Welcome to Orlando
Many of our partners are in town for the HTG, ConnectWise and associated vendor parties so I wanted to take a moment and give you some ideas on how to best leverage us, your vendor, for greater success. Despite popular opinion, we’re not at the conference for the sole purpose of handing out swag and filling up trade show floor space with banners and marketing junk.
We’re here to inform you – We know you’re busy. We know we have a ton of webinars. I hear this a lot – yet you spent a ton of money to be out of your office for days and the best way to earn some extra ROI on your trip is to talk to us about what is going on at ExchangeDefender. You may not use every single product we have, you may not stay on top of every single blog post we write or announcement we make – so feel free to ask about what is new, what has changed and if any of your previous issues have been resolved. We are always adding to our solution portfolio and we know it end to end so we’re the best folks to give you a 10,000 foot view of our company; and can drag over a sales or technical person to explain the full details in a second.
We’re here to connect you with other partners – IT providers are not all the same. Many of our partners specialize in specific verticals and have developed custom stuff using our API, so if you are thinking outside the box we can likely get you contact info for partners that work in the same vertical or have a different way of using or positioning our solutions.
We’re here to give you the whole picture – If you don’t tune in to every webinar or haven’t spoken to anyone at ExchangeDefender in a year chances are you’re missing out on a lot of development. We can quickly walk you through everything that has changed and put it in a context of why we are doing so. For example, we recently launched ExchangeDefender LiveArchive 4 and it is no longer based on Microsoft Exchange. Why? It’s not due to the cost. It’s not due to the licensing. It’s not due to the complexity – it’s because our long term business goal for LiveArchive is to create a full redundancy for your entire communication experience – not just email. With LiveArchive 4 we can now provide failover email solution that also includes your contacts and your whole schedule, so you’re missing absolutely nothing when your mail server goes offline. Understanding what we are doing, and why, is a great way to make sure your clients are getting the solution that continues to solve their evolving problems as they count on you more.
We’re here to give you a quick rundown of everything new – If you’ve made it this far you’re in minority, most people just skim blog posts. That is fair, we do it as well. Information overload is serious business and you can only take in so much every day. Well, if you stop by our booth we can talk to you about what we’ve done, what we’re doing, what is coming down the pipe and so on.
We’re here for feedback – Most importantly, we are here to hear from you. You’re welcome to call us 24/7 but if there is something that really bugs you about our service or something that is working out really well but needs some tweaking, we are here to get the big picture for you so we can sell it to our management and developers. Our entire solution stack has been built on partner feedback and it’s the single most valuable takeaway (yes, even more important than new partner acquisition) from conference events.
To sum it up: Stop by, say hi, ask us what’s new and tell us what we could be doing better. And please don’t ask us where Vlad is, he is more of an imaginary character like the Wizard of Oz than an actual participant of day-to-day business 
Anastasia Wiggins
ExchangeDefender Client Software
We are proud to present the first release of the new Client Software infrastructure that is starting to include all of our ExchangeDefender solutions under one look and experience. As I’ve explained before, we are bringing the same ExchangeDefender web experience to your Desktop/Outlook as well as the mobile world of iOS and Android. Lot’s of new stuff so let’s get started.
Branding: The most demanded feature for the Outlook and Desktop addin. You don’t have to customize things either, all the product names, logos and colors will be pulled down from ExchangeDefender based on the user login.
We are adding search as well as message previews to ExchangeDefender quarantines. This gives our clients true, live access to the SPAM quarantine and makes the system respond in realtime along with the ability to instantly print, whitelist or deliver the message.
Previews are great for clients that need immediate access and don’t want to waste tons of time waiting for emails to be released and delivered to their Inbox – they can access them right away!
Speaking of the need for realtime alerts, some of our clients really liked old email reports because they would get that daily reminder of all their SPAM. We’ve introduced a new feature with the ExchangeDefeder Outlook addins (desktop has had it for years) that will pop up a reminder that there is new SPAM waiting for you every 30 or 60 minutes.
