These blogs will provide you with insights and opinions about indirect channel collaboration and multi-channel communication from a strategic and a best practice perspective. We will also discuss Relayware’s technologies and software and how they can be applied to help customers with common indirect channel management challenges and share exciting news from our community of customers
A few weeks ago I had the privilege of talking to an individual who worked for a channel partner organization. During the course of our 20 minute conversation I learned some incredibly useful bits of information. The net take-away was that she thought the vendors that her company did business with weren’t as easy to deal with as they made themselves out to be.
Just like in the movie, “Spinal Tap”, our lists go to 11. 
At the end of the day your resellers and partners wish you were easier to do business with. As you plan for the 2nd half of 2013 and consider your strategic needs for 2014 – start by putting yourself in your partner’s shoes and think about THEIR needs as you allocate resources and define program policy compliance requirements.
Ask yourself whether or not you have sufficiently automated collaboration and communication mechanisms in place to give your partners every opportunity to succeed!
We’ve all heard the African Proverb, “It take a village to raise a child“. The idea behind this is that a child does not become a productive member of society by simply following direct orders from his or her parents. The proverb implies that everyone in the community has a vested interest in the success of every child. It implies that the community has a responsibility to inform, enable, collaborate with, and nurture each child.
The same is true for your indirect sales channel…it takes a village. A child’s village is made up of parents, teachers, coaches, friends, classmates, teammates, public servants, spiritual leaders, etc. When it comes to your indirect sales channel, the village is made up of vendors, distributors, wholesalers, consultants, integrators, resellers, dealers, etc. The members of your village all have different experiences, expertise, and abilities. Newcomers to your village and members who are currently struggling NEED to be engaged with and have access to the collective knowledge of all members if they are to be productive and successful.
If you are a vendor, start by enlisting the entire village to help fulfill the needs of each newcomer or struggling child [channel partner]. As a vendor, there’s only so much you can do yourself, so surrender now and ask the village for help! Between you (the parents) and the rest of the channel (the village), new or struggling members should feel not only welcome but also empowered to explore their curiosities and get on-board and up-to-speed quickly. Only after you’ve encouraged and observed engagement between newcomers or struggling members and the rest of the villagers should you truly begin to set expectations of this demographic. Between you [the vendor] and the rest of the village, you should be fully capable of providing the following:
Ahead of my brief series on ecosystem collaboration, I was keen to share the details of a book that I am reading and which is written by Jacob Morgan. Jacob is the principal of Chess Media Group, a management consulting and strategic advisory firm on collaboration. Jacob is also the author of the Amazon best-selling book, The Collaborative Organization. The book mainly deals with the topic of solving internal business challenges using emerging social and collaborative tools but almost all of the main principles that Jacob covers for improving workforce productivity can be applied directly to improving external ecosystem productivity as well.
Our assertion is that the application of collaborative working practices and emerging social and collaborative tools offers business even greater benefits when applied beyond the enterprise. This is because the considerable productivity gains brought about by collaborative working and collaborative business processes translate directly into increased revenue when applied to today’s sales channels. Supply chains and value chains have evolved into sophisticated ecosystems made up out of many companies and individuals each providing products, services and knowledge to customers often acting independently but frequently collaborating to deliver business solutions to the customer. Your product is typically only one (small) part in such a solution. Where effective communication through the value chain was once the primary challenge for companies and one that programs and PRM systems solved in part, collaboration with ecosystems is now the number one challenge facing businesses with indirect go to market strategies.
Morgan notes that there has been a significant behavioral shift that has taken place in the last 10 years. The advent of social networking and the ubiquity of the software and technologies utilized to engage in social collaboration has transformed the way in which people communicate and otherwise interact. Indeed social networking and collaboration have become the communication medium of choice for the generation of individuals now entering the workplace (yours and your external ecosystems’) and is rapidly displacing email for everyone else.
