Case Studies

Already a fixture among business customers, BlackBerry was seeking to establish its BlackBerry footprint in mass retail and scoop up consumer market share. In 2003, the BlackBerry smartphone was a relatively new entrant in wireless retail and needed to grow consumer market share and brand affinity in a highly competitive category. Although the BlackBerry platform was distributed through a large number of wireless carrier stores and independent resellers, BlackBerry needed to increase in-store mindshare at a faster pace to grow revenue and meet their aggressive strategic initiatives.

With big box retailers pulling away from product-specific training, Whirlpool was losing ground on the nationwide sales floor. They knew it was vital to gain a stronger presence at retail to ensure healthy sales growth. Since 1998, Whirlpool has engaged MarketStar to execute a brand advocacy program that today delivers front-line support, including a data-empowered team and customized reporting. In 2011 alone, brand advocates developed sales methodology adopted as “best practice,” trained 17,196 sales associates on behalf of Whirlpool, and collected 30,114 pieces of customer and sales associate sentiment and competitive intelligence.

Yahoo! wanted to target the wireless retail storefront to influence application downloads on smartphones and tablets. But how do you make an impact at retail without a product presence? Seeking a new approach to marketing their suite of Apps, Yahoo! turned to MarketStar as a strategic partner.

Until June 2011, global energy management specialist Schneider Electric was losing potential sales on leads going nowhere. It was the ultimate challenge: bring leads back from the dead. Schneider engaged MarketStar to regenerate their lead funnel through lead nurturing and progress them towards a purchase decision. Ready to resuscitate, MarketStar revived leads, qualifying more than $3 million in opportunities within six months, doubling the click-through rate to 3.25 percent, and expanding from 400 to 45,000 nurtured leads.

How do you launch a new product without a proven sales process? A global deal-of-the-day provider needed to strategically launch new services by targeting local merchants in major markets. MarketStar developed a customized sales process and proactively delivered beyond expectations.

NVIDIA wanted active support for partners selling their Quadro Graphics cards and Tesla GPUs. Quadro and Tesla products are specialized for the high-performance computing market, and require a high level of product knowledge to complete the sale. NVIDIA approached MarketStar to provide sales engineering and sales support for system builders throughout their channels.

MarketStar's Logitech VAR team supports Logitech's entire channel-based selling motion through account management and territory development. Due to Logitech's broad and evolving product mix, effort is required by the entire team to maintain product awareness within the channel; accomplished through phone-based product training, onsite visits, and marketing plan/incentive program deployment.

MarketStar has managed HP’s ESSN and PSG channel partners for the past 15 years, consistently meeting sales quotas and driving billions of dollars in sales every year with HP’s 18,000 partners. MarketStar’s reach encompasses the largest enterprise partners, mid-market players, and SMB partners.

HP sought to provide a consistent partner experience, control costs and increase quality for their level 1 support queries, including unassigned partner calls into the Pre-Sales Support team, or Partner Operations Support Team (POST). They needed agents to help partners with questions regarding the process and to uncover new opportunities.

A leading manufacturer of computer chips was seeking to broaden its reach into second- and third-tier ISV partners to drive incremental sales. This included reaching strategic global markets. By increasing software enablement and optimization for its hardware, the company would drive adoption of their chips with VARs of all sizes and make a greater impact in sales to the enterprise and SMB space.