LiveArchive & Compliance Archive
Just one more.. well, two more things. We are adding access to LiveArchive and ComplianceArchive so it’s never more than one click away.
LiveArchive will give you a one click access to the full web experience of a fully functional webmail client now with contacts, appointments and a year of your email.
Compliance Archiving is being embedded right into the product – you will be able to quickly locate, open and even filter down messages by subject, sender, recipient and date. This will allow people with very large mailboxes to quickly get to the messages that may have been received years ago with a quick search.
One of the biggest improvements in the actual infrastructure of the Desktop and Outlook 2010 & 2013 addins is that the addin will automatically update itself whenever a new version is released. Unfortunately, you will have to uninstall the existing addin and install the new one from here, but this will be the last time!
As always, all our software is available for download here.
Hank Newman
VP, Development
Exchange Migration Conversations
Many of our partners have been asking about the migration collateral as well as the experience our partners and their clients have on these calls. What is being discussed? How are you being introduced? Do you try to sell? What sort of information do you provide? What kind of guarantees do you provide? Relax. It’s a process and a very flexible one at that with two goals in mind: Reassure the client and identify any problems up front.
Pre-call (Partner)
Prior to the call with the client, ExchangeDefender and our Partner get together and go over the new opportunity. We discuss all the obvious stuff – domain names, current technology, current problems, any special personnel or solutions in place, timelines, etc. We determine how ExchangeDefender will be introduced (sometimes as ExchangeDefender, sometimes as “migration team” and other times just by the name) and which solutions we are to discuss during the call.
We do not sell to the client on the call. It is partners responsibility to evaluate the needs and requirements the client may have for more complex things like corporate encryption, long term archiving, Outlook addins and so on. However, sometimes we can explain the technical and business implementation matters better because of our experience with them and we make sure we get our partners permission to talk about those items. Sometimes partners have a third party encryption or compliance product they prefer over ExchangeDefender so we try to make sure we follow the plan the partner has laid out for their client and assist in what they want to do.
Initial Client Call (Partner & ExchangeDefender & Client)
Partners typically arrange a phone call between the client, themselves and us and we get on the line with our questionnaire and go through the typical barrage of questions that lead us in the direction the client deems to be most important. This is critical: Always let the client guide you through their problems so you can address them. Based on their prior experience, company management may have different concerns than their IT team or previous IT Solution Provider; they may not be the right ones to answer the questions you may be asking; they may provide more detail of where the company is going and give both the partner and ExchangeDefender an avenue to help mitigate some risks and problems that will show up down the road.
During the initial talk we identify their primary problems and concerns; identify the contact points and vendors they rely on; timelines or dates around which no service interruption should take place; regulatory compliance requirements and activities, etc.
The purpose of the first call is to introduce our process, make adjustments and determine the correct plan of action.
Followup Partner Call (Partner & ExchangeDefender)
There are always surprises and opportunities the more we talk with our clients. The purpose of the followup call is to divide up the work and discovery process and begin the assessment. While some partners will allow us full control of the process and trust us to do the work end-to-end, others may prefer to do parts of the migration process themselves (installing their own RMM, making backups, etc) and we plan our course of action during this call.
Without getting extremely granular on every detail, the technical process of a migration is not complex. The complexity comes from problems, issues and limitations that come up during the mailbox move. So one of the first steps after we deploy the ExchangeDefender Business Monitoring tool (or our partners RMM choice) is to deploy bandwidth monitoring tool and verify the speed of the Internet connection around the clock. We go through the mailbox infrastructure and identify large mailboxes that are appropriate for Compliance Archiving, run tests and so on. The goal of the followup is to get an understanding of what can and cannot be done, what timelines we may be looking at given the limitations and restrictions and to match up calendars and migration schedules.
Followup Client Call (Partner & ExchangeDefender & Client)
Followup calls are optional and frequently handled by the partner but ExchangeDefender does offer to be a part of the whole process of explaining our discovery and our recommendations about compliance, encryption, DNS control, migration, LiveArchive business continuity, upgrading of various desktops and systems, viability of the Outlook addins or third party vendors or remote office migration plans.
