ZINFI Technologies, Inc.

A significant portion of both B2B and B2C sales are made through a network of partners and resellers. Even today, however, most companies have antiquated channel management tools that do not live up to the full promise of their partner network. Only a very few organizations adequately invest in upgrading their channel management infrastructure, due to certain channel management misconceptions. In this article we will explore some of the common myths that impact not only the operational efficiency but also undermine the real truth about all channel networks.

* Partners are my indirect sales team - Nothing could be further away from the truth. While partners do have sales capability and most organizations tend to treat their partners as if they are an extension of their sales force, the reality is that partners are customers. While partners are certainly vocal and their feedback is critical because they run their own businesses, they do not regard a vendor as their equal. Maybe this is not the case if you are running a multi-outlet franchise, but when it comes to a traditional, two or three tier distribution channel, partners are their own bosses. There is no question that they do not work for their vendors. They work for their customers and for themselves. It follows that the way you manage your direct sales force as opposed to this indirect sales force should be planned and executed differently. This is where you need state-of-the-art channel management infrastructure.

* My partners are loyal - Yes, it is true to some extent, but their loyalty is really directed towards their own customer base and their employees. At the end of the day, their loyalty to a vendor comes last. Organizations that perceive their partners’ lack of receptiveness to competitors may perceive this as loyalty are completely misreading how the partner truly feels about the relationship. Yes, they may be engaged, and sell a lot of products, but their loyalty is to themselves and their relationships are based on the logic of what works for them. They are running a business, but not a frat house. Building partner loyalty requires deeper understanding, based on a structured approach towards channel management - starting with partner profiling, offer alignment, partner enablement and incentives management. Just as, if you want to build employee loyalty you need to think about their needs, in the same way it is critical to understand and deliver what partners care about. Most channel initiatives tend to be company centric vs. partner centric, and this is why they tend to fail.

* Partners will drive demand - Until and unless your partners are large distributors or national retailer/retailers, do not expect your partners to have the marketing capability to drive demand. Mature channel management organizations do not expect their sales people to drive their own demand; rather they deploy fully capable marketing processes, automation, programs and people. Similarly, your partners are your fulfillment arms, so you have to bring either a fully integrated marketing capability to them or provide them with sales-ready leads. The general expectation is that if a partner is getting commission they will naturally generate leads and close deals. This is a fallacy, but one which most organizations are not willing to relinquish. This expectation is not realistic, because it’s outside the resources and competency of most partners.

* The partner council knows it all - Most vendors selling through the channel tend to create partner councils to stay connected with the market place. While this is certainly an appropriate channel management approach in that it helps keep a ...

Lead management is one of the top marketing keywords that is searched on Google every day, which is a clear indication of the huge and growing amount of interest in the topic. Are we clear on what lead management means? Basically, lead management is an organized way of generating, distributing and managing contacts with potential prospects, and engaging with those prospects to identify or generate an opportunity for a sales team to pursue. Lead management is one of the most important business functions, bridging both marketing and sales, through a combination of people, process and automation.

Just like a fish out of water, a lead has a specific and limited lifetime. Once a lead has appeared, it needs to be nurtured, managed and closed systematically. A typical lead management system will allow an organization to manage five critical phases of the lead life cycle, as follows:

Lead Generation - Content marketing has displaced the old model of telemarketing to generate leads. Today’s marketers know that buyers search online and, by the time they contact a vendor, they have a very clear idea about what they are looking for. This is the precise point where the first step along the path of systematic lead management, using an integrated approach to lead generation, must be taken. Integrated tactics like social marketing, search marketing, email marketing, direct mail marketing, and online banner ads, are all critical methods of generating awareness and create a solid foundation for inbound marketing. If you combine inbound marketing with outbound telemarketing towards your installed base of existing customers and interested prospects, you can exponentially increase the effectiveness of your lead generation efforts.

Lead Distribution - With leads in the pipeline and interest from prospective buyers, the next key step in lead management is lead distribution. I can’t emphasize how essential it is to have an automated mechanism for lead scoring and distribution. Not all leads are ready for sales contact, so either they need to be nurtured further (please see Point 3, below) before being handed to an inside or outside sales rep or, in the case of channel-based organization, must be distributed to the right channel partner. This is where a rule-based lead distribution engine comes in. Any state-of-the-art channel marketing automation platform should be able to distribute a set of leads to a group of partners based on various criteria, such as partner type, partner location, partner competencies, or interested buyers’ segment, e.g., SMB, mid market, enterprise, vertical or geography.

Lead Nurturing - Another critical component of lead management is lead nurturing and scoring. A marketing automation platform should be able to automatically create a multi-touch engagement with a potential buyer based on their purchase behavior. A prospective buyer’s online persona should be scored in a systematic way, and appropriate sales people (whether internal captive or external partner-based sales reps) should be alerted when a lead is ready for contact. This systematic approach towards lead nurturing is critical to drive sales efficiency, increase closure rate and build the reputation of an organization as a responsive provider in their marketplace.

Lead to Opportunity Creation– Once a marketing-qualified lead has been converted to a sales-qualified lead, the next big step is to develop the opportunity. This is the moment for exact deployment and fit analysis. This is a critical sales step, and also an essential part of the lead management process.  Most existing CRM systems provide an effective way of tracking and managing opportunities, but they aren’t designed with the channel in mind. If you are selling through the channel, make sure that you use a Partner Relationship Management platform that can drive opportunity creation and management through the channel in a dynamic and distributed fashion.

Lead Management Analytics - Last but not least: the most important step in lead management is to integrate the marketing and sales processes seamlessly, via a dynamic analytical engine that allows you to see clearly how effective your marketing is, how well your messages are aligned across multiple market segments to drive better engagement and conversion, and the steps you need to take to improve the efficacy of your sales programs and campaigns.

At first sight this list may seem like too much to handle for an organization that hasn’t yet implemented automated lead management processes. However, it is not that difficult if you deploy lead management systems in simple automated processes, step by step. The key is to select a marketing automation platform (for a direct sales organization) or a channel marketing automation platform (for an indirect sales organization) that allows you to roll the system out over a few quarters. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and this definitely applies to your state-of-the-art lead management system. But by taking the first step towards automated lead management, and identifying a reliable automation vendor to partner with, you can not only increase your sales, but also substantially reduce your marketing and sales costs.

I would love to hear from you where you think your organization is and what challenges you have faced to either deploys or to plan a deployment of a state-of-the-art lead management process. Thank you for continuing the conversation!

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Lead management is one of the top marketing keywords that is searched on Google every day, which is a clear indication of the huge and growing amount of interest in the topic. Are we clear on what lead management means? Basically, lead management is an organized way of generating, distributing and managing contacts with potential prospects, and engaging with those prospects to identify or generate an opportunity for a sales team to pursue. Lead management is one of the most important business functions, bridging both marketing and sales, through a combination of people, process and automation.Just like a fish out of water, a lead has a specific and limited lifetime. Once a lead has appeared, it needs to be nurtured, managed and closed systematically. A typical lead management system will allow an organization to manage five critical phases of the lead life cycle, as follows:* Lead Generation – Content marketing has displaced the old model of telemarketing to generate leads. Today’s marketers know that buyers search online and, by the time they contact a vendor, they have a very clear idea about what they are looking for. This is the precise point where the first step along the path of systematic lead management, using an integrated approach to lead generation, must be taken. Integrated tactics like social marketing, search marketing, email marketing, direct mail marketing, and online banner ads, are all critical methods of generating awareness and create a solid foundation for inbound marketing. If you combine inbound marketing with outbound telemarketing towards your installed base of existing customers and interested prospects, you can exponentially increase the effectiveness of your lead generation efforts.* Lead Distribution – With leads in the pipeline and interest from prospective buyers, the next key step in lead management is lead distribution. I can’t emphasize how essential it is to have an automated mechanism for lead scoring and distribution. Not all leads are ready for sales contact, so either they need to be nurtured further (please see Point 3, below) before being handed to an inside or outside sales rep or, in the case of channel-based organization, must be distributed to the right channel partner. This is where a rule-based lead distribution engine comes in. Any state-of-the-art channel marketing automation platform should be able to distribute a set of leads to a group of partners based on various criteria, such as partner type, partner location, partner competencies, or interested buyers’ segment, e.g., SMB, mid market, enterprise, vertical or geography.* Lead Nurturing – Another critical component of lead management is lead nurturing and scoring. A marketing automation platform should be able to automatically create a multi-touch engagement with a potential buyer based on their purchase behavior. A prospective buyer’s online persona should be scored in a systematic way, and appropriate sales people (whether internal captive or external partner-based sales reps) should be alerted when a lead is ready for contact. This systematic approach towards lead nurturing is critical to drive sales efficiency, increase closure rate and build the reputation of an organization as a responsive provider in their marketplace.* Lead to Opportunity Creation– Once a marketing-qualified lead has been converted to a sales-qualified lead,

