Cloud Marketing

The more encounters I have with them, the more I see that partner portals are EXTREMELY inefficient. I have had first hand experience with some of the best ones out there, and they are still a complete mess to navigate. It can be almost impossible for partners to find the information they’re looking for. From a partner’s perspective, this can result in a giant waste of time and a huge amount of frustration. For the vendor/enterprise, there is a loss of potential sales growth because channel partners aren’t updating their websites with the most up to date, relevant product information. This means website visitors are not being converted to customers because they are not getting the information they need.

1. Give partners ONLY the information they need. This can be done by optimizing your partner portal to have role-based users. Most often, channel partners have different certification levels, so don’t expect them to log in to a partner portal and then go find their certification level’s section. Only provide them with information relevant to their product offerings. Using  certification levels to act as filters for content can exponentially decrease the amount of time it takes for partners to find the information they need. This decreases the time-to-market for new products and promotions, cutting off competitor encroachment.
2. Let partners know when there is new content in a more efficient way. The way we interact with the web is changing the way marketers should deliver information not only to customers but also to salespeople, resellers, VARs, distributors, etc. Thanks to the advent of RSS, email subscriptions, and other content delivery mechanisms, information delivery is becoming much more customized. Let partners choose the methods of contact they find most relevant/easy. At the same time, don’t expect one touch to be enough to get channel partners to change content.
3. Automate content updates, lead nurturing, and marketing as much as possible for partners. The less time channel partners have to spend changing website content or turning their leads into quality leads, the less time it takes for them to convert a sale. Enabling partners doesn’t necessarily mean giving them the ability to do something so much as it means doing it with them. The old saying, “Give a man a fish and feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and feed him for life,” doesn’t necessarily apply here. Sure, you can teach him to fish, but when you have to hit your numbers by the end of the quarter, just handing him a net full of fish and telling him to reel them in seems a lot more practical.

Doing any one of these three things will help improve vendor to channel partner relations. However, it is probably best to start with limiting irrelevant information and improving communication before tacking the problem of automation.