Director of Client Solutions, Vedonia Ingram shares how Mindmatrix’s single-point/self-service solutions, for channel partners and direct sales teams, helped write Mindmatrix’s client’s success stories.
This year at Sirius Decisions, I was proud to be able to present two case studies on how to grow and develop your channel by responding to your partner’s needs.
The first case study focused on how channel managers can utilize single-point solutions to help both their channel partners and direct sales teams to shorten sales cycles. We were pleased to present on the success of one of our clients, Atonix Digital, who utilized Mindmatrix’s sales enablement tools to enable their direct and channel sales reps. Presenting alongside me was Alicia Grundhoffer–(fellow Mindmatrix colleague and expert in Sales Enablement and Marketing Automation for Channel Programs). Together, we walked through the challenges that marketing and channel managers can expect when working with a sales model that needs to leverage relationships with partners while providing tools to help partners sell.
Our second case study, presented alongside Todd Davis, Director of Marketing from Adaptiv Networks–focused on how a platform with self-service capabilities can empower channel partners to complete onboarding tasks faster by providing access to training materials and marketing collateral when they need it, without consuming too much of marketing’s internal resources.
With these two powerful topics, I wanted to take the time today to share of some of the insights we shared at the show, as well as some of the interesting tidbits we covered with the marketing and channel representatives who attended.
Here’s a summary of some of the challenges marketing teams face when enabling direct and channel sales:
- Creating content with options for co-branding and white labeling that their partners can quickly and easily access;
- Providing messaging for their partners and controlling the frequency and distribution of that messaging based on best practices;
- Training and on boarding partners or direct sales reps (Channel Managers) on products and solution selling strategies–without consuming too much time!
- Tracking ROI of marketing assets, and the effectiveness of a particular asset in closing an opportunity.
- Sharing insights into leads that are warmed up as well as lead activity (opening emails, visiting websites, downloading marketing collateral).
These challenges are made especially difficult by the fact that most marketing managers are also taking on dual responsibilities as channel operations managers within their own organizations.
So what does this mean at the end of the day?
- Lost time.
- Lost productivity.
- More time spent working on collateral for partners–rather than strategic solutions to grow business.
Here’s how we’ve seen the breakdown ourselves on practical tasks that channel operations managers/marketers need to complete:
In the end, what worked for both Adaptiv Networks and Atonix Digital was a unified solution that combined sales and channel enablement features with a robust marketing automation platform.
We were very pleased to cover these topics at the show and I look forward to covering more insights over the coming weeks that focus on how unified solutions play a role in reducing these issues for channel and marketing managers alike.
Contributed by- Vedonia Ingram
