Two Major New Initiatives From Wick Hill

Leading security VAD Wick Hill is helping resellers successfully convert leads with two new partner programmes - a new online lead management service (LMS) and the provision of reseller microsites. The LMS system, believed to be the first of its kind in the channel, takes the burden of progressing leads away from the reseller by providing an easy to use, online alternative to the usual Excel spreadsheet delivered by other distributors. LMS allocates leads, then manages and tracks them, providing email reminders to resellers when it’s time to follow up calls or take other agreed actions.

Mark Vickers, sales and marketing director for reseller Storm Europe, commented: “It’s a very, very good idea and one that will make our life a whole lot easier. Having all the Wick Hill leads online in one place is excellent. It’s also extremely helpful to get an email reminder that a lead is due for a follow up call. It’s already improved our ability to deal with leads and will improve our lead to sales conversion rate. It’s a very useful tool.”

Tony Taylor, sales and marketing director of Phase CRS, said: “It’s great to have everything there online and be able to see it from anywhere. It’s good for the sales guys out on the road because in between meetings they can log onto the Wick Hill site and see what calls are due for follow up.” Taylor also finds that the LMS system has eased the management burden. He commented: “Wick Hill is doing the lead management, which means less work for us. We can focus more on actually progressing the leads and making sales.”

Alongside the LMS system, Wick Hill has also developed a system of microsites to help resellers successfully conclude leads. Wick Hill provides the reseller with a fully developed, vendor-dedicated site under the reseller’s name, with a reseller URL (e.g. compureseller/watchguard.com). The user is directed to a site which appears as the reseller’s site with the relevant vendor information and leads from the site are processed to the reseller.

This service is beneficial to resellers in several ways and it reduces the amount of time and money they need to spend on maintaining their web presence and keeping their sites up to date. The vendor content is kept up to date for the reseller by Wick Hill. One important benefit for resellers is that they can be more certain of retaining any leads. If potential customers have to go onto a vendor site, they may end up dealing directly with the vendor, or find details of another reseller, or be directed to a different reseller by the vendor.