LESS is MORE…

Many small to medium-sized businesses rely heavily on marketing tips and advice that they can get for free from the Internet; at least in the early years of their business.  While this is fine and dandy, your business’s marketing efforts need to be specific and catered to what matters most to your target market and to your current customers. So, I have a few quick tips for you which I think will help you get a better response rate from all your marketing efforts.  To increase the success of your mailing campaigns, advertising, email marketing and the number of leads you get from your website or events, when marketing to clients:

“Use the least amount of words as you can to get your message across! Less is More!”

Here are 2 reasons why, with marketing, LESS is MORE:

#1: When you use as few words as possible, you will be removing all of the extra “stuff and fluff” and keep only the key points of your marketing message highlighted.  This will, in turn, make your message clear, more focused and easier for the reader to understand what you want them to know or do in a timely manner.

#2: Just like you and your business, the people coming in contact with your marketing are BUSY!  When someone reads a piece of marketing collateral or sees an advertisement, they do a quick scan of it.  If it looks too long right off the bat, many people will decide not to even invest the time required to read through it.

A GREAT acronym to remember when creating marketing is K.I.S.S.!

K – Keep 

I – It

S – Simple &

S – Straightforward

How does ExchangeDefender “K.I.S.S.”?

At ExchangeDefender, we keep our marketing simple and straightforward in a variety of ways. First, we have identified our niche and our target market. Second, our product line is very specific, easy to understand, and we market the features that our partners are most interested in. Third, we don’t hide anything; all of our services come packaged all-inclusive to create more profitable offerings for our partners. Lastly, we tell partners what they need to know to have a better more successful partnership with us.

When marketing becomes clear, more focused AND more people actually read the whole message that you are trying to relay – you significantly increase the potential of your efforts!  “K.I.S.S.” is a great way to leverage your marketing to be sure that your client base is receiving the information that you want them to get in an easy fashion for all parties. Also, it is also great to incorporate a call to action with your marketing message so that the customer will know what to do with the information that they are reading, thus also creating a quicker result from your marketing.

Stephanie Hasenour
VP Marketing, ExchangeDefender
stephanie@ownwebnow.com
(877) 546-0316 x735

3 ExchangeDefender Features to be Thankful For…

Most of us have taken at least some time off during the Thanksgiving holiday week, to relax with friends and family, overeat, and over shop. It’s all in the name of the grand American tradition. But before we all shift into a lower gear (hopefully) and reflect on what we’re giving thanks for this season, let’s take a moment to consider a few unique features of ExchangeDefender that might qualify for the list.

Here are just three of ExchangeDefender’s great features and why we’re thankful to have them every day:

Web File Sharing

Whether ExchangeDefender protects your own Exchange server or a Hosted Exchange 2010 + SharePoint 2010 account with us, the web file share library is built in to every user account. The web share library makes it easy and safe to share important documents, photos, videos, and more over the web without having to worry about whether they’ll get there or if they’ll be secure, or deal with the complexity of a separate subscription and license from another provider.

We’re thankful for this feature because most of us despise spending valuable time messing with large or grouped email attachments, and are quite happy never to have to do it again. As the information we want to share grows in size and “richness,” the scalability and flexibility of ExchangeDefender Web File Sharing are just what users need, and the simplicity can’t be beat – there’s no need to manage any additional subscriptions, fees or licenses, but Web File Sharing is always available.

LiveArchive

The LiveArchive service is always on to ensure that no matter what, whether your email server crashes or the power goes out in the office, users will always be able to access critical email and stay productive in case of anything. Using ExchangeDefender’s secure standby servers, up to a year’s worth of inbound and outbound email is available and actionable through Outlook Web Access at all times.

We’re thankful for LiveArchive because it’s one of the industry’s, best-kept-secret, Awesome Deals. It’s always on, powered by Exchange 2010 across two data centers, archives sent and received mail, and users never have to deal with training, management, maintenance, or software installation. Why is it a best-kept-secret Awesome Deal? Because LiveArchive – and the ability to resume work right where you left off no matter what happens – is included with every ExchangeDefender account. It’s astonishing to realize that other email providers charge as much as $49 per user just to be able to keep working in the event of a technical glitch or outage.

Message Encryption

ExchangeDefender Message Encryption provides a free and transparent encryption mechanism that enables businesses to quickly comply with SOX, HIPAA, SEC and local government requirements for personal information encryption. Create global encryption policy for domains or email addresses, and instantly encrypt specific messages without policy rule management. ExchangeDefender Message Encryption extends business security beyond the usual technical constraints without management headaches, software installations, or additional fees.

