How to sell NNN servers in the Netherlands and not stay with bare enthusiasm: the secrets of sales
Today I would like to talk with you about sales. Since I have been selling and managing a hosting provider for more than 10 years, I have gained some experience and I would like to share it “without banknotes”.
In the article, I will reveal the secrets of big sales, sellers' goals, and the real benefits that users can get, whether it will be mutually beneficial and consider cases when a client is deceived. That is, the article will not only be advertising, although do not expect that there will be no advertising. I'm still corrupt ...
First of all, let's look at what sales can be done for:
')
As a rule, the sale is characterized by several of the above points.
Consider the goals and causes of sales more deeply.
Server hardware vendors can give a good price for servers when they purchase a large batch right away, purchases can be either with a growth plan (supply of a certain number of servers per month during a certain contract period) or without it. Depending on demand, the number of servers specified in the contract, it may be necessary to sell. Since sometimes it is more profitable to pay at cost or even to a small minus than to purchase a smaller batch and, as a result, have a smaller discount. In addition, a batch of servers - this is not all. The final price of the service and the need for sales is determined by the free areas of the data center and channels, operators of which are also happy to always offer a greater discount with a greater amount of connectivity.
The trouble is that there is not always money to buy many servers at once, and sometimes even a growth plan does not allow you to pull the purchase financially. In 2011, I found a way out, while all the data centers in Ukraine were selling platforms from E3-1230 at fairly expensive prices, I decided to sell them to people 1.5 times cheaper. Only due to the fact that in the first year I decided not to make money on the rental platform at all, to make a margin from the lease equal to 0. I offered customers a low price, but only when paid for a year. For subscribers with a monthly contract there was no big discount and I tried not to deal with them at all. As a result, already in a year I filled almost 2 racks with my own equipment in the Utel data center, you can read the details in my article: “ua-hosting.company” or how to become a hosting provider from scratch and generate more traffic than all of Belarus , in the section "Moving to the data center" Ukrtelecom "or how to buy servers for half a million."
What product will be popular is determined by the Product Manager, it is all responsibility for product development and planning its demand, both during the short and long term. Alas, not all product managers can fully take into account the dynamics of IT development and the fact that even in the case of bare metal (“bare” servers) you need to come up with some special balanced solutions that satisfy the needs of most subscribers, reduce the degree of product fragmentation and a consequence, allowing to provide the best price by reducing depreciation costs and increasing the volume of a particular position
Since we are not a data center and do not yet have a huge stock of outdated equipment, we decided to abandon the outdated leased servers in the data center and provide our subscribers with the latest Dell R730xd, which satisfied the needs of almost all customers. We have reduced our depreciation costs, increased reliability and provided space savings in cabinets and electricity. That is why, very often in our topics, you can find advertising:
Dell R730xd 2 times cheaper? Only we have 2 x Intel Dodeca-Core Xeon E5-2650v4 128GB DDR4 6x480GB SSD 1Gbps 100 TV from $ 249 in the Netherlands and the USA! Read about How to build an infrastructure building. class c using servers Dell R730xd E5-2650 v4 worth 9000 euros for a penny?
And we also completely left the dedicated entry-level servers, replacing them with virtual servers with dedicated drives and offering a very successful sale at the moment with a 30% discount for Habr users to the unique analogue of the entry-level servers that we invented for you: All the truth About VPS (KVM) E5-2650 v4 (6 Cores) 10GB DDR4 240GB SSD 1Gbps from $ 20 or how to share the server correctly? (Options are available with RAID1 and RAID10, up to 24 cores and up to 40GB DDR4).
Of course, this all attracts new customers, since our competitors do not offer anything like this in the same price range. But current customers are happy to develop with us and order additional services. In this case, we use long-term planning and have recently improved our product with the NVMe-solution, which allows us to increase resources in a fairly wide range, there will be a separate article about it in the future.
Thanks to innovations and sales of the right solutions, we managed to provide growth for 300 expensive servers in just over a year, but it is very important not to remain with bare enthusiasm, as equipment worth over 2 million euros will inevitably become obsolete, and we will, nevertheless, after some time we will increase the rental price for new subscribers, we already give out Dell R730xd servers at a price of $ 249 / month only if paid for a year, and there can be no exceptions. Competitors often sell them 2 times more expensive.
And we don’t really like to sell many servers in one hand without a contract, and even more so give discounts, on the contrary, when an order comes for a large number of servers - we say that the price will inevitably be higher if without a contract, because customer care, we will immediately get a huge simple that will be recycled for a long time and which will cost more than the client will bring us for the year of working with us.
