So far, we’ve talked about  defining your objective, selection and segmentation of receivers, medium and message. In this the last part of this topic, we’ll talk about repetition and frequency.

Response

When you deliver call to action, then you must also have in mind a desired response both in terms of:

• Action – What do you want the receiver to do:
  • Immediately?
  • In future?
• Medium – How do you want them to respond?

By implication, if you are going to communicate and any communication must have a call to action then you must plan for the response and consider how you will:

• Receive it
• Monitor it
• Report upon it
• Act upon it

In practice, this means content creation within your portal. It means making sure that the information or functionality exists within your portal to easily satisfy the call to action, to act upon it and to capture the interaction resulting from it.

Repetition and Frequency

Whether you send out weekly updates, monthly newsletters or quarterly bulletins, consider carefully how often your partners want to hear from you. It is important that you consider how many vendors are contacting them daily and how many different communications they are likely to receive and want to receive. Consider conducting research amongst your partner community before deciding for yourself. The results may differ substantially! We think that communicating more that once per week is dangerous because it increases the likelihood substantially of your messages being:

• Ignored
• Read selectively
• Categorized as “Junk Mail” and never read again

Communicate sparingly and ensure that what you have to say is worth saying and interesting to your audience. However, if you issue an important message to your channel partners, it is worth repeating it selectively to those who failed to respond to your call to action the first time. This “second bite of the cherry” can often produce more results than your first provided that you change the tone of the message to incorporate a more personal, appealing or even pleading tone. Next week we’ll start a series of posts on partner service and support, specifically partner portals and mobile solutions.

Communication Objectives

Whilst you can communicate with your channel partners too infrequently, the opposite is certainly also the case. As with all forms of communication, if you have nothing worthwhile to say, don’t say anything. Partner communications must have a purpose each and every time. They must inform, educate or form a proposition of some sort. You must stop and think:

• Why are we communicating?
• What are we trying to achieve:
  • Quantitatively?
  • Qualitatively?

Selection and Segmentation of Receivers

Your message must be relevant and interesting to your receiver. Therefore prior to creating the message, it is essential to determine who your audience will be and consider adapting your communication according to your audience:

• Restrict your audience to only those receivers for whom the specific message is relevant
• Adapt the medium of the message so that it is relevant
• Adapt the syntax and / or the semantics of the message so that it is relevant
• Adapt the timing of the message so that it is relevant
• Adapt the call to action of the message so that it is relevant

This step can often be difficult for vendors who lack sufficient personal profile data on the individuals in their channel. It is common to hear of vendors sending partner communications to the partner principle or to the sales@ or info@ email address. All of which are of negligible value and send out a poor impression of your level of partner intimacy. Quite simply, if you do not have a detailed, up to date partner database with multiple contacts in all disciplines for each of your partners, your communication strategy will at best deliver sub-optimal results.

Next week we will look at communication mediums.

In its simplest form, this is providing marketing contacts within channel partners with advance information in relation to your own marketing campaigns and providing access to marketing materials to enable them to run their own in parallel. Simple, but often poorly executed. In practice, channel partners typically find out about vendor marketing campaigns at around the same time that their customers do. Whilst we all know that planning, budgeting and implementing a marketing campaign can take many days or weeks, vendors most commonly leave their channel partners with insufficient notice to develop their own campaigns and run them concurrently. This is quite simply insane.

Channel partners are often eager to find new ways to communicate with their customers and new messages to communicate to them. If they and you can leverage your collective investment and your collective firepower simultaneously and with a consistent message you have a chance to multiply your return on marketing investment significantly. What it takes to succeed is for vendors to see partner marketing teams and marketing budgets as extensions of their own resources. Create a virtual marketing team or community, protect your confidentiality with NDA’s if necessary but share information about upcoming product launches, promotions, demand generation campaigns and even branding campaigns by whatever means you have available.

The key here though is timely communication and information sharing amongst your channel partner community. On this note, in our experience, vendor databases of channel contacts on average hold less than one marketing contact per eight company records! Remember, you can’t market through companies, only through people!

There are a number of tools on the market along with agencies able to support online co- branded collateral creation and these ensure that when a partner does participate in collaborative marketing, they can adhere to your brand, message and creative look and feel which again serves to maximize impact for the vendor. Subprograms work best when linked to market development fund programs, such that the vendor contributes toward the cost of co-op campaigns as and when they are implemented in adherence with their own guidelines.

