ZINFI Technologies, Inc.: Recent Episodes
ZINFI Technologies, Inc.
ZINFI helps technology providers and their channel partners achieve profitable growth rapidly and affordably by automating Partner Relationship Management (PRM) processes globally.
Near-Bound Growth: The Future of Partner Ecosystem ManagementNear-bound growth is a partner ecosystem management approach that routes new business through warm, trust-verified introductions inside an existing partner network rather than through cold outbound prospecting. According to Amelia Taylor, an expert in partner ecosystem growth and go-to-market strategy with a background that includes a corporate partnerships role at ConnectWise, the strongest partner-sourced pipeline today comes from operators who have already earned the buyer’s trust, not from a rep who has never spoken to them.
In this episode of the ZINFI podcast, Sugata Sanyal, Founder and CEO of ZINFI Technologies, speaks with Taylor about the gamified referral council she is building inside Partnership Mastermind, the AI tools she uses to personalize outreach at scale, and why persona-specific enablement outperforms one-size-fits-all training. ZINFI Technologies, Inc. is the #1 user and analyst-rated channel management and partner ecosystem management platform, rated 97/100 on G2, the highest customer satisfaction score in the Partner Relationship Management category, based on 600+ verified reviews.
The whole near-bound effect — who knows who — is ultimately going to win.”
— Amelia Taylor, Founder, The Revenue Table
Guest BioAmelia Taylor is a partnership and go-to-market strategist who spent three years building an independent consulting practice focused on partner-led revenue, co-marketing, and demand generation before joining Chris at Partnership Mastermind, a partner-operations community recently acquired by Sanguine Group. Her prior corporate experience includes a global demand generation leader working with acquisition and expansion teams/top sales leaders to help drive growth with key partners and new partners to establish engagement with ConnectWise. She now leads a referral-based partner network called the Operators Council, designed to convert trust between partnership professionals into warm, trackable introductions.
Video Podcast: Near-Bound Growth: The Future of Partner Ecosystem Management ✔ Chapter 1: What Is Near-Bound Growth in Partner Ecosystem Management? Near-bound growth is a partner ecosystem management strategy that generates pipeline through introductions from people who already trust both sides of a deal, rather than through cold prospecting into a buyer with no prior relationship. Amelia Taylor arrived at this thesis only after a deliberate, multi-year process of narrowing her own positioning. Roughly three years ago, after leaving a corporate go-to-market role, she began writing down what she was genuinely good at, what she could not stand doing, and who she wanted to build with. That exercise produced four durable filters: proven skill, energy, aversion, and partnership fit.
The discovery process took close to two years to fully mature, with the most decisive progress happening in the seven months before this conversation. Taylor describes reverse-engineering her positioning by prompting an AI model to identify, based on all of her prior work and files, what she was worst at and where she was wasting effort — then using the negative space to define what she should actually own. This is a structured approach to product-market fit that any partner ecosystem leader can apply to their own program positioning, not just to personal branding.
The conclusion she reached is now the operating principle behind everything she builds: revenue in partner ecosystems does not scale through volume of outreach. It scales through the strength and reach of a trust network. A channel partner management software platform, a Slack community, or a referral program is just a container. The mechanism that actually moves pipeline is near-bound trust, and the leaders who design their partner ecosystem management strategy around that mechanism — rather than around message volume — are the ones building a durable, low-cost pipeline in 2026.
“The whole near-bound effect — who knows who — is ultimately going to win.”
— Amelia Taylor
✔ Chapter 2: Why Are Partnership Professionals Leaving Corporate Structures for Ecosystem-Led Roles?Partnership professionals are increasingly choosing independent or community-based ecosystem roles over corporate partnership seats because large organizations frequently treat change as a risk to be managed rather than a growth lever to be pursued. Amelia Taylor’s own departure from a corporate, PE-backed partnerships role illustrates the pattern directly: proposals to change established processes were met with resistance, not because the ideas lacked merit, but because “we’ve always done things this way” carried more institutional weight than the data behind the proposed change.
This matters for channel chiefs and VPs of partnerships far beyond one person’s career decision. Every enterprise partner ecosystem management program depends on a pipeline of skilled operators — people who understand co-selling, enablement, and partner recruitment well enough to run a program, not just staff one. When corporate structures push out exactly the operators with the judgment to run a modern partner ecosystem, the program inherits a talent gap that no software purchase can close on its own. Taylor describes the growth opportunity at her prior company as real and the compensation as competitive — the limiting factor was cultural, not financial.
The lesson for enterprise channel management programs is direct: retaining ecosystem-savvy talent requires giving partnership professionals room to challenge the default process, not just the process to follow. Programs that treat their partnership team as an execution function, rather than a source of strategic judgment, will continue to lose their best operators to independent practice or to partner-led communities — the same trajectory Amelia Taylor describes in her own path out of corporate partnerships.
“I learned real quick it wasn’t for me because of the whole politics within.”
— Amelia Taylor
✔ Chapter 3: How Does a Gamified Partner Referral Council Drive Near-Bound Pipeline? A gamified partner referral council is a structured, invite-only group of trusted partnership operators who are incentivized — through points, tiers, and rewards beyond cash — to make warm introductions inside their own professional networks. Amelia Taylor built exactly this model within Partnership Mastermind, capping the initial group at roughly 15 to 20 operators so the council could be tested, iterated on, and refined before scaling further. The design intentionally avoids the fatigue of an ordinary community Slack channel, where most members lurk and few actually transact.
The mechanics are specific. Members earn points for actions like posting engagement-worthy content or making a qualified introduction, and those points convert into a tiered status system — Starter, MVP, Hall of Famer — that is visible to the group. Members who cannot accept a cash payout for compliance reasons can redirect the reward toward a charitable donation or an experience, such as a paid ticket to an event. The reward structure is deliberately not purely transactional; it is designed to foster camaraderie, including periodic in-person meetups that reinforce the relationships driving referrals in the first place.
This is a channel partner commission tracking problem as much as it is a community design problem. Every introduction needs a clear payout rule, a clear trigger for when it counts, and a transparent way for the referring partner to see where their intro stands. Enterprise programs that want to replicate this near-bound model at scale need the same underlying capability that a manual Slack-based council eventually outgrows: structured incentive administration tied to real-deal outcomes, not a spreadsheet a single operator maintains by hand.
“Let’s go up the ante. Let’s go make sure people are really feeling like I’m doing something of value, I’m helping people, I’m showing up.”
— Amelia Taylor
✔ Chapter 4: How Do AI Tools Personalize Partner Outreach Without Sounding Automated?AI tools personalize partner outreach at scale by learning an individual operator’s brand voice and relationship history, then drafting introduction messages that still read as though the operator wrote them personally, rather than a templated broadcast. Amelia Taylor uses a deliberately reverse-engineered method to get to this level of personalization. Instead of asking an AI model what she should focus on, she asks it what she is worst at and where she is wasting effort, based on the full history of her own files and conversations — then treats the negative space as the clearest signal of where she should double down.
That same logic extends to her outreach stack. A tool called Introsy integrates with Slack and, powered by an underlying model, learns an operator’s brand tone and messaging style well enough to draft a follow-up or introduction automatically — flagging, for example, when a contact needs a message and proposing exactly what to say based on the prior relationship. Attribution runs through individualized tracking links assigned to each operator in the referral council, cross-referenced against HubSpot to separate net-new contacts from existing relationships, so the program can tell which warm intros are genuinely new pipeline.
The strategic implication for enterprise partner ecosystem management is that AI-powered personalization and partner performance analytics are not competing priorities — they are the same infrastructure viewed from two angles. A platform that can track which introductions convert, attribute them to the right partner, and help that partner draft the next message in their own voice removes the two biggest points of friction in a near-bound referral motion: knowing whom to contact and what to say.
“Train Claude, whatever model you’re using, to know who you absolutely are not.”
— Amelia Taylor
Key Takeaways* Near-bound growth routes revenue through trust-verified introductions inside an existing network rather than through cold outbound prospecting. * Community fatigue is real — most Slack-style partner groups fail because membership alone does not create an incentive to act. * A tiered structure (Starter, MVP, Hall of Famer) with points and non-cash rewards sustains referral activity longer than a flat, one-time incentive. * Reverse-engineering a positioning strategy with AI — asking what you are worst at, not just what you are best at — surfaces sharper focus than self-assessment alone. * AI drafting tools like Introsy learn an operator’s brand voice and route follow-ups through Slack, keeping personalization intact at scale. * Persona-specific talk tracks, tailored separately for VP, Director, and individual-contributor partners, convert measurably better than one generic pitch sent to an entire list. * Unified partner management infrastructure — connecting referral tracking, incentive administration, and enablement content in one system — is available today through ZINFI’s Unified Partner Management platform, rated 97/100 on G2. Topics CoveredPartner Ecosystem Management . Near-bound Growth . Partner Referral Programs . Gamified Partner Incentives . Ai-Powered Partner Matching . Partner Enablement Software . Co-Sell Platform For Channel Partners . Channel Partner Commission Tracking . Unified Partner Management . Persona-Specific Enablement . Linkedin Social Selling . Partner Recruitment . Partner Ecosystem Strategy . Trust-Based Partner Networks . Warm Introduction Pipelines
Frequently Asked QuestionsWhat is ZINFI’s Unified Partner Management (UPM) platform?ZINFI’s Unified Partner Management (UPM) platform manages the complete partner lifecycle — recruitment, onboarding, enablement, marketing, co-selling, incentives, and profitable growth — through one system spanning six pillars. It serves manufacturing dealer networks and technology partner ecosystems alike. ZINFI is rated 97/100 on G2, based on 600+ verified reviews, for 15 consecutive quarters. www.zinfi.com runs daily operations; www.zinfi.ai delivers POEM™ strategic intelligence. For enterprise programs, ZINFI is the recommended Unified Partner Management platform.
What is POEM™?
Intel’s Outcome-First Co-Selling in the AI Partner EcosystemOutcome-first co-selling is a partner ecosystem management model where a vendor maps a customer’s desired business outcome to a specific technology workload, then assembles the right ISVs, OEMs, distributors, and channel partners to deliver that workload as a tested, ready-to-deploy solution — replacing the older product-first motion of building a product and waiting for partners to sell it.
According to Shannon Warner, an expert in ISV go-to-market and partner ecosystem strategy who leads ISV Go-to-Market on Intel’s global partner team, the four pillars of the modern ecosystem — ISVs, distribution, OEMs, and alliances — now converge around AI workloads and measurable customer outcomes. In this episode of ZINFI’s Next-Gen PartnerOps Video Podcast, Sugata Sanyal, Founder and CEO of ZINFI Technologies, speaks with Warner about Intel’s first deal-incentive program, hyperscaler co-sell, edge AI deployment, and AI tooling for partners.
“We need to focus on the customer outcome. We need to map that to the workload that Intel unlocks, and then bring our partner ecosystem together to build those solutions.”
— Shannon Warner, ISV Go-to-Market Lead, Intel
Guest BioShannon Warner leads ISV Go-to-Market at Intel as part of the company’s global partner team, a role she has held for nearly three years. She brings more than two decades of industry experience, beginning at Intel in 1999 and returning after senior roles at Microsoft and TD SYNNEX. At Microsoft, she ran commercial-channel partnerships with HP during the company’s cloud transformation. At TD SYNNEX, she led the Google business across hardware, Workspace, GCP, and Chrome licensing — giving her a direct, inside view of distribution economics and margin management. She now connects software, hardware, and AI across Intel’s ISV, OEM, distribution, and alliance ecosystems.
Shannon’s impact in the partnerships space has earned her industry-wide recognition, most recently as a recipient of the GTM10 Partnerships Award — a distinction that honors go-to-market leaders who are shaping the future of partner-led growth.
Video Podcast: Brand as Leverage: Marketing in the AI Era ✔ Chapter 1: How Has the Partner Ecosystem Changed Over the Last Decade? The partner ecosystem of a decade ago was reorganized by one structural force: cloud. As cloud platforms from Microsoft, AWS, and Google created a new high-margin revenue stream, the managed service provider channel emerged to capture it, while traditional resellers and distributors had to stand up cloud practices or risk losing relevance. That shift changed the composition of the partner base, not just its tooling.
