mommyjenlin

Content marketing is becoming a primary strategy to solve the challenges of massively scaling and diversifying marketing channels. But content does not naturally support both scale and diversity at the same time. The only thing that scales as endlessly and cost effectively as the digital world is data. As a result, data marketing is on the rise and will ultimately inherent the throne as the core strategy for modern marketing. What is data marketing? It's using interactive data to directly influence or add value to your prospects, customers, and partners. Think of it as content marketing without the editorial. Data marketing is already fueling the rapid growth of content marketing. The best pieces of content marketing are typically wrapped around a compelling piece of (static) data. The key is that stripped of editorial, data must become interactive and not only deliver personalized insights but capture and bring user input back.  Modern business solutions are increasingly...

The magic ingredient for successful channel enablement at scale is data. Imagine having the financial, operational, and behavioral data you need on partners to optimize new product launches, coverage models, and channel programs. Imagine being able to show partners — no matter how new or small or niche their focus — how other partners like them have achieved high return on investment (ROI) on their business with you. IDC's Channel Enablement Maturity Model provides a stage-by-stage guide for advancing the organizational, process, technology, and data infrastructure necessary to transform your channel marketing and sales enablement operations. The journey along IDC's Channel Enablement Maturity Model is one of evolving from a publishing/transactional framework to a process-driven one. IDC's Channel Enablement Maturity Model - Summary View Stage 1: Ad Hoc Stage 2: Opportunistic Stage 3: Repeatable Stage 4: Managed Stage 5: Optimized for Scale Key ch...

Enablement programs for B2B sales and channel resources tend to focus on activities – trainings, certifications, portal visits, most popular assets, most posts per person, ratings, etc. These are all indicators suggesting enablement resources may have been consumed. But they don’t do a very good job of measuring one of the most important objectives of enablement - changing behavior. New platforms that integrate publishing, process, and social capabilities are making it possible to track behavior patterns in the context of specific business processes. Hidden in this data are the daily habits that differentiate our best direct and indirect sales resources. Sales enablement professionals need to find this data and share it with the rest of their sales audience. This is a particularly crucial for the on-boarding process. Regardless of whether you’re training a new/replacement sales rep or bringing on a new partner and their employees, connectedness is a key metric that you need to capture ...

High tech channels are restructuring due to the emergence and convergence of social, mobile, big data, and cloud based solutions. These forces are expected to cause a substantial churn in the channel. IDC predicts turnover of 25,000 to 50,000 infrastructure partners in North America by the end of 2013. This is a major wake up call for high tech channel marketers. Three years from now your channel community, the solutions they sell, and the most profitable routes to market will be very different than they are today. Vendors that see a net gain in channel capacity over this time frame will be the ones who diligently accomplish the following three objectives: 1. Redefine relationships: Vendors will need to be both more strategic and more tactical in support of their channel. The business planning process must incorporate strategic issues such as helping partners acquire new skills, building partner networks, funding acquisitions, and driving multi-vendor alliances into the channel. A...

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 recruiti...

A recent IDC study of large IT companies found that, on average, channel revenue was $3.7 billion. The average internal channel marketing staff of 53 managed nearly 22,000 partners, equating to $12 million of revenue per internal staff but only half a million dollar per partner. Most shocking from the study -- these organizations have an average of approximately 15,000 inactive partners. Active partners only constitute 31% of the channel mix, with the remaining 69% being inactive. Given the expense involved in recruiting channel partners and on-boarding their first sales, it is in the vendor’s best interest to identify the best partners across the entire partner population and enable them to step-up to higher levels of sales performance. Channel Marketing Service and Automation Solutions The traditional method of assigning business development managers to the top 5% of partners, and others to groups of the second 15% of partners, is not scalable. The business development manager assign...

Whether you pursue a lead through direct sales or a partner it doesn't really matter how you get the lead. But what happens next? With your direct sales, you track the nurturing process as the lead develops into an opportunity. You measure your sales reps by the number of meetings they get, the deals they close. You may even have a closed loop reporting process that shows the efficiency of your marketing and sales funnel. With your partners, your lead gets passed off and … then what? Does the partner accept the lead? Do they follow up? Do their marketing outreach programs conform to your policies and expectations? How much time and how many touches does it take them to close? How do you decide which partner is qualified for which leads? How do you efficiently identify the productive partners, those that need encouragement and those that should be dropped? Multi-Billion Dollar Channel Management Questions These are critical questions that have a tremendous impact on businesses with ...

Do you know how much of your marketing investment is dedicated to your channels? Not just co-op and market development funds(MDF), but also the investment in other marketing activities that are intended to either directly or indirectly support the channels. This may include "ground cover" as some people would put it. If your answer is no, then you're not alone. Few companies have a more holistic understanding of their investment in the channels, let alone their return on that investment. In addition, most channel-centric companies are afraid to modify their investment in the channels since they don't quite know what will happen; taking a stance of "if it's not broken, don't fix it". With cost pressures on marketing only increasing, this strategy will need to change, and quickly. The challenge is even greater for those companies just beginning a channel marketing program. . . trying to decide how much to invest in the channels and how to manage and tr...