When we launched Zift Solutions, our focus was to empower channel organizations with leading-edge technology and processes that would allow them to ask less of their partners but ultimately drive better results. We wanted to make marketers lives easier by transforming the way companies were doing business on both sides of the channel, automating an array of traditional marketing tasks and enhancing the capabilities of suppliers and partners to capture the attention of today’s buyers. I truly believed in what we were doing and offering the marketplace, and the response to the Zift Platform as well as the results we’ve seen from our users have exceeded expectations.

In a few short years, we’ve built a strong foundation, established ourselves as the premier Channel Marketing and Management (CMM) leader and are committed to delivering value to our users while creating a profitable, productive and socially responsible workplace for our team. Last year, Zift enjoyed success on multiple fronts, including:

  • Growing financial strength with a 74% increase in revenue, our largest 4th quarter ever, and $14M in Series B financing.
  • The acquisition of SharedVue to create the most experienced and largest CMM provider in the marketplace today, with more partner users than any other provider.
  • New customers including the addition of Abila, GENBAND, NetApp, SimpliVity, Samsung Electronics and Xerox among many others.
  • Industry recognition from analysts and marketplace leaders, including being recognized by SiriusDecisions as the top CMM vendor and earning the highest score among all vendors in the Technology category in The Forrester Wave™: Through-Channel Marketing Automation Platform Q3 2015.
  • An evolving corporate culture that is focused on achieving work-life balance for our employees (the number of which grew by 81% in 2015), and highly values community involvement as evidenced by Zift joining Pledge 1%, a corporate philanthropy movement dedicated to making the community a key stakeholder in every business.

DRIVING SUCCESS FOR CUSTOMERS

What we’re most excited about and focused on as we move into 2016 is Zift’s ability to drive results for our users. Our customers are already benefitting from more extensive service offerings and support resources following the SharedVue acquisition. Plus, our Research and Development (R&D) team has doubled in size, so we can innovate and deliver the advanced features and functionality the Zift Platform is known for even faster.

Our ecosystem is constantly expanding and we’re committed to ensuring seamless integration for Zift users, either via our Embedded Access Applications (EAAs), like our Hootsuite™ App, or direct connections with the SFA, CRM, PRM and MDF systems, social media platforms, sales enablement programs and data platforms you are already using.

Zift’s ability to significantly enhance results has never been more apparent. In 2015, our users reported:

  • 421% increase in leads created
  • 219% increase in social accounts connected
  • 158% increase in social shares/retweets
  • 150% increase in social likes
  • 140% increase in campaigns created

Results like these are driving more and more channel organizations to Zift Solutions and customers like Samsung and SimpliVity are leading the charge toward CMM as a proven path to increasing partner engagement and profits. Zift is a critical component in the Samsung Team of Empowered Partners (STEP) channel program and Samsung Business Academy, which received great press from CRN, as well as The VAR Guy. Zift is also a key feature in SimpliVity’s push to help partners harness hyper-convergence demand, highlighted in a recent article on ARN.

In a year from now when I share my 2016 wrap-up, I have no doubt there will be more success stories like these as Zift continues to prove its solutions and services are absolutely essential to channel success.