Channel Marketing Concierge Services: A key tool to help increase channel engagement
Learn about the various kinds of Channel Marketing Concierge Services that companies can offer to add value to your channel partners.
Assisting with partner marketing, a concierge service can enhance the acceptance of your Partner Marketing platform among your partner ecosystem. Due to their focus on sales and revenue generation, your channel partners may not have the capacity to fully utilize your partner marketing platform. That's where a channel marketing concierge service can step in to provide support.
Channel marketing concierge services help you drive significant ROI from your investment in channel marketing programs and tools. This blog discusses the various kinds of concierge services that will help you scale up your channel model and support channel partners efficiently without overloading your corporate marketing team.
Your channel partners may not have the skills or the in-depth knowledge to understand where they stand in terms of marketing your brand and what they need to do to sell more or faster; and you are too busy to work with each channel partner and figure out their strengths and weaknesses at the individual level. As a part of channel marketing concierge, you could provide your channel partners access to partner marketing assessments and similar marketing consulting services. Through partner marketing assessments, a channel marketing consultant can work closely with your channel partners, understanding their challenges and helping overcome them. Partner marketing assessment can even help you, as a vendor, to identify the gaps in your channel marketing and sales strategies. For example, if all your partner marketing assessments point to a particular area where your channel partners are failing, you may have to address it specifically in your partner training programs. It may also point to something deeper, such as a need to look for a specific skill-set at the time of partner recruitment itself.
This involves making partner marketing and sales enablement tools, such as partner portals, email marketing tools, or lead prospecting tools, available to your channel partners and providing them support for using those tools. Partner marketing and sales enablement tools help channel sales has three main benefits:
By investing in partner marketing and sales enablement tools, you send the message that you truly care for their success.
As discussed before, your channel partners will gravitate towards whichever vendor's product sells the easiest. If you want your brand to become your channel partner's favorite, you need to ensure it is popular−help them generate demand for your product or service. This demand-creation program support involves offering your channel partners ready-to-use marketing and sales programs or even running the program on their behalf and then routing the relevant leads to them.
Perhaps you have provided your channel partners access to a sales and marketing automation platform or a partner portal that lets them run marketing and sales campaigns. But, have you left them to figure out the platform/portal on their ? As discussed before, your channel partners have far too much going on to bother to learn to use your portal or marketing tool. You can offer marketing concierge services that cover sales and marketing campaign/platform setup, so your channel partners don't have to worry about the details. Examples include creating a complete partner profile in the system, setting up marketing and sales campaigns for channel partners, etc.
As a vendor, you invest a lot in MDF programs hoping to offer your channel partners the right marketing support. However, MDF programs are often underutilized and misunderstood by many partners. Your channel partners need more education on the benefits of MDF for their business. A channel marketing concierge team can help your channel partners understand the benefits of using MDF and assist them in planning and managing their quota of MDF better. A MDF consultant can work with your channel partners on a regular basis discussing the availability of MDF and optimal ways of its utilization.
Sure, you have a corporate marketing team that provides basic marketing materials to your channel partners, but what if they need a little more? For your brand to be recognized at local levels, your marketing and sales campaigns need to be localized−individualized for each market. Plus, your channel partner is your brand ambassador. You cannot afford to have any brand/messaging inconsistency there. At the corporate level your marketing department certainly cannot meet each channel partner's need for individualized marketing and sales collateral and in the rare cases where channel partners try to tailor the corporate marketing and sales materials, the results are usually disastrous. A channel marketing concierge service that offers creative design, branding, campaign localization and local language support may be the answer to this challenge.
Your channel partners have multiple vendors and leads flowing in from multiple sources. You can help your channel partners find the method in this madness by offering them lead management services as a part of the channel marketing concierge program. Lead management services may include
Nobody likes to put in effort if they don't know the results. Your channel partners would certainly like to know how they are faring. If there is no way for them to know what results their marketing/sales efforts are generating, they will either be demotivated or continue to make those efforts irrespective of results−which is a waste of resources. However, your channel partners may not really have the time or expertise to understand complicated marketing reports and crunch the numbers to find out if the last email campaign they sent out did well. Also, you may not have the time to consolidate the reports from every channel partner across the board and make sense of it. It might be helpful to offer measurement and ROI reporting as a part of your channel marketing concierge services in this case.
Concierge services help channel partners get the maximum benefits from channel marketing programs and tools, and, at the same time, generate more revenue for companies by helping channel partners market and sell their products and services better.
Mindmatrix is a leading provider of PRM software, channel partner marketing software and sales ecosystems enablement solutions including partner portal software. Since its inception in 1998, Mindmatrix has been focused on helping companies sell more, faster. A pioneer of sales (direct & indirect) and marketing enablement technology, today Mindmatrix is the only company offering a fully unified platform (Bridge ™) that connects and enables sales (direct & indirect), marketing, alliances and partner ecosystems. Backed by Mindmatrix's innovation and expertise, Bridge expands sales ecosystem enablement beyond its traditional boundaries to cover not just Sales Ecosystem Enablement, but also Partner Marketing and Multi-vendor Solutions Management
Learn about the various kinds of Channel Marketing Concierge Services that companies can offer to add value to your channel partners.
Learn about the various kinds of concierge services to scale up your channel model and support channel partners efficiently without overloading your corporate marketing team in this article