The initial process is all about gathering ideas, suggestions, problems and solutions and running them by your client. It’s never going to be foolproof and we’ve heard this one often:
“You are very reassuring and seem to have a good grasp on how all this works. I’m happy about that. My concern is with things that you don’t know about and things that we don’t bring up that will break the system after the migration. We don’t want to be in a situation where you just tell us that you didn’t know about it because we didn’t tell you”
The above problem is inevitable, it is commercially impossible to both provide an economical move and a fool proof one. So we focus on the process at hand, we do only what we write into the contract and then we deal with anything that may be outside of that contract through other means. It doesn’t make all the clients happy – which is unfortunate – but it gives them something they can count on and a process they can understand.
As we go through the migration, every step is clearly communicated to the partner. They are armed with tons of branded collateral and every message we send out also has their logo on it. We can send the notification directly to the partner or to the partner and the client contact. Whenever a mailbox moves, whenever a DNS record changes, whenever a login is about to be made or profile reconfigured – we send out notices.
For more details on the collateral and the process notifications and the actual migration and technical stuff, stay tuned. There is new stuff being added every single day and a lot of it is customized with each given scenario. The key to migrations is planning and constant communication. So we’ll obviously have more and more of it here.
-Vlad
Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO, ExchangeDefender
ExchangeDefender Outlook 2013 Integration
We’re happy to announce Outlook 2013 addin for ExchangeDefender. You can download it here and you won’t have to use anything but Outlook to access your most frequently used ExchangeDefender functions such as management of SPAM quarantines, whitelists, stats and so on. The plugin will refresh the data every 30-60 minutes (or in realtime if you prompt it to do so) and it’s just that simple.
What I would like to discuss now is the future of the platform. As you may have seen on this blog, there has been a significant amount of mobile development on our Shockey Monkey platform. All of that is coming to ExchangeDefender as well this quarter.
It gets even better: Now that we have ExchangeDefender Outlook addins for Outlook 2007, Outlook 2010 and Outlook 2013 (in addition to our Desktop addin, our web portal) we are looking to extend these addins to incorporate additional ExchangeDefender features to the everyday Outlook experience: LiveArchive Business Continuity, Encryption, File Sharing, Compliance Archiving Search and Recovery, LocalCloud, Chat and more. By further integrating these services with your mobile and desktop (or Outlook) experience we are able to provide a more cohesive and collaborative office experience no matter where you are or which device you are using. This is a significant challenge but one that we are working on every day.
Hank Newman
VP of Development, ExchangeDefender
hank@ownwebnow.com
Answering With The Cloud
Every new wave of technological advancement brings nuances that make it difficult to make the exact comparison to the problems old technology solved. The easiest way to promote the new stuff is to talk about all the new great things it does, but what do you say when you are questioned about things that are no longer a problem in the 21st century?
One of the questions we are usually asked is if a company has enough bandwidth to rely on Hosted Exchange.
Fair question. When the small company first started it’s Exchange deployment in late 90’s early 00’s it had all it’s employees in one site and every desktop was on the LAN. Fast forward to 2013 where most employees have mobile phones that are in constant sync with the Exchange deployment over the WAN. Remote offices, road warriors, executive laptops at home – now each user has several devices connecting to the Exchange server at the office and there would be actual net savings in bandwidth if the Exchange server went to the cloud!
To be fair, these “infrastructure concerns” are typically coming from the IT employee who is trying to protect his job with inferior solutions: Your sales process should focus on actual business operations concerns around business continuity, security and compliance. Here are some ways to differentiate the cloud model with the DIY model.
Just how reliable is the cloud version? What happens when it goes down?
Well it uses the same software that you would run in your office so it is comparable to your existing experience. The difference with the cloud is that the systems are much larger and far more redundant so they can conduct more maintenance without affecting operations because it’s not a single server. Maintenance keeps small problems from becoming big problems and when there are issues they are posted here so you know exactly what is going on.
