that C-level clients will appreciate
• Proposals should define the problem being solved
• Prospect-specific content should be customized
• Much of the other content should be generic for all clients
• See a budget for on-premise systems of an average Fortune 500 company
• Understand line items on the budget and what those technologies presently do
• Get to the bottom of why they have not already made a transition to the Cloud
• See where scores of vendors fit into the marketplace
• Service models, specifically IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, and XaaS
• XaaS includes many categories and vendors
• Deployment options such as private, hybrid, and public cloud
• Who should be on the vendor's team?
• Who are the people who work for the CIO or CTO?
• What caused the role of the CIO to become more important?
• See three examples of roadmaps
• Ask specific questions based on what you learn
• Ask about security and the role of the CISO
• Security should not be an afterthought
• Information has value that needs to be assessed before moving to the cloud
• Metadata plays an important role in tracking changes to data, which can impact value
• Look at the ways many enterprises currently store data, including data warehouses
• Characteristics of big data and how data lakes are becoming more popular
• Big data analytics and how it should be used to improve operations
• How Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) create new value chains
• APIs enable Web Services to connect machines to one another
• Context for Web Services, Cloud Computing, Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), and Microservice Architecture (MSA)
• Learn how business processes define services and compare monolithic applications of the past with MSA
• Learn three methods to integrate two cloud services
• See a detailed case study on integrating Salesforce and Hubspot
• Learn about integration across the enterprise
• Compare Waterfall to Agile methodologies
• Learn about Containers in relation to Virtual Machines (VMs)
• Plan to publish a case study for each client from the initial proposal
• The proposal should include a definition of the business problem to be solved and how the vendor plans to solve the problem
• This same definition can be re-purposed in a case study
• The value of the solution should be quantified
• Testimonials are an important part of the case study
VERSION 2.0: NEW & IMPROVED COURSE BASED ON STUDENT FEEDBACK
Are you curious about how the most successful sales people generate Cloud Computing Sales? The course is designed for people who want to transform their lives by effectively selling high-value Cloud Computing solutions to enterprise clients. You will learn detailed ways qualify prospects based on asking the right questions about what they already have and what they want to do. You will also learn what to include in a proposal from both a business and technical perspective.
Generate More Transactions by Solving Business Problems
• You will be able to have intelligent and informed conversations with engineers and executives as you solve their business problems with cloud-based technology solutions
• There are 15 quizzes, one after each lecture to remind you of the most important takeaways
• 16 assignments have been created to allow a student to focus on a SaaS vendor and its competitors
• The assignments also allow students to learn about CRM applications, video conferencing software, and more
• The average lecture is 11 minutes and the course takes three hours
Preview the course and watch the Introduction to see the assignments. Homework is for sales people, not engineers, programmers, or data scientists. The assignments revolve around the things cloud computing account executives need to know how to do, such as working with a customer relationship management (CRM) platform, qualification, lead scoring, researching, understanding client business models, and following the competition. Register for the course after watching the Introduction. There are no surprise assignments. You can see them all in the Introduction.
Cloud Computing is a Fast-growing Market
• Market is projected to more than quadruple in the next decade
• There is a increasing need for sales people, marketers, solutions architects, business analysts, and engineers who can use the right terminology and understand the concepts that enable the cloud to work
• You will learn about Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), Microservice Architecture (MSA), Information Governance, Big Data analytics and much more
• There are several downloadable files you can use immediately – including a CSV file with contacts at dozens of cloud computing firms that can hire you!
• Learn about famous vendors such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Salesforce, Hubspot, as well as many others with an downloadable poster with 27 categories of service models and vendors in each
• Downloadable content also includes a research report for SaaS sales people and open source software business models
• Open source has impacted the world of the cloud – as evidenced by the recent acquisition of Red Hat by IBM
Course Structure Makes It Easier to Apply What You Learn
There are nearly 200 companies discussed along with real-world case studies. Diagrams are presented in several steps, explained in language anyone can understand. Budgets, CIO technology roadmaps, and implementation processes are described to help you sell profitable solutions. At the end of the course, you will be able to generate case studies that show the value you and your team were able to generate.
Watch the INTRODUCTORY LECTURE (at no cost) to learn about "customer churn," compensation and incentive structures for account executives, and questions you can ask of a sales manager in the hiring process or review period. Know when a SaaS business model is working, what it needs to do to make changes, and when churn might doom a SaaS company that hires you. Churn impacts your compensation, so it is the most important thing you can learn to impact as a sales pro in the SaaS ecosystem.
If you want to generate transactions by solving business problems with cloud technology solutions, this course will provide unique insights on how to do that. You don't need a computer science degree to take the course, but you have to be driven to sell.