RackForce Engages eCoast for Cloud Appointment Setting Campaign

RackForce is a leading provider of cloud infrastructure. Based in Canada, but with an international presence in dozens of countries, RackForce has prospered with the rising interest in cloud products and services. Some of that interest is due to the heightened state of cloud awareness. But RackForce is unique among cloud vendors because it offers services in two categories: It can set up a client for secure cloud hosting, or it can provide the client with “cloud-ready” data center infrastructure to enable them to host their own cloud.

“In terms of the perception of the cloud – its stability and how the cloud can lower IT costs – we are clearly at the point of broad acceptance,” said Brian Fry, RackForce’s vice president of marketing. “One of the last obstacles has really been overcoming clients’ security concerns. Some IT personnel want to host and maintain their own datacenters, because they think it’s more secure. But we now have the ability to make cloud applications and cloud access more secure than hosting your own data center, and with “hybrid options” both types of data centers can be used. That’s been very persuasive to even the most reluctant prospect, and it has won us new customers.”

With 35 employees, RackForce has developed a remarkable capacity to deliver its products and services internationally. The Company is extremely confident of its ability to close business, once it gets in front of the appropriate decision maker. But within the last year, RackForce felt the need for more sales capacity, specifically in terms of meeting face-to-face with key prospects.

RackForce reached out through its Cisco partnership (and its relationship with Long View, a noted Cisco Value Added Reseller) to determine if there was a preferred vendor who could provide a professional demand generation effort, to accelerate the volume and quality of contacts with key executives at prospect companies. Cisco immediately referred RackForce to eCoast, and now RackForce and eCoast have been engaged in a highly productive relationship for almost a year.

Based in New Hampshire, eCoast is an outsourced sales and channel- marketing agency focused on executing highly customized demand generation programs that result in increased net new revenue for their clients. Since 2000, eCoast has provided a wide-range of IT providers with marketing services including appointment setting.

“We have worked extensively with RackForce to understand the unique customer qualification criteria needed to identify the best opportunities for their cloud-based solutions,” said Will Gibney eCoast’s vice president of sales and marketing. “We developed messaging that specifically targeted conversations with Business Line Managers and IT professionals, and that messaging focused on how RackForce solutions provide better ways to solve the challenges that these businesses faced every day.”

eCoast’s callers comprehensively qualified prospects and booked face-to-face appointments, while supplying the lead data directly to RackForce for more follow-up.

“We work with a team of eight appointment setters from eCoast,” noted Fry. “Each time a call is made on our behalf, we receive details of the conversation in an HTML record. We initially had a brief mismatch of leads with respect to our service offerings, but we corrected it immediately. eCoast was extremely responsive, and we immediately refined the campaign.

“The shift to a cloud-based solution can be confusing for many buyers and eCoast worked with RackForce to understand what was needed to create opportunity, drive customer adoption, and help grow their cloud-based solutions business,” said Gibney.

“In one recent successful effort, we orchestrated our outreach across multiple channels,” Fry added. “We presented a webinar, which we combined with an email marketing effort, all supported by ongoing calls from the eCoast team. We can report a very good return on investment for all of our efforts.”

The appointment setting service that eCoast provides is not what you might imagine from a typical telemarketing company.

“eCoast truly collaborates with us on all of our efforts, and they bring their substantial expertise to help us achieve our sales goals,” Fry explained. “We really feel as though we are all on the same team, even though eCoast is an outsource provider.” The result?
“We have a lot of deals in motion as a result of the eCoast efforts. These are deals we may not have seen otherwise. Plus, the eCoast efforts have broadened our relationship with Long View, a Cisco VAR, and we are now also working more closely with them as part of these efforts that eCoast is managing. We have repeatedly renewed our efforts with eCoast whenever we have had the chance, and we see even more opportunity for the future.”
 

RackForce Overview

RackForce Networks is a privately held ICT service provider based in Kelowna B.C., Canada. Founded in 2001 by entrepreneurs Tim Dufour and Brian Fry, RackForce supports thousands of customers from over 100 countries.

RackForce’s roots are based in Internet infrastructure hosting where it has earned a reputation for leadership and innovation. RackForce has consistently provided market leading services by selectively leveraging emerging technologies to provide cost effective, innovative offerings. For example, as early adopters of virtualization, Linux and open source management platforms, RackForce has provided more function and performance for the dollar than its larger peers.

In the 2005-2007 period, RackForce developed strategic relationships with major technology leaders, such as Microsoft, IBM, Cisco Systems and VMware. This enables RackForce to have early access to game-changing intelligence, products and technologies. RackForce translated these advantages into the development of new enterprise- class services, revising its capabilities to focus more directly on the enterprise market.
Today its services are represented in ‘4 Pillars’ infrastructure services portfolio. The Company focuses totally on infrastructure services - up to, and including the Operating System layer. RackForce’s mission is to provide industry leading services that enable organizations to buy infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solutions, in a cost effective and flexible model, leveraging to as large an extent as practical, the latest technologies and innovations. It delivers these services from RackForce’s new class-leading ‘GigaCenter’ data center in Kelowna, as well as at its secondary Kelowna facility and one in Toronto. Learn more: www.RackForce.com