Tumbleweed launches new Lead-to-Deal Lifecycle program 24 March, 2008 By Vanessa Ho

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According to Dave Harris, vice-president of worldwide channel with Tumbleweed, the program is part of the company's commitment to sell 100 per cent of all its products through the channel by the end of 2008.

The Lead-to-Deal Lifecycle program is an integrated program that provides $50 to the team that comes up with a lead.

Harris said that when the lead because an opportunity, the program will automatically feed into Tumbleweed's CRM system to register the deal without the partner having to do any additional work. The partner then receives an additional 10 per cent margin.

"If [the deal] is closed within 90 days, we will provide the sales team with another $500," said Harris. He added that if the partner loses the deal for whatever reason, they will receive 10 per cent of the sales value as well as keep the 10 per margin the received for registering the deal.

"It is rewarding people that do the extra work to develop an opportunity with a customer," Harris noted.

The program also provides free technical support for partners that are in the middle of solving a customer problem or in the middle of an installation.

Products that are part of the partner program include MailGate, Tumbleweed's outbound e-mail security product that is focused on the data loss prevention space. As well, the program includes Secure Messenger, its e-mail encryption product and Secure Transport, a solution that manages and securely transfers large files via FTP.

As well, for the program's top resellers they get access to a Rapid Response number that gives them the same rights as Tumbleweed employees in order to prioritize a customer request.

What makes this program different from other reseller programs in the market, said Harris, is that everything is automated and integrated together where the reseller doesn't have to do anything to register a lead into a deal.

Ideal partners for the Lead-to-Deal Lifecycle program are those that have a strong security practice.

The program currently has 20 partners in North America and Harris doesn't expect to grow the program beyond 30 resellers.

"We are looking at where we need to strengthen our business and what works best for us are larger companies that are scalable with great regional players that are in $50 to $60 million range of sales in the security market," said Harris.

In turn, he added that Tumbleweed is focused on providing good service to them and to its end customers.

"I want us to have real value and understand our resellers business to help them develop a practice."