Determined to revolutionize a smarter, uncompromised way for IT pros to reliably work in the Cloud, Faction has attracted impressive numbers of progressive, forward-thinking customers and channel partners nationwide.
I recently sat down with Laurel Burton, VP of Marketing for Faction, to get her take on the evolution of the channel landscape and find out how Faction is empowering channel partners as thought leaders and leveraging Distributors within the highly competitive Cloud market.
Here are a few highlights from our discussion:
Q: What do you love about working with channel partners?
A: The nice thing about working with channel partners is that they’re all coming from a different angle to solve some of the same issues for customers. Our partners have their own specialties and their own unique value proposition that they offer to customers. They know their customers well, and they can become a sphere of influence for their customers. Faction partners have a really unique and interesting cloud story to tell with a combination of their services on top of our infrastructure. They can really direct sales through that thought leadership and their unique specialties
Q: What is your relationship with your channel partners?
A: As Faction is the only Cloud solution that the majority of our channel partners sell or white label under their own name, we have to educate and empower them to be Cloud experts, which can be pretty difficult. My goal, in terms of marketing and meeting our sales goal as a company, is to empower channel partners with sales enablement tools that really help them learn quickly. That includes providing training tools and assets, marketing campaigns, lead generation campaigns, even telemarketing scripts, that are customizable and will allow them to sell Cloud overnight as opposed to the typical product development and marketing cycles that can take months.
Q: How has the channel changed?
A: The trends I’ve seen in channel marketing over the past few years really seem to be the level of intelligence and differentiation of each of the channel partners. When I knew channel marketing back in the day, companies often sold everything to everyone. Now, I see much more sophistication, especially in a lot of these fine-tuned, smaller shops that are focused on a very specific value-add stack. These guys know their customers well. They are the expert on that customer, and they know exactly how to direct their customers to buy.
Q: How has Faction followed these trends?
A: Over the last three years, I have seen an evolution in how Faction works with our channel partners. We tend to work much more closely with the Distributor community. The Distributor community not only resells on our behalf, but they’re also recruiting on our behalf, finding channel partners in their own ecosystems that want to sell Faction. We’ve also learned the type of channel partner that is going to be most successful selling, reselling or white labeling such a sophisticated product as Cloud.
We’ve also fine-tuned our target market in terms of partner prospects. Ideal channel partners really need to be managed services-savvy, used to recurring revenue models, and compensate their reps in a similar fashion as we would, with a monthly recurring revenue stream for Cloud. I think we’ve been able to really fine tune and hone in on what our true target market is, even within the partner community.
Q: What makes a successful channel partner?
A: To Faction, successful channel partners are now understanding, through the training materials, how to pitch and sell a complex product like Cloud. They are leveraging our marketing campaigns and our marketing tools. They understand how to execute successful lead generation campaigns, and they’re not just talking the talk, but now are converting leads into sales.
To learn more, watch the full video of our interview with Laurel Burton in our Channel Visions Video Series:
If you are interested in being considered for an upcoming edition of Channel Visions, please contact marketing@ziftsolutions.com
About Faction
Faction is an enterprise-focused IaaS cloud service provider offering private, public, & hybrid cloud solutions. At Faction we supply cloud the way you want it – deep control, broad customization, and extreme performance spanning eight cloud locations. Join Faction’s cloud revolution and take back the keys to your kingdom.
