Selling backup to a possible customer can be tricky. Yes, the base is to sell firstly, the backup software and secondly, storage in the cloud, but what are the key points that the customer needs to be aware of? What can turn the tables for you, if the customer feels that backup is just an additional expense and the sales guy only tries to sell them up? Let us go through all the main points to get you covered on your sales journey.
Should I just scare them?
The first and foremost argument for having a backup is the ability to restore in ANY disastrous situation. However, customers tend to feel safe in their cozy environment: “I’m just a tiny accountant office with a single physical server? Who would attack me?” “We are using a highly redundant system (like Azure). There is no such thing as an outage. What could possibly go wrong?”
This is a false sense of security. According to the 2025 ransomware survey conducted by Veeam, almost 70% of the interviewed 1300 companies were targets of ransomware attacks. Regardless of size or hosting platform.
99% of ransomware enters a network through emails. An unsuspecting colleague clicks on a link and ransomware runs through the network like wildfire. High redundancy does not protect against losing data above the OS level on a server. Nor does the fact that a smaller company is less likely to be targeted – everyone is targeted. The main difference might only be in the amount of the ransom asked for decryption.
Some customers would argue that such an event is rare – and if push comes to shove, they’d just pay the ransom and get their systems unlocked. However, this is not so simple. According to Veeam, once the ransom is paid, only around half of the affected companies were able to successfully decrypt their data. Sometimes, after the ransom was paid, the hacker group simply disappeared, at other times, the decrypting software did not work.
Time is also an important factor. While your restore could already be running, you’d be waiting for the response of a cyber criminal group. First to get to know what / how much they want, then to get the decryptor. The negotiation phase can take up to a week – and the decryption can be even slower. Not to mention: do you really want to negotiate with criminals?
So yes, in today’s world, if somebody is not cautious and worried about cyber threats, that somebody is not paying attention.
Practical considerations
What if not the worst of all comes? No flood, no fire, no ransomware. Simply the newest intern of the team deleted that one file that three other colleagues have been working on for the last month. Maybe you have some versions of it somewhere – but a lot of work is definitely lost. Would it not be simpler to be able to just open last night’s backup and pop that file right back into the folder where it should be?
What if a mailbox have been deleted from your M365 subscription? Or one single virtual machine from Azure? Many don’t know, that
Microsoft is responsible only for the redundancy of their systems, NOT the data on those systems.
This means, they promise you that you can virtually always access their platforms and services – however, the data on their platform is your responsibility. Whether it’s Azure or M365, if data is lost from your subscription, Microsoft will simply spread their arms.
Pre-sales
What if your sales team does not include a technically well-versed colleague who could do the pre-sales stage for you? We also got you covered!
Here are the main points that is worth considering when selling Veeam.
Which product to sell? Veeam Backup & Replication (new name: Veeam Data Platform) is the base software. In enterprise environments which make use of virtualized infrastructures together with client machines and physical servers, you’ll choose this product. However, if a client is tiny with only a single physical server on site, you’ll offer Veeam Backup Agent.
OS version: Veeam does support a wide variety of OS versions both Linux and Windows, however not everything. For instance, a stand-alone physical server cannot be older than Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1. In general, if a prospective client is not willing to put energy and money into updating their infrastructure, it is more sensible to move on. You might make a sale for a couple of Euros just to give over the customer to your tech team who will spend days or even weeks on setting up the backup for the customer and maintaining it. At the end, it might not be a healthy price/value ratio.
Network speed: naturally, Veeam cloud backups work best on high speed Internet subscriptions. What if the customer is a smaller company with not so much speed? Veeam has an Enterprise feature called WAN acceleration to be used on networks slower than 100 Mbit/sec. This means, you’ll need to get to know the network speed during the pre-sales phase and then sell the Enterprise license for the customer (as opposed to the Standard one). However, keep in mind that WAN acceleration is not sorcery. If the network speed is below 10 Mbit/sec while the backed up data amount is Terrabytes, it means that the cloud backup will never ever finish on a daily basis. The customer will end up paying for cloud backup which they never will be able to use – and at the end of the day, during a disaster recovery situation, your company will be blamed, even if you did everything right. Best to be upfront about needing to go for a network upgrade at the same time of selling Veeam, as an investment into their security.
Backup data amount and local storage device: the backed up data does need to go somewhere locally too. Of course, you can live with cloud only backups, but most customers would want a copy of their data close by. This makes sense, because restore times from a local storage is much shorter than from the cloud. Therefore, during pre-sales, you do need to know whether they already have a device to store data on. If not, or if the data amount they want to back up is greater than the storage device they already have, it gives you the opportunity to sell for example a NAS device for the customer or a bigger HDD in their physical server.
Windows licenses: for Hyper-V, it is free to have two virtual Windows machines running. If the prospective client is a tiny company using Hyper-V and they already used their two free machine licenses, it’s important to keep in mind that they’ll need to pay for an additional virtual machine. Veeam does not support installing Veeam Backup & Replication on the physical host. The support normally does help, if there is an issue with such an installation, but they only do help on a best effort basis (they are not obliged to).
In conclusion, it is always better to first sniff around a bit, get to know the current possibilities of your prospective customers before selling them anything. Once you know all the hidden traps, you can offer them a comprehensive solution that covers all their needs based on their actual situation. Generally, customers don’t take it well, if buying a software of any kind involves some hidden costs (like a network upgrade).
Added value
Veeam does offer great value for their price. Their universal license covers everything from physical infrastructure on-premises, through several virtualization methods (Hyper-V, VMware, Nutanix, Proxmox, etc.) to anything in public clouds like M365, Azure, Amazon, etc.
You buy Veeam from us as a reseller on a pay-as-you-go basis. No hidden costs. Just what your customer actually uses.
We offer a comprehensive wiki and a great deal of experience from our side to guide you through installing, configuring and maintaining your Veeam product as well as helping you in urgent, high severity cases. And when our knowledge runs out, Veeam support takes over. They are an exceptional team (based in Romania and Armenia) with decades of experience.
In the past few years, we’ve been in a situation when we needed to go for a restore from our Veeam backups – the worst nightmare of any cloud provider due to a faulty storage device – and it worked without a hitch. Next time, when a customer needed help in a serious situation, we KNEW from experience that it is only a matter of time to get their data back from the backups. Veeam is a complex set of software with a myriad of options. However, when configured correctly – as their motto states – IT JUST WORKS!
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