According to Gartner, sales enablement is “the process of providing the sales organization with the information, content and tools that help salespeople sell more effectively.”

Meanwhile, Hubspot defines sales enablement as “the iterative process of providing your business’s sales team with the resources they need to close more deals. These resources may include content, tools, knowledge, and information to effectively sell your product or service to customers.”

Over at Forrester, sales enablement is explained as “a strategic, ongoing process that equips all client facing employees with the ability to consistently and systematically have a valuable conversation with the right set of customer stakeholders at each stage of the customer’s problem-solving life cycle to optimize the return of investment of the selling system.”

Perhaps it is simpler to examine the term itself. Sales enablement includes anything that helps a salesperson be better able to sell.

Every company endeavors to provide their salespeople with everything they need to be successful. More often than not these are built for salespeople who work for them. They are every bit as useful and valuable to salespeople working in the company’s channel partner companies as well.

What Does Sales Enablement Include?

Most people immediately think of sales training. But if that were all there is to it, there wouldn’t be need for a separate term. Sales enablement goes well beyond just training.

It’s useful to think of “sales enablement” as being a process shared by your marketing and sales departments. Marketing tends to be the producer and sales the end user.

• Content is a major component of sales enablement. From white papers to case studies, product briefs, presentations, and published reviews, salespeople make use of content in many, many ways.
• Sales Tools such as emails and email campaigns, proposal boilerplate, direct mail and other collateral are a category of content worthy of separate attention.
• Systems for orchestration and optimization of sales activities such as customer relationship management, pipeline and sales funnel tracking, marketing automation, lead management and more.
• Strategic planning, most usually manifested in sales playbooks.
• Training not only in sales processes, techniques, and strategies but also product and product application training.

Can Indirect Channel Salespeople Use Sales Enablement Tools Built for Direct Sales?

With very few exceptions there’s really no reason why not, though indirect salespeople may use them somewhat differently.

Direct salespeople who are employed by the manufacturer or software developer have a singular mission to sell their company’s products. They clearly benefit from all the items listed above.

Channel salespeople, especially at managed service provider (MSP) partners, go beyond just selling any given vendor’s products. They are tasked with selling their own company’s services that wrap around those products. They may implement them, configure them, deploy them, manage them, monitor them, support them and more. Very often they’ll want to integrate vendor content into their own to form a complete proposal.

While it may seem counter-intuitive, indirect channel salespeople have a very significant advantage over direct representatives, so much so that many direct salespeople seek to partner with them. Customers don’t buy a product, they invest in what that product can do for them, the functionality they provide. The value they deliver.
Channel partners are in the business of putting vendor’s products to work. Their services enable those products to deliver that all-important value to customers.

5 Strategies Channel Sales Can “Swipe” from Direct

Getting the vendor’s products sold is an objective direct and indirect sales shares. It’s only natural that the content and strategies developed for the Direct team can be readily applied by Channel Partners as well. Some examples include:

1. Case Studies – While most channel partners will prefer to leverage their own case studies to showcase their services along with the vendor’s products, they also benefit from presenting such compelling evidence of the value and functionality of the products. Especially in the early days of the partnership when they may not have projects under their belt, case studies created for Direct sales are just as valuable to Channel sales. No marketing tool is more persuasive than examples of other customers benefitting from the product and services.
2. Playbooks – These are often created to present an effective strategy for selling into a specific vertical market. Channel Partners can adapt these for their use by simply amplifying the customer enablement services they add.
3. Product Training – Whether direct or indirect, product knowledge doesn’t change and is equally required to enable salespeople to sell.
4. Product Information and Collateral – Channel salespeople can readily incorporate key product information into their own sales letters, proposals, and other content items.
5. Credibility – Smart channel salespeople seek to partner with direct salespeople and do joint calls. This votes tremendous confidence on the part of the customer that this channel partner is working that closely with the vendor of the product being used in their proposed project.

