CRN Exclusive: Xerox Unveils Marketing Kits To Help Partners Sell Newly-Launched Products

Xerox has rolled out marketing tools to help its partners generate awareness of the company's recent product launch and ancillary apps and services provided by the channel.

The Norwalk, Conn.-based vendor has provided solution providers with the materials needed to host forums around Xerox's new offering and deliver professional-grade online content and outbound emails. The tools are intended to further differentiate Xerox from other print vendors, according to Kevin Warren, the company's chief commercial officer.

"We're really trying to walk the talk," Warren told CRN. "If the level of difficulty [for partners] is harder than it could be, they won't get there."

[Related: New Multi-Brand Dealers Flock to Xerox Due To Open Platform, Broad Portfolio, Active Recruitment]

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Xerox's demand generation kit is focused on the generating interest for the vendor's 29 new printers, multifunctional devices and apps. The tool kit includes social media templates with images, suggested content to post, webpage elements, photography and inserts for customer emails, according to the company.

Partners will have the opportunity to leverage Xerox's targeted follow-up process to help partners convert prospects into sales, Warren said. Partners will be able to leverage Xerox's marketing portals, social media capabilities and customer relationship management (CRM) capabilities to make their follow-up process more regimented and increase the "hit rate" for forum attendees, Warren said.

"It's almost like an event marketing consultancy," Warren said.

Tremendous variability exits among the marketing capability of Xerox's channel partners, Warren said, with some of the bigger ones possessing extremely marketing sophisticated while others lack the time or resources to put coordinated marketing campaigns together.

But smaller partners typically have to devote most of their time and energy to focusing on salesforce effectiveness and service support, Warren said, and typically have little, if any, marketing capabilities in house.

"Some partners might have marketing capabilities closer on the scale to us," Warren said. "Others might be brand new to this."

Edge Business Systems recently brought a new AltaLink product (designed for larger workgroups) into its demo room, and leveraged Xerox's capabilities to send out customized invitations to clients and prospects for VIP demos, according to Josh Salkin, managing partner of the Atlanta-based Xerox dealer.

Salkin has been able to co-brand Edge on the Xerox marketing collateral, enabling the company to deliver professional-looking pieces that still retain a personal touch.

"Xerox is a world-class marketing company," Salkin told CRN. "Edge does not have the resources or the design ideas that they do. They're professionals at marketing their own products."

As a result of this push, Salkin said Edge has had more demos of the AltaLink products in the past week than it had in all of 2017. And Salkin said Edge has successfully converted those demos into double-digit orders for the new AltaLink series.

"There's been a tremendous excitement form clients and prospects to come in and see the products," Salkin said. "Their marketing collateral has been extremely helpful to Edge. It's been a tremendous kickstart for our company."