A while ago, Brightvision held a webinar entitled How to Create Successful Partner Marketing Campaigns that keep your Channel Partners Engaged. During the webinar, myself (Jakob Löwenbrand CEO, Brightvision) and Mesach Amuah-Fuster (Managing Director EMEA, Allbound) discussed various aspects of partner marketing.
What is partner experience?
In short, partner experience is a way for companies to gauge the health and success of their partner marketing efforts. Partner experience can encompass several KPIs related to things like partner engagement, satisfaction score, and revenue.
Knowing who your partners are, and what they need, is essential for optimizing the partner experience. Just like customer experience can indicate customer satisfaction, partner experience is an indicator of a strong, healthy, and engaged partner relationship.
So, with that in mind, here are three things you can do to improve the partner experience.
-
Tailor your message
Spreading a message too thin, or trying to be everything to everyone, is a recipe for marketing failure – and this goes for channel marketing too. Many partners targeting the same prospects with the same products can lead to message fatigue. For your message to be relevant and memorable, it must be tailored to the prospect.
Take, for example, a manufacturer of computer storage devices. They might have sales partners in various industries: mining operations, scientific labs, and food production for example. Each of these partners will be working with customers with different pain points, requirements, objections, budgets, and so on. The messaging to each of these prospects would be slightly different, even though the partners are selling the same product.
-
Focus on clarity
People will buy into things they understand. If they don't understand, they're more likely to quit. So, one of the best strategies for partner engagement is to provide your partners clear, readable, actionable information: something that they can easily communicate to other people.
“If you can make something easy to understand, your partners will run with it. They'll become your agents — and sell it on your behalf — whether they're on your payroll or not,” said Mesach Amuah-Fuster, Managing Director EMEA at Allbound.
-
Build trust
It's easy to build partnerships, but it takes time and effort to build a good partner relationship. Think of the partner as your customer: you need to understand their needs and pain points, and they need to trust you. When there’s a high level of trust between you and your channel partners, you are each convinced that the other is committed to mutual success.
That’s why it’s important to communicate frequently and openly with your channel partners. A partner may have a question and not know where to turn for answers. If you’re available to answer questions, clarify details, and offer support, it can strengthen your relationship with the partner and lead to a better partner experience.
Perhaps you also would be interested to learn about how we executed the successful partner campaign "Adobe by Crayon"?
Crayon is a leading Adobe partner and needed our help to promote the partnership with the goal of generating leads and creating awareness. The campaign needed to be both scalable and applicable for different types of campaigns, all over the world.
