Marketers Missing Out On Channel Partner Opportunities For Demand Gen

“Especially at this time when we’re working through a tough economy, reaching out to channel partners and their ability to provide leads is important,” says Shari Marion-Hoff, CEO of channel marketing specialist Hawkeye-Cohesion. “Channel partners represent a variable rather than fixed cost, and utilizing them can drive down your overall cost of sales. But still supplier companies struggle with it.”

Marion-Hoff sees a lack of urgency and a weight of process in channel partner lead and demand gen efforts. Many companies have ambitious programs in place to encourage channel partners to capture leads, and pass them back for follow-ups. And many supply companies aggressively pass leads on to their channels. But communication is often slowed by questions such as “who owns the lead?” or “is it a qualified lead?” so that the lead itself is cold before the right person gets to it. She believes that if channel partners are given more latitude and tools to define, distribute and act on leads, they will be more successful.

Another obstacle in channel marketing for lead and demand gen is defining different kinds of partners. For example, in the high-tech business, value added resellers (VARs) and retailers can be key partners for the same product. In the prerecorded entertainment space, the middleman is less important than it used to be. Retailers are the priority channel. Supply companies must define the channel mix they want to get their products in front of the right customers. But before that, an effective and measurable lead gen program, is a necessary long-term strategy.

REWARDING DEMAND

Dave Gee is CEO of Sales Sherpas and an adjunct professor for a course track in channel management at the University of Wisconsin. His experience at several insurance and financial services companies has shown a huge difference in how channel partners work and how they should be managed for lead and demand gen. Indirect sales forces will be a constant challenge for this process, he says, because they are challenged to act on leads, not generate them.

“I think you can reward your channel partners’ lead generation achievements, and I see that becoming a trend in the BtoB space,” Gee says. “But you also have to understand that there are entire third-party companies that do nothing but generate leads. Bottom line, no matter it comes from, stay away from leads you can’t measure or performance you can’t measure.”

As Gee mentions, some companies will generate leads for a price. Other companies, such as Hawkeye/Cohesion, will work with supply companies to develop programs that reward channel partners for lead generation. It also sets up processes for supply companies to get leads down the line faster, so channel partners can act on them.

Social networking and social media applications are starting to get traction as well. As Forrester research analyst Jeremiah Owyang writes in his blog “Web Strategy.” “At first, social media impacted the PR group within any particular vendor, then spread to corporate marketing, yet just now in 2008 I’m starting to see some uptake of Channel Marketing departments starting to take notice of social media for channel use.”

Owyang says vendor to partner communications are “perhaps the first seen effort is to use these tools as a way to better communicate to partners. Tools such as blogs and podcasts are great for talking to your partner base, but don’t forget about letting them cross-communicate to each other by using community tools. The better your partners are at reselling your products, they better off you are. It’s expected there will be some needs for permissions and rules of engagement as many partner are competitors.”