You know the importance of the relationship you have with your channels in driving sales and revenues for everyone involved. When that relationship is working well, it is fully “enabled.” So, what does a fully enabled channel look like? Simply, it is a channel partner who perceives your product/service line to the be “go-to” one when it is time to sell to a new prospect. It is the one that markets itself, and is easy to sell. An additional virtue of the enablement model is that it takes the pressure off the use of the “price only” sales model. It helps avoid price becoming the preferred driver of channel sales.
How does great Channel Marketing Enablement happen? What is the blueprint for building a complete Channel Marketing Enablement platform? Today we will talk about the first of the two main pieces that enable channel sales. The first is the linear relationship corporate has with a partner all the way from recruiting through campaign engagement to measurement.
Recruitment – You don’t hire just anyone off the street. The same principle goes for choosing a channel partner. You should have a structured, defined process very similar to the one you use to attract and nurture prospects for your products/services. This means landing pages for sign ups, lead scoring and segmentation, nurturing drips and activity monitoring.
Training and onboarding – No one can sell unless they fully understand you, your product, and what sales tools work best with what, where and when. More importantly, they shouldn’t be expected to figure this out for themselves. Playbooks can do much of this, then certification programs serve to assess and guide training, and partner portals provide ongoing access to collateral.
Channel partner engagement – Simply put, you never leave them on their own. Campaigns via email and SMS will keep you in constant touch. You guide them throughout your relationship, keeping them updated with your products/services and your end-consumer market. You prepare them so they can sell your product/service as much as you want them to. Ways to increase channel engagement levels include offering timely certification programs, releasing training videos, sharing information about new product/services or latest market trends and giving them new /updated sales collateral. These elements will ensure your channel partners come back to you because they make your channel partner’s job easier.
Measurement – You can’t improve what you can’t measure, so you need to know what is working and what isn’t. When you engage in multi-step, multi-channel marketing campaigns, developing usable metrics can be difficult. Consider the array of levels that need to be measured. There are the various channel partners, all operating somewhat differently. Each of those partners has individual players working within the organization. At any given point, everyone is tracking a set of individual prospects each of whom is active at any one moment in a unique place in the sales funnel. How can you possibly track and evaluate every actor’s behavior? Sales Enablement Software can do this so that you can finally wrap your arms around your entire sales and marketing apparatus.
In a broader sense, Channel Marketing Enablement drives channels to willingly take ownership. They feel they have the freedom to market effectively to regional and local markets, personalizing as needed without tedious reliance on the parent marketing arm. Channel Marketing Enablement makes your product easy to sell, so they focus on you, not another vendor.
About Mindmatrix
Mindmatrix is the only single, fully integrated platform offering complete marketing and sales enablement for direct and indirect sales. Mindmatrix offers Partner Relationship Management (PRM) software, Channel Marketing Automation, Asset Management software, Sales Enablement software and Marketing Automation software for the complete enablement of your sales and marketing teams.