Cloud Exchange is also redundant across two data centers so if there is a networking issue that impacts one you will still be in business.
In the event of a catastrophic outage, where your cloud Exchange is actually down, you can rely on ExchangeDefender LiveArchive which gives you last year worth of email including all your contacts, calendars and appointments with full realtime access to send and receive even over a mobile device.
What about backups? What if they go out of business? How can I be sure I have my data?
You’re protected in several ways, the most immediate one being Outlook 2013 cached mode. Because Outlook 2013 is included for free we will upgrade all your workstations to store all your email locally on your workstations or laptops so it will be protected by the local backups first.
We also provide business level backups of your entire organization and we can do it on a monthly, quarterly or annual basis so you can snapshot your mail and keep it here or off site in a safe deposit box on a portable USB hard drive. We can even automate the process by keeping this information on BDR systems in our data center.
There is also an option for Compliance Archiving – we can store up to 10 years of email and have it available for immediate search without additional devices or appliances. It’s just another service available to protect your data.
To be honest, the concept of backups worked in the old days where organizations had small servers or single instance storage with a single RAID – cloud deployments are scalable, using multiple servers with DAG that keeps copies of the data in multiple locations. Because these systems are built for scale they offer more flexibility and more data copies – but we can certainly help you sleep easier at night by providing these additional services that make sense if you’re not so sure about the cloud.
What about security? I hear the cloud is hacked a lot! I have compliance to worry about as well.
The threat of having your security compromised is real regardless of where your Exchange is. One thing you can be sure of is that providing the level of monitoring and security layers available in the cloud would make an office server solution very expensive. ExchangeDefender provides stated Security Procedures document, Data Destruction Document, is SSAE 16 certified and undergoes multiple security audits every year – how about your IT employee?
We already mentioned Compliance Archiving, the system that gives you realtime access to 10 years of your email, where you can quickly locate any inbound, outbound and even interoffice email that matches search criteria. If you have HIPAA concerns, ExchangeDefender will sign a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) so you’re covered and have full access to your mail without worrying if it has been tampered with by the IT staff.
Security is really a matter of monitoring, technology and user awareness. ExchangeDefender has a lot more resources and higher end firewalls and DDoS protection service to address security problems when they pop up, patch the systems quickly because it can offline redundant servers, filter suspicious traffic and more that we cannot do affordably for you in the office. But what we can do is implement requirements for password rotation, we can deploy RSA SecurID for one-time passwords, we can monitor usage patterns and more.
Summary
Sometimes it’s hard for people stuck in the old model of IT to quickly accept how change has provided for better solutions to old IT problems. The key to a successful client relationship and a sale is not to argue some preconceived notions about IT but to explain the advances in technology and all the better stuff they will get from the cloud.
While everything about technology can be debated endlessly by the tech world, technical implementation to suit business has been taken out of the clutches of IT departments and placed into control of executives who have a more practical view of technology. Try asking two IT people: “What’s the best way to backup data” and see how many answers you get. Asking an executive will get you a different, more practical answer: We need to be able to continue work as usual within X hours but we need to have access to Y years of data in case of an audit.
ExchangeDefender and our partners are constantly evolving the best technology and the best local people around the world to solve these IT problems. Sometimes starting the conversation and framing it in a way to explain the advancement we’ve had in the past two decades when it comes to email is more difficult than just providing the solution. We hope this helps and if you need more info please do not hesitate to contact us.
Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek
CEO, ExchangeDefender
ExchangeDefender Migrations & Support Business Model
ExchangeDefender Migrations & Support Services is off to an incredible start. But I’ll be first to admit that as usual, marketplace adoption of our solution is slightly different from the way we expected it would be. This webinar will briefly explain our services and business model and then dive deeply into the way our Migrations & Services business has been adopted so far by our partners and how everyone is leveraging these services for a profit. No two small business IT Solution Providers are alike – there are MSPs, ISVs, VARs, specialists, technicians, large IT departments and small contractors to Fortune 500 that are leveraging our services to deliver solutions to teams small and large – and one thing they all have in common now is that they have a partner that can help them scale and quickly offer cloud solutions that are not just latest and greatest but also supported and implemented end to end:
ExchangeDefender Migrations & Support Webinar
http://www.exchangedefender.com/media/XDMigrations.wmv
01:52 What’s new
05:47 Migration Services
08:30 Does it make sense?
10:14 Support Services
12:45 Does it make sense?
14:53 Promotions, Strategy, Win-Win
16:39 Migration Overview
23:08 Migration Overview
25:47 Profit Opportunities
29:10 Migration Fees
33:36 Migration Assistance
38:06 Migration Parallel Tasks
47:28 Cloud = No More IT Problems?
I cannot stress this enough: This is an invitation to a partnership. Migrations & Services is not a product you pick off the shelf and throw into an invoice – it is a project oriented rollout where we do as little or as much as you would like us to do. We can do the migration. We can do the support. We can do the software rollout. We can move the email. We can manage the DNS and manage the VIPs that need their iPhone and iPad configured. We can even bill the client and pay you a commission. We can do anything and everything you want us to do: But the point is that you can build a huge business by being a part of this. Let’s talk.
ExchangeDefender Migrations & Support Services are about giving you scale. About giving you freedom and time to pursue more profitable ways to be more valuable to your clients while leaving the complex, annoying, time consuming and frankly thankless tasks to us. Please download the webinar and hear what our partners have done with us so far, how they are structuring these deals, what they are charging for it, how they are executing side projects and how everything works in real life.
I urge every single one of you reading this post to email me at vlad@ownwebnow.com and sit down for a conversation about what this can do for you. No pressure, no sales quota (after all, you’re talking to the boss), no tricks, schemes or purchase required: This is the biggest opportunity we are presenting to our partners in the 16 year history of our business and I am personally the one spearheading this effort because without you none of this would ever be possible.
Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO, Own Web Now Corp
ExchangeDefender Reputation Scoring
When you send an email through ExchangeDefender it is checked for the presence of viruses, malware, SPAM and other dangerous content. It is our responsibility to make sure that the mail crossing the network, both in and out, is safe and that we are notcontributing to the flood of junk across the Internet. This is the story of our outbound network and it’s working great.
We also have another network, outbound-jr (affectionately nicknamed junk relay) where the rules are a little more relaxed. Some organizations have business case scenarios thatrequire them to send out null sender messages (maintenance, bounces, oof replies), some like to send bounces, some have massive email notification systems (RMM, transactions, etc) and they are on the line of legitimate andjunk mail as a choice. Since junk classification is handled by computers, (not humans), sometimes-legitimate mail is not being accepted for delivery.
A change that we are considering implementing, is a stricter set of monitoring and access restriction controls on outbound-jr. The first of these is a restriction on open SMTP ports, which often contributes to open relay mass mailings. This can be accomplished by rolling out a service that will deny access to outbound-jr if a client’s port 25 is accessible from the Internet (outside of the ExchangeDefender network). Traditionally this has been managed by IT departments and partners, but with a constant barrage of overly aggressive SPAM methods, the ability for most to manage this without security threats or incidents is an overwhelming issue.
To counter these threats and provide the most effective and best solution possible for our partners, we are soliciting feedback and beginning the alerting process to clients that have port 25 open without IP restrictions to the ExchangeDefender network. If there are no major objections to enforcing IP restrictions to port 25 (after all, if you have external client that requires SMTP relay access they can always use the SSL port) then we are considering adding this as a service requirement.
