Selling a Chief Financial Officer (CFO) on anything that needs to come out of the business budget is very tricky. If you find yourself speaking to a CFO, remember that they are concerned with the cost implications to the business first and foremost. When you’re intent on selling the CFO on business continuity, you talk benefits and what the service can do for the business, but you also talk money.
Talk Business Continuity
Business Continuity is the main purpose of backup services, so don’t beat around the bush and get right down to the heart of the matter. In case the CFO is hard to convince though, there are always ways to preempt common arguments. According to Datto’s most recent assessment, 82.1% of Datto customers utilized a failover virtualization to keep their systems running and the doors of their businesses open. Obviously, investing in business continuity services that can virtualize data, saves the business precious downtime, financial expenses and man-hours. Selling the CFO on business continuity by touting the money-saving capabilities of the business continuity solution can be an accomplished by showing how much money the information you handle actually costs. Help the CFO see business continuity as though the services are protecting company investments instead of just data.
Talk ROI
While the total cost of ownership may concern CFOs when reviewing disaster recovery solutions, the return on investment more than makes up for it. The CFO may ask, what if the disaster recovery feature is never needed? Making an investment based on the perceived hypothetical situation where disaster recovery is necessary is of course a valid concern. A bit of analogy beats this contention.
Think of the fire extinguisher found in every office.A company paid for that fire extinguisher, but it only returns on that investment when a fire breaks out. What if a fire never occurs? Is the fire extinguisher any less valuable to the safety of the business? Just as a company cannot risk the absence of a fire extinguisher, it cannot risk the absence of a disaster recovery solution.
The truth is that the ROI of DR solutions cannot truly be assessed until after a disaster occurs. Selling a CFO on backup solutions is about addressing the fact that the company cannot risk the lack of a disaster recovery solution in place. The level of security that disaster recovery and business continuity solutions provide for a business, far outweigh the costs associated. It is your job as the Trusted adviser to your clients to make this value argument and convince the CFO to see your point of view.