Programs are integrated endeavors aimed at stimulating sales.
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Programs create sales urgency often with offers that are made available for some limited period of time and can be aimed at customers, salespeople, or partners and channels. I've run programs aimed at all of these audiences.
At Lucent, we wanted to encourage customers to replace outdated equipment from competitors with the new Lucent PortMaster 4. I rolled-out a trade-in program that offered '96 ports for free' (an effective 33%, $20K discount). Our goal was to get a chassis into more customer network operation centers. Then, over time, these centers would buy more ports and more chasses. Before Lucent had purchased our company (Livingston Enterprises), I had run Livingston's marketing programs helping to drive the previous year's strong revenue growth.
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I've spent a significant amount of time running sales programs as seen here with the Cisco Foundation Advantage Sales Program. Foundation Advantage was a $1.3B per year in revenue program that migrated network equipment customers from outdated Cisco or competitive products to new Cisco products. The program involved discounts, leasing, trade-ins, and sales incentives.
Enabling the field and partners with whitepapers, datasheet, presentations, demo, etc. are fundamental requirements of Marketing. For instance, I did a joint whitepaper with Intel when I was at BEA that demonstrated the additional value realized by running BEA middleware software on Intel-based servers. Intel was one of BEA's most important partners, funding development and marketing activities that BEA could leverage. BEA and Intel salespeople used this whitepaper to encourage customers to consider Intel based servers when deploying BEA middleware. Over the course of several years, marketing activities like this helped Intel move from supporting a single digit percentage to a 40% share of the BEA middleware server market.