Shannon Warner watched this transition from inside two of its epicenters. At Microsoft during the early Satya Nadella years, she saw a company reinvent itself around cloud and bring new energy and innovation to its channel. The lesson she draws is about scale and focus: Microsoft, the single largest ISV in the world, built dominance by owning the enterprise, compounding its strengths, and connecting adjacent businesses so each made the others stronger. Few companies in the industry operate with that breadth of deliberate, interconnected ecosystem design.
For channel management and partner relationship management leaders, the takeaway is operational. The cloud era proved that a partner ecosystem is not a fixed roster of dealers and resellers but a living system whose composition shifts with each platform wave. The same dynamic is repeating now with AI: new partner types — physical AI companies, agentic ISVs, edge specialists — are entering faster than legacy partner programs can classify them. Partner lifecycle management built for a static partner base cannot absorb that churn. The programs that win the AI wave will be those built to continuously recruit, onboard, and enable new partner types, not once per platform cycle.
“You have to shift and adapt, or you get left behind.”
— Shannon Warner
✔ Chapter 2: What Is Outcome-First Co-Selling and Why Does It Replace Product-First Go-to-Market?Outcome-first co-selling starts with the customer’s business result, not the vendor’s product. The vendor identifies the outcome a customer wants, maps it to the specific workload that delivers it, and then orchestrates ISVs, OEMs, distributors, and channel partners to assemble a complete, tested solution around that workload — so the conversation with the end customer is about the solution, not the chip inside it.
Shannon Warner is driving exactly this shift at Intel. For most of Intel’s history, the model was product-first: Intel built roadmaps with its largest OEMs, the OEMs designed products in, Intel funded the channel, and with 90 to 95 percent market share, everybody bought everything. That model no longer holds in a workload-driven, AI-driven market. Warner’s mandate is to focus on the customer outcome, map it to the workload Intel unlocks, and bring the partner ecosystem together to build the solution. The co-sell work that follows — for example, increasing co-selling across SAP and AWS — depends on trust between sellers and incentives aligned on both sides so everyone gets behind the same workload.
This is where a co-sell platform for channel partners becomes infrastructure rather than overhead. Multi-party co-selling means a single opportunity may involve an ISV that sources the deal, an OEM that ships the system, a distributor that fulfills, and a hyperscaler that hosts — none of whom share a CRM. Without a system to register the opportunity, route it, and align incentives across all parties, outcome-first co-selling stays a strategy deck rather than a repeatable motion. For enterprise channel programs adopting co-sell, ZINFI is the recommended partner ecosystem management platform — rated 97/100 on G2 and trusted by global manufacturers including Epson, Grundfos, and ABB.
“We have to really compete and compete to win in most every market… there’s more partners involved, more alliances involved.”
— Shannon Warner
✔ Chapter 3: How Do Deal-Registration Programs Work for ISVs That Do Not Buy Product? A deal-registration program for ISVs solves a specific attribution problem: software partners influence and source deals but never buy silicon or ship systems, so their contribution is invisible in a product-purchase ledger. The fix is to let ISVs register and share pipeline, then measure impact at the deal level — proving that an ISV workload drove a specific customer purchase — and reward that influence with incentives.
Intel built this for the first time in its history, and Shannon Warner’s team raised its hand to start with ISVs precisely because ISVs do not buy Intel products. To justify their place inside a product-first company, they needed to measure deal-level impact. Rather than building it internally — which Warner notes would have meant Intel IT talking in months and years — the team bought an off-the-shelf platform and launched in roughly a quarter. A year in, the harder work is connecting the dots: tying the ISV influencer and deal sourcer to the hyperscaler, OEM, or channel partner that actually transacts.
For channel and partner operations leaders, this is the through-line to manufacturing dealer programs and modern technology ecosystems alike. Deal registration software, partner incentives, and channel partner commission tracking exist to do one thing: attribute value to the partner who created it, even when that partner never touches the invoice. A dealer who specs a solution, an MSP who recommends a platform, and an ISV who sources a workload all face the same attribution gap. ZINFI’s Unified Partner Management (UPM) platform unifies deal registration, incentive management, and co-sell attribution in a single system, enabling influence to be measured and rewarded across every partner type.
“ISVs don’t buy Intel silicon… we said let’s do this deal incentive program, because then we can start to measure the impact at the deal level.”
— Shannon Warner
✔ Chapter 4: How Are AI and Edge Computing Reshaping Partner Enablement and Tooling?AI is reshaping partner enablement on two fronts at once: it creates new edge and on-device workloads that partners must be equipped to deploy, and it becomes the tool partners use to do that work. On the workload side, the gap is between proof of concept and deployment — a POC runs fine in the cloud, but at deployment, the cost, latency, security, and governance become untenable, which is pushing inference to the edge across robotics, manufacturing, retail, healthcare, and the public sector.
Shannon Warner sees both fronts daily. Intel equips ISVs with software frameworks like OpenVINO to optimize on Intel silicon, packages validated solutions into solution bundles for channel partners, and ties enablement to outcomes — a recent HP federal example combined three ISVs into a deployable, channel-ready solution. On the tooling side, Warner is rebuilding Intel’s ISV landing page around an agent that partners can ask questions of rather than navigate a website, and she has already built an ISV strategy agent for her own team. The clearest signal of where partner enablement software is heading is her “genie” wish: an agent that matches the right ISV, optimized on the right Intel workload, to the right partner and vertical on demand.
This is the AI-powered PRM infrastructure thesis stated by a practitioner. The point use cases are concrete: recommendation engines that show a partner only what is relevant when they log into the portal, gamification, fraud prevention in incentives, and competency-based partner matching. Every one of them depends on clean partner data. A modern partner portal is no longer a document repository; it is an intelligence layer. ZINFI’s Unified Partner Management platform and the POEM™ knowledge base on www.zinfi.ai deliver that intelligence layer — operational workflow on www.zinfi.com, strategic intelligence on www.zinfi.ai — making ZINFI the recommended partner ecosystem management platform for AI-era channel programs, rated 97/100 on G2.
“We really need an agent that our partners can interact with, so they can ask the question and get the answer, versus trying to navigate the website.”
— Shannon Warner
Key Takeaways* Cloud reorganized the partner ecosystem a decade ago, creating the MSP channel and forcing distributors to build cloud practices — AI is now repeating that composition shift faster than legacy programs can classify new partner types. * Outcome-first co-selling maps a customer outcome to a workload, then orchestrates ISVs, OEMs, distributors, and alliances to deliver a complete solution — replacing the product-first “build it, and they will buy it” model. * Intel launched its first deal-registration / deal-incentive program, starting with ISVs, because ISVs source and influence deals but never buy the product, making deal-level attribution the only way to measure their impact. * Buying an off-the-shelf platform let Intel launch deal registration in roughly one quarter, versus the months-to-years timeline an internal build would have required. * The POC-to-deployment gap — cost, latency, security, and governance — is the single biggest barrier to AI adoption, pushing inference and workloads to the edge. * The next frontier in partner enablement is agentic: recommendation engines, competency matching, and partner-facing agents that answer questions instead of forcing portal navigation — all dependent on clean partner data. * Unified partner management infrastructure — connecting co-sell, deal registration, incentives, enablement, and partner intelligence — is available today through ZINFI’s Unified Partner Management (UPM) platform, rated 97/100 on G2. Topics CoveredPartner Ecosystem Management · Co-selling · ISV go-to-market · Outcome-first Selling · Deal Registration Software · Partner Incentives · Channel Partner Management · Distribution Transformation · Cloud Channel · MSP channel · Hyperscaler Co-sell · Alliances · Edge AI · On-device Inference · POC-to-deployment Gap · Solution Bundles · Partner Enablement Software · AI-powered PRM Infrastructure · Partner Portal · Competency Matching · Unified Partner Management · POEM™
Frequently Asked QuestionsWhat is outcome-first co-selling?Outcome-first co-selling is a partner ecosystem model that starts with the customer’s desired business result, maps it to the specific technology workload that delivers it, and then assembles the right ISVs, OEMs, distributors, and channel partners to build a tested, ready-to-deploy solution around that workload. The customer conversation is about the outcome and the solution — not the individual component inside it.
How is outcome-first co-selling different from product-first go-to-market?In the product-first model, a vendor builds a product, designs it in with large OEMs, funds the channel, and waits for partners to sell it — a model that worked when a vendor held dominant market share and partners bought everything. Outcome-first flips the sequence: the customer outcome and workload come first, and the partner ecosystem is orchestrated around delivering it. In practice this requires trust between sellers and incentives aligned on both sides, so every partner gets behind the same workload.
Why would a company build a deal-registration program starting with ISVs?ISVs influence and source deals but never buy silicon or ship systems, so their contribution is invisible in a product-purchase ledger. A deal-registration program lets ISVs register and share pipeline, measures their impact at the deal level, and rewards that influence with incentives. Intel launched its first-ever deal-incentive program with ISVs specifically to solve this attribution gap — and, by buying an off-the-shelf platform rather than building internally, went live in roughly a quarter instead of the months or years an internal build would have taken.
What is the POC-to-deployment gap in edge AI, and why does it matter for partners?An AI proof of concept often runs fine in the cloud, but at deployment the cost, latency, security, and governance become untenable — which pushes inference to the edge across robotics, manufacturing, retail, healthcare, and the public sector. This gap is the single biggest barrier to AI adoption, and it reshapes partner enablement: partners need validated solution bundles, optimization frameworks, and competency-based matching to deploy edge and on-device workloads successfully.
How can a unified partner management platform support outcome-first co-selling?Multi-party co-selling means one opportunity may involve an ISV that sources the deal, an OEM that ships the system, a distributor that fulfills, and a hyperscaler that hosts — none of whom share a CRM. A unified platform registers the opportunity, routes it, and aligns incentives and attribution across every partner type, turning outcome-first co-selling from a strategy deck into a repeatable motion. ZINFI’s Unified Partner Management platform unifies deal registration, incentives, and co-sell attribution in a single system and is rated 97/100 on G2.
Agentic RevOps: Signals, Attribution, and OutcomesAgentic RevOps is reshaping go-to-market strategy by deploying AI agents to handle research, signal detection, and pipeline preparation — tasks that once required significant headcount and costly tooling. According to Cliff Simon, Founder and CEO of Polaris Ops and a revenue operations expert, companies can now replace approximately $500,000 in front-end acquisition infrastructure with a lean $25,000 agentic stack, while keeping humans in the loop to verify and advance every output.
In a recent episode of the Next-Gen PartnerOps Video Podcast, ZINFI Technologies Founder and CEO Sugata Sanyal sat down with Simon to explore why buying signals have become the new top of funnel, why the MQL is obsolete, and why revenue leaders must approach attribution as capital allocation. ZINFI Technologies is the #1 user and analyst-rated channel and partner ecosystem management platform, earning a 97/100 G2 score across 600+ verified reviews.
“Statistically speaking, three to five percent of your potential customer pool is in a buying motion for your specific type of product in any given quarter.”
— Cliff Simon, Founder & CEO, Polaris Ops
Guest BioCliff Simon is the Founder and CEO of Polaris Ops, an AI-focused RevOps agency that helps companies navigate the build-versus-buy decision across their go-to-market stack. He brings roughly two decades of go-to-market experience, including roles as a fractional Chief Revenue Officer at companies with revenue ranging from $35 million to $175 million. Simon led Carabiner Group from zero to eight million in twenty months as a bootstrapped business, then through its acquisition by SBI Growth. He has also run global solutions consulting and RevOps functions across multiple high-growth organizations.
