When you are trying to help your channel partner promote their products, one of the most frustrating things that can happen is when you put in a lot of time and money offering them a marketing program, and they either ignore it or don’t use it correctly.
I hear about this happening time and time again in our industry, and it is a problem that doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon. And, it’s a shame because if you’ve invested a good deal of time and money into marketing efforts that can benefit both you and your partner, you are losing money if they are not being implemented effectively.
The reason this happens so often is that your channel partners probably don’t know how to implement your marketing program effectively. It is, in some ways, outside their area of expertise.
A way around this problem is to implement marketing certification as part of your ongoing best practices. Using marketing certification, you can train one or more key members of your channel partner’s team in how to effectively use the marketing material you have supplied them.
In addition to providing them the necessary skills, a certification program has the added benefit of increasing your mindshare with your channel partners.
Once your channel partner can see the benefits of using your materials and understands how to use them, both you and your channel partner will generate more sales and profits together.
Of course, the challenge here is how to get your channel partners to dedicate the time to have one of their team members achieve marketing certification. The best way to do this is to incentivize the training.
Offer them access to funds that can be used to implement the marketing program as soon as a team member achieves certification status. Getting more money into their marketing budget or access to reduced price marketing materials makes the training time a good investment for your channel partners, and can motivate them to become involved in your program.
Making marketing certification part of your overall best practices will pay dividends into the future as your partners start to actually use the marketing materials you’ve provided them with – and use them correctly.
