It’s one thing to make sure employees within your own company are maximizing their marketing opportunities, and in turn, their sales results. But what do you do when your company depends on a variety of small businesses, such as resellers, to market and sell your product?
It isn’t as if you have the authority to go into those businesses, take control of the reigns, supervise the staff and implement new marketing programs. How do you train and motivate your resellers to maximize their marketing and sales of your products or services without stepping on any toes?
If your company is Microsoft Great Plains Business Solutions, the answer is that you hire an expert to create and present a series of “Marketing Boot Camps” tailored specifically to the needs of your resellers.
Microsoft Great Plains (www.greatplains.com) provides business-applications software that helps small- and mid-market companies become more agile in today’s interconnected economy by extending specific information and procedures to employees, customers, vendors and partners.
Microsoft Great Plains’ core business is financial/accounting software, but it also focuses on customer-relationship-management software. The integration of the two — for example, enabling data entered in a website purchase to go directly into financial records — is a key task, according to Tera Long, certified marketing executive association manager for Microsoft Great Plains, headquartered in Fargo, N.D.
Resellers are usually small firms
To help sell its software, Microsoft Great Plains provides some sales leads to its reseller “partners,” which typically are local computer consulting firms with perhaps 25 employees.
However, these partners typically need marketing training to be able to generate more sales leads on their own, according to Diane Gasal, Microsoft Great Plains’ manager, partner marketing development.
Boot Camps created from scratch
Gasal and Long chose to hire Mac McIntosh as their marketing expert to create and present a series of two-day boot camps for their partners across the United States and Canada.
After discussions with Gasal and Long about specific objectives and telephone interviews with a few key reseller partners, McIntosh developed the custom Marketing Boot Camps, which emphasize the following “how to” topics:
- Create or improve your marketing plan
- Generate more high-quality sales leads
- Use relationship marketing techniques to gain a competitive advantage
- Cost effectively and efficiently market your company and its services
The Marketing Boot Camps offer the content that the partners need to make marketing a more vital part of their new business development work. Participants come away armed not only with concepts, but proven plans and techniques that enable them to get quick results when they return to work.
According to McIntosh, “The curriculum includes lots of practical marketing tips and techniques their reseller partners can easily put to work without spending a lot of money.”
Gasal points out that the content is complemented in a key way by McIntosh’s flexibility, professionalism and friendly manner, traits that have endeared him not only to the people at Microsoft Great Plains who organize the boot camps, but to the more than 200 people who have attended them over the past year.
“McIntosh is effective in the boot camps because he is current, entertaining and highly knowledgeable — but in a laid-back way,” Gasal said. “The remarkable thing about Mac is that he is liked by almost everyone.”
Added Long: “He’s one of those types of people where you hire him and you never worry about him again. He’s very low maintenance.”
The resellers who have already participated in the two-day boot camps have rated McIntosh an average of 4.6 on a 1-5 scale, with 5 being a perfect score.
“I’d recommend Mac to anybody other than our competitors,” Gasal said.
Training sessions have paid off Sales figures can’t be publicly disclosed. But according to Gasal and Long, the Marketing Boot Camps that “drill instructor” McIntosh has run for Microsoft Great Plains and its partners have mobilized the troops to generate new sales leads in ways they had never done before.
As a result, Microsoft Great Plains has already agreed to host a minimum of four more Marketing Boot Camps for its partners during the next 12 months.
For more information about having Mac McIntosh speak at your next event, please call 1-800-944-5553 or 1-401-294-7730, or send an email to mcintosh@salesleadexperts.com.
