Are your expectations of your partners unfair?

Do you have QBRs with your partners? Do you have partner scorecards? If you evaluate, audit or score your partners, it’s likely that your SMB partners may not be completely set up for success. Here’s why, and a better path.

How do you measure your partners and what do you expect of them?

While most vendors/manufacturers measure their partners on technical expertise, deals and sales pipelines, we commonly see measures on marketing participation and business development. Some of the marketing criteria we have seen on scorecards are…

·  Participation in vendor marketing campaigns

·  Email campaign execution and results

·  Channel partner advertising activities

·  Social media activity and plans

·  Syndication of vendor content on their sites

·  Access and utilization of vendor marketing collateral

These might be useful indicators for your bigger partners – the ones with marketing teams.  

But for the 84% of technology partners that don’t have an in-house marketing resource, how are you helping them to participate, let along succeed? And as for that social media plan, how many of your SMB partners even have a LinkedIn company page or a Twitter account? Do you know?

Are they worth the effort?  You be they are.  

Ninety percent (90%) of the IT channel is SMB. They are the resellers and service providers who are your face to the massive ecosystem of small business customers. According to Cisco’s Michelle Ragusa-McBain, the SMB ecosystem is “made up of about 400 million companies and a total of 65% of global employment. The opportunity? A $610 billion IT spend.” Most of these SMB companies (>70%) don’t have IT staff and rely heavily on their local resellers and managed service providers (MSPs) – your SMB partners – to understand their unique small business challenges and local market requirements.  

So now that we’ve established that your SMB partners are serving an important set of customers, and we know that they don’t have marketing resources, what can you do to help them?  This is where Through-Channel Marketing (TCM) comes in.

How Through-Channel Marketing Can Help

Your SMB partners don’t have the resources or bandwidth to continually receive your campaigns, load them, click on links, nor send out emails every time you ask; and they certainly can’t do it for all the vendors they work with. Through-Channel Marketing takes the burden completely off the partners, and gives you, the vendor, full control.  That control ensures your content is always brand compliant. Once the partner enrolls and opts-in, they’re done. They “set it and forget it.”  

Vendors can determine which campaigns flow through which partners, when, and how. You can time the syndication of marketing content, social media posts, and email marketing according to your own corporate calendar. You can coordinate search campaigns and have all the digital marketing elements completely integrated and automated, with leads flowing to your partners.  All that’s left for them to do is action the leads. 

The bonus for your SMB partners is that TCM helps their business beyond just participating in your marketing campaigns. Their own digital presence is immediately elevated, and they are more likely to be found as prospective customers search for solutions.

In 2020, 80% of the B2B buyer’s journey was online, and they’re not going back.  

For your solutions to be found, your partners must first be found, and getting them into the digital path to purchase is good for them, and for you.  A strong, healthy partner ecosystem should be your goal.

If you’d like to explore Through-Channel Marketing, we’d love to talk with you about it. AscendX Digital offers one the industry’s only TCM as-a-Service models where you get all of the benefits without having to purchase another marketing technology platform. Instead of spending months learning the technology and “figuring it out”, you can shorten your time to market, start small, build over time, and focus on the strategy of why you’re doing it in the first place.

Your partners will do better on their scorecards, their businesses will get a much-needed digital boost, and you will gain access to more customers through more partners, all on your own terms.