It’s not that marketing has become a conversation more than a pitch, or that companies no longer control their brand message, or that customers trust peers more than manufacturers. All of that is true. But there’s something more fundamental.
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.
The Value Proposition, and its close cousin, the Unique Selling Proposition, are two time-honored tools that have been used for ages to help marketers crystallize a message that is relevant to customers. In the age of social media and social selling, they still represent the crucial core of good positioning and messaging. But marketers need some new ways to address the unique challenges of dialog.