Axcient has introduced a new marketing automation solution designed to help MSPs drive demand for the vendor’s BDR, file sync and share, and other solutions more scalably and effectively.
The new tool, which is officially named the Axcient Marketing Portal (AMP), debuted today during industry association CompTIA’s 2019 ChannelCon event in Las Vegas. Available immediately at no extra charge to all of Axcient’s more than 3,000 partners, the system aims to help channel pros tap into the vendor’s knowledge base of sales and marketing best practices.
“They’re not necessarily as good as we are on selling our specific solutions,” says Angus Robertson, who became Axcient’s chief revenue officer in June following an earlier stint as CMO. “We know what works, we know what resonates with their end clients. Packaging that in a way that’s consumable that they can just turn on to drive business with their clients is going to help them grow.”
AMP contains modules for collateral, campaign management, and market development fund activities at present, with more to come. The collateral component helps partners automatically generate white-labeled or co-branded white papers, product briefs, and other materials. The campaign management tool provides end-to-end materials for a variety of heavily automated social media and email-based demand generation campaigns.
The MDF module, meanwhile, helps partners plan, fund, and execute co-sponsored webinars, lunch-and-learns, and other events. Axcient can help MDF recipients build invitation lists for such activities. “We do have a fair amount of end clients in our database, and we can also digitally target end clients in their geo or their verticals,” Robertson says.
Extensive backend connections enable data about leads, sales, and customers to flow directly among AMP and Axcient’s CRM system and other business solutions, sparing users duplicate entries and multiple sign-ins. According to Robertson, that integration work is a big part of why building AMP took some six months of effort.
Axcient launched AMP on a limited basis early in June, and has been validating its effectiveness quietly since then. Initial results have been encouraging. “It’s already helping on the upselling and cross-selling side,” Robertson says.
AMP is based on technology from Mindmatrix, a maker of channel partner sales and marketing enablement solutions. Robertson applauds the company’s willingness to work with Axcient on creating custom functionality.
“They were able to follow through with the level of integration that we wanted,” he says. “There was quite a lot of developer-to-developer conversations.”
Axcient plans to equip AMP with functionality that will award points for utilizing the platform. Partners can then exchange those points for rebates, MDF, free consulting, and other benefits. “We want to reward the partners that are growing and also engaging with us,” Robertson says.
The new points system will play a key role as well in a forthcoming program, due to launch this year, in which Axcient will employ end user advertising campaigns to produce qualified leads that it will then farm out to its resellers. MSPs with the most points will be first in line for those sales prospects.
“We actually think we can double the traffic to our website by the end of the year by turning on marketing to those end clients and then routing that traffic to those MSPs who are really engaged with us,” says Robertson, adding that Axcient already gets frequent inquiries from SMBs that it’s making no effort to reach.
“We’ve had quite a lot of end clients coming in asking for demo requests and asking for trials even though we’re not marketing to end clients,” he notes, crediting unplanned SEO for those leads. “Today what we do is we qualify those opportunities with our account managers and then bring those to select managed service providers, but we do that very manually.” The functionality now in development will automate and systematize that process.
AMP is Axcient’s first full-scale marketing automation system, and replaces an earlier portal that did little more than provide centralized access to a collateral library. “Partners could go and access that collateral and download that collateral, but there wasn’t really any automation or business process as part of it,” Robertson says.
The new tool is also part of a larger effort to make partner satisfaction a selling point for Axcient in the crowded market for BDR and related solutions. Earlier measures include the December 2018 rollout of a partner success team that serves as a single point of contact for escalating issues, directing partners to relevant product education materials, and other tasks. Future efforts will seek to enhance Axcient’s billing, onboarding, training, and support processes.
