The UC Upper Hand: Product Plus Enablement Equals Success
It’s more challenging than ever for solution providers to keep up with a rapidly evolving industry. Partners need support that goes far beyond just selling a solution in a box to succeed.
’We know there’s a lot of great products on the market. But that’s only half the story, because if you give a partner just product, then you’re not helping them with the rest of the story,’ says Mark Sher, vice president of unified communications, product and marketing at Intermedia.
Sher is referring to your customers’ entire lifecycle, which includes sales and marketing resources, support and training. For example, if you think about the product as an engine, enablement is the fuel. Enablement from vendors allows partners -- like you -- to be more efficient with your resources and quickly scale your cloud business.
’We invest in the product and the enablement equally because that’s how serious we are about our belief that it’s a complete continuum. You can’t have one without the other to be successful in the channel,’ says Sher.
’We do live webinars. We’ll even come to a partner’s site and do live training for their sales people, whatever really works best for our partner. We try to make it as interesting and engaging as possible,’ says Sher.
’That’s their full-time job. They’re waiting, willing and ready to help partners through the sales process. And they’ll do anything from helping you learn about the product, getting a sales engineer on the phone if you need one, helping you create a quote, working with one of your clients, to talking to you about pricing,’ says Sher.
And that’s not all, Intermedia gives partners the reliability of a 99.999% uptime SLA and access to J.D. Power-certified technical support experts 24-7. Find out how Intermedia helps you sell cloud services under your own brand in our next installment.