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Voodoo Team Cluster, Phoenix, AZ—Many Mitel Authorized Partners began as Inter-Tel dealers and sold that company’s popular and reliable Axxess phone system.

Early this year, when Mitel announced the end of product support for Axxess systems, Voodoo helped numerous Mitel partners create and launch special campaigns to their installed bases of customers to convey the news.

Without exception, participating partners using these Voodoo eVideo campaigns reported $100,000 or more in “easy upgrade” business within 2 months of their campaign launches.

Don Barrett of Gibson Teldata in Indianapolis, Indiana, reported over $106,000 in upgrades in their initial tally, with more expected in 2015.

Jim Rabbitt of Partners Technology in Braintree, Massachusetts, reported over $100,000 as well. “We landed an incredible 10 upgrades out of a possible upgrade list of 109,” said Rabbitt.  “The campaign generated $40,000 in new upgrades right away.  We’d had six more potential upgrades sitting inert in the pipeline and the campaign helped move them forward.”

The lucky group of Mitel resellers worked with Voodoo Marketing Services Director Michele Riley, leveraging Voodoo Business Builder systems subsidized with MDF from Mitel. 

“Voodoo and Michele are big assets and very, very helpful to me and my organization,” said Rabbitt.  “Best of all, this campaign is only one of many we are launching this year through Voodoo. We’ve already paid for our Voodoo system 20 times over.”

The Voodoo Team tries hard to make Voodoo easy enough for anyone to use and get immediate and ongoing results.  But sometimes when you look under the hood, it can feel a little complicated.  

The Voodoo QuickTips Blog offers a searchable archive of articles and resources on almost any challenge you can think of.  Click here to visit the blog.  And don't forget to bookmark the page!

You'll be a Voodoo Superuser in no time...

St. Cloud, MN —  Government agencies, school districts and non-profit organizations struggle with their purchases of telecom hardware and services. High costs and time-consuming bidding processes (required by law) only add to their challenges.  

One of the midwest's largest telecom resellers, Marco Inc., has partnered with the National Joint Powers Alliance (NJPA) and Voodoo Viral Marketing Systems (Voodoo) to help solve these problems.

In 2011, the NJPA, a national contracting cooperative, sent out a Request For Proposal (RFP) for Unified Communications services.  They solicited bids from numerous top telecom manufacturers.  Billion-dollar Canadian manufacturer Mitel Networks won the bid, based on a combination of innovative hardware, excellent service and value-based pricing. The resulting NJPA contract establishes legally pre-bid discount prices for UC products and makes them available to all NJPA members free of charge. Members can utilize the NJPA contract to purchase Mitel hardware and services at dramatically reduced prices, eliminating the need for a proposal process. 

"Many governmental organizations find themselves working under tight timeframes where an RFP process isn't practical," said Jason Becker of Marco. "In these situations, a contract that has been pre-bid and approved is a godsend. The ability to bypass RFP and bidding requirements is a huge advantage," Becker said.

As a Mitel reseller, Marco recognized the importance of the NJPA contract for its own clientele. They chose Voodoo's Automated Video Communications platform to produce, personalize and distribute a series of videos explaining the value of the NJPA contract.  

"Voodoo produced a series of video case studies to demonstrate the power of NJPA in real-world situations," said Barry Opatz, VP of Marketing for Marco, Inc. 

Two organizations were featured in the videos.  The City of St. Cloud, Minnesota, leveraged the NJPA contract to purchase new technology in advance of a critical deadline. (Watch case study by clicking here.)   The Pueblo School District in Colorado estimated they will save some $400,000 because of discounts received through the NJPA contract. (Watch case study by clicking here.)*

"We've seen how important the NJPA contract can be to cities, school districts and other non-profits," Opatz said. "By producing these videos, and distributing them through our Voodoo system, we are reaching more people with a personal touch and spreading the word about Marco, NJPA and Mitel.  It's a win-win-win as far as we're concerned," said Opatz.

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*Note: these video examples play in Marco and Jason Becker's custom-branded and personalized video frame.  Each Marco representative has their own personalized frame, dynamically generated by the Voodoo system.

Phoenix, AZ—Voodoo Viral Marketing Systems has introduced a new QuickTips feed on twitter that is open to active Voodoo users and the general public.  

"Twitter is an effective way to serve our user community with real-time info and updates regarding our platform, as well as best practices for digital marketing and communications," said Angela Servino, Drector of Customer Service & Training at Voodoo.

The QuickTips feed is one of numerous ways Voodoo focuses on excellent customer service.  "The percentage of Voodoo users reporting high satisfaction is well over 90%, and this is one more tool we'll use to keep it that way," Servino said.

To subscribe to the new feed, click here and then click the Follow link. 

