EfficientIP Promotes Multi-Vendor Co-Branded Messages As It Expands North American Channel Program

EfficientIP, a provider of network security and automation solutions specializing in DDI (DNS-DHCP-IPAM),is expanding its North American channel program to give more network solutions and service providers access to the company’s technologies.

To effectively integrate a broader, but limited range of resellers into its North America channel ecosystem, the company has streamlined its Smart Partner Program by simplifying the onboarding process. “We are not looking to be overly distributed,” said Ronan David, VP Business Development and Marketing. “So it’s key for us that we work with partners who can bring to our customers value across all the sales cycles.”

To offer product training that fits into the schedules of partner sales teams, EfficientIP reorganized its training programs to make them more granular and progressive. “It’s not easy for partners to spend five days in a row in a room in order to be trained on a product,” said David.

Instead, the company now offers a curriculum of virtual classes and labs to enable autonomous learning. Dedicated trainers are also available to provide immediate online support if partners have questions. “Our goal is to give our partners a higher level of flexibility to organize training around their schedules, but make sure that we can be there if they need help from a trainer.”

Flexible Marketing Support

EfficientIP is employing an equally flexible strategy around marketing support. “We don’t want to change how they do business,” said Lauren McAluney, Global Marketing Operations Manager. “We want to fit ourselves into their businesses in the most seamless way possible.”

“Our strategy is to align our approach of go-to-market with their go-to-market strategy,” added David. “As we look at our different partners, they have defined specific strategies around specific technology areas. We need to help our partners understand where our technology will fit with the overall story they want to build for their customers.”

This will allow them to bring to customers a much stronger story, David continued. “Not only the value we can deliver to the customer with regard data protection, but in a larger picture, the quality to the other products they can connect to.”

EfficientIP will support strategic partners with dedicated or tailored campaigns to align with the broader solutions they are providing. “If they do have a marketing department, we will sit down with them to determine what their plans are, how we can fit into them, and how we can help feed the content they need.,” said McAluney.

Multi-Brand Campaigns

EfficientIP is also developing a “very rich set of marketing collateral” that can be inserted into partner campaigns. To support partners efforts to market bundled solutions to customers, EfficientIP is developing co-branded collateral with different vendors. For example, the company is developing a co-branded white paper with Cisco to promote the capabilities of technology developed by the two companies.

“This is really important, we think, for partners depending on what they’re selling and what their customer base is. If they have a core base of Cisco users or VMware users, for example, it will strengthen their ability to sell into the user groups they already have.”

EfficientIP prioritizes messages around customer pain points rather than brand-heavy stories about its products, added McAluney. “Customers want to know how to solve their pain. Our marketing credo is this: you need to understand the audience and what their pain point is before you can solve it. They don’t care about your product or solution because it come from EfficientIP. They’re going to care first that this product or solution can solve X.”

In March, EfficientIP appointed John Ricciardi as its new Channel Development Director. In his role, Ricciardi will be responsible for developing and executing the company’s regional channel strategy in North America.