What to Consider When Choosing a Cloud Provider to Grow Your Business

Choosing the right cloud vendor is a mission-critical exercise every business must undergo. Ideally, you should be discovering, testing, evaluating, and reevaluating your technology stack at multiple intervals to ensure you have the right mix of solutions, services, and support you need for success. 

To help with this process, we’ve compiled an expert vendor’s perspective on what to consider when choosing a cloud provider to grow your business. Our tips and insights focus on core business goals including optimizing your sales funnel, increasing customer retention, and expanding your revenue opportunities.  

1. Define your unique needs 

Every growth strategy should start at the beginning—clarifying your goals and determining what your cloud technology needs are. To grow your business, you’ll need to identify a cloud provider that can understand and support your goals with cloud solutions that are the right fit for you. 

When it comes to defining your needs, you can also seek out cloud providers that specialize in helping businesses evaluate their current technology stack and make recommendations based on your desired future state. Look for a cloud provider that can help with: 

• Understanding your current technology stack from an expert’s perspective. 
• Clarifying your growth goals in clear and measurable terms they will be accountable for. 
• Providing solutions, services, and support that align with your goals. 
• Ensuring ongoing technology performance and maintenance. 

As you evaluate what to consider when choosing a cloud provider, you will likely come across other desirable qualities you’re seeking in a vendor, but these are a good place to start. 

2. Consider your sales funnel 

Another key component to help grow your business is reviewing your sales funnel to optimize it for growth. Ask the cloud providers you’re considering to look at this with you and get their insights on how they can help you attract more customers and keep them for the long term with exceptional customer experiences. As the backbone of your communications strategy, your cloud provider should have a clear idea of how their technology will enhance your customers’ interactions with your brand to maximize your growth potential. 

This step may also involve reaching out to your current customer base to get real-time insights into your current strengths and weaknesses. Conduct customer interviews or send out a survey to collect data on questions like: 

• What attracted them to your business? 
• What made them decide to buy your product or service? 
• What, if any, complaints do they have? 
• What do they love and what would they change about your product/service? 
• How can you exceed their expectations? 

Doing this will not only make your current customers feel seen, heard, and respected, but will also give you a great starting point for your customer retention plans and strategies. And with the right cloud provider to assist you, you can ensure a seamless experience for collecting these key insights in the future. 

3. Discuss the customer experience

To ensure your ongoing growth and success, you need a communications system that facilitates and optimizes exceptional customer experiences from first impressions to resolving customer issues. The right cloud provider for your business will have experience and expertise in designing customer experiences that can be customized to your unique needs. 

Expand on the data collected from your sales funnel review with your potential cloud providers. Ask them to take you step by step in the customer experience journey with your business to get a sense for the attention to detail they offer, what products they recommend, how they can customize and support them, and any other details they can offer to highlight why they’re the best choice for you. 

A cloud vendor that can sell you on the experience they provide your business is likely to have a good grasp on how to do the same thing for helping you impress your customers. 

4. Discuss how to implement growth strategies 

With the basics of your future growth goals defined, you can begin discussing the next major step for what to consider when choosing a cloud provider. It’s critical to find a vendor that is equipped to help you put your plans into action, create meaningful results, and stick to their promises when maintaining your business technology. 

Some key discussion points to bring to your potential cloud provider include: 

• Who your key stakeholders are and how their technology will ensure your workflows operate smoothly. Can they tailor your cloud system so that the right parties are always in the loop on the right discussions? If you have specific workflows or common processes that require special attention, are they equipped to accommodate those? Can they guarantee that your workflows will actually work and not require tedious workarounds that take up time and resources?  
• How your cloud system will store data for reporting and analysis. Once your solution is set up, how will you check on its performance? Is seeing your data and reporting easy to do? Will you easily be able to link it to your KPIs to measure growth? How will they ensure your ongoing success with their solutions? 
• How your cloud vendor will provide continuous support. Do they provide continuous monitoring of your technology and ensure your network uptime and performance? What kind of support services and guarantees do they offer? Do they provide a direct line to support and/or support representative dedicated to your business?

5. Discuss next steps for expansion 

Finally, delve into the future of possibilities your new cloud provider can offer you by exploring their entire portfolio and service offerings. Beyond your initial needs and goals, consider the long-term and whether your potential provider has the range of solutions, services, and support you will need both now and in the future. As technology continues to evolve at increasingly fast speeds, it’s important to find a cloud solutions vendor that can help you keep up—and exceed expectations with dedicated services and support tailored to your business. 

Grow Your Business with S-NET 

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