Unsurprisingly, there were sharp intakes of breath from both partners and end customers worried about the financial impact of NCE. And Tech Data, one of the world’s leading cloud providers, was no exception.
But once normal breathing was resumed, Tech Data wasted no time in asking One Little Seed to plan and execute an integrated marketing campaign to help allay channel partner fears, explain the implications of NCE in plain language, support training initiatives, and of course, build a pipeline to be proud of.
The fast and fabulous
“And as it turned out, our sheer speed of execution through using One Little Seed made us one of the first to market in APAC for NCE.”
Tech Data knew they had little time to waste waiting for other regions to develop content they could leverage. So, they didn’t. “We jumped into action from the very first day Microsoft announced NCE,” says James Bright, Tech Data Marketing Manager - Australia and New Zealand. “The changes were significant, and it was important that partners understood them so they could ‘do right’ by their customers and their own businesses.
“We knew we wanted a fully integrated, multi-touchpoint campaign, which was engaging, and supported and maximised the value of our local brand personality, offered our partner channel real value, and positioned us as the nice guys!” says James. “But we were very aware of the short turnaround time. So, we turned to One Little Seed to deliver an end-to-end NCE strategy and manage all the moving parts.
“And as it turned out, our sheer speed of execution through using One Little Seed made us one of the first to market in APAC for NCE.”
Awesome outcomes
James says the ‘NCE guy’ approach of the campaign positioned Tech Data as knowledgeable, helpful, and proactive. “I feel we definitely owned the NCE guy label within our partner channel, and I haven’t seen any of our competitors do anything as significant and impactful in the NCE space.”
“The campaign One Little Seed developed was very content focussed and generated awareness with existing and potential partners. While the objective of much of the content was to be educational, One Little Seed never lost sight of our need to gain marketing qualified leads and convert them to sales.
“The campaign exceeded our pipeline KPIs, and now we’re busy working on converting those leads to customers. What we’ve converted so far has already paid off our investment in the campaign, and there are many more opportunities on the table.”
One Little Seed’s three-stage integrated NCE guy campaign converted the challenges presented by NCE into an opportunity for Tech Data to grow its market share. “The combination of strategic awareness, enablement, and transactional tactics delivered an impressive sales pipeline,” says James.
“One of the beauties of working with One Little Seed is that due to their in-depth understanding of our market and industry, they know exactly what do. There’s no guesswork."
Awareness tactics included sharing a series of targeted digital assets designed to nurture channel partners. The assets demystified the complexities of NCE in a series of blog posts, a sponsored article in CRN, informative eDMs, and social media posts posing key NCE questions. Each asset pointed to a dedicated NCE explainer landing page with a centralised hub of regularly updated resources.
The landing page attracted significant views and generated marketing qualified leads (over 10% of which were net-new).
Enablement tactics provided proactive, practical help to channel partners through educational webinars. Tech Data designed and built an online calculator to help partners and end customers calculate how to maximise NCE value while minimising the cost. They also rolled out NCE training and certification. All of which generated still more net-new and existing partner opportunities.
Lastly, the transactional tactics promoted additional limited-time-only partner incentives and discounts for specific Microsoft and Office 365 products to generate action.
And the outcome of the three-step strategic and integrated campaign approach? While obviously, we can’t discuss the dollar value added to Tech Data’s sales pipeline, or the conversion revenue, let’s just say – wahoo, NiCe one!
Still growing strong with One Little Seed
James says Tech Data in Australia works with around half a dozen agencies, each with specialist areas of expertise. He chose One Little Seed based on their channel partner superpowers and their ability to deliver what they promise.
“The knowledge One Little Seed have of distribution partners and vendors is hard to come by. And they’re not top-heavy with management – they’re all doers, making them fast, responsive, and cost-effective,” says James. “That’s one of their absolute advantages over other agencies!”
“One Little Seed delivered on every front – I’d rate them as one of the best and brightest agencies we work with.”
And the relationship with One Little Seed, he says, is “excellent.”
“One of the beauties of working with One Little Seed is that due to their in-depth understanding of our market and industry, they know exactly what do. There’s no guesswork."
“They always perform to my expectations – and that’s a bar I set very high, having known Kristal through the IT industry for many years. She’s a perfectionist by nature, and that’s rolled out to everyone in the company and how they perform. Nothing gets missed.
James Bright
Marketing Manager
Australia and New Zealand
