Quantifying your brand’s strengths and weaknesses in channel mindshare will give you a benchmark to measure improvements, says Graham Smith, marketing manager at SCI Sales Group
While product, price and profitability undoubtedly play an important part in the mindshare of your channel partners, there are other issues to consider. Trust, ambitions, loyalty, communication and synergy (TALCS) are perhaps less obvious components of mindshare, yet equally powerful. SCI Sales Group recently conducted a survey on LinkedIn and asked over 100 channel and account management experts what was their greatest challenge. Mindshare was top of the list. But before you can improve mindshare, you need to quantify your current position.
Measuring mindshare
As part of your channel partner satisfaction surveys, you should include measurement of TALCS:
• Trust – Do your partners trust you
to deliver?
• Ambitions – Do your partners feel you share common goals?
• Loyalty – Do they feel there is value in a long-term relationship?
• Communication – Do you have frequent dialogue and use the right media?
• Synergy – Do they feel your two companies co-operate sufficiently?
Conducting this type of research over the phone can be more revealing than an online survey or questionnaire sent in the post. Interviewers can elicit more complete and substantive answers from partners, as well as ask for clarification and elaboration concerning responses.
By asking partners to score your performance, you will get a clear picture of where your mindshare is strong or weak. It may also be possible during the survey to ask partners to compare your performance with rivals.
In addition, using a telemarketing survey will enable notes to be made on why scores in particular areas are high or low. This adds valuable qualitative data to the quantitative score.
Improving mindshare
So now you’ve got your base score for each partner, how do you begin improving mindshare?
1. Improve trust: Trust is obviously a two-way street, but according to our research, if channel managers want to be trusted they have to keep their promise, act with integrity and protect their reputation. Keeping promises means you need to agree what you are going to do, do it, and then tell them you’ve done it. Good communication is a valuable part of trust. Integrity builds trust. For example, a leading IT company ensures sales managers sign a code of conduct. This stipulates they should not show bias in favouring one channel partner over another. By contrast, changing the parameters of a channel partner incentive programme will promote distrust. Reputation also impacts on trust. A product/service with a reputation for failure will damage your partners’ trust in you to deliver something they can sell.
2. Increase loyalty: Trust is a step beyond satisfaction, but a step short of loyalty. Loyalty is linked primarily to whether the partner feels there is value in the relationship. Incentive and reward programmes will certainly improve loyalty, and engaging them early in planning quotas will remove the feeling that goals are arbitrary.This is not simply about profit margins. Your partners will take a long-term view of the partnership and consider how much effort is needed to make it work, so make partnering an easy process with a clear path.
3. Choose partners that share your ambitions: There needs to be harmony in the ambitions of your company and those of your partners. Do you share common goals? Are your territorial and market ambitions the same? A partnership with shared ambitions is likely to have less conflict, and may lead to a deeper level of engagement.
4. Forge greater synergy: Synergy is all about co-operation. This is obviously a key element in dictating the level of mindshare; co-operating on large scale projects and in the marketing push. Don’t underestimate the power of supplying leads as part of your co-operative marketing. According to ChannelWeb, 82 per cent of respondents said they are motivated by an OEM/vendor’s ability to supply leads. But don’t deliver cold leads; they need to be BANT qualified.
5. Use the right communication: An important factor in gaining mindshare is communication. But the relevance, timing or openness of communication with partners often leaves them confused and dissatisfied. You should start by conducting an audit of your partner communications. Is it a genuine dialogue or a monologue? Is it relevant to individual partners or a ‘one-size-fits-all’ blast? Do you have a partner portal? Is there an immediate response to partner enquiries and easy access to information?
Don’t ignore the value of human interaction in the drive for mindshare. A visit from a field sales executive or well-managed telemarketing campaign will have significant impact, and make your partners feel more valued than any email or direct mail campaign. Using TALCS will help you quantify your areas of weakness and strength in channel mindshare, give you a benchmark to measure improvements, as well as a metric for comparing your position with that of your rivals.
