Axcient Adds Marketing Portal for MSP Partners

At the CompTIA ChannelCon 2019 conference, Axcient this week launched a marketing portal through which managed service provider (MSP) partners can gain access to turnkey marketing collateral designed to promote adoption of the data protection and cloud migration tools Axcient makes available.

The challenge many MSPs face is they don’t have the resources available to hire someone to generate marketing collateral, says Angus Robertson, chief revenue officer for Axcient.

The Axcient Marketing Portal provides access to a marketing enablement tool that makes it simpler for MSPs to build their own custom marketing content, says Robertson. That content is optimized to be delivered either through an email or social media campaign, adds Robertson.

The Axcient Marketing Portal, based on a marketing automation platform from Mindmatrix, will also become the vehicle through which partners will be able to access market development funds (MDF) to drive those campaigns, says Robertson. Soon partners will via the portal will be able to describe online the campaigns and events they want to Axcient to fund on their behalf.

“We’re moving toward automated MDF,” says Robertson.

Axcient is not yet to the point where it will add a marketing competency that needs to be met to participate in the higher levels of its channel program. However, Robertson says the company is headed in that direction.

Like most vendors with strong channel programs, Axcient is focusing more of its efforts on sales and marketing enablement tools that make it simpler for partners to create their own sales leads. The challenge partners often face, however, is many of those tools are designed to encourage customers to adopt a specific product versus promoting a practice or specialty an MSP has developed expertise in.

As such, MSPs will embrace the tools provided by vendors when appropriate, while continuing to rely on their own limited resources to promote their own brand first.