'Ingenious Bar' Open for Partner Questions

CHANNEL PARTNERS CONFERENCE & EXPO — The first time ever “Ingenious Bar” at the Channel Partners Conference & Expo was the place for inquiry and curiosity, or where conference attendees could seek answers to nagging business questions — marketing, sales, business management, CRM and more. Sponsors Mojo Marketing, Swarmsales, VAR Street, and World Synergy were there to help.

World Synergy welcomed questions about branding, SEO, social media, PR and more. The company calls what they do Essence Marketing — or finding out why you choose to do what you do. Armed with that knowledge, World Synergy helps clients augment their “why” with the right content, messaging, branding and website development.

Glenn Smith, CEO of World Synergy, built the company with the goal of integrating marketing, application development and technology.

“I saw all this stuff merging together, and a typical CMO had better learn how applications are built, had better understand technology … because if he or she doesn’t, all their marketing efforts would fail,” he told us.{ad}

Today, the company builds solutions that understand Essence Marketing and helps clients differentiate, not with products and services, but with the things that are core to their business and makes them unique.

VAR Street is all about integrated ecommerce and quoting solutions for IT and office products resellers.

“We have our own CRM platform, sales quoting, purchasing … it’s a complete end-to-end solution for resellers,” said Roshan Tayade, sales manager at VAR Street, who added that he’s been working with the channel for the past 10 years.

The company also offers a mobile app for the sales team.

With telecom DNA, Mojo Marketing is a natural for helping telecom, IT and cloud companies with their marketing strategy. Angela Leavitt, chief mojo-making officer, told us the company helps clients find the right messaging and medium.

There weren’t any marketing questions that Mojo Marketing couldn’t help with – marketing consulting, marketing plan development, branding and positioning; content, social, SEO; content marketing, email marketing, video marketing, web marketing; lead generation campaigns, etc.

Last but not least, is Swarmsales, a startup that offers sales-as-a-service marketing via a closed marketplace, called the Swarmsales marketplace. “We’re focused SaaS — cloud, analytics, mobile, social, ad tech and marketing,” CEO and co-founder Ankur Srivastava explained.

Around for about a year, Swarmsales has aggregated 550 sales people and has about 100 companies in the marketplace. The goal is to connect businesses, i.e. resellers, with on-demand sales experts to close deals within targeted accounts.

Why would a reseller choose to use the Swarmsales marketplace?

“As a reseller today, most company channel programs aren’t giving you incentives to come and work with them until you close a deal – then they’ll pay you margin or commission. With Swarmsales, they come in, create their profile, create one major account, they add their bank, they can roll their entire team into the teams feature, and as the sellers are creating activity, all that money goes into the bank and you can start reconciling it internally and get people paid out accordingly,” Srivastava said.

Swarmsales pays resellers based on milestones, i.e. intro, demo, pilot and close, plus an uncapped commission on every close.