Quadric Software

How to Convince Your Boss to Buy a Backup Solution

Need to convince your boss to a buy backup solution? This can be a stressful process. However, if you do your homework and prepare a solid presentation, you will have more confidence when it’s time to convince the decision-makers in your organization.

We’ve prepared some steps to convince your boss to buy a backup solution, along with some selling points for Alike, in this week’s blog post. Before you meet with the decision-makers in your organization, be sure to read this guideline to help you make the best presentation.

1. Explain Why Your Organization Needs a Backup Solution

Start by addressing the following questions: What critical business needs will new software address? What are the critical assets do you need to protect from disasters? How will it save you time and / or money? What are the overall benefits of the new backup solution?

Prepare to demonstrate how the solution will support your business continuity goals and budget parameters. In addition, use data to show how the new backup solution will meet your ROI and RTO goals.

When making a case for Alike, for instance, you could mention that Alike DR provides advanced disaster recovery features, such as replication, offsite vaulting, and cloud storage with Amazon S3. You could also show our short video on how Alike can save your business from a disaster.

Alike can also save your business time and money with Changed Block Tracking and Alike’s unique deduplication, providing impressive compression ratios. Case Studies can be another useful tool for showing how a particular backup solution will help meet your ROI and RTO goals.

2. Assess and Compare Costs

If you know your budget already, do some research and compare the costs. Make sure you understand how the licensing works for each company. For instance, Alike’s flexible licensing options may be perfect for your budgeting needs, particularly if you have a smaller environment. But Alike can also be ideal for larger environments, which doesn’t break the bank even in larger organizations.

Next, be sure you get quotes from each vendor. Before you get a quote, make sure you know what costs you’ll need to account for, such as maintenance renewals, future upgrades, etc. Many backup vendors will offer an instant quote.

You’ll also want to check to see if the vendor offers special pricing for certain organizations, such as Government and Non-profit agencies. Be sure you know which department to contact for a custom quote.

3. Understand Technical Costs

Many backup solutions have hidden costs and hardware lock-ins that may not be apparent during the preliminary research. Does your current IT infrastructure support the solution? Will you need new hardware and other upgrades?

This is another argument you can make for Alike if your current IT environment doesn’t support certain technology needs, or if your budget won’t allow for expensive upgrades. Alike does not require additional licenses or hardware specific to Alike DR. This can be a very attractive feature for an organization with a tight IT budget.

4. Anticipate Pushback

This is perhaps the most important point in this post. Know your boss’s potential concerns before you prepare your final presentation. What will you get pushback on? Once you anticipate these, then you will be able to compose a response.

Here are just a few “call and response” examples.

Boss: “It’s too expensive.”

You: “While the initial costs may be outside our overall budget, look at the savings we’ll have in the long run, not to mention the fact that you can’t put a price on data protection.”

This is a perfect opportunity to highlight features that will save money, such as Alike’s data deduplication that saves on storage costs. You can even add the benefits to an ongoing maintenance plan to this part of your pitch.

Boss: “I still don’t understand why we need a backup solution. Don’t we have anti-virus programs installed on all of our computers?”

You: “Yes, I understand your concern, but protecting our organization’s vital assets is a multi-tiered process. And as you have probably seen in the news, many of the next-gen hackers can get through any anti-virus program and infect our systems with ransomware, and the only defense against ransomware is a comprehensive backup solution with disaster recovery features.”

Okay, so you may not need to go into that much detail, but you get the point. You will probably have to make the initial argument for a backup solution several times, using different scenarios and examples. Money will mostly likely be the biggest barrier. If that’s the case, make sure the vendor you pitch matches your budgeting needs.

Lastly, reiterate the cost-benefit savings mentioned in points 1 and 2, and look for vendors that offer special pricing. Overall, your presentation should anticipate any concerns management may have, whether it’s cost, additional labor, or other potential roadblocks.

5. Think Outside the PowerPoint Boxe(s)

No one wants to sit through an hour-long meeting watching you awkwardly click to the next slide of bar graphs. Even if you’re not the creative type, there are plenty of free tools out there to help you make the best presentation possible. Get outside your presentation comfort zone, and try something different.

There is a caveat to this, however: Know your audience!

Maybe your boss loves PowerPoint presentations filled with raw-data-fueled charts and graphs. Be sure you know who will be in the meeting and which formats they’re more likely to respond to.

No matter how you present it, part of every effective presentation should include three main categories:

• Benefit
• Cost
• Application

For each of those major points, be sure to include quantifiable benefits (This solution can increase our productivity by 40% over the next 3 years). Lastly, prepare answers to questions your boss is likely to have about the benefits, cost, etc.

Conclusions

Even if you’ve done a ton of research and prepared a stellar presentation that fits your audience perfectly, be prepared to have your request denied due to factors out of your control. Go into your pitch knowing if there have been recent company-wide budget cuts, re-prioritizing of company needs, and other factors, you could get a “no” for an answer.

Regardless, here’s the key component to making an argument for a new backup solution: make it very clear that above all, you have researched this new solution with the benefit to the company in mind, and show that you have anticipated any risks and made a plan to address any fundamental challenges.

Feel free to contact us if you have any questions about Alike and how it can benefit your organization, and good luck!