•         Create an immediate positive experience for partners
•         Turn your partner reps into champions quicker
•         Keep partners on track to being ramped
•         Break the 80/20 rule
•         Give visibility into partner training status
•        Let Channel Account Managers focus on building partner relationships

Let’s start this off with a scenario: it’s your first day at a new sales job and you’re excited to get started. You’re greeted in the lobby of the office building, and your employer leads you to your desk. They hand you a couple pieces of paper and walk away. On the paper is all the information you’ll receive – a welcome letter, company overview, and simple checklist of to-dos to review before you’re expected to start meeting and exceeding your quota.

You’re immediately in over your head with no real training, knowledge transfer, or guidance on the best methods to sell and be successful in your new role. That sounds like nightmare fuel for most people, and an understandable reason to walk right out the door.

Now replace yourself in this scenario with your partners and their employees. Sound familiar?

This experience for partner organizations is all too common with vendors. They’re your partners by technicality alone. Many times, 90 days later, partners have not and likely will never contribute to your pipeline. Can you blame them?

Given that kind of welcome mat, most partners choose to continue selling what they’re comfortable selling: not your products, where there is uncertainty and room for failure.

The trick is to get a partner and their reps more comfortable with selling your products over a competitor’s, and quickly. You only have one shot to make a good first impression. The onboarding needs to be guided, engaging, valuable, and on-demand. Easy… right?

Many times, channel organizations are stretched thin, so onboarding processes take a back seat or are manual with zero visibility. The burden of administrative tasks, training, education, and onboarding falls on your team of Channel Account Managers, which frustrates and distracts them from their core responsibility of building partner relationships and selling.

The reality is there is no sustainable way to onboard every new partner and new partner hire without guided, collaborative, automated onboarding.

No matter how automated, collaboration is still a requirement in onboarding to form strong partner relationships. Channel Account Managers should be part of the automated onboarding process, just not the mindless box-checking and record-keeping aspects of it. That’s best left to automation.

Zift can help you with the technology, best practices, and creative services required in successful channel partner onboarding. We believe strongly in process before technology, and recommend taking time to think about what partners need to do in the first week, two weeks, month, etc. to become ramped (i.e. time to first deal and time to quota). A great place to start is looking at your own internal processes, but we also have industry best practices backing our approach.

Creating interactive content partners will find easy to engage with is key to successful automation implementation. This is a great way to integrate partners into the platform and to pass on knowledge to sales teams in a way that holds their attention. Our Creative Services team, for example, uses quick whiteboard videos for training or information purposes to great effect.

I can’t overstate the importance of on-demand training options for partners. Training modules with a prescribed path that partners can work through on their own time give them that extra edge in the field. Partners need that know-how to best frame your solutions for selling. If you don’t give them that, they won’t be able to sell as effectively, and may choose not to try selling your products at all.

Here’s the main takeaway:

Make it easy for partners to sell your products and they will.

If you aren’t helping them get comfortable quickly, you’re ultimately pushing back or eliminating their potential to produce revenue and contribute to your pipeline.

What are you doing today to onboard your partners? What’s working and what’s not?

The post Missed Opportunities: The Importance of Partner Onboarding appeared first on Zift Solutions.

Below are just a few steps that can help make your channel partner’s marketing more effective, boost overall program buy-in, and increase channel marketing generated pipeline.

Deliver the right content

Poll the partners – Spend time creating content that partners will use. There’s simply no better way to gauge interest than to ask your partners what they’re trying to promote and sell. Doing this will allow for better alignment to partner sales and marketing goals.

Consider the buyer’s journey – Tailor campaign plays to target personas, and support their buyer’s journey.  Make these campaign plays pre-packaged and easily digestible for your partners. You are the marketing expert.

Prescribe and complement a partner marketing strategy – Talk to partners about their marketing calendar. This will allow you to influence and prepare campaigns in advance for their upcoming initiatives while creating a more personal, productive partnership. Your campaigns should always be adding value to a partner’s business goals.

Promote the partner

Expand campaign customization – Lead strongly or only with partner branded campaigns. Heavy supplier branding results in a loss of partner identity, a confusing experience for buyers, and emails that look like an advertisement.  Give your partners a voice by letting them easily customize all campaign messaging and co-branded assets.