Lead management is one of the top marketing keywords that is searched on Google every day, which is a clear indication of the huge and growing amount of interest in the topic. Are we clear on what lead management means? Basically, lead management is an organized way of generating, distributing and managing contacts with potential prospects, and engaging with those prospects to identify or generate an opportunity for a sales team to pursue. Lead management is one of the most important business functions, bridging both marketing and sales, through a combination of people, process and automation.

Just like a fish out of water, a lead has a specific and limited lifetime. Once a lead has appeared, it needs to be nurtured, managed and closed systematically. A typical lead management system will allow an organization to manage five critical phases of the lead life cycle, as follows:

* Lead Generation - Content marketing has displaced the old model of telemarketing to generate leads. Today’s marketers know that buyers search online and, by the time they contact a vendor, they have a very clear idea about what they are looking for. This is the precise point where the first step along the path of systematic lead management, using an integrated approach to lead generation, must be taken. Integrated tactics like social marketing, search marketing, email marketing, direct mail marketing, and online banner ads, are all critical methods of generating awareness and create a solid foundation for inbound marketing. If you combine inbound marketing with outbound telemarketing towards your installed base of existing customers and interested prospects, you can exponentially increase the effectiveness of your lead generation efforts.

* Lead Distribution - With leads in the pipeline and interest from prospective buyers, the next key step in lead management is lead distribution. I can’t emphasize how essential it is to have an automated mechanism for lead scoring and distribution. Not all leads are ready for sales contact, so either they need to be nurtured further (please see Point 3, below) before being handed to an inside or outside sales rep or, in the case of channel-based organization, must be distributed to the right channel partner. This is where a rule-based lead distribution engine comes in. Any state-of-the-art channel marketing automation platform should be able to distribute a set of leads to a group of partners based on various criteria, such as partner type, partner location, partner competencies, or interested buyers’ segment, e.g., SMB, mid market, enterprise, vertical or geography.

* Lead Nurturing - Another critical component of lead management is lead nurturing and scoring. A marketing automation platform should be able to automatically create a multi-touch engagement with a potential buyer based on their purchase behavior. A prospective buyer’s online persona should be scored in a systematic way, and appropriate sales people (whether internal captive or external partner-based sales reps) should be alerted when a lead is ready for contact. This systematic approach towards lead nurturing is critical to drive sales efficiency, increase closure rate and build the reputation of an organization as a responsive provider in their marketplace.

* Lead to Opportunity Creation– Once a marketing-qualified ...

Every organization selling through a network of partners; be they resellers, system integrators, agents or franchise holders, struggles with partner engagement. And, one of the main areas of challenge for them is to make a partner log into the partner portal for content consumption and program awareness. There are multiple reasons why partners don’t use a vendor’s partner portal (please see our earlier article on How to Make Your Partner Portal More Partner-Friendly); however, there are simple techniques that you can use to increase partner portal access by multiple folds. One of the main techniques that is underused, or not used consistently - is social media marketing.

While most organizations selling via a channel tend to use social media, our conclusions after observing multiple deployments are that social media is more often treated as a mechanism for publishing snippets of information rather than a holistic medium for partner engagement and marketing. The use of social media in the B2B space is fundamentally different from how it works in the B2C space, because of one primary issue; lack of available time for content consumption by the target audience. Most vendors tend to push news and other types of content via Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and even sites like Pinterest but the key to increasing partner portal adoption is to make sure there is a holistic publishing strategy. This is how it works.

Assuming that an organization has an overarching strategy for using social media for end-user marketing (both in the B2B and B2C spaces), and since content marketing has become the de facto norm today, it is important to ensure that your strategy for driving partner portal usage is integrated within your overall plan. There are a few simple ways of doing this.

Segment content - Channel partners may follow an organization through various channels on the same social media sites, so you need to avoid mixing different types of information in your feeds. For example, if you use Twitter to promote company news and events, you need to make sure you don’t muddle this channel by delivering technical or product releases, bug fixes, or other tactical announcements that you have already posted in your partner portal. Also, if you have inbound engagement via any of the channels related to support, partner or customer complaints, it’s essential to direct that conversation to the correct social media site, for example to your customer support portal. Actively managing the type of content and where it’s viewed is a critical part of segmenting content appropriately, and driving relevant traffic to your partner portal.