We’re thankful for Message Encryption for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is the simplicity it delivers for regulatory compliance. While we also offer a Compliance Archive solution as a stand-along service as well, the Message Encryption feature satisfies some important privacy requirements. Unlike other email and security providers who charge add-on fees upwards of $10 per month per mailbox for message encryption services, ExchangeDefender includes both On Demand and policy-based encryption functionality with every account. This is really what we’re grateful for, because it’s such a huge opportunity for the markup, to build a healthy margin into the resale.

So on that note, I hope you had the happiest of Thanksgiving holidays.

Do you find this information useful?

If you’d like a lot more in-depth discussion about the cloud and how it affects you and your clients, visit Looks Cloudy http://www.lookscloudy.com where I blog daily about the adoption of the cloud in SMB, conduct live webcasts and podcasts with industry leaders and more.

Kate Hunt
VP Community Development, ExchangeDefender
kate@ownwebnow.com
(877) 546-0316 x777

Happy Thanksgiving!

From all of us at ExchangeDefender, we wish you a very Happy Thanksgiving!

Sincerely,

The ExchangeDefender Team

Black Friday!

Black Friday is one of the, if not THE, biggest shopping day of the year! Take advantage of this and shop for yourself! We are running a one-day promotion for Compliance Archiving for only $1.00/user.  This is a promotion is solely for partners only, and not for resale. 

Are you curious as to what Compliance Archiving is all about? What does it include? How do I use it? What are the benefits?

Check out the Compliance Archiving page of our website, http://exchangedefender.com/features_compliance_archiving.php.

This is a great offering that you will want to take advantage of! Simply enter the coupon code “XDBlackFriday” when ordering Compliance Archive and you will receive the great $1.00 price point for all of the accounts that you order, and they will stay grandfathered in at the rate for the duration of the account!  This promotion is ONLY valid on Black Friday, 11/25/2011, so don’t hesitate!

If you have any questions please feel free to contact me!

Stephanie Hasenour
VP Marketing, ExchangeDefender
stephanie@ownwebnow.com
(877) 546-0316 x735

ExchangeDefender University

Whether you are a current partner of ExchangeDefender or just interested in working with us, ExchangeDefender University is a great resource for you to use in order to have a successful partnership with ExchangeDefender.

During the rebranding and rebuilding of the new ExchangeDefender site, we have added all kinds of new information to ExchangeDefender University. We have a Training section where we have all of our training videos and deployment guides available to assist you with the set-up and implementation of our services. There is a section titled Start-up Guides which includes deployment guides and corresponding instructional videos for some of our most popular services. There is also a Partner Resource section that includes everything that you will need to be profitable with ExchangeDefender Included in Partner resources are links to the following:

· Marketing Collateral

· Current Promotions and Special Offers

· Profitability Best Practices

· Frequently Asked Questions

· Upcoming Events & Webinars

· Partner Testimonies

There are also links to all of our other websites, like the Support Portal, our Corporate ExchangeDefender Blog, the Network Operations (NOC) Blog, and our Knowledge Base.

In addition to all of that, there is a step-by-step walk through process of how to successfully work with ExchangeDefender. It runs through a Portal Tour, Account Management, Placing an Order, Managing Services, and how to go about Getting Help. Just click on the big blue arrow to get started. When you are finished there is a link in the last step that will bring you back to the ExchangeDefender University homepage.

Visit http://www.exchangedefender.com/XDUniversity.php!

ExchangeDefender University is a great tool to utilize – and a great site to bookmark and refer to! Please take advantage of it – it is there to help you every step of the way! And of course, if you have questions…don’t hesitate to Contact Us!

Stephanie Hasenour
VP Marketing, ExchangeDefender
stephanie@ownwebnow.com
(877) 546-0316 x735

How to WIN During an Outage

Don’t get me wrong, by win, I mean limit the bleeding to as minimal as possible. Let’s face it, nobody wins during an outage, everybody gets yelled at by someone else for the entire duration and thereafter. Knowledge of technology goes out the window and gives way to frustration and anger at other folks. I’m going to keep my opinions out of the post and just recap the some of the “best” solutions we saw come from partners. And I’ll additional preface this by saying, this isn’t meant to imply what could have been done, because it’s not my place to say that, period. But these were some things that I saw executed that worked for partners and their clients and I figured I would share.

This list isn’t in any sort of order…

Plan A – LiveArchive – Contact Export Combo

This was pretty impressive to me, out of the gate. I had a partner that rolled their clients to LiveArchive and they actually had links on their desktop to do this, like we recommend. The first person to pull this off, had it the easiest for sure. Most smartphones support Contact exports from ActiveSync to the phone SD Card. So he was able to have them have their email via LiveArchive and still not have their contacts disappears once we went to the Dial tone migration route.

