The 5 Best Practices for Improving Partner Marketing

Understand the differences in dealing with partners vs direct go-to-market.

- David Aspinall

Your partners are often the closest touch-points to your customers. To not leverage their perspective and input from a field and theatre perspective is a criminal waste of the gift of feedback and market intelligence.

Neglecting partners in your marketing strategy is a quick way to miss a revenue target. Paying attention to all channel partners will stretch a team and your budget to breaking point.

A ‘throw it on the wall and see what sticks’ approach, and signing up every channel partner to represent your products does not grow sales. In fact, it does the opposite, it reduces sales. Find your sweet spot, and improve your partner marketing.

Chief marketing officers (CMOs) are constantly balancing expectations to enable organic revenue growth, capture market and/or wallet share, and provide the foundational platform to ensure successful entry into new markets.

This makes for a highly complex environment that requires a very technical approach to a role that is often not fully understood by the rest of the executive team.

An organisation’s marketing complexity grows exponentially when the total addressable market can only be fully served by leveraging indirect channels.

Additional risks such as loss of control, loss of brand value, and loss of message must be balanced with the promise of fully leveraging a partner’s capability (be it a technical, geographic or process value add) in building your overall answer to the ultimate marketing question of ‘what’s in it for your customers and why should they care?’.