Nextiva Debuts Marketing Program for Partners

Nextiva on Wednesday unveiled a new end-to-end marketing program that allows partners to launch and manage digital, social and event marketing strategies.

CoNEXtion uses quality lead syndication and more than a dozen demand-generation tools to provide Nextiva’s partners with the ability to uncover leads from the “top of the funnel to close of a sale,” the company said.

MeiLee Langley, Nextiva’s director of channel marketing, said telecom partners need help when it comes to marketing as many are “old-school telecom and circuit slingers” that are suddenly finding themselves immersed in a hardware-less cloud world of smaller monthly residuals and no hardware rebates.

Nextiva’s MeiLee Langley

“I believe they now realize that they have to fish for more business and can’t simply rely on contract renewals and support services anymore,” she said. “With that shift, the partners have become hungrier for marketing support, but while they’ve said that’s what they want, I’ve banged my head against the wall over the years because they would inevitably never use the tools and assets we created for them. Partner engagement has always been an ongoing issue. It finally occurred to me after many late night chats with various partners, many just find marketing too daunting, expensive and time-consuming because they’ve relied solely on their sales acumen over the years. But marketing doesn’t have to be any of those things — it can be easy and quick to do if they have the right tools and just a tiny bit of training.”

In addition to traditionally offered resources like marketing development funds (MDF), campaigns in a box and co-branded collateral, CoNEXtion provides partners with demand-generation tools and resources including:

Nextiva’s regionally located field marketing managers operate as an extension of the partner’s marketing team to help navigate, execute and report on CoNEXtion.

“We did a soft launch of this following our NextCon conference in November and we’ve already had 54 partners enroll in the beta platform,” Langley said. “Partners are not only using the tool, but are actually seeking out training. We populate CoNEXtion with not just Nextiva content, but also general UCaaS industry content where the Nextiva logo is nowhere to be found, as well as custom content about their company. I want partners to be able to use CoNEXtion for more than just Nextiva, as the more their business grows, the more opportunities they will have to bring Nextiva to the table.”