Once we enabled that, we had another partner that had the same idea but a day too late, so he had to go fetch the contacts from the old OST to put them into the Temp Mailbox to facilitate the process above. Then he had to move the contacts under a different contacts folder to avoid duplication once we merged the data back.

Plan B – Migrate to Rockerduck, like yesterday!

We had a few of those that basically saw a pattern of hardware issues and limitations on the Exchange 2007 software and decided they’d had enough and they moved to Rockerduck on day 1. Yes, they took a hit on the man hours required to export then upload PSTs, but this group of folks were done with the outage as soon as those PSTs finished uploading.

Plan C – Find an ExchangeDefender employee and hire some people to beat them with bats on sight.

I was hoping they would find Vlad, but that didn’t happen. Obviously, there are great variables that prohibit or make it more difficult for folks to try do items A & B, and I understand there is a cost in labor that was assumed at the time of deployment and it is hard to take that hit again. We understand and we have a plan in place to migrate all users that do not opt out to 2010 via online moves. This is going to take some voodoo work to make it seamless but our Exchange team has a plan designed to make it happen. Unfortunately, some of the prep work caused some extra authentication windows to pop up for already irritated end users, but this is one of those “one step backwards to go to two steps forward” scenarios.

Carlos Lascano
VP Support Services, ExchangeDefender
carlos@ownwebnow.com
(877) 546-0316 x737

Back By Popular Demand: Three More Common Questions About ExchangeDefender Hosted Exchange, And How To Handle Them

Last week we presented the four most common questions or objections about ExchangeDefender Hosted Exchange 2010 + SharePoint 2010, and some advice for how to turn those objections into more reasons for the client to say yes. As I said then, we want all of our partners to be successful.

Over the years we’ve worked with many thousands of partners, some who have sold a lot of our products and at least as many who haven’t sold many…or any at all. The experience of many years and many partners illuminates important patterns, trends, and some critical lessons about how those who succeed at selling our Hosted Exchange services do so.

In other words, we’ve learned a couple of things from our partners about how to sell our own solutions, and we realize that sharing these lessons might help more partners find more success. So it makes sense to share them.

First, the same questions and objections seem to pop up time and again. Second, the way that you address them can mean the difference between closing the deal and losing it. The first installment about objections got a great response, so today we’ll address three more common questions that your prospects are going to come up with as they consider whether or not the solution is right for them. They’re more “How does it actually work?” questions than true objections, but you’ll get them all the time. And the way you answer is still very, very important.

So here they are:

1) Do they read all of my email?

No. The reality is that the staff in our data centers where the email is kept, while they are managing the hardware administering the services, does not have access to message content. The data is encrypted when it’s transmitted, it’s encrypted once it arrives in the data center, and as I already mentioned, data center staff never has access to it.

This question should tell you that your prospect or client is a little bit privacy-conscious, or perhaps very privacy-conscious. It’s a question that should lead you to inquire more deeply as to why they are concerned with privacy.

2) Are they backing my email up?

Not exactly, or in the traditional sense of “backup.” But Hosted Exchange 2010 + SharePoint 2010 comes with ExchangeDefender built in, including compliance archiving capabilities and Live Archive, which enables you to access a year’s worth of your messages at any time, if anything goes down, so clients always have access to their important messages.

3) Is my email going outside the US?

No. Further, it’s only managed by US citizens in the USA under standard SEC disclosures. To be more accurate, mail is limited to its geography. If the client is in Australia, their email stays in Australia. In the UK, it stays in the UK. All in accordance with the specific regulations in each unique location.

As with the question about whether anyone else is reading their email, it’s important to step back and find out why this matters to them. Often the answer is a really important business consideration you’ll be very glad to know about.

There are a few more security-oriented questions we get quite frequently, which we’ll be addressing in another blog written by the technical team. Stay tuned for that, coming up – the guys will be bringing some great talking points to explain to clients how cloud security works to keep email even more stable and secure than clients could on their own servers.

Do you find this information useful?

If you’d like a lot more in-depth discussion about the cloud and how it affects you and your clients, visit Looks Cloudy http://www.lookscloudy.com where I blog daily about the adoption of the cloud in SMB, conduct live webcasts and podcasts with industry leaders and more.

Sincerely,

Kate Hunt
VP Community Development, ExchangeDefender
kate@ownwebnow.com
(877) 546-0316 x777

“Find a Need, Fill a Need.” Is this the right way to go to market?

Companies invest a lot of time, money, and resources into the creation of their products and services. Yet, these valuable resources usually dive deeply into how their product works or what its function is – while often ignoring or rather wrongly focusing on how to attract clients to what they are selling. This is where marketing plays its role.

Any outreach that comes into contact with a prospective client in any way, shape, or form is performing a marketing function. The question is, do companies know how to perform marketing functions in a way that accurately represents their organization while effectively reaching their target market?

