Summary of Table Topics
Whilst Channel Sales and Marketing teams may have different roles and job functions, they should align to the organization's top level business goals - typically increasing revenue, net-new customer acquisition, and market expansion. This discussion will explore how vendors align their “channel programs” and their “channel sales & marketing” team actions to demonstrably contribute to the top-level company goals.
This table explored how vendors align their “channel programs” and their “channel sales & marketing” teams by ensuring each are invested in, and contribute to, the top-level company goals.
To do this sales and marketing teams need to ensure there are processes in place that help them stay aligned so feedback loops demonstrate what is working.
It was suggested that monthly and quarterly meetings (ideally F2F), to check on goals and to track progress was essential – sharing the goals and taking joint ownership of achieving them. The channel teams also need to ensure the partner program drives the right behavior, with Partner QBR’s that include both sales and marketing teams and that partner business plans drive towards those same corporate goals.
A simple sanity check might be at the program level to look at the MDF program activities and see if these are reflective of the company goals.
One phrase used was ‘We are a channel company not a company with a channel’ this was considered useful as if indirect sales and marketing are working together the first part of this will be true.
It was considered essential that the vendor must be easy to do business with and transparency of commercials is also essential to enable easy visibility of the value.
For this data is king and all teams need their own personalised dashboards (channel, sales and marketing) which should inform what is and what is not working so decisions are data-driven not a hunch.
An interesting side discussion is the generation shift in leadership roles and the new culture is greater transparency as these individuals are comfortable with social media and they are familiar with sharing everything and this drives a need to be seen to be sustainable, equitable, and diverse.
In conclusion it was stated that is it less about what the vendor wants and more about what the partner needs to drive partner engagement.
Achieving and maximizing ROI from MDF programs while minimizing the associated challenges should be the ultimate objective for any Channel Marketer. But how exactly is this achieved, and what are the typical roadblocks faced in this pursuit?
There were several questions addressed in this table discussion:
Alignment between sales and marketing and between partner and the vendor brand was the number one takeaway towards achieving success with MDF funded campaigns.
Tier-one partners tend to have stronger sales and marketing teams who align with the brand and MDF objectives and drive the lion’s share of the revenue.
They tend to be more market and marketing savvy; understanding ABM and more complex Always-On Brand to Demand campaigns, Intent activation, nurture paths, and driving pipeline and sales to close.
It is the tier-2 and tier-3 partners who represent the greatest challenge to support as they need more straightforward lower funnel solutions like BANTs and Sales Appointments.
These partners are unlikely to have dedicated marketing talent and the biggest challenge is to simply ensure they follow up and engage new leads and opportunities. There is a need for BDR and sales training on best practice in this area to support these partners.
For MDF tracking and ROI to be meaningful (leading to more funding) there needs to be full transparency between the brand and the partner showing lead source, campaign coding, and follow up tracking and responsibility. There is a common goal to establish a lead conversion benchmark for all to be judged against and aim towards. Establishing performance benchmarks will provide better comparisons; partner to partner and from campaign to campaign.
Portal Fatigue (too many portals which dilutes the ability to analyse results and streamline campaigns).
How can you create tailored, co-branded and customized content at volume for your partners that is brand compliant, and always up to date. We discuss best practices for blending the art of engaging content with the science of process and insight that enables you to deliver co-branding at speed and scale, and track engagement.
As a rule, vendors did not feel that partners are ready to understand and execute on personalisation of content beyond co-branded existing collateral and so education is needed on the “art of the possible” for partners.
There were significant differences noted in regions with some partners only managing to translate content (let alone personalise) and ideally requiring content to be translated for them (this was prevalent in LATAM and APJ).
Looking at alignment between sales and marketing it was considered that channel teams were always the last to hear news, but the first to be asked to react and execute on new programs.
It is accepted that the primary influencer on alignment is the CRO – if they are on board then the rest follows and so often it works best to have direct sales and channel sales under one CRO as in essence, they are another channel route to market.
The key content piece created by everyone is still PowerPoint and content is marketing led which sometimes isn’t aligned to what sales needs to drive opportunity engagement. Marketing creates what they “think” is needed without the due involvement of sales teams.
When it comes to TCMA (Through channel marketing automation tools and platforms) these are primarily used by smaller partners who do not have a full marketing department and the tools needed to conduct campaigns. Larger partners require custom campaigns and marketing activities. Interestingly it was quoted that updating content in TCMA platforms was a huge time-constraint with some vendors doing it themselves and taking up to 2 months to complete. And all those reported using TCMA were light on internal training and needed more.
Some sideways discussions on marketplaces posed the question of the relevancy of distribution but that they add value when increasing adoption of tools and portals and remove workload from both vendors and partners – so back to the basics of slick logistics in a new digital world.
Content governance in terms of message and brand
Version control including content with live links
Tracking is hard when TCMA is not engaged it is hard to track what content piece is successful
The customer journey is at least 70% digital - have your partners advanced their digital marketing capability accordingly and are you providing them with the right support to succeed? On this table we will discuss tools and techniques for partner assessment, scorecards, enabling better marketing, and closing the loop on sales.
During this session, the discussion centred around the increasingly digital B2B customer journey, the ability of partners to market effectively to those individuals, and the challenges to vendors this presented, particularly in closing the loop between marketing and sales.
The discussion focused on how to improve support to partners in line with this more complex buyer journey. This includes the growing buyer committee and the need to track influence as well as revenue.
On the day some of the data points called out in Kathy Contreras’ presentation stimulated a lot of discussion and debate on how vendors can adjust their marketing to accommodate this:
Enabling partners to manage the buyer journey is the hot topic – how to encourage a deeper understanding of what the customer wants, the buyer committee and the length of time a deal may take to resolve.
Identifying the right partners to invest in and the right form of investment was also discussed. This is key to focusing efforts with the right partners, and then identifying the correct enablement support for each partner whether that be people, process or technology focused.
Techniques discussed to resolve this included data analysis and scorecards to segment partners but key to success was the ability to connect with partners to really understand their requirements, and to identify where they needed support. Concierge services are seen as being effective in managing this process, and often the perception of “true partnership” is improved when the process is managed well.
Closing the loop on marketing and sales activity represented a huge challenge and within the loop attributing effectiveness to the multiple touch points of a typical B2B purchase was a constant point of discussion and consternation.
Focusing on quick wins it was seen as a lot easier to close the loop on leads generated centrally and distributed to partners which can be tracked through deal registration.