If you missed our recent webinar, Partner Marketing: Driving Positive Business Outcomes in Today’s Buyer’s Journey, co-hosted by Maria Chien of SiriusDecisions, no worries! We explain the key takeaways of the webinar in our blog post this week.
For partner enablement to be successful, it needs to be consistent and relevant to the partners
Partner enablement is not a one-time project. Your partner enablement efforts need to be consistent and updated to match your brand positioning and your prospect market. It’s not like you can create a bunch of marketing and sales materials for your partners, share it with them at the time of onboarding and forget about it. You need to constantly stay in touch with your partners, updating them about what’s going on in the market, telling them what’s new with your products/services, sharing with them how your buyers are changing, how your marketing and selling has to change to keep up with that. Plus, the support your offer to them has to be relevant to them. You can have the best partner portal or the best partner marketing program in the market, but unless your partners find it relevant, you are not going to see the benefits.
Partner enablement strategies should keep pace with the evolving needs of the entire partner ecosystem-not just partner sales
For partner enablement to be successful, it needs to cover all angles of the channel–partner sales, partner marketing and partner operations. Only enabling partner sales won’t help organizations achieve the results they seek. Enabling partner marketing and partner operations along with partner sales is essential. Otherwise the whole partner enablement framework becomes extremely disjointed and ineffective. Reason being the new buyer’s journey which has now blurred the lines between marketing and sales. Partner marketing now has to perform functions that were traditionally considered a part of partner sales and partner sales now, is all about closing. So, enabling channel partners from the selling perspective alone won’t help anymore. There is a tremendous need in the market today to enable sellers and partner organizations to market, sell and support the new buyer’s journey and customer lifecycle–something that can happen only when all the 3 areas of the channel model are supported.
Partner enablement efforts should be tied to partner activities, buyer needs and partner requirements, instead of focusing more on product features
Many organizations think of partner enablement as providing partners with the right assets and training to sell. They focus their partner enablement efforts on educating their partners about their products and giving them an asset repository of the collateral they need to share with the buyers. But that’s not going to work–especially because partners these days are so busy and have multiple vendors giving them the same thing. At the end of the day, partners just tend to focus on the brand that is easy to sell, because that is what brings them the revenue. So, what vendors need to do is help partners sell more–and ensuring that their partner enablement program focuses on what matters to their partners and their customers, is the way to do it. For example, integrating marketing and sales tools into the partner environment that helps partner connect better with their leads or offering partners marketing marketing and sales concierge services that helps them keep the marketing momentum going even as they are busy dealing with customers.
If you liked what we discussed here, catch us at the CompTIA #ChannelCon 2019, August 5 – 7, at the Bellagio Hotel, in Las Vegas, for more insight into how you can make your partner enablement program more effective. We are at Booth #120 at the show. You can secure an appointment with Mindmatrix at ChannelCon, by sending an email to sales@mindmatrix.net or calling 412-381-0230. See you at the ChannelCon!
