1.
7 STEPS TO EFFECTIVE
B2B CHANNEL MARKETING
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Email: marketinginfo@winntech.net
Phone: 800‐444‐5622

2.
Accelerating Sales Growth
The continuing paradigm shift in the IT market shows steady movement towards a
greater focus on the Channel ‐‐ to increase sales, achieve increased market penetration
and enhance brand recognition. More and more, large vendors are announcing their
intent to bolster their Channel efforts and direction, recognizing the substantial growth
that can be attained. The bottom‐line is truly the bottom‐line – how to increase
revenues while reducing the overhead and direct costs of driving those increases.
With the pervasive growth of the Internet, there has been a dramatic shift in how
technology buyers educate themselves about new solutions. Businesses today have
many more options in their buying cycles – from research tools, analysis, social media,
and an expansive reseller community.
This has changed the sales process dramatically, and technology vendors are racing to
adapt. Potential customers are expecting more competitive pricing, improved value,
and consultative services to complement their process.
Still, the channel model presents a number of challenges that must be identified and
overcome in order to realize the full benefits and revenues. These challenges are both
internal to the vendor, external with the partner, and ultimately, reflected at the
customer‐level as well.
Sirius Decisions, a leading marketing advisory firm, identifies three Channel models that
can be applied, each bringing different methodologies and approaches to the
relationship and direction:
• Supplier‐to‐Partner ‐ programs suppliers use to raise awareness and drive demand
with their channel partners
• Partner‐to‐Customer ‐ Supplier‐created programs that partners execute with their
customers
• Supplier‐to‐Customer ‐ Campaigns focused on feeding partners leads and
opportunities.”
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3.
So Many Challenges
Prime vendors are faced with many challenges in identifying; qualifying, and potentially,
on‐boarding new channel partners. This becomes an ongoing effort, not only in Partner
Management, but providing the sales and marketing enablement tools that can help
ensure the best chance of sales success. Ongoing channel education programs on
solutions, products, and consistent messaging are critical factors to building a successful
partner relationship.
• Managing MDFs and Co‐op funding will always be a key focus of any channel
relationship. Ensuring that funds are budgeted and allocated to the channel partners,
while monitoring their usage and implementation, will help drive the focus on specific
solution areas and brand recognition. Firms that allocate these funds to their Channel
partners have shown dramatic increases in sales over those that do not.
• Lead/Opportunity Management. Tracking the progress and status of lead
opportunities delivered to partners has always presented a challenge. Proprietary
information, sales nature, and a general lack of feedback and reporting create a
disconnect in measuring the effectiveness of channel‐related marketing initiatives.
Often the prime vendor won’t know about a deal until it closes, and therefore, can
offer limited support and expertise to help their channel partners in successfully
closing deals.
• Partner follow‐up activity. No one likes to make cold calls. Traditionally, research
continually shows that sales representatives will make limited efforts to follow up on
leads they are provided, and in some cases, they will sit dormant. One recent study by
Insidesales.com showed that the average number of follow up attempts to trade show
lead activity resulted in an average of less than one‐and‐a‐half follow‐up attempts.
Obviously, this limits any effective results.
• Timing of Follow‐ups. In addition to the challenge of follow up activity to leads, the
timing of those follow‐ups is critical. An interested, qualified prospect is often ready to
continue their initial conversation or inquiry within a matter of hours or days. Too
many leads sit for weeks before they are followed up on, and the lack of effective
reporting mechanisms means that the oversight of the lead follow up activity becomes
extremely limited.
• Nurturing of leads. As marketing maturity grows in the industry, more channel
partners will become aware of the values of lead nurturing. While the size of the
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4.
channel partner is often aligned to their marketing maturity; there is still a prevalent
focus on the short‐term deal…making the numbers before the month, quarter, or year
ends. Larger, more mature vendors recognize the true value of a long‐term solution
focused on lead nurturing and cultivation, and need to drive this philosophy
throughout their channel.
• The expansive growth of the reseller community, and the breadth of vendor solutions
that they offer, has caused an overload of messaging and possibilities to an already
over‐crowded prospect universe.
So Many Solutions
1. Identify your optimal channel partner profile – Because there are costs and effort
associated with on‐boarding and maintaining a new partner, it is important that
vendors look for partners that fit the corporate model. Per Sirius Decisions, channel
sales and marketing often push programs out to partners, re‐purposing what they can
without considering alignment. This alignment is critical to effective channel
marketing and growth. An effective partner qualification process may evaluate
corporate culture, growth, vertical markets, solution expertise, support, etc.
2. Assign dedicated resources to manage the relationship and marketing funding ‐
Greater results are apparent when the relationship between the prime vendor and
channel is a true partnership, leveraging knowledge, materials, and solutions that both
parties can bring to the table.
3. Evaluate Performance – Ensure that channel partners maintain an agreed‐upon
performance level. The on‐going cost of partner management demands that under‐
performing partnerships must be continually evaluated, and over‐performing ones
recognized and rewarded. This can frequently be achieved through various partner
status designations and criteria.
4. Develop Lead Nurturing Strategies ‐ Partners traditionally focus only on low hanging
fruit, the short‐term sales opportunity, without recognizing the value of longer‐term,
ongoing cultivation. As an entry point, prime vendors and their marketing teams or
outside firms should establish specific Lead Nurturing pilot programs to help the
partner and VAR community develop a cost‐effective framework for lead nurturing
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5. and cultivation, and continue to realize the benefits of such a marketing and sales
approach.
