One of my primary purposes each day as a marketer is to find a way to reinforce the value of our services to clients and to show them cost-savings whenever possible.
Most “green” initiatives that you see today don’t have much weight behind them. You have businesses telling their clients they have a recycling bin or use recycled copy paper. Short of being “green” certified, it’s really a hard sell.
The naked truth: your clients don’t care if you implement green practices if it doesn’t save them money and protect their bottom line.
It doesn’t matter whether or not your clients are green-minded, if you can find a way to articulate cost-savings for them through your green practices, you’ll have the one-up you’re looking for.
For example, at Claris Networks, we started a program called ClarisCares, which reduces our clients energy consumption and saves them money at the same time by using virtualization technologies in our data center.
Let’s say we have a business with 17 locations who wants to invest in constructing their own mini-data center onsite at their headquarters.
Here are some initial costs they would consider:
- Purchasing the hardware, software licenses, etc.
- Purchasing a cooling system.
- Purchasing a back-up power system.
- Constructing the facility to house the equipment.
- Hiring employees to manage this equipment.
- Hard-wiring all 17 locations to the equipment.
Initial capital expenditures would be estimated at around $300,000. The sad part? Infrastructure is notoriously under-utilized and is one of the mostdepreciating assets a business can own.
Servers on average only use 20 percent of their capacity at any given time. That’s a 20 percent efficiency rating, which is far worse than the 40 year-old windows we have in our home.
This equipment will also have to be replaced in three to four years as it becomes antiquated in today’s market.
The Cost-Saving Pitch
Talk money first, not the environment.
By virtualizing a clients infrastructure we remove the need to invest in this large capital expenditure, cluster their information in a safe and reliable environment with hundreds of other businesses and use resource distribution technologies to host multiple businesses on the same server.
This technology maximizes the efficiency rating to 100 percent and reduces the overall number of individual servers needed if these clients all owned the same hardware, separately.
The Environmental Pitch
Each server that is virtualized saves an estimated 7,000kWh of electricity and removes more than four tons of carbon dioxide emissions per year from the environment.
The cost-saving, burden-reducing and environmental impacts of virtualized infrastructure solutions are very apparent today.
Virtualized Infrastructure. Protecting your bottom line.
Saving the Environment. Priceless.
This is your message.
About the Author
Brooks A. Brown is the founder and principal of Shout Out LLC, a Knoxville, Tennessee-based marketing, public relations, and communications firm serving clients throughout the nation.