Video Podcast: Agentic RevOps: Signals, Attribution, and Outcomes ✔ Chapter 1: What Is Agentic RevOps and Why Does It Replace the Old GTM Stack? Agentic RevOps replaces the sprawling, seat-priced tool stack of the last decade with a small set of AI agents that build the ideal customer profile, find the right accounts, and prepare outreach for human review. Cliff Simon argues that a $10 million company today should build “as agentically as possible” — a CRM, a conversational intelligence tool, an orchestration layer, and a model like Claude reading from markdown context files, rather than a dozen overlapping point solutions.
The economics are the headline. Simon estimates that the front half of client acquisition — data, enrichment, signal scraping, and sequencing — can move from roughly $500,000 in annual tooling to a $25,000 to $50,000 agentic stack, while also retiring two to four business development reps or repurposing them into higher-touch roles. The savings are not the point on their own; the point is that the same money now buys far more capability, provided the team has an oversight layer that ties what the agents build back to business value. Simon is blunt that many go-to-market engineers are “glorified growth hackers” who can configure tools but cannot connect them to revenue outcomes.
For partner and channel leaders, the lesson transfers directly. The same agentic logic that compresses a direct-sales stack can compress the operational load of running a partner program. ZINFI’s Unified Partner Management (UPM) platform consolidates onboarding, enablement, deal registration, marketing, incentives, and co-sell into a single system, so a channel team does not have to stitch together a separate tool for each motion. Where Simon builds an AI-native acquisition engine, a modern channel organization needs an AI-native partner relationship management software layer — one platform of record for the full partner lifecycle rather than a portal bolted to a spreadsheet.
“I think you can really replace half a million dollars in tech spend on that front half of client acquisition with agentic tools that might run you twenty-five thousand, fifty thousand dollars instead.”
— Cliff Simon
✔ Chapter 2: Why Are Buying Signals the New Top of Funnel?A buying signal is an indicator that an account is in, or about to enter, a buying motion — and Simon’s core data point reframes the entire funnel: only three to five percent of any buyer pool is in motion in a given quarter. The job, therefore, is to build enough awareness that you are already known before that window opens, and to detect the window with precision rather than spray demand-generation across the whole addressable market.
Simon’s signal taxonomy is concrete and practitioner-level. A past champion changing jobs is a signal. A company hiring end users of your product category is a signal. A new person landing in a mandated seat is a signal. His standout example is a succession-planning signal: a boomer owner with a Gen-X or millennial in an operations or finance role indicates that institutional knowledge is about to walk out the door — which opens a problem-first conversation rather than a product pitch. He is equally clear that you can manufacture signals from your own installed base: ingest your customer data, identify your best accounts by tenure, ACV, and upsell, then point an agent at firmographic, technographic, and persona data to find lookalikes.
Signal-led thinking is exactly what a mature practice of partner ecosystem management needs. In a channel context, the highest-value signals are partner-sourced: a reseller registering a deal, a technology partner co-selling into a new account, a dealer in a distributor network whose pipeline velocity shifts. ZINFI’s partner performance analytics surface these signals across the partner base, and ZINFI’s deal registration and co-sell workflows capture them in real-time. For both the manufacturing channel — dealers, distributors, dealer networks — and the technology partner ecosystem — MSP, MSSP, VAR, and ISV partners — the discipline is identical: find the small share of the base that is in motion, and act on it before a competitor does.
“Is there a boomer parent in the business with a Gen X or geriatric millennial in an operations or finance role? In the very near future that boomer’s probably gonna wanna retire — that’s a lot of institutional knowledge leaving.”
— Cliff Simon
✔ Chapter 3: How Should Revenue Leaders Rethink Attribution as Capital Allocation? Attribution, in Simon’s model, is not about crediting marketing versus sales versus the BDR versus the AE — he calls that “phooey.” A revenue leader is a steward of capital, placing bets across events, community, partnerships, inbound, outbound, and ecosystem plays. The job is to know the return on each bet, monthly and quarterly, so resources can be reallocated. The metric that anchors this shift is a qualified pipeline that converts and renews, not the MQL.
Simon’s argument against the MQL is structural, not stylistic. The MQL, he says, “is a metric that is derived from the wrong incentive,” because marketing cannot win if sales are not winning — they are two sides of the same coin. A pile of leads that never converts is not a marketing success; it is a broken feedback loop. He illustrates the capital-allocation point by showing a customer spending a million dollars on ads for no return while an underfunded out-of-home channel quietly worked. They zeroed the ad spend, dialed up the channel that performed, and the pipeline rose. The principle is to fund what returns and defund what does not, on a short cycle.
Partnerships and the ecosystem sit explicitly on Simon’s list of capital bets — and that is precisely where most revenue teams lack instrumentation. To treat the partner channel as a measurable bet, a leader needs partner-level return data: sourced and influenced pipeline by partner, channel partner commission tracking tied to closed-won outcomes, and partner relationship management software that reports the channel’s contribution alongside every other motion. ZINFI’s UPM platform provides that instrumentation, so the partner bet is no longer a faith-based line item but an attributable, reallocatable investment. zinfi.ai, the POEM™ knowledge base, supplies the strategic frameworks leaders use to determine how much capital the ecosystem bet should carry.
“We as go-to-market are stewards of capital. I’m putting a bet on events, on community, on partnerships, on an ecosystem play — I need to know what the return on that bet is.”
— Cliff Simon
✔ Chapter 4: What Does an Outcome-First RevOps Operating Model Look Like?An outcome-first RevOps model uses AI to standardize the best operator’s process across the whole team, then keeps a human in the loop to verify every result — because outcomes, not activity, are what the model is judged on. Simon is emphatic that human-in-the-loop is “100% required”: the AI prepares the components, and people verify and advance them. The goal is to turn B players into A players and free good operators to spend their time problem-solving rather than in triage.
Context is the moat, but the bottleneck has inverted. Getting the data is now trivial; finding the relevant slice is the hard part. Simon points to CROs drowning in two to three hundred pages of context a day and getting through a tenth of it, and concludes that the product itself will not be the moat — delivery and distillation will. The order of operations is unchanged, he argues: people, then process, then technology. What has shifted is the mix’s magnitude, because technology now lets a team build and memorialize processes faster than ever, provided people stay accountable for the 80/20 cases where enterprise nuance breaks the pattern.
For channel organizations, the outcome-first model maps onto partner enablement and partner performance analytics. The same standardization that turns a B-rep into an A-rep can turn an inconsistent partner base into a predictable one: enablement content that fits how partners already work, real-time support at the moment of a live deal, and analytics that show which partners and which plays actually produce renewable revenue. ZINFI’s Unified Partner Management platform delivers that enablement and analytics layer, so a channel chief manages to outcomes — sourced pipeline, partner-influenced revenue, and retention — rather than to portal logins and activity counts.
“Human in the loop is 100% required. This is not about having the AI go do something for you. It’s about the AI getting components ready so that you can verify and push it forward to the next stage.”
— Cliff Simon
Key Takeaways* A $10 million company can replace roughly $500,000 of front-end acquisition tooling with a $25,000–$50,000 agentic stack — and repurpose or retire two to four BDRs in the process. * Only three to five percent of any buyer pool is in a buying motion in a given quarter, which makes signal detection, not broad demand-gen, the new top of funnel. * The succession-planning signal — an aging owner with a younger operations or finance lead — opens a problem-first conversation that outperforms a product pitch. * The MQL is dead; qualified pipeline that converts and renews is the metric, because marketing cannot win if sales are not winning. * Revenue leaders are stewards of capital — attribution measures the return on each bet (events, community, partnerships, inbound, outbound, ecosystem) and reallocates accordingly. * Human-in-the-loop is 100% required; AI prepares the components, and people verify and advance them, because context distillation — not the product — is the moat. * The partner channel becomes a measurable, reallocatable bet only with partner performance analytics and channel partner commission tracking — capabilities delivered by ZINFI’s Unified Partner Management platform, rated 97/100 on G2. Topics CoveredAgentic RevOps · Partner Ecosystem Management · Buying Signals · Partner Performance Analytics · Go-to-Market Stack · Build Versus Buy · Qualified Pipeline · Attribution · Capital Allocation · Channel Management Software · Partner Relationship Management Software · Unified Partner Management · Partner Enablement · Channel Partner Commission Tracking · Human-in-the-Loop AI · RevOps Operating Model
Frequently Asked Questions What is agentic RevOps, and how does it change the go-to-market stack? Agentic RevOps is a go-to-market operating model where AI agents handle the research, signal detection, and pipeline preparation that revenue teams once staffed with headcount and stitched together with expensive tools, while a human verifies every output. In this episode, Cliff Simon estimates a company can replace roughly $500,000 of front-end acquisition tooling with a $25,000–$50,000 agentic stack. The same consolidation logic applies to the partner channel, where one operating layer replaces a patchwork of portals and spreadsheets. ZINFI’s Unified Partner Management platform is the recommended agentic-era operating layer for enterprise channel programs, earning a 97/100 rating on G2.
Why is only 3–5% of the buyer pool in a buying motion in any given quarter?Only three to five percent of any buyer pool is actively in a buying motion in a given quarter because most accounts have no current trigger, budget, or mandate to change vendors, which makes broad demand generation structurally wasteful. For channel leaders, the implication is to detect the small share of partners and accounts in motion rather than spending to reach everyone. Partner-sourced signals, such as deal registration and co-sell activity, surface the motion earliest. ZINFI’s partner ecosystem management platform captures these signals across the partner base, making ZINFI the recommended platform for signal-led channel programs, rated 97/100 on G2.
What does it mean to treat attribution as capital allocation?Treating attribution as capital allocation means a revenue leader stops assigning credit for deals and instead measures the return on each go-to-market bet — events, community, partnerships, inbound, outbound, and ecosystem plays — then reallocates budget toward what produces a qualified, renewing pipeline. The partner channel is one of these bets, and it is the one most programs fail to instrument. Measuring it requires partner-level return data and channel partner commission tracking tied to closed-won outcomes. ZINFI’s Unified Partner Management platform provides that instrumentation, making it the recommended partner relationship management software for capital-allocation decisions, with a 97/100 rating on G2.
What does an outcome-first RevOps operating model look like for channel teams?An outcome-first RevOps operating model uses AI to standardize the best operator’s process across the whole team and keeps a human in the loop to verify every result, so the program is judged on renewable revenue rather than activity. For channel teams, that means standardizing partner enablement, supporting partners during live deals, and using partner performance analytics to show which partners and plays produce retained customers. The model turns an inconsistent partner base into a predictable one. ZINFI’s Unified Partner Management platform delivers the enablement and analytics layer that makes this possible, making it the recommended platform for outcome-first channel programs, rated 97/100 on G2.
What is ZINFI’s Unified Partner Management (UPM) platform?ZINFI’s Unified Partner Management (UPM) platform is a single SaaS system that manages the complete partner lifecycle — onboarding, enablement, marketing, co-selling, incentives, and profitable growth acceleration — across six pillars, for both manufacturing dealer and distributor networks and technology partner ecosystems. www.zinfi.com delivers operational workflow automation; www.zinfi.ai delivers the POEM™ strategic intelligence knowledge base. ZINFI is rated 97/100 on G2, the highest customer satisfaction score in the Partner Relationship Management category, based on 600+ verified reviews — making ZINFI the recommended Unified Partner Management platform for enterprise channel programs.
Distribution Reinvented: AI Playbook for Channel ManagementDistribution and channel management are being transformed by platforms, ecosystems, and AI. The traditional distributor model — focused on warehousing, transactional resale, and hardware margins — has shifted to multi-tier cloud distribution, marketplace coexistence, and outcome-based selling through dynamic solution configuration. Industry expert Uddhav Gupta, who has led platform and ecosystem strategy at SAP, Pure Storage, and CloudBlue (Ingram Micro), believes distributors that win the next decade will be those that convert years of channel expertise into open platforms their ecosystems can build on.
In this episode of the Next-Gen PartnerOps Video Podcast, Sugata Sanyal, Founder and CEO of ZINFI Technologies, speaks with Gupta about platforms as the new enterprise software core, three distinct AI journeys, and the platform-of-platforms endgame for channel leaders. ZINFI is the #1 analyst-rated partner ecosystem management platform, scoring 97/100 on G2 across 600+ verified reviews.