5. The Demand Center – Sirius Decisions has articulated the tremendous value of the
“Demand Center” as a centralized marketing operation to support both internal and
channel programs.
Aberdeen reports that 81% of leading firms provide lead generation programs and
support to their channel. How can prime vendors provide this framework to enhance
partner effectiveness? A large part can be addressed by providing packaged
campaigns, with centralized repositories of campaign information, preferred vendors,
as well as the inclusion of:
• Consulting – Provide value‐added solutions and consulting to help partners with
designing effective marketing campaigns.
• Lists – Quality data sources are one of the most important drivers for a successful
campaign. Providing access to pre‐approved and tested sources of marketing lists
should be a key component of any offering.
• Templates – Anything that can be standardized in formatting, messaging, graphics, etc.
will create a valuable consistency among partners, help with brand recognition, and
ultimately, assist in expediting the ramp‐up time for any marketing campaign.
• Emails – Writing a concise, effective email message is an art. Providing guidance,
suggested messaging and standardized formatting will benefit the initiatives.
• Collateral – Providing a centralized repository of product and solution briefs,
marketing collateral, case studies, white papers, etc. for partner use and co‐branding
ensures consistent messaging and quality materials to support their campaigns.
• Teleservices – Identify teleservices vendors that meet your company’s objectives,
provide experienced, qualified personnel to represent your firm, and ultimately, drive
sales opportunities into the pipeline. This can eliminate the wide variance of quality
providers in the market, and allows for you to negotiate a reduced pricing structure
based on the preferred vendor relationship.
• Event Services – Planning the logistics, recruitment, and presentations of an event,
whether a small executive gathering, webinar, road show, or major conference, takes
a huge amount of effort that few resellers have available internally.
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6. Identifying pre‐approved vendors to provide this as a pre‐packaged campaign will not
only reduce the potential problems that can occur with any event, but will help ensure
a more successful program.
• Call Guides – Standard baseline call guide/script templates can be made available to
channel partners to help conceptualize any calling campaign, while ensuring that the
messaging and presentation of the prime vendor’s solutions remain consistent.
• Social Media – The apparent explosion of social media channels as a marketing tool
has created an extremely cost‐effective means to not only promote companies,
products, solutions, and events, but also serves as a tremendous tool to gather
feedback from the community. Prime vendors should look to utilize social media to
help partners in the promotion of their solutions.
As importantly, social media can provide a great vehicle for creating a shared
repository in knowledge management, for channel partners to access information,
product details, marketing collateral, and potentially campaign offerings.
6. Co‐branded events ‐ With the abundance of resellers, name recognition continues to
be a challenge. Conducting co‐branded events has a very positive impact on drawing
attendees based on the vendor’s branding, and adds further credibility to the channel
partner.
7. Feedback Mechanisms – Open and on‐going communications between prime vendors
and their channel partners is a critical component to any successful relationship.
Traditionally, one of the greatest challenges has been the lack of feedback and
coordination on qualified opportunities between the two parties. Too often, primes
have to chase down their partners to get status updates on active opportunities, by
which time there may be little that the prime vendor can do to assist and support the
channel partner in progressing the deal further along the sales pipeline towards a
close.
Not only would regularly scheduled status calls/meetings address this, but there are
also many CRM and SFA tools that can be used to maintain current program updates.
It is very important that primes require their channel partners to provide frequent
status updates into these systems, for the reasons addressed above, as well as to
ensure that continuous communications and marketing efforts in other areas do not
impact the developing relationships with the prospect organizations and create
conflicting messaging.
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7. According to a recent Aberdeen Group report, The Extended Sales Enterprise:
Channeling Better Results, “firms enjoying Best‐in‐Class performance share several
common characteristics, including:
• 81% deploy dedicated resources responsible for managing all channel sales
• 81% provide centralized, online partner access to products, prices, promotions, etc
• 79% support their channel with sales forecasting/analytics tools
Addressing and implementing these 7 steps will help to build partner loyalty through
support, knowledge, funding and programs, while ultimately increasing the revenue
stream for both prime vendors and their channel partners.
________________________________________________________________________
Alan Feldman is Sales and Marketing Manager at Winn Technology Group, and has
focused on the design, development and execution of direct marketing campaigns for
many of the leading technology vendors in the industry over the past eight years. Prior
to Winn, he spent nearly 25 years as a Sr. Management Consultant in the technology,
government, retail and education markets.
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8.
Sponsoring Organization
Winn Technology Group is a privately‐held marketing solutions company headquartered in Palm
Harbor, Florida. Exclusively providing marketing support to the technology industry since 1990,
Winn has partnered with leading IT firms to develop B2B marketing solutions, conducting
thousands of initiatives to:
• Generate qualified leads and appointments,
• Nurture, cultivate, and qualify actionable sales opportunities,
• Develop B2B channel marketing programs and partnerships,
• Collect and analyze valuable business intelligence,
• Identify and recruit attendees for B2B events, and
• Build brand awareness and name recognition.
As the state of the technology market changes and adapts, Winn has continually been
recognized for their strong focus on Lead Nurturing and Channel Marketing programs. For more
information, visit our website , send us an email, or call 800‐444‐5622.
We invite you to join our LinkedIn channel marketing discussion group, share your thoughts,
contribute to critical discussion, and learn from others in the industry – all with the intent of
improving processes and success in IT Channel Marketing.
Please click on the following link to join: http://linkd.in/e56Njb
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