As a result of helping my son navigate complex issues in his late teens, I’m a vocal proponent of ending the stigma of mental illness. As part of that effort, I put my experience into action, volunteering as a program leader for an 8-session course offered by National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI). 

So, it’s probably no coincidence that my view of channel programs starts with a similar lens:  the health of the program. While there are many measures I’ve seen customers apply, ranging from partner engagement and campaign usage to ROI metrics, a healthy pipeline is one of the best gauges of program success. 

Let’s Take Your Temperature

What is a healthy pipeline?  It’s a pipeline that above all else supporting consistent and predictable sales performance.  The goal of a healthy pipeline is to limit the peaks and valleys in a way that helps your program scale its business. Of course, many variables impact pipeline health, including finding best-fit buyers, improving deal velocity, partner performance, and more. That said, improving pipeline health includes having a tool that supports synchronized marketing and selling efforts for your diverse partner community.  

When a pipeline is healthy, it is a guide that predicts growth, interprets buying trends, and links buyer touchpoints to deal closure. At Zift, we work with customers every day who are trying to break down the barriers between sales and marketing to gain a shared view of the pipeline. We don’t yet talk a lot about using the pipeline to analyze buyer intent, but those data-driven decision-points will sooner or later be part of our channel program analysis.

Get Your Pipeline in Shape

Building a healthy pipeline requires sales and marketing collaboration across your funnel or pipeline to engage potential buyers.

• Top: Marketing builds the top of funnel to create awareness.  Here, the guiding principle is content, content, content delivered on-behalf of or through partners.  When nearly 70% of buyers make vendor lists based on research, you will never be in the game without content.
• Middle: Marketing and sales both play key roles in the middle of the pipeline.   Marketing enables sales with tools, playbooks, templates, selling tools, testimonials – and more.  Sales promote value and differentiation armed with tools to engage buyers.
• Bottom: At the bottom of the pipeline, sales works with buyers to close business. 

Those buyers are the lifeblood of your business and Zift’s.  Anything that we can do together to make the buying and selling process easier, faster, a win-win, is goodness.  To that end, Zift’s Channel Center of Excellence is providing Health-Checks now, to help you evaluate the health and well-being of your channel pipeline and program. You can contact them here to get started. 

I don’t want this to be a one-way conversation, so share your comments below or feel free to reach out to me directly at kristafuller@ziftsolutions.com I’m looking forward to hearing from you! In the meantime, friends, be kind to yourselves and be kind to each other. 

The post Healthy Pipeline, Healthy You appeared first on Zift Solutions.

Excitement is infectious. Excited partners selling to customers make for excited customers. There is another factor at play here, though.

The highest performing salespeople generally have one trait in common: a high EQ. Yes, you read that right — not IQ, but EQ, which stands for Emotional Quotient. Having a high Emotional Quotient measures Emotional Intelligence, which plays a key role in understanding the importance of fostering good relationships with customers. 

In fact, Emotional Intelligence and emotional agility are essential to professional and personal success. Brownwyn Hoffmann, a Fortune 500 Consultant & Executive Coach, shared this knowledge with several hundred leaders at the 2019 Women of the Channel East event in NYC.  

How can you nurture these sales powerhouses and match their EQ with excitement for selling your products? 

Carefully nurturing your connections is a great place to start. Enabling partners is not just a best practice we recommend for any channel program. It’s something that is vital to channel health to keep those high performers going strong. Keeping them updated on business and market-valued competencies gives partners a reason to keep coming back, and not focusing on other vendors. Train them on not only your products and business objectives but also competitive differentiators. This will really give them an edge when making a sale. 

Think of enablement as connecting through videos or training in your portal. It might be time to reinvent the content and timing of your to-partner communications.  What about offer campaigns with calls to action that will excite buyers to connect with your partners? Maybe it’s time to reevaluate the messaging and clarify the problems your solution solves uniquely and offer your partners training on how to refresh their pitch. 

Enablement is more than an activity. It’s an approach to creating mutual success. 

I hope that 2020 is the year where your channel relationships help your business to soar!

The post Up Your Partner Enablement Game with EQ Nurturing appeared first on Zift Solutions.

“A leader is one who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way.” – John C. Maxwell

At SiriusDecisions Summit 2019, I introduced Kerstin Demko, North America Director of Partner Marketing, to a room packed with fellow channel leaders excited to learn how Sage’s world-class channel program prepares for success. For the 100+ attendees, she modeled leadership, showing how she is cultivating successful partners with intentional, layered marketing programs across North America for Sage.

As she discussed her journey leading partners through a digital transformation, she opened her presentation with this message:

‘Change is about action.

Transformation is about cultivating belief.’

