In our blog last week, we identified the second of the four phases for fast-tracking demand in B2B channels. The third phase is ‘Demand Creation, which we will be discussing in our post this week. This phase involves employing concierge services to provide prescriptive marketing checklists and offer menu-based plays to ensure programs are designed for success.
“Partners often lack critical marketing skills/resources; suppliers that use concierge services to help partners deliver demand programs reap greater results.”-SiriusDecisions
- Channel marketing concierge services
- Help drive significant ROI from your investment in channel marketing programs and tools
- Strengthen vendor-partner relationships by ensuring channel partners get timely support in selling vendor products/services
- Ensure channel partners actually use the channel marketing resources and tools made available to them
- Improve overall partner performance by helping them sell more
- Ensure vendor brand and messaging stays true at every level
- Allow vendors to scale up their channel model and support a stable of channel partners efficiently without overloading their corporate marketing teams
What concierge services can vendors offer their partners
Partner marketing assessments
Through partner marketing assessments, a channel marketing consultant can work closely with your channel partners, understanding their sales and marketing challenges and helping overcome them. Partner marketing assessment can even help you, as a vendor, to identify the gaps in your channel marketing and sales strategies.
Demand-creation program support
Demand-creation program support involves offering your channel partners ready-to-use marketing and sales programs or even running the program on their behalf and then routing the relevant leads to them.
Campaign/platform setup
If you have provided your channel partners access to a sales and marketing automation platform or a partner portal, you can offer marketing concierge services that cover sales and marketing campaign/platform setup, so your channel partners don’t have to worry about the details. Examples include creating a complete partner profile in the system, setting up marketing and sales campaigns for channel partners, etc,.
Channel fund planning and management
A channel marketing concierge team can help your channel partners understand the benefits of using MDF and assist them in planning and managing their quota of MDF better. A MDF consultant can work with your channel partners on a regular basis discussing the availability of MDF and optimal ways of its utilization.
Creative and design agency, localization services
For your brand to be recognized at local levels, your marketing and sales campaigns need to be localized–individualized for each market. A channel marketing concierge service that offers creative design, branding, campaign localization and local language support may be the answer to this challenge.
- Lead management services
- Lead management services may include
- Generating leads for your channel partners
- Importing leads into the sales/marketing platform
- Reaching out to leads at the right time (via automated emails) and staying in touch with them regularly (by setting up lead nurturing drips)
- Pushing hot leads to channel partners
How do channel concierge services help in fast-tracking demand
Channel marketing concierge services work to offer channel partners all the marketing support they need to push your brand and sell more. They play a key role in keeping your channel partners in-tune with your offerings, brand, and marketing messaging helping them drive more revenue for you.
Watch this space next week for the final phase in Fast-tracking demand in B2B channels, Performance Measurement. This series of our blog post is based on our webinar, Fast-tracking demand in B2B channels, co-hosted with SiriusDecisions. You can watch the entire webinar here.
