Generally, there are a lot of marketing materials available to partners from vendors. With every product launch comes a wealth of information – whitepapers, data sheets, case studies, product placement details. The challenge is often wading through it and deciding what’s relevant, what’s best for a specific purpose and how to most effectively use the resources to generate leads and then ultimately, revenue. Most of the time, these materials are not presented to partners in a ‘marketing friendly’ way. They need to be re-written to be customer friendly and made usable in marketing activity.
Set your lead gen goals and stick to them
Once you’ve decided on your materials, you then need to work out which mechanism you’re going to use to find new leads. Which is best; email, telemarketing, inhouse, outsource, events? And who exactly is project managing the campaign? Unless there’s a clear plan with an end goal, money and time are wasted, because there’s not a complete view of a marketing activity or campaign and there’s no one really driving it.
Marketing owns the message, then it’s over to sales to action the leads and too often, these processes are not joined up. No one has overall responsibility for the success of a campaign, there are different owners for each part of the process. Add in an external agency that needs managing – telemarketing, for example – and that’s often another layer of disconnection.
Particularly in smaller resellers, there may be one marketing manager who just doesn’t have the time to fully manage end-to-end campaigns across departments, but they don’t have time to do everything themselves and no internal telemarketing resource. Too often, these resellers miss out on generating demand with vendors.
"It’s pretty clear which dishes are the desserts, but that’s only because you know that chocolate is not necessarily the best way to start a meal"
Imagine going to a restaurant and not having a menu. You sit down and are then presented with a two-page long list of dishes. In no particular order – you jump from salted caramel cheesecake to pork belly with creative potatoes and some kind of jus, and then to a goat’s cheese salad. You’re not sure which is the starter, and which is the main. Which wine complements the pork belly best? It’s pretty clear which dishes are the desserts, but that’s only because you know that chocolate is not necessarily the best way to start a meal.
Once you’ve decided on your courses, you would expect them to come in the correct order and with a little bit of time in between so you’re not all done in under an hour and are struggling to keep up with your wine consumption, so you finish the bottle by the end of the meal. This requires excellent co-ordination and communication between the kitchen and waiting staff, and it’s the Maître D’s job to keep an overall view and ensure the smooth running of service. Without this, the meal would not achieve its goal of enabling the customers to enjoy their experience and leave satisfied.
Stay organised from start to finish
Planning and running marketing campaigns is a similar concept. You need to plan your resources, approach and management from the start to ensure a successful campaign. As a vendor, organising your marketing resources and approaches for partners into packages which are scalable can enable them to easily and quickly launch a demand generation campaign. This will then achieve results that produce revenue for all parties. If you have too many unorganised options available, there will be limited success and a lot of time wasted.
It’s more than the old favourite ‘marketing in a box’. This is usually a centrally produced library of materials that vendors publish on their partner intranet for partners to co-brand. Very few partners have the time or resources to edit and use these materials successfully. Marketing in a box is more of a ‘tick in the box’ than ready-to-go resourced campaigns.
"The roadblock is often it’s just a bit too hard to bring all the disparate elements of the campaign together and there are always other priorities"
It’s the concept of organising marketing activity into a ‘menu’ of items with focused project management resource that Partners can access immediately. Too often, marketing funds provided by vendors are wasted, either not used or not used effectively. There’s no excuse for partners not to be actively executing demand generation campaigns when they are being effectively given ‘free’ money to do so. The roadblock is often it’s just a bit too hard to bring all the disparate elements of the campaign together and there are always other priorities.
Vendors should put the time and effort into presenting marketing activity to partners in a way that makes sense and they can execute quickly. Packaging up materials and resources for partners to easily access takes the initial barrier away from partners executing more campaigns. It’s not just about providing the materials and then leaving partners to work out how to best use them. Vendors have the opportunity to work with partners and make their lives a bit easier by giving them a head-start with organised demand generation options. That’s where the added value of the partnership is demonstrated.
