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When my wife and I were first married, like a lot of other younger couples, we began furnishing our new home via garage sales.   The second time we went out together she fell in love with a large painting that would go perfectly with the couch we just bought.  I asked the owner how much and she said, “$40”.  I took a deep breath and said, “I can’t give you $40 but I will give you $25”.  All of a sudden my wife blurts out, “Babe, the frame is worth more than that”!!!  After a few moments of awkward silence and with the owner of the painting smiling, I turned to my wife and said, “We need to talk”.

Moving to the cloud isn’t about the money, it’s about optimizing your core business, increasing efficiency and effectiveness, driving new revenue and growth.  When you think about it, the benefits are there:

If you’ve heard it once, you’ve heard it a thousand times, “I can’t afford a new ERP” or “I can’t afford to change ERPs”!  When you add the cost of purchasing a couple of servers, racks to house the servers, backup systems, firewall and security, and hiring expertise to manage the equipment to the cost of implementing a new ERP system, it can get really expensive really fast.  It can almost seem overwhelming to a lot of small business owners.  Yet, the cost to implement a new ERP doesn’t have to be that overwhelming if you take an Operating Expense (OPEX) approach instead of a Capital Expense (CAPEX) approach.

After 20 years of hosting leading ERP packages including Sage 100 and SAP Business One, I-BN has watched AWS and Azure enter the cloud market place over the past few years.  And I would say this even if I wasn’t an I-BN employee…bigger doesn’t mean better, all it means is bigger.

Although there might be savings moving to the cloud, the reason to move to the cloud is about a company’s core business strategy. More importantly, your company’s core business is the reason to move to the cloud. 

• How does owning a lot of computer infrastructure help you compete in today’s fast paced market place?
• Does money spent on infrastructure help your core mission or can that money be used more effectively?
• Does having an IT staff help your sales and marketing effort?
• Does having a lot of infrastructure help you grow?
• Does having infrastructure that is adequate today help you grow for tomorrow?
• Is the infrastructure you own today truly adequate for you to accomplish your mission?

From the days of the first mainframes that filled a football field to this fast paced server based internet age, it’s always been about getting information to the right people when they need it. The cloud solves this problems for your business.

In business, your ASPIRATIONS are a key factor in your success or failure. Let’s say for an example that you just finished a very successful implementation or you closed a large sale. Everything went perfectly...you did all the right things, the client loved you, you finished on time and on budget, your product produced an immediate ROI and it was a pleasure working with the client. This recent success will impact how you approach your next implementation or sale. The positive outcome will affect your ASPIRATIONS and carry over to your next engagement.

Yet, we don’t succeed every time do we? Let’s say you just had a horrible implementation or a horrible support session with a client. If you let it, this negative outcome will affect how you go into your next support call or engagement. Or let’s say you lost a big sale because a competitor dropped their price. This negative outcome can have an affect your next sale and you’re more likely to go in offering a discount based on your past experience. Or worse, you go on your next sales call believing there’s no way this prospect will buy what you’re selling. More often than we’d like to believe, we let our negative ASPIRATIONS control our outcomes.

Only you control your ASPIRATIONS. If you believe that a current client is so tough and unreasonable and no matter what you do you can’t satisfy them, you probably can’t. If you believe that a customer won’t buy at your current price, they probably won’t. If you believe that a competitor has more flexibility than you, they probably do. If you believe that your competitor’s product is better, it probably is. So before you’re next engagement, whatever it is, check your ASPIRATION level. Sometimes it’s good to ignore that little voice on your shoulder.

One thing is for sure, if you don’t believe your product can compete, if you don’t believe you can work with a client, if you don‘t believe you can reach a positive result, you won’t even try.

About the author: Bob Tobey spent over 20 years teaching managers, customer support and sales people how to be better at their craft. These blogs are intended to help the I-BN partner community improve their business.

I-Business Network has been managing cloud infrastructure since 1999, long before the cloud was even called the cloud. We specialize in hosting SAP Business One, Sage 100cloud, Sage 300cloud, Sage 500cloud, Sage CRM, Sage HRMS, Sage FAS and Sage BusinessWorks in two SSAE 16 data centers. For more information about hosting your Sage ERP in the cloud, contact Bob Tobey at btobey@i-bn.net.

The negotiation over the US budget and border security is over for now. This negotiation will be a case study for years to come. A lot of negotiating factors went into this deal. First there was a DEADLOCK, then time became an issue and added power and pressure to both parties. Outside parties got involved, these were the 1000s of government employees not getting a paycheck. PLAYER SUBSTITUTION came into play when a bipartisan congressional group was formed with 9 Democrats and 8 Republicans. At this point in the negotiation, both parties had pretty much established what they wanted so the next move was to develop a NEGOTIATING CONCESSION STRATEGY.

As the negotiation over the US budget and border security drones on, I thought it was interesting that the two political parties formed a committee of 9 Democrats and 8 republicans to come up with a compromise. Is this a true form of PLAYER SUBSTITUTION? Not really because in this example Speaker Pelosi would still need to bring it before the congress and if she doesn’t like the bill she won’t and President Trump still needs to sign the bill into law and if he doesn’t like it he won’t sign.

During my over 20 years of sales presentation training, there was a question that always came up and that’s how to introduce and integrate team members into a presentation.  There was an excellent example a few weeks ago of what NOT to do and I just want to say that this post in not meant to be political.  I’m only using the Democratic rebuttal to President Trump’s oval office speech as a training example because it’s timely and most everyone watched it or heard about it.   

Think about the presentations you’ve been in as an audience member.  The key facilitator introduces him or herself and then they either introduce their team members or allow the team members to introduce themselves.   Sounds simple enough but are you missing an opportunity to enhance the reputation of your team?