Talk to your customers, listen more than you speak, share what you learn, be ready to help.
There’s no such thing as a Marketing Qualified Lead on the Fastest Path to Revenue. It’s all about verifying your market by finding a customer willing to buy now.
Social Selling is the coordination of Social Reps and Sales Reps to manage the qualification and hand-off of social media prospects in a way that doesn’t undermine your brand experience. Sales Reps convert water flowing over the dam into revenue. Social Reps focus on making sure there’s always a steady supply of water behind the dam.
Read moreSocial Selling: Generating Demand with Social Media
Social media is a significant opportunity for the channel, because it provides a way to attract and empower partners with a new marketing capability, the activity of social marketing can significantly amplify the company’s reach, and the inherent engagement involved in socializing the channel supports better relationships between the company and it’s channel partners.
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.
Good partners—especially growing partners—don’t just want to be fed leads, they want to learn how to drive leads themselves.
LinkedIn is the world’s largest social network for professionals. They’ve done a fantastic job of making themselves an essential part of business networking. Just about anyone who wants a job, or wants to connect with other professionals, has a LinkedIn account where they carefully curate their profile. LinkedIn has almost … Read more
The most fundamental truth of ROI: It’s nearly impossible to measure for marketing, it’s the wrong place to start with social media, and it’s a virtual recipe for social marketing disaster.