Successful B2B businesses understand that buyers now lead the buying process, and sellers need to meet buyers where they are. Think of how the buyers’ journey has evolved since the dawn of the new #digitalnormal. Almost 85% of C-level executives begin the sales process online, and 57% of the process is complete long before a salesperson is engaged in the process! Indeed, organizations must have high-value content readily accessible and “findable” on their websites. Equally important is positioning your sellers as thought leaders. Expert social sellers consistently share relevant information, direct buyers to your website, and become trusted advisors. Developing social selling expertise occurs through creating an optimized online persona, targeting and connecting with your ideal prospects, and, once connected, building valuable relationships. JSG’s Social Selling program can turn your team into social selling experts through boot camp participation, hands-on exercises, and one-on-one coaching.

Sponsored by our partners at JS Group, written by Vlad Krause, Director of Social Media and Analytics.

A successful Partner Portal launch requires more resources than expected. Your partner program touches many areas of your business, and you will need insight and assistance from internal departments such as CRM Admin, Partner Operations, Partner Marketing, and Legal.

Long-term success is dependent on designating a resource as your portal owner. This resource should be involved from the initial project stages as they are pivotal in the success of your Partner Portal.

Sponsored by our partners at The Spur Group. Written by Lindsay Jensen, Director of Alliances.

You know what they say: 90% of the brands out there aren’t in the top 10%, and when you’re not one of the usual suspects in the category, it can be hard to get the mindshare and sales you need. So how do you overcome this obstacle? Here are 3 ideas:

Go on offense. Information-on-demand is only interesting if your channel is taking the lead, which isn’t always the case – you need to shift to an outbound, aggressive posture to proactively get in front of the field sellers who are face to face with the customers you need.

Teach, don’t sell. Never assume your channel field seller ecosystem knows your market or how your customers use your product. Teach them how to interpret the playing field – quickly, simply, and vividly. Give them the quick mental tools to find opportunities for you and your brand within the pool of deals they are working on right now.

ABG – always be growing. Teach, ask, listen, and feed what you learn back to your channel partners. Did 60% of them say they heard a competitor was going direct? Tell them what their peers told you, because no one sells a peer like a peer. Always be growing, iterating, and creating a dialog.

Written by Stephen Denny, President and Founder.

Sponsored by our partners at Denny Marketing.

Channel Marketing tends to bifurcate into “To” Channel Marketing and “Through” or “With” Partner Marketing. Communicating to partners needs to give them the information they want when they want it and how they want it delivered. It’s important not to overcommunicate and to consider whether some information should be via social or text while other needs a one-off email or aggregating newsletter. An A+ “through/with” channel marketing strategy leverages channel partners as an extension of your team to develop relationships, drive demand and generate leads that are the right buyers ultimately highlighting your solutions. Channel marketing strategies expedite your “top-of-the-funnel” approach by proactively putting you in front of the right audience while illustrating the value in choosing your organization.

Tip: If you want your channel marketing strategy to succeed, you must be flexible in how you support partners. That means letting them drive demand in ways that make the most sense for them. For example, give them the tools they need to execute modern strategies that generate leads including social selling and developing personalized video content.

Sponsored by our partners at 360insights. Written by Heather K. Margolis, SVP of Marketing.

It can be a challenging and daunting task to quantify how well your partner program is serving your business. You need to find a way to measure the experience and success of your partners as well as your internal stakeholders. It is helpful to have a holistic understanding of every component of your partner program, including subjects like partner experience, training, budget and partner marketing to name a few. These components then must be examined deeply from both the partner and internal perspectives. Understanding how your program is performing gives you the insights to be able to allocate resources and invest in the areas that need it the most. This comprehensive evaluation, known as the Vendor Maturity Index (VMi™) by AchieveUnite, uncovers these insights and identifies problems at their root, allowing program leaders to create an actionable roadmap to take your strategy to the next level.

Sponsored by our partners at AchieveUnite

QBRs (Quarterly Business Reviews) are the hub-of-the-wheel of any strong partnership. However, they are rarely done, executed poorly, and with lots of effort. Pre-build, automatically populated, and template-driven QBR tools are the only practical way to consistently deliver these valued partnership activities.

Why Partners Value: Partners partner because they are building a jointly developed business model to increase their success. Well-developed QBRs align joint business goals and efforts to help the partner achieve growth, capabilities, and profitability.

Why Channel Managers Value: There are simply too many tasks, metrics, and capabilities to keep track of. Well-defined QBR systems deliver across-the-board status in one unified presentation instantly and allow channel teams to focus on partner success (and not building QBR reports).

Why Senior Channel Leaders Value: QBRs also rollup to territory and regional levels to allow instant visibility into team and area performance.

Sponsored by our partners at Successful Channels. Written by Gary Morris, CEO and Founder.

Investing in partner enablement is necessary in order to ensure your channel understands your solutions, and how to sell them in the market. However, not all enablement is created equal, and companies can waste tens of thousands of dollars on poorly-designed or executed enablement programs. When selecting a vendor or trainer, ask for case studies or examples of how the training showed results. This is especially true if you are using your Market Development Funds (MDF) to pay for the partner enablement, which is a great idea, by the way. For example, does the enablement not only build new skills and capabilities but also directly impact your funnel? Do your partner sales reps leave the training with fresh opportunities or connections that they know how to convert? If the vendor provides some type of ROI calculator that’s another great way to ensure your partner enablement investment will directly impact your revenue.

Sponsored by our partners at BlitzMasters, written by Andrea Sittig-Rolf (Chief BlitzMaster & CEO)

The premise today is that Partner Experience (PX) is as important as Customer Experience (CX) – across all verticals.

The catch is, making things simple for partners is not always simple for vendors – but when it drives adoption, sales growth, and partner and customer satisfaction, the rewards far outweigh the effort.

Here we take a look at three key steps vendors can take to drive partner adoption and increase ROI.

1. Customer-focused content

Through constantly developing great new customer-centric content, and rolling it out in a regular cadence, vendors have experienced great success with their channel program.

Infographics, e-books, white papers, and other pieces of collateral to help bolster marketing campaigns and add value for customers are all well-received by your partners – and can be customized by the partner with their logo, color pallet, and company branding. Helping build their market profile and expand their digital marketing footprint in existing and emerging markets.

Additionally, creating to-partner communication ensures your partner network is aware of all the new campaigns and collateral available on your portal and in your content library.

A growing content trend is animations. Creating simple animations that clearly explain and sell the value proposition of your product/solution, then using them across multiple tactics enhances engagement.

If you can, keep it short and to the point. If your video is long (such as a webinar), it’s ideal to chapter the content into shorter easy viewing segments.

2. Cadence

This is an area where many vendors feel overwhelmed. Adding a constant stream of new and updated collateral and campaigns encourages partners to revisit your portal while allowing them to maintain conversations with customers as they progress along the buyer’s journey.

It may not always be possible to create a sales or product-focused campaign. But it’s essential you don’t go quiet. Offering your partners campaigns that feature relevant and helpful business advice, the top industry trends to be aware of or best practice thought leadership pieces are highly popular.

Partners are in desperate need of new content. Producing and delivering a constant stream of new or updated content into your channel program is challenging. But it’s the key to driving partner engagement and campaign adoption.

3. Portal design

The first piece of content partners see is your channel portal. How this is presented can drive or diminish their PX, and be the deciding factor in adopting or abandoning your portal.

Your portal should be stylish and uncluttered in its layout. Make your portal intuitive so it’s easy for partners to find what they’re looking for within one or two clicks. Partners don’t have the time to go searching for relevant content or campaigns.

Partners want, and expect, everything they need to be readily available and to quickly find answers to their questions.

Build your reputation as the vendor that makes business and sales easier for your partners.

Creating content for multiple products and solutions and building them into multi-tactic campaigns is time-consuming and often challenging for our clients, so the Elastic Digital creative team is able to do it for them. This is resulting in higher partner engagement and reach, while enhancing demand generation and delivering visible ROI.

Sponsored by our partners at Elastic Digital, written by Cameron Dimopoulos (Agency Manager)

If you aren’t engaging regularly with your partners, it can be challenging to know what they are thinking. From product updates to feedback on the latest industry trends, if you’re not listening and regularly engaging, you are potentially missing out on a wealth of insight. 

By launching your own branded online community you can significantly enhance your channel partner program. Allow your partners to discuss your latest announcements, work collaboratively to solve customer challenges, and share ideas, content, leads, best-practice, and even fears or challenges in the market. 

Whilst delivering these benefits to your partners, you can also track how they’re feeling and whether sentiment is trending upwards in a particular vertical market, or downwards in a specific geographic territory, or whether a new product launch is being perceived strongly.

The business value of these deeper engagements with (and between) your partners is significant – but you can also enrich the quality of the relationships, increasing both trust and the integrity of your brand.

Written by Adam Jones, Chief Product Officer.

Sponsored by our partners at OnSerro.

