Episode 23 - Heather Margolis

In this episode of ChannelWaves, Steven Kellam hosts Heather Margolis, founder and CEO of Channel Maven, to discuss the importance of end-to-end partner marketing. Heather shares insights on navigating the buyer’s journey, overcoming common challenges, and leveraging tools like SEO, SEM, and AI. Tune in to learn how to effectively engage, educate, and enable partners for better marketing outcomes. Perfect for channel leaders looking to enhance their marketing strategies and stay competitive.

What is Channel Waves by StructuredWeb?

A podcast for Channel Marketers, Channel Waves is a place where channel leaders share success strategies, best practices and emerging trends, brought to you by StructuredWeb.

Welcome to ChannelWaves, the podcast where channel

leaders share success strategies, best practices, and emerging

trends brought to you by StructuredWeb.

Here's your host, Steven Kellam.

Welcome everyone to ChannelWaves.

I'm your host, Steven Kellam.

Very excited to have my good

friend Heather Margolis join us today.

Welcome, Heather. Thank you.

Thanks for having me. Sure.

And Heather is a longtime thought leader.

She is the founder and CEO of Channel Maven,

along with other companies in the past as well.

But she's been doing this for a little

while and she had a great idea.

She wanted to talk about the value

of end-to-end marketing for partners.

I really liked it because, Heather,

I live and breathe this, right?

Every time I'm in any channel situation, somebody asks me

a question or even when I think, I always take

back to when I was a partner and I try

to put my partner hat on and I try to

think about what end-to-end partner marketing looked like for me

back then and what it looks like today.

So maybe you can start with, maybe explain

a little bit what is end-to-end

channel marketing and why it's so important today.

Yeah, I mean, it really, if you split the buyer's

journey into awareness phase, like, they know that they have

a problem, maybe they know how to solve it, maybe

they don't know how to solve it yet.

Consideration is when they're deciding between a couple

of different options and then their decision phase

is, I know what I want.

I've narrowed it down to two or three companies and or

options or solutions, and I know where to go from here.

In the last few questions that I have in every single

one of those phases, there are different things that, that a

company needs to make sure they are doing to get in

front of the customer at that right time.

Someone once explained to me that, that it

was like being on a merry go round.

And when the merry go round stopped and the person went

to get off, like, what was right in front of them.

So if I'm searching for something, a company needs

to be doing things like SEO and SEM.

If I'm trying to get more information, I'm going

out to referral sites or I'm asking my peers,

well, then there need to be customer testimonials and

there need to be email campaigns that are, that

are landing in their inbox.

So it's really about being with the prospect every step

of the way to ensure that your brand is getting

noticed, your solutions, there's enough information out there for them

to see all of that, and then that you're continuing

to hit them, that you're continuing to

be where they need you, when they need you at

every step of the way.

Because people get distracted, people have deadlines, people

end up doing things that take them out

of their buying process for the moment.

So you want to make sure that you're

continuing to be in front of them.

Gosh, it sounds so simple when you lay it out that way.

It's not. It's not.

So maybe we can talk about some of the challenges

that you see and then I'd be glad to throw

in some of the challenges that I actually live through.

And I can think of a challenge that I

live through on each one of those steps. Right? Yeah.

I mean, where to begin.

So making sure that your brand awareness is

where it is, so that you're even considered.

You're doing things like SEO SEM.

You have a website that is easy to

find information on and has verticalized content.

So if I go to a website and it

looks like they're just talking to somebody in medical

devices, I immediately assume that's not for me.

So if you've taken so much trouble to get

somebody to your website, make sure that when they

get there, the information is actually relevant to them.

Um.

Man, I feel like this is when I

feel like I wish I had slides.

I don't do slides, but, um, you know, the act of

getting someone to pay attention to you is, is hard enough.

But then once they get there, what are they seeing?

Are they getting the information

they need at their fingertips?

Are the things that you do have

at their fingertips answering the questions?

Because everybody wants to be

on their own journey, right?

They don't necessarily want to have to go

and get a demo or ask a salesperson.

They want to figure out as

much information as they can.

Having a ton of content out there in

the right places is really challenging and making

sure that it's either evergreen or updated.

So I think it's hard across all partners.

And I always go back to, I think of how vendors

interact, the one-to-one big SI's, the one to the

few, the managed partners, and the one to the many.

And there's so many, many, so.

And I was in the one to the

many and we were pretty good at that.

But even that first part of

the awareness is really hard.

When you're trying to run a business with 20

people, sub $10 million, you wearing multiple hats, and

maybe you're getting some MDF dollars and you're trying

to figure out how to do this.

And that's the majority of partners. Right.

So how do vendors come alongside maybe in all three?

Because each one has a different challenge,

but it's all the same thing. Right?

Awareness, awareness, awareness.

And then one thing that I think about digital marketing now,

even more than what it was before, is I do think

that those one to many, and a lot of the small

partners have an opportunity to look much bigger and to look

much better if they do this one thing right.

