Treadmill offers resellers the opportunity to tap into an on-going marketing and lead-generation programme. This innovative initiative, conceived with EMC, combines best practice on marketing and lead generation developed by Magirus with messaging from EMC. "This is not a short-duration lead-generation initiative, it's about providing on-going partner enablement and developing net new business for EMC," said Aquila Frazdaq, EMC business development manager for Magirus, "having marketing services on tap for our resellers compliments their existing efforts and provides a fast ROI - a win-win for all concerned."
Core to Treadmill is an ongoing promotional email, telemarketing and lead cultivation service. This multi-touch, multi-medium approach allows prospective customers to be nurtured over time - a massive improvement over one-off, short-duration marketing campaigns where leads are lost because a prospective customer is not ready to buy within a given timeframe. "In addition, we are able assist our resellers by lending them the skills and support they need to close the deal. This may involve a joint-call on the customer through to pre-sales support, training and accreditation. It's all about enablement," said Frazdaq.
Magirus found from resellers that conventional short duration marketing campaigns often resulted in calls being scheduled after the campaign had ended, with the result that no-one called back. Treadmill not only overcomes this problem but incorporates a rigorous process to clean and update data and monitor the progress of leads.
"This is a million miles away from tactical campaigns and blitz days, provided by some distributors, where leads are thrown over the fence and partners expected to get on with it," said Frazdaq. "We've adopted a strategic approach aimed at specific verticals and selected our partners with care; we engage with them throughout the sales cycle to assist them to maximise the opportunity and to enable them to deliver the value EMC customers expect."
The pilot programme has been running for 3 months and to-date has yielded 30 leads which are being progressed by 8 participating EMC resellers. Resellers involved in the pilot include: DCG, Kelway, Logicalis, Morse, Redstor, Prestige, Red Vista and Transam.
Peter Dickinson, business development manager of the London-based reseller, Transam, was pleased with the early results from Treadmill, "We specialise in storage and virtualisation and although we are growing rapidly we simply lack the resources to engage in marketing at this level. It's a "no-brainer" for us to work with a distributor which not only trains and accredits us but also delivers qualified leads matched to our specialisation, then assists us to win the deal. I think this is the future of distribution."
In one instance, Transam undertook a free File System Assessment for a prospective customer, which led to the reseller proposing a solution to reduce restore and backup times for business critical data and develop an Information Life Cycle strategy - a solution incorporating EMC Centera, EMC EmailXtender, EMC DiskXtender and VSRM technologies. The project is valued at over £50,000.