https://www.channelfutures.com/wp-content/themes/channelfutures_child/assets/images/logo/footer-new-logo.png
  • Home
  • Technologies
    • Back
    • SDN/SD-WAN
    • Cloud
    • RMM/PSA
    • Security
    • Telephony/UC/Collaboration
    • Cable
    • Mobility & Wireless
    • Fiber/Ethernet
    • Data Centers
    • Backup & Disaster Recovery
    • IoT
    • Desktop
    • Artificial Intelligence
    • Analytics
  • Strategy
    • Back
    • Mergers and Acquisitions
    • Channel Research
    • Business Models
    • Distribution
    • Technology Solutions Brokerages
    • Sales & Marketing
    • Best Practices
    • Vertical Markets
    • Regulation & Compliance
  • MSP 501
    • Back
    • 2022 MSP 501 Rankings
    • 2022 NextGen 101 Rankings
  • Intelligence
    • Back
    • Galleries
    • Podcasts
    • From the Industry
    • Reports/Digital Issues
    • Webinars
    • White Papers
  • Channel Futures TV
  • EMEA
  • Channel Chatter
    • Back
    • People on the Move
    • New/Changing Channel Programs
    • New Products & Services
    • Industry Honors
  • Resources
    • Back
    • Advisory Boards
    • Industry Organizations
    • Our Sponsors
    • Advertise
    • 2022 Editorial Calendar
  • Awards
    • Back
    • 2022 MSP 501
    • Channel Influencers
    • Circle of Excellence
    • DE&I 101
    • Channel Partners 101 (CP 101)
  • Events
    • Back
    • CP Conference & Expo
    • MSP Summit
    • Channel Partners Europe
    • Channel Partners Event Coverage
    • Webinars
    • Industry Events
  • About Us
  • DE&I
Channel Futures
  • NEWSLETTER
  • Home
  • Technologies
    • Back
    • SDN/SD-WAN
    • Cloud
    • RMM/PSA
    • Security
    • Telephony/UC/Collaboration
    • Cable
    • Mobility & Wireless
    • Fiber/Ethernet
    • Data Centers
    • Backup & Disaster Recovery
    • IoT
    • Desktop
    • Artificial Intelligence
    • Analytics
  • Strategy
    • Back
    • Mergers and Acquisitions
    • Channel Research
    • Business Models
    • Distribution
    • Technology Solutions Brokerages
    • Sales & Marketing
    • Best Practices
    • Vertical Markets
    • Regulation & Compliance
  • MSP 501
    • Back
    • 2022 MSP 501 Rankings
    • 2022 NextGen 101 Rankings
  • Intelligence
    • Back
    • Galleries
    • Podcasts
    • From the Industry
    • Reports/Digital Issues
    • Webinars
    • White Papers
  • Channel Futures TV
  • EMEA
  • Channel Chatter
    • Back
    • People on the Move
    • New/Changing Channel Programs
    • New Products & Services
    • Industry Honors
  • Resources
    • Back
    • Advisory Boards
    • Industry Organizations
    • Our Sponsors
    • Advertise
    • 2022 Editorial Calendar
  • Awards
    • Back
    • 2022 MSP 501
    • Channel Influencers
    • Circle of Excellence
    • DE&I 101
    • Channel Partners 101 (CP 101)
  • Events
    • Back
    • CP Conference & Expo
    • MSP Summit
    • Channel Partners Europe
    • Channel Partners Event Coverage
    • Webinars
    • Industry Events
  • About Us
  • DE&I
    • Newsletter
  • REGISTER
  • MSPs
  • VARs / SIs
  • Agents
  • Cloud Service Providers
  • Channel Partners Events
 Channel Futures

Best Practices


Time to give marketing more respect? Good Idea

  • Written by Charles Cooper 1
  • April 20, 2017
If you’re still treating marketing as an afterthought, you’re likely courting trouble. A fresh marketing strategy is just as crucial to a reseller’s business as is a strong sales and engineering plan.