“By having a documented marketing strategy in place, your business is 313% more likely to achieve your business goals.” Source: coschedule.com

Having a documented marketing strategy not only makes you more successful, but it will also help your team stay on the same page, set goals, and build out marketing projects to improve your chance of being more successful.

Most marketing departments operate with ‘to do lists’ and while this is a start, it lacks the necessary strategy components aligned to business goals and the overall understanding of the business dynamics that influence success.

A ‘to do list’ also does not draw from market intelligence, past insights from marketing tactics and industry best-practice.

When a company has a documented marketing strategy, they have a blueprint to what needs to be done from a marketing perspective to address marketing objectives and achieve business goals.

Learn more at Robotic Marketer’s site.

Sponsored by our partners at Robotic Marketer. Written by Mellissah Smith, Managing Director.

Absolutely, conferences, trade shows, and conventions are great opportunities for partner engagement.

Although there’s no substitute for face-to-face, hand-shaking interaction with partners, the move to being virtual has made it easy to experience many of the rewards of tradeshows from the safety of our homes. BUT, whether live or virtual, partner engagement shouldn’t stop once the event is over.

It’s imperative that channel professionals continue to interact with the partners they meet at events by leveraging LinkedIn and Twitter. Vendors commonly make the mistake of launching into an aggressive sales motion promptly after events. Rather, it’s important to nurture and develop those relationships on LinkedIn until you’ve developed credibility and trust with current and prospective partners.

Sponsored by our partners at Channel Maven, written by Brad Rolfe (Strategic Account Director)

The MDF allocation process is often the easiest part of the through-partner marketing equation. How are partners using the marketing funds you give them?

Most partners will point you to activity metrics such as impressions, clicks, or number of leads to evaluate their performance. By then it is too late to influence them; the activity has already happened.

The best way to ensure marketing funds are being spent on accelerating revenue growth is first to match the right partners to the right activities. This delivers activities to partners that they value and understand. Then, provide them with easy access to support and packaged campaigns with clear deliverables that remove the guesswork from delivering activity.

Making this your process allows you to understand the marketing capabilities of each partner, to match them to the support they require, to guide them to the right campaign activities for them, and to make it easy to measure the results.

Working this way gives you clarity before the activity happens that it is linked to accelerating revenue growth.

Sponsored by our partners at bChannels, written by Bastien Goubeaux (Program Manager – Client Services)

How long it takes to recruit a partner is dependent on a number of variables, such as how easy it is to deliver a vendor’s proposition, how it stacks up against the competition, the size and complexity of the product or solution, and the onboarding process itself.

Essential to starting this process, however, is to establish Mutual Interest between a vendor and the partner. Mutual interest is found by identifying the right partners, and by having the right offer. At bChannels we refer to this as data intelligence (who) and competitive intelligence (why). With the data-driven approach developed by bChannels, this first step can typically be accomplished within a few weeks.

Sponsored by our partners at bChannels, written by Blythe Story-Smith (Head of To Partner Services)

Demand generation is key to accelerating revenue growth but is a major cost to channel partners. Giving leads to your channel partners might seem like the perfect solution to your through-partner marketing challenges. However, this is also a risk.

Partners need to have the marketing capability to be able to handle the leads you give them. A partner without experience or the tools to nurture leads will be unable to move early-stage ‘top of funnel’ leads forward. The leads risk being seen as unqualified and a turn-off to channel partner salespeople.

Rather than think of ‘leads’, you need to think of the right ‘activities’ that match the partner’s capability. Then drive partners’ sales growth from the right demand generation activities by making it easy for them to drive their own marketing initiatives. For example, providing a catalog of packaged digital campaigns removes the guesswork from delivering activity. It gives clear deliverables and allows partners to choose activities that they will understand and are capable of delivering.

End customers rarely buy ‘just’ your brand. By providing packaged campaigns, you make it easy for partners to deliver co-branded activities that feature your brand in the partner’s solution.

Work this way and you create the opportunity to follow up with them in the right way for the leads generated to drive partner sales growth.

Sponsored by our partners at bChannels, written by Bastien Goubeaux (Program Manager – Client Services)

Start by thinking about what empowers the success of your own direct sellers.

• What information do they reference to support their sales motions?
• What collateral is used to introduce and support new offerings?
• What strategies and tactics are driving new wins?

You have modules in your Channel Management platform such as Education + Training and Content Library features … but what you put there makes all the difference in the world. 

You need to be super close with your sales and marketing organizations.

For example …

• you need to know what the sales team is being enabled on this month and access the resources to repurpose.
• You need an intimate awareness of new marketing campaigns and available digital assets.