As a consequence, our customers who use email and web portals extensively are really struggling to adapt. Many are only just beginning to implement first-generation Partner Relationship Management (PRM) technologies only to find that their limited collaboration and communication capabilities are unable to address the needs of their audience or to overcome the challenges of effectively leveraging a demand side ecosystem. Social CRM and PRM technology fails to address their needs because they enable only some aspects of sales, marketing and program automation and almost none of the collaborative sales, marketing, learning and support processes required. Enterprise collaboration tools are great for facilitating collaboration but enable messaging, file and project-sharing inside a company and rather crudely beyond it.
In my forthcoming blogs, I’ll be building on this assertion and explaining:
Be sure to look out for my own ebook entitled “Collaborate Beyond the Enterprise – The Definitive Guide to External Social Collaboration and Indirect Channel Marketing” out next month. We’ll be previewing it on our website so stay tuned!
It is often said that the cost of new customer acquisition is five times the cost of customer retention. Yet many companies have yet to benefit from these economies. More significant are the multiples generated by repeat purchases from retained customers and these come as a consequence of long term customer satisfaction. This in turn comes from a deeper understanding of each customer, their individual business challenges and proposing solutions for those challenges rather than a “one size fits all” approach.
These principles are as relevant for the businesses that make up a company’s demand-side ecosystem as they are for customers. This is because the majority of businesses today are more dependent upon the sales and consequently the revenues generated by such entities as indirect sales channels than they are upon the revenues generated directly by their own resources. The key to success then, in part at least, is the successful “management” not only of customer relationships but also of indirect channel relationships.
In the quest for high levels of customer retention and the generation of ongoing repeat business many companies have introduced Customer Relationship Management software systems and, often inappropriately, these have been employed to also manage relationships with indirect channels. But unless the principles of CRM and what has come to be known as Partner Relationship Management (PRM) were adopted enterprise-wide, operationally, collaboratively and culturally, such software systems often achieved neither their potential nor the company’s business goals.
Since the advent of enterprise social and collaboration strategy and associated systems at the turn of the last decade, business focus has turned from CRM to Social CRM and from “relationship management” to collaboration. The principal behind this is that social and collaborative engagement is ultimately deemed more productive than the traditional management of transactional business relationships. Indeed in the recent McKinsey Global Institute report “The Social Economy: Unlocking Value and Productivity Through Social Technologies”, MGI concluded that businesses could realize a 25% productivity gain through the adoption of social and collaborative strategies and technologies.
We put forward the case then that by evolving existing Customer and Partner Relationship Management strategies and technologies into one’s in which social collaboration is central, businesses can help to achieve long-term customer and channel partner satisfaction, ensure repeat purchases, improve customer and partner relationships, increase loyalty, decrease customer and partner turnover, decrease marketing costs (associated with customer or partner acquisition), increase sales revenue, and thereby increase profit margins. Over the coming weeks, we will set out to define the components of such a strategy and identify the technologies available to implement it in this blog. Coming soon:
If you want to understand the potential benefits of deploying social collaboration and communication technologies within and beyond the enterprise look no further than this excellent McKinsey report.
In summary, the report tells us that ina few short years, social technologies have given social interactions the speed and scale of the Internet. Whether discussing consumer products or organizing political movements, people around the world constantly use social-media platforms to seek and share information. Companies use them to reach consumers in new ways too; by tapping into these conversations, organizations can generate richer insights and create precisely targeted messages and offers.
While 72 percent of companies use social technologies in some way, very few are anywhere near to achieving the full potential benefit. In fact, the most powerful applications of social technologies in the global economy are largely untapped. Companies will go on developing ways to reach consumers through social technologies and gathering insights for product development, marketing, and customer service. Yet the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) finds that twice as much potential value lies in using social tools to enhance communications, knowledge sharing, and collaboration within and across enterprises. MGI’s estimates suggest that by fully implementing social technologies, companies have an opportunity to raise the productivity of interaction workers—high-skill knowledge workers, including managers and professionals—by 20 to 25 percent.