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May seem like an interesting place to start a discussion about rules of channel engagement, but nothing is more important to remember. In today’s channel, rules of engagement (ROE) vary widely depending upon many factors, some of which we’ll discuss here. Nothing says your competitors will observe those rules. Truth be told, some vendors also ignore them resulting in channel conflict characterized by disappointment, disillusionment, and potentially wasted time, energy, and funds.

Setting Expectations: Understanding the Rules of Channel Engagement

Vendors invest heavily in partner recruitment programs to select the best possible partners to represent and sell their products and services. Then, they invest even more in onboarding those partners effectively, and enabling them with all manner of training and coaching. Some also provide extraordinarily talented channel account managers (CAM).

Then they drop the ball by neglecting to set everyone’s expectations clearly and decisively in the “engagement” section of their channel partner program.

ROE are nowhere near “one-size-fits-all.” As the channel matures and evolves so do the relationships between different types of vendors and different types of partners. This article will offer guidance on how to create an ROE statement but will focus even more on the critical importance of publishing one so everybody knows what to expect. Not everybody may like everything about your ROE but knowing what they are goes a long way toward building and maintaining trust in your channel.

Trust: Core to the Definition of “Partner”

Without trust there can be no partnership. If a channel partner were to suspect that their CAM was sharing any part of their sales strategy with their competitor, even inadvertently, they would avoid working with that CAM, which ultimately translates into not working with that vendor.

The channel has used the term “partner” for so long that it may have lost some of it’s meaning. Those who take the term seriously invest heavily into their relationships and work hard together toward common success. For others, a CAM may simply be someone who provides clerical and administrative assistance or checks on pipeline occasionally. That eliminates the value of the role.

Concern for Customers

It’s far too easy to lose sight of the impact of channel conflict on customers. They do not think of things in terms of a channel. They see anyone who is selling them a product as a representative of that product’s manufacturer. Confusion arises immediately when multiple salespeople call on them selling the same product. They have no desire to be caught between channel partners and/or direct vendor reps, and everyone should be completely committed to avoiding that at all costs. Even more compelling reason to set everyone’s expectations effectively.

Different Focus, Different Relationship

One way in which the channel has diverged came with the emergence of managed service providers (MSP). Prior to that when everyone considered themselves a “reseller,” the focus was on selling IT products. Vendors expected their channel partners to push their products out into the market and rewarded those who did so most effectively.

They also wanted to protect their best partners. This prompted them to introduce formal “deal registration” programs which would assure the first partner who registered an opportunity that vendor resources would only be assigned to them and no other partner. This assurance would only last for a fixed period of time, and only apply to a specific sale, not all sales to a given customer.

Channel partners may never have appreciated the sacrifice this represented on the part of the vendor. Who’s to say that the first reseller to register a deal is the best equipped to close the deal? It would be in the vendor’s best interest to accord resources only to the reseller with the greatest likelihood of bringing home the business. Of course, some couldn’t resist breaking their own rules and helping their “favorites,” too. Or those who had direct sales teams found their direct salespeople conflicting with registered partners. Ultimately, this damaged trust in the vendor and their program sending resellers to competing brands or worse.

With the transition to MSP came a transition of focus as well. Where the primary goal of the reseller was to sell products, the primary goal of the MSP was to sell their own services. These services brought higher profit margins, but also served to differentiate and distinguish one MSP from others.

ROE with MSPs would be far more complex. With the focus off the product came less need for joint co-selling calls with customer-facing vendor resources in attendance. Vendors could provide back-end support to any partner asking for it with no visible cause for conflict. MSPs didn’t need “protection” as much as they needed high-level strategic and technical support.

While this diminished need for deal registration programs, it didn’t eliminate the need for published, agreed-upon ROE. There would be exceptions in which vendors might be called upon to contact prospective customers. Rules might govern things like what they could and could not discuss, including not recommending any particular MSP.
From the customer’s perspective, they see different professional firms with competing strategies vying for their business, which is welcome. The fact that more than one may offer the same component products in their solution becomes far less significant.