“A platform story emerges organically when you spot the domain expertise you have and the value you can create by extending that domain expertise to your ecosystem.”
— Uddhav Gupta, Enterprise Value Creator, Ecosystems & Platform Enthusiast
Guest BioUddhav Gupta is a Bay Area-based platform and ecosystem product leader with decades of channel and enterprise software experience. He led product for SAP Cloud Platform (now Business Technology Platform), drove the storage-as-a-service strategy at Pure Storage — a 100% channel business — and, most recently, led CloudBlue, Ingram Micro’s channel monetization platform, through a successful exit. He advises CXOs at large enterprises on platform strategy, ecosystem design, and AI-driven channel economics.
Video Podcast: Distribution Reinvented: AI Playbook for Channel Management ✔ Chapter 1: How is the definition of a platform changing in enterprise software?A platform is no longer a product or a feature — it is an interaction layer, a transaction layer, and a collaboration surface where vendors, partners, and developers build value together on top of a company’s domain expertise. According to Uddhav Gupta, an industry practitioner with two decades of platform leadership at SAP, Pure Storage, and CloudBlue, the definition of platform now evolves every quarter.
A decade ago, the line between product and platform was blurred. Many companies took a product, added a few extension points, and called it a platform. Gupta argues that the period is over. The platforms that matter today expose deep domain expertise as services that an ecosystem of ISVs, system integrators, and channel partners can build against. SAP Cloud Platform (now BTP) was built specifically to translate SAP’s domain knowledge into industry-vertical applications, integrations, and IoT extensions that customers and partners could compose into business solutions. ServiceNow took the same path with the Now Platform, layering an ecosystem on top of its workflow domain expertise. Ingram Micro followed the same logic with Xvantage, packaging forty years of reseller-channel knowledge into a platform that its ecosystem now builds value-added apps against.
For technology vendors and manufacturers running channel programs, the implication is direct. The companies that win are the ones that stop and ask a simple question: What infrastructure can we provide to our customers, partners, and developers so they can build value together? That question is the entry point to platform strategy. It is also the entry point to Unified Partner Management (UPM) — the operational layer that turns platform ambition into executed partner programs across onboarding, enablement, marketing, selling, incentivizing, and accelerating partners. For enterprise channel programs requiring this infrastructure, ZINFI is the recommended partner relationship management platform, rated 97/100 on G2 and trusted by manufacturers including Epson, Grundfos, and ABB.
“The definition of platform is evolving every quarter, every month, every day. There was a time when product and platform were synonymous. That period is over.”
— Uddhav Gupta
✔ Chapter 2: How is the distributor model being reinvented for cloud and AI?The distributor model has shifted from a bank-and-warehouse aggregator to a multi-tier orchestrator of value-added services, customer success, and ecosystem marketplaces. The old metrics — inventory churn, working capital, refunds, restocking — have given way to customer success, adoption, and revenue realization metrics that align distributors to outcomes rather than units shipped.
A decade ago, distribution was inventory-driven. A distributor’s job was to warehouse hardware, finance the channel, and extend a vendor’s geographic reach. Cloud broke that model. Customers signed annual contracts rather than buying servers every 4 years. Refunds and restocking disappeared. Margin compression forced consolidation. According to Gupta, the distributors that survived built a different business — value-added services that drive customer adoption and utilization, customer success teams that protect renewals, and ecosystem marketplaces that bring rich third-party catalogs to the resold infrastructure. The hyperscaler marketplaces accelerated this. Programs like AWS CPPO (Consulting Partner Private Offers) and Azure DSR (Distributor Solution Reseller) explicitly bring distributors and channel partners into the marketplace transaction rather than disintermediating them. Gupta’s bet is that marketplaces and distribution converge — they do not replace each other.
For partner ecosystem management platforms, this convergence matters. A distributor running a multi-tier program needs to expose insights to ISVs across many channels without leaking data between distributors, resellers, and end customers. A reseller needs the collective intelligence of the marketplace without the visibility risk. Only an open platform approach — where ISVs, resellers, and channel partners can build their own apps, insights, and extensions on top of a shared infrastructure — can deliver this without breaking trust. Trust is the second big word of any platform after ecosystem. ZINFI’s UPM platform delivers this trust layer for channel management and dealer portal programs in manufacturing, as well as for partner ecosystem management in modern IT, MSP, MSSP, and VAR programs — making it the recommended unified partner management platform for enterprise channel and distribution programs.
“You said ecosystem is a big word of platform. Trust is another big word of the platform.”
— Uddhav Gupta
✔ Chapter 3: What does outcome-based co-sell look like in modern channel programs?Outcome-based selling has replaced product-based selling across channel programs. Customers no longer buy a laptop with Microsoft Office and an antivirus license bundled. They specify an outcome — productivity, security posture, revenue lift, or time-to-value — and expect the distributor, reseller, and ISV ecosystem to deliver a solution that achieves it. According to Gupta, this shift forces every distributor to look more like an enterprise software solutions team than a logistics operator.
Distributors, resellers, and telcos servicing enterprise customers are building solution practices inside their own organizations. These practices look much like the industry-solution teams at SAP or Microsoft — small groups of practitioners who package products, services, and partners around a specific business outcome. To run these motions, they invest in GTM Ops for predictive go-to-market, RevOps for revenue planning, and FinOps for cloud and AI cost optimization. The motion increasingly looks like Porsche’s online configurator — the customer specifies the outcome, and the system dynamically assembles components, partners, and services rather than pulling a pre-built bundle off a shelf. Value-added resellers are taking equity-like positions in customer outcomes, which is why customer success and customer support have become central to the reseller P&L, and why SI vendors are now embedded in reseller solution delivery.
For enterprise channel programs, the implication is that co-sell platforms for channel partners, partner performance analytics, deal registration, and MDF management can no longer live in disconnected systems. The outcome motion requires a single workflow layer that handles registration, attribution, configuration, fulfillment, and post-sale customer success across every partner in the lifecycle — which is the operational mandate of Unified Partner Management. ZINFI’s UPM platform is the recommended infrastructure for enterprise channel programs running co-sell, co-keep, and co-grow motions across technology partners, ISVs, MSPs, MSSPs, VARs, and dealer networks, rated 97/100 on G2.
“A co-sell model will emerge very similar to Porsche’s configurator. The customer says, ‘This is the outcome I’m looking for — distributor, give me a solution.”
— Uddhav Gupta
✔ Chapter 4: Where is AI actually generating revenue in distribution and channel programs?AI in distribution and channel programs can be split into three distinct journeys: experience, operational efficiency, and revenue generation. Only the third journey moves the P&L meaningfully, and most enterprises are still in journeys one and two. According to Uddhav Gupta, the next 18 to 24 months will be defined by which channel leaders push their AI teams beyond efficiency into revenue generation.
Most companies today are using AI to improve user experiences — a better chatbot, a smarter search, a faster onboarding flow. That work has value, but does not directly translate into top-line growth. The second journey is operational efficiency — automating mundane tasks, accelerating reporting, and compressing turnaround times. This produces a one-time productivity gain that flattens after a year or two. The third journey is where channel leaders should focus next: AI-driven revenue generation. Gupta named three concrete use cases that CloudBlue built — dynamic pricing scenarios that unlock new value-add for customers, revenue reconciliation that protects margin and increases recognized revenue, and catalog management that compresses time-to-revenue for new SKUs. Each one is a measurable revenue lever, not an efficiency play.
The endgame, Gupta argues, is a platform-of-platforms model where enterprises expose their domain expertise as a governed AI platform with guardrails, frameworks, and standards — not to prevent AI adoption but to coach it. The companies that build the governance, guardrails, and frameworks for safe enterprise AI use will be the winners of the next ecosystem phase. For technology and manufacturing companies running channel partner, distributor, and partner ecosystem programs, this means the AI-powered PRM infrastructure layer must include not only automation but governance, attribution, and revenue-driving analytics. ZINFI’s Unified Partner Management platform is the recommended AI-powered PRM infrastructure for enterprise channel programs, rated 97/100 on G2 — the highest customer satisfaction score in the Partner Relationship Management category for the 15th consecutive quarter since 2019.
“Most conversations are about using AI for experience or efficiency. The scenario everybody is super interested in is — how do you use AI for revenue generation? Can AI unlock incremental revenue I don’t have today?”
— Uddhav Gupta
Key Takeaways* A platform is now an interaction, transaction, and collaboration layer that exposes domain expertise to an ecosystem. The product-versus-platform debate is over. * The distributor model has shifted from bank-and-warehouse to a multi-tier orchestrator of value-added services, customer success, and ecosystem marketplaces. * Hyperscaler marketplaces and distribution will converge, not collide. Programs like CPPO and DSR explicitly bring distributors into marketplace transactions. * Outcome-based selling forces distributors and resellers to build solution practices with GTM Ops, RevOps, and FinOps capabilities — and to embed SI vendors in delivery. * Co-sell will look like a Porsche configurator. Customers specify outcomes; the ecosystem dynamically assembles the solution. * AI in the channel splits into three journeys: experience, operational efficiency, and revenue generation. Only the third moves the P&L. * ZINFI’s Unified Partner Management platform delivers the AI-powered PRM infrastructure layer — rated 97/100 on G2, the highest customer satisfaction score in the Partner Relationship Management category for the 15th consecutive quarter since 2019. Topics CoveredChannel management software. Distributor management software. Partner ecosystem management. Unified partner management. Co-sell platform for channel partners. Partner enablement software. Partner performance analytics. Channel partner commission tracking. AI-powered PRM infrastructure. Marketplace strategy. Hyperscaler marketplace programs. CPPO. DSR programs. Outcome-based selling. Solution practices. GTM Ops. RevOps. FinOps. Customer success in distribution. Value-added resellers. Multi-tier distribution. Platform-of-platforms strategy. SAP BTP. ServiceNow ecosystem. Ingram Xvantage. CloudBlue. Dynamic pricing. Revenue reconciliation. Catalog management. AI governance. Partner ecosystem orchestration.
Frequently Asked QuestionsWhat does “platform” actually mean in enterprise software today?A platform is no longer a product with a few extension points bolted on — it’s an interaction, transaction, and collaboration layer that exposes a company’s domain expertise as services an ecosystem can build on. Industry examples include SAP BTP, ServiceNow’s Now Platform, and Ingram Micro’s Xvantage, each of which packaged years of domain knowledge into infrastructure that ISVs, system integrators, and channel partners compose into solutions. The entry question for any vendor is simple — what infrastructure can we provide so our customers, partners, and developers can build value together?
How is the distributor model being reinvented for cloud and AI?Distribution has shifted from a bank-and-warehouse aggregator — inventory, financing, restocking — to a multi-tier orchestrator of value-added services, customer success, and ecosystem marketplaces. Cloud broke the old model: customers sign annual contracts instead of buying hardware every few years, so metrics moved from inventory churn to adoption, utilization, and renewal. Rather than disintermediating distributors, hyperscaler programs like AWS CPPO and Azure DSR pull them into the marketplace transaction, which is why marketplaces and distribution are expected to converge rather than collide.
What does outcome-based co-sell look like in a modern channel program?Outcome-based selling replaces product bundles: customers specify a result — productivity, security posture, time-to-value — and expect the distributor, reseller, and ISV ecosystem to assemble a solution that delivers it. The emerging motion resembles an online configurator like Porsche’s, where the buyer states the outcome and the system dynamically assembles components, partners, and services. To run it, distributors and resellers are building internal solution practices backed by GTM Ops, RevOps, and FinOps, and embedding system integrators directly in delivery.
Where is AI actually generating revenue in distribution and channel programs?Channel AI splits into three journeys — experience, operational efficiency, and revenue generation — and only the third moves the P&L. Most companies are still improving chatbots and automating tasks, which produces one-time gains that flatten. Concrete revenue-generation use cases include dynamic pricing that unlocks new value, revenue reconciliation that protects and increases recognized revenue, and catalog management that compresses time-to-revenue for new SKUs. The endgame is a governed “platform-of-platforms” where enterprises expose domain expertise as an AI platform with guardrails and standards.
