NitroMojo and Marketing Advocate Specialize in Marketing Automation for Channel Partners

As I noted in a post last year, there is a universe of specialized marketing automation systems for companies that sell through channel partners. These products address several interrelated challenges: distributing leads to partners without losing track of performance; distributing partner-customized versions of company-created content; and helping partners run their own marketing campaigns. Here are two more vendors with related offerings:

NitroMojo focuses primarily on lead distribution and tracking. Its particular strength comes from sending follow-up email surveys directly to leads to find out what happened: were they contacted by the channel partner? did they eventually buy? is there someone else at their company to talk to? is there something else they might purchase? This addresses one of the central dilemmas of selling through partners, which is losing contact with the leads and, as a result, not being able to measure effectiveness of corporate lead generation programs. NitroMojo says about 60% of leads reply to the surveys, giving enough information for meaningful analysis of program, partner, and salesperson performance.

The system also provides sales reps and sales managers with basic sales automation, including abilities to enter and rate new leads, review and prioritize existing leads, track call results, send materials from a central library, and schedule future calls. Corporate marketers can build campaigns with multiple events, create landing pages, capture revenues and costs, distribute leads with complex routing rules, score leads on behaviors and salesperson ratings, and measure performance.  Pricing starts around $3,000 per year plus $100 per user per month, which is usually less than the cost of marketing automation and sales automation systems that NitroMojo would replace. The current version of NitroMojo system was introduced about a year ago and had three global clients with more than 150 users when I spoke with the company in April.

Marketing Advocate is designed to help technology resellers who lack in-house marketing skills. It provides a resellers with a vendor-sponsored microsite that gives them access to marketing content, prospect lists, acquisition email campaigns, and automated nurture emails.  Resellers define their target prospects when they set up the system and then purchase suitable lists from suppliers including NetProspex, Jigsaw, and Harte-Hanks. These prospects, and other names uploaded by the reseller, receive standard campaign emails at three week intervals until they respond by visiting a landing page. The system then sends them personalized emails offering contents related to their behaviors. The leads are also scored and, when ready, can be passed to a telephone lead qualification service or directly to the vendor’s sales automation system. The sponsoring vendor doesn’t see the lead names until the reseller enters them into the system.

The point of all this is to minimize the effort that the resellers themselves must put into marketing. Marketing Advocate typically builds 25 to 30 prospecting campaigns tailored to different customer segments, and lets the resellers select the campaign and segments they want to pursue. The company also assembles and selects content to offer in the emails, has negotiated arrangements with the list providers, gives reports that analyze program response quantity and quality, and offers a concierge service to review results with resellers and discuss improvements. The system can also integrate with event management software and Google AdWords. Partner agencies are available for telephone lead qualification, search engine optimization, and paid search.

Marketing Advocate typically costs $500 to $700 per month per reseller, with some portion of the expense usually subsidized by the sponsoring vendor. Marketers pay $1 per name for prospects. The system is used by divisions at several major technology vendors including IBM, Microsoft, and HP.