If you’re a sales engineer, you’re likely responsible for everything technical when selling your product or service. You work hand-in-hand with a sales counterpart, but let’s be honest—your load doesn’t feel any lighter. And since it’s the end of the year, you’re solely focused on closing that big deal. You barely have time to think—let alone about next year—but your boss just delivered a new quota that makes you think: “How is that even possible?” You may be thinking through all the ways you can optimize your time to hit that goal, but you still haven’t landed on a solution.
How many days a year do you spend traveling, sleeping in hotels, installing your software, and lugging around a bunch of expensive equipment? And how much time do you spend prepping for your PoC with zero IT support? I’m going to guess it’s a lot. If you could cut that time down to minutes, still connect to a prospect’s site, and use their data in a completely secure way by using the cloud, I’m willing to bet you’d consider it. So, now that I have your attention …
You may have run software demonstrations in the cloud using your favorite service, but what about running proof of concepts (PoCs) in the cloud? Did you know it was possible? Good news: it is.
High-value clients require a personalized and engaging experience when looking to buy expensive software. Often times what can make or break your deal is the ability to set up a complex PoC environment before another vendor. Let’s look at how you can accelerate this process by using the cloud—and salvage enough of your time to work on more deals and hit your numbers.
These are the three primary benefits to using the cloud for PoCs:
Speed to Provision
Most cloud providers have the appropriate tools to create customized, multi-machine software PoCs in seconds. You can also benefit from creating a central repository of master PoC images and templates that you can easily provision and share. You need to be able to capture the entire memory state of a customer multi-machine PoC as a snapshot and save as a template for rapid re-use. With this capability, your speed to provision a complex PoC stack can go from weeks to minutes.
Real-time Collaboration
Many cloud providers enable customers and partners to access virtual environments remotely from anywhere with just a browser. This gives prospects a rich and compelling hands-on experience almost instantly, as if the software was running locally. You want to partner with a cloud provider who can provide an ‘over-the-shoulder’ view for real-time collaboration, which will minimize the need for traveling.
Complex Networks and Hybrid PoCs
With the cloud you can create complex, multi-tier networks with custom routing and security policies to power your applications. You can demonstrate the full value of your solution in the cloud just like you would on site. Most cloud providers also offer customers the ability to create a two-way IPSec VPN to connect your PoC to multiple back-end enterprise systems. This can be at your corporate office or the prospect’s office, depending on how complex you want to get.
These are just a few examples of how you can run PoCs in the cloud and realize real benefits. Not only will you be able to do more PoCs, but they’ll be faster to provision, easier to share, and allow you to build complex environments just like you would on site.
If you’re facing a massive quota bump, you have to get all options for optimizing your time on the table. The time and complexity involved in running PoCs on site is something you can leave in the past. Most managers need you to do more with less, but I’m here to tell you can do more with more by using the cloud for your next proof of concept.