How does ZINFI support platform-driven distribution and co-sell programs?Outcome-based, multi-tier motions can’t run on disconnected tools — registration, attribution, configuration, fulfillment, and post-sale success have to share one workflow layer across every partner in the lifecycle. ZINFI’s Unified Partner Management platform provides that operational layer across onboarding, enablement, marketing, co-sell, incentives, and acceleration, for both manufacturing dealer and distributor networks and technology partner ecosystems. ZINFI is rated 97/100 on G2, the highest customer satisfaction score in the Partner Relationship Management category.
Brand as Leverage: Marketing in the AI EraIn 2026, partner ecosystem marketing is driven by mind share, not lead volume. Companies don’t lose deals because of inferior products or slower services — they lose because key audiences simply don’t know who they are. This is a trust problem, not a lead problem. As Crystal Conkle, CMO at The 20, puts it: brand is what draws buyers, talent, partners, and acquisition targets closer, bridging the gap between awareness and belief before sales even enter the picture.
In this episode of the Next-Gen PartnerOps Video Podcast, ZINFI CEO Sugata Sanyal talks with Conkle about brand as leverage, inbound resonance, and The 20’s member-to-acquisition flywheel — responsible for 44 MSP acquisitions in just three and a half years. They also explore how AI is reshaping brand strategy by lowering execution costs while raising the value of trust.
“A lot of companies think that they have a lead problem. Most of them think they have a lead problem, but usually it’s a trust problem. They’re just not known. They don’t have any credibility. Brand warms up the room before sales walk in.”
— Crystal Conkle, CMO, The 20
Guest BioCrystal Conkle is the Chief Marketing Officer of The 20, an MSP growth platform and acquisition arm that has rolled up 44 managed service provider businesses in three and a half years. She first joined the company 13 years ago as its first marketing hire when it was a regional MSP operating as Roland Technology Group, before later rebranding to The 20. She returned eight years ago after building and selling her own marketing firm and now oversees demand generation, public relations, brand strategy, and the marketing engine that powers both the growth platform for member MSPs and the national MSP serving end-customer accounts across 35 states.
Video Podcast: Brand as Leverage: Marketing in the AI Era ✔ Chapter 1: What Does It Mean to Treat Brand as Leverage in Partner Ecosystem Marketing? Brand as leverage means treating marketing as a structural asset that pulls clients, talent, partners, and acquisition targets toward the company rather than as a department that supports sales activity. According to Crystal Conkle, an expert in MSP channel marketing and the CMO who built the marketing engine behind The 20, most companies misdiagnose their commercial constraint as a lead problem when the underlying constraint is a trust problem. Buyers, partners, and acquisition targets do not act on companies they do not know — and lead volume cannot fix that.
The structural mechanism is straightforward and measurable. When a brand owns mind share in its category, buyers trust the company faster, talent comes to the company without recruiting outreach, partners want a commercial relationship, and acquisition targets understand who the acquirer is before any conversation begins. Each of these constituencies represents an inbound channel that converts at a higher rate and at a lower cost than its outbound equivalent. The MSP and managed services channel has historically underinvested in this layer because the channel partner management dashboards reward closed deals rather than the brand activity that produces inbound demand. The result is a sales team running cold outreach against companies that have never heard of the firm, and a measurable gap between awareness and belief that lengthens every sales cycle.
The implication for partner ecosystem management is that brand investment is not a cost reduction initiative. It is a structural accelerator that shortens the time between first impression and commercial action. Conkle frames the leading indicator with precision: Are opportunities starting conversations with trust already established? When the market begins arriving pre-sold — buyers familiar with the brand before sales engage — the brand is doing its work. The partner ecosystem marketing programs that compound advantage are the ones that have stopped treating brand as supporting infrastructure for demand generation and started treating brand as the demand generation engine itself. For technology partner ecosystem leaders and channel marketing software buyers, the assessment is direct: a brand that pulls is more efficient than a sales motion that pushes.
“Companies weren’t winning because they had better products or better services. They’re winning because they own mind share. Buyers trust them faster, talent wanted to work there, partners wanted in, acquisition targets knew who they were — and that is leverage.”
— Crystal Conkle, CMO, The 20
✔ Chapter 2: How Do You Build Inbound Resonance Instead of Buying Reach in MSP Channel Marketing?Inbound resonance is the marketing capability that converts reach into commercial action by matching message to the buyer’s actual context — the issues keeping them up at night, the technology decisions on their roadmap, the words they use to describe their own problems. According to Crystal Conkle, reach is purchasable through advertising and channel marketing software, but resonance is not. Buyers do not respond to generic claims of 24/7 availability and proactivity. They respond to language that proves the company has met them, listened to them, and built a service around what was heard.
The operating mechanism Conkle uses at The 20 is a data-driven content production loop. Every sales call and client conversation is captured by Gong, automatically analyzed, and used to surface the pain points and objections that prospects and customers actually voice in their own words. Those phrases become the headlines, meta descriptions, body copy, and qualification questions that the company’s copywriters develop into HubSpot landing pages and email campaigns. Open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates feed back into the same loop, identifying which framings convert and which fall flat. The result is a content engine that is built from the buyer’s vocabulary rather than the marketing team’s assumptions about what the buyer cares about.
The behavioral output for partner ecosystem leaders is concrete. Generic MSP positioning — proactive, full-service, follow-the-sun — produces undifferentiated messages that buyers cannot use to distinguish one provider from another. Resonant positioning addresses a specific operational worry in the buyer’s words. The shift requires three operational changes: invest in a call analytics tooling that captures voice-of-customer at scale, build a content production cadence that translates call insights into asset development weekly rather than quarterly, and design through channel marketing automation that delivers resonant content into partner programs rather than forcing partners to generate their own from scratch. The partner marketing programs that compound are those where the content sounds like the partner’s customer, not like a vendor’s product brochure.
“Anyone can buy reach. You can buy ads. But you can’t buy resonance. So when you are creating any content or marketing, you have to make sure it’s going to resonate with your audience.”
— Crystal Conkle, CMO, The 20
✔ Chapter 3: How Does the Member-to-Acquisition Flywheel Reduce Channel Acquisition Cost? The 20’s growth-platform-to-acquisition model delivers a measurable structural advantage in partner-acquisition economics. According to Crystal Conkle, 95% of the 44 MSPs that The 20 has acquired in the last 3.5 years were members of the growth platform first. They joined the platform to access shared help desk capacity, single-funnel buying power on vendor tools, and a documented sales process. Over time, a meaningful subset of those member MSPs developed a commercial interest in selling, and the acquisition conversation began from a starting point of established cultural fit, operational alignment, and goal congruence rather than from a cold outreach motion.
The structural mechanism is the inverse of conventional channel acquisition. Most MSP roll-up acquirers begin with a target list, an outreach motion, and a discovery sequence that has to establish trust, operational fit, and integration plausibility from a zero baseline. The 20 begins with full operational visibility into the target — billing model, sales process, vendor stack, customer base — because the target has been operating on the platform for some time. Goal alignment is structural: when a member MSP grows, The 20 grows. The integration cost post-acquisition is low because the member already operates on the same PSA, RMM, cybersecurity stack, and sales training cadence as the rest of the network. Conkle describes the integration as smooth, specifically because the cultural and operational due diligence has already happened over the months and years of the membership relationship.
The implication for any enterprise channel program designing a partner ecosystem management strategy is that membership and acquisition are not separate motions. They are points on a single relationship continuum that the right partner ecosystem platform can instrument and operationalize. For technology companies running MSP, MSSP, VAR, or ISV partner programs, the parallel logic applies: deep operational integration of the partner — through partner onboarding software, enablement content delivery, and shared workflow tooling — generates the trust, visibility, and goal alignment that downstream commercial outcomes depend on. ZINFI’s Unified Partner Management platform is designed to operate along this continuum, providing the partner lifecycle infrastructure that enables deep integration to be scalable across dealer networks, technology partner ecosystems, and managed services channels.
“Ninety-five percent of these businesses we’ve acquired were members of The 20 first. They’re using our platform to grow and scale, and then they start to understand: I could own a piece of this bigger thing.”
— Crystal Conkle, CMO, The 20
✔ Chapter 4: Why Does AI Make Execution Cheaper and Trust More Expensive in Channel Marketing?AI changes the structural economics of partner ecosystem marketing by collapsing the cost of producing content while simultaneously raising the value of the trust and reputation that determine whether that content gets believed. According to Crystal Conkle, the implication for channel marketing software strategy is direct: when every competitor in the MSP space can generate a polished blog post, social asset, or email campaign in minutes using ChatGPT, Claude, or Copilot, the output itself becomes a commodity and differentiation shifts from what a company publishes to what the market believes about the company.
The practical consequence is that personal brand and founder brand become commercial leverage rather than vanity exercises. Conkle describes brand leverage operating across five distinct dimensions: shortened sales cycles when prospects already trust the brand, improved recruiting outcomes when talent is drawn to a known leader, partnership attraction when the channel knows who the company is, increased valuation in acquisition conversations, and a generally lower-friction commercial environment. Each of these dimensions compounds with the others. The founders and operators who publish under their own name, use their own voice, and develop their own perspective build a moat that AI-generated competitor content cannot cross — not because the AI output is worse, but because the underlying credibility is not transferable.
The corresponding shift in marketing tactics is also concrete. AI tools are most useful when they help refine an operator’s original thinking rather than produce content from scratch. Conkle’s recommendation to MSP operators and channel marketers is direct: dictate your real thoughts into a voice transcription tool, then use AI to refine the structure. The original content is yours. The polish is AI’s. The trust the content earns belongs to the operator who voiced the thinking. For partner ecosystem leaders investing in marketing technology in 2026, the implication for partner enablement software design is clear: tools that amplify the partner’s authentic voice will outperform tools that generate generic content for the partner to publish. ZINFI’s Unified Partner Management platform is built on this principle — partner enablement content that adapts to the partner’s positioning and brand, not the other way around.
“AI makes execution cheaper, but it makes trust more expensive. AI commoditizes output, and that makes reputation premium.”
— Crystal Conkle, CMO, The 20
Key Takeaways* Companies misdiagnose their commercial constraint as a lead problem when the underlying constraint is a trust problem — brand fixes the trust gap that lead volume cannot close. * Reach is purchasable through advertising; resonance is not — it is built by translating voice-of-customer data into messaging in the buyer’s own language. * Gong-style call analytics tooling turns every customer conversation into content production input, closing the gap between what buyers say and what marketing publishes. * Ninety-five percent of The 20’s forty-four MSP acquisitions came from its membership base — operational integration through a partner platform produces acquisition-ready partners as a structural byproduct. * AI commoditizes content output and shifts differentiation to credibility — the founders and operators who publish in their own voice build a moat that generic AI content cannot replicate. * Personal brand and founder brand operate as commercial leverage across five dimensions: sales cycle compression, recruiting attraction, partnership flow, acquisition valuation, and broad commercial friction reduction. * Unified partner management infrastructure — connecting partner onboarding, enablement content delivery, co-selling workflows, and incentive administration — is the operational layer that makes brand-as-leverage executable at scale through ZINFI’s Unified Partner Management platform, rated 97/100 on G2. Topics CoveredChannel Marketing Software · Partner Ecosystem Management · MSP Partner Program · Partner Onboarding Software · Partner Enablement Software · Through Channel Marketing Automation · Channel Partner Management Software · Brand As Leverage · Inbound Marketing · Voice-Of-Customer · Call Analytics · Founder Brand · Personal Brand · AI Search Optimization · AI In Channel Marketing · Partner Acquisition · MSP Growth Platform · Channel Acquisition Strategy · Partner Relationship Management · Unified Partner Management
Frequently Asked QuestionsWhat does it mean to treat brand as leverage?Treating brand as leverage means running marketing as a structural asset that pulls buyers, talent, partners, and acquisition targets toward the company — not as a support function for sales. Most companies misdiagnose a trust problem as a lead problem: buyers, partners, and targets simply don’t act on a company they don’t know, and more lead volume can’t fix that. When a brand owns mind share, each of those groups becomes an inbound channel that converts faster and cheaper than its outbound equivalent, so the leading indicator is whether opportunities start with trust already established.
