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ChannelViews

Boost Your Business with an Effective Channel Advisory Board. Here’s How to Start Building Yours

By Lisa Masiello, president and founder, TECHmarc Labs, Inc. A channel advisory board provides leadership in identifying, cultivating, and strengthening a technology vendor’s relationship and business interactions with the rest of their partner community, industry leaders and influencers, other IT vendors and potential clients. It also provides external guidance to a vendor’s management team on their corporate […]

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Are You Helping Your Partners Address Evolving Buyer Personas?

By Jeffrey Mesnik, president, ContentMX According to Forbes magazine, buyer personas are “semi-fictional characters that personify your ideal customer” and are “imperative to having accurate audience insights.” But what happens when the persona of the buyer changes almost overnight, as it has for technology buyers?  As stated by Gartner in the introduction to its report, Targeting […]

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Channel Marketing: Why ‘Engage and Empower’ Partner Strategies Outperform ‘Pamper and Pressure’ Tactics

By Ed Breault, VP Marketing & Industry Solutions at Aprimo If your organization has a distributed sales model, you know how integral channel partners can be to your growth and continued success. You also probably know how difficult it can be to engage and enable partners to take the actions necessary to drive that growth […]

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12 Ideas for Succeeding in a Mentoring Relationship

By Theresa Caragol, founder and CEO, Achieve Unite, and Izzy Barry, director, M&A and PMOaaS, VMware Inc. With US unemployment holding steady well-below 5%, and the number of job vacancies rising to an all-time high of 6.37 million in April, finding top-talent for channel management and marketing positions is tougher than ever. That’s why it’s increasingly […]

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Seven Ways Sales Incentives Are Changing

By Dan Hawtof, VP of Strategy and Solutions at Hawk Incentives Many companies use incentive programs to motivate independent channel partners such as dealers, distributors and resellers. In fact, the Incentive Federation extrapolated in its “Incentive Marketplace Estimate Research Study” that 41 percent of enterprise companies invest in channel incentives worth a total of more than […]

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Channel Account Managers Hold the Keys to the Kingdom for their Partners

By Gary Morris, CEO and Founder, Successful Channels, and Luanne Tierney, Managing Member, Fivesky Editor’s Note: Earlier this year, Gary Morris, CEO and founder of Successful Channels, and Luanne Tierney, one of the most successful Silicon Valley channel executives in the industry, collaborated on an article to show how channel vendors can better meet the […]

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Winning the Battle for MSP and MSSP Attention

By Jeffrey Mesnik, president, ContentMX Traditional channel marketing models no longer work. In the past IT departments would install pipes, wires, computers, and storage to support a corporate infrastructure. CIOs would piece together the required infrastructure based on expert opinions from channel partners representing the OEMs. Thanks in some part to vendor consolidation, a CIO […]

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Five Questions Vendors Should Ask Partners About Their Channel Program

By Heather K. Margolis, founder, Channel Maven Consulting Thanks to the Internet, cloud adoption, and changes in buyer behavior, the Channel has slowly but steadily shifted towards selling outcomes versus products. With this comes a monumental shift in vendor-partner relationships whereby partners are self-selecting relationships with anywhere from 5 to 25 vendors at any given […]

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Driving Channel Success Through Increased Partner Engagement

By Veronica Brunwin, Relayware Chief Product Officer Top channel managers are acutely aware that the Pareto Principle (often called the “80/20 rule”) applies to channel partner productivity. It’s long been known that typically 80% of business is generated by 20% of channel partners. The most obvious effects of the 80/20 rule in a channel program […]

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2017 Content Preferences Survey Report from Demand Gen Report

Chances are your partners are requesting more short-form assets from your marketing team. According to insights shared in the 2017 Content Preferences Survey Report from CMR’s sister publication, Demand Gen Report, a growing number of B2B buyers are doing their product shopping homework by skimming what might be considered the CliffsNotes of marketing materials. Complaining […]

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