Localize engagement - Partner portal usage tends to be highest in the English language, partly due to the prevalence of English in the technology industry but also due to lack of localized interfaces and content for non-English-speaking countries. This assumes you have picked the right partner management platform (please see our earlier article, Must-Haves for Your Partner Portal). It is important that you only promote English-language content where it can be understood, and local-language content only in the appropriate country channels. It makes no sense to push an English-language globally when you know very well that in certain countries like China, Japan or Korea it will be wasted. This thoughtfulness is critical in making sure that the reach of social marketing is not abused and engagement is strategically planned and managed.

Reduce overload - Not every news item or sales program is relevant to partners, so they don’t all merit a push via social media. Selecting what’s critical to know and strategically valuable in social media engagement is crucial if you want to rise above the noise. So, if you have a big announcement – like a company acquisition, major new product launches, or mega price reductions, use social media to push that news out and drive traffic back to your partner portal. However, if you want to promote a roadshow in one city or country, be selective about how you use social media for such tactical engagements. To run a location-specific promotion, you are better off using traditional tactics like email or telemarketing to drive partner registration.

Track engagement - The great news is that today, if you have a state-of-the-art Partner Relationship Management platform, then you will be able to track partner portal metrics in great detail. You should be able to see where the traffic is coming from and what they are doing in your partner portal. Just as your corporate marketing team drives content marketing for broader lead generation, there is now an opportunity to do the same in channel marketing - provided you have an integrated strategy and the right tool for engagement tracking.

Refine to scale - Once you have segmented your content, provided it in a localized environment, managed conversations to make them relevant, and understood what is working and what needs work, the next step is to refine and scale globally. It can’t be done overnight, so there’s no need to be impatient. Lay out a multi-quarter plan and strategize step-by-step execution over a couple of quarters, and you will see more traffic to different parts of your partner portal because your channel partners are more aware and being engaged via a variety of social media-centric inbound channels.

Partners will only engage with your partner portal if they need to. So unless what drives them to your site is about support, or checking licenses or other business-driven needs, if you are to have a hope of bringing them back to your portal to learn about new products, training, promotions, or other information, you have to pick the right way to communicate. Outbound communication has dramatically changed over the past decade, and more rapidly during the past five years. We have observed among our vendor client base that, when an organization uses social media marketing effectively to communicate to their partners, they can increase inbound traffic to appropriate sections of their portal much faster, and significantly grow overall adoption.

I would love to know how you are using social media marketing to drive partner engagement and what you think is working or not. Please share openly if you can.

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Every organization selling through a network of partners; be they resellers, system integrators, agents or franchise holders, struggles with partner engagement. And, one of the main areas of challenge for them is to make a partner log into the partner portal for content consumption and program awareness. There are multiple reasons why partners don’t use a vendor’s partner portal (please see our earlier article on How to Make Your Partner Portal More Partner-Friendly); however, there are simple techniques that you can use to increase partner portal access by multiple folds. One of the main techniques that is underused, or not used consistently – is social media marketing.While most organizations selling via a channel tend to use social media, our conclusions after observing multiple deployments are that social media is more often treated as a mechanism for publishing snippets of information rather than a holistic medium for partner engagement and marketing. The use of social media in the B2B space is fundamentally different from how it works in the B2C space, because of one primary issue; lack of available time for content consumption by the target audience. Most vendors tend to push news and other types of content via Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and even sites like Pinterest but the key to increasing partner portal adoption is to make sure there is a holistic publishing strategy. This is how it works.Assuming that an organization has an overarching strategy for using social media for end-user marketing (both in the B2B and B2C spaces), and since content marketing has become the de facto norm today, it is important to ensure that your strategy for driving partner portal usage is integrated within your overall plan. There are a few simple ways of doing this.* Segment content – Channel partners may follow an organization through various channels on the same social media sites, so you need to avoid mixing different types of information in your feeds. For example, if you use Twitter to promote company news and events, you need to make sure you don’t muddle this channel by delivering technical or product releases, bug fixes, or other tactical announcements that you have already posted in your partner portal. Also, if you have inbound engagement via any of the channels related to support, partner or customer complaints, it’s essential to direct that conversation to the correct social media site, for example to your customer support portal. Actively managing the type of content and where it’s viewed is a critical part of segmenting content appropriately, and driving relevant traffic to your partner portal.* Localize engagement – Partner portal usage tends to be highest in the English language, partly due to the prevalence of English in the technology industry but also due to lack of localized interfaces and content for non-English-speaking countries. This assumes you have picked the right partner management platform (please see our earlier article, Must-Haves for Your Partner Portal). It is important that you only promote English-language content where it can be understood, and local-language content only in the appropriate country channels. It makes no sense to push an English-language globally when you know very well that in certain countries like China, Japan or Korea it will be wasted. This thoughtfulness is critical in making sure that the reach of social marketing is not abused and engagement is strategically planned and managed.