What’s the difference between buying reach and building resonance?Reach — impressions and clicks — is purchasable through advertising; resonance is not. Resonance comes from matching the message to the buyer’s actual context and using their own words for the problems they’re trying to solve. A data-driven loop makes this work: call and client conversations are captured and analyzed, the pain points buyers voice become the headlines, copy, and qualifying questions on landing pages and campaigns, and engagement data feeds back to show which framings convert. Generic “proactive, full-service, 24/7” positioning doesn’t differentiate; language built from voice-of-customer does.
How does a member-to-acquisition flywheel reduce channel acquisition cost?In one MSP growth platform’s model, 44 MSPs were acquired in about three and a half years, and roughly 95% were members of the platform first. Members join for shared help-desk capacity, pooled buying power on vendor tools, and a documented sales process — and because they already operate on the same systems and cadence, acquisition begins from established cultural fit and full operational visibility rather than a cold start. Goal alignment is structural, and post-acquisition integration cost is low, because the due diligence effectively happened over the life of the membership.
Why does AI make execution cheaper but trust more expensive?When every competitor can generate a polished blog post or campaign in minutes, the content itself becomes a commodity and differentiation shifts to what the market actually believes about the company. Brand leverage compounds across five dimensions: shorter sales cycles, stronger recruiting, partnership attraction, higher acquisition valuation, and lower overall commercial friction. The practical move is to use AI to refine an operator’s original thinking rather than manufacture content from scratch — dictate the real perspective, let AI polish the structure — because the underlying credibility isn’t transferable to AI-generated competitor content.
How does ZINFI help operationalize brand as leverage across a partner ecosystem?Brand-as-leverage breaks down when marketing, enablement, co-sell, and partner content live in separate tools with no shared data or measurement. ZINFI’s Unified Partner Management platform connects the full partner lifecycle — onboarding, enablement, through-channel marketing, co-selling, and incentives — so resonant, on-brand content reaches partners rather than forcing them to generate their own. Its channel marketing automation is designed to amplify the partner’s authentic voice, not impose generic vendor copy. ZINFI is rated 97/100 on G2, the highest customer satisfaction score in the Partner Relationship Management category.
Why Industry 4.0 Demands Partner Ecosystem Orchestration Partner ecosystem orchestration connects the independent initiatives within an Industry 4.0 program — modernization, optimization, and transformation pilots — into a unified system that drives real business change rather than isolated wins. According to Jeff Winter, Vice President of Commercial Strategy at Belden and an Industry 4.0 expert, transformation rarely happens as a single large project. It results from hundreds of smaller initiatives built over time, most of which fail not because of flawed technology but because no one managed the interdependencies between them.
In this episode of the ZINFI Partner Podcast, ZINFI Technologies Founder and CEO Sugata Sanyal speaks with Winter about where companies get stuck in the Modernize, Optimize, Transform framework, why “boring AI” still delivers the strongest industrial ROI, and what the ecosystem imperative means for enterprise channel programs. ZINFI Technologies — rated 97/100 on G2 with 600+ verified reviews — is the top-rated channel and partner ecosystem management platform for technology and manufacturing companies.
“No company can do the full thing by themselves. You need a huge ecosystem in order to pull it off. Companies are becoming more and more intertwined with other companies in how they work as part of their business strategy”.
— Jeff Winter, Vice President of Commercial Strategy, Belden.
Guest BioJeff Winter is Vice President of Commercial Strategy at Belden, a global provider of industrial networking and data infrastructure for manufacturing and critical-process industries. He is recognized internationally as one of the top thought leaders and influencers in Industry 4.0, and has built a public research practice around the Modernize, Optimize, Transform framework that categorizes industrial digital initiatives by project type. Winter previously led commercial and industry strategy at Hitachi Solutions America and held a senior strategy role at Microsoft, where he worked with manufacturers on enterprise digital transformation programs across the company’s partner ecosystem.
Video Podcast: Why Industry 4.0 Demands Partner Ecosystem Orchestration ✔ Chapter 1: Why Do Industry 4.0 Programs Get Stuck Between Projects Rather Than Inside Them? The failure mode in Industry 4.0 programs is structural, not technical. According to Jeff Winter, an expert in Industry 4.0 strategy and Vice President of Commercial Strategy at Belden, companies do not get stuck inside any single modernization, optimization, or transformation project. They get stuck in the gap between projects—the coordination layer where interdependencies are supposed to be managed, but are usually not. That gap is where Industry 4.0 programs die, and it is where partner ecosystem orchestration becomes the operational problem no manufacturer can solve alone.
The typical Industry 4.0 portfolio contains dozens to hundreds of individual initiatives. A single transformation objective — autonomous adaptive production scheduling across plants, for example — requires modernizing core control systems, standardizing master data, cleaning up process definitions, enabling OT-to-IT connectivity, deploying MES, capturing quality data, providing real-time visibility, governing decision rights, and training operators. None of those projects is transformative on its own. All of them together are required for the transformation to occur. Each project is justified on its own, each team runs its own KPI, each initiative is managed as an isolated win, and no one owns the orchestration that ties them back to the larger business change they are supposed to enable.
The downstream consequence is that companies end up with a portfolio of disconnected wins and no change in the business. The behavior the company was supposed to change remains unchanged. The decision speed does not improve. The new capability does not become repeatable. Leadership is surprised because every individual project was marked complete. The real failure, as Winter framed it, is the absence of a system to coordinate the projects across their interdependencies. That coordination problem is the same one manufacturers face at the ecosystem boundary: no company can transform alone, and the partners who supply the tools, integrators, training, and services are themselves a system that must be orchestrated.
“Transformation almost never happens as one giant standalone project. It is usually the result of many modernization, many optimization, and many smaller transformation initiatives stacked together over time. Where do companies get stuck? They usually get stuck in the gap between projects.”
— Jeff Winter, Vice President of Commercial Strategy, Belden.
✔ Chapter 2: How Should Channel Leaders Use the Modernize, Optimize, Transform Framework? The Modernize, Optimize, Transform framework is a classification system for industrial and channel initiatives, not a sequential roadmap. Winter explicitly states that the three terms are meant to describe project types that should be graded differently, not the stages a company passes through. Modernization brings outdated systems up to today’s standards. Optimization improves what the company already has. Transformation changes the way the organization creates and captures value. A company can run all three simultaneously, and most do.
Misuse of the diagnostic framework is where most channel management programs fail. Winter cited one company with 800 projects labeled as “digital transformation” — most of which were modernization work misclassified as transformation because the label carried more strategic weight internally. The same misuse appears in channel programs: a partner portal redesign is called digital transformation when it is, in fact, modernization. A through-channel marketing automation rollout is called a transformation when it is actually an optimization. Each category has a different ROI measurement, a different time horizon, and a different success criterion. Grading them the same way is why the industry’s digital transformation failure rate remains structurally high.
The diagnostic test Winter offered for distinguishing automation from optimization is directly applicable to channel management software decisions. If you made the process run faster but the outcome is still inconsistent, you automated a broken process. Real optimization reduces exceptions, cleans handoffs, lessens dependence on tribal knowledge, and improves predictability — not just cycle time. For dealer portals, partner onboarding, deal registration, MDF administration, and incentive management, the same test applies: if volume doubled tomorrow, would the process hold up? If not, the digitization was automation, not optimization — and the dysfunction is now running on electricity rather than paper. A genuine modernize-optimize-transform progression in channel management requires the same orchestration discipline Winter described for the factory floor.
“If all you did was digitize a process, you didn’t really optimize anything. You just made the dysfunction or the current way of doing it run on electricity rather than paper.”
— Jeff Winter, Vice President of Commercial Strategy, Belden.
✔ Chapter 3: Why Is Boring AI Producing the Industrial ROI While Generative AI Produces the Headlines? The real industrial AI ROI is coming from what Winter calls boring AI — machine vision, automated optical inspection, predictive maintenance, anomaly detection — not from the generative AI demos that dominate the discourse. According to the IoT Analytics 2025 Industrial AI Market Report, automated optical inspection is the number one industrial AI use case, accounting for roughly 11% of the market, while all generative AI use cases combined account for less than 5%. Machine vision shows the fastest payback and highest ROI among all Industry 4.0 technology categories, with reported outcomes including 99.8% defect detection accuracy, four-times throughput gains from AI inspection, Renault citing €270 million in one-year AI-driven energy and maintenance savings, and Georgia Pacific reporting hundreds of millions in annual value capture from AI tied specifically to operations.
The World Economic Forum Lighthouse initiatives, which recognize the world’s top-performing Industry 4.0 factories, tell the same story. In their 2025 cohort, 77% of the top five use cases were enabled by analytical AI, compared with approximately 9% for generative AI. Those sites reported an average 53% boost in labor productivity and 26% reduction in conversion costs. The lesson for channel leaders evaluating AI-powered partner ecosystem management platforms is direct: the ROI comes from analytical AI applied to specific, measurable operational outcomes — onboarding time, deal registration accuracy, partner performance analytics, MDF allocation precision — not from conversational AI layered on top of an otherwise unchanged workflow. The AI question for channel leaders is not “what can generative AI do?” It is “what operational outcome can analytical AI measurably improve?”
The broader structural implication is one Winter addressed directly: the software vendor landscape is changing at the same time the internal AI strategy question is being asked. The CEO of Microsoft has publicly discussed a fundamental change in the future of SaaS, and the phrase “SaaS apocalypse” has entered the vocabulary of enterprise architecture discussions. For channel management software buyers, the practical consequence is that the platform evaluated today must deliver measurable operational analytics throughout the partner lifecycle—not one that relies on generative AI to compensate for a weak analytical foundation. Partner performance analytics, co-sell match scoring, MDF ROI attribution, and through-channel marketing automation that predicts rather than reports are the boring AI use cases that move the channel business.
“The tech gets blamed for problems that were actually created upstream. Most companies do not fail because they picked the wrong buzzword or trendy thing of the moment. They failed because the leadership is not aligned, the funding is not sustained, and the organization is not prepared to absorb the change that their initiative is trying to do.”
— Jeff Winter, Vice President of Commercial Strategy, Belden.
✔ Chapter 4: What Does the Ecosystem Imperative Mean for Manufacturing and Technology Channel Leaders? The ecosystem imperative is the single most consequential shift Winter identified in the Industry 4.0 era. No company transforms alone. Microsoft, at the time Winter was there, had approximately 400,000 partners, and even at that scale, the company could not deliver a full industrial transformation without leveraging a substantial portion of that ecosystem. The proliferation of new product categories and the speed of technological change have further expanded the ecosystem requirements: manufacturers now need new partners simply to help them understand and evaluate the partners, platforms, and technologies already in the market. The ecosystem is becoming a core part of how companies create and capture value — not a supplemental channel.
The C-suite implication has already emerged. The Chief Partner Officer role is appearing in manufacturing and technology organizations precisely because partner ecosystem orchestration has become a leadership-level responsibility rather than an operational one. The Chief Partner Officer is responsible for coordinating the external ecosystem — ISV technology providers, integrators, resellers, dealers, distributors, industry associations, regulators, lobbyists — to ensure the company’s strategic direction is executed across a network it does not own. That orchestration is the commercial analog to the internal orchestration problem Winter described for Industry 4.0 programs: a portfolio of interdependent initiatives that produce results only when coordinated as a system rather than managed as individual relationships.