No MSP can expect other MSPs to restrain themselves from competing for any given customer’s service business. This is the appropriate nature of channel conflict in a free enterprise society.

Nobody can be compelled to play by the rules, but clear expectation-setting encourages everyone to do so.

5 Tips to Avoid Channel Conflict

1. When writing an ROE statement, take into account what you expect your partners to lead with. If they’re focused on selling a specific product they should know to expect that the vendor may have also committed to working with someone else to close that sale.
2. Partners will love you for helping them promote their company and their services. Funding their marketing activities that promote services that involve your product is the most proactive thing you can possibly do. However, if you’re going to actually recommend a specific MSP partner to a given customer, you need to figure out how to make other MSP partners aware of that. You may be able to write how you establish preference of partner for specific use cases into your ROE.
3. Adopt a “no surprises” strategy. Nobody likes surprises, and nothing erodes trust more. Measure every action you consider taking on behalf of a partner against how other partners would react to learning you had done so.
4. Consider including a do-not-reveal (DNR) clause in your channel partner program agreement to assure your partners that you will not reveal their trade secrets to their competitors who you may also partner with. This is probably a partner’s worst fear, so get in front of it.
5. Be sure to clearly state what you expect from them, and what they can expect from you. What are all the ways in which they can expect you to provide support to them? What can they not expect from you? What must they do to continue their partner status and grow within your program? Remember as you write this that people partner with people.

Although each situation is unique and may require its own specific solution, by following these 5 tips, you’ll lay the groundwork for a solid ROE that will help you mitigate channel conflicts before they arise.

The post The Rules of Channel Engagement: 5 Tips to Avoid Channel Conflict appeared first on Zift Solutions.

It’s common sense that building trust begins right at the beginning of any relationship. This is the time when you are first getting to know each other, learn about each other, and take your first measure of what you think you can expect from each other.

In partner management, we refer to this time as the period of onboarding, and that’s where we can easily begin to create a problem, especially when we’re committed to the greater efficiency of automating the onboarding process.

Who’s Coming Onboard What?

It serves to pay special attention to Burg’s words. While he’s specifying that people do business with people they know, like, and trust, the first key point there is that they do business with people. They interact with people. They make decisions based on their relationship with people.

We need to distinguish between onboarding a new partner company into our program, and simply getting to know the people at that company better. One can be automated, and the other cannot. This is where the trouble can begin.

Begin by remembering that you are onboarding a partner company and getting to know that partner’s people and you can readily avoiding alienating anyone or damaging your fledgling new relationship. Along the path of using automation, we must be very conscious of how easily we can offend the people involved by making them feel like “just another number.”

Using Automation to Accelerate Partner Onboarding

There are plenty of details, empirical facts, that need to be captured and catalogued during the partner onboarding process, details about the new partner’s corporate entity including tax exempt information, market segmentation information, full contact info for all critical people, financial account specifics, and more. All of these can be captured quickly and in a basically automated way.

We’ve automated the once laborious process of getting people to sign the agreements necessary to establish a formal partnering relationship. No more waiting days for documents to travel back and forth.

Information, in the form of objective, factual details, are readily collected regarding each member of the new partner’s organization and their roles, making it far easier for members of your team to identify the right person to interact with to accomplish whatever needs to be done.

Tracking the successful completion of required training for various members of the partner organization is easily automated as well, speeding their progress toward delivering a quality customer experience with your products and services.

Business Metrics, Commitments, and Performance

Peter Drucker assured us, “You cannot manage what you do not measure,” so its critical to your onboarding success to record all goals and objectives for your new partnership.

Automation can then help dramatically with the tracking of achievement toward those goals. Not just sales results, but also all the indicators and activities that lead to sales. From the top of the sales funnel to the bottom, tracking progress along a well-defined sales process is an excellent way to employ automation.

