677 Streamline Vendor Management and MSP Marketing with XAmplify

[Uncle Marv]
Hello friends, Uncle Marv here with another episode of the IT Business Podcast powered by NetAlly, the show where we try to help you as an MSP or an IT service provider run your business better, smarter, and faster. Well, for this episode, we have another vendor profile for IT Nation's PitchIT program. And today we are looking at xAmplify, a company that offers various solutions for channel marketing, partner relationship management, and through channel marketing automation.

So this will be an interesting chat. And I have with me the co-founder and CEO Sudhir Nambiar. Sudhir, how are you?

[Sudhir Nambiar]
I'm doing good, Marvin. How are you?

[Uncle Marv]
I am doing pretty, pretty good. So xAmplify, it didn't quite roll off my tongue as well as it should have, but in terms of marketing automation and stuff like that, that all sounds pretty interesting.

[Sudhir Nambiar]
Yeah. I mean, it is an interesting couple of more few features that are highlights that we should have said is we are probably one of the few platforms that enable co-marketing and co-selling for MSPs.

[Uncle Marv]
Okay. So in a sense, we can just simply log into the platform. Is it a white label situation or a co-branding where we can throw our logo in with your stuff and kind of connect with things like HubSpot, Salesforce, all of that?

[Sudhir Nambiar]
Absolutely. So let me back off a little bit. Obviously you're using HubSpot, Salesforce, all your PSAs, CRM, anything that you're using.

Obviously that is where you keep your lead opportunities, customers, all those information. You probably are using HubSpot marketing or Marketo or Eloqua or any of these kind of systems or I should give some credit to Sean Lardo who reminded me that ConnectWise uses a platform called Glass Hive. Somehow we compete with them, but again, they use that.

So in our case, we are a marketing and sales automation platform, which allows an MSP to do co-branded campaigns. If on an average, an MSP works with 10 to 15 vendors today, if you look at it, they log into 10 to 15 vendor portals to do deal registrations, to get content about those individual vendors. Probably sometimes they can allow co-branding, sometimes they don't.

In our case, all of these things, all this multi... So now again, I'm just going a little technical. It's like a multi-tenancy situation, right?

You have a multi-vendor situation now, but somehow you had to log in 15 places, not in one place. So this is where we start coming and saying, okay, in this place, you log into your place, all these 15 different vendors can actually create their own instances, give it to you. One place which is connected, if you do a deal registration in any of the vendors, it not only goes into those vendor CRMs, but it also goes into your CRM, your PSA, your ConnectWise, your Halo PSA, whatever PSA you're using, it goes into both the places at the same time.

So you're not duplicating, you're not diluting your leads. Now at least you can say, I have a sales funnel. As an MSP, when you're selling different products, which is part of a solution using four different products, where does your lead list lie?

Four different places.

[Uncle Marv]
So let me kind of understand a little bit myself more clearly. This isn't just simply creating marketing. This is more or less managing the leads that come in, managing your deals.

So I assume that there's a way to help us close deals better and faster?

[Sudhir Nambiar]
Oh, 100%, right? Because see now, at least if your deals are in one place, you see it, you know who to approach, which vendor should be coming with you to help if you want. There are topics again, so today if you look at it, again, now, again, if I dial back a little bit, if you look at MSP business, every thought leader, every marketing or business consultant, everybody suggests that, hey, you need to go deep in your subject area.

You go off, do not go all over the place. I mean, all this kind of great stuff, but how much, right? How do I get new customers?

My biggest problem is, obviously, my big one problem is retaining my existing customers. Retaining existing customers, retaining my existing employees. What if somebody leaves?

My worry is not that when they leave and join Deloitte or something, I don't have a problem at all. My problem is when they join the company, which is probably a mile down the street. That's where my problems start, because that's when I start losing my customers.

Anyway, so having said that, if I'm working with four different vendors, four different solutions, if I'm adding newer technology to my offerings, who would be the best ones to help me close it so I can start closing my deals much faster once I have everything in one place? Today, it is all scattered across. I'm not sure where do I focus.

[Uncle Marv]
Then here's my question. If we're talking about co-marketing with our vendors, we're talking about doing our deal registrations there. What about the clients that we're marketing to or we're prospecting that maybe don't fall under a vendor deal?

[Sudhir Nambiar]
You can... Again, co-marketing is just a feature. You definitely can do your marketing as well.

You can do... Yeah. We have multiple agencies on our platform.

You can pick and choose anybody. You can engage with them. They can help you market it.

You can do all of those things. You can use your own agencies as well, but also you can use the vendor-provided collaterals and contents as well, which can allow you to actually not only just think of marketing as a cost, but you can also think about it as a revenue source. You can do MDF reports.

You run campaigns and go after those vendors and say what you're doing, and they can see if they're on the platform. If not, you can tell them why you're helping them market their product and why they should be compensating you for that.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. So it seems that we started off with one of the questions that I normally save for later as to what makes you different. So obviously this automation with the vendors makes you different.

So let's go back and talk about the other features of Exemplify.

[Sudhir Nambiar]
Okay. Like, which other features would we talk? We have...

