Delivering successful through-partner marketing campaigns for BroadSoft

Challenge

BroadSoft (now part of Cisco Webex) is the market share leader for cloud unified communications with an open, mobile and secure platform trusted by 25 of the world’s top 30 Service Providers by revenue. BroadSoft applications empower users and teams to share ideas and work simply to achieve breakthrough performance. BroadSoft is transforming the business of communications, by delivering the technology, products and support that Service Providers need to help their own customers work smarter and stay connected.

BroadSoft wanted to enable Service Provider partners to increase sales of its cloud communications platforms to SMBs. We created the insights, strategy, content and partner toolkit for a series of issue-led campaigns targeting the end-to-end buying journey.

Situation

Being able to reach key decision-makers and stimulate new demand increasingly relies on being able to engage customers around their business issues. This is certainly true in the communications market where traditional cost- and price-led arguments are proving less and less effective. Many BroadSoft partners, however, lacked the expertise and resources to develop this type of insight-led marketing for their BroadSoft-based cloud communications offerings.

We therefore needed to establish a framework for how BroadSoft should support Service Provider partners, and then leverage BroadSoft insights, knowledge and resources to develop compelling campaigns, which help partners generate new sales opportunities.

Action

We worked closely with BroadSoft to help them develop a new way of working with partners. Initially this involved creating a new framework for through-partner marketing and then delivering a series of packaged ‘campaigns-in-a-box’ that could be rolled out to selected partners. This included developing the campaign strategy and messaging and then building a full set of tools that would support an integrated marketing campaign. We also created partner briefing guides that gave partners a blueprint for how to successfully implement the campaign.

Impact

The campaign was well received by BroadSoft partners, with very positive feedback around the quality of the assets and the guidance provided. The commitment demonstrated by BroadSoft in investing in the campaign has helped strengthen the levels of engagement with key partners.

The campaign has already been implemented by a number of Service Providers in the US and UK. One partner reported £1m+ of opportunities generated within 2 months of launch, and positive results against a range of metrics, including a 10% click-through rate from the outbound emails. Another partner achieved over 1,500 visits to their campaign landing page in the first 5 weeks of the campaign running, with 37 leads generated.

As a result of the success of the initial pilot campaign, we were asked to develop a series of follow-up campaigns utilising the same approach.

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