If only you could hang a big poster above your office and then watch lines of customers crowd through the door. Life would be just grand.

That may have passed as an ersatz marketing strategy when the channel was still in its formative stages and relatively few people outside of the tech cognoscenti knew their way around a computer keyboard. But that strategy is as relevant to the needs of contemporary resellers as is the IBM PC Jr.

Nowadays resellers need to reach prospects who in many cases may not even be aware of their existence. Yet marketing still receives short shrift in an industry where products and sales take precedence over marketing. But there are good reasons why channel executives should rethink market’s importance in their overall sales strategy.

No More Information Deficit
Before the turn of the century, the technology buying experience was more tilted in favor of resellers of technology. If someone wanted information about CRM or ERP, for example, they might attend a trade show or pick up brochures. But eventually, they would contact a channel salesperson, who could leverage their familiarity with the product to close the sale.   

The information deficit has since turned into an information surplus. Buyers today can bypass the channel and get instant access to information about new products and technologies. That’s also shifted the constellation of power more in favor of customers. A recent study on line of business buyers completed by CompTIA found that nearly 40 percent of those polled research and finalize purchase decisions before interaction with any selling party.

“If you’re a technology salesperson, you’re going to be sitting for a very, very long time on your chair waiting for a phone call that may never come,” says Dean Ara, principle of Total Product Marketing. “Nowadays, the buyer is very independent of the sales experience. And the buyer is only going to call you when he or she needs a little bit more information and wants to check out and compare vendors and partners.”

As a result, “The marketing person is no longer someone who just sets up events at trade shows,” he added. “They have to take active roles in educating prospects—or else the prospect will never come to you for buying information. That’s the No.1 thing that’s changed from 20 years ago.”

Younger generations of resellers who grew up with the internet as their new normal may well take all of this in stride as standard operating procedure. But older VARs and MSPs, who started in business running IT shops, may not naturally think of involving marketing as part of their overall sales strategy.

It’s this cohort that’s most in need of revising the role of marketing in their operations. And they can start by avoiding three common mistakes.

3 `Don’ts’

  • Don’t lull yourself into believing that customer support is a differentiator. As Ara notes, great customer service is only the equivalent of table stakes in this game. “Lots of resellers may say, `We take care of customers. Go ask John, my client,’” he said. “Well, I’m sure that John is happy with you but how do you prove that? The reality is that buyers aren’t going to go talk to `John’ to find out about your company.”
  • Don’t believe there’s one-size-fits all marketing and that the same tactics apply, no matter where the prospect is in the buying cycle. As potential customers move through their various stages, from awareness to making a decision, you’ll need different content, different resources, different approaches and different ways to speak to them. Unless resellers understand where their prospects are within the buying cycle, closing the deal turns into a crapshoot.
  • Don’t go AWOL. If you fail to maintain a consistent marketing cadence, you risk diluting your message to the market. Sudden bursts of marketing followed by long lapses of silence only confuse customers. If you suddenly go missing, don’t be surprised when they disappear as well.

Hiring a Marketing Maven
Should you hire someone with technical chops who hails from inside the organization or look outside for a candidate well versed in the ABC’s of marketing?

Obviously, there are pluses and minuses to both approaches but the ideal candidate would be someone who can speak both languages. No one wants to listen to techno jumbo all day long. And so a marketing maven who can take technical jargon and distill the necessary information to prospects is going to be worth every penny they get paid.

If you can’t find one, then look internally for candidates with a command of the marketing challenges facing the organization. They should be able to convert customer input into actionable tactics, both from a marketing perspective as well as from the operational side. Think about moving up a technical operations person or an engineer with the aptitude for taking on the new role. They already know their way around the organization and will be familiar with its sales challenges. Another bonus: It can help improve the sometimes fractious relationship that builds up between sales/engineering and marketing.