One key is to apply automation to your existing best practices to accelerate and assure fewer errors. Once you find yourself adapting your processes to accommodate automation you are ceding ground unnecessarily. Technology is highly adaptable. Best practices, once adopted successfully should not be. Stick with what works. Make it work faster.

Remember the Human Aspect of Partner Communications

While partnering occurs between companies, success is achieved by people. That success must be recognized, acknowledged, and celebrated. When your automated processes inform active conversation between you and your partners you are leveraging technology to enhance human endeavor, and that’s the goal.

When you simply report activity and results in email and other messaging you are abandoning the opportunity to enjoy the sharing of success. Mediated interpersonal communication enables the sharing of information, but filters and reduces the human enjoyment of each other and of partnering with each other to achieve success. Ultimately, automate the facts and figures, and experience the sharing of feelings in person.

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“It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question,” said twentieth century playwright Eugene Ionesco.

It’s a safe bet that most of your channel colleagues ask many of the same questions as you when interviewing a potential new partner. What most manufacturers and software providers want from their partners is similar, if not the same.

This also means, however, that the channel partner you’re interviewing has probably heard your questions many times before and is totally aware of the answer you’re seeking. Kind of renders those questions pretty useless, right? So what can you do to learn what you need to know before accepting them into your channel program?

Let Prospective Channel Partners Interview You

Have the prospective channel partner ask you some questions. You’ll be surprised how much you can learn. For example, if their first question is “How much margin can I achieve on your product?” what do you learn?

The first thing you learn is that either that partner exec has been living under a rock for several decades or they’ve never worked in the IT channel. Otherwise they’d know their competition will discount any margin you cite out of existence, so why even ask the question?

They might ask which distributors they can source your product from. A valid, pragmatic question, but if it’s the first question they ask it may mean they’re little more than a peddler, an order taker.

A partner who inquires about available training early in the interview is someone you’ll probably want to look more closely at.

Will They Be Respectable Representatives for Your Company?

Enlightened managers will want to know about your company’s core values. They want to work with someone whose integrity rivals their own. A partner who doesn’t lie or exaggerate. They may pose situational questions to see how you’d handle various scenarios that could challenge your veracity. They’ll be looking for your courage to do the right thing. Not only is that a quality partner, they’ll probably also be a valued confidant and consultant.

Partners who have successfully made the transition from “reseller” to “service provider” will ask you what kinds of services your products will require. Do they need to be provisioned? Configured? Integrated? Monitored? Maintained? Service providers look for products they can wrap service offerings around because they know that’s where they’re primary profit will come from.

It’s also where your ability to obtain customer satisfaction lives. No matter how valuable, how high-quality your product is it will be worth nothing or even worse than nothing if it’s not implemented effectively and properly maintained. Your best choice of channel partner is the one who will passionately protect your product’s reputation.

How Shall We Go to Market?

If a candidate asks no questions about marketing, it probably means they don’t recognize the importance and the value it provides. Since they will be as much a marketing arm for your company as a sales arm and a service delivery arm, this is not a good sign.

Perhaps the best phrasing for a question that would indicate a channel partner with the right ideas about marketing would be, “How does your co-operative marketing program help me promote the customer-value of what I can do with your products and my services?”

Other marketing-focused questions might include, “are you willing to invest in marketing activities we propose that will benefit both of us?”

In It for the Long Run

Some channel partners are opportunistic, only applying for partnership to obtain a discount on your product to fulfill a particular sales opportunity – which can be a waste of your time.

Some partners may ask, in the first interview, about the levels of your partner program. How do they earn elevation from the bottom of your program to the top? What advantages will they earn for making the investments required to get there?

Going further, they may even ask whether or not you conduct regular partner council meetings. This question signals their desire for a long-term relationship in which they can contribute their ideas and their input into your planning and decision-making processes. Ultimately, this is the kind of partner that benefits your company best over the long run.

We’re Getting Closer to Real Partnership

It really is no longer enough to have channel members fill out an online form to get rubber-stamped into your program. As we move forward, vendors and software providers need channel partners more than ever before, approaching the point where the level of need is completely mutual. At that point, the use of the word “partner” becomes more valid and meaningful than ever.

