First, you need to define what cloud is. The typical approach, is to define your company's cloud product. I'll tell you, if you're doing this you're doing it wrong. You need to let the customer define what cloud means to them and here's why; Cloud enables companies to change their perspective about their own infrastructure and what it does for their organization. How on earth would you know anything about their infrastructure especially if its your first or second discussion. God gave you two EARS and one MOUTH so go with that ratio and let them define their view. I guarantee this information will lead you down a compelling conversation.
Second, go in your discussions with an open mind knowing that what your customers are asking for is a solution to a problem, not how neat your portal is. An example comes to mind where I engaged a prospective customer about cloud. They said they used AWS and that they loved the ability to go in when ever they wanted to create, test and tear down a virtual machine. There were API's pre written, the price was cheap blah blah blah. Well, little did they know, their CIO and CFO were seeing noticeable increases in costs and the CIO was having a hard time getting support. So guess what I did? I took the make yourself equal, THEN differentiate tactic. I talked about 'similar functionality' minus the pre-loaded API's and found out that what really caused them concern was cost containment and management, but MORE IMPORTANT was having someone to call when they needed support. I'm not giving you a ton of detail so you're probably thinking getting this information was easy, but I can tell you it wasn't. For an IT Sales guy to get in front of a CIO is difficult, but a CFO is near impossible. The net of this story is I won a substantial deal that cleared my quota for the year, but more importantly, it was digging into the real problem and differentiated my offering ONLY because I was selling differently than my competitors.
There are actually quite a few things to discuss on this topic, but for sake of simplicity and your short attention span, the last thing I'll address is maybe a little more holistic. In my opinion, enterprises and businesses are realigning priorities. If they make hamburgers, they want to focus on making hamburgers- NOT managing the intricacies of IT. What they want is a right sourcing approach to their problems. Right sourcing is essentially finding the right solutions, whether it be cloud, private cloud, colocation or a blend of all three to address a business need. By right sourcing, companies become more agile in an ever changing landscape and they acquire flexibility that keeps them focused on their core competency.