It seems I started something with my post about the Ambassador Program jackets (which was kind of the point)… A couple of our sales team sent me emails saying that their customers had read the blog and were saying :

“Hi [Sales Guy]
I spent lots of money with you last year – I deserve a jacket surely?”
Cheers
[Your Favourite Customer]”

Let me explain what ‘the jacket’ really means… It’s recognition of being welcomed into an a club of people who have not simply bought our products, but have used them to make their organization more efficient and are telling people about how much they’ve saved.
So to make it a tiny bit more transparent – here’s the rules for getting in:
1. You have to have bought one of our “IT efficiency solutions" to help your organization’s IT become more efficient
2. It has to be implemented in your organization – We don’t want our stuff to be shelfware¹
3. Be seen showing benefit to your organization that you can explain ideally as cash savings, but less tangible benefits such as speed of OS deployment or lower admin overhead is fine too. We want our stuff to be used and to achieve the ROI we promised.
4. Be publicly telling people about what was achieved (forums, case study, tweets, blog, video, etc…)
For example…Maybe you’re a hardcore techie, then blog about how you integrated it with something on a personal blog or maybe a post on a technical community forum, such as myITforum.com, on how you used it to make some bit of administration more simple… or maybe, if you’re more of a management type, you want to post about how it helped you from a process of business perspective.
So in short – if you want some miscellaneous vendor marketing swag – keep pestering your sales guy². If you want into our IT Efficiency Ambassador club, get in touch and let’s get you there 🙂
Regards
Amy Collins
Director of Product Management, 1E

¹ – which ironically would be indentified in one of our AppClarity reports
² – which ironically our sales guys loved being pestered