The questions your candidates ask let you know how much they’re thinking, what they’re thinking about, how innovative they can be, and what their values are – all great criteria for such an important decision.

The post Reverse the Interview: What Channel Partner Recruits Want to Know Tells You Everything You Need to Know appeared first on Zift Solutions.

If there’s one word our channel has overused and abused, it’s “partner.”

There was a time when “partner” implied a joint financial ownership agreement, which brought with it a commitment to work together to profitably produce successful customer outcomes. More recently it conveyed membership in an exclusive organization of related businesses all creating practical solutions using a specific provider’s products.

Then it became simply anyone who sold someone else’s products or services. In this definition, the rule was “the more the merrier.”

“Associated” Suggests Aligned Interests and Intentions

By definition, we associate with others that have similar, contiguous, or adjacent interests, products, and services.

Being totally frank about what we look for in channel partners, we place high value on those who already have a large installed base of adjacent technologies and who would therefore be ideal customers for our products and services. The channel partner has already established the all-important trust relationships with these customers, so a substantial portion of the sales cycle has already been accomplished. These customers know these partners and trust them already. They are open to the introduction of anything the partner would deem worth their while.

Taking this to its logical conclusion, this means that the partners most attractive to us are those who possess the skills and knowledge to recommend, install, implement, and support technologies and strategies that are aligned to our own.

Said another way, it’s usually best to seek partners who are capable of being the installation and support arm of our organization. Sales organizations talk about revenue production. If we want our technologies to gain broader acceptance we must be far more concerned about customer success, producing very positive business outcomes for the customers our partners serve with our products and services. This is a critical value chain, from production to proposal to provisioning and on to the ongoing support that is required to earn incremental investments in the future.

Creating the Conversation – Talk Shop

The content of your prospective partner interview must change radically. It’s no longer enough to simply confirm stable financials, number of salespeople, and similar fundamentals.

The most informational interview will now be a conversation about the specific business or businesses your products and therefore your partners serve. Do they know as much as you about that business? Are they fully conversant in the financial, operational, procedural, pragmatic, and even political context of that business?

This is the fabric of today’s partnering relationship. Your mutual end-customer is also seeking a partner, a partner who fully understands and appreciates what your customers find valuable, because that’s exactly what they’ll be appealing to in all their pursuits.

This doesn’t eliminate technology from the conversation. Without a familiarity with the technologies, no partner can truly be effective. Why?

What We’re Selling Has Fundamentally Changed

To effectively create customer success, we must fundamentally change what we and our partners sell to them. It’s no longer sufficient to simply “sell tech” and compete on speeds, feeds, and performance.

Today we must be selling not the technology alone, but rather the effective, productive implementation of the technology to create successful, productive customer outcomes. We must deeply know, understand, and appreciate the intrinsic value of what these technologies do for businesses. Then we must sell that value, not the products, to our customers.

Value is at the heart of everything we sell. Not just our value or our products value but the concept of value in the customer context. What is valuable to them? How does that value serve them?

How the Context of the Customer Has Changed in the Cloud

When equipment was to be installed on customer premises, the brand of that equipment, the perception of reliability, durability, flexibility, security, and interoperability were paramount. It was the substance of almost all partner/customer conversations.

As more IT operations migrated to the cloud the actual products involved became insignificant. More often than not the customer is completely unaware of whose platforms their cloud services are being produced on. Nor do they care. They’re not paying for brands. They’re paying for the pragmatic performance of the applications. Not what it is, but what it does. How well it does it. How flexibility, how adaptably. How inexpensively.

To be able to have these conversations meaningfully requires that the channel partner you’ve enlisted have interests, practices, experience, and expertise in platforms that are aligned with these customers’ businesses.

Wonderfully, this creates the opportunity for you and your channel partners to have profound and lasting impact on customer success, and will be rewarded handsomely for doing so.