Thoughts? Opinions? Let us know via phone, chat, support tickets or just email me at vlad@ownwebnow.com
Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO, Own Web Now Corp
ExchangeDefender Service Check
Although I can’t talk about our major initiative until the webinar next week, we have a ton of new stuff we’re developing on the backend to make your life easier. First of many that I have the pleasure of announcing is the ExchangeDefender Validation Wizard:
ExchangeDefender Validation Wizard gives you the ability to eliminate/isolate problems on the ExchangeDefender network through the same process our team uses and through the same systems our engineers rely on. The beta is available at: http://www.exchangedefender.com/check.php
Simply plug in the mailbox email and password and our wizard will troubleshoot things end to end and line up with our best practices:
Validation Wizard
What the wizard actually does is even more important to understand: this is not some simple database field validation tool. It actually opens connections to the live backend servers, tests connections, looks up DNS records and does everything that technicians typically do by hand.
Exchange Mailbox: Wizard will first check the password and authentication credentials against the live CAS server. If this check fails it means you have the wrong email/password combo. Please note that this check validates the actual connection, not what is in the control panel. If your user went around you and reset their password via OWA then just remember the best practice to reset it right back to something you can support.
MX Record Check: After the mailbox is verified as live and online, system will check the DNS for the correct MX and Autodiscover records. This is particularly useful in the mail troubleshooting process when email delays and missing emails are a problem. Clients tend to have incorrect, missing or external MX records in their delivery list and more often than not this is the culprit to missing and delayed email. Every now and then we also find that the domain record registration had expired (and as it’s the last thing we ever check it’s among the most frustrating)
Network Connectivity: As the test implies, we check the connectivity to clients CAS, HUB and Mbox server to check on the backend and identify any potential bottlenecks that could be affecting connectivity.
Mail Services Check: The extension of the network test, in which we go through all the web, SMTP, IMAP, POP3, CAS and MAPI services to make sure the clients mailbox is setup correctly, mail flows as it should and there aren’t any “weird” issues on the backend such as a mailbox that is locked out, over quota, possessed by email gremlins and so on.
Piece of a Proactive Puzzle
As you can tell, we are putting more and more pieces together that allow us to deliver a truly managed service throughout the cloud. Typical cloud service checks verify that the servers are online and functioning but the truth is that there are typically dozens of servers and multiple data centers involved in service delivery and the transparency to the backend can at times make it impossible for a third party to effectively troubleshoot the service.
By extending the access of our backend into your hands we feel we can deliver powerful functionality in a very easy to use and manage tool set. Even though PowerShell access is available, we find it that few have the capability to rely on it and every time you have to do something manually through PowerShell you will waste more time than you expected. Not to mention that the testing has to be layered in order to make sense.
Our business model calls for us to further simplify and eliminate the hassle of email issues. By transferring these complex, procedural and often poorly documented best practice and troubleshooting sets to a simple, easy to use and cleanly presented service we can eliminate a huge cost and open up our portfolio to delivering managed mail services that are not conditional on the infrastructure problems.
I certainly look forward to sharing everything we’re up to here but I think you can agree that it helps when we’re on the same page 
Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO, Own Web Now Corp
vlad@ownwebnow.com
(407) 536-VLAD
ExchangeDefender M&S Services Division
Over the past 16 years ExchangeDefender teams have brought some remarkable products to the cloud and enabled service providers to solve common small business problems and still fit in the company budget profitably. As we have grown so have our partners, around the world, and we’re happy to announce the new service division that will build upon that success.
When I speak to our most successful partners the most common problems IT Solution Providers encounter is that of scale. The opportunities in the marketplace are tremendous and taking advantage of them all would require working around the clock and through the weekends. With our market threatened by large companies with cheap solutions and poor service, it becomes even more important to show flexibility, portfolio diversity and customer service: namely, if the client wants to move their email and document storage to the cloud over the weekend to minimize operational impact we have to make that happen.
ExchangeDefender is excited to bring that dream to reality for many of our partners.
Our ExchangeDefender Migration Service is a project-oriented solution that works on our partners behalf to organize, schedule, execute, document and support a migration effort. Our ExchangeDefender Support Service is a subscription-based service meant to continue white-branded support of the client once they are in the cloud around the clock. Through both solutions, and through our partners, we can deliver cloud based solutions small businesses want at the price they want to pay with the level of service they can rely on. Our mission is very simple.