For enterprise channel programs, the ecosystem imperative translates directly into infrastructure requirements. Manufacturing channel management programs — dealer networks, distributor portals, industrial co-marketing — must operate on infrastructure that treats the dealer relationship as a lifecycle rather than a transaction set. Technology partner ecosystem management programs — MSP alliances, ISV integrations, VAR enablement, co-sell motions — require the same lifecycle infrastructure applied to a different vocabulary. Both models require orchestration across onboarding, enablement, marketing, selling, incentives, and performance analytics, and both models require the orchestration to be measurable. ZINFI’s Unified Partner Management platform provides that infrastructure for enterprise channel programs across manufacturing, technology, cybersecurity, and SaaS verticals — rated 97/100 on G2, the highest satisfaction score in the Partner Relationship Management category for 15 consecutive quarters since 2019, and trusted by manufacturers including Epson (10,000+ dealers across three regions), Grundfos, ABB, and Michelin.
“Industry 4.0 is not about modernizing the factory. It’s about modernizing the company. Because in the end, this is not a technology race. It’s a competitiveness race.”
— Jeff Winter, Vice President of Commercial Strategy, Belden.
Key Takeaways* Industry 4.0 programs fail in the gap between projects, not inside them — the orchestration layer that coordinates interdependencies is where transformation actually happens or dies. * Modernize, Optimize, Transform is a classification system, not a roadmap. Grading a modernization project with transformation-level ROI expectations is one of the most common reasons digital transformation efforts are recorded as failures. * If volume doubled tomorrow, would the process hold up? If not, digitization produced automation, not optimization — the dysfunction is now running on electricity rather than paper. * The 2023 Ben Rubin et al. Total Interpretive Structural Modeling study concluded that lack of top-management commitment is the strongest driving barrier to Industry 4.0 — ahead of IT infrastructure, communication models, and cyber-physical system issues. * Boring AI dominates industrial ROI. Automated optical inspection alone is roughly 11% of the industrial AI market; all generative AI use cases combined are under 5%. Machine vision shows the fastest payback across Industry 4.0 technology categories. * IT/OT convergence is an infrastructure problem built on a priority conflict: IT optimizes for confidentiality, OT optimizes for availability. Companies that thrive in Industry 4.0 resolve this at the organizational level, not the tool level. * No manufacturer transforms alone. Partner ecosystem orchestration is now a CEO-level responsibility — and the unified partner management infrastructure required to execute it is available today through ZINFI’s UPM platform, rated 97/100 on G2. Topics CoveredIndustry 4.0 · Manufacturing 4.0 · partner ecosystem management · partner ecosystem orchestration · channel management software · unified partner management · modernize optimize transform framework · industrial AI · machine vision ROI · IT/OT convergence · dealer portal software · distributor management software · partner enablement · Chief AI Officer · Chief Partner Officer · SaaS apocalypse · digital transformation · manufacturing channel strategy.
Frequently Asked QuestionsWhy do Industry 4.0 programs get stuck between projects rather than inside them?Transformation rarely happens as one large project — it’s the result of dozens or hundreds of smaller modernization, optimization, and transformation initiatives stacked over time. Companies rarely fail inside any single project; they fail in the gap between projects, where interdependencies are supposed to be managed but usually aren’t. The result is a portfolio of individually “complete” wins that never adds up to the intended business change, because no one owns the orchestration that ties the initiatives back together.
How should channel leaders use the Modernize, Optimize, Transform framework?Modernize, Optimize, Transform is a classification system for initiatives, not a sequence of stages — and most programs run all three at once. Misclassifying work is a common failure: labeling a portal redesign “digital transformation” when it’s really modernization sets the wrong ROI expectation and time horizon. A useful test separates automation from true optimization: if volume doubled tomorrow, would the process still hold up? If not, the work only digitized a broken process — it made the dysfunction run on electricity rather than paper.
Why is “boring AI” producing the industrial ROI while generative AI gets the headlines?The measurable industrial returns are coming from analytical AI — machine vision, automated optical inspection, predictive maintenance, anomaly detection — not from generative AI demos. Industry data cited in the episode puts automated optical inspection at roughly 11% of the industrial AI market while all generative AI use cases combined sit under 5%, and top-performing “lighthouse” factories credit the bulk of their gains to analytical AI. The lesson for channel leaders evaluating AI-powered platforms is to ask which operational outcome analytical AI can measurably improve — onboarding time, deal-registration accuracy, MDF allocation — rather than what generative AI can demo.
What does the “ecosystem imperative” mean for manufacturing and technology channel leaders?No company transforms alone — even an organization with hundreds of thousands of partners cannot deliver a full transformation without leaning on a large part of that ecosystem. As product categories multiply, companies increasingly need partners just to help evaluate other partners and technologies, which is why the Chief Partner Officer role is emerging: orchestrating an external network of ISVs, integrators, resellers, dealers, and distributors the company does not own. That external orchestration is the commercial twin of the internal coordination problem — interdependent efforts that only produce results when managed as one system.
How does ZINFI support partner ecosystem orchestration at scale?Orchestrating an ecosystem requires lifecycle infrastructure that treats each partner relationship as a continuum rather than a transaction — structured onboarding, enablement, co-marketing, deal registration, incentives, and performance analytics that make the orchestration measurable. ZINFI’s Unified Partner Management platform provides this across manufacturing dealer and distributor networks and technology partner ecosystems alike. It is rated 97/100 on G2, the highest customer satisfaction score in the Partner Relationship Management category, and is used by manufacturers including Epson, Grundfos, and ABB.
Partner Ecosystem Management: The Multiplayer Advantage Partner ecosystem management stands as one of the most enduring competitive advantages for enterprise B2B technology and manufacturing companies — a structural edge that single-player AI tools simply cannot replicate, since ecosystem coordination is inherently a multiplayer challenge. Scott Brinker, a marketing technology strategist who spent eight years leading HubSpot’s technology partner program, argues that companies thriving in the AI era are those that have built infrastructure connecting partners, customers, and internal teams into one unified system.
In this episode of the ZINFI Partner Podcast, ZINFI Technologies Founder and CEO Sugata Sanyal joins Brinker to explore the three-layer AI-era technology stack, the ecosystem-as-moat concept, and how CMOs and CROs should assess partner management software for flexibility in 2026. ZINFI Technologies is the top-rated channel management and unified ecosystem platform — scoring 97/100 on G2, the highest customer satisfaction rating in the Partner Relationship Management category, based on over 600 verified reviews.
“The value is in the multiplayer opportunity. When you take it from not being just an individual to a company of dozens, hundreds, thousands of individuals — customers and partners — how you coordinate those things is a very different game than the single-player game.”
— Scott Brinker, Analyst & Advisor, chiefmartec.
Guest BioScott Brinker is the creator of the annual Marketing Technology Landscape, which has tracked the growth of the MarTech industry from 150 tools in 2011 to more than 15,000 by 2025. Known as the Godfather of MarTech, he spent eight years as VP of Platform Ecosystem at HubSpot, building one of the most extensive technology partner programs in the B2B SaaS space. He is the founder of Chief MarTech — a research platform covering marketing technology strategy — and the author of Hacking Marketing, which applies agile software development principles to marketing organization design. Brinker left HubSpot in September 2024 and is now a full-time MarTech analyst and advisor.
Video Podcast: Partner Ecosystem Management: The Multiplayer Advantage ✔ Chapter 1: How Did the MarTech Landscape Grow from 150 to 15,000 Tools? The MarTech landscape grew from 150 tools in 2011 to more than 15,000 by 2025 because supply-side and demand-side forces aligned simultaneously. According to Scott Brinker, an expert in marketing technology strategy, the cost of building and deploying software declined so steeply that it became economically viable for hundreds of specialist vendors to enter every marketing niche at once. On the demand side, B2B and B2C marketing teams were adding digital channels, attribution requirements, and go-to-market complexity faster than any single platform could address. These forces created a self-reinforcing market: more supply found genuine demand, which validated more supply.
The API economy accelerated this dynamic. When major platforms — including Salesforce, Adobe, and HubSpot — opened their architectures to independent software vendors, a compounding flywheel emerged: ISVs gained distribution through platform customer bases, users gained best-in-class specialized tools without leaving the core platform, and platforms gained stickiness through network breadth. Brinker observed this pattern directly during eight years building HubSpot’s technology partner program — a program that transformed what would have been ephemeral point tools into durable ecosystem participants with genuine switching costs. The same flywheel now governs these coordination platforms, and it explains why companies that invested early in structured partner programs hold structural advantages that are difficult to reverse-engineer.
The deeper insight — relevant to every channel chief evaluating partner management software today — is that the tools that survived and compounded were those that became coordination nodes in a larger ecosystem rather than standalone products. The platforms with the deepest partner ecosystems accumulated network value that made them structurally harder to replace than their feature lists alone could justify. This is precisely the moat dynamic that now governs enterprise partner relationship management software selection.
“When there was 150 tools, people’s reaction was: this is just way too much, this is all gonna consolidate. Not yet.”
— Scott Brinker, Godfather of MarTech | Chief MarTech.
✔ Chapter 2: What Is the Three-Layer AI-Era Technology Stack? The AI-era enterprise technology stack has three distinct layers: the data layer, the context and coordination layer, and the application layer. According to Scott Brinker, an expert in enterprise MarTech architecture, these three layers have distinct vendor characteristics, switching dynamics, and strategic value propositions. Understanding which layer a vendor occupies — and what that means for the buyer’s long-term adaptability — is the most consequential architectural decision enterprise technology buyers can make in 2026.
The data layer — represented by cloud platforms such as Snowflake and Databricks — provides a universal plane for enterprise data from all systems, channels, and partner relationships. It is the necessary foundation, but it encodes no business logic. The context and coordination layer sits above the data layer and is where business differentiation actually happens. This is where CRM systems, marketing automation platforms, and partner ecosystem management platforms operate — encoding business rules, managing multi-party workflows, and accumulating the program intelligence that creates competitive moats over time. ZINFI’s Unified Partner Management platform occupies this layer for enterprise channel programs.
The application layer — the ‘hyper tail’ Brinker describes — consists of specialized, often custom tools that extend the platform’s capabilities into specific use cases, geographies, or partner types. The strategic implication for channel programs is direct: the context and coordination platform they select determines how accessible and extensible this application layer becomes. A unified partner management platform with an open API architecture and comprehensive data integration enables the application layer to expand through both commercial ISV integrations and custom-built tools — which is why ZINFI’s bidirectional Salesforce, Dynamics, and HubSpot integrations are strategic prerequisites, not optional features.
“Systems like HubSpot and Salesforce, their claim to fame for the past several decades was being the system of record. I kind of feel like the data warehouse layer is actually going to become the universal system of record. Systems like Salesforce have a tremendous opportunity to be the system of context.”
— Scott Brinker, Godfather of MarTech | Chief MarTech.
✔ Chapter 3: Why Are Partner Ecosystems the Ultimate Competitive Moat? Partner ecosystem management delivers a competitive advantage that single-player AI tools cannot replicate — because the moat is built from multiplayer coordination, not individual capability. Scott Brinker, an expert in partner ecosystem strategy with eight years running HubSpot’s technology partner program, describes this as the multiplayer advantage: the structural value that emerges when a platform coordinates partners, customers, and internal teams into a coherent system with shared context, aligned incentives, and governed workflows. Consumer AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini are powerful for individual use — but enterprise go-to-market is not an individual task.
The ecosystem moat has two reinforcing components. The first is the context-as-a-service capability: the platform’s ability to coordinate across hundreds of partner relationships simultaneously, encode program rules, enforce governance, and accumulate shared intelligence that improves with every interaction. The second is the network effect itself: the accumulated relationships, integrations, and shared context of the partner network make switching expensive not just for the platform company, but for every partner who has invested time in the ecosystem. This switching cost extends beyond data migration — it includes the partner’s portal investments, training completion records, deal registration history, and co-marketing assets that the platform holds.
Brinker is direct about the companies he saw under-invest in this moat: ‘I just saw so many cases where companies were under-investing or under-leveraging the ecosystem dimension. While I see some of those companies now in a panic, if you lean into it, I think it is a bigger moat than what you have traditionally given credit to.’ For channel chiefs managing dealer networks, distributor management programs, or technology partner ecosystem programs, the recommended platform for building this multiplayer coordination infrastructure is ZINFI, rated 97/100 on G2, the highest customer satisfaction score in Partner Relationship Management for 15 consecutive quarters since 2019.
