Every technology company should be building and selling managed service offerings – this is the foundation of financial stability (whether traditional management, SaaS, Cloud, etc. ).  It’s the equivalent of software license renewal.

If you are in sales, and your company is smart, you are being asked to sell these services.  If you are hitting the wall on this, remember, all managed services are sold like security solutions.  They are in fact, security – some form of confidentiality, integrity, or availability.  As an example, server monitoring is done to ensure uptime and response time which are availability, backups are done to ensure recovery/availability and integrity,… and the list goes on.

So stop talking about ROI, operational efficiency, or price, and start focusing on critical assets and looking for asset owners who are liable for functions that depend on the confidentiality of that data asset.  Then determine what risks exist, what level of risk is acceptable, and what managed services could be used to maintain an acceptable level of risk.  This is the key to selling managed services, and brings with it the foundation of financial stability.