Susanne Dansey’s Blog

Eileen posted recently about one of the latest Microsoft Partner Marketing promotions that is available to Partners now.

Here’s the deal:

You can order 200 FREE postcards or 1,000 FREE emails which you can personalise with your logo and contact details to your target customers or prospects with this campaign. If you want more then you can do so for a reasonable charge (£1.39 for postcards and 6p per email).

But wait! What is the promotion all about?

Products featured:

• Small Business Server (on the SB campaign)
• Windows Vista (SB campaign)
• Forefront (Mid-market campaign)
• System Center Essentials (Mid-market campaign)
• Windows Server (Mid-market campaign)

Technology focus areas:

• Security
• Reliability

Whilst it’s great that Microsoft are giving some free collateral away, it’s likely that any sales and marketing activity built around this WON’T WORK if you don’t put a sensible plan around it. Sending out 200 postcards without any follow up is probably going to be as effective as a mouse squeak at a Led Zepplin concert so what can you do to make sure any effort you put in gets you the results you are looking for.

1. Understand the products the campaign talks about - find out what the competitive products on the market are such as Symantec Endpoint Security and that of Trend Micro’s.

2. Work out exactly who you are going to send your postcards and/or emails to. Are you going to send it to a brand new list that you’ve just bought? If so, how are you going to qualify them and follow each one up? Is it easier to pop over to your local commercial estate and hand deliver each one after qualifying them yourself? Howabout sending some of them to your clients who are nearing the stage where they need to think about upping the anti with regards to a more secure and sophisticated IT infrastructure?

3. How are you going to follow up with them after the mail out and when? It takes about seven ‘touches’ to get a prospect to think about buying so think about who you are going to make responsible for the follow up and schedule in times to contact each one. Make sure that the follow up questions are fairly open ended so that you encourage them to talk about other issues you may be able to help resolve. Try and make sure that you have at least 10 appointments for every 100 prospects ‘touched’. You should aim for between 3-6 of these appointments to be converted into business relationships. Other ways of contacting them could be by popping in (take biscuits or cakes) for an informal chat, send out another postcard with a follow up message (designed by yourself), give them a call, send an email, or invite them to a mini-seminar where you invite 10 potential customers along, add some loyal clients to help fly your flag and get them engaged on a 1:10 basis. At all times, make sure you maintain a theme/colour/message so that the reader associates the various messages together.

4. Think about how you are going to follow up after this campaign. Check out here to see what else is in the Partner marketing ‘pipeline’.

I know a few Partners are already doing this and I’d be keen for others to share how they use this particular tool to help gain new business.