MGI’s report, The social economy: Unlocking value and productivity through social technologies, explores their potential economic impact by examining their current usage and evolving application in four commercial sectors: consumer packaged goods, retail financial services, advanced manufacturing, and professional services. These technologies, which create value by improving productivity across the value chain, could potentially contribute $900 billion to $1.3 trillion in annual value across the four sectors.
Two-thirds of this potential value lies in improving collaboration and communication within and across enterprises. The average interaction worker spends an estimated 28 percent of the workweek managing e-mail and nearly 20 percent looking for internal information or tracking down colleagues who can help with specific tasks. But when companies use social media internally, messages become content; a searchable record of knowledge can reduce, by as much as 35 percent, the time employees spend searching for company information. Additional value can be realized through faster, more efficient, more effective collaboration, both within and between enterprises.
The amount of value individual companies can capture from social technologies varies widely by industry, as do the sources of value. Companies that have a high proportion of interaction workers can realize tremendous productivity improvements through faster internal communication and smoother collaboration. Companies that depend very heavily on influencing consumers can derive considerable value by interacting with them in social media and by monitoring the conversations to gain a richer perspective on product requirements or brand image—for much less than what traditional research methods would cost.
To reap the full benefit of social technologies, organizations must transform their structures, processes, and cultures: they will need to become more open and nonhierarchical and to create a culture of trust. Ultimately, the power of social technologies hinges on the full and enthusiastic participation of employees who are not afraid to share their thoughts and trust that their contributions will be respected. Creating these conditions will be far more challenging than implementing the technologies themselves.
Find out how Relayware can enable your business to collaborate beyond the enterprise.
Why do we buy things? Not so long ago, the answer was simple. We either bought things out of necessity or out of desire and the proportion of our purchases falling into the second category was directly proportional to our disposable income. Then came marketing. Marketing convinced us that luxuries were in fact necessities and created a desire within us for things we did not need and shortly after having bought them, things we often never used.
In the 21st century, our determination to buy things is additionally fueled by rampant consumerism and a heady mix of the following:
I have tried hard to shield my children from these effects and they certainly are not over-indulged but consider my 12 year-old daughter. 3 years ago she was desperate for an iPod Nano. Everyone else had one, the new models (released less than a year after the last) had video capability, a built-in camera, they came in a range of cool colors. It cost roughly the equivalent of my entire Christmas list when I was her age but a year later, it just didn’t cut it. Because it was not a phone and her friends had all moved on from iPods – they all had phones. By the time we got around to buying her one (in spite of my wife’s protests) we now faced a dilemma. Buy a now-obsolete iPhone 4 and risk her being ridiculed by her school-friends or spend another $100 on an iPhone 4S…which looked identical but which listened and talked back. Of course, as loving parents, we had no choice but to buy the new model but this week I have sensed that change is once more on the way…
I should point out that though they had phones, none of my daughter’s friends ever actually made phone calls. Oh no! Phones are for messaging when you’re 12. And now apparently, it’s cool to use Blackberry Messenger amongst soon-to-be-teenagers. Sure Blackberry’s are outdated, in no way cool, they have very few apps and their manufacturer may soon be consigned to the history books if sales volumes are anything to go by.
But they are less common than iPhone’s and therefore they make their owner stand out as an individual. Because my daughter does not have one, she is excluded from the ‘club’ that IM’s using BBM…an outsider. Can I really do that to my own daughter?! Scary isn’t it?
So what has the story of my daughter and her Blackberry-envy got to do with B2B marketing, collaboration and communication you ask? Well the factors affecting her buying decisions (or my own more accurately) are, apart from being downright scary, indicative of a subversive shift in marketing tactics and the influencing of behavior. You see, my daughter’s generation is influenced far more by their interaction with other people and companies on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube than by press, radio or TV commercials. They’re too smart for that. My younger daughter is 10 and when asked about commercials she told me, “they just tell you to buy their stuff, but they would wouldn’t they?”. Smart kid!