That is why in each case it is important to correctly define the border to which you are ready to give the servers without a contract to the client, otherwise you can not just remain with bare enthusiasm, but get a serious loss, threatening, including bankruptcy. And then no sale will save.
Although there are a number of companies, especially the famous French, which keeps afloat due to tricks and this is what allows it to do sales, dumping competitors. According to rumors, it is subsidized by the state. And also hides some of those. the peculiarities of their servers, which reduce the performance and parameters of these servers to nothing, thereby reducing the cost of their services. So, only the absence of a hardware controller, in a seemingly powerful configuration, can reduce the solution's performance by more than an order of magnitude, if of course operations with the storage are important to you. Therefore, it is very important to pay attention to the offers that are being made to you and feel free to ask if there is a hardware controller in it or not. And what about the battery or capacitor ... Analyze on the subject of bottlenecks, so that these performance figures can be achieved in practice, which is very important for large projects with a large number of nodes. And still new processors can still be much more efficient than old ones.
Not so long ago, we were approached by a client who rented an outdated processor in a similar data center and thus calculated its performance for rendering:
What is wrong with his calculations? If you compare different processors, you can not divide the price by the number of threads, because it will be DIFFERENT in efficiency flows.
I answered him the following:
Here is the marketing of cheap configurations and servers in action. Of course, the price of iron also depends on the channels. And we have the same E5620 is more expensive, including at the expense of high-end data center and support. It is precisely because it is unprofitable to keep 9-year-old servers, and it is easier to throw them away (to sell to a lower class data center, where the cost of accommodation is not so much expensive, and sometimes distribute everything for free) than to place. Nevertheless, we have left a few E5620, another platform from IBM, for customers who do not care about the processor, but for whom traffic is important, because, nevertheless, this server is 110 dollars cheaper ... And sometimes it solves. Therefore, even outdated platforms can be useful, only the number of incidents with them is much higher than with new servers. And this must be taken into account.
Sometimes it happens that a large stock is released in data centers immediately. For example, because of the departure of some unscrupulous major customer who went bankrupt, he just quietly moved out because of imaginary savings, or some other reason, for example, the course for mining became unprofitable, etc. In this case, there are 2 scenarios - to incur losses and sell off large runoff for many months, receiving a full margin from each client and airing the air with free servers (or, at most, disconnect them from power, temporarily remove them from the racks, thereby removing the need for construction of new racks, which will not help much, since there are also plans for growth and you need a place in the warehouse and a lot of engineering workforce, yes, the server also costs money!), or sell minus, provide advertising and attract new users the cat Previously, we could not afford a data center of practically the highest level (Tier III + in this case, level IV is not available only because in the Netherlands there is only 1 electricity supplier, if there were two, you could get level IV certification without problems ) with Platinum SLA. Description of the data center you can find here .
This time, about 200 servers were released in the data center, not as many as when 600+ servers of the Megaupload file sharing service were arrested by FBI and when they could not be used for another half a year, as a result, but a rather large number which needs to be sold, especially since these are Dell R630 platforms, the newest, with new processors. Ideal even for miners (although I am not a fan of mining, and even an opponent, since resources are wasted to generate nothing, but it is). Since energy efficient and economical, 8 drives, 2.5 "form factor maximum. No frills.
Therefore, in spite of the availability of Dell R730xd 2 x Intel Dodeca-Core Xeon E5-2650 v4, which is much more high-end servers, we decided to offer 2 options, because the price will surprise you even more - $ 100 cheaper for in relation to the offer with an annual payment and for 200 dollars, almost 2 times, comparing with E5-2650v4 without a contract! In this case, you can pay monthly, only $ 149 / month and order both configuration options in the Netherlands here :
2 x Intel Deca-Core Xeon E5-2630 v4 / 128GB DDR4 RAM / 4x1TB HDD / 1 Gbps 10TB (+ $ 15 / extra 10TB) - $ 149 / month
or
2 x Intel Deca-Core Xeon E5-2630 v4 / 128GB DDR4 RAM / 2x240GB SSD / 1 Gbps 10TB (+ $ 15 / extra 10TB) - $ 149 / month
Yes, the offer does not contain 100 TB of traffic, as our standard offers with Dell R730xd and E5-2650 v4, but according to statistics, most of our customers and 5 TB on these servers do not use ... Nevertheless, if someone has little traffic, we are ready sell an additional $ 15 for every 10 TB.
