The recent Channel Visionaries’ Channel Chief Series in Santa Clara served up a healthy balance of industry trends, revolutionary ideas from thought leaders and real solutions organizations could implement immediately to generate revenue growth and maximize partner performance.
But, in my mind, the big idea was around channel management transformation. In an era of tech disruption and rapid channel changes, where strategic partnerships are more important than ever, event hosts noted that as many as 70% of alliances fall short of expectations. They encouraged channel leaders experiencing week program performance, lack of partner adoption and passive execution of activities to rethink their approach and realign channel investments.
Making Connections to Make Your Channel Cha-Ching
Zift President and CEO Ken Romley presented a keynote address with Chad Reese, Director of Partner Digital Marketing at Cisco. Ken and Chad emphasized:
- Optimizing marketing with Channel Marketing and Management (CMM) solutions
- Coordinating tactics among partners and tying Marketing Development Funds (MDF) to execution
- Betting on partners based on their marketing sophistication, technology infrastructure and engagement levels
- Using coordinated, co-branded partner campaigns to maximize results
- Leveraging analytics to understand how partners succeeding inside your systems
As part of this presentation, Chad shared details on the recent launch of Cisco Engage digital marketing services. According to a recent article from TechTarget, Cisco Engage strives to get partners to become digital marketing warriors. Chad also shared the ENGAGE launch video.
Miss the keynote presentation?
If you missed it and are interested, you can click here to download Ken and Chad’s keynote presentation.
Over to you…
If you were able to attend the event and have any great insights you learned, I’d love to hear your comments below.
