Resellers are currently exploring marketing-lead growth strategies as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.
According to Exertis Head of Cloud Marketing, Helen Workman, resellers are moving away from a growth strategy that is built on sales and placing more emphasis on the marketing of the company following the spring lockdown that reduced sales opportunities.
Speaking to UC Today after the launch of Exertis Cloud, which includes a marketing platform and support for its customers, Workman said “our entire proposition is essentially split by three different pillars; confidence, simplicity and support. Coming from a reseller background, the main obstacle they face when it comes to selling Cloud is understanding. We’re going to make it easier from a reseller perspective and an end user perspective to help them navigate those conversations about why an end user should consider migrating over to cloud.
We build the marketing plan, we execute it for them, report on it and pay for all of it as well, so it comes with zero charge to the customer. Alongside that, we’re building a demand generation programme for resellers and, since launch. that’s been a real attraction for a lot of resellers because digital marketing is such a niche topic and it’s a heavy investment area when it comes to growing your business.
I think a lot of organisations are starting to move away from a sales-lead model and a lot are now starting to become more marketing focused, especially as we found ourselves working from home, so that’s why it was important to us that we built out an actual marketing service to help them grow their business.”
Exertis Cloud customers receive a dedicated cloud success manager to help build their cloud proposition as well as the marketing-as-a-service piece that offers the digital marketing service free of charge.
The distributors cloud proposition will revolve around Microsoft 365 and Azure initially, with added integrations from Exertis’ security partners including Kaspersky, Sonic Wall, Storage Craft and Carbonite. Rik Hubbard, Exertis Cloud Services Director, said that the distributor is hoping that the Cloud integration will kick off a Device-as-a-Service proposition too.
“We are bringing a partner-centric focused proposition, with Microsoft as the cornerstone” said Hubbard.
“That proposition will fall into two main camps, the first being workplace enablement, a mixture of Microsoft’s 365 licenses which enables people to be more effective, both in an office environment but also working remotely”
“As part of that proposition, we will be also joining the dots between what we do on hardware, bundling Microsoft licensing around it. We’re a very large distributor of desktops and laptops, so it feels like it’s a very good opportunity to bring together the hardware with the cloud licensing and then a service wrap to start to bring in a device as a service preposition into the marketplace.
That’s very much focused on the end user side of things from a small medium business and upwards. The other part of what we’ll be doing is using our inherent expertise around enterprise and the acquisition of Hammer a few years ago to provide Microsoft Azure solutions. That will be an Infrastructure as a Service proposition, architecting and supporting our partners to be able to support their customers to move up either storage or business operations into cloud infrastructure.”