Every organization selling through a network of partners; be they resellers, system integrators, agents or franchise holders, struggles with partner engagement. And, one of the main areas of challenge for them is to make a partner log into the partner portal for content consumption and program awareness. There are multiple reasons why partners don’t use a vendor’s partner portal (please see our earlier article on How to Make Your Partner Portal More Partner-Friendly); however, there are simple techniques that you can use to increase partner portal access by multiple folds. One of the main techniques that is underused, or not used consistently - is social media marketing.

While most organizations selling via a channel tend to use social media, our conclusions after observing multiple deployments are that social media is more often treated as a mechanism for publishing snippets of information rather than a holistic medium for partner engagement and marketing. The use of social media in the B2B space is fundamentally different from how it works in the B2C space, because of one primary issue; lack of available time for content consumption by the target audience. Most vendors tend to push news and other types of content via Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and even sites like Pinterest but the key to increasing partner portal adoption is to make sure there is a holistic publishing strategy. This is how it works.

Assuming that an organization has an overarching strategy for using social media for end-user marketing (both in the B2B and B2C spaces), and since content marketing has become the de facto norm today, it is important to ensure that your strategy for driving partner portal usage is integrated within your overall plan. There are a few simple ways of doing this.

* Segment content - Channel partners may follow an organization through various channels on the same social media sites, so you need to avoid mixing different types of information in your feeds. For example, if you use Twitter to promote company news and events, you need to make sure you don’t muddle this channel by delivering technical or product releases, bug fixes, or other tactical announcements that you have already posted in your partner portal. Also, if you have inbound engagement via any of the channels related to support, partner or customer complaints, it’s essential to direct that conversation to the correct social media site, for example to your customer support portal. Actively managing the type of content and where it’s viewed is a critical part of segmenting content appropriately, and driving relevant traffic to your partner portal.

* Localize engagement - Partner portal usage tends to be highest in the English language, partly due to the prevalence of English in the technology industry but also due to lack of localized interfaces and content for non-English-speaking countries. This assumes you have picked the right partner management platform (please see our earlier article, Must-Haves for Your Partner Portal). It is important that you only promote English-language content where it can be understood, and local-language content only in the appropriate country channels. It makes no sense to push an English-language globally when you know very well that in certain countries like China, Japan or Korea it will be wasted. This thoughtfulness is critical in making sure that the reach of social marketing is not abused and engagement is strategically planned and managed.

Many vendor organizations today are considering the implementation of end-to-end partner marketing automation tools. What’s more, many have already put in place a set of point-tools that are trying to make them all work together. The key for both of these scenarios is to make sure that partner marketing automation doesn’t take a life on its own and serve as a means to an end. The primary purpose of a partner marketing automation platform is to drive profitable growth, so yes, it must increase your partner-led demand generation activities, but it also must reduce costs by introducing more streamlined processes and greater efficiency. However, the success of a partner marketing automation platform depends directly on organizations’ following specific, sequential steps in order to deploy such capabilities globally. The following is a brief overview of the five critical choices a vendor organization must make before an integrated partner marketing automation platform can be deployed worldwide.

Plutocracy vs. Democracy - When you are planning to build your pipeline via your partner network using partner marketing automation, the first question to ask is ‘who sells my product?’ Do the majority of my sales come from 20% of my partners? If that is the case, then you should focus first on enabling the top tier partners who do most of the selling. Making them more efficient will be the logical way to get results from rolling out your partner marketing automation. On the other hand, if half of your partners do half of your sales then you will have to roll out partner marketing automation for most of your channel. In both cases, eventually you want to make sure the partner marketing automation platform can be available for all partners but, in the beginning, being selective and applying a strategic focus helps you to get to those wins faster, and promotes success to drive broader adoption at a later stage.

