MIME 2017 Annual Report

12 We also have an experienced sales team focused on developing and strengthening our channel partner relationships. Many organizations work with third-party IT channel partners to meet their security, IT and cloud service needs, so we have formed relationships with a variety of the leading partners to target large enterprises, mid-market and small organizations. For large enterprises, we work with international partners including CDW and Dimension Data. In the mid-market, we work with leading national partners, including Softchoice, SHI, CDW and Softcat. The small business market is primarily served by the reseller community and also by Managed Service Providers, who typically provide or host email services. We work closely with all of these channel partners to offer cooperative marketing, deal registration, as well as support and technical resources. We believe these partners view our services as a key source of additional revenue and a way for them to add significant value to their customers as they can support their desire to move to the cloud without compromising their security position. Sales to our channel partners are generally subject to our standard, non-exclusive channel partner agreement, meaning our channel partners may offer customers the products of several different companies. These agreements are generally for a term of one year with a one-year renewal term and can be terminated by us or the channel partner. Payment to us from the channel partner is typically due within 30 calendar days of the date we issue an invoice for such sales. Our sales cycle varies by size and sophistication of customer, the number of products purchased and the complexity of the project, ranging from several days for incremental sales to existing customers, to many months for sales to new customers or large deployments. We plan to continue to invest in our sales organization to support both the growth of our direct sales organization and our channel partners. Marketing Our marketing strategy is designed to meet the specific needs of each of our customer segments. We are focused on building the Mimecast brand, product awareness, increasing customer adoption of our products, communicating the advantages of our solution and its benefit to organizations, and generating leads for our channel partners and direct sales force. We also invest in public relations and thought leadership to build our overall brand and visibility. We execute our marketing strategy by using a combination of internal marketing professionals and a network of global channel partners. We invest in field, channel, product and brand marketing and have increased our investment in digital marketing to drive greater lead generation volume and efficiency. Our local marketing teams support the conversion of these leads into qualified opportunities for inside sales and are responsible for branding, content generation and product marketing. Customer Service and Support We maintain our strong customer retention rate through the strength and quality of our products, our commitment to our customers’ success and our award-winning global Customer Success and Support teams, which consist of more than 260 employees dedicated to ensuring a superior experience for our customers. For each of the fiscal years ended March 31, 2018, 2017 and 2016, our customer renewal rate has been consistently greater than 90%. We calculate our annual customer retention rate as the percentage of paying customers on the last day of the prior year who remain paying customers on the last day of the current year. We have designed a comprehensive monitoring methodology that measures and evaluates the interactions we have with our customers from sales and on-boarding to support and renewal. Our cross-functional teams, under the supervision of our Chief of Customer Operations, work together to ensure the best customer experience is achieved and to address customer needs as they arise. A key value driver of our customer on-boarding process is our Legacy Data Migration services. Our customers often have legacy email archives that they want to move to the cloud. Our data migration service helps solve the problems customers face when extracting data and getting it into the right format for importing to the cloud, which can be expensive, time-consuming and require interactions with multiple vendors. In addition, we offer a full range of support services to our global customer base, including comprehensive online resources and email support with no outsourcing of support or account management to third parties. We also offer a range of additional services that include options for 24x7 telephone support and an assigned customer success manager. These support services are tiered to meet specific requirements of our diverse customers. Our full range of customer outcome driven onboarding services is designed to cater to all customer segments. These services include dedicated implementation and onboarding consultancy services.