It's absolutely hard.

And I think a lot of times

when you're working with partners, you're talking

to people who are technologists first.

They're salespeople first.

They're not marketers.

This isn't something that they've seen a lot

of value in because they've gotten a ton

of business through word of mouth.

But the market is changing. Right?

Like, it's getting a lot more competitive.

The economy is down.

We need to make sure that these partners have the

right resources to be able to market to their prospects

and that they can, they can do this multi-step

approach, because if they just do one thing and it

doesn't go, then they go back to the vendor and

they say, that one thing you gave me didn't work.

But from a customer's perspective, you

can't just do that one thing.

You have to do all of the things to

get them to participate in the conversation and to

actually get that meeting and get that demo.

So a couple of things on that.

So is the market down or is it

just change and what it needs to be?

I think that's very interesting.

If you look at the, you look at

the stock market, that's doing really well. If you.

Yeah, I know, I know. I'm in it.

I get the updates.

But if you look at who's buying and

what's happening and why that is, there's still.

I agree, in the small business, there's still a lot,

in all business, there's still a lot of challenges.

Right.

I think we're getting hit harder in tech, and

this is, listen, this isn't a question for me.

This is a question for Jay

McBain or Larry Walsh. Right.

Like, I am seeing a ton of layoffs in

tech right now, specifically in the channel organization.

And I think it's because we are

reinventing how we work with our partners.

I hope that's what it is.

I hope it's not that we are not putting

the same importance on those partners, especially when it

comes to a traditional hardware software company.

Heather, there are a lot of things that

are going on that causing this shift. Right.

Complex consumer buying behavior, digital

transformation, the blurring of the

lines between marketing and sales.

I think all these things are starting to come together.

Anything in particular in the ship

that stands out for you?

Yeah, I mean, I think we as consumers are marketed to all

day, every day, and are now getting used to, oh, if I

forget to click on that ad now, it'll come up again.

We've just sort of been trained that way.

And the same is true for our, when we're buying for

our business, we're so used to all of the bots and

all of the AI and all of the big brother'esque

factors I mentioned to a friend or I was searching for.

I just got a stand up pilates or stand up paddleboard.

You can do Pilates on, but it's very, very challenging.

I do do Pilates on.

You can do yoga and big shout out to. Yup Sup

And Phil Berry and his wife Christine, who have a

shop in Massachusetts, so they shipped it out to Colorado.

I'm super lazy.

I don't want to deal with the pump all the time.

I got a pump that just hooks into my car and

I pump it up and then I'm good to go.

But I searched for that and then

I never went to buy it.

And on Instagram, all of a sudden I'm

getting all of these ads like, your phone

is marketing to you at all times.

So when you flip it on its head and

you say, okay, now I'm a partner who's marketing

to a CIO or an IT decision maker.

They expect to have that information where they want

it, when they want it, without bombarding them.

So you have to sort of figure out,

how does this end-to-end piece work.

One thing that's super interesting is intent data.

So I've used, um, Demand Base in the past.

I've used 6sense in the past.

But these softwares that tell you who's searching

for which terms that are going to bring

your solutions are important to them.

Um, so, you know, we just keep adding more and more

layers to our infrastructure stack to make sure that we are

selling to the right people at the right time.

You're actually living this.

You are a business owner that

people are trying to sell to.

So you're actually, so you've seen it, and people that

know you know you well, you've seen it on the

vendor side and you've been on the solution side.

Now you're a small business actually living

on the other side of that. It's got to be fascinating.

Yeah, you can just see it from all angles.

Fascinating, sometimes annoying, but yes.

You know, the messages that hit home, that

speak to exactly something I'm having trouble with.

I will absolutely open those.

Get a demo, talk to a person. Yeah.

It has to be relevant for sure. Yep.

Okay, so here's the big question on this, and this

is once again, you played in all these spaces.

You know exactly what someone is, a vendor is looking at

is, okay, how do I get this end-to-end marketing

message across and help those partners at all those layers?

Right.

The one-to-one, you got a

CAM or a PAM working with the SI thing. Right?

That's fine.

The managed partners could be interesting.

I talked to $100 million partner the other

day that was kind of lost around stuff. Right.

And there's a lot of them on down. Right.

So what do vendors do to help partners

either understand this or get through this?

What are some of the action items that they can do?

You know, I always say, educate, engage, enable.

So educate your partners on how to do these things.

What are the marketing activities

they should be focusing on?

How are they doing social selling correctly?

How are they ensuring that they are verticalizing their

messages, their content, their outreach, so that when somebody

in medical devices gets a call, it's different than

when somebody in financial services gets a call.

Cause they use different vernacular

and they use different.

They have different business problems that

they're trying to solve for.

So, and then it's ensuring that you're

engaging the partners in the way that

you want them to engage a customer.

So I tell vendors all the time to use LinkedIn.

