Recent TBI Channel Investments Pay Off

PRESS RELEASE — CHANNEL PARTNERS CONFERENCE & EXPO — April 17, 2018 — TBI (booth #6063) has made large investments in 2017-18 to enable channel partners to move up market as their clients adopt emerging technologies, without the need to increase headcount or undergo a significant skills pivot. Investments in training, marketing and new programs position partners to grow with their clients by leveraging several resources: a vendor-agnostic training portal – the University of TBI, a full-service marketing team for strategy and custom content, and a referral program to outsource transactional sales in order to focus on higher-revenue opportunities.

Free, technology training without vendor hype.

The University of TBI is a vendor-agnostic training platform and free partner resource that includes certification programs on a variety of emerging technologies, including SD-WAN and public cloud management. Since its inception in 2016, the platform has grown to over 1,400 active users. Partners leverage the University as an avenue to both educate new employees and increase the sales capabilities of their more tenured staff for complex solutions.

One of TBI’s partners, Marco Technologies, is integrating the platform into their internal portal and making it a key component of their employees’ onboarding and continuing education requirements. “We’ve seen immediate changes within our sales team,” says Matt Kanaskie, Sales Manager of Recurring Solutions at Marco Technologies. “Their ability to qualify and quantify opportunities has improved tremendously and yielded many sales.”

TBI’s training team continues to add new curriculum. The newly released SD-WAN 2.0 training, for example, was created after TBI spent the prior year training partners and successfully selling SD-WAN services across multiple vendors. The SD-WAN 2.0 training shares best practices, myths and misconceptions, vendor breakdowns and more.

When it comes to marketing, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel.

TBI’s marketing department operates as an agency (without the fees) to TBI’s partner community. Partners can leverage TBI’s team for website audits, guidance on marketing initiatives, social media training, customizable collateral, development of email campaigns and more. This is all done with a personal, customized approach, and begins with a discovery call to understand the partner’s current marketing efforts and identify areas of opportunity.

Phil Geier of Pivotalogic says, “It’s been incredibly helpful to lean on TBI’s marketing team for advice on campaign creation and marketing strategy. The team is always willing to work with me and create content that fits my business model and resonates with my client base.”

In addition to its one-on-one strategy, each month TBI’s marketing team arms partners with selling guides on a new technology. The selling guides are intended to be easy-to-digest (not overly technical), and include target customer profiles, discovery questions and vendor recommendations.

Outsource the minnows, focus on the big fish.

TBI’s Referral Program allows partners to focus on larger, higher revenue opportunities while TBI handles the transactional sales. Partners enrolled in this program have a dedicated team serving as an extension of their business, managing sales from contact to close and uncover both upsell and cross-sell opportunities. By leveraging this program, partners lower their cost of customer acquisition and dedicate their time to pursue higher revenue opportunities.

A TBI Partner said, “As my business shifts towards selling cloud-based solutions, I am less focused on inquiries for lower-margin sales like coax. TBI’s Referral program offers me a great way to still capture these sales while I focus on larger opportunities.”

TBI continues to invest in new resources to enable partners to further grow their businesses as the industry evolves and clients pursue digital transformation initiatives. Visit us during Channel Partners at booth #6063 to talk about how we can help you move up market.

About TBI
TBI is the nation’s leading third-party technology distributor. Since 1991, it has assisted Systems Integrators, VARs, MSPs, IT consultants and more in advising and sourcing the right technology solutions. TBI serves as a partner’s advocate, ensuring the proper provisioning of cloud, Internet, data, mobility, voice and managed services from best-in-class service providers to achieve clients’ desired business outcomes. Through training and marketing programs focused on the benefits of technology to the business, TBI empowers its partners to be the foremost authority to advise and source all of their clients’ technology needs. With the largest back-office in the industry, TBI partners are fully supported by certified solutions engineers, pre- and post-sales operations and project managers.

For more information visit www.tbicom.com.