Cisco this week announced Comstor as the winner of the 2020 Cisco Marketing Velocity North American Disti Innovator Award. This award is given to Cisco partners who executed outstanding marketing initiatives using digital, social, and omnichannel approaches and notably contributed to the Cisco ecosystem in doing so. Comstor was recognized for its EDGE (Engage – Develop – Grow – Extend) Progression Program, and its newest asset, the EDGE Focus Tool.
“Comstor achieved amazing results this year in terms of recruiting new partners to Cisco, driving substantial sales growth in the small and medium business space, and using data to uncover very focused enablement offerings for our reseller partners,” stated Molly Sherwood, Senior Director, Marketing at SYNNEX, following the award announcement. “I do not think Comstor would have achieved this level of success without Cisco’s continued support of our EDGE program.”
The EDGE Progression Program is an intentional and focused marketing and business development asset for Comstor. It aims to recruit new partners to the Cisco community, enable those partners to effectively sell Cisco architecture solutions, drive their demand generation pipeline, and expand partners’ Cisco customer experience practice. Comstor helps achieve this by providing partners with a dedicated team of Cisco architecture experts. With customer experience at the focus of the program, Comstor offers educational content and tools to these partners and works hand-in-hand with them to accelerate the growth of their business.
The recent launch of the EDGE Focus Tool has enhanced the abilities of this program by equipping the Comstor marketing team to utilize vast amounts of Cisco and SYNNEX partner data to pinpoint the target partners. As a result, partners in the EDGE Progression Program grew 83 percent year-over-year, which is 50 percent faster than non-EDGE partners.
Sherwood told us that this win was truly a team effort for Comstor, with overlapping support from business development, inside and outside sales, partner business management, and, of course, marketing. “There is a culture here at Comstor that encourages successful alignment across departments, and it’s one of the key competitive advantages of this organization.”
A key element of the EDGE Progression Program’s success has been its go-to-market strategy, according to Sherwood. “EDGE really is an industry-leading partner program,” she said, reflecting on the program’s recognition and visibility from even before she joined the team. “I think sometimes companies think they need to come up with something totally new every year, but we’ve been riding the EDGE message for years, evolving and adapting it to what it is today. It works.”
You can learn more about the award-winning EDGE Progression Program here.
