Whaleback enhances Premier Partner program 1 August, 2008 By Vanessa Ho

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"The goal of the sales agent program is to help extend the sales coverage and sales capacity of [our] Premier partners," said Dave Zwicker, vice-president of marketing with Whaleback Systems.

He added that these sales agents assist the four to six Premier partners that Whaleback is the midst of recruiting for certain geographic areas in the U.S.

"We view [Premier partners] as anchor stores in a shopping mall where we want to flow all the business in certain geographies through a few [of them] who will be volume resellers of our managed services offering," Zwicker said.

As part of Whaleback's Premier Partner program, the Sales Agent program features different tiers. The first tier is the integration of Whaleback's recently launched Customer Referral Program where anybody can refer to Whaleback any SMB they know that requires a new phone system and if they become a Whaleback customer, that person will receive a $500 cash reward. Zwicker said that this tier is more for people who make a onetime referral or one or two a year.

"This is a great way to get referrals at a much higher rate and [acts] like a lead generation program that works better than traditional [ones] where [the company] doesn't have to spend a lot of money on telemarketing, junk mail or trade shows," he added.

The next level is the Independent Referral Agent that has an informal relationship with Whaleback where they don't have to know anything about the company and is not associated with any Premier Partner. These agents do a referral about once a month and acts as a part time job.

The third level is the Certified Partner Agent (CPA). Zwicker explained that these agents are recruited by Whaleback and are trained, tested and certified by them to work with designated Premier Partners. These agents do about two or more referrals in a month and have to sign an agent agreement with Whaleback, who then tracks their performance.

CPAs get access to a secure partner extranet site where they get quotation and proposal boiler plate material, competitive analysis and all the sales resources that Whaleback gives to their partners with sales reps on staff.

"When they do referrals, instead of $500 a pop, it could be worth several thousand a pop," Zwicker said.

He explained that CPAs get a share of the upfront revenue when a customer signs on and they also get a piece of the commission for the full four-year length of the service contract with Whaleback.

Depending on how the sales agents perform, the commission sharing between the partner and the agent at the lowest level will be a ratio of 25 per cent for the agent and 75 per cent for the partner. Mid-level is one-third to the agent and two-thirds to the partner and at the high performance level, commission sharing is a 50-50 split.

On average, Zwicker said Premier partners have two to six sales agents that act as an extension of their company. Participation in the Sales Agent program is completely voluntary but Zwicker said partners can benefit because the sales agents are not part of their company and don't have to allocate payroll or benefits to them and they would only be paying them out of the commissions they receive from Whaleback anyways.

"This way they are not committed to employees so if business goes down they don't have to terminate people and if it goes up, they can add quickly. [Sales agents] are contractors that add value [to their company]," noted Zwicker. "[The Sales Agent program] is a way to help some partners ramp their business and others to grow their business."