Plan of Action
As UCLA’s legendary basketball coach John Wooden noted on many an occasion, failing to plan is the equivalent of planning to fail. It applies to marketing equally. Good marketing must align with the company’s other goals to communicate the true value proposition to customers. So if a reseller changes sales goals or branches into a new technology area, it’s also probably a good time to update the marketing plan as well.

Play up the organization’s strengths. Everyone talks about “value add” but marketing ought to highlight a company’s expertise. Demonstrate why you can decipher customer pain-points better and transmit that message across your network of marketing communications. A specialist with customized computing solutions has more to offer than the proverbial jack-of-all-trades, especially when it comes to understanding customer needs in complicated areas like cloud computing.

Develop authority in your market by demonstrating thought leadership. Marketing doesn’t have to be costly. So learn to blog and supply relevant news and research that’s tailored to the needs of your customers. This isn’t a one-and-done exercise and should be part of a long-term plan to cultivate connections with your readers. 

Finally, make sure that the company name gets seen.

Organizations can interact with customers on all available digital platforms—mobile, social, email—and so it’s important to supply a steady stream of relevant blog content and outreach via e-newsletters and social media. Also, get to know the ins and outs of search engine marketing so the company’s messages have a better chance of being viewed by the people you want to influence. A good marketing person understands the ABCs of SEO and the importance of being found via Google and paid ads as well as through content marketing and market automation.

 

Tags: Agents Cloud Service Providers MSPs VARs/SIs Best Practices

Most Recent


  • Black Hat expo hall 2022
    The Gately Report: Black Hat USA Edition with Cisco, IBM, CISA, More
    Black Hat USA has come roaring back since the COVID-19 pandemic.
  • Why DevOps Teams Need Security Skills and How Shift Left Tools Help
    Developers need cloud-native security skills and tools to build secure code from the start to mitigate risks.
  • Kim Zetter at Black Hat
    Black Hat USA: No Excuses for Cyberattacks to Catch Critical Infrastructure Off Guard
    Critical infrastructure remains just as vulnerable as it was years ago.
  • Three crowns
    Channel Futures and Channel Partners Ready Trio of Powerhouse Summits
    A Triple Crown of in-person events for MSPs and agents alike.

2 comments

  1. Avatar Two-Tier Fan April 24, 2017 @ 10:36 pm
    Reply

    Great piece and concisely
    Great piece and concisely put. I worry about resellers/dealers/solution providers who don’t market themselves. I tend to ask the question “how do you get new customers?” and gauge their responses to find out IF they do any form of marketing at all.

  2. Avatar Brooke Harper May 8, 2017 @ 6:08 am
    Reply

    I think we have come to an
    I think we have come to an age that marketing has become one of the primary functions of a company – as it was with sales. They are now on equal footing when it comes to priority and importance. Without proper marketing, sales would have a difficult time selling their product or service.

Leave a comment Cancel reply

-or-

Log in with your Channel Futures account

Alternatively, post a comment by completing the form below:

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Related Content

  • CF Top Gun 51 with new logo
    2021 Top Gun 51 Nominations Are Open — Apply Now!
  • USB drive
    A Coup and a Theft: Why MSPs Can’t Let Clients Get Lax About USB Security
  • Ransomware skull and crossbones
    JBS Did What it 'Needed to Do' with $11 Million Ransom Payment
  • Cloud Certification
    CompTIA Updates Cloud+ Certification, Drops New AI Guide for Businesses

Upcoming Events

View all

MSP Summit

September 13, 2022 - September 16, 2022

Channel Partners Conference & Expo

May 1, 2023 - May 4, 2023

Galleries

View all

The Gately Report: Black Hat USA Edition with Cisco, IBM, CISA, More

August 12, 2022

7 Channel People Making Waves This Week at Microsoft, Rackspace, RingCentral, Avaya

August 12, 2022

Oracle Cloud & AT&T, AWS Lead Cloud News Roundup

August 12, 2022

Industry Perspectives

View all

How to Take Shared Responsibility for Securing Cloud

August 11, 2022

Seize the Application Modernization Opportunity

August 2, 2022

A Growth Mindset: Your Organization’s Strategic Differentiator

August 1, 2022

Webinars

View all

Outsmarting RaaS: Implementation Strategies To Help Your Clients Before, During, and After a Ransomware Attack