Helping partners adopt funnel-filling best practices was clearly not easy. Many partner organizations first needed to understand Sage’s changing business model, transitioning to the cloud.   

Working with partners on the changing model required intentional sales and marketing enablement.  Referring to a 2018 PartnerPath State of the Partner survey, she reminded her peers that the cloud requires partners to adapt to new business models. Regardless, many partners are not adopting cloud fast enough, though the data clearly shows that the most progressive partners are diversifying and excelling in sales.

The Sage team had two imperatives: 1) Partners need to learn to market and sell solutions (not just products), and 2) Partners need to transform their business to the cloud. In light of the changing channel, Kerstin described the 4 intentional steps that helped shape the actions and beliefs of the partners within the Sage program.   

• Understand your Audience / Start with the Data: The data revealed that most channel partners, with the exception of the largest, have a limited digital presence and limited marketing expertise. Why? Most of the Sage resellers are SMBs that built their business on technology sales with Sage, not needing to focus on reaching new buyers for new solutions. They did not possess the digital marketing expertise required to create new demand for cloud solutions. In fact, 84% of the partners did not have a dedicated marketing resource. And finally, only 50% of their reselling partners had a plan to move to the cloud — with 42% of the partners admitting they didn’t know where to start. While the statistics were not pretty, they set the baseline for the sales and marketing enablement efforts.

• Educate your Channel on the Buyer’s Journey: To start the change process, Kerstin’s team focused on teaching the channel partners to understand the buyer’s journey and the critical importance of creating awareness and interest. Partners learned to understand the funnel and understand how buyers evaluate solutions at specific stages in the selling journey. This literacy supported the next steps.

• Deliver Content to Support the Buyer’s Journey: Kerstin’s team then focused on creating content for partners through a technology platform to support the marketing and selling efforts at each stage in the buyer’s journey with a range of tools and campaigns to help buyers understand challenges and to commit to the result.

The team supported the program with prepared campaigns, including prepackaged marketing plays, a campaign marketplace as the home for the campaigns, and Sage-sponsored concierge services. The campaigns included multi-touch marketing plays with content including top-of-funnel landing pages; eBooks and articles; social posts and banner ads; nurture emails and landing pages; and nurture content, such as guides and checklists.

This type of content preparation and delivery requires a deep understanding of the buyers and a deep understanding of the partners.    

• Track Results: Finally, the evidence of the changing channel is revealed in the data. The layered approach of training, packaging campaigns and supporting transformation with a platform for delivering campaigns delivered significant results, including closed deals resulting from a lift in Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs).  

As a change agent at Sage, Kerstin continues to lead by aligning people, changing processes and providing further support with tools and solutions that simplify internally and externally. The results in her program are transformational.

About Kerstin Demko

Kerstin serves as the North America Director of Partner Marketing for Sage. With Sage for five years, she is responsible for driving innovation, demand generation, and setting strategic direction to enable partner success. Kerstin is recognized as an industry leader and was recently honored by The Channel Company as a 2019 Woman of the Channel for her commitment to partner success. 

The post SiriusDecisions Highlights: Leading the Changing Channel appeared first on Zift Solutions.

I’m just back from this year’s SiriusDecisions Summit where I had the chance to watch as two of Zift’s customers were named Channel Marketing Program of the Year Award Winners by SiriusDecisions. Both award winners, Cisco and Citrix, shared a similar focus: The digital transformations of their programs working alongside their partners, SiriusDecisions and delivering through Zift.  

Citrix’s Marcio Moerbec, Director of Worldwide Partner Marketing, framed the challenge this way: Partners are in a tug of war to grow business outside of their referrals and customers, and the only way to win new business is to activate digital marketing. He described how their Kickstart Program married content, planning, budget and resources to deliver education and content to partners. The results of the investments are paying dividends.

Kelsi Doran, Omnichannel Strategy Lead, Global Partner Marketing, shared how Cisco is connecting disjointed programs across the omnichannel to create personalized experiences for their partner communities.

Their successes showcase how people inspired to create change — and equipped with innovative processes supported by a capable platform — drive measurable change within the business.

Change and transformation was a theme. In another post next week, I’ll share insights that Kerstin Demko, Partner Marketing Director at Sage, shared in her best practices case study with conference attendees.  

So, channel marketing leaders, what does this mean for you?  

First, in a world where 6 in 10 B2B buyers make decisions about who to talk to about a product or service offering before EVER talking to a salesperson, your reach has to cast a net to best-fit buyers. Second, digital marketing when combined with personalized content is hands down one of the best ways to cut through the clutter to reach and communicate to the needs and challenges of your best-fit buyer. And finally, to execute and deliver with your partners’ communications, training is no longer a nice-to-have. It’s imperative. They need to know how to execute.

