The new portal has prebuilt campaigns for email and social, and around business continuity and cloud migration, which can be customized into the partner’s brand and colours.
Angus Robertson, Axcient’s chief revenue officer
LAS VEGAS – Backup and cloud migration provider Axcient has formally launched their Axcient Marketing Portal. The new enablement tool is designed to let MSPs easily build out comprehensive marketing programs. In this respect, it’s a part of Axcient’s ongoing efforts to scale up the amount of automation they make able to their partners. The announcement was made at the CompTIA ChannelCon event here, where Axcient has a booth and presented a session on Tuesday.
These automation initiatives began with Axcient’s Business Availability portal, which they launched last year, and to which they add more capabilities every quarter. The Axcient Marketing Portal being formally announced now was actually made available to partners in June.
“It was a quiet launch,” said Angus Robertson, Axcient’s chief revenue officer. “We wanted to make sure it all worked properly before talking about it. We have more than 3000 partners, and we launched it to all of them. There could have been a problem if they couldn’t all log in, or had access to other partners’ information, or if it wasn’t all integrated properly.”
The software for this portal came from Partner Relationship Management vendor MindMatrix. It replaces a previous Secure Share, where partners could download assets and PDFs.
“A lot of what this adds is around automation and presentation,” Robertson indicated, emphasizing that the new portal has three capabilities.
“One is prebuilt campaigns for email and social, and around business continuity and cloud migration,” he said. “Another is brandable or co-brandable assets. A partner can click on any asset and it is immediately available in their brand and colours. This has been the most popular part of the portal.”
The third capability is the ability to make MDF requisitions through this site.
“They submit these through this, and we can approve them,” Robertson said.
A long-time problem for tech vendors in marketing enablement has been that they invest in making these kinds of creative resources available to partners – and then the vast majority of partners don’t use them. In some ways, the problem is more frustrating today than early in the decade, when many partners didn’t show an interest because they were techies with little interest in marketing. That’s much less common these days. But partners still tend to be busy.
“MSPs have so much going on and so many priorities,” Robertson said, telling an anecdote about a partner who didn’t have time to automate – because they were too busy doing things manually.
“Our goal is to get a 20 per cent participation rate, but we are some way away from that,” he said. That’s an understatement.
“In the first month, we had 40 partners using it out of 3000. Our goal is to get 600 of them using it. That’s why it’s critical for us to make this so easy to use.”
The new tool is available to all Axcient partners, and is free of charge to use.
More automation is on the way.
“This is the first phase,” Robertson said. “The next phase is automating the onboarding process, and we are looking at the end of Q3 or Q4 for that.” The time required isn’t for back end design, but for actually designing the interface that partners will use.”
Robertson indicated Axcient is also working on ramping up the qualified leads they provide to partners, by routing them through third party platforms.
“We will use these to marketing to end customers, qualify the leads to make sure they are real opportunities, and assign them to a partner,” Robertson said. “We know if we do that right, it will really set us apart.”
A demo of the new portal can be viewed here.
