Everyone is selling migration to the cloud as the next big thing. However, be sure to avoid the “trip to grandma’s house” effect.

Expectations and reality must be consistent, and you must calibrate customer expectations appropriately. Cloud solutions will enable the infrastructure for positive business operation change, but cloud in and of itself will not achieve the desired results.

Your customers must also adopt complementary policy, systems and people modifications to optimize cloud solutions. If they do not, they may scapegoat the IT solution.

So take every effort to avoid the “return trip effect” when selling your solutions. Elizabeth Weise in USA Today recently noted:

“Scientists have confirmed something every traveler knows: The trip back from someplace always seems shorter than the trip to get there.

They’ve dubbed it "the return trip effect" and found that it made trips home seem 17% to 22% shorter than initial trips.

Their research found that the effect was caused not by increasing familiarity with the route but because people expected the initial trip to be faster than it was, making the trip back seem shorter…

That appears to skew people’s sense of what to expect on the way back "so they are happily surprised it doesn’t take as long as they expected," says Anne Wilson, a researcher who studies the psychology of time at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario, Canada.”

Cloud proposals

The takeaways as it relates to proposing your cloud solutions include:

• detail an implementation plan, with milestones and metrics.
• Define clearly your responsibilities, and those of your customer.
• Be conservative, so that expectations and reality align.

As your buyer, I would much rather be pleasantly surprised than have to constantly ask you “are we there yet?”