CloudStride is a small cloud security and data warehousing startup that serves India as its core service region. The lifeblood of this business is its channel sales, with big distributors (who have their own resellers) as its channel partners. The founder, Sumith Satheesan, noticed his digital channel marketing strategy was a tedious, labor-intensive process. His distributors took several months to engage in co-marketing, if they did at all. There was no fast, easy way to do the work, and he was understaffed.
Most importantly, the strategy he was able to get across his distribution channels had no trackable data to give insight on campaign performance or quarterly forecasting.
“It’s futile to send content when you can’t see who to follow up with,” Sumith told us during our case study interview. “It’s a blind cycle.”
“It’s futile to send content when you can’t see who to follow up with. It’s a blind cycle.”
Sumith Satheesan, CloudStride Founder
The CloudStride Interview
Let’s dive into the case study interview itself, which covers Sumith’s major pain points and how xAmplify was not only a solution for him—but is now also a solution for his distributors, who found the platform so game-changing they’ve since adopted it for their own businesses.
Channel marketing pain points for CloudStride
- Ease of redistribution to scale rapidly
- Data insight for campaign optimization
- Following up with qualified leads to convert to sales
- Onboarding partners quickly
CloudStride had some channel partners in place, but Sumith was having trouble sharing campaigns with them and activating redistribution on a large scale. Sharing content was the main objective.
He would deploy his usual email campaigns, make the followup calls, and so forth. But his marketing team was investing time that he felt was a waste. They couldn’t see how the downstream end users were behaving. He would just wait and hope for a positive outcome. Taking matters into his own hands, Sumith would even attempt to interact with the resellers of his distributors himself. But many would never reply to his follow up emails and calls–and he was never certain if his distributors had even redistributed his campaigns to them in the first place.
The channel sales solution for CloudStride and its channel partners
- Metrics to view partner and end user activity
- Rapidly increasing sales (30% within the first 3 months)
- Easy co-marketing campaigns for him and his distributors
- Solidified distributor relationships
- Expedited onboarding of partners (now takes only 1.5 to 2 months)
Using xAmplify, Sumith got a more robust solution than he ever imagined. The first thing he boasted to us about were the Two-Tier Metrics. “xAmplify gives you qualified leads,” he laughed. “I now know who to call first! My team calls them [after we see their interaction with our campaign] and converts them.”
With these metrics and the ease of redistribution, his lead generation rapidly increased and his channel sales skyrocketed by 30% within only three months using the platform.
Sumtih added, “The campaign has such an effect that we’re getting results from the very first email to go out in an entire campaign sequence. The end customers are responding to my distributors and asking about CloudStride.”
“The end customers are responding to my distributors.”
The most surprising outcome for Sumith was how xAmplify has helped solidify his existing relationships with distributors and bring on 49 new reseller partners. He reported that the platform played a major role in this acquisition because the distributors found it so useful and intuitive. As soon as he onboarded his distributors, xAmplify in turn made it much easier to communicate to and through their resellers. Now he has these new partners lined up who want to use the xAmplify platform. “They’re obsessed with it,” Sumith laughed again.
And the icing on the cake? An onboarding process that used to take several months getting his distribution channels to engage in co-marketing strategies now only takes 1.5 to 2 months on average.