HPE Launches Digital Marketing Pilot, Taking Lead Generation Into ‘21st Century’

‘It is really taking our digital research and lead generation into the 21st century,’ says HPE North America Managing Director Paul Hunter. ‘It is leading to a great number of new customer calls, building relationships with new contacts and new customers, and just really expanding the breadth of our relationships with our customers and bringing our partners into the fold to do that.’

Hewlett Packard Enterprise has launched a breakthrough digital marketing pilot program that provides partners with advanced customer analytics as part of a plan to drive digital marketing demand generation into the “21st century,” said HPE North America Managing Director Paul Hunter.

Hunter said he was “excited” about the new digital marketing demand generation program that involves just a handful of partners.

The program is aimed is aimed at connecting partners with buyers who are searching for specific business outcomes.

“We’re working with our digital partners to understand what searches are taking place, connecting keyword searches with our customers, and then sharing that opportunity with our partners,” said Hunter.

The pilot program defines specific partner expertise around areas like risk and compliance and then connects that expertise to customer searches, said Hunter.

“It is really taking our digital research and lead generation into the 21st century,” he said. “It is leading to a great number of new customer calls, building relationships with new contacts and new customers, and just really expanding the breadth of our relationships with our customers and bringing our partners into the fold to do that.”

HPE is working with a limited number of partners before it scales the program, said Hunter. “We’ve got a sizable investment we are making from a marketing standpoint,” he said.

“We are working with a few partners to make sure it is meaningful and that it can scale,” said Hunter. “Then we’ll build out the partners that we work with based on the opportunities that we see. That is really dependent on partners investing in the right areas. What I mean by that is having the capability to ‘cloudify’ an experience for customers.”

One of the companies in the pilot program is CBTS, No.33 on the 2020 CRN Solution Provider 500, the $1 billion HPE Platinum partner with 1,500 engineers and 2,800 technology certifications.

Steve Lankard, vice president and principal of the infrastructure solutions practice at CBTS, said the HPE analytics-based lead generation program is a breakthrough.

“HPE is using some pretty cool tools to find out the behavior of potential buyers and what those buyers are interested in and then they are sharing that information with us on those accounts we are jointly targeting, whether it is our installed base or acquisition accounts,” he said.

The new analytics program is a marked improvement over past lead generation efforts, said Lankard. “With these web analytics you can tell if the customer is looking on the web for certain types of topics and then we can try to target them with the solutions that HPE and CBTS can bring to those customers,” he said. “It is a new approach, leveraging analytics in prospecting and targeting. I am absolutely bullish that this is going to increase the success of the campaigns we are running with HPE.”

Hunter, for his part, said the key to the digital marketing lead generation pilot program is partners connecting specific solution sets with customer needs.

“It’s dependent on the intelligence of connecting your solution with a customer need,” he said. “The better the connection, the more scalable the insight, the better the return. It is something that has a lot of potential.”