Customer success is what makes the channel business profitable. We developed the ULTRA Program, a structured membership program, to help you—our partners—leverage the power of data and automate and scale your business. More knowledge, more resources and more time are the keys to solving your biggest business challenges.

Leverage Data and Insights

Ingram Micro reaches 90% of the world’s technology users and our cloud platform serves over thirty million users and thousands of customers around the world. As a result, we have access to a lot of data around the business of the channel. All that data is not useful, however, until it is analyzed and put to good use! Do you know what specific metrics really matter to your business and how you should benchmark them? Do you have an in-depth understanding of your customer base and know where opportunities lie in offering value to them? 

As a member of the ULTRA Program, you will receive bi-weekly insights and data specific to your business. Every ULTRA member receives detailed customer retention reports, allowing you to see how you are retaining your end customers, your net dollar retention, and your gross retention with your cloud business. The insights report takes a deep dive into your end customer’s behavior – what they are transacting and their volatility from a seat retention perspective. The very best SaaS companies keep monthly revenue churn at around .58%; that’s only about 7% revenue churn a year. This data is presented in an easily digestible format, giving you the ability to make better-informed business decisions.

Do you know how much dollar value an average upsell would be to your business? We found this to be a tough question for our partners to answer. Upselling a client can cost between two to four times less than acquiring a new client. It’s a lot more beneficial from a revenue standpoint to upsell and cross-sell to current customers. As an ULTRA member, you will receive whitespace analysis reports, suggesting potential opportunities within your existing customer base. The data is about your business. This data can also be compared against your peer group, so you can see how you are performing relative to others in the industry.

In today’s recurring revenue business landscape, the objective is to retain the customers you already have and identify opportunities to sell to your existing customer base, increasing customer lifetime value. As John Dusett, Executive Director of Sales for Ingram Micro Cloud, says, “Reducing churn becomes even more important in a subscription-based business, and retaining existing customers becomes the focus.”

The foundation of the ULTRA Program is to give you an edge over the competition—with data-driven recommendations tailored to your specific business. We package all that data so you can easily discover macro trends, identify areas of growth and improve your customer retention strategy.

Focus on Customer Success and Retention

Analyzed data offers great insight and recommendations, however, if you don’t have the proper resources by your side, you won’t be able to effectively implement them for your business. Ingram Micro has a world-class Customer Success team of more than 250 associates located in twenty countries across the world. As an ULTRA member, you will have access to experts and “Know-How” leaders who have expertise across a wide range of topics. For example, by looking at metrics such as customer churn rate and net recurring revenue (NRR), our customer success consultants help ensure customer retention, but also identify untapped upsell and cross-sell opportunities.

Whether it's increasing profitability from existing customers or preparing a go-to-market strategy with demand generation experts, the ULTRA Program will help you establish your cloud business and set up a customer success practice, step by step. Additionally, with elevated Customer Support provided to ULTRA members, you can lean on the expertise of Ingram Micro’s local customer success and support teams as an extension of your own team.

Do More with the Automation Edge

If you agree your success in the world of cloud is tied to recurring revenue, then you also understand the need for people to grow or retain your business. However, another (and likely underutilized) approach to the issue of resources is to automate for efficiency.

Ingram Micro’s Platform Success team, in conjunction with our customer success consultants, can help you address a lack of resources or time by streamlining your business operations. In addition to helping you take full advantage of the Cloud Marketplace, platform success associates are required to understand partner operational processes and help you automate as much as possible through native integrations, low-code/no-code integrations or through integrations via our APIs.

All Cloud Marketplace extensions are included free of charge in the ULTRA membership program. CloudBlue PSA, a professional services automation tool that helps you manage and reconcile cloud projects and managed services, is included for ULTRA members. If you are already using other PSA, ERP or CRM tools and systems such as ConnectWise, Autotask, QuickBooks Online, Xero and SyncroMSP, we will make sure your favorite applications are connected to your Cloud Marketplace for easy and seamless automated data exchange, eliminating time-consuming, repeatable processes.

The most successful businesses use technology to continuously become more efficient, strategic, and profitable—without simply adding more people. 

"These partners stand out because they have a significantly higher ability to focus, with more resources being unlocked from automation to focus on business growth or customer success," says Eric Gitter, Executive Director of Global Customer Success at Ingram Micro Cloud.

Upskill Your ULTRA Expertise

With the ULTRA Program, we target partners who are highly committed to the growth of their cloud business. In turn, we are equally committed to your success and growth.
 
To that end, program members receive a range of certification vouchers and training to grow their team’s skillset faster, as well as specific workshops and services to build out deep expertise in specific solution areas such as infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), unified-communications-as-a-service (UCaaS) and cybersecurity. Your current technology resources can be further trained and enabled in agnostic technical training (e.g., CompTIA) provided for free with ULTRA membership. Most recently, we have partnered with Pluralsight to deliver a full suite of tools and strategic skills development and planning for all types of cloud initiatives. Discounted licenses for the full suite of Pluralsight hands-on learning solutions is available on the Ingram Micro Cloud Marketplace for partners to purchase for their teams or for their customers. (Simply log into your Cloud Marketplace account and click on the Professional Services, Management and Training tile, or enter “Pluralsight” in the blue search banner at the top of the landing page.)

Going back to leveraging data and insights, we can show you how your team’s skillset compares to the benchmark of your peers and provide recommendations on how to upskill and/or maintain “ULTRA” levels of expertise.

Ingram Micro exists to be the “business behind your success,” and the ULTRA Program is an example of our investment in helping our channel partners realize a Future of Even More. Let us help you retain what you build so you can expand on what you build—faster!

The ULTRA Program is now available in the U.S., Canada, Australia and New Zealand and can be found in the Ingram Micro Cloud Marketplace by searching for “ULTRA.”

To learn more about the ULTRA Program, register here.