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 heather@channelmaven.com
Okay, thanks, Heather. Have a great day. Thank you.