This is changing the world of marketing forever. Here are a few facts:
There’s been a drift toward online marketing for the last 10 years of course – nothing new. Only the nature of that online marketing is changing rapidly. Online page advertising is no longer working (if indeed it ever did).
B2C marketing follows the audience. In just a few short years, engagement in social networks and using social media apps has risen to be the number one online activity. No prizes then for guessing where advertising spend is growing most rapidly. What’s also changed is the platform or device upon which the engagement is taking place. There are already more smartphones on the planet than PC’s.
By 2015, Gartner predicts that there will be 5 times as many. Mobile internet access is set to exceed fixed internet access this year and it’s set to grow rapidly. The rapid expansion in 4G connectivity will facilitate and speed this growth.
And with 4G comes more time spent watching media on mobile devices so yet more advertising spend will drift toward online and mobile.
Of course another great strength of social marketing is that it often comes with the endorsement of our friends and colleagues. The phenomenon of Liking and Sharing products and the companies that manufacture them not to mention the viral YouTube video campaign have changed the way marketing comes to us. A referral is so much more powerful than an unsolicited advertisement or mailshot and far more likely to be consumed by the recipient.
So it works. But does it work in a B2B context. This all hinges upon whether or not communication preferences and behaviors are changing in people’s private lives in isolation or whether they’re changing across the board. Clearly, it’s the latter and employers are accelerating the transformation by introducing enterprise social communication and collaboration tools either as extensions of CRM or stand alone. Many employers actively encourage staff to participate in their business social networks and to help promote their products and services.
While email remains the number one communication tool in business and volumes continue to grow, response rates are declining. There’s a whole new generation of employees joining the workplace from university who have never used email to communicate and simply don’t get it. Their expectations of communication are fundamentally different to earlier generations:
Once upon a time, the only way to communicate was through face to face meeting. Then came written communication, then printing brought mass media, then the telegraph and the telephone. Cinema, radio and television then eMail arrived in the 90′s followed by SMS, the internet, BBS’s, video conferencing, websites and portals and now social communication and collaboration facilitated by the internet has entered into the mix. With only one exception, none of these mediums has disappeared from daily use but more so now than ever before, we live in a world of multi-channel communication.
Effective marketers need to exploit each and every channel to be effective and reach their audiences wherever they may be and whichever technology and platform they choose to use for communication. They must be mindful that their audiences will select the voices and topics that they themselves want to hear from and quite literally won’t choose to follow those they don’t. And since the mobile device will play such a crucial role in communication and the use of smartphones and tablets will accelerate leaving fixed devices far behind, marketing has to be tailored to the device at which it will be targeted like never before.
They must also be mindful that an increasing amount of time is spent using mobile apps as opposed to mobile browsers. While much of this can be explained by the rise of the mobile device as a game console, many leading companies are deploying free mobile apps as means of getting their messages directly to their audiences exploiting inherent features like location awareness, instant updates and notifications.
So my Christmas message goes out to all of the B2B marketers out there:
Merry Christmas, happy holidays and a happy and prosperous 2013!
In an ideal world, the members of our indirect sales channel would engage with us, our brands, and their network of professional connections on a much more regular basis. They would do so with their mobile devices and social media rather than via email blasts and lumbering through partner portals. They would take action on interesting vendor communications instantly and easily from wherever they are. In other words, together you and your resellers would be fully immersed in social channel marketing behaviors!
Here are a few tips for understanding the psychology of your audience as you develop your social, mobile channel marketing strategy:
Clearly communicate the rules and benefits of engagement to your indirect sales channel. Give them the flexibility to choose when, where, and how they engage as each situation fits their unique image and what it is that they want to be known for.
“Trick-or-Treat, your brand is neat, give me something good to Tweet!“ When it come to Channel Marketing, that’s the cry of your indirect sales channel this Halloween season!
I don’t mean to scare you, but your channel is no longer sitting at their desk with multiple browser windows open to all of the different partner portals they’re forced to log into on a regular basis. They never have been, nor will they ever be sitting around waiting for your weekly email blasts either. That’s not to say that those tools and resources should go away. It’s just that they’re not the only game in town anymore.
