Rackspace Adds Gamification to Partner Program

Bent on winning with partners, Rackspace, the provider of managed cloud services, is partnering with Seismic, a provider of sales and marketing enablement, to use its platform to reach Rackspace partners through gamification.

Seismic will provide Rackspace direct and indirect sellers the same training materials and marketing content to ensure consistent content and messaging across the organization.

Rackspace’s Lisa McLin

“Prior to using Seismic, our training, sales and marketing content was delivered to our partner community through a myriad of different tools, said Lisa McLin, vice president of alliances and channel chief at Rackspace. “The process of ensuring that everyone had the right assets was not easy — we would have to email partners individually, which was laborious and prone to human error. Now we upload all of our assets directly into Seismic, which makes it easy for our direct sales team and channel community to obtain the materials they need to engage with prospects from one simple source of truth. Adding gamification to the program has also motivated partners to engage with and use the content we’ve produced.”

Rackspace launched a new partner program a year-and-a-half ago, laying the foundation for what it called a “Fanatical Channel” — an extension of the company’s Fanatical Support tenets and promise to deliver exceptional service every day.

Key components of the new partner program are a strategic partner agreement, strengthened partner enablement and an enhanced partner portal. Part of the partner enablement strategy was increased transparency between Rackspace and the partner community. Since the launch of the partner program in 2018, Rackspace has added managed service offerings such as its professional services catalog and VMware on AWS, as part of the partner commission incentives, along with gamification.

McLin started working with Seismic about a year ago to first grant partners access to all current internal sales content, and then worked on integrating it into its partner portal to create the gamification platform. Partners can also access white papers for the company’s portfolio, pitch decks, videos and co-branded materials through the portal — the same content that’s used by Rackspace’s internal sales team.