Cobweb’s Managing Director talks about the issues in marketing and selling security as a service on behalf of Mimecast. In this talk to the 2017 Managed Services and Hosting Summit Michael relates how 70% of the buyer’s journey is done before they pick up the phone to us, hence the need for marketing. “Some 8%-10% of our revenues are now spent on marketing,” he says, “both on acquiring new customers and continuing to engage with the existing clients to drive that lifetime customer value.”
On the issue of security, he says “you cannot protect at the perimeter any more. Defence starts with protecting the identity, then.”
“We help customers in the three ways – help them think about productivity, modernise the infrastructure and secure the business. Productivity in particular is about a lot more than selling Office 365.”
Partnering is absolutely essential; managed services is a journey and organisations involved have to become much more about learning and their own education as they go through these changes, he concludes, adding that Cobweb has increased its training budget four-fold going into the current year. The experience that the customer gets is only as good as the people who can deliver it.