Instead, your channel lives on their mobile phones and tablets at all hours of the day with nifty applications running in the background. They are accustomed to receiving automatic notifications when something they consider to be interesting has happened. They are accustomed to being able to share that information with a network of personal or professional connections with just the push of a button. They regularly comment or add an opinion to their outbound communications even after having hit the “send” button. They’re also used to instantaneous recognition/gratification/feedback when they engage in behavior that’s social, mobile, or collaborative.
Do your channel marketing efforts still revolve around partner portals, weekly email blasts, and the desktop/laptop user?
Come back next week when we share best practice tips on social channel marketing and re-marketing!
In our personal lives we’re compelled to check in with Facebook, Foursquare, and Yelp! in order to be crowned as the “mayor” of a restaurant, bar, or other business. We compete with others, both inside and outside of our social circles, to prove our loyalty to the businesses we love. Sometimes we’re granted discounts and perks from those merchants as a result of our loyalty. These days there seems to be growing enthusiasm over the idea of game mechanics, like the ones mentioned above, as a motivator for driving improved employee performance and loyalty. The theory is that leaderboards, badges, and other publicity-driven tools and measurements that have been widely adopted in our personal lives will encourage a healthy dose of competitiveness and excellence amongst employees within an organization – even across distinctly different business units. In fact, an employer may even go so far as to offer perks, discounts, or other rewards to employees who demonstrate desirable behaviors and excellence as measured by their game mechanics criteria.
I say, “Welcome to the party”. Similar strategies and tactics have been in play as a means to motivate the indirect sales channel for years! Scorecards, real-time business plan progress reports, training & certification, co-op, rebate, MDF, and incentives programs are all game-mechanics-like practices and they’re nothing new to the world of indirect sales! These programs are all designed to celebrate success, track achievements and encourage loyalty, competency, and other desirable behaviors amongst an indirect sales community.
That being said, the traditional channel enabling programs mentioned above have primarily operated as private celebrations in the past. However, the widespread use of mobile devices and apps that constantly ask us to brag about where we’ve been, who we were with, what we saw, and how fast we run, cycle, or swim has made society comfortable to the point where we shamelessly share every bit of evidence related to our whereabouts and achievements with the entire world – including photographic proof! In other words, “game mechanics” appears to be making it socially acceptable to publicize EVERYTHING about ourselves – both personally and professionally.
This is significant because channel programs that, to date, have operated as a very private form of game mechanics are in need of change. The expectation of the audience, the indirect sales channel, is that everything is public, transparent, real-time, accessible anytime / anywhere, interconnected, and automated (based on user preferences, of course). The simple fact is that social sharing, PDA (Public Displays of Achievement), and mobile device usage – for both the consumption and distribution of content – have begun to weave their way into the fabric of B2B culture. As a result, B2B technology solution providers must modernize their offerings to include the following:
If B2B technology solution providers fail to deliver on the above requirements they run the risk of being displaced by a competitor who is better prepared to satisfy the social, mobile, collaborative, communication, and competitive expectations of both the enterprise AND the indirect sales channel.
Please share your thoughts on this phenomenon in the comments section!
Here at Relayware, we are excited to announce the launch of our proudest achievement – the 2012 Release of our leading B2B collaboration and multi-channel communication solution for companies seeking to maximize the performance of their indirect sales channels. The highlight of the Release is Relayware Mobile. The mobile app, the first of its kind for both smartphones and tablets provides indirect sales channels with the information, training and the collaboration and communications tools they need whenever and wherever they need them. Downloadable from Apple App Store and Google Play, Relayware Mobile can be fully styled to reflect individual customer branding.
In addition to the new mobile app, Relayware’s 2012 Release extends our leadership position further with numerous innovative new features, enhancements and additions. These include:
Relayware’s 2012 Release is available immediately to new and existing customers. Find out more and download Relayware Mobile right now!