Every area of your business needs to be funneled to your channel partners and …

Only through your initiative, internal relationships and knowledge can you know what and when to equip your partners with.

Sponsored by our partners at Brandfolder. Written by
Jeff Burak, Director of Strategic Partnerships & Resellers.

According to Forbes, account-based marketing (ABM) “focuses on a few large and important accounts that hold the greatest promise of adding to your bottom line”. ABM is built on the same foundations as the channel itself – more often than not, partners can sell vendor solutions more successfully to more customers than the vendor themselves. They bring added value with bolt-on services, managed or otherwise, expertise in building and delivering systems as well as strong relationships with their customers. These are all powerful reasons why ABM can work when a vendor and partner approach it together as a true partnership.

That said, ABM isn’t for everyone. It’s a serious, long-term commitment that takes time and effort on both sides – often with external help – to get set up. There’s work to do in identifying target accounts, building insight, working out the delivery process for content, campaigns, and much more. It can also get pretty expensive. But, it’s in your mutual interest to shorten sales cycles, increase deal sizes, drive activation and adoption whilst winning clients that will become long-term advocates, so it could be worth taking a leap of faith.

Sponsored by our partners at Purechannels

Partner ABM – What Is It and Is It Right for You?

First, never forget that your partners are businesses in their own right. They have their own brand guidelines, datasets, marketing strategy, and tough internal targets, schedules to fit your activity into, other vendors, and their own services to promote. making it more about their choice and less about your instruction.

So, trust them and put the power back into the hands of the partner. Channel marketing executives are your greatest asset for driving the results you expect. Adopt a collaborative approach in terms of what can be best achieved with your objectives, the funding available, and the objectives of the partner. Always be upfront about your MDF budget, as it will save everyone time and face in the long run. This is about mutual management of expectations.

Sponsored by our partners at Purechannels

5 Ways to Know You’re Getting the Best from Your Partner Marketing

Hiring a concierge service is not a trivial decision. They will become a core capability, plugged directly into your channel revenue. The following aspects should be vetted ahead of time and monitored throughout the engagement.

• Partner engagement. Capturing the attention of the partners and keeping their level of engagement high.
• Partner satisfaction. Survey your partners to see how satisfied they are with the agency concierge you put forward.
• Channel marketing manager satisfaction. Review how well the concierge team works with your channel marketing managers supporting their objectives.
• Strong channel revenue track record. The concierge agency should have hard data to support both their past and current success in campaigns performance and driving channel revenue
• Technical knowledge. How well does the concierge service understand the core ZiftONE platform that you use to conduct channel marketing? Are they certified or recommended by the platform itself?

Sponsored by our partners at MACRO

Everything You Need to Know about Partner Marketing Concierge Services

Vendors can help their partners grow their business with ZiftONE in different ways. Some partners may have Marketing teams, while others might not. No worries – there’s a solution for either case.

As a vendor, here’s a quick checklist for what you can do to enable your partners:

• Onboard partners to PRMs like ZiftONE the right way
• Enable your partners to be self-sufficient
• Ensure content is available for partners to use
• Deal registration must be flawless
• Run campaigns for a select group of partners

At Macro, we work closely with ZiftONE customers and their partners to make sure they draw the most value from the platform and to ensure the relationship is growing business successfully. Find out what would work best for your particular channel.

Sponsored by our partners at MACRO. Written by Dan Radu, President and CEO.

How Vendors Can Enable Partners to Grow the Business With ZiftONE

Like with all third-party services, defining a scope of work is critical for managing expectations and budgets. In Macro’s experience running a global concierge service, these are the most common elements of a concierge SOW:

• Partner relationship management and advisory
• ZiftONE platform adoption
• Measuring performance

Sponsored by our partners at MACRO

Everything You Need to Know about Partner Marketing Concierge Services

Besides a better go-to-market alignment with your partners, there are many benefits to a concierge service:

• Build better relationships.
• Manage channel operation.
• Fill in for full-time Partner resources.
• Digital technology expertise.
• Get more out of your channel tech investments.
• Regional and local market advantages.
• Free up internal resources.
• Agency back-up.

Sponsored by our partners at MACRO

Everything You Need to Know about Partner Marketing Concierge Services

A partner marketing concierge is a third-party agency – like Macro – that acts as a natural extension of your team. The concierge team augments and extends your capacity for white glove partner marketing initiatives supporting your go-to-market strategy. The concierge service is a crucial relationship link between the Vendor and its Partners.

