How To Sell Backup? Stop Pitching Fires, Floods, And Famine

By Jim Roddy, VP of Marketing, RSPA

At the ASCII Success Summit in Columbus, OH, Rob Rae, vice president of business development at Datto, offered advice on selling backup and business continuity during his keynote presentation May 29. Here are five of his best quotes and observations:

• The chance of a natural disaster wiping out a business’ data is remote — less than 1 percent. Rae asked the nearly 100 solutions providers in attendance, “Would you spend $1,000 a month to guard against a 0.05 percent probability? Too many people are pitching backup during fire, floods, and famine. The real threat is people. We are the worst. We delete stuff. We download stuff. Businesses need to protect themselves against people, not so much hurricanes, tornadoes, and floods.”
•  “I think 90 percent of the end users out there don’t have a proper backup,” Rae said. “They may think they do, but they don’t. Tape backup is local backup and not a continuity solution.”
• Rae walked the attendees through Datto’s Recovery Time (RTO) and Downtime Cost Calculator, which you can access by clicking here. Solutions providers can use this calculator to help prospects and customers determine the financial impact downtime will have on their business. The example Rae showed during his presentation resulted in a cost of $371 per hour of downtime.
• Another example Rae outlined was from an online retailer of wine who was generating thousands of dollars of sales per hour — but were losing that much revenue every hour their website experienced downtime.
• “To make money on continuity, you should add at least a 50 percent margin to services and a 20 percent margin on hardware,” Rae said.

The ASCII Success Summit – Columbus is being held May 28-29 at the Renaissance Hotel in downtown Columbus, OH. It is one of eight solution provider-focused conferences ASCII is hosting in 2014. For more information on ASCII, go to www.BSMinfo.com/go/InsideASCII.