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 Channel Futures

Sales & Marketing


IT Companies: Resolve to Evolve Your Channel in 2014

  • Written by Heather K. Margolis
  • December 9, 2013
Vendors have a huge opportunity to work closer with their partners in 2014, but it's important to know what your customer needs.

As the end of the year approaches, talk often turns to new year's resolutions. But how many of us actually stick with them? Instead, companies should look at how they are helping their channel evolve in 2014: What are your goals? How do they relate to your partners’ goals? 

If you can’t answer that last question, you need to readjust your goals. Vendors have a huge opportunity to work closer with their partners, but it's important to know what your customer needs. In short, vendors must learn to better communicate to their partners without overwhelming them, enable partners to better market themselves and provide content for partners to leverage.

How, you ask? Here are some rules to follow:

  1. Create a governance policy to monitor what and how often things get communicated to partners via e-mail. If it’s not time-sensitive, it should go in a newsletter and on social. Also, remember how you communicate is as important as what you’re communicating. Identify the partners’ pain point in the first sentence of every e-mail, social post, newsletter and piece of content.
  2. Enable partners to better market themselves with campaign materials, social content, marketing platforms and One-2-One Partner Support. By teaching partners to fish, you are enabling their success—and yours—for the longer term.
  3. Content marketing is on the tip of every marketer’s tongue. Since partners have never been the strongest marketers, there is a huge opportunity to enable them here. What types of content will best help your partners? Ebooks, blogs, social posts, white papers, infographics or video?

How can you better help your channel to evolve? What are your biggest challenges for 2014?

Contributing blogger Heather K. Margolis, the Channel Maven, has led channel programs for major IT companies.

Tags: Agents Cloud Service Providers MSPs VARs/SIs Sales & Marketing

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One comment

  1. Avatar Rick Cedrone December 10, 2013 @ 11:21 pm
    Reply

    I agree that evolving the
    I agree that evolving the partner channel should be a top priority for every company in 2014, particularly when it comes to content marketing. Providing partners with great content is crucial, but so is distributing that content across various channels. I’ve noticed that as partner communities continue to grow, this task becomes more and more time consuming and keeping it fresh presents a greater challenge. Content syndication for partner marketing can not only help quickly and effectively solve this problem, but it also frees up time and resources to focus on other parts of the business.

    — Rick Cedrone, Marketing Manager, TIE Kinetix (www.tiekinetix.com)

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