General Consultant Discussion

So I did a presentation to a group of CEO's today around our EverSafe! Disaster Recovery Solution. I decided before I walked in to use an app on my phone and embed this into the presentation. This is the front of the building where the meeting was held :) https://www.dropbox.com/s/zsfl80czhu1hs2f/FxGuru_20130710_114118%20%281%29.mp4

@MarkChinsky It looks like you have way too much fun at work!

How'd it go?

It went very well. One of the CEO's houses was featured on some million dollar home TV show. His salt water fishtank is so large he scuba dives in it. There are normally 12 members, but 4 were out due to vacations and conflicts. Of the 8, 7 realized, after my presentation, that they were at significant risk and are interested in talking further. We have a solution that a very high percentage of people who are pitched, are interested in pursuing and many go on to purchase. The problem is that the vast majority of companies don't realize they have this problem and exposure. So if I (or you as a sales agent :) ) can get some quality time with the CEO and/or CIO, the vast majority will want to pursue. But doing a great job in building a website with strong SEO, or direct mail or telemarketing is not going to do well because you can't capture the attention of the decision maker and make them realize they have a problem unless you can get them as a live captive audience. If I had millions, I'd run a bunch of informercials on business networks that business folks watch, but I don't :)

Have any of you who do IT support or had a personal experience had a failure that required either replacing a server or reinstalling an operating system and data. if so, how long on average did it take to get the company up and running again and what kind of effort was involved?

Mark, one of our client's had a server crash and after spending two days setting up a new server, re-installing applications, etc. discovered that there cloud based back was incremental. What a mess trying to recover MAS 200. It took another three days to put Humpty Dumpty together again. We are in the process of upgrading them to 2013, and we are still finding data issues. I can't emphasize enough the need to test restoring from a backup occasionally. So simple to do! So often not done.

As a VAR same problem here in cross selling disaster recovery as in cross selling CRM. Often our contacts are not the decision makers in the area (even when you think they are). Also it has been my experience that most companies do not think seriously about disaster recovery until/unless they have a serious loss. Working through IT departments to suggest backup strategies is very difficult in my experience. I don't have any large customers without an inside IT department who consider me a total moron about any type of IT related suggestions. .02 TL;DR: You're on the right track marketing to the ""C"" level. Not so sure about VAR cross sell as most don't have the proper contacts to influence the sale.

Wayne, I don't fell so bad now. I've been shelved to 'moron' category by the IT folks as well. Now I won't take it personally. I do feel sorry for the CFO who is left holding the bag when something happens as they were relying on IT to cover this. I've tried to involve them as part of the project team, etc to no avail.

@KathrynScofield If IT were such geniuses how did they let something like this happen? Personally I'd fire their asses after this and maybe that should be my marketing strategy when talking to them. ""If you were to suffer an IT outage that lasted days or longer, would your job security be safe? If the answer to this question is ""no"" or ""i don't know"" call us...