But this is not all, you can get 3 months for free by ordering and paying for the server for a period of six months. To receive the bonus, contact the sales department after providing the service.
If the server needs to be upgraded, you will have to pay for the upgrade ($ 75 one-time, regardless of the number of servers + monthly upgrade fee) and the bonus period will be lost. Because it is better to order an additional server, if such a need arises. And cheaper, most likely, will be our standard offer with E5-2650 v4, which initially contains more drives and more traffic. However, this offer is very cost-effective if you need a lot of CPU and RAM.
Yes, and get 9 months for the price of six, it will be very profitable for you (894/9 = 99,333), the server cost will be less than $ 100 a month!
Fruitful work and thank you for your attention!
In the article, I will reveal the secrets of big sales, sellers' goals, and the real benefits that users can get, whether it will be mutually beneficial and consider cases when a client is deceived. That is, the article will not only be advertising, although do not expect that there will be no advertising. I'm still corrupt ...
Our sale of servers in the Netherlands: 2 x Intel Deca-Core Xeon E5-2630 v4 / 128GB DDR4 / 4x1TB HDD or 2x240GB SSD / 1 Gbps - $ 149 + 3 months for free if paid for from 6 months. You can order servers here .
First of all, let's look at what sales can be done for:
')
- to increase turnover;
- in order to correct the error of the product manager (Product Manager) who did not ensure proper planning of the flow and as a result there was an excess of certain positions;
- to attract new customers;
- in order to bind existing subscribers to itself even more, having interested them with additional products;
- for dumping competitors;
- to reduce losses as a result of leaving large customers.
As a rule, the sale is characterized by several of the above points.
Consider the goals and causes of sales more deeply.
Server hardware vendors can give a good price for servers when they purchase a large batch right away, purchases can be either with a growth plan (supply of a certain number of servers per month during a certain contract period) or without it. Depending on demand, the number of servers specified in the contract, it may be necessary to sell. Since sometimes it is more profitable to pay at cost or even to a small minus than to purchase a smaller batch and, as a result, have a smaller discount. In addition, a batch of servers - this is not all. The final price of the service and the need for sales is determined by the free areas of the data center and channels, operators of which are also happy to always offer a greater discount with a greater amount of connectivity.
The trouble is that there is not always money to buy many servers at once, and sometimes even a growth plan does not allow you to pull the purchase financially. In 2011, I found a way out, while all the data centers in Ukraine were selling platforms from E3-1230 at fairly expensive prices, I decided to sell them to people 1.5 times cheaper. Only due to the fact that in the first year I decided not to make money on the rental platform at all, to make a margin from the lease equal to 0. I offered customers a low price, but only when paid for a year. For subscribers with a monthly contract there was no big discount and I tried not to deal with them at all. As a result, already in a year I filled almost 2 racks with my own equipment in the Utel data center, you can read the details in my article: “ua-hosting.company” or how to become a hosting provider from scratch and generate more traffic than all of Belarus , in the section "Moving to the data center" Ukrtelecom "or how to buy servers for half a million."
What product will be popular is determined by the Product Manager, it is all responsibility for product development and planning its demand, both during the short and long term. Alas, not all product managers can fully take into account the dynamics of IT development and the fact that even in the case of bare metal (“bare” servers) you need to come up with some special balanced solutions that satisfy the needs of most subscribers, reduce the degree of product fragmentation and a consequence, allowing to provide the best price by reducing depreciation costs and increasing the volume of a particular position
Since we are not a data center and do not yet have a huge stock of outdated equipment, we decided to abandon the outdated leased servers in the data center and provide our subscribers with the latest Dell R730xd, which satisfied the needs of almost all customers. We have reduced our depreciation costs, increased reliability and provided space savings in cabinets and electricity. That is why, very often in our topics, you can find advertising:
Dell R730xd 2 times cheaper? Only we have 2 x Intel Dodeca-Core Xeon E5-2650v4 128GB DDR4 6x480GB SSD 1Gbps 100 TV from $ 249 in the Netherlands and the USA! Read about How to build an infrastructure building. class c using servers Dell R730xd E5-2650 v4 worth 9000 euros for a penny?
