Even the most powerful multi-tactic marketing campaigns will fail if you don’t have the buy-in of your channel partners. Collaboration with channel partners is critical as is developing marketing campaigns that are aligned with your partners’ active sales incentives. But in today’s shifting sales landscape, suppliers also have to actively promote their own marketing resources to gain partner mindshare.
Here are a few simple steps you can take to secure partner engagement and buy-in to help them drive sales:
Simplify Campaigns
With limited (or no) marketing resources, channel partners are often overwhelmed trying to support multiple vendors and product lines. They need your help and support in order to drive awareness about your solutions and services and nurture leads. Through partner marketing automation solutions simplify marketing complexities and enable turnkey execution of coordinated co-branded campaigns that leverage a wide array of marketing tactics and activities.
Goal-driven marketing menus are another effective and easy way to lift the burden from channel partners, allowing you to communicate expectations, tactics, available content and expected results at a glance.
Drive Adoption
Suppliers not only have to invest resources to make it simple to use their campaigns, they must also actively promote what is available to channel partners. In fact, 20 to 30% of your total partnership support budget should be earmarked toward driving awareness and adoption of your marketing programs. To drive partner adoption, suppliers should:
- Personalize marketing programs to reflect channel partners’ brands
- Deliver the flexibility to incorporate partners’ knowledge and expertise
- Demonstrate the unique value channel partners bring to the table
- Address the unique pain points of channel partners’ target audience(s)
When you do so, you position yourself as an advocate and give partners confidence that their own messaging and value propositions will be incorporated into your campaigns. To further benefit channel partners and drive adoption, consider offering ongoing training and incentives, limiting reporting requirements and coordinating with Channel Account Managers and Partner Business Managers to promote efforts and gain feedback into what’s working and why.
Learn More
Learn more about securing partner buy-in and ensuring channel marketing success by downloading Zift’s latest eBook: 3 Steps to Success Channel Partner Marketing – Working Collaboratively to Drive Sales.
