CS 020: Plan vs Reality

Hey Marcel Martens here. Welcome back to the Cloud's Secret Podcast. Today I just wanted to quickly share with you, that it not always goes as you would have expected.

So first, we've got to go through the theme song and then I want to tell you about my recent experience with filling up the Cloud Secret Course, of course, and to that I have a nice... I made a nice comparison with some offers we made before, and how we make offers today.

 

So first of all, the last few weeks I've been hustling my ass off to fill up the Cloud Secrets Course that will be starting the 1st of November or around the 1st of November. I don't really care about what specific date it is, as long as, well, when we finished up and fill up the course, then we can start but it's really difficult to fill it up because, where do you get traffic? Where do you get to trust? And how do you eventually sell them on a call?

So I've spoken to a few people now, and they all applied. No, lets start at the beginning, the participants so far they came using Facebook marketing and I noticed that the first two runs didn't work quite that well, so we spent a few hundred bucks on ads. Maybe we've got a few participants, but not that we filled up the course with the... Well, I expected that we would get like 100 applications or so. From that 100, we will go over them, see whose a fit and it was not, and those that are a fit, I would invite to join this Cloud's Secrets Course. It's a pretty unique course, where we not only teach you how to set up Office 365 and all the technical stuff, but we also teach you how to acquire customers, how to get customers, how to set up your contracts, how to exceed expectation, and end up with a customer for life and eventually upsell them into your value ladder so you can keep selling to your current customer.

And the same goes with and one of my company's MIT services to which we apply the same methods that I'm teaching you in the Cloud Secret Course. At first, I would tend to sell the always saving business suite and for those who didn't listen before, consists of Office 365 Business Premium with the email hosting and the Office Suite. We've got a file solution in it for a no line file system that you can take all your data with you all offline and you can make sure that the right people are seeing the right files and directories. So, it's pretty secure, and it's included backup online, so all the email and data are safely backed up to our data center and last but not least. The security antivirus software with our unique ransomware protection and for the customers who we sell that suite, we first did the installation based on the number of hours we spend on the installation, and it was pretty variable because for small customers we would spend a day, for bigger customers we would spend two days, and so on and so on. You can, you can imagine, right? Good.

But that's the first phase is just the installation the customer, well they've got an empty product with no data in it, and then all their data needs to be moved or migrated to the cloud and that is also based on spent hours and how many hours we spend during the migration. So these two unknown factors for a customer, any customer were too big, they wouldn't sign the contract because the variable was too high. They would ask me, "How much time you need for the implementation?" I said, "Okay, around a day, maybe one and a half." "And what about migration?" I say, "Yeah, it depends on how many arrows we endure, how much the data you have, how much email, how many gigabytes, terabytes of email you have."

And, with that, we made a big change. And and now I can explain it easier and all, well, almost all offers we make, they sign up, and it's all based on one major change, and the major change was, okay, we, we take the average of small and big companies all together and we average the implementation, or the installation to one and a half days.

So I made a fixed price for the implementation, and that's really the major secret here because I can explain them that the implementation is for a fixed fee so they know what they get for what price. And then afterwards when it's all set up, we go to the customer and migrate all the data and email, that will be based on how many hours we spent, and as I can explain to them, "Okay, if you got, I don't know, 20 gigabytes of data and 10 gigabytes mailbox, it's probably a few hours and we're done. But if you've got like 50 users with over, I don't know, five terabytes of email and God knows how many data, it could take us two to three days, I don't know." And they would understand so they can budget their own costs. You know?

So I'm going to go, I've got to run. I'm already late to my next appointment. I just wanted to drop this with you. If you like this, please rate and subscribe on iTunes and leave any feedback or comments. If you're interested in learning all the stuff that I teach and share with you here, go to cloud-secrets.com/cloudmind again, that's cloud-secrets.com/cloudmind. Thanks again and talk to you soon. Bye bye Marcel Martens.