Jive Communications created their own technology to create a business phone system, which is mobile friendly, and hosted through the online virtual cloud so you can connect to Jive on any device at any time. Tiffany Dunn, Director of Strategic Alliances at Jive, shared how their partner teams reach out to businesses and shows them how Jive can benefit their communication operations by flexible training. With their custom technology, they’re able to help businesses that may only need two users up to 20,000 users.
Their history originally started in the K-12 and Public-Sector market, which worked extremely well since those markets wanted to simplify their phones and setup. Since then, Jive has continued to grow and is now open to several marketing verticals with specialized solutions, regardless of business or organization size. One thing that makes Jive’s growth so successful is their partnership program, which lets their partners go out and sell their services to their customers. This strategy has proven to be beneficial for all parties involved and why Tiffany truly believes in the power of strong and strategic alliances.
While having a partner-based sales approach is great, training needs to be consistent across the board to make sure their partners understand their software and services before any quotes or sales can happen. The first thing Tiffany needs to consider is who their potential partners are, which business vertical do they fall into and what they would need to be proactive in selling, along with how to be trained from a sales and technical standpoint.
From there, they take a two-pronged approach and they always have access to Jive’s Partner Success, which is a specialized support team willing to help on any subject.
Jive’s Online Approaches for their Partner Plus Program:
- Leverage their two-time award-winning Partner Plus portal, specifically for their partners
- Provides an easy way for their partners to interact with Jive
- You can create quotes based on pricing models
- Access to marketing resources, lead generation, case studies, sales collateral, vertical specific resources and more
- The platform is very user friendly and simple to use so it’s easy for their partners
- Notifies Jive’s internal team when a partner registers a lead or consumer as an opportunity
Jive’s Off-Site Training for their Partner Plus Program:
- Several different training modules in their Partner Plus portal available and range from live webinars or on demand videos
- Currently, they have 19 videos on demand in their training section, but are currently revamping that section so they can offer six certifications through their training
- Additionally, they have Channel Teams in the field (also known as Pods) and Jive currently has 13 Pods across the nation
- Pods are made up of an account manager or field sales rep, an engineer, along with a channel rep and are responsible for the success of their territory
- The engineer and channel reps are there to enable their partners with lunch and learns, on-site training, or anything else that is necessary that the partners inside their pod territory are well educated, understand Jive’s differentiators and how to compete
Jive believes that having both online and in person training makes a big difference to their partners success. This is another reason why they’re excited to unleash their upcoming certification program to their partners. While there will be recognition given to partners who are certified in one or all six certifications, there will also be some fun perks that come along with it.
By completing a certification, partners will be able to obtain gift cards, along with credit to use at Jive’s Online Store for swag or promo items to help them celebrate their new Jive knowledge. Over time, the goal will also be to investigate deeper insights, such as those partners who are certified versus those who are not then compare the two segments under a performance analysis. However, since this program is just being launched, it will take time to create a baseline and measure key metrics before any results can be released.
In conclusion, Tiffany shared that their partners are one of their most valuable resources and to ensure participation Jive does everything they can to make working together as easy as possible—and with over 3,000 partners, their approach proves that this strategy is successful.
Whether you’re a customer or partner of Jive, one thing is certain - you will get simple yet effective solutions regarding unified communication products and services.
About our Training Series
As part of our own expansion and growth, we’re excited to continue our training series. This series encompasses a wide variety of channel topics designed to help channel partners gain knowledge of successful business practices.
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