TPM Best Practices Series – Cross-Functional Alignment

This is Part 1 of a 6-part series of Through-Partner Marketing Best Practices.

Partner marketing touches many parts of an organization. To be successful, through-partner marketing (TPM) must communicate and coordinate early with each internal team.  TPM touches corporate channel strategy, partner sales and development, inbound & outbound marketing, corporate communications, and corporate digital marketing. 

For example, the Channel Chief determines the channel rules of engagement, while the field sales teams manage the specific partner participation in programs. Corporate marketing manages the company communications and product launches, while the channel marketing teams train the partners and retrofit the messaging for the partner audience. Alignment with these teams is necessary for success.

Cross-functional integration and support is THE top partner marketing challenge

In a recent survey, cross-functional alignment and lack of organizational support for partner marketing were listed as THE top challenges faced by partner marketing leaders. They topped marketing budget, staff, and technology as the top concerns.

What we found with Vendors who were aligned:

• When the marketing team brought the partner sales team on board, they helped to identify partners best suited to participate and promoted the benefits of the program to their partners. Partners trust their partner business managers (PBMs), and this made it easier for the channel marketing team to get more partners onboarded more quickly and realize results more quickly.
• When the channel leadership team was involved, they were able to build the through-partner marketing into the partner program requirements. Participating in the program was encouraged as a component of the top partner tier. Additionally, there is a lot of to-partner communication with through-partner marketing, and the strategy and marketing teams could coordinate their messages and timing.

• When channel marketing included corporate marketing, the corporate team saw the vast opportunity to leverage through-channel marketing to expand their own campaigns, digital marketing, and product launches. 
• This coordination helped to integrate the through-partner marketing into the timeline of the company’s marketing strategy so that they always had fresh content, and partner strategy was always included in the marketing strategy.
• Corporate marketing was most excited to coordinate web, social, and email announcements on product launch day through all of their partners to a massive customer audience. They could truly blanket every corner of the market with their brand.

We have met with several organizations that didn’t have alignment when they launched a TPM program. Here’s what we have seen in those cases:

• Few partners participate.
• Partner marketing is chasing the corporate marketing team for content.
• Web content, emails, and social posts are not strategically coordinated and don’t align with the vendor’s brand marketing.
• Communication *to* partners is infrequent or non-existent.
• Web content is stale.

How do you get alignment?

When we work with vendors, we host communication sessions that include demos so that each team can see their own live content and walk through the marketing processes. Additionally, we host strategy sessions with partner marketing and each of the internal teams. We talk through the teams’ internal goals, and we show them how the through-partner marketing initiative can contribute to their own success. We often see light bulbs go on across the organization, and when that happens, everyone rows in the same direction.

Having a common purpose facilitates cohesive marketing to more customers, through more partners, with superior results.

Through-Partner Marketing Services

AscendX Digital delivers through-partner marketing services for Vendors. Alignment is built into our processes. If you want to learn more, visit our services page here.

Next up in this blog series – The importance of identifying resources (people + budget) across the organization, as well as internally to the marketing team to ensure success.