What Partners Want from Channel Marketing Enablement

The third interview in our series on The Channel’s Biggest Marketing Challenges? is with? Mike McDermott,? SVP of Business Development? at PrimitiveLogic. Mike? leads solution selling of? business and technology consulting services, and develops? reselling relationships with leading technology suppliers. We discuss channel challenges from the VAR and Integrator perspective, including best practices for channel marketing enablement? and for partners adjusting to cloud disruption.

Just a few of the best points from our conversation with Mike McDermott:

• We look to the partner to understand market targets, value propositions, call scripts and programs that we can customize and go to market. That’s the channel marketing enablement we’re looking for–some do it better than others.

• In the old paradigm vendors would say “here’s some money, let’s go get some deals.” That can work sometimes, but it hasn’t been a big success for us. We’ve tried some MDF programs for outbound calls, or marketing tools on our website, but they haven’t really worked well for us.

• What? works well for us is vendors who take the time to understand our market and our solutions, and help us get the content and materials we need to better position their products into our solutions–so I can consult and bring our strengths to bear. For example, if I don’t do HR, why is a vendor pushing MDF and campaigns at me to do HR when we don’t have any competency there?
  

  We’re successful when we find vendors that are willing to come together with us, understand our competencies and how we go to market, and we work together to build a plan.

• Having a channel account manager is key–we need someone who can help us get to the information and data we need quickly to get onboard. It’s hard for us to invest the time and resources to figure out each vendor’s partner site on our own.

• Vendors think they can just give us a campaign-in-a-box and it will be perfect for us, but usually it’s not. A lot of times, vendors just want us to hit up our existing customers for a quick win, but we’re looking for a more sustainable model where we can build net new customers. It takes time and investment.