Marketing automation? Does the provider offer an automated platform for executing a fully customisable, email and social
Customer Lifecycle Support Checklist: Evaluate the Partner Assistance Offered by Potential Cloud Providers
So you’re considering moving email, file management, backup or archiving to the cloud. You even have quotes from a few providers you’re checking out. Great! It’s a step in the right direction to support your company’s growth. However—some partnerships are more valuable than others. Use this checklist to evaluate how far your providers will go to help you make a sale and keep your customers happy.
Product/solution education To sell a product, you need to to know the product. Does the vendor offer… Not-For-Resale (NFR) services? The best way to learn how to sell a product is to use it yourself. Does your vendor offer heavily discounted or free services for your internal use? Educational materials? Can your sales staff easily access whitepapers, datasheets or battlecards? Is there a university, on-demand webinars or demos for your technical staff?
Marketing and demand generation Many channel organisations don’t have the time or expertise to successfully generate leads and reel them in. Will your vendor help you by providing… Marketing materials? Does the provider offer datasheets, white papers or other materials? Can you co-brand them with your own company information alongside the vendor’s? What about completely private-labeling them to remove the vendor’s branding and fully make them your own? Marketing campaign guidance? Does the provider offer “campaigns-in-a-box” that give you everything you need to plan and implement a full marketing campaign? Marketing automation? Does the provider offer an automated platform for executing a fully customisable, email and social campaign on your behalf, with minimal work on your part? Sales support? Will the provider’s sales experts join your sales calls to answer customer questions and help close the deal?
Learn how Intermedia’s partner program meets these key requirements. CALL US
+44(0)20 3384 2158
EMAIL US
[email protected]
ON THE WEB intermedia.co.uk/partners
Onboarding and migration Once you’ve made the sale, it’s time to get the customer up and running. Will your vendor make it easy for you both with… Migration software? Many vendors offer tools to transfer customer data into their environment. What tools will your vendor provide to you? Migration assistance? Data migration is complicated, and no two IT environments are exactly alike. Because of this, human assistance is often necessary. What level of support will your vendor provide? And what level of expertise is available to you? Is migration free? Some providers may only help for a fee, and others will refer you to a third-party consultant. Make sure you’re not surprised by hidden fees before it’s too late.
Account administration Your vendor’s cloud management console should be powerful enough to meet your customers’ IT needs, but simple enough to use that you can easily use it. Does your vendor’s control panel offer… Simple day-to-day management? Does the control panel enable you to keep your day-to-day labour costs under control? Granular control? Is the control panel robust enough to support a wide range of customer needs, to ensure you’re not boxing them into an unwieldy solution?
Customer ownership and selling models Some cloud providers are truly creating a win-win-win situation for you, your customer and the provider. Others see their partners as a means to their own ends. To ensure you’re entering into a mutually profitable relationship, does your provider offer… Ownership over billing? Who controls billing—you or your vendor? Respect for your customer relationship? Will your vendor be marketing directly to your customers? Multiple selling models? Can you choose a private-label model for selling to your customers? Can you choose on a customer-by-customer basis?
Technical support If the need arises, you want your provider to be there for you. Will you receive…? 24/7 phone support? When you need assistance, will you be able to get someone on the phone? Short hold times? How quickly does the provider typically answer the phone? Assistance from certified experts? When you call in, will you reach someone with the expertise to actually solve your problem? An assigned account representative? Are you able to speak with the same person about your needs, or will you have to reintroduce yourself every time you call in?
Uptime assurance If your provider’s service goes down, it’s your reputation that’s at stake. Does your provider offer… An uptime SLA? Does your provider guarantee a certain level of availability? What measures will be taken to compensate you should they fail to achieve this SLA? 99.999% uptime? Many providers promise 99.9% uptime. And while this may sound good, it actually adds up to more than 525 minutes of unplanned downtime per year. Look for providers with a 99.999% uptime service level agreement—which is less than 30 seconds of unplanned downtime a month.
To see how Intermedia’s partner program stacks up, visit Intermedia.co.uk/partners.
Intermedia’s Partner Program Intermedia’s Office in the Cloud™ enables partners to resell more than 20+ essential cloud services, including email, backup & file sharing and security solutions. Intermedia’s services are all mobile, reliable and managed through a single control panel. This integration helps partners reduce overhead and create major efficiencies, because they only have one vendor, one bill, one source of support and one place to administer services. Intermedia’s partner program gives partners full control over how they run their cloud business with the flexibility of three different models from which Partners can choose. Partners can retain full customer ownership, which means they control billing, branding and margins through its Private Label model. Or, if partners prefer, they can sell under an Advisor model, in which Intermedia handles both billing and technical support and partners earn generous commissions over the life of the customer account. And lastly, partners can simply
pass Intermedia leads to close under the Referral model. Uniquely with Intermedia, Partners can make the decision to sell data services under the Private Label, Advisor or Referral models on a customer-bycustomer basis depending on what’s best for their business and their customers. Intermedia provides support to its 6,000+ active partners throughout every aspect of the customer lifecycle. Every Intermedia partner has access to a premium through partner marketing automation platform to help them generate leads, and an assigned sales representative who will work with them to turn those leads into sales. And after each sale, Intermedia’s Cloud Concierge™ team will fully handle the migration of their customers to the cloud – ensuring no downtime. Finally, on an ongoing basis, Intermedia provides partners (or their customers, depending on which model they select) with 24/7 expert technical support with typical hold times of less than 60 seconds.
Learn how Intermedia’s partner program meets these key requirements. CALL US
+44(0)20 3384 2158
EMAIL US
[email protected]
ON THE WEB intermedia.co.uk/partners
