Channel Marketing from a Sales and Marketing Perspective

Complexity and Diversity at Scale

Channel marketing in large high tech companies is one of the most complex and diverse operational activities in all of marketing. Complexity and diversity are pervasive across: market, product, program, even organizational structure. Channel Management groups typically report to either marketing or sales. The trend today favors the sales reporting approach, especially for regions outside of the US. The in-country channel manager will either be or report to the regional head of Sales. Channel Marketing typically sits within channel management or corporate marketing. In many companies the main function of the channel marketing team is to act as a conduit between business units/product management and worldwide channels. This creates an inherently complex organizational structure from which a wide range of additional sources of complexity and diversity must be managed.

The Sales Perspective

From a sales perspective, channel management is all about recruiting and performance – identifying key opportunities and the partners best suited to capitalize on them, and investing in their success. This typically involves working with key partners to develop business plans, including staffing, investment planning, and performance goals. However, it is rare that these business development plans include specific marketing plans developed in conjunction with the vendor's channel marketing team.

This is a critical point of failure for many channel programs. Most partners do not have the marketing expertise needed to manage full scale, long term strategic branding and lead generation campaigns. Many do not even have marketing staff. As a result, much of the marketing effort focuses on discrete expenditures such as events – it is not managed as a coordinated set of campaigns optimized for a multi-channel, multi-touch, long sales cycle lead generation process.

The Marketing Perspective

From a marketing perspective, channel management is all about programs. Programs for recruitment, training, and of course, performance. Given the immense diversity in the channel it is impossible to offer a one-size-fits-all approach to channel marketing programs. But it is equally impossible to individually serve the needs of every partner.

The Partner Perspective

From a partner perspective, channel management is about of all things, consistency. It takes on average about a year for new partner programs to be fully adopted and implemented so changes must be highly rationalized and carefully rolled out by vendors.

Standardization and Specialization

Thus the need to find a balance between standardization and specialization. To find the right balance, specialization decisions have to be made first and the first specialization decisions that have to be made are about standards. The question is: what can we offer to every partner in each category and what opportunities/requirements are there for custom programs? This should be asked across a defined set of categories:

y Partner class: (Platinum, Gold, Silver, etc.): this one is obvious and universally addressed.

y Partner type: (Dev, VAR, ISV, SI, etc.) This one is also obvious but there is a lot of room for creativity. For example, do VARs get a special "turnkey" product offering that is not available to others?

y Region: This is an especially challenging area for channel marketers as there are real market differences in terms of culture, technology adoption/maturation, regulation, as well as language that make regional marketing more decentralized.

y Technical/Product focus: The need for specialization here is largely determined by the breadth of your offering portfolio. But companies with hundreds of solutions need to be especially careful not to overwhelm the partner community.

y Strategic alignment: Making changes to your market direction or product mix requires a huge commitment from the channel and they will require not only special programs but also special monitoring and guidance to ensure effective changes are made. Data is particularly important and additional incentives for feedback may be necessary.

y Partner potential: This is a two-fold problem - identifying the high potential partners and understanding the specific drivers of their business with your brand. Getting these research issues right is critical to moving the most valuable growth opportunities up the performance curve.

Standard marketing programs, campaign models, events, collateral and other go to market assets can be designed for each of these categories. Then specialized programs can be overlaid to facilitate coverage of partner capabilities relative to market opportunities.

It is important to understand that marketing programs for high tech sales must be highly leveraged over a wide range of media and market segments. They must be managed with a long term perspective. Most MDF, JDF, co-marketing approval processes focus on short term, discrete activities such as an event and are measured on 30 day or 60 day timelines. However, this is not an effective way to market complex solutions that require great education and deliberation on the part of the buyer.

IDC Recommends

To address this, IDC recommends that companies better coordinate their sales and marketing teams with respect to channels. Channel marketing should develop marketing plans as a normal part of the business planning and market development process. In addition, the partner community should be researched and assessed with the same depth and regularity applied to the markets they serve so any changes in business drivers can be quickly identified and incorporated into channel programs in the most appropriate way.