MDF and Co-Op Marketing

We talked about the pro’s and con’s of MDF as a partner incentivization tool in the last chapter. Now let’s look at it as a practical facilitator for collaboration. Channel partner marketing budget’s are geared around promoting the partner and the things that they sell to their own customers. Few channel partners are philanthropists so if they are going to invest any portion of their own budget in promoting a vendor instead of themselves, there will have to be a very good reason or else a financial contribution by the vendor in question.

In the 90′s and the early part of the last decade, MDF became little more than a bribe. Most propped up the balance-sheets of channel partner who came to rely upon it to stay in profit. As margins fell for vendors and the need for greater financial transparency and compliance became more critical, many vendors tightened up the rules of MDF programs or stopped them altogether.

Accrued MDF based upon a fixed percentage of sales can often be seen as an entitlement and can become a contractual obligation for a vendor to provide it. Instead it should be a discretionary fund to which channel partners apply under strict guidelines for part financing of activities deemed likely to generate sales directly or indirectly for the vendor. It should be positioned as unlimited? and a partner should be able to utilize it as often as they wish provided that a number of rules are applied:

• A vendor should look to pay no more than 50% towards any campaign or activity
• Criteria should be laid out under which the 50% will be paid subject to achievement of agreed KPI?s
• Ideally campaigns or activities should be implemented through vendor-aligned agencies through which they (and hence the partner) may enjoy volume discounts thereby minimizing the cost of the initiative to all
• Partners should receive no payment from the vendor until after the activity has been completed
• Partners should demonstrate that they have achieved the prescribed KPI’s and reimbursement should be made accordingly
• ROI should be tangible and measurable

We have worked with vendor’s who have implemented such a scheme to replace an accrual-based model. Their message: “more control but more available funds”. Naturally, if the MDF spent delivered a better ROI than before then, by definition, this meant more sales and hence more marketing budget. In reality, we saw significant reductions in fund redemption’s but a significant improvement in the quality and alignment of partner-led campaigns. Such campaigns were considerably more effective than before leading to better results. A virtuous circle and one which has seen massively increased marketing productivity from the partners and massively decreased vendor costs whilst leaving the channel as a whole happy in the knowledge that unlimited funds are available to them so long as they can demonstrate that they will spend them wisely.

Next week, we’ll look at through-partner marketing and content syndication.

In the 1990′s and 2000′s, collaboration with channel partner networks centered squarely around plugging the gaps – either extending a vendors reach into geographic, vertical or horizontal markets or else utilizing channel partners as a means of augmenting a vendors capabilities where services were a key component of the solution required by the customer. In this way, vendors gained a more complete offering and were able to meet the needs of their customer wherever, whenever and however they were needed. Collaboration has taken many forms, the five key areas have been:

1. Professional services
2. Supply chain, logistics and distributed credit
3. Sales and pre-sales
4. Marketing
5. Post sales support services

Of the five, undoubtedly the most consistently well implemented has been collaboration in the provision of customer services. Starting first with break-fix warranty support by resellers themselves and then over time migrating to such work being carried out by large TPMs. Collaboration in logistics and credit distribution has matured such a that a relatively small number of global and regional distributors have taken the lion’s share of the market. Lucrative professional services has often been a source of channel conflict and sales and marketing collaboration has been less consistently well executed and typically with a number of stand-alone programs. Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll be looking at a range of programs that are amongst the most common, good and bad and considering their advantages and disadvantages for the vendors who implement them.

We’ll also be discussing the new partnering and collaboration paradigm; specifically the impact of SaaS, PaaS, IaaS and Cloud Services in general upon the relationship between vendors and partners so stay tuned.

Whether you adopt the ‘big bang’ approach of launching a new partner program with accompanying PR campaign or the more low-key approach of augmenting your existing partner-base as part of your existing program, it is important to preface any communications with messages reinforcing the points above. You must set the context of the recruitment, why you are doing it, what it will mean for you, what it will mean for existing partners and most importantly what it will mean for and how it will benefit your target partners.
Putting the actual marketing communications activities to one side; we will deal with them in later section, let’s turn our attention to creating a low cost and efficient means of inviting partners to join you and processing their applications.

Email has been the defacto standard communication medium but it is also statistically weak in generating responses. Spam filters and security software have exacerbated the problem. Social media has exploded in popularity as a communication medium but its use in a B2B context tends to be rather broad and not sufficiently targeted to solicit a response. You must also remember that in order to have whole companies to partner with you, you must start by recruiting individuals – company’s don’t form relationships with other companies – people do.