It’s critical for our partners to trust the process through which we intend to implement and support the cloud. In order to trust us you need to be able to understand our process, consider all the typical “what if” cases and properly fit our projects with your own model. In order to explain it all and go through all the details we will be holding a live webinar that I would like to invite you to:
ExchangeDefender Migration & Support Service Webinar
Oct 9, 2013 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM EST
Registration: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/686418297
Please take the time to join us as we will be taking questions live as well as discussing existing migration and support projects that will not be a part of the recorded webinar. While the projects and our process are very intuitive and simple, the devil is in the details and there is more to migration and support than moving mail and answering technical questions.
The focus of the new division is service. We are not just representing us, we are representing your brand. We are not just supporting our product, we are becoming a part of your support and escalation process. We are not simply a software company, we are a service provider too. As you’ve noticed through the blogs and through our expanded portfolio, we are growing up a lot and assuming more responsibilities to help you grow faster.
The single greatest growth opportunity for SMB IT Solution Providers in a decade is here and now is the time to take advantage of it. I urge you to join us and work with us to our mutual success. We certainly work forward to it and have put and incredible amount of effort into this.
Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO, Own Web Now Corp
vlad@ownwebnow.com
(407) 536-VLAD
First Step In Positioning a Migration Sale
Since we’ve announced the launch of our new managed migrations we’ve been getting a lot of great feedback, many of you are ready to jump on board and get the ball rolling! ExchangeDefender is proud to be the only company on the market with this type of offering. We are here to help you understand how to successfully position the service and increase your profit margins to a number you’ve never seen before! Last week I gave you a general overview of the migrations , this week I will discuss the first step in the process, the sale.
· Be Prepared– One of the most important aspects of selling, or anything for that matter is being prepared. The end user does not have the vast knowledge of the cloud like you do; it’s your job to help educate them so they can see the value. Not only will they need to understand the cloud, they will need to understand the offerings being presented to them. When selling ExchangeDefender’s Hosted Exchange the client will need to comprehend there is a difference in the services they will receive from ExchangeDefender vs. the competition. As I discussed last week, ExchangeDefender is specifically designed to be a business enterprise solution, this is immensely different from the barebones, minimum cheap-o solution. To guarantee you are prepared, we offer FREE customized collateral for your business! Our collateral makes it simple to understand the product and its features; your clients will know exactly what they’re getting.
· Time and Cost– As you’ve probably experienced time and time again, the two most frequently asked questions and deciding factors for business owners are- how much will this cost and how long will this take/will I be down? Always come prepared with pricing and the scope of the project! E-mail is the primary form of communication and life blood of their business, so it makes sense they do not want to experience any downtime or difficulties that might arise from a migration. Migrations take time and time is money, but with our managed migrations you won’t have to worry about spending hours of your time or the client’s time ever again. We have developed a migration process that will allow us to seamlessly migrate their mail and this can all be done during off-peak hours. By the time they come in Monday morning, all of their mail will have been migrated to ExchangeDefender’s platform. We see the process through end to end. Price is also an important factor for business owners. As I discussed, your client will need to understand that what you’re offering with ExchangeDefender may be a few bucks more each month, but we are offering a true business enterprise solution, unlike the competition. Since we are doing the migration for you and that is pure profit, you have a little more flexibility on the quote for the migration piece. This will help offset some of the other cost and the client will be more willing to work with you. Most of our partners make their money off the migrations, not the monthly fees they collect from Hosted Exchange. We are giving you the opportunity to pocket every penny of the migration fee.
· Contract and Payment-The last and final step is documentation and setting up a payment agreement. Going back to being prepared, make sure you always have the contract on hand! Also, make sure to always have the payment details in writing and have them sign that agreement.
If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me directly at : Anastasia@ownwebnow.com or 877-546-0316 x 739.