Value-Add Resellers, how do you brand?

[theLarry]

curious how any of you VAR's are handling this. we resell retail web services through a brand here at RP and a brand on another platform that also suports our customers. We also have a separate brand that we do web development, hands-on account management and other web consulting and project management. it can be tough marketing multiple brands for different things but we were always afraid of marketing under one brand.

Example, here, we are Strategy Webs. we could add pages and market our other hands-on services, but we always thought it could be a problem if our direct clients contact the support number on RSP's (our) reseller site and wanted to know something about a managed website service what we (personally) offer - and their response of course would be WTF. I know at our other reseller platform a lot of people do it our way and a lot go ahead and expand their offerings on a singe brand...

what/how do you guys do it? (again guys, not fishing for any critical trade secrets here)

(you've probably noticed we like asking questions and sharing ideas and more importantly sharing strategy)

[clivejo]

I'm not sure if you are aware but you can disable RSP support for your clients and develop your own support platform. You can then log in as reseller and open a ticket on their behalf, behind the scenes. I love the reseller log-in feature. It is so handy for sorting out problems, upgrading accounts and general customer service. I would love for RSP to make it more open for us to hook into the back end, ie how cPanel works. One of my wish lists would be the ability for cross reseller login, like a permission based thing.

LOL Any clients I cant sell a paid for package to, I refer to a certain RSP sister store which offers a free account and sign them up there. It is a great shame that I cant offer reseller help and assistance and to transfer these accounts under my umbrella when they choose the upgrade, because the majority do.

[doneritehosting]

I feel you larry, you have said in a post that provided support for your clients is critical for your business model. It is for me too and for the world of me I cant figure out how to tie some services together myself and make it work off rsps reseller site... Too many things can go wrong such as you said for example.... contacting rsp for a service they dont support.... and vice versa.... I dont think it would be a good thing to do offering multiple companies services off lets say rsp's reseller sites anyhow.... However Adding a domain to your account and designing a site from the ground up around the services you want to offer will, Just for the simple reason that you can offer your own contact info off that site and not different sales / support channels from multiple companies jumbled together... call it a doorway site if you want that ties everything together. Less confusing and once the customer is directed to the actual site for the services there is far less chance of support mixups.... One day I will get around to putting one together lol...

Just my thoughts.....

[theLarry]

okay, our local Face-2-Face brand only offers "hands on" type services, no sign-ups and nothing to buy. we promote the fact that we use our sister brand name (reseller brand from the other guys - for now") for all of our on-line platforms, its where we place all of our customers and we recommend it for do-it-yourself'ers. That way we can keep them separate in the minds of our clients and its quite clean from a support stance. We do not support their "hosting" and our hosting brand does not do hands-on work.

@clivejo: that's the whole point to our model.. we don't/can't support our customers. In a model where we WERE supporting our hosting clients then this wouldn't really be an issue as you could simply wrap everything you do into into a nice neat operation, unified billing a posibility, and certainly unified contact points for sales, customer service, tech support.