Do you have a Partner Portal and/ or PRM platform in situ?
Do you feel that BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, Timing) is still the most appropriate lead program for channel partners?
In your experience, what is the single most challenging aspect of running / managing MDF programs?
What level of importance do you attach to personalisation in your content creation activities?
What tool(s) do you use to understand your target audience engagement with your sales and marketing materials (in the context of the following examples)?
Are you happy with your partners' marketing performance?
What is one thing your organisation should do to improve your partners marketing activity?
Overall, how do you rate the CMU Event today?
Quotes about the day
What are your key channel challenges in 2022?
Participant portals were considered rudimentary; not catering for all partner types, let alone providing a personalised experience by job function or partner type. Portals had been built to support the legacy business and were not correctly configured to handle non-transacting partners or consulting or co-sell partnerships. Essentially, many were working with tools that are not relevant for the current, diverse partner base.
Some portals are missing even the basic element such as deal registration and content management. Whereas many were described as missing several elements such as co-marketing campaigns, pipeline visibility, warranty management, training, and MDF campaign tracking. Several responses identified the lack of support for 2-tier models including distribution or the ability to cater for P2P and when more than one partner is engaged on one opportunity.
This was explained as leading to poor engagement figures and partners not using the portal. For those described as more adequate, they still lacked a good partner experience and many portals are undergoing revisions and reviews.
we have a home built portal – that says it all
There is a resounding lack of knowledge of what works and what does not, with few metrics from previous campaigns, aligned to partners or Geos or campaigns. This is then reflected in a lack of onward visibility of how partners are using leads or measuring “success.” The net result being a lack of insight to justify future investment.
There was some frustration with the time required to ensure campaigns were compliant with MDF guidelines, without curtailing what partners want to do. If partners are prepared to present proposals and are proactively creating campaigns, it was frustrating when “process” got in the way (compliance, fund allocation, approvals and payments).
When faced with multiple partners, there was concerns around investing with the right resellers, or budgets being spread too thin, with multiple products and thousands of partners.
With a strategy to drive “strategic growth” this partner management, segmenting and allocating resources was a challenge.
Participants were using a variety of tools (Hubspot, Marketo, Turtl, Eloqua, Cognism, CRM, Impartner), or tracking unique links from those who visited content. Click-through rates and social followers were also tracked – so everything on a digital platform. Some participant vendors relied on their channel partners to do the tracking.
Once again, the same tools were in evidence plus, at this 1:1 level there was personal, manual, follow up. Some participant vendors were using SFDC campaign ID’s to track these opportunities.
Please note that none of the delegates answered that the event was poor or average – all provided good and above feedback.
Really well ran with great round table discussions and IDC insights"
The format is great with a community of peers."
Each presentation gave good insights and learnings."
The table discussions were really useful"
Presentations were fantastic"
Interaction with peers and knowledge sharing was inspiring"
Meeting with people in similar roles from other organisations and sharing challenges, ideas and best practices"
The roundtable discussion were interesting"