It is essential therefore that you gather accurate contact information; names, job roles email etc of you are to target the right people with the right message. We discussed this in earlier sections of this document but here it is critical. Sales people will have different motivations to join your program to those of a marketer or support person. You must play to these motivations effectively in your communications if you are to succeed in making your campaign above average in terms of response. This means that you will need to engage in targeted and personalized campaigns segmented by organization type, market focus type, job role type and so on – communicating multiple value propositions to each. This takes time and effort but the results will be worthwhile.

The email or other contact should direct the individual ideally to an online registration point within which you can gather more information about them and populate and enrich your database whilst ascertaining if your judgment in inviting them to join you was correct. The same registration point must be available via your corporate website to catch stray applicants that you may not have invited or who missed your recruitment campaign first time around.

Since by now you will have devised your partner selection and segmentation criteria, you may now begin the process of mapping applicants against them and either approving or rejecting their application. This can be an arduous and time consuming task best automated especially if your campaign has been broad. Needless to say, ensure you have the necessary systems and/or business processes in place before you begin.

Next time, we’ll be discussing partner on-boarding.

In my previous posts, we examined methodologies for identifying the attributes of suitable partners and for segmenting those partners into the most appropriate groups. Now it is time to get those partners on board.

What’s in it for Me?

Many vendors now throw together a few deliverables that are cheap and easy to deliver and dress them with a logo and a brand name. This was fine in the days when the market was less crowded, less competitive and when vendors could differentiate themselves through their unique technology. But in the age of technology commoditization and convergence, most lack the means to compel their channel partners to work with them simply because their product was the best or the only available.

Today, partner programs themselves have to be the differentiator and through them, a vendor needs to convey actions as well as words that motivate channel partners to work with them rather than their competitors. But what do channel partners want to hear? In essence:

• You will develop technology that is superior to your competitors
• You will create a desire within your mutual customers to buy new technology or upgrade from existing technologies
• You will invest in demand generation
• You will make customers receptive to buying your products and your brand
• You will direct customers to your channel partners
• You will direct your channel partners to potential customers
• You will minimize channel conflict
• You will provide the necessary information, education, tools and resources to assist your channel partners in marketing, selling and if necessary supporting your products
• You will ensure that the sale of your products will prove to a be a profitable enterprise
• You will make it easy for channel partners to augment your product offering with complementary products and value added services
• Your will ensure that your products deliver on their promise, that they are reliable and encourage repeat purchases
• You will, throughout be easy to do business with and treat your channel partners with integrity and respect

Many of these expectations depend on having great products but if you get the other elements right and implement them better than your competitors, it is entirely possible to have inferior products but a far more dedicated and motivated channel than they do. We will discuss best practice in partner program deliverables in later posts but at this point, there are two important principles to remember:

1. The best recruitment campaign in the world will fail if your partner program is not compelling
2. The notion of ‘build it and they will come’ – having the best program but failing to market it and proactively and systematically drive recruitment will also fail

Next time, we’ll discuss effective recruitment campaign approaches.

Last week’s announcement regarding Q2 revenues and market share for PC vendors and based on Gartner and IDC research was great news for Lenovo and for RelayWare.

Like many companies, Lenovo had begun to see slow or no growth in their mature markets – North America and EMEA but also like many companies who rely on a leveraged model, they knew that the secret of success lay in more effective channel engagement. The whole report was interesting for any hi-tech vendor, but in particular, I thought that this comment may interest CEO’s and other senior executives who struggle to see the connection between partner performance optimization and revenue growth: and hopefully inspire further investment in their own channel development initiatives:

“Lenovo outpaced Acer Group to become the number 3 vendor worldwide. It continued to reap the results of its channel expansion in markets outside of Asia/Pacific, garnering notable gains in the U.S. and Japan. All regions saw positive growth and total volume increased by nearly 23% on the year.”

This outstanding achievement took place just 9 months after selecting RelayWare as Lenovo’s global Partner Relationship Management solution – take a look at the original press release. Lenovo now have the most powerful and sophisticated partner management infrastructure of any of their contemporaries – HP, Dell, Acer, Toshiba and Apple all use a plethora of disparate systems, websites, tools and databases – I know we’ve spoken to them all.

Hopefully these great results will inspire other executives to share Lenovo’s vision and make the necessary investment in their own channel development initiatives.