The post When Recruiting Partners, Seek Business Model Alignment appeared first on Zift Solutions.

It’s been a frustrating year for conducting business – and just communication in general. A year of seemingly endless video calls and choruses of “I think you’re on mute!” Or even worse, the dreaded “Can you please mute yourself?”

We’ve all heard the saying before: “It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it.” This should come as very good news to anyone who is concerned about being less successful at conducting meetings virtually over Zoom, Teams, Webex, Blue Jeans, or other virtual conferencing platforms.

Everything You Do Communicates, Even When You Do Nothing

You send an impassioned request in an email to a colleague. You get no response. What does that tell you?

Literally everything we do communicates, even when we do nothing. The concern that virtual meetings are far less effective is based on the idea that something is missing that can only be achieved when meeting in person. One study suggests that only 7% of human communication comes from the words spoken, 38% comes from the tone of our voice, and 55% comes from our body language. Clearly videoconferencing adds an important visual element that goes considerably beyond simple voice teleconferencing – but after a year of virtual meetings, we all know it’s not 100% the same.

Applying This to Partner Recruiting

The channel continues to be so thoroughly embraced because it provides participating manufacturers and software providers with more salespeople connecting with more customers than they could ever possibly achieve with hired staff. The people in each partner organization are the most important part of the equation. It’s critical to the success of the relationship that those people and the management that leads them be trustworthy, professional, and capable of properly representing the value proposition represented by the products and services involved.

The need to continue adding more qualified partners to grow the business is unquestionable. The more capable partners, the more “feet-on-the-street,” the greater the sales volume that can be achieved.

Some will argue that the only way to gauge trustworthiness and integrity is to meet with them in person. During this pandemic, that is impractical if not impossible. That leaves only telephone or videoconferencing as viable alternatives.

So how do you compensate for what is lost when you can’t meet in person?

What Is Lost When Meeting Virtually?

While a virtual meeting allows you to hear a speaker’s tone of voice and read their body language (from the waist up, at least), some of the nuance can be lost from these paralinquistic, or non-verbal cues. Paying attention to these cues can be extremely valuable in getting more out of every conversation even when interactions are face-to-face.

But especially when communicating over video or telephone, paying close attention to what people say with their eyes, hands, posture, and tone of voice helps you evaluate just how honest and reliable these communications are. While there’s truly nothing quite like being there, paying closer attention to paralinguistic communication really is the next best thing when your only choice is virtual interviewing.

Non-verbal communication includes:

Facial Expressions

While a smile is easy to fake, there are several other cues that few people even think to control. These can be very revelatory. On video calls, the space between speakers, whether it be across a conference table or desk, is reduced to just a couple of feet. Being face-to-face makes these expressions even more noticeable.
Pursed lips, for example, may indicate distaste, disapproval, or distrust. Or your interviewee might be biting their lips, suggesting they are anxious, stressed, worried about something. On the other hand, you may see their eyes light up, or their gaze focus when discussing something that excites them.

Paralinguistics

How one speaks often says much more than the words they are saying. Tone of voice, for example, can indicate extreme emotions or not. The rhythm of speech, inflections, even the volume at which one speaks conveys much. Some seem to feel that speaking faster and more loudly is more persuasive.

Body Language

Most people know what it means when speaking to someone whose arms are folded in front of them. It has been suggested that body language alone may often account for as much as 60% to 65% of all communication. While video calls offer a limited view as opposed to being in the room with someone, you may still pick up on some cues as to how engaged they are in the conversation.

Eye Gaze

The eyes have it! While lens/screen parallax may make it difficult to look directly into someone’s eyes, the eyes really are often the windows into the soul.
Where are they looking? You’ll often notice that the person you’re conferencing with is looking at their own image on the screen, rather than you – certainly something we’ve all been guilty of this year. When you see their eyes slowly moving across the screen, it’s altogether possible they’re typing emails rather than listening to you. Or worse, they’re staring off the side, probably at work being done on a second monitor.

Appearance

There’s a good reason many of the videoconferencing platforms are enabling you to change your background. You may not realize it, but the impressive office the person you’re speaking with may not be real.

While you may be tempted to wonder what a virtual background is hiding, or judge a person’s casual attire, remember the humanity behind the screen. It’s been a tough year for us all, and many are still juggling working from a less than ideal home office (if not their dining room table). On top of that, parents are trying to find space and time for virtual learning from home. In this case, it’s okay to let a slightly less polished appearance slide – you’re here for the conversation, not to read the titles on their bookshelf.

Overall, if a person’s words fail to match their nonverbal cues, trust the nonverbal messages. Listen as much with your eyes as your ears. In most cases, the nonverbal message is much more accurate.

If anything, the pandemic has vastly accelerated the popular acceptance and adoption of virtual calling and conferencing. While the analysis suggested here is certainly an imprecise science, the more aware you are of what the other person may be saying to you with their eyes, their facial expression, body language, gestures and more. You may find yourself as comfortable with the result of your virtual meeting as you would have had you met them in person.

The post Pursuing Prospective Partners in a Pandemic appeared first on Zift Solutions.

If you have partners in Kansas City, Boston, and Florida, would you send them all a message about looking forward to the Bills game? Of course not – you’d customize it to them.

Your partners may not even be saying it, but for many of them, your collateral just isn’t working.

If you were to ask why, they might come up with a million excuses. But the ones who are being honest will tell you, “because they’re all about you!”

Gain Perspective

That may sound odd at first but think about this from your channel partner’s perspective. They’re in business to make money, which means they need to sell themselves first. Then they can sell your products.

Also, if they’re in a sizable market and there are several other partners nearby, the last thing they want to do is look the same to customers. If they’re all sending out the same materials as the competition, they lose. Nobody likes to lose.

So what’s the answer? As a Channel Account Manager, get creative, get innovative, and start producing templated channel marketing collateral your partners can customize to lead with their message. Let them promote their quality services and then promote the value they can offer customers using your products. This paves the path of progress from your warehouse to full utilization of the product by the customer. In other words, it gets the whole job done.

An Easy Template for Customizing Marketing Collateral

We’re talking about way more than leaving space for partners to crash imprint their logo on your collateral.

While every marketing item is different, they all follow a fairly standard, predictable path.

The Hook

• This is where most amateur marketers make their first mistake. Many will start with “Hello, my name is…” or “Thank you for giving us the opportunity to propose…” If that’s your opening, its very likely that’s as far as anyone will read.
• Give your partners a provocative first sentence that will grab the reader and show them you and your partner understand their problem, and follow up in the rest of the first paragraph assuring them you’ve got the right stuff to solve it.

The Evidence

• In the second sentence, present evidence of your claims. Show how your products resolve the pain described in the hook. Be sure to speak in terms of benefits, not just product features. What is the value your solution provides to them?

The Opportunity

• Here’s the partner’s opportunity to explain how they leverage your product to deliver real value, as well as express their preference for your product.

The CTA

• The Call-to-Action must be easy for the customer to accomplish and put them directly in contact with the partner.

Your channel managers may not have the marketing or writing experience to help partners customize these, so consider having your marketing people coach them, or make those marketing resources directly available to the partners for such help.

Integrated Strategy

While important, providing customizable collateral is just one aspect of an overall solution that will help your partners be more successful. The rest of the solution starts with conveying the mindset to your channel management team that you and your partners are truly collaborating and co-marketing to leverage each others’ value propositions in order to sell both your products and services.

If your channel management team are not marketing oriented, considering positioning a regional marketing resource who helps partners craft effective marketing communications. When paired with a tailored marketing material strategy, these investments will pay off handsomely with sales dividends on both sides.

(Josh Allen just scored big with some partner-first channel marketing collateral in 2021…but the big game will have to wait until 2022.)

The post Why Your Channel Marketing Collateral Isn’t Working For Your Partners appeared first on Zift Solutions.