As technology vendors have both developed and refined their channel marketing strategies over the past few years the need for a refined yet bespoke marketing approach has emerged as top priority. The vendor who manages to encourage, educate and inspire their partners to create and execute joint marketing activities will be the big winner with increased brand awareness plus channel based return in the marketing funnel. Accelerate is a 100% fully funded, managed program of packaged marketing activities and collateral that focuses upon delivering joint sales opportunities. ShoreTel’s Accelerate Marketing Knowledge Series was developed upon the premise of educating channel marketing professionals with the very latest industry ideas, concepts and practises. ShoreTel’s approach is based on developing marketing skills and learning’s from one event to the next with two driving factors; ensuring partners attend all events to aid personal development, and building a community that is both competitive but also able to differentiate themselves (from a marketing perspective) in order to address more of the market. The events were run in November 2010 and April 2011, the agenda being developed collaboratively with some of the best industry marketers e.g. Chris Wilson, Richard Robinson, Ed Weatherall, Lisa Hutt and Richard Bush.

Objectives:

This program had two specific goals: to increase the marketing skill levels of ShoreTel partners while also increasing awareness, consideration and marketing pipeline for ShoreTel via an increased number of joint marketing campaigns.

Target Audience:

ShoreTel’s Accelerate Marketing Knowledge Series was aimed at those people within ShoreTel’s partner community who influence or perform a marketing function. The agenda topics and speakers were designed to appeal to Managing Directors, Sales Directors, Marketing Directors, Marketing Managers and Executives. The agenda items, timings and presenters were deliberately designed to be both compelling and action orientated.

For channel marketers to gain access to the knowledge and learn from the experience of these industry leaders is unprecedented for a technology vendor to offer at no cost to their partners. This important element helped to create a successful set of events simply with the calibre of presenters who also attended free of charge

Results:

ShoreTel had just launched the Accelerate Partner Program in the UK when development of the ShoreTel Accelerate Marketing Knowledge Series began in September 2010. It was always Tom Perry’s vision to create a partner community under the Accelerate banner and provide bi-annual knowledge and action events to drive increased marketing activity through his channel partners. The initial event objective was to get 35 attendees, 25 partner registrations per event plus 10 other participants (Presenters or ShoreTel employees). We received 19 and 21 partner attendees respectively to the November and April events.

As a result of the calibre of presenters, content and the exclusive offer made at the November event, ShoreTel agreed to fund and develop 7 new joint marketing campaigns. In addition to these activities ShoreTel identified and agreed to fund another 15 joint campaigns after the recent April event. Therefore ShoreTel have over 25 joint marketing campaigns agreed and underway in the UK channel as a direct result of the ShoreTel Accelerate Marketing Knowledge series

The ShoreTel Accelerate Marketing Knowledge series gives the partner the knowledge and the courage combined with a generous 100% funding offer to take a chance and create a ShoreTel joint marketing campaign that demonstrates the true value of partnership.

A couple of courses into the schedule and I am amazed at how many channel sales / marketing people that I have talked to recently who do not have a marketing plan in their business, or at least a plan that is written down and agreed with management. I would hazard a guess that most business leaders / owners would not dream of not creating a business plan or a sales plan, so why not have at least a very basic marketing plan. Furthermore I discovered through a few carefully guided questions, if the partners do say that they have a plan it is very organic in the sense of it is understood but not written down so they can change it regularly. I would call that more tactical than strategic.

Planning is crucial to the success of any business or even marketing activity or endeavour. It is also a part of the course where I have been most surprised, in the sense that I thought it was a given that in order to justify spending budget as a marketing department you would need to create a plan, with at the very least targets and ROI objectives.  This plan with marketing goals would then need to be presented and approved by management before any spending commenced.

With this in mind I just wanted to reinforce the need for Strategic Marketing Planning and one of the best ways that I have summed it recently is with the aid of The Direct Marketing Guide © 1998, published back in 1998 by the recently rebranded The Institute of Direct Marketing www.theidm.com

The nine major benefits of a good strategic marketing plan

Once you have digested the first part and then come to write the plan please use these six simple steps.

The six qualities of a good strategic marketing plan

If you work in a channel partner and have influence in the marketing function for your business please remember these simple words; planning prevents, poor performance. 

A roundtable can be as basic as conducting a meeting around a table. There is also those that are facilitated either usually by an independent party like a journalist or marketing consultant. Many marketing event and publishing companies offer them as part of an editorial package or they can be organised with the help of more independent parties who can be employed by the vendor to ensure the session flows on time, everyone gets a say and all the relevant covers points are covered. There is nothing worth than a partner taking time out of their business to come and sit around a table and either be preached at by the vendor for the most part or be beaten to the punch by louder and more obnoxious partner.

There are many different formats that a roundtable can take and it is really up to the organiser to choose what is most appropriate for the desired outcome. There is the ‘Simple Agenda’ approach whereby the facilitator moderates the conversation to ensure the group keeps to the agenda and time to ensure all points and covered, minuted and action assigned. ‘Game of Two Halves’ whereby the facilitator will spend one or two hours with the partners only, to understand any grievances, issues plus examples of both. After a break the vendor representatives are invited back into the room to face a series of the partners questions, guided by the facilitator and also listen to the horror stories and then hopefully offer a response or action to the get those issues fixed for the next meeting. I must point out these sessions also offer up the opportunity for the partners to provide positive feedback to the vendors, especially about account management or other heroes within the business, it is not just a bloodletting session for the partner to walk away feeling a sense of release. The other format is ‘Open Season’ whereby the facilitator has both the partners and the vendor in the room with an outline of possible discussion items. The advantage of this format is that the partners can get an instant face to face answers to their points as opposed to the previous format whereby they have to wait until the second half of the session to get answers and explanations from the vendor.