[Uncle Marv]
Well, let's just start from the very beginning in terms of if it's, you know, it helps with automation for marketing. So what are the types of things that a normal MSP would do marketing-wise?

[Sudhir Nambiar]
You would be probably doing an email marketing, email campaign, video marketing, social media campaigns. You would do surveys. You could do...

All of these things can be done integrated within the platform. You could actually have, you know, some of your partners, some of your allied MSPs. If you have not started being friends with other MSPs who complimentary services can do, you could add them as your partners within the platform.

You could do co-marketing with them if you want to, because you are yourself doing co-marketing for you. You could work with vendors. Apart from this, the most important, as I said, is the visibility element that you get right from what you're doing, contact analytics.

We have on behalf of you, within an MSP, I mean, if you have four people, five people, you could have a corporate account where you don't have to be sending it. You could have an admin sending campaigns on behalf of you, sending everything safe and secure. So you could use it that way.

For sales analytics, you can use it. You could do sales cadences. You could run campaigns that are multi-touch campaigns running on a scheduled, you know, some updates and things like that.

You could do that.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. So let me ask a couple of little deeper questions. You talked about being able to run the campaigns from here.

If you're doing social media marketing, I know that one of the things that we're taught is to not run the same thing on each different platform, you know, LinkedIn, Facebook, X, all of that stuff. So if you create a campaign, are you doing the same campaign to all or can you tailor it a little bit?

[Sudhir Nambiar]
Oh, you can tailor it completely yourself. See it's up to, if you are running your campaign, you can have the same message all over the place. You can have it different in different places.

You decide how you want to do it. In fact, we give you, we are just a platform and you can actually pick and choose. Now, if you are using any of our marketing partners, agency partners, they probably would also suggest the same thing.

You do the same message, might be different. It could be, it would be better if you don't use scanned messages. We are not providing you a bunch of messages, which we keep circulating among different MSPs.

We don't do that because you don't need it. If you want to do that, just call, ask some vendors, they'll provide you the same as well. You don't have to pay for anything.

You could just get it from them.

[Uncle Marv]
Okay. So we're just paying for the platform. Now, you guys do allow for things like video hosting, you can help create landing pages and stuff, right?

[Sudhir Nambiar]
Oh yeah. We have landing pages, we have our form modules, you could, ours is a bidirectional sync between your CRMs to the marketing automation to vendor CRMs as well, external to your organization. You control what you want to show it to the vendor, you control how you want to show it to your vendors.

You could actually create your partner page in every MSP. I mean, you would have a partner page with all the vendor logos, right? You create that whole page on our platform.

You could just do that. So you decide which vendor I'm going to show and you, this is a dynamic page, which you can control on the platform itself.

[Uncle Marv]
Interesting.

[Sudhir Nambiar]
Yeah. It's a, it's, that's pretty interesting. That's pretty new as well, but it is more focused for a scenario where there is an MSP or partners or SIs or agents or whatever category you want to put it.

Somebody who's selling somebody else's products.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. And then what about list management?

[Sudhir Nambiar]
Completely, completely modern again. So you could do any type of list management. In fact, the fun piece on our platform is when you upload your list, we automatically do a validation for your list.

It is inbuilt in the platform. Your list is always validated. It'll tell you these are, you know, you know, these accounts are spam prone and this is not.

We do all of those things so that your domains are protected. We help you with the DKIM, DMARC, SPF record, everything, which I don't need. I don't think so I need to help anybody, but we do have it, but we have a, we have a very technical team.

Okay. They can help you as well. All right.

[Uncle Marv]
Very nice. That is a service that validation, I think a lot of people have trouble with because we got to go scrub the list somewhere.

[Sudhir Nambiar]
Exactly. Yeah. This is, it's pretty, pretty awesome.

Not only that, you, your account is capable to receive leads from your vendors. If you have partners, you can share leads. These are all protected leads.

Once somebody shares a lead to you, you will see the complete activity happening on that lead. You could do all of those features and functions on the platform itself. Nice.

[Uncle Marv]
All right.

[Sudhir Nambiar]
Now I- This is, so we are fairly, fairly new, again, we as a, as a company, we are not new. We are four, four and a half years, but so far we have been selling mostly to the vendors because they use us as their partner portal. So there are a lot of MSPs who would be already using our platform.

[Uncle Marv]
Right.

[Sudhir Nambiar]
They just don't know that they have an alternative to buy the platform from us directly. So one worry you can just take it off from your mind is your contacts are going to be seen by the, by any vendors apart from you. You can see, you can do, you can do this thing.

On our platform, once you upgrade your account or once you subscribe to us, your leads would be exactly the same thing, but nobody else can see it unless or until you give them deal reg or something like that.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. Well, let me ask you this question, since you, you opened up the can of worms for me that you guys were using this with vendors already. Let me start with the first part is why open this up to regular MSPs?

[Sudhir Nambiar]
I, I started my career as an MSP. I learned this whole channel business as a partner working with all these vendors, never was happy. I, I had these issues where my contacts are given to my competitors.

I have issues. I mean, you know, I had all, all, all sorts of funny things. That's why I thought, okay, we should do something about this.