My hope with this post is to paint a vivid picture of the difference between a client’s needs and wants and also layout some common problems or challenges that businesses face while trying to figure out the best strategy that they should use when marketing to their client base.

Let’s start with the idea behind the title of this post…

“Find a need and fill it – Is this really the key to successful marketing?”

In the past, businesses were built on satisfying customer’s needs.  While this is still the case, however, now, it’s more about customer’s wants.  The real question is if people actually understand what they need vs. what they want?

Need – Loosely defined as something that is necessary for survival.

Want – Loosely defined as a wish, craving, demand, or desire for something.

Many needs can be translated into wants when the right message is sent to consumers. People may not need to get the latest brand new thing, but they want to feel that sense of security, excitement and success that goes along with having something shiny and new to show off.

As with everything in life, there are always multiple opinions on theories or ideas and marketing is no exception. Just because some marketing advice is repeated often, doesn’t necessarily make it true or applicable in all situations especially in business. I both agree and disagree with this statement and will explain why.

“Find a Need, Fill a Need”

If you follow the “find a need and fill it” marketing strategy you will be inviting commodity pricing. Think about this… People need a computer network set up … but they want someone who understands their business, and that will suggest things to make it run smoother before an outage occurs.

People price shop for what they need. Most things that people need have multiple alternatives and competition in the marketplace. Therefore, people tend to buy things that they need based on cost by going for the most cost-effective option. Alternatively, people will pay premium prices for things that they want without even thinking about it. Take Apple for example, Apple understands that people will buy what they want regardless of the price that they have to pay to get it. There is a certain allure and sense of satisfaction when purchasing something that one wants. The “Find a need and fill it,” approach is great for getting in the door with a client, particularly if you’re the first to knock and their need is urgent…nonetheless, that approach may not always win you the client or retain the long term business that you are inevitably going for. After that point is when you market to clients based on their wants.

People will pay for the intangible things – are you proving these?

“Find a Want, Fill a Want”

On the flipside, if you follow the opposite “Find a want, fill a want” strategy it could lead a new marketing revolution for your company. Of course there is always a process in finding both needs and wants, it is essential that both be filled. To fill a need is not just about filling the gaps but to really provide a solution – and a lasting one at that – thus creating a long-term revenue stream. To satisfy your customers you must both fill the need and keep your customers happy by giving them want they want. But the trick to this is…When finding what they want; you can turn that want into a need by offering the solution to their problem. Think about Technology.  Everybody NEEDS it, but if a company also provides stellar support and excellent customer service, you fill the need and also provide a premium service making it a want and therefore more attractive to a prospective client.

How do you find your customers’ needs?

It is not always easy to find one’s needs. Watch for trigger phrases from your clients – People will rarely say that they need your product or service. What they will do, however, is lament the lack of something, or talk about a specific problem or even state an aspiration for something. For example, Instead of a customer saying “I need some new accounting software” they will say something like “I can’t ever get a handle on my receivables.” This then will open the door for you to offer a solution to their problem thus making your offering both a want and a need for them. Also, this will make your company stickier to your clients because you will be providing them with more than just a commodity that the “next guy” could offer them. They will find value in your offering thus making client retention much easier.

ExchangeDefender’s Approach

At ExchangeDefender, we go to market with both strategies in mind – filling needs AND wants. For example, ExchangeDefender’s LiveArchive product is an enterprise-grade business continuity platform that lets you resume work right where you left off if the Internet connection was interrupted or other technical glitches got in the way of getting things done. The best part of all is that LiveArchive is always on, constantly archiving your sent and received mail, so there is no maintenance or management to worry about in case of an outage. So, when doing marketing for LiveArchive we market it as a feature that you want to have to make your offering more attractive to your prospective clients and it will most definitely be something that you need in the event of an outage. We look to fill the essential needs of our clients while also providing them with intangible things that they want like, great customer service and technical support, and also the intangible satisfaction of knowing that if an outage were to happen that they will already have business continuity built-in and in place that they can rely on when they need it.

Final Thoughts

Marketing is very “cloudy” because there is not a right or wrong strategy. The bottom line with marketing is that people buy and will continue to invest in products and services that solve their problems. People don’t necessarily buy something just because they need it or want it. Naturally, price, or ‘value’ will always be an issue with most people but if you have the best solution to solve their problems, then price will be much less of a concern. The goal should always be to create win-win situations for both you and your clients – so find your niche and protect it!

How can I help?

Please let me know if there is anything that I can do in terms of helping you about with marketing.  We have a ton of resources to offer our partners including marketing collateral so please take advantage of that and don’t hesitate to contact me!

Stephanie Hasenour
VP, Marketing, ExchangeDefender
stephanie@ownwebnow.com
(877) 546-0316 x735