August 23, 2022

Why it is Important to Upgrade Aging Servers and How to use Live Optics to Upgrade Efficiently

August 25, 2022

Executives at Home are Not Alright: An Intro to Digital Executive Protection

September 8, 2022

White Papers

View all

Work Goes Remote – (and Other Top ITOps Trends)

May 25, 2022

The New Bottom Line: How MSPs Can Meet the Healthcare Crisis While Evolving Their Businesses

April 19, 2022

How to build a Security Operations Center (on a budget)

April 4, 2022

Channel Futures TV

View all

ThreatLocker Preaches Zero Trust, Addresses Industry Competition

ScienceLogic Debuts New Partner Portal

August 9, 2022

Vonage a ‘Single Communications Stack Provider’ for Partners, Customers

June 27, 2022

IBM, Partners and the $1 Trillion Hybrid Cloud Opportunity

June 26, 2022

Twitter

ChannelFutures

.@splunk vet Bill Hustad named @Okta's new #channelchief. dlvr.it/SWXmws https://t.co/ILQesul0Cz

August 12, 2022
ChannelFutures

The Gately Report: #BHUSA edition with @Hacker0x01, @Cisco, @SaltSecurity, @CISAgov, @ExtraHop, @IBMSecurity, more.… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

August 12, 2022
ChannelFutures

Channel People Making Waves Include: @kencarnesi, @szebenisz, @vasujakkal, @brettsmith52, @DaveMichels… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

August 12, 2022
ChannelFutures

Nancy Henriquez, VP of Sales & Marketing at MSP 501 award-winning @synetek, touches on the importance of gathering… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

August 12, 2022
ChannelFutures

.@Equinix's new hire is a familiar face in the telco channel. dlvr.it/SWXV6v https://t.co/jIg0LrZ4DO

August 12, 2022
ChannelFutures

Missed the news this week from @OracleCloud and @ATTBusiness? We've got it here. Plus, news from @AWSCloud and… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

August 12, 2022
ChannelFutures

Huge channel-impacting acquisitions in the past month. We've got details on @IBM, @nokia, @GoTo, @EnsonoIT,… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

August 12, 2022
ChannelFutures

Boost privacy by design with #shiftleft mindset and add #security to cloud deployments from start, says… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

August 12, 2022

MSP 501

The industry's largest and most comprehensive partner awards program.

Newsletters and Updates

Sign up for The Channel Report, Channel Futures Update, MSP 501 Newsletter and more.

Live Channel Events

Get the latest information on the next industry-leading Channel Partners event.

Galleries

Educational slide shows and images from live events.

Media Kit And Advertising

Want to reach our audience? Access our media kit.

DISCOVER MORE FROM INFORMA TECH

  • Channel Partners Events
  • Telecoms.com
  • MSP 501
  • Black Hat
  • IoT World Today
  • Omdia

WORKING WITH US

  • Contact
  • About Us
  • Advertise
  • Newsletter

FOLLOW Channel Futures ON SOCIAL

  • Privacy
  • CCPA: “Do Not Sell My Data”
  • Cookie Policy
  • Terms
Copyright © 2022 Informa PLC. Informa PLC is registered in England and Wales with company number 8860726 whose registered and Head office is 5 Howick Place, London, SW1P 1WG.
This website uses cookies, including third party ones, to allow for analysis of how people use our website in order to improve your experience and our services. By continuing to use our website, you agree to the use of such cookies. Click here for more information on our Cookie Policy and Privacy Policy.
X