Global vs. Local - The next question for deployment of your partner marketing automation platform is where does it make most sense to launch? While launching in a large market like the US or Germany or China has the benefit of high volume and high opportunities, there are times when you may be better off launching into smaller market such as Canada or Singapore. This highly targeted approach allows you to test campaigns and perfect your messaging and positioning before you undertake a mega launch of your partner marketing automation. At ZINFI we have often seen global teams roll out campaigns that are barely used at individual country levels. This waste of resources can be easily avoided by taking a strategic approach about when to launch local as opposed to global campaigns.

Quarterly vs. Bi-Annual- The next critical question is the ideal frequency of your campaign refresh rate. Most companies launch multiple products and solutions every quarter but often less is more. So, before you load up a continuous stream of fresh assets into your partner marketing automation platform, the key is to make sure you have the right assets to enable the right partners be most successful, and that will also enable your local country teams to prioritize what they know is most effective for their particular geography. One of the best ways to balance the tension between not enough fresh content and not overwhelming your partners with too much, is to take a bi-annual approach – a first half and second half refresh. This gives you breathing space to align your sales incentives over a period of six months rather than rushing to meet quarterly deadlines, which may suit the transactional nature of SMB-focused product but don’t allow you enough time to gain traction with co-initiatives in the enterprise space. So, thinking through your campaign upload and refresh is critical for partner adoption and success.

Manual vs. Automated - We at ZINFI provide complete end-to-end partner marketing automation capabilities at a flat price. However, we recommend to our customers that even if they have the access to a comprehensive set of automation capabilities, it may not make sense for them to switch everything over from their current manual processes. An example would be to move a campaign in a box, with incentives, collaterals and more to a fully automated delivery process. There are two reasons for this - first, it takes time from the vendor standpoint to get consensus on what to load into the tool, so even if the initial set-up only takes minutes, it will take a long time to achieve alignment internally on what campaigns to load into the partner automation tool. Secondly, it is easier to roll out one or two new tools per quarter for a core group of partners and ramp from there, rather than launching a plethora of campaigns or assets and tools all at once. The goal is to build rolling thunder. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and it doesn’t make sense to expect a deployment of your partner marketing automation platform to be successful globally and overnight.

Tactics vs. Initiatives - Last but not least, one of the most important things to think about is how you align your sales initiatives behind the marketing tactics (email, event, search, social, etc.) that you will provide to your channel. Without a comprehensive alignment of the two, much of the potential of your partner marketing automation platform will remain unrealized. For your partner to see value in your partner marketing automation platform it must achieve two primary objectives. First, it should make running campaigns significantly easy/easier, but it should also streamline the process for sales reps at your partner organizations to follow-up with leads, close, report and receive sales incentives. Closing this loop is incredibly powerful and organizations that pay extra attention to making this happen get a lot more value from their platform than those who don’t.

In summary while the very purpose of a partner marketing automation platform is to give you the ability to drive growth through your partner network at a lower cost, there’s more to it than that. To achieve this goal, an organization must think through the partners to who they will deploy the platform, what parts of the world will adopt the platform most readily and in what order, which campaigns must be loaded and why, and how sales incentives should be aligned to reward closure. Once these choices are judiciously made, your partner marketing automation platform is almost guaranteed success.

