Wednesday, March 31, 2010

How do you fix bad VAR Websites? (Part 3)


In post 1 and post 2 on this subject matter I noted that we see a couple of common problems with our VAR websites:
  1. VAR websites exhibit low, slow adoption of our marketing assets
  2. VAR websites frequently exhibit product branding violations
I noted that before now the only way we had to fix the situation was to nag each individual VAR to add new marketing programs, discontinue outdated marketing programs, and fix branding violations. It was like a game of "whac-a-mole" because as soon as you fixed one problem you were on to attack a long list of others.

So we were trying a new service called SharedVue Website Content Syndication...

Problem: Solved!
How do you fix a bad VAR website? My little joke was that you don't fix *a* VAR's website; instead you fix *all* of them. Well, I am pleased to report that we have launched the service and gone "live" with our first four VARs. (Not nearly all of them, but a good start, and I expect adoption to be brisk.) Take a look:
  1. Customer Driven Technology: http://www.cdtplm.com – click the banner on the left that says "PTC Business Solution Center"
  2. Impac Systems: http://www.impacsystems.com – click the text link at top right that says "PTC Business Solution Center"
  3. Global Product Delivery Systems: http://www.g-pds.com – click the text link in the middle of the screen that says "PTC Business Solution Center"
  4. Maintenance Reseller Corporation: http://www.mrcpds.com – click the text link in the middle of the screen that says "PTC Business Solution Center"
This "PTC Business Solution Center" that is common to each site is the product of the SharedVue Website Content Syndication. It delivers:
  • Quality marketing content – we can now easily drop into any VAR website our best ~25 marketing campaigns
  • Easy to deploy – the VAR pastes one line of HTML code onto one page of their website to accept the syndication feed, it takes less than 30 minutes to set up
  • Hands-off maintenance – takes away the burden of website maintenance for the VAR because campaigns & product collateral are refreshed centrally by my team and changes are automatically and instantly syndicated to the VAR websites
  • Lead flow – certain campaigns have lead capture forms, and the leads go directly to the VARs
Pretty cool, eh? What do you think?

3 comments:

  1. Just went "live" with Enser the other day. Go to http://www.enser.com/ and click the text link for the "PTC Business Solution Center" in the middle of the home page. The VAR EVP/GM told me "Awesome... very well thought out and executed!"

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  2. A note about the Global Product Delivery Systems website linked in the blog post: their contract with PTC was terminated (these things happen), so we were able to turn off the syndication feed to them. So if you click that link you will see the content is no longer syndicated to that site.

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  3. Over 30 PTC VARs are now running SharedVue website syndication, and PTC is about to launch a Chinese language version of it that will probably double that number within a couple of months!

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