We are pleased to have Laurel Burton, Vice President of Marketing at Faction, as a guest blogger for Channel Chatter.

Like many channel organizations, we have a very small marketing team here at Faction. If you’re anything like me, that means spending a good bit of time wishing you had more resources to support and engage partners.

Faction offers private, public and hybrid Cloud infrastructure as a service and we are 100 percent channel based. In the crowded Cloud marketplace, that means doing everything you can to capture the attention of both partners and prospects. So, I know first-hand that It can be utterly overwhelming trying to support a full partner community on your own. Instead of continuing to juggle everything with limited resources, we turned to Zift for help.

We’ve been using Zift Solutions at Faction for a little over two (2) years now and currently have 70 to 80 percent of our partner community on the Zift Platform. Prior to Zift, it was nearly impossible to provide the level of support and customized collateral we wanted to deliver to our partner community. Zift’s comprehensive toolset allows us to create and easily distribute truly customized marketing and sales tools to our entire partner community. With Zift, one person can do the job of literally an army of 20 people. A small team can really look and appear much larger and much more sophisticated than it may actually be.

Turning Partners into Thought Leaders

All of our white papers, case studies and fact sheets are loaded into the Zift Solutions platform. With the press of a button, our channel partners can replace our logo with theirs or change verbiage to highlight their unique capabilities, essentially giving them their own unique stash of high-quality, customized marketing assets to use whenever they need to. We also utilize syndicated content and a news reel widget from Zift to build and distribute Cloud news weekly across our community. Using the widget, which embeds the content directly into partner’s websites, our partners look like true Cloud experts, with current, relevant Cloud news appearing on their website consistently.

Zift Gets Baked into Faction’s Sales Pitch

What I hadn’t counted on, but was pleased to discover, is that Zift is something that we’ve been able to incorporate into our own sales pitch to resellers. As the only Cloud service provider that is 100 percent channel-based, we are appealing to reseller partners that may or may not have resources and strengths around the channel already.

When partners sign up with Faction as their Cloud service provider, they get customized collateral and access to a powerful marketing automation tool that allows them to create and send email campaigns – and measure their results. They get access to our deal registration portal and our entire library of collateral assets along with syndicated content, news widget, our website tracker, and the list goes on. Many of our solution providers aren’t large companies and most are resource-challenged. The fact that you’re going to get all of these benefits as part of their relationship with us absolutely encourages partners to sign on with Faction. Now, not only do they gain a Cloud service provider, but also all of the marketing tools, campaigns and the automation capabilities to execute and measure success. All through a single Zift Platform. It’s a great value proposition for partners.

I was also a bit surprised at how many of our partners were already familiar with and using Zift Solutions. The partners love having a single sign-on that they can use for multiple companies and Zift has quickly become a standardized solution in the community.

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To learn more, watch the full videos to see how Faction uses Zift to empower our channel partners in the highly competitive Cloud marketplace.