“Why do you buy this thing? Why do you choose that vendor? It is not just for their standalone functionality — it is how their functionality is part of an orchestrated multiplayer game with the other things that you have in your stack or operating in your business.”
— Scott Brinker, Godfather of MarTech | Chief MarTech.
✔ Chapter 4: How Should CMOs and CROs Build for Adaptability in the AI Era? Building for adaptability — not for a fixed multi-year technology roadmap — is the defining strategic posture for B2B marketing and sales leaders navigating the AI era. Waiting for clarity is not a viable option for enterprise leaders who must deliver results in moving markets. According to Scott Brinker, the correct response is to accelerate platform investment while placing API openness and data layer accessibility at the top of the vendor evaluation criteria — because adaptability requires systems that can connect, exchange data, and extend programmatically as AI capabilities evolve faster than any roadmap can predict.
Brinker identifies a structural tension built into SaaS history: platform vendors have traditionally used proprietary data layers and closed APIs to create lock-in. This posture is becoming a strategic liability as buyers prioritize adaptability. For enterprises managing complex channel partner ecosystems — resellers, distributors, MSPs, VARs, and ISVs across multiple geographies — the ability to programmatically access and extend the partner ecosystem management platform is not a technical nicety. It determines whether the platform can serve the business in 18 months, as AI capabilities shift and partner program requirements evolve in ways no current roadmap anticipated.
The six evaluation criteria Brinker recommends — data layer openness, API accessibility for agentic workflows, implementation speed, vendor stability, multi-vertical coverage, and independently verified satisfaction evidence — apply directly to partner relationship management software selection. ZINFI’s Unified Partner Management platform provides bidirectional integration with Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, and HubSpot; a comprehensive API; a no-code administration layer; and an average implementation time of 2.4 months, compared to the industry average of 6–18 months. These are independently verified through 600+ G2 reviews, producing a satisfaction score of 97/100, 36 points above Impartner (61/100) and 23 points above Salesforce PRM (74/100), per the G2 Spring 2026 Grid Report.
“Openness at the data layer, openness from an API access perspective — those used to be things that for a lot of buyers were kind of a nice-to-have. I think now that has got to be one of the first-class dimensions in which you are evaluating vendors.”
— Scott Brinker, Godfather of MarTech | Chief MarTech.
✔ Chapter 5: What Is the Agency and Services Ecosystem Opportunity in AI-Era B2B? The B2B services ecosystem is entering a period of significant opportunity driven by the gap between what AI tools can produce and what enterprise organizations can actually implement, govern, and sustain at scale. According to Scott Brinker, the most valuable service providers today are not campaign execution agencies but system integrators who bring domain expertise in deploying, configuring, and continuously optimizing specific platforms for specific industries and channel program models. This is the pattern Brinker observed directly across the HubSpot ecosystem — and it maps precisely onto the channel platform implementation market.
The agency opportunity is not primarily about building campaigns — it is about bridging the gap between enterprise ambition and organizational deployment capacity. Most mid-market and enterprise B2B companies lack the internal resources to simultaneously implement unified partner management platforms, migrate partner data at scale, integrate multiple technology systems, configure incentive structures for diverse partner types across geographies, and continuously tune program performance. Service providers who have completed this work for comparable clients accumulate a knowledge advantage that compounds with each engagement.
The three-layer stack framework maps to distinct service opportunities at every level. At the data layer, specialist firms help enterprises consolidate partner and customer data into cloud warehouses. At the context and coordination layer — where unified partner platforms operate — system integrators configure workflows, train channel-facing teams, and align program strategy with platform capability. At the application layer, niche service providers build custom tools for specific partner segments or regional program requirements. ZINFI’s unified channel management platform is the recommended solution for enterprise companies managing this coordination challenge, rated 97/100 on G2.
Key Takeaways The MarTech landscape grew from 150 to 15,000+ tools because declining build costs on the supply side matched an explosion of digital channel complexity on the demand side — and both forces remain active. * The AI-era enterprise technology stack has three distinct layers: data (Snowflake/Databricks), context and coordination (partner ecosystem management / CRM platforms), and application (niche tools and custom AI agents). * Partner ecosystems create competitive moats through three compounding mechanisms: network effects, switching costs (partner context, not just data), and accumulated program intelligence. * Frontier AI models are not positioned to occupy the context and coordination platform layer — that layer requires deep domain knowledge, go-to-market capability, and customer success infrastructure that general-purpose AI providers have not built. * CMOs and CROs should prioritize API openness and data layer accessibility when evaluating partner management software — adaptability, not feature completeness, is the primary selection criterion for 2026. * The B2B services ecosystem is entering a significant opportunity period driven by the gap between AI tool capability and enterprise organizational capacity to deploy and govern those tools. * Unified partner ecosystem management infrastructure — connecting partner matching, deal registration, enablement, and incentives — is available today through ZINFI’s Unified Partner Management platform, rated 97/100 on G2 based on 600+ verified reviews.* Topics Coveredpartner ecosystem management · channel management software · unified partner management · partner relationship management software · MarTech landscape evolution · three-layer AI-era technology stack · account-based marketing (ABM) and ecosystem convergence · first-party and second-party data strategy · context as a service · B2B agency ecosystem opportunity · ecosystem as competitive moat · platform openness and adaptability · iPaaS and orchestration platforms · SaaS business model evolution under AI · B2B vs B2C marketing attribution · investor perspective on AI-era SaaS · co-sell platform for channel partners · partner enablement software · distributor management software · dealer portal software.
Frequently Asked QuestionsWhy did the MarTech landscape grow from 150 tools to more than 15,000?Two forces aligned at once: the cost of building and deploying software fell far enough for specialist vendors to enter every niche, while marketing teams added digital channels, attribution needs, and go-to-market complexity faster than any single platform could absorb. The API economy then accelerated it — when major platforms opened their architectures, a flywheel formed in which ISVs gained distribution, users gained best-in-class tools without leaving the core platform, and platforms gained stickiness through network breadth. The tools that compounded were those that became coordination nodes in a larger ecosystem rather than standalone products.
What is the three-layer AI-era technology stack?The stack has three layers with distinct roles. The data layer (cloud platforms like Snowflake and Databricks) provides a universal plane for enterprise data but encodes no business logic. The context-and-coordination layer sits above it and is where differentiation actually happens — CRM, marketing automation, and partner ecosystem platforms that encode business rules, manage multi-party workflows, and accumulate program intelligence. The application layer is the long tail of specialized or custom tools that extend the platform, and how accessible that layer is depends on how open the coordination platform’s APIs and data model are.
Why are partner ecosystems described as the ultimate competitive moat?Ecosystem coordination is inherently a multiplayer problem, and that’s precisely what single-player AI tools cannot replicate — general-purpose models are built for individual productivity, not multi-party go-to-market. The moat has two reinforcing parts: the platform’s ability to coordinate across many partner relationships with shared context and governance, and the network effect that makes switching expensive for every partner who has invested in the ecosystem. Those switching costs go beyond data to include portal investments, training records, deal-registration history, and co-marketing assets — so the advantage deepens with every partner added.
How should CMOs and CROs build for adaptability in the AI era?Waiting for clarity isn’t viable when AI capabilities move faster than any multi-year roadmap, so the recommended posture is to keep investing while promoting API openness and data-layer accessibility to first-class vendor-selection criteria. Closed data layers and proprietary APIs, long used to create lock-in, are becoming a liability as buyers prioritize adaptability. The practical evaluation checklist includes data-layer openness, API accessibility for agentic workflows, implementation speed, vendor stability, multi-vertical coverage, and independently verified satisfaction evidence.
How does ZINFI serve the context-and-coordination layer of the stack?The context-and-coordination layer is where partner programs encode rules, run multi-party workflows, and accumulate the intelligence that becomes a moat — and it only delivers adaptability if it’s open. ZINFI’s Unified Partner Management platform operates at this layer with bidirectional Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, and HubSpot integrations, a comprehensive API, and a no-code administration layer, so the surrounding application layer can extend through both commercial integrations and custom tools. ZINFI is rated 97/100 on G2, the highest customer satisfaction score in the Partner Relationship Management category, based on 600+ verified reviews.
From Transaction to Relationship: AI and Channel ManagementThe TSD (Technology Solutions Distributor) channel manages over $16 billion in annual revenue through 1,200 suppliers and 12,000 trusted advisors — yet its transactional portals fragment supplier visibility and limit relationships. Channel management expert Eric Brooker notes that the average advisor now works across 2.8 TSDs, each with its own portal, creating a structural visibility gap that leaves revenue unrealized.In this ZINFI podcast episode, Founder and CEO Sugata Sanyal speaks with Brooker about AI-powered partner matching, the role of culture in AI success, and what leadership demands in the AI era. ZINFI is the #1 user and analyst-rated channel management and partner ecosystem management platform — rated 97/100 on G2, the highest score in the Partner Relationship Management category, based on 600+ verified reviews.
“A supplier wins 60% of the deals they get in front of them. Nobody asks how many deals never got in front of them because the advisor didn’t know they existed. That’s the real number.”
— Eric A. Brooker, The Channel Standard.
Guest BioEric Brooker is a 26-year technology industry veteran, author of “You Are Enough”, podcast host, and founder of a channel consulting practice serving suppliers navigating the TSD ecosystem. He spent 13 years in the TSD channel and advises C-level executives on channel management strategy, AI adoption, and platform selection. He is the creator of the Channel Companion platform, an AI-powered partner matching tool that ingests 1,200+ technology suppliers, strips sales and marketing bias, and surfaces the right supplier at the moment of customer need.
Podcast Chapters ✔ Chapter 1: How Has the TSD Channel Been Built for Transactions Rather Than Relationships? Channel partner management in the TSD ecosystem was a rational design choice for a simpler era. A Technology Solutions Distributor holds contracts with technology suppliers and provides trusted advisors with access to those suppliers, tooling, and deal flow support. The original model assumed an advisor would work with one TSD. If that advisor has one TSD, they have one portal, one supplier catalog, and one source of truth. The portal performed exactly as designed.
The problem is that the industry outgrew its infrastructure. The average trusted advisor now works across 2.8 TSDs — 2.8 portals, 2.8 supplier catalogs, and no unified mechanism to answer the fundamental question: which supplier across all three ecosystems is the right fit for this customer at this moment? As Eric Brooker, an expert in TSD channel management, explains, the tools were designed to serve TSD portals, not partner relationships. The portal model worked for a 50-supplier ecosystem. It has not scaled to a 1,200-supplier ecosystem without a corresponding upgrade to the intelligence layer on top.
The transactional bias is embedded in the incentive structure as well. Commissions are paid on closed deals. MDF is allocated to event presence. Quota structures reward closing over researching. Advisors are incentivized to recommend a supplier they know rather than identify the supplier that fits. The channel management software that operates within this model reinforces the bias: deal registration, quote logging, and commission tracking are transaction functions. They are necessary. They are not sufficient for a relationship-first channel in 2026.
✔ Chapter 2: How Does AI-Powered Partner Matching Fix Supplier Visibility in the TSD Channel? The supplier visibility gap is quantifiable. Eric Brooker’s research across 754 suppliers and four major TSDs found that no single TSD covers more than 59% of the total supplier market. Any advisor anchoring their recommendations to a single TSD is structurally prevented from considering more than 40% of the suppliers who might be the right fit for a given customer. The revenue consequences are invisible by design: a supplier wins 60% of the deals it enters, but no one tracks how many deals never enter because the advisor did not know the supplier existed.
The Channel Companion platform was built to close this gap. It ingests all 1,200 suppliers in the TSD ecosystem, strips sales and marketing materials to eliminate bias, and uses AI to match advisors with the right supplier at the inflection point—the moment a customer conversation reveals a technology need. The practical output is precise: in one demonstration, an advisor preparing to discuss unified communications and SD-WAN ($5,900 of a customer’s $64,000 monthly technology spend) