How to close the quarterly sales plan in just 3 days with digital-only tools?

Date : May 12, 2019 By Andrei Iunisov

Back in 2008 I was an employee of Parallels, we were competing with VMware with our famous Parallels Desktop against VMware Fusion. This was a very interesting market situation with only 2 products having the same feature set and equal in price of $79,99.

I was responsible for affiliate marketing and revenue-driving promotions. The end of the quarter was very slow in sales, we needed to drive $300K revenue in the upcoming 5 days to meet the sales targets. Additionally, I was not allowed to make any significant discounts available to the general website audience, I need to prevent cannibalizing channel sales and I had no advertising money.

Well, I had at least one asset — 5,000 affiliates. Among them there were many, incl. popular websites like MacUpdate or MacHeist. We came up with an innovative concept of promotion — MacUpdate Bundle. This bundle offered 10 Mac utilities for a single price of $64,99 instead of $265,78. Each vendor from the bundle made the corresponding discount. The bundle was hosted on MacUpdate, these guys kindly automated the key issue process for clients and helped me to negotiate with all the other vendors.

The good thing about the bundle was that it was promoted only for MacUpdate audience, we didn’t cannibalize resellers and distributors and didn’t pay for the ads. The result was significant — sales plan closed in just 3 days. The overall bundle sales were bigger that the whole channel sales for the current quarter. For me it was even better — I got a chance to meet with CEO Serguei Beloussov, he gave me an opportunity to visit Parallels US office and meet with my future boss Corey Thomas. I learned a lot from Corey before he left the company and became the CEO of Rapid7.

This practice was so effective that Parallels were running these bundle promotions from time to time up to 2018, never seen promotions running for 10 years.