Sometimes perspective matters. Allow me to offer you mine as the CEO of ExchangeDefender.<\/p>\n
Last week we held a huge webinar to announce the biggest addition to our business in over a decade. One that will see our business grow exponentially over the next few years. The response from the people that have attended the webinar has been fantastic. But if we\u2019re being honest, we had more partners apologize for not being able to attend the webinar and ask for the recording than we had in attendance for the webinar. As always, we provide a direct link to it a few days after the event but this time we did something different.<\/p>\n
Recognizing that our partners are swamped and busy running their business, we went a few<\/em> extra steps. We called every single attendee that came to the webinar. Less than 5% answered the phone or returned the voicemail. We shot a quick 5 minute video to summarize the content of the webinar for people that are too busy. We created flyers.<\/p>\n Today I wrote up a bullet list summary of our webinar, again for everyone\u2019s convenience, but I buried the big announcement as a single line bullet point half the way through the writeup and asked the marketing department to use half the newsletter to highlight our marketing and advertising efforts.<\/p>\n Why?<\/strong><\/p>\n I have no doubt our new support service will be a smash hit. In fact, we\u2019ve already been overwhelmed with the response to it. Not only will it make partners that offer these services instantly more profitable (because we\u2019re doing the work) but it will open up a marketplace for partners that didn\u2019t have an expertise in email security, compliance, encryption and other \u201creal business concerns\u201d a venue to provide the service now that someone else is going to stand behind it. I\u2019m not worried about us, we\u2019re doing great.<\/p>\n I am, however, worried about many of you. I totally understand not being able to get to a webinar, an hour is too much to ask. But if you can\u2019t answer the phone or return a voicemail.. what are you doing to give yourself a chance to grow a business? If you\u2019re too busy to answer the phone or see what the vendor you already work with can do to make you more effective and profitable, how are you going to implement and promote those solutions that are designed to help you? If you\u2019re too busy with work to actually improve your work and to make it profitable, then how do you grow? How do you improve your odds to survive and thrive in an environment where big players are working tirelessly to eliminate and displace you? How do you learn about delivering the new services clients need and how do you talk to them before someone else reaches them?<\/p>\n We owe our business to our partners. Loyalty is a pretty big thing for me personally because I\u2019m here thanks to the thousands of people that chose to trust us. Our business responsibility is to have your best interest in mind.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n And with that, I wanted to highlight marketing. The IT world is changing and the concerns businesses face with their technology are going beyond uptime and reliability. I have assembled a great team at ExchangeDefender not just to help you deliver these services but to educate you and to help you promote that service to the business community you serve. Helping you double profits on our services next year is a short term goal. Making sure you remain relevant, profitable and successful 3-5 years from now \u2013 that\u2019s where my mind is at<\/strong>.<\/p>\n -Vlad<\/p>\n P.S.<\/strong> I don\u2019t mean to criticize anyone; I understand the time is scarce and you have a million webinars, phone calls, emails, voicemails and social media notifications. You know best how to spend your time and the last thing on my mind is trying to offend or guilt you about not attending the webinar \u2013 if you read this that way I apologize and I hope you give it another shot. Truth is, we track this stuff: partners that show up for our webinars, that take the time to consider the solutions and work with us to implement them do 23x better financially a year out<\/span> (from Aug 2016 to Aug 2017) than those that don\u2019t show up or answer the phone. Those are the numbers I know and the numbers I can track. I want that kind of success for all my partners. I have no doubt we\u2019ll be killing it with support next year \u2013 but I feel like my responsibility to you, to all of our partners, is to help you grow. And I can do that much better through marketing efforts than we are doing right now<\/em>. Hence the highlight.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1137","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-exchangedefender","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.exchangedefender.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1137","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.exchangedefender.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.exchangedefender.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.exchangedefender.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.exchangedefender.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1137"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.exchangedefender.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1137\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1139,"href":"https:\/\/www.exchangedefender.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1137\/revisions\/1139"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.exchangedefender.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1137"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.exchangedefender.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1137"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.exchangedefender.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1137"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}