Summary
This article provides information about identifying opportunities and qualifying customers where Neverfail would be a great solution to fill the needs of a prospective client. Through interaction with a prospective client, you can determine if Neverfail products are the right fit for the organization.
High Availability and Disaster Recovery projects are typically driven by several market drivers affecting all businesses. It's important to understand each one, how they affect your potential customer, and how they impact the priority of the project.
Dependency on Applications
When companies begin to realize their dependency on technology, they begin to see how much downtime could cost their organization, and they start to look for solutions to mitigate that risk. This is the most basic driver, and usually has the lowest priority. Ask these key questions.
-
Are there critical windows when applications must be available, such as end-of-month-reporting or Customer Service hours?
-
Are there SLAs (Service Level Agreements) that IT has committed to the business?
-
Are there applications that are widely used and highly visible, for example, the CEO’s email?
-
Do they have high transaction volume?
-
Would downtime cripple business operations in terms of revenue and/or render critical service delivery useless?
Recent Outage
From this driver on, you start to see the project gets a Top 3 priority in an organization.
-
Has the organization recently had a hardware, application software, or power outage?
-
Was any data corrupted or lost?
- Did the OS fail?
-
Was there a ransomware attack? If so, how long was the outage and did they have to buy new hardware and restore from backup?
- Was there a natural disaster?
Customer Demand
Customers today have a "24 x 7 x 365" expectation of business because the world is connected. Remember your customer’s clients are only a Google search away from finding their competition. The Customer Demand driver also leads to higher priority projects.
Strategic Partners
Are external organizations with whom you interact requiring High Availability? Many software companies (ISV) have mission critical applications within their own niche. These specific types of applications are good targets for you, and they could be a steady supply of business and provide these ISVs additional value in their software or services. Remember Continuity Engine is over 20 years old and is a proven technology. Most ISV's understand their software but have a very difficult time understanding business continuity. Many times ISV's come up with less than adequate methods of providing high availability. Thus this represents a big opportunity for Neverfail partners.
Shareholder or Management Demand
Shareholders or management demand the business to be accountable and to work to mitigate the organization’s exposure to risk. There are several areas in which partners can focus with their prospects.
-
Active Project -
The organization may have an ongoing project and is currently seeking solutions.
-
Malicious Attacks -
With recent events of terrorism and cyber security attacks (ransomware), risk management has increased visibility. Risk management equals security plus business continuity.
-
Natural Disasters -
Natural disasters are unpredictable and experience has shown that hurricanes, tornados, floods, and earthquakes can devastate those businesses that are unprepared. Projects driven by natural disasters are often seasonal.
-
Regulatory Requirements -
Many regulatory requirements such as HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley, audits for financial services, and government regulations mandate High Availability and Disaster Recovery.
-
Cyber Security Frameworks - NIST and ISO also have business continuity and disaster recovery requirements as part of a robust cyber security posture.
Operational Environment
The client’s operational environment will determine not only which products and services they may need, but also the success of a purchased Neverfail solution. Identifying potential issues with existing applications, custom applications, or other non-standard applications or configurations early in the sales process will prevent problems later. Key questions to ask include:
- Is the server running Windows 2008 R2 or above?
- How many production servers need protection?
-
Are the servers physical or virtual and what is the quantity? if virtual, what platform (VMWare, Hyper-V, Open Source)? If virtual, what platform (VMWare, Hyper-V, Open Source)?
- What are they looking to accomplish High Availability (local, single facility failover), Disaster Recovery (remote, active passive in different geographical locations) or both?
- Does the customer typically buy Standard or Enterprise support?
-
For File Servers and SQL Servers, are there any additional 3rd party applications running or depending on the servers?
- Are they running any accounting, HR or ERP applications?
- Are they running applications from Mitel, Honeywell, Milestone, AVST, Cisco, Central Square, Progress MOVEit?
- Do they have other database systems like Oracle, PostgreSQL, MySQL?
Vertical Markets
As with any horizontal solution, you can effectively identify opportunities in vertical markets as well. There are unlimited vertical or market segments that have mission critical applications but banking, insurance, brokerages, investment, and critical energy (utilities, nuclear, oil) companies in particular all depend on critical applications and are especially sensitive to external regulatory requirements.
-
Begin with an overview of how other companies in their industry have addressed High Availability and Disaster Recovery.
-
Suggest that they talk to other companies who solved availability issues by engaging with a Neverfail partner.
-
Talk to your Regional Manager about hosting a webinar targeted at that vertical market.
-
Coordinate with the Neverfail marketing team to create specific messaging around these industries.
Lead Qualification
To convert an unqualified lead to a qualified lead, Neverfail recommends asking the prospective client the following simple questions:
-
Is the company running on a Windows platform? A qualified opportunity is Windows only. Neverfail does NOT support Linux or AIX.
-
Are they considering a DR or HA project and if so, which type?
- Is there a timeframe? When do they expect to start and complete it?
-
What critical applications do they want to protect?
-
Do they have an approved budget for the project?
-
Do they have clustering in place or are they considering clustering?
-
Have they looked at any other solutions?
Additional Opportunity Qualification
To ensure that Neverfail is the right tool for the job, it's important to ask the qualifying questions:
-
What is the company trying to accomplish?
-
Is this a High Availability or a Disaster Recovery project?
-
What are your success criteria for this project?
-
How critical is the application or server?
-
How much downtime can you afford?
-
Is it acceptable for users to have to make changes during a failover?
-
Does the failover have to be automatic or can it be a manual process?
-
Is your HA or DR solution something that you have to test periodically?
-
What is driving this project?
-
Is it in the budget, or did you just have an outage?
-
How are you handling HA or DR for your critical servers today?
-
What is the impact on your business? Is this a planned and budgeted project?
-
Did this come up from an audit or other external drivers?
- Is there any custom or 3rd-party applications on the server that need protection?
- Do you have an implementation timeframe or deadline?
The Pain
It is important to take your customers through some form of risk assessment and help them realize how far the risk reaches, and what level of risk they face. To increase your close rate on Neverfail sales, it is important to understand the pain of downtime, and how to position the Neverfail Continuity Engine around it.
-
Why is it important?
Increasing complexity of IT environments leads to more problems, including downtime.
-
Shift from Recovery to Availability.
Availability needs may be higher priority than recovery altogether. Backup and recovery tools are a fundamental business continuity strategy but only protect the zeros and ones. They also have much higher recovery time objectives (RTO). Availability focuses on restoring critical systems with in seconds but not several minutes, hours or days.
-
How far does it reach?
It also reaches customers, prospective customers, and potential customers and your supply chain, affecting both revenue and relationships.
-
Why don’t companies do it?
Competing interests and the price of implementing and supporting a solid business continuity plan. In many organizations its not visible every day (they consider it insurance) and customers are oblivious to the risks they really face, not knowing who should own it the risk and not prioritizing it as a critical business function. Finally, organizations can feel like backup, replication and basic failover are enough to mitigate the risk.
Applies To
Neverfail Continuity Engine all Versions