If that's how you want your partners reaching out

to prospects, then you should make sure that you're

modeling for them how they should be leveraging LinkedIn.

And then finally it's enabling them, giving

them the campaign materials, the resources.

Leveraging a platform like StructuredWeb to ensure that

they have what they need when they need it.

Because even if they're using their own

marketing automation tool and they're marketing multiple different

technologies as more of a business outcome instead

of just a feature function type of campaign,

they need to have the content at their

fingertips that they can leverage to attract that

prospect and bring them into the fold.

Having that content, would you say that

that's a big miss for both partners?

Is that one of the biggest challenge?

What are some of the

biggest challenges for these partners?

On that, yeah, I think what I'm seeing now,

being back in it much, much closer, is that

partners are either their messaging is great, the content

is fine, but they're stopping at the awareness phase,

like they're doing all the things you're supposed to

do in the awareness phase.

SEO SEM, they're doing social.

Maybe they send one email or they do one webinar,

but then there's no follow through, there's no like, oh,

this person didn't join the webinar, let's send them the

replay, and then a week later send them an ebook

that also talked about what the webinar talked about.

Then the next week send them

an invite to another webinar.

It just sort of ends or it picks up.

Six months later there was a webinar, they had some

great content, but they don't do anything for six months.

And then the person either forgets who they are

or is like, oh, that's right, I remember when

I was thinking about this company, but then I

forgot about them and I bought something else.

So you don't want to miss that perfect moment.

And then the, or the other issue I'm seeing is

that they just don't verticalize the content and it's like

speaking to the masses, or they use the same campaign

for medical devices that they use for financial services and

they're just not using the right semantics.

So how do you solve both those problems?

Is automation is a key to it, but you could

give someone a great platform, but if they lose focus

or they don't stay on track, okay, you have the

great platform, you still have a problem.

So what is that?

Is that two partner marketing?

Is that case studies?

Does it make it relevant?

Is it training them and enabling them and

showing the benefit of staying through it?

Is it even rewarding them for your journey to end?

Or is it all the above?

Yeah, I mean, I think it's all of the above.

Different for each.

Some people are more receptive to incentives.

And, you know, my time at 360insights taught me

a lot about how to build the habits with the

partners that are going to make them more successful.

I'm a huge advocate for that.

And for incenting the behaviors that

are going to continue to.

You're like teaching them to fish

without them realizing it, right?

Like partners go out and connect

with a lot of their prospects.

Maybe they send a campaign through LinkedIn, which,

you know me, I love social, um, how

do you incent them for that?

So that they continue to do that the next time

without getting the incentive, like have them do it once,

and then the reward becomes that they actually got some

leads from it and they actually got some meetings from

it and maybe a few closed deals.

So I think incent them to do the

habits that are going to make them successful

so that the success becomes the reward. Okay.

What do you see the future holding on this, right.

Where are we trending on this?

Everything that you talked about sounds great, but

if you looked at the resources that vendors

have today, maybe that's not so easy.

So how do you manage that? What is the trend on that?

Are we going to get better?

Are we going to get worse? Who's going to win? Lose?

Why?

Well, there, there are certainly some things coming

that, you know, I'm still pretty involved in

a bunch of different software companies.

I'm seeing a lot of leveraging AI

to remind partners of things in a

non sort of overwhelming, annoying, bombarding way.

I'm seeing a lot of just trying to make their

lives easier wherever possible so that they can do the

more strategic things, like take the tactical stuff off their

plate, whether it's through CAMs or software or AI, so

that they can do the more strategic things. Okay.

All right.

Wrapping this up.

Any advice?

I mean, do that right?

Make life simple for partners way for them

to get there.

You know, everything that you do with partners to make

yourselves easier to do business with, to ensure that they

know that you actually care about their business.

And it's not just like, where are my leads?

What are you doing?

I'm not seeing results that it's, hey,

what's going on in your business?

How are you growing your business?

How can we help you focus?

I think especially the smaller partners who aren't managed

need sometimes a little bit of that coaching and

it can be through a platform, but they just

sometimes need, like atta'boy, atta'girl.

There you go.

You're doing all the right things.

Here's some incentive.

Here are some more programs.

Here are some more resources for you.

The one thing that always surprised me when I

would do concierge work with partners is that they

didn't realize how many resources were available.

And having run channel marketing, that was

like a dagger to the heart.

Like, how did you not know that

we do all these things for you?

Or you have all these programs that are free

for you to use, but they're, you know, they're

in their cars, they're on the phone with customers.

The vendor is not their priority.

You just need to tell them.

Tell them what you told them and then tell them again.

Okay.

All right, Heather, thank you for joining us today.

Thanks you're in the middle of all of this.

What's the best way for people to reach you? Be engaged.

What's the best way for people to connect with you?

Just certainly connect with me on LinkedIn.

Heather K. Margolis or email [e-mail]

Okay, thanks, Heather. Have a great day. Thank you.