San Francisco, CA—Voodoo Viral Marketing Systems announced today that its integration with Salesforce.com  has moved out of a 3-month beta-testing stage and into production.  Many users of Voodoo's popular Automated Video Communications platform requested that Voodoo and Salesforce be connected.

"We always listen to our customers, and the number one request we got in 2013 was Salesforce connectivity," said Voodoo co-founder and Director of Platform Development Rick Davis.  "Sales reps want Voodoo's features in their SFDC toolset, while marketing and sales executives need visibility into their reps' Voodoo activities," Davis said.

The integration process began with a simple "Import Contacts from Salesforce" feature inside the Voodoo interface, and rapidly grew from there.  In the newly updated version, whichever Voodoo platform the user subscribes to is readily accessible from a tab in their SFDC account, with all features active.  All of Voodoo's automated outreach can be posted to each contact's Activity History in Salesforce.

“Voodoo has personally brought me about a million-and-a-half dollars worth of business," said David Budke, a long-term Voodoo user and Application Specialst with Integra Telecom. "Meshing Voodoo with Salesforce is the best of both worlds. It brings the powerful capabilities of the Voodoo system into the CRM tracking mechanism. That's what I need, and just as importantly, that's what Integra's sales management team demands,” Budke said. (To watch an interview with David Budke about his experiences as a Voodoo user, click here.)

For more information about the benefits of Voodoo and Salesforce, visit the Voodoo Viral website at www.voodooviral.com or call 949-309-2847 ext. 1. 

Rochester, NY—Allworx is a wholly owned subsidiary of Windstream Communications and a leader in VoIP Phone Systems and Unified Communications Solutions.  Each year, Allworx introduces innovative, award-winning telephony products and services, and sells them through a group of savvy partners they refer to as Apex Resellers.

Allworx' sales and marketing team, led by Jason Beckett and Sydney Burton, has followed equally innovative ways to market and sell their products.  Video has been a strong and successful tool, using a combination of informative privately hosted videos and entertaining publicly available clips on YouTube.    

Deploying video at the corporate level is one thing, but deploying it through resellers can get complicated and often leads to inconsistencies that dilute corporate branding for the benefit of the resellers.  How to standardize and professionalize every reseller's use of video while allowing those VARs the co-branding opportunities they demand?  

Enter the Voodoo platform, which offers a full-featured content and campaign management tool called the Voodoo Campaign Manager and the eVideo Launcher, a foolproof campaign-sending tool for users who don't have the time or patience for a learning curve.

These two tools allow Allworx to solve their channel enablement challenges with minimal effort and cost.  The marketing team creates one set of email, video and other content in their Voodoo Campaign Manager, pre-building complete campaigns for the resellers to use.

Resellers then use the eVideo Launcher to broadcast those pre-built campaigns to their contact and customer lists. Resellers love it because with Voodoo, it takes less than 5 minutes for a brand new user to choose a campaign to send, upload a recipient list, select the Automated Action Alerts they want to receive, and click Send.  Every email and video is dynamically co-branded for the reseller with contact personalization right down to the rep level—automagically.  

Imagine that: Scores of resellers get exactly what they want in a channel promotional tool—ease of use, innovative video messaging, and real-time open and video view notifications.  The manufacturer gets exactly what it wants—control of content, professionalism and branding compliance, real-time trackability, PLUS the communications power of video.  Everyone involved wins, selling way more with way less effort. 

Orange County, CA—Mariner's Church is one of Southern California's fastest-growing churches.  It's growth and success depends on the personal and transformational work accomplished in intimate settings called "Rooted" groups.  One of the church's major challenges is how to train new Rooted group leaders quickly and effectively, leveraging the knowledge of more experienced facilitators.

Enter Voodoo, which solved the challenge using only the church's existing library of underutilized training videos and the Voodoo Automated Video Communications platform.  Voodoo allows an administrator to pull up a bookmarked Capture Form and drop in the contact information of new facilitators.  No need to log in.

Voodoo then "drips" each week's required training and coaching to new facilitators.  The interface includes:

1) the weekly training video

2) a series of questions and prompts and

3) a survey assessing the value and success of that week's training.

Launching the series via Voodoo offers other vital features including access to "Cumulative Knowledge." This allows recipients to see the structure of the entire curriculum and revisit any and all material they've received in the past. While they can see what lies ahead, they aren't given access until the ideal moment in their training.  This gives new facilitators time to digest the necessary information and have it feel fresh and alive.

Currently, Voodoo is actively training 116 group leaders across 5 church campuses.  With average attendance of 15 new parishioners per group, some 1700 people benefit from the training system at any give time. Innovative video-based training and feedback is one of the ways Voodoo helps organizations like Mariners Church stay "rooted" in success.