Explaining to a CIO or CTO how you can support and manage their technology comes naturally to you. You are both on the same turf and understand each other’s concerns. You live in the same world. However, there is generally another decision maker who will have to sign off on any contract for services. That individual is the CFO. A financial officer’s interest is less about the technical benefits you can provide and more about the financial ones. They will be focused on how your managed services will support the financial health and contribute to the bottom line of the business. If you can’t articulate a clear answer to that question, you may fail to win the support of a critical decision maker.

In a 2-part Blog Series, we discuss the ways you will need to present the case for managed services to a financial officer.

Cloud Services = Lower Capex
In proposing migrating to cloud services, such as storage, SaaS, off-site servers, etc., emphasize the savings in capital expenditure. By moving to the cloud, small firms can cut or eliminate a lot of capital expenses associated with hardware, cabling, backup hardware, and UPS systems.

Cloud Services Utilities
Supporting an in-house technology infrastructure also requires utility expenditures. Highlight the costs of powering their in-house hardware, as well as the power costs to cool equipment rooms that would be not incurred if they migrated hardware to the cloud.

Business Continuity
Here you can go a little bit negative. Instead of focusing on the need to spend on redundancy, outline the costs of NOT spending money needed to protect the integrity of the operation in the face of a natural disaster, power outage, or cyber attack. Statistics show that a significant percentage of small firms go under after a disaster. Highlight the immediate loss of business, plus the drop in lifetime customer value as clients move to a competitor.

When you go into a selling situation, it is important to recognize who the decision makers are and how to market to them. However, as a marketer and seller of your service, you may need to step away from that mindset if you are going to land a client. Watch this space next week for the concluding part of the series.