i.e. What’s Good For The Goose…

Not to get too preachy here, but good partnering is about partners bringing out the best in each other. The only way that works is when you and your partners share best practices. You are thinking you do that already? While most programs are pretty good at working together in some areas, most programs fall woefully short when it comes to marketing. If you are working with marketing automation, you’ve gained a wealth of knowledge about how to market effectively. However, in way too many cases channel programs have not taken the necessary steps to bring these best practices to their partner communities.

What do I mean? If you have embraced marketing automation, you know that nurturing works.  It revives tons of opportunities from being squandered. You understand the value of having detailed information about your prospects. You’ve seen the increase in close rates. You know measuring ROI is essential to your success. It allows your campaigns to continually get better. You know automation works. It makes your digital marketing efforts manageable. If you know all this stuff, why do you let your partners continue to market the old way?

I’ve heard all the excuses. Channel partners don’t have the content budgets or the marketing people to make what works for you, work for them. Well… while that might have been true in the past, people with channel partners now have no excuses. You need to check out your marketing automation vendor’s extension framework. With channel marketing automation, you can now extend your marketing automation campaigns so they can directly support your channel partners’ activities.

What does that mean? It means your partners get co-branded campaigns, where they leverage YOUR workflows and content, but have it automatically changed to support THEIR branding. It means you get collaborative selling where, after passing a lead off to a channel partner, both you and your channel partner can see all the marketing interactions with either company. And it means that you get closed loop reporting on marketing, where you can see your partners’ pipeline activities by connecting to their existing systems.  You don’t have to ask your busy partners to do any extra work just to keep you informed.

Now that is sharing your marketing automation advantage.  That means your partners benefit from your expertise and do marketing right.