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Many vendor organizations today are considering the implementation of end-to-end partner marketing automation tools. What’s more, many have already put in place a set of point-tools that are trying to make them all work together. The key for both of these scenarios is to make sure that partner marketing automation doesn’t take a life on its own and serve as a means to an end. The primary purpose of a partner marketing automation platform is to drive profitable growth, so yes, it must increase your partner-led demand generation activities, but it also must reduce costs by introducing more streamlined processes and greater efficiency. However, the success of a partner marketing automation platform depends directly on organizations’ following specific, sequential steps in order to deploy such capabilities globally. The following is a brief overview of the five critical choices a vendor organization must make before an integrated partner marketing automation platform can be deployed worldwide.* Plutocracy vs. Democracy – When you are planning to build your pipeline via your partner network using partner marketing automation, the first question to ask is ‘who sells my product?’ Do the majority of my sales come from 20% of my partners? If that is the case, then you should focus first on enabling the top tier partners who do most of the selling. Making them more efficient will be the logical way to get results from rolling out your partner marketing automation. On the other hand, if half of your partners do half of your sales then you will have to roll out partner marketing automation for most of your channel. In both cases, eventually you want to make sure the partner marketing automation platform can be available for all partners but, in the beginning, being selective and applying a strategic focus helps you to get to those wins faster, and promotes success to drive broader adoption at a later stage.* Global vs. Local – The next question for deployment of your partner marketing automation platform is where does it make most sense to launch? While launching in a large market like the US or Germany or China has the benefit of high volume and high opportunities, there are times when you may be better off launching into smaller market such as Canada or Singapore. This highly targeted approach allows you to test campaigns and perfect your messaging and positioning before you undertake a mega launch of your partner marketing automation. At ZINFI we have often seen global teams roll out campaigns that are barely used at individual country levels. This waste of resources can be easily avoided by taking a strategic approach about when to launch local as opposed to global campaigns.* Quarterly vs. Bi-Annual– The next critical question is the ideal frequency of your campaign refresh rate. Most companies launch multiple products and solutions every quarter but often less is more. So, before you load up a continuous stream of fresh assets into your partner marketing automation platform, the key is to make sure you have the right assets to enable the right partners be most successful, and that will also enable your local country teams to prioritize what they know is most effective for their particular geography. One of the best ways to balance the tension between not enough fresh content and not overwhelming your partners with too much, is to take a bi-annual approach – a first half and second half refresh. This gives you breathing space to align your sales incentives over a period of six months rather than rushing to meet quarterly deadlines, which may suit the transactional nature of SMB-focused product but don’t allow you enough time to gain traction with co-initiatives in the enterprise space. So,

Many vendor organizations today are considering the implementation of end-to-end partner marketing automation tools. What’s more, many have already put in place a set of point-tools that are trying to make them all work together. The key for both of these scenarios is to make sure that partner marketing automation doesn’t take a life on its own and serve as a means to an end. The primary purpose of a partner marketing automation platform is to drive profitable growth, so yes, it must increase your partner-led demand generation activities, but it also must reduce costs by introducing more streamlined processes and greater efficiency. However, the success of a partner marketing automation platform depends directly on organizations’ following specific, sequential steps in order to deploy such capabilities globally. The following is a brief overview of the five critical choices a vendor organization must make before an integrated partner marketing automation platform can be deployed worldwide.

* Plutocracy vs. Democracy - When you are planning to build your pipeline via your partner network using partner marketing automation, the first question to ask is ‘who sells my product?’ Do the majority of my sales come from 20% of my partners? If that is the case, then you should focus first on enabling the top tier partners who do most of the selling. Making them more efficient will be the logical way to get results from rolling out your partner marketing automation. On the other hand, if half of your partners do half of your sales then you will have to roll out partner marketing automation for most of your channel. In both cases, eventually you want to make sure the partner marketing automation platform can be available for all partners but, in the beginning, being selective and applying a strategic focus helps you to get to those wins faster, and promotes success to drive broader adoption at a later stage.

* Global vs. Local - The next question for deployment of your partner marketing automation platform is where does it make most sense to launch? While launching in a large market like the US or Germany or China has the benefit of high volume and high opportunities, there are times when you may be better off launching into smaller market such as Canada or Singapore. This highly targeted approach allows you to test campaigns and perfect your messaging and positioning before you undertake a mega launch of your partner marketing automation. At ZINFI we have often seen global teams roll out campaigns that are barely used at individual country levels. This waste of resources can be easily avoided by taking a strategic approach about when to launch local as opposed to global campaigns.

* Quarterly vs. Bi-Annual- The next critical question is the ideal frequency of your campaign refresh rate. Most companies launch multiple products and solutions every quarter but often less is more. So, before you load up a continuous stream of fresh assets into your partner marketing automation platform, the key is to make sure you have the right assets to enable the right partners be most successful, and that will also enable your local country teams to prioritize what they know is most effective for their particular geography. One of the best ways to balance the tension between not enough fresh content and not overwhelming your partners with too much, is to take a bi-annual approach – a first half and second half refresh. This gives you breathing space to align your sales incentives over a period of six months rather than rushing to meet quarterly deadlines, which may suit the transactional nature of SMB-focused product but don’t allow you enough time to gain traction with co-initiatives in the enterprise space. So, thinking through your campaign upload and refresh is critical f...