Google’s B2B Incentive: Will Companies Bite?
October 20, 2015
By David Engel, Senior Associate, Research & Consulting
I love using Google Docs and Sheets. The ability to easily share a Sheet with friends for planning a bachelor party to New Orleans made preparation much smoother than anticipated. Friends flying in from New York, North Carolina, Seattle, Los Angeles, and Boston uploaded their flight info to track who to share cabs with to and from the airport. Voting on bars, restaurants, and other activities was a cinch.
Google Apps for Business, which includes Calendar, Gmail, Hangouts, Drive, Sheets, Forms, Slides, Docs, Sites (a website builder), and administration tools, has been available for some time and is used by many Fortune 500 companies. Back in 2014, Google offered a referral program which gave current users a $15 reward for each new Google Apps user. Recently though, the juggernaut has taken a page out of T-Mobile’s book when, earlier this year, T-Mobile announced that they would cover a customer’s early termination fees to make switching to T-Mobile easier. Now, Google is offering prospects a similar deal for switching to Google Apps for Business: “If you're worried about switching to Docs because you still have an enterprise agreement (EA) with another provider, we'll cover the fees of Google Apps until your contract runs out,” Google's Rich Rao announced in a blog post.
That’s another impressive swing at Microsoft Office, but it’s not the only one! Google has taken it a step further by offering resellers a reward of $25 per user to cover the costs of training the new customers. Since many companies rely on their trusted resellers, it’s definitely a smart move and creates a great initial customer experience.
