There’s a lot of complexity to building a successful marketing strategy. One of the biggest challenges is that partners have all levels of marketing expertise. Some partners are even better at marketing than their vendors. But many more have limited capabilities, and some have none at all. Most have a deep desire to do good marketing, even if they don’t know how and lack the infrastructure to do it.

This week I spoke to both Tricia Atchison and David Pereira to learn how they help partners become successful marketers. Trisha Atchison is the Worldwide Director of Channel Marketing and Enablement at Citrix. David Pereira is the founder and president of Get Lift, a full service B2B marketing agency. David worked with Trisha to create KickStart, a program designed to help partners create and execute the most effective route to pipeline creation and sales growth. The program won Sirius Decisions’ Channel Marketing Program of the Year award.  

Citrix’s Kickstart Channel Marketing program has five core components that enables their partners to execute an integrated marketing strategy.

Content is king. The foundation of an award-winning program is having great content for partners.  

Planning is something many marketing programs don’t focus on enough. This includes joint business planning and creating quarterly or six-month marketing plans.

Find ways to make it easier for your partners to access marketing funds. Citrix integrated funding into the marketing planning process to fund a series of campaigns rather than a single activity or event.

Because Partners have different levels of marketing resources and infrastructure, they need varying levels of support. Citrix solves this by offering marketing agency support where the agency executes on the partners’ behalf. This provides more consistent execution and tracking of results. 

Enablement is a foundation for success, and not just partner enablement. First you need to enable your partner managers on your marketing program, what it means for partners, and the ideal profile of partners who can benefit most from it.  

The first key to a successful Channel Marketing program is content because content is king. @tricia_atchison
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Sometimes you just have to be willing to put yourself out there, be bold, and not be afraid that it may not work perfectly the first time out the gate. @tricia_atchison
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