World-class channel marketing programs have learned to trust our solutions to support their programs.

We are inspired by their creativity and their success and hope you are, too. Congratulations to Citrix and Cisco!

The post Views from the Summit: The Best of Channel Marketing appeared first on Zift Solutions.

You yourself know how this feels. Think of the last time you or your team were in a software decision-making process in the channel. You talked to many salespeople, no doubt. How many times did you feel like you were in a sales process versus a collaboration with a peer addressing your challenges? No doubt, you spent a lot of time evaluating capabilities and price, but did you really understand what the next 6 months of your professional life might look like?

Your buyers are in that same predicament. They crave an experience, from you and from your partners.

Having spent years architecting sales strategies through both direct and indirect channels alike, I have wrestled with the very issue I write about in this blog: creating a cohesive experience throughout the customer journey. As business leaders, we find it much easier to talk about marketing and selling a product than about anticipating the lifecycle of the customer and crafting a sales and customer management process that drives success.

In the months ahead, I invite you to join me as we explore best practices and ideas that may help you and your teams. I will offer you these three ideas:

• In a SaaS Model, Customer Lifetime Value is Everything, Period: I’ve spent most of my years in SaaS companies, and know the models well. There’s a balance between driving new business and focusing on maintaining the lifeblood of the business: existing customers. SaaS companies ideally, regardless of sales channel, strive to recover cost of sales & deployment in the first 12 months — this is a common health metric. As the channel leader, you have to create pipeline value as well as retain customers to meet revenue and growth metrics.
• Your business is changing: With the rise of ecommerce and changes in buying preferences of the ‘empowered buyer’ — your customers will seek ecommerce channels over both your direct and partner sales teams when possible. As an industry, we need to embrace the buyer and equip our partners to respond.
• Channel teams can revolutionize your company: With over 70% of global sales going indirect, you and your teams face a unique opportunity to deliver value in how you think about delivering products, services, and experiences to your buyers through your channel.

I’m looking forward to sharing more with you on this journey. I’ll be at the SiriusDecisions Summit next week, and I’d love to meet you in Austin. Otherwise, leave a comment or drop me a line at kristafuller@ziftsolutions.com.

The post Customer Experience & the Channel: On Being a Customer Experience Advocate appeared first on Zift Solutions.

Leadership and understanding have always been top of mind for me. I’ve invested my career in product management and product marketing leadership roles, exploring businesses where I have an affinity with the product offerings. I’ve worked with plenty of interesting, exciting solutions — so when I heard about what Zift was doing, I jumped at the chance to be VP of Product Marketing.

How do you define Product Marketing?

To me, product marketing is about, above all else, commercializing software solutions for buyers and making sure that you connect a customer with the product that best fits their needs. It’s a series of questions I never tire of answering: What’s the messaging around your product? How do you position it in the market? How do you work with the sales team to talk about it? What stories do you tell on your website? Product place, price, and positioning are all connected, and all have to be cohesive in one solution.

What do you like best about working with and for Zift?

I love what Zift is doing. I love how we work with channel programs, sales and marketing leaders to create success in their businesses. I always choose businesses where I have an affinity for the product on offer, and Zift’s offerings — and our customers who purchase them — are engaging and exciting to learn about. The process in itself is fascinating, and the people behind the processes and programs are hard-working and involved themselves.

That’s one of the parts of the channel I like best: people invested in the channel, like my fellow Zifters, tend to work well with others. Whether it’s nature or nurtured by industry, people in the channel are very good at networking. Channel programs do a lot with a little, so it makes sense that the people behind them are good at connecting the networking dots to get what needs to be done, done.

What is your current focus?

I’m working on big projects you’ll hear more about in 2019 and helping to shape our vision of Enterprise Channel Management into a realized solution set. I’m thrilled to be part of the team working toward groundbreaking goals in the channel industry.

You’re breathing new life into Zift’s Lean In Chapter. Can you tell us more about that?

I believe women learn best through sharing their experiences with each other. Talking with and understanding other women in sessions with our Circle is what the program is designed to do, and that promotes confidence and provides a safe setting to practice business skills. Women leading women to grow together — It’s a wonderful program, and one I’m glad to lend my voice to and promote.

Any personal passions outside of Zift and Product Marketing?

My personal passion is helping to eliminate the stigma of mental illness through my work as a certified trainer with the National Alliance of Mental Illness, or NAMI. I work with families to break the silence on mental illness and begin developing positive behaviors and coping skills.  

This year, I’m enjoying the 25th anniversary of my blind date with my husband, Fred. We share our lives with one young adult son and our standard poodle, Charlie, who is just as feisty and smart as our son was as a toddler.   

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