Fuelling growth through stronger partnerships

As a technology vendor, your channel partners are pivotal to driving revenue and growth. But are you truly enabling them for success?

In today's complex solution selling environment, partners need more than just generic campaign content. They require a comprehensive campaign strategy that enables them to sell your solutions profitably while delivering an exceptional customer experience.

This blog explores key strategies you can employ to effectively support and engage your partners through their marketing efforts. Inevitably, strengthening your partnerships. By aligning more closely with partners' needs and business objectives, you can drive increased commitment, and revenue from your partner base.

Align on mutually beneficial goals

Aligning on mutually beneficial goals is crucial for successful vendor-partner co-branded campaign. Rather than setting goals aligned to a certain number of leads, look at the strengths of the partner and where they are in their maturity. Your focus could then become performance metrics of business outcomes such as revenue impact. Alternatively, building awareness around your joint value proposition, highlighting the strengths of your partnership. 

Make it easy for partners to do business with you

One of the biggest barriers partners face is overly complicated processes from vendors. Having to navigate different portals, programs, and approval workflows across multiple vendors can be time intensive. Simplifying processes should be a top priority.

Deciding which vendors to engage with, on a meaningful level, is a big decision for any partner. Creating user friendly processes and providing support to your partners goes a long way in setting you apart from other vendors.

This goes for any marketing activities outlined for partners; how are you sharing content with them? How easy is it for them deploy campaigns? Do they know how to successfully nurture MQLs? 

Tools like TCMA platforms are an effective resource to free up your time by automating partners’ go-to-market. Awarding you the opportunity to work closer with your partners on a more strategic level, supporting them through their business goals.

Deliver compelling, differentiated content

Content is integral to any successful partner marketing program, and ensuring sustainable engagement from partners comes from well co-branded assets that have the partner front of mind. To stand out from competitors and engage prospects effectively, partners need content tailored to their unique value propositions and customer perspectives.

Partners don't want to run the same campaigns with the same content as their competitors. They want to be seen as a leader within that particular solution.

Collaborating with partners to develop co-branded content that elevates their brand positioning and expertise, not only drives better response rates, but also creates a tighter partnership. This is something you can develop directly with partners. Alternatively, you can introduce an agency that specialises in helping to develop the partner’s go-to-market strategy and proposition, they can also help drive successful campaigns joining up the touch points from marketing to sales.

See the success Zebra saw when putting their partners front of mind, read the case study.

Understand partners' unique business needs

Not all partners are the same. They have varying levels of marketing and sales capabilities, technical expertise, customer focus areas and business goals. Placing them into broad tiers ignores these nuances.

Take the time to truly understand where each partner is in their journey - their strengths, gaps, growth objectives and challenges. This insight allows you to tailor enablement efforts, messaging and engagement in more contextual, high-impact ways. Allowing you to create content that will effectively reach the audience of your partners.

Provide enablement beyond just marketing

It's important to consider that while marketing is certainly a core need for partners, they require comprehensive enablement that spans the entire customer lifecycle. This goes beyond the duration of a single campaign. 

By looking at enablement for your partners across the entire buyers journey, you can better equip them to sell and support your complete solution. This creates successful end-to-end campaigns that drive higher revenue, stronger customer retention and greater partner commitment to your business.