Over the past several weeks, I’ve been interviewing channel marketing executives and managers about the challenges they face growing partner revenue. The interviews are the first step in an industry benchmarking survey we’re working on at SocialRep, in an effort to understand challenges and best practices in partner enablement, sales acceleration and performance management.
For businesses that rely on channel partners to promote and sell their products, marketing is rapidly becoming a critical strategic risk. The more technology migrates to the cloud, the more it disrupts old partner business models. Reliable partners who generated sales yesterday may not be the partners driving sales tomorrow, putting millions of dollars in channel revenue at risk.
Read moreHow Businesses Help Channel Partners Generate Demand
Have you ever stopped to consider the terminology of marketing, and how it both reflects and affects the way we think about our relationship with customers? Marketing activities are organized as campaigns (often launched with advertising air cover) which focus on targets for the sales force to acquire. These terms are not only militaristic, they betray an attitude of control over customer and channel relationships that is an artifact of a bygone era. Businesses no longer control relationships the way they once did, and channel managers and marketers needs to adapt.
The new world of channel marketing is inbound over outbound—instead of putting a target on the backs of? customers for partner sales team to hunt, you help partners attract customers with relevant content that addresses their interests and needs. You do that by enabling partners to engage with the market, cultivating peer connections, collaborating with influencers and driving dialog with customers.
When we say “Socializing the Channel” we mean a deliberate process of elevating your channel marketing approach from managing many 1-to-1 relationships between you and your partners to managing a digital community in which you and your partners are all contributing members.
One of the most common refrains I hear among marketing solution providers in the channel is that any kind of partner marketing initiative must be blindingly simple for partners to execute. If you require partners to do so much as press a button from time to time, that may be too much to ask. God forbid you ask your partners to put some effort into their campaigns. The ideal scenario is for your partner to just open their mouth so your automated message can tumble out.
There’s a d
angerous? undercurrent we see developing among channel? marketing organizations? trying to deal with the? confusing landscape of social media options? that can? best be called “Checking Off the Social Media Box.” Everyone knows social media is important, but it’s hard to pin down exactly where it adds the most value, so business objectives get over-simplified to reduce the confusion.
Chris Becwar at Channel Management published a post last week that points to? one of the central challenges channel partner marketers face today, a challenge we discuss frequently at SocialRep: how do you enable channel partners to market most effectively?
It’s a seemingly simple question with a time-honored answer: sales incentives! If you provide the right incentives, channel partners will? move heaven and earth to close deals. What’s missing from that simple equation is the depth of disruption rocking the global IT channel, reducing the effectiveness of? traditional incentive approaches.
Today, SocialRep is launching a new chapter. After years of engineering and product development on social data systems, analytics and curation, we’re bringing all the pieces together in a single platform focused on enabling social marketing for the B2B channel.
As we’ve previewed our solution with analysts over the past few weeks, we’ve heard it called Inbound Channel Marketing, Through-Partner Social Marketing, and Social Channel Marketing. Whatever label you put on it, we’re proud to deliver the first end-to-end platform that enables businesses to empower their partners to engage customers authentically through social media.
It makes sense for CRM heavy-weights to continue the migration of marketing applications and infrastructure to the cloud, but the real challenge is actual customer engagement. The battlefield is not your CRM system, it’s the platforms and networks where customers are already engaging
Successful social marketers offer links to objective content that is relevant to their customers, they offer their own insights on articles they read and share with the community, and they respond to the discussions that are driving engagement without relying on automatic responders.