And we also completely left the dedicated entry-level servers, replacing them with virtual servers with dedicated drives and offering a very successful sale at the moment with a 30% discount for Habr users to the unique analogue of the entry-level servers that we invented for you: All the truth About VPS (KVM) E5-2650 v4 (6 Cores) 10GB DDR4 240GB SSD 1Gbps from $ 20 or how to share the server correctly? (Options are available with RAID1 and RAID10, up to 24 cores and up to 40GB DDR4).
Of course, this all attracts new customers, since our competitors do not offer anything like this in the same price range. But current customers are happy to develop with us and order additional services. In this case, we use long-term planning and have recently improved our product with the NVMe-solution, which allows us to increase resources in a fairly wide range, there will be a separate article about it in the future.
Thanks to innovations and sales of the right solutions, we managed to provide growth for 300 expensive servers in just over a year, but it is very important not to remain with bare enthusiasm, as equipment worth over 2 million euros will inevitably become obsolete, and we will, nevertheless, after some time we will increase the rental price for new subscribers, we already give out Dell R730xd servers at a price of $ 249 / month only if paid for a year, and there can be no exceptions. Competitors often sell them 2 times more expensive.
And we don’t really like to sell many servers in one hand without a contract, and even more so give discounts, on the contrary, when an order comes for a large number of servers - we say that the price will inevitably be higher if without a contract, because customer care, we will immediately get a huge simple that will be recycled for a long time and which will cost more than the client will bring us for the year of working with us.
That is why in each case it is important to correctly define the border to which you are ready to give the servers without a contract to the client, otherwise you can not just remain with bare enthusiasm, but get a serious loss, threatening, including bankruptcy. And then no sale will save.
Although there are a number of companies, especially the famous French, which keeps afloat due to tricks and this is what allows it to do sales, dumping competitors. According to rumors, it is subsidized by the state. And also hides some of those. the peculiarities of their servers, which reduce the performance and parameters of these servers to nothing, thereby reducing the cost of their services. So, only the absence of a hardware controller, in a seemingly powerful configuration, can reduce the solution's performance by more than an order of magnitude, if of course operations with the storage are important to you. Therefore, it is very important to pay attention to the offers that are being made to you and feel free to ask if there is a hardware controller in it or not. And what about the battery or capacitor ... Analyze on the subject of bottlenecks, so that these performance figures can be achieved in practice, which is very important for large projects with a large number of nodes. And still new processors can still be much more efficient than old ones.
Not so long ago, we were approached by a client who rented an outdated processor in a similar data center and thus calculated its performance for rendering:
1. CPU Model: 2x Intel Xeon E5620 2.40GHz
2. GHz Min - GHz Max: 2.40 GHz / 2.66 GHz
3. Cores - Threads: 8/16
4. Price / number of flows: 2.62
5. Price per month: 42 EUR
What is wrong with his calculations? If you compare different processors, you can not divide the price by the number of threads, because it will be DIFFERENT in efficiency flows.
I answered him the following:
Different CPUs have support for different instructions and not only the number of cores and threads is important. Therefore, the price should be calculated not on the flow, but not on the processing speed of your operation, which will depend very much on the CPU and on how effectively floating point (comma) operations are processed.
For example, the conversion efficiency of the outdated 2xIntel Xeon E5620 2.40GHz, which was released 9 years ago, is 8 times worse than on a new and modern 2 x Intel Dodeca-Core Xeon E5-2650 v4, that is, if you count according to your scheme:
1. CPU Model: 2 x Intel Dodeca-Core Xeon E5-2650 v4 2,20 GHz
2. GHz Min - GHz Max: 2.20 GHz / 2.90 GHz
3. Cores - Threads: 24/48
4. Price / number of flows: 211/48 = 4,396 EURO
5. Price per month: 249 USD / 211 EURO
However, if you add an efficiency factor that you have forgotten about, the results will be different.
For example, this is the result of ONE E5-2650 v4 processor (not two, but one), and this is the result of two outdated E5620 processors .
We are interested in Floating Point for your case:
Floating Point Score 10451 - for two processors E5620.
Floating Point Score 38103 - for ONE processor E5-2650 v4, we have two of them, because the difference in performance will reach 8 times.
And this is even without taking into account all the additional instructions that are important for the conversion and rendering in particular.
That is, adding a coefficient, we find that for E5-2650 v4, you need to divide the price by 8, if you compare it with the old E5620, where you were led by the price, and not by the corresponding price / performance for the task.
And we get that:
1. CPU Model: 2 x Intel Dodeca-Core Xeon E5-2650 v4 2,20 GHz
2. GHz Min - GHz Max: 2.20 GHz / 2.90 GHz
3. Cores - Threads: 24/48
4. Price / number of flows: 211/48 = 4,396 EURO / 8 = 0.549 EURO
5. Price per month: 249 USD / 211 EURO divided by 8 and we get 31.12 USD / 26.37 EURO
0.549 EURO per stream is in comparison, against the outdated E5620, where the price was 2.62 EURO. That is, the configuration offered by us for 249 dollars is almost 5 times cheaper than the server for 42 euros!
You will need fewer servers in our configuration to provide the performance you need.
Here is the marketing of cheap configurations and servers in action. Of course, the price of iron also depends on the channels. And we have the same E5620 is more expensive, including at the expense of high-end data center and support. It is precisely because it is unprofitable to keep 9-year-old servers, and it is easier to throw them away (to sell to a lower class data center, where the cost of accommodation is not so much expensive, and sometimes distribute everything for free) than to place. Nevertheless, we have left a few E5620, another platform from IBM, for customers who do not care about the processor, but for whom traffic is important, because, nevertheless, this server is 110 dollars cheaper ... And sometimes it solves. Therefore, even outdated platforms can be useful, only the number of incidents with them is much higher than with new servers. And this must be taken into account.
Sometimes it happens that a large stock is released in data centers immediately. For example, because of the departure of some unscrupulous major customer who went bankrupt, he just quietly moved out because of imaginary savings, or some other reason, for example, the course for mining became unprofitable, etc. In this case, there are 2 scenarios - to incur losses and sell off large runoff for many months, receiving a full margin from each client and airing the air with free servers (or, at most, disconnect them from power, temporarily remove them from the racks, thereby removing the need for construction of new racks, which will not help much, since there are also plans for growth and you need a place in the warehouse and a lot of engineering workforce, yes, the server also costs money!), or sell minus, provide advertising and attract new users the cat Previously, we could not afford a data center of practically the highest level (Tier III + in this case, level IV is not available only because in the Netherlands there is only 1 electricity supplier, if there were two, you could get level IV certification without problems ) with Platinum SLA. Description of the data center you can find here .
This time, about 200 servers were released in the data center, not as many as when 600+ servers of the Megaupload file sharing service were arrested by FBI and when they could not be used for another half a year, as a result, but a rather large number which needs to be sold, especially since these are Dell R630 platforms, the newest, with new processors. Ideal even for miners (although I am not a fan of mining, and even an opponent, since resources are wasted to generate nothing, but it is). Since energy efficient and economical, 8 drives, 2.5 "form factor maximum. No frills.
Therefore, in spite of the availability of Dell R730xd 2 x Intel Dodeca-Core Xeon E5-2650 v4, which is much more high-end servers, we decided to offer 2 options, because the price will surprise you even more - $ 100 cheaper for in relation to the offer with an annual payment and for 200 dollars, almost 2 times, comparing with E5-2650v4 without a contract! In this case, you can pay monthly, only $ 149 / month and order both configuration options in the Netherlands here :
2 x Intel Deca-Core Xeon E5-2630 v4 / 128GB DDR4 RAM / 4x1TB HDD / 1 Gbps 10TB (+ $ 15 / extra 10TB) - $ 149 / month
or
2 x Intel Deca-Core Xeon E5-2630 v4 / 128GB DDR4 RAM / 2x240GB SSD / 1 Gbps 10TB (+ $ 15 / extra 10TB) - $ 149 / month
Yes, the offer does not contain 100 TB of traffic, as our standard offers with Dell R730xd and E5-2650 v4, but according to statistics, most of our customers and 5 TB on these servers do not use ... Nevertheless, if someone has little traffic, we are ready sell an additional $ 15 for every 10 TB.
But this is not all, you can get 3 months for free by ordering and paying for the server for a period of six months. To receive the bonus, contact the sales department after providing the service.
If the server needs to be upgraded, you will have to pay for the upgrade ($ 75 one-time, regardless of the number of servers + monthly upgrade fee) and the bonus period will be lost. Because it is better to order an additional server, if such a need arises. And cheaper, most likely, will be our standard offer with E5-2650 v4, which initially contains more drives and more traffic. However, this offer is very cost-effective if you need a lot of CPU and RAM.
Yes, and get 9 months for the price of six, it will be very profitable for you (894/9 = 99,333), the server cost will be less than $ 100 a month!
Fruitful work and thank you for your attention!
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/419777/
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