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Marketing Certification: 3 Simple Steps To Drive Increased Partner Demand Generation (Because Partners Are Listening Now)

By Claudio Ayub, Chief Strategy Officer, Perks WW Channel

Vendors provide marketing automation tools and content in abundance to their partners across different stages of the sales cycle. However, many partners don’t really know what to do with them. Indeed, a recent SiriusDecisions’ survey concluded that only 17% of partners really use these tools.

Claudio Ayub, Chief Strategy Officer, Perks WW Channel

How do you avoid being a part of this statistic? By implementing a marketing certification program, channel managers can demonstrate the real value their marketing programs provide to their partners, and ultimately encourage them to play a more proactive role in lead generation activities.

Here are three simple steps to help you along the way.

  1. Identification: Find the right people in the partnership who look after marketing efforts. In the larger partners there will be a dedicated person or even a marketing team: but in the small to medium businesses marketing or demand generation activity could be initiated and rolled out by any number of personnel in addition to their wider work remit. Identifying the right person for this activity is key to introducing marketing certification initiatives that drive the right behavior.
  1. Learning: Once you identify the marketing personas in your partner base, teach them how to use your marketing automation tool and how to serve up the right content – in the right way – along the buyer’s journey. Also guide and educate them on what demand mechanics to use along this journey. Introduce direct or digital learning tracks to facilitate this, and channel portal easy step guides also work well.
  1. Reward: So you have your marketing persona identified in your partner base and have invested some time and resources in really educating them on how, where and why to use your marketing automation tools and content. Now reward them for using the tools, displaying the right behavior, and implementing the right demand generation. Make the recognition seamless when you integrate the marketing persona into your existing channel partner rewards program.

You will be amazed to see the demand generation uplifts gained through incentivizing the correct marketing personas, which packaged up, is a marketing certification program.

Editor’s Note: The information in this post appeared originally in this infographic.

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