How to Scale Demand Marketing with your Partners - 5 key takeaways

Sherpa's CEO Tom Perry joined Impartners Masterclass with Dave Taylor and Trevor Burnett discussing 'how to scale demand marketing with your Partners'. Here's our 5 key take-aways from the webinar. 

Partner communities' demands have shifted. 

The pathway with leads and opportunities generated through a set of well orchestrated activities from MDF are no longer enough. We are entering a new era, one with greater sophistication, one that enables Vendors to create structured, integrated programs utilizing the combined benefits of technology and service. 

The proliferation of different Partner types. 

Five years ago we would have been talking about a few types of Partners - namely in the reseller space, but today we have a proliferation of different types of Partners. This has led to Vendors asking themselves the question: how do they create programs that support different types of Partners who are trying to do different types of activities? There is not a one size fits all solution and different support models are needed (including digital programs, enablement programs, account based marketing programs) We know that the support models required are changing and adapting, and that puts us very much in the hands of technology platforms, like Impartner, to assist us on that journey. 

Assess - The right type of Partners. 

When we are asked to support in creating demand at scale for Partners, we go through a three step process: assess - invest - manage. For the first stage, assess, we look at the current Partner ecosystem. Using a plethora of data metrics including commercial data, marketing maturity and engagement.  We ascertain the marketing invest-ability of the Partners, helping us to understand which Partners will offer the biggest impact to revenue performance.  

Invest - You cannot invest in every Partner. 

Traditionally there has been a pyramid model with “self-serve” at the bottom, some services in the middle and at the top concierge/ white glove services, but which Partners do you put into which service? Do you allow them to self-select? By bringing data science to the process you can get to a point where you have a per Partner view of insightful metrics that show you which Partners are ready for scale. Visualizing your Partner community internally enables you to make informed decisions about where to direct invest your budget. 

Technology can level the playing field. 

The big promise of the technology and services wrap is that we are able to bring more Partners into the program, and to level the playing field. Particularly for Partners that don’t have marketing resources available to them. Campaigns can be complex, multi-tactic, regionally optimized but we can use technology to allow us to pick off the best parts of a campaign for automation- for example, by using tools such as TCMA (Through Channel Marketing Automation) and Google ads. 

View the full webinar here. Or chat to us about our Partner Assessment platform, ahead of its release next quarter!