Now we know that the communication sector hosting solutions are predominantly focused on delivering hosted services into SMB as there is a huge market opportunity here.

We have seen that a lot of hosters are moving up the value chain and trying to upsell customers new services. For example, hosters upselling web hosting customers to a dedicated server or even better with a hosted Exchange mailbox or other service.

I treat these upsell scenarios quite differently. Moving a customer from a shared web hosting to dedicated web server hosting is really just expanding the current solution for the customer and ensuring they are receiving the right level of service.

However when upselling a new services as Exchange into a web hosting customer, you have made (in my mind) a bigger step with that customer.

  1. You have convinced the customers business that you can deliver a service they are not currently receiving.
  2. You have convinced the customers business that there is a need for them to have this service in their business.
  3. You have convinced the customer that their business will benefit/reduce pain by taking a hosting service versus an on premise solution for a different aspect of the IT estate.

(Obviously not all the hurdles that need to be crossed and not all the compelling reasons for taking hosting services)

As you can see though this is usually a more complex sale then just upgrading a service for the customer. Therefore the sales engagement needs to be more involved.

This does not mean that you have to have a large sales force and spend large amounts of resources on acquiring the customer, as this is still very much a web driven business model with SMB, but you definitely need to really understand the customers you are targeting and drive messages that resonate with them appropriately.

If you have a large current customer base and are looking at attempting to upsell SaaS services into that base, please get in touch!