We started this platform initially had to, had to learn and had to make sure that, you know, it is capable enough for a vendor to use it, for a partner to use it. It was always there because we, we, we just, we built it from a partner partner's point of view. I am, I am an MSP.

I know the challenges. I know the difficulty of getting a new customer. I know the difficulty of keeping those customers.

I know the challenges. How do we lose the customer? I mean, how do you lose a customer who you work for like two, three years?

What happens? All of a sudden, what happens, right? There are situations that happens where, which you don't know, and a lot of time you'd see that the data has been leaked out and you did not, you were just got flat footed.

You didn't know what to do. So I, so that is how we have built it. So we, we started working with the vendors.

It's going fairly okay with the vendors that they're using. A lot of them are using it, but now we probably a six months back, we started working with ConnectWise for an integration with their RMM and PSA. We have started working with all other RMM PSA as well.

I mean, right now our Halo PSA is also live. So what we do is we wanted to make sure that it was just not an additional small benefit for an MSP. It needs to have a very business driven, like you could see now your entire pipeline in one place.

We are doing all the integration. These are all part of it. So you can just see all your pipelines, all the content.

It is co-marketable; it is a co-sales activity is handled. You can do all your leads, deals in your CRM, your PSA. So it is not going and seen by somebody else.

You're not just having sales guys coming and going. You have salespeople, they will be selling for something after three months, you might let them go. They might leave.

Things happen and you don't even know your leads are lying somewhere else. What do you do with that?

[Uncle Marv]
All right.

[Sudhir Nambiar]
I mean, you have to be at least aware of it. I mean, all these great marketing techniques that people talk about, it's fantastic, but then it has to be in one place.

[Uncle Marv]
Yep. It has to be in one place, manageable by you. All right.

Now, are there any differences between what the vendors get and what the MSPs get?

[Sudhir Nambiar]
Oh, no. Okay. The vendors get to see how many of their MSPs are active, what are they doing, whom should they help, whom should they proactively call and help?

They can't just call you after every two weeks in a cadence, right? I mean, if you look at every day, there is some vendor who has a cadence call with you. I mean, what are you going to update with them?

Instead, this just flips it around and says, okay, I'm active, my prospects are active on the campaigns. You might want to give me a call and say, hey, use this next one, do this, do that. You have more marketers than me.

I'm just a small MSP.

[Uncle Marv]
Nice. All right. So Sudhir, this all sounds great.

And you've got a mission, I think, to enable these intelligent solutions to help us grow our business and come up with managing our revenue growth and closing more deals. So it sounds great.

[Sudhir Nambiar]
Yeah. I mean, absolutely. I mean, the two things, as I said, one more feature which would come is the multi-tenancy from a sales marketing approach, that you're logging into your account and you're seeing all your vendors in one place.

That's how you will do. I mean, you want to build a system that way, I mean, not the other way around. That's one.

The other thing is, as you said, yeah, I mean, I definitely hope that we can help. I mean, we are helping a lot of MSPs, partners, different communities. Because, again, I'm sure one of the favorite topics you have is EBITDA and the acquisitions and all of these things.

Once you go to the next level of conversation, the first conversation is always good, always nice. Okay. Are you X million dollars and above or whatever?

And then before writing the check, they'll say your revenue growth is not very conversive. I mean, it's very toxic because you have exposure to few customers. Absolutely.

Right. You would. I mean, as an MSP, you would have few customers you're deep in, and then the rest of them are there.

But they're just known by everybody. So I'm hoping the more and more you start, you have systems that are open, you can work with different type of vendors. For example, VMware, the price increase issue that is going on right now, perfect opportunity for all MSPs to add new logos.

If you had an alternative for VMware, and there are so many companies who have alternative for VMware, why not use it? Yeah.

[Uncle Marv]
Nice.

[Sudhir Nambiar]
So those kind of things. I mean, those are things that is very, very visible on a platform, very easy, very fast, very quick.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. Sudhir sounds great. For those listening here, I'm going to have the link to the website, XAmplify on the show notes page.

Of course, you'll be hearing about them all summer as part of the PitchIT program. XAmplify, the ultimate marketing automation tool, and basically a place to keep all your marketing and vendor deal management places, tools in one place. Of course, you can do regular marketing through there, collaterals, co-marketing campaigns.

But it all sounds great. All right. So Sudhir, I wish you good luck the rest of the summer here and hope to see you in Orlando at IT Nation Connect.

[Sudhir Nambiar]
Absolutely. Thanks a lot for this opportunity, Marvin, and I hope to see you as well in Orlando and any of the other events from now till Orlando.

[Uncle Marv]
Yep.

[Sudhir Nambiar]
Almost all the events, we will be there.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. Great. We'll be looking for you out there.

So there you have it, folks. Sudhir Nambiar from XAmplify. Check him out.

And vote for them as part of the PitchIT program. That'll do it for this episode and this vendor profile. Be looking for some others as we go through the rest of the summer, highlighting the PitchIT contestants.

And of course, you can always check out the rest of the podcast over at ITBusinessPodcast.com. That's going to do it for now. We'll see you next time.

And until then, holla!