Last week at EMC World, we announced enhancements to our data protection portfolio, including:
- Major enhancements to our market-leading Data Domain protection storage portfolio
- Updates to ProtectPoint, our revolutionary storage integrated data protection solution that combines the best of snapshots with the best of backup
- New CloudBoost technology that will connect our entire portfolio to the cloud
But, technology alone doesn’t solve anything. Successful selling is all about relationships, building a connection with customers. It’s about painting a vision, showing our customers how they can transform from their outdated data protection infrastructure, and most importantly giving them confidence that EMC is the best choice for them both today and tomorrow.
To do that, we need to deliver more than technology, and it’s no surprise that EMC customer support is cited as being head and shoulders above the competition. While this gives many customers confidence, there are numerous other investments we make that separate us from the competition:
- Validate the Value: ROI based upon theoretical savings is not good enough. Our “Validate the Value” toolkit enables EMC teams and partners to quantify the benefit derived from our solutions using customer metrics not theory. This gives confidence to our customers and gives us real world insight into the true benefits derived from our solutions.
- Technical Advisory Boards: We host these intensive sessions around the world to connect customers with our product teams. The purpose is to discuss long term requirements for data protection, and these discussions impact decisions for product roadmaps. There are a number of examples of action that we’ve taken as a result of Technical Advisory Board input, such as native vSphere integration for both Avamar and NetWorker.
- Data Protection Communities: There are dozens of sessions hosted around the world each year to connect our customers together in local user group events. Whether EMC-sponsored or run by established local user groups this is an opportunity for customers to connect with other local users, to share best practices and seek input from peers as well as from EMC experts.
The common theme throughout these different activities is building trust with our customers. Whether it’s demonstrating the tangible value and ROI of our solutions, identifying trends early to evolve our product strategy, or simply ensuring customers have an outstanding end-to-end experience, it all starts with trust.
For those readers who are not current EMC customers we’d love the opportunity to build your trust. For current customers, if you haven’t yet had a “Validate the Value” exercise in your environment, connect with your local EMC account team or partner. And stay tuned as a Technical Advisory Board and/or User Group will be coming to a city near you soon.
Successful relationships need to be built on trust. At EMC, we are making the investments into our customers so that they can trust that we will support not only today’s requirements but all their future data protection needs.