Mike Morgan

Self-Profiling

In order to maintain data quality in your database and improve the targeting and quality of your communication, offer partners access and editing rights to their profile data so that they can maintain themselves. Make this easily accessible to them from the homepage or as part of the navigation.

Lead Management

Coupling your marketing, lead generation and sales activities with automated lead distribution via the portal streamlines the process and delivers leads directly to the channel sales people best placed to close them. Additionally, if you provide a means for partners to update lead status themselves online, they can keep you up to date and let you know when sales are worn or lost. This also ensures that you can monitor performance and ensure that closers receive more leads.

Deal Registration

Essentially, lead management in reverse, deal registration capabilities allow partners...

Last week, we started to consider the best approaches for providing a service and support offering to your channel partners for which the investment required is proportionate to the return yet the quality of offering is consistently high regardless of partner status.

Last week we talked about segmentation versus quality of service and the challenges of nurturing lower tiered partners to encourage growth. This can be a difficult and time consuming task. It is for this reason that many vendors simply don’t bother to try. But in difficult business and economic climates such as those we currently face, failure to exploit all of the sales and marketing resources and opportunities available to you is quite simply inexcusable. Our advice would be to invest in:

• Profiling your lower tiers

• Building a comprehensive database of your entire partner community

• Segmenting your partners based upon qualitative as well as quantitative metrics

• Targeting those...

So far, we’ve talked about  defining your objective, selection and segmentation of receivers, medium and message. In this the last part of this topic, we’ll talk about repetition and frequency.

Response

When you deliver call to action, then you must also have in mind a desired response both in terms of:

• Action – What do you want the receiver to do:
• Medium – How do you want them to respond?

By implication, if you are going to communicate and any communication must have a call to action then you must plan for the response and consider how you will:

• Receive it
• Monitor it
• Report upon it
• Act upon it

In practice, this means content creation within your portal. It means making sure that the information or functionality exists within your portal to easily satisfy the call to action, to act upon it and to capture the interaction resulting from it.

Repetition and Frequency...

eMail is still the default B2B communication method these days long replacing the direct mail piece. It looks likely to be eclipsed by social media but we have yet to encounter a vendor who has been effectively able to harness the power of social media to measurable effect with partners. Meanwhile, most vendors do a very poor job of communicating with partners via mail. Frequency – too little or too much, poor targeting and weak content are the main culprits. What is more, to make it work properly for you, you need to: