We've written about the devastating effects of IT outages on your support staff, and it's not any better for your sales team.
When research firms report on the costs of downtime, such as the Ponemon Institute's data visualized below, one of the major contributing factors is the opportunity cost of lost sales.
What is opportunity cost? It's the potential business loss incurred when an alternative action is taken. In this case, the "action" is downtime and the loss comes from sales your team couldn't make during the outage. It also includes future lost revenue from customers' or prospective clients' lost trust derived from them experiencing or reading about the downtime.
In a nutshell, service interruptions are costly. So protect your customers and prospects — whether they're small business or enterprise — from downtime at all costs (pun intended). As it is in healthcare, where you often hear that "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure," the health of your infrastructure and software is worth maintaining and will save your organization thousands or millions of dollars in opportunity cost.
Let's look at downtime and how it affects each stage of a typical sales pipeline.
Inbound Marketing
Prospects, or potential customers, typically enter the sales pipeline from the marketing funnel. Inbound marketing is where marketers use SEO, landing pages, pay-per-click ads, etc. to draw in customers to your website or application. When a site goes down, or an app becomes unresponsive or inaccessible, the effect of downtime is clear: Prospects don't enter the funnel in the first place because they can't.
Leads
If a prospective buyer becomes a lead, or an interested party to your business, it's the salesperson's job to engage with them and qualify them as a good fit for your product. Trust is already really low in this stage, with many leads still skeptical or unsure of your services and brand. When they are invited to trial or demo your product, and they experience or witness service interruptions, it may be impossible to regain their trust and bring them back. In effect, they get stuck in the pipeline, never advancing to a qualified lead.
Customers
You may not typically think of existing customers as sales prospects, but customers can be a significant chunk of your revenue stream if (1) you require monthly or annual subscriptions or contracts, or (2) you have more than one paid product or service to offer.
When a client is already a customer, and they experience outages with your infrastructure, it chips away at their loyalty. Every customer has a breaking point. When a customer has "had enough" and decides to jump ship, they almost always never come back. The further down the pipeline they are, the less likely they are to forgive a company or its brand for downtime.
How to Prevent Downtime Costs from Affecting Sales
We've talked a lot about the problem in this post. But it's not all doom and gloom. You can mitigate downtime with cloud server monitoring.
Process-wise, be sure to communicate to your sales team immediately. As we mentioned in Downtime is Killing Trust in Your Support Staff, developers and operations personnel aren't the only key employees in outage events. Because of the nature of tech support channels and the corresponding sales channels, customers may reach out to a salesperson before a support member because they feel like they'll get an answer sooner.
