Nortel’s New Marketing Bureau Helps Channels Increase Revenue

LONDON – Nortel* [NYSE/TSX: NT] is making it easier for its UK and Ireland channel partners to quickly capitalise on new revenue opportunities with the introduction of the Nortel Channel Marketing Bureau. The Bureau offers channel partners a suite of fully managed, co-branded, co-funded lead generation campaigns that can be up and running in as little as five days. Each campaign focuses on a strategic technology, such as Unified Communications, enabling channels to maximise on market opportunities. Results to-date show channel partners realising a return on investment in as little as three months from the start of a campaign.

The Marketing Bureau has been set up with all the creative materials on-hand, ready to be co-branded. This means that once a channel partner has worked with their Nortel channel marketing manager to identify their target audience, they can sit back while Second2, Nortel’s specialist channel marketing agency, manages the co-branding, execution and rollout of the campaign. Partners can then focus their efforts exclusively on following up on leads, meeting with customers and closing deals.

During the pilot project for the Marketing Bureau earlier this year, two Nortel channel partners - 1st Comms and Midland Telecom - realised a 1:28 return on investment on their campaigns, with every pound spent garnering 28 pounds of revenue. This month, Eircom, which used the Marketing Bureau to promote a seminar as part of its Meridian 1 upgrade campaign achieved a 19 percent registration rate in response to invitations to participate in the seminar.

“My team’s job at Nortel is to help our channels be successful,” said Tony Bailey, vice president UK and Ireland channels, Nortel. “Channel partners specialise in understanding customer’s individual challenges and designing and implementing solutions to meet their needs. This leaves them little time to run marketing campaigns. The Marketing Bureau is designed to make it easy for them to run campaigns with minimum hassle, ultimately giving them more time to spend with customers.”

Campaigns are co-branded and packaged for each partner and may include a series of HTML emails, direct mail, a campaign web landing page, online registration, a collateral download tool and telemarketing. Each partner has access to their own secure reporting tool allowing them to track success.

“We found the Marketing Bureau incredibly easy to use,” said Martin Cross, business development manager, Connect. “We were pleased by the speed with which real, actionable leads came in, and delighted when we closed our first deal in just three months.”

“We used the Marketing Bureau to run a Unified Communications campaign over 12 weeks,” said Mark Hyland, director of business development, Unified Group. “And we’re currently following up on 33 leads off the back of it - a great result - and that’s before the additional pull through business that has come in.”

“The Marketing Bureau is an important component of our UK and Ireland marketing plan,” said Andy Grant, UK regional marketing leader, Nortel. “Having it focused on strategic technologies, such as Unified Communications, gives our channel partners the opportunity to grow their business as well as helping Nortel extend its marketing reach.”

About Nortel

Nortel is a recognized leader in delivering communications capabilities that make the promise of Business Made Simple a reality for our customers. Our next-generation technologies, for both service provider and enterprise networks, support multimedia and business-critical applications. Nortel’s technologies are designed to help eliminate today’s barriers to efficiency, speed and performance by simplifying networks and connecting people to the information they need, when they need it. Nortel does business in more than 150 countries around the world. For more information, visit Nortel on the Web at www.nortel.com. For the latest Nortel news, visit www.nortel.com/news.

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