Sponsored by our partners at MACRO

Everything You Need to Know about Partner Marketing Concierge Services

Nobody has an exclusive partnership with channel partners. If they do, you’re going to put more into recruiting than you need to. Unless the channel partner has approached you with their book of opportunities, don’t get in the middle of their contractural obligations.

There are several people in a partner organization who have the influence you’re seeking. Obviously their senior executives or ownership would be best. Often their most successful salespeople will get an immediate ear when suggesting you. Many channel partners have a team responsible for alliances and partnerships. Perhaps most valuable are their engineering or consulting people whose opinions regarding technologies are respected across their organization. Good news is you have plenty of targets.

Remember just what it is you are looking for. Each channel partner has sales and technical resources. Each of those sales resources has existing customers. The sales cycle is cut in half when those channel salespeople sell your solutions to their existing customers. No prospecting needed, nor penetration, nor qualification. They already have credibility with each of those customers and will see your products as the most valuable thing they can find, new offerings to sell to existing customers. They know it’s “five times easier to sell to existing customers than it is to create new ones.” Then, when you help them create new ones, you’re giving them another gift. A “good” channel partner will know and appreciate this, and will answer when you ask about their account base.

Be selective and leverage adjacencies. That is, look at the partner directories for other companies whose products work well with your own. This way, when you recruit them, you’ll be adding incrementally to their sales knowing they are focused on markets your solutions would sell well into. Focus on your value proposition to the partner and how you can help them accomplish their goals. Seek recommendations from friends in the channel community.

The channel partner will onboard them to their company. They’re not necessarily going to “onboard” them to every vendor they represent. You want to onboard a new salesperson when they arrive because it’s your chance to drive their attention and enthusiasm to your products over others. They’re also your salesperson now. Make the investment of onboarding them. Otherwise, you’ll never get as much sales performance out of them as you could have.

There are many. Too many to cover them all here, but you’ll find many great resources here on the Zift Solutions website. Most importantly, keep in mind that you are working to include these channel people in your culture and your family, as well as build their enthusiasm for marketing, selling, and delivering your solutions incorporated into their own. Onboarding is the most important thing we do with channel partners. If you get it right you’ve just grown your company.

First the management. Ask them what they want you to do with the SPIF. Some may want you to pay it to them and they’ll share part or all of it with their salespeople. Others may want to distribute it between sales, pre-sales engineering, implementation specialists, account managers, engagement managers, relationship managers or others.

A Sales Performance Incentive Fund (SPIF) rewards salespeople for selling your product. These are usually “bonuses” offered for a short term to increase the attention they pay to those products on which you’ve placed a SPIF. In today’s channel, most salespeople are more focused on selling their services, so you’ll need to do more than just pay a SPIF, you’ll need to show them how to drive service sales with your product. Also, take care to clear SPIFs and coordinate them with partner management, some of whom may not like anyone else managing their salespeople with money. Or, they may want a piece of the SPIF themselves.

Understand their priorities. It’s not likely they make much money from margin on your products because others discount them so severely and they must be competitive. The best partners figure out how to wrap their own services around your products and drive profitable revenue from those services. Any assistance you can provide in the way of reusable enagement models, promotional ideas, assistance in promoting their services around your products are their most prized gifts. Cash is good short term. Support growing their services business has long term beneficial impact.

It’s what they want, but most don’t expect it. Those that do are the ones you should not accept into your channel program because they limit your business unfairly, unless they truly own their market. That’s what you need to gauge.

Absolutely. Great relationships are built on shared experiences. Shows are often the only opportunity you have to physically be with many of these people. Whether or not you present at the show, or even have a booth at the show, the interactions, the conversations, the pub crawls, rounds of golf, and other enjoyable pursuits you share make the relationship richer. The best channel partners participate in these enthusiastically. You and they become part of a quantifiable community of friends that all work together and help each other. Conferences are a great venue for advancing all your partner relationships.

You know you’re partners when you’ve become friends. You are on a first-name basis. You know their children’s names. You check in with each other frequently. You’re helping them succeed and they’re helping you succeed. They matter to you. Add to that their performing near the top of your partners list and its a lock.

We call them “partners” for a reason. Partners share a tangible interest with us. We make money when they make money. The best phrase to keep in mind is “we’re in this together.” The biggest mistake suppliers make is to consider their channel partners to be subservient to them. Make no mistake, you need them more than they need you. Without you they still have other provider’s products to sell. You invest in the channel because you want the best “feet on the street.” They’re an extension of your company. A reflection of your company. It’s a very personal, intimate relationship. If it isn’t, it won’t last long.