The goal, which is partially realized at this point, is for Axcient’s Partner Success team to leverage the new Axcient Marketing Portal to provide an automated process to distribute the number of leads that has been steadily increased since Axcient opened up their trial program.
Michael Elliott, Director of Product Marketing at Axcient
Backup and cloud migration provider Axcient has launched their first formal lead generation program. Managed by the Partner Success Team that Axcient introduced near the end of last year, the new program is designed to provide a systematic way of allocating the increased number of qualified leads that have come in since the introduction of Axcient’s free trial program.
“We have always had cobranding capabilities – assets that let partners co-brand us, or in some cases like Anchor, white label us – but we never had a formal process before of how to take leads and hand those off to an MSP,” said Michael Elliott, Director of Product Marketing at Axcient. “What changed that and led us to introduce this process was when we started to open up the trial experience to let anyone do trials of our solutions. Most of the leads come from this, and it necessitated a need to automate that process so that we can most effectively take advantage of these opportunities.”
Those leads have been consistently increasing in number.
“Since the trial process began, it has reached just under a hundred leads a month, and it has been growing 30-40 per cent month over month,” Elliott indicated. “Some of them have been 20-50 seat licenses, and some have been 1000 seats plus with more potential going forward.”
Because the new Axcient only sells through channel partners, unlike the old one before the merger with eFolder, the company had to develop a system to allocate this increasing number of leads to MSPs.
Corey Banner, director of Partner Success at Axcient
“A good percentage of our time with the Partner Success Team is spent talking to partners about how we could better expand growth together,” said Corey Banner, director of Partner Success at Axcient. “We have determined that focusing on the trial process and coming up with best way to service those end clients is the key.”
“Our goal is to service these incoming clients who haven’t used Axcient before, and help partners grow the number of business continuity and availability solutions they have with Axcient,” Elliott indicated. “How to make that scale is a process we are going through.”
The plan is to integrate the lead distribution process through the new marketing portal that Axcient rolled out in June, and to which all partners have free access.
“It provides a repository of all assets that partners can use to run their campaigns without having to request them from Corey’s team,” Elliott said. “It also allows MSPs who don’t have automated marketing systems to load in their clients and run marketing campaign. The more that partners use that marketing portal to build up and ramp solutions with Axcient is part of the process we use to determine which partners are growing their business. As leads come in, we look at MSPs in the region who know how to sell those solutions. We do detailed segmentation analysis. We are building more automation into that as well. We aren’t there yet, but we will be able to determine which partners in a region are most capable and ‘hungriest,’ in order to allot the leads.”
Axcient does not charge partners for the leads.
“We have been getting a lot of great feedback from partners about the program,” Elliott said. “They see it as an opportunity to grow their business without having to invest dollars directly.”
