Scale or Fail: Would 10X partner marketing make an impact?

Market conditions are showing that most businesses need partners more than ever.

1,000 new SaaS providers are in a mad rush for market share. Product led, new markets, and sales and marketing noise make it even harder to get and keep new customers.

Unfortunately you will find it very hard to address this danger and opportunity without the help of your channel partners – as your internal sales team alone cannot scale to cover your market/s.

A February 2022 Channel Marketer reports shows “96% of B2B leaders expect to increase revenue directly attributed to their partner ecosystems.”

Vendors are seeing a need to leverage more business value from partners and are constantly in search of adding new partners. Note from the Channel Marketing report: “Of the respondents, 82% will be adding to their roster of partners”. Yet Forrester in a 2021 report states: “Nine of ten new partner/vendor relationships fail to return value, should you need them”.

Fortunately, there are ways to ensure you are not left out, and can more easily leverage your partner model as you struggle with…

• Ad-hoc go-to-market campaigns, with limited resources to scale with partners
• Lack of full partner engagement and if/when engaged lack of results visibility
• Poor returns on MDF (Market Development Funds) investment

What does the promised land look like?  Start with joint execution “With” your partners…

• Align your resources on parallel joint marketing campaigns
• Amplify your great marketing with data insights to aid partner sales teams
• Automate the above campaigns to quickly scale partner supporting initiatives

Scale your campaigns leveraging “Partner-With” marketing. That is, vendors and partners execute marketing campaigns together. Results favor this focus as both sides own the effort and outcome – with partners having “skin in the game”.

Drive these joint campaigns with 1-100 partners at once – for 10X scale. Touch more end users faster – before others drown out your story. Include if needed the traditional/creative marketing steps in the mix, or more quickly launch by leveraging assets that are performing in your corporate campaigns. Add a dose of data insights to spike your chances of success.

You will need to first decide which campaign automation platform to use. Your own marketing automation platform (MAP) is not built to run parallel partner campaigns. You can have each partner use their own platform albeit most will not have the resources, time, or knowledge to do so. A third option is to outsource the partner automation platform and services function.

This last choice can help you address the partner resource gaps we sometimes see. “Partner-With” marketing campaign automation helps with most tasks – and some of the providers will also do the heavy lift to execute your campaigns.

Align vendor and partner resources on these lead generation campaigns, partner by partner. And if needed apply MDF funds to these campaigns. Show expected results to the money owner/s to help secure these funds.