Clearswift to enhance reseller incentives

Richard Turner, 38, previously worked at RSA, the security division of EMC, where he spent the last 12 years, as vice president, EMEA.

According to Turner, (pictured), Clearswift’s current training programs include the Certified MIMEsweeper Engineer, Administrator and Sales Professional (CME, CMA and CMSP) available for partner, sales and technical staff.

However, it now wants to improve the frequency and availability of the courses, where they run and to make them more accessible to channel partners.

“We want to do a better job of identifying which of the resellers sales people need, the right kind of training because tech folks will be less interested in the CMSP certification, and the sales people really do not need the detailed technical training of the CME course,” he said.

According to Peter Croft managing director Clearswift APAC, the company needs to direct training, incentive and pricing schemes to frontline sales staff to enable them to make more money, more easily.

He said it will implement evaluation units so partners can act more quickly on a prospect enquiry and incentive schemes for resellers to bring in new leads and deals.

Two new types of programs will be enhanced; Deal registration - when a reseller registers a potential deal with Clearswift, they will get an extra 10 percent discount when they close that deal.

Lead registration - when a reseller provides three new leads to Clearswift it will provide the actual sales person doing the work with a small ‘thankyou’ such as a pair of movie tickets as a reward.

“All programs are under periodic review to make sure that they are meeting market demand. The most recent reviews were on the Lead and Eal registration programs, where we adjusted up the incentive on both of those schemes,” said Croft.

“We have also introduced a MDF fund which rewards the reseller with a percentage of the value of their licence business in any quarter. Clearswift will match this dollar for dollar to be spent on agreed marketing activities,” he added.

According to Turner, the company is looking at a vendor direct support model for those partners that would like to sell Clearswift, but for whom holding a full service support desk is not appropriate.

“Clearswift will then support the end user on behalf of the partner. Those partners who do maintain their own support desk capability will be rewarded with higher purchase discounts allowing them to retire more margin,” he added.

clearswift emc security