Align with partner go-to-market strategy – Most partners are focused on solution selling so it’s important to understand where your products fit within their sales cycle. By delivering content focused more around fixing a business problem, partners are better equipped and more likely to use your campaigns in their go-to market strategy.

Close the loop

Sales enablement – Educating a partner’s sales team is an invaluable and frequently forgotten step in executing a successful campaign. Include cheat sheets, campaign overviews, playbooks, call scripts, battle cards, PowerPoint presentations, whitepapers, case studies and data sheets in every campaign. If sales is knowledgeable on how to follow-up on campaign leads their lead conversion rate will be much higher.

Opportunity reporting – Associating actual partner dollars to a channel marketing campaign is the magic bullet. There are lots of great tools to get this information efficiently including connecting to a partner CRM or closed loop email workflows to get automatic updates. If you don’t have access to a tool to help, then a more manual partner check-in is still recommended to track pipeline. If you position tracking opportunity information as mutually beneficial, the information will be obtained easily.

Target the right partners for your program up front and put yourself in their shoes. Define your program goals and idea of successful participation, then make sure partners are aligned before any engagement. Picking the right partners up front and enabling them to be successful will give you the program KPIs you’re looking for, and alleviate a lot of future pain.

The post Driving Channel Adoption and Sales Pipeline through Partner Marketing appeared first on Zift Solutions.

The Communication Conundrum

The majority of people that I work with are marketing professionals. As such, they tend to develop campaigns focused on messaging to their own customers and end users. They’re not thinking of their partner base as a group to which they should be marketing.

While we often hear that it’s difficult to capture partner mindshare, the fact is vendors are not doing a great job staying in touch or promoting available tools and campaigns to partners. At most, they may send an occasional newsletter. Rarely do vendors fully utilize the tools available to them to segment and target their partner base to actively promote campaigns or analyze results. Doing so can make a significant and almost immediate impact.

Real Life Success

With a little help from Zift, a large power management company recently sent out a targeted marketing communication campaign promoting a brand new web plugin to their channel partners. They tied a small incentive to the campaign to embed the new web plugin within two weeks. Prior to the first email, only seven partners had taken the initial steps to install the web plugin on their website.

Email #1 – Announcement (Week 1)

A brief message was sent to partners who had not yet activated the new product showcase announcing its availability and providing the incentive to do so within two weeks. The results were nearly immediate:

• 286% increase in activated showcases
• 20 new partners activated the product showcase

Email #2 – Reminder (Week 2)

We sent a quick follow-up email reminder encouraging partners to activate the product showcase with the incentive. Once again, the email elicited a fast partner response:

• 63% increase in activated showcases
• 17 new web plugin’s activated

End Results

With just two emails in two weeks and the promise of a $25 gift card, we saw:

• 528% increase in activated showcases 37 showcases activated
• Campaign cost under $1000

By sending two simple emails and spending less than $1,000 on partner incentives, the vendor now has nearly 50 partners syndicating their product showcase on their websites, potentially reaching thousands of end users.

The fact remains: You can spend thousands on your channel program, design and integrate the most advanced Channel Marketing and Management platform, but if you’re not communicating and selling the value to your partners – they won’t buy in. However, with just a minor outreach effort and a little incentive, partners will and do engage.

Every Little Bit Counts

Every effort that you make to connect with your partners counts. Clearly, just putting a couple of emails together can make a huge impact on what your partners are doing – and can have a measurable and positive effect on their engagement and the overall success of your channel program.

Take time to examine your partner base, take stock of what your partners are currently using today and identify gaps. Then tailor your content and communications to your partners to fill those gaps. Be sure to use your CMM platform’s reporting and to-partner communication filtering to help you segment and determine what type of content will be relevant to different partners.

Blanket emails and newsletters won’t do the trick anymore. If your communications are targeted and clearly demonstrate the available tactics, tools and campaigns you’re making available to partners, they are much more likely to read them, engage in your channel program and establish the very behaviors you’re hoping to see.

Over to you…

What tactics or strategies have you employed to increase partner engagement? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.

The post How to Increase Partner Activity by 528% In Just 2 Weeks appeared first on Zift Solutions.