Currently I facilitate partner roundtables for Avaya in the UK for Platinum & Medal Partners in London, Manchester & Edinburgh. The sessions have ranged from audiences of 40 to 10 Avayians and Partners depending on the time or location. Already both Avaya and the partners have seen improvements from these sessions.

I doubt it, so I sent the 7 question survey to as many people in my network of vendors, partners consultants etc. that would (a) be interested in the topic, so as to take part and (b) be even more interested in the results.

I started with a simple question, (1) Where are you employed? This helps set the tone for the survey and how to then interpret the answers to the more in depth questions. The responses were as follows Vendor 38.3%, Reseller 31.9%, Distributor 12.8% or Supplier 17%. Therefore 64% of the responders were from Vendors or Resellers which is the perfect base for answering the remaining questions and providing the insight I required to summarise and interpret the results.

Throughout my vendor careers we were always asked to ensure that the partners were aware of the rules and regulations that governed vendor funding models, my initial view was that not many partners took any notice, but I was wrong as when I asked, (2) Have you ever heard of the Federal Accounting Standards Board (FASB) Rules or Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Compliance? Surprisingly 72.5% of the responders answered ‘Yes’ and 27.5% answered ‘No’ that is a very positive sign for vendors who are tightly governed by these various policies. This result is very positive for vendors as governance of funding programs is very tight and they need to ensure that everything is managed to the letter of the law.

The next question had to be simple and direct, (3) What is the preferred funding model for partners? I wanted a definitive answer to this question so I only listed 3 possible answers, Accrued (earned as % of revenue), Discretionary (allocated on case by case basis) or other. The results were as follows Accrued 43%, Discretionary 41% and other 16%. There were some additional comments that were added in the other section which I think need a mention and that add to the debate…

1.     “Hybrid, mixing both to support short & long term goals”

2.     “Mixed”

3.     “A mixture of both”.

4.     “Split 50/50 between the 2”

5.     “Mix of earned and specific projects”

6.     “To run both in parallel is particularly useful. The accrued approach provides an element of predictability but there are occasions where the vendor can collaborate with you on activities with mutual benefit above and beyond the accrued %, as long as you are a 'clean' user of accruals!”

7.     “most reseller too small for accrued funds to be meaningful”

8.     “they want to see a mixture of both”

9.     “Discretionary allocated on long term agreed plan

The audience is almost split on which system is preferable, plus a decent number advocate a mixed approach which might well be worth exploring for future vendor program changes.

In the next question, (4) what are the barriers to spending? I created a multiple choice question because I know people have more than one reason for not being able to spend their allocated Market Development Fund (MDF) or Business Development Fund (BDF). I was interested to see where the answers would rank, and here they are in order of response:

Clearly vendors need to address all of the items listed, but I would say the top two were easily the area of most focus from the responders. If vendors make it easier for partners to claim on activities that they would like to execute the utilisation rate would increase and everyone would be happy, but this seems to be where there is a gap, and everything slows down and momentum is lost from creating and executing joint marketing programs funded by the vendor.

Next I wanted to find out if people thought, (5) if marketing funding levels should be linked to a partners status within the Vendor’s Certification Program? And we would accept a simple, Yes 75%, No 10% or No Preference 15%. The consensus here makes perfect sense, if a vendor has a certification program, a benefit of that program and achieving a higher level of certification should be rewarded with more Market Development Fund (MDF) or Business Development Fund (BDF) than lower certified partners. But that does not always happen which I find a little bit odd.

The next question was (6) Should Partners match Vendor’s funding with contribution of their own to an activity? And the answers were a little surprising nearly 32% of responders were from resellers. The answers were Yes 36%, No 7% and Depends on the activity 57%. This is a really interesting result as it shows vendors that resellers are open to new ideas and approaches, so if you are changing your partner program don’t just serve up the same old program rewards and guidelines, think outside the box and stimulate growth with your partners who are asking for a new approach.

And finally, let’s talk about how to get access to these Market Development Fund (MDF) or Business Development Fund (BDF) statements. The question was (7) Are the online Marketing funding portals you have experience of easy to use? And the answers came back were Yes 20%, No 48% and Varies 32%. I think we can safely say that as nearly 50% of the responders were negative in response to this question then the vendors seriously need to take a look at the platforms that are used to access the fund balance and create the transactions. We must bear in mind that the vendors may be constrained by using a global system, but if the system is not used by the partners, then clearly changes are required.

In conclusion, this is just a snapshot with 51 individual opinions on the 7 simple topics that  admittedly only covers a fraction of this topic, but I think it gives us a genuinely good indication of the thoughts within our industry Re: Vendor Funding: Accrued or Discretionary, what is best for the partners? As a next step I would encourage vendors that are thinking of changing the way they reward their partners to investigate the pros and cons thoroughly before making any changes, and most importantly consult your audience. If a vendor changes from discretionary to accrued it takes smaller partners at least 6 months to earn enough funds to afford to roll out a single activity, if the program then changes back they lose out again as the more highly certified partners will most likely always receive the discretionary allocations. Vendors need to think carefully around this topic, as they can help to make or break quarters and most importantly channel relationships and coverage.