Getting Started In E-mail Archiving

Joe Kadlec, vice president and senior partner at Consiliant Technologies, Irvine, Calif., on getting started in e-mail archiving:

GET TECHNICAL TRAINING AND CERTIFIED: The biggest thing is to have systems engineers who understand the e-mail-archiving software and the other components. This requires training and certification. Our guy had assisted training and Web-based training. Symantec requires that at least one systems engineer go to a two-day training class [for its Enterprise Vault e-mail-archiving software]. Our engineer then was able to take an online test in order to get the certification to sell Enterprise Vault.

GET SALES TRAINING AND CERTIFIED: We also have three people who have gone through sales training, including me. We went through our distributor to get someone on-site to lead the training session, and took the online test. To succeed, you have to pay attention. They don't make it easy. But it's pretty straightforward if you have someone who can lead you.

LINE UP VENDOR SUPPORT: Once we qualify what the customer is trying to do, we bring in resources from Symantec, CommVault or Hitachi [Data Systems]. They're all different. For instance, we've gone through the training with Hitachi for its HCAP [Hitachi Content Archive Platform]. But since we've been a Hitachi partner for so long, we can get the right people involved even though we don't have the certification.

MARKET YOURSELF: We did a seminar in February with Hitachi, which was very well-received. We're still looking for the ROI [return on investment]. It was expensive, because we held it at a Hyatt restaurant, and we had to fly to New York. But the timing was right. We set it up, and a week before the event, Hitachi acquired [e-mail archiving vendor] Archivas. We also did a one-day Symantec-focused internal marketing event in July with Avnet, and produced seven new appointments.

GET YOUR PEOPLE INVOLVED: [For the Symantec event], we gave $30 gift certificates to our internal reps for every appointment they booked. At the end of the day, we had dinner and drinks with them and tallied the points. It was money well-spent.

CROSS-SELL WITH YOUR OTHER OFFERINGS: E-mail archiving is another way to get a foot in the door. We bring e-mail archiving up with our customers, and it's on their radars. Once the execs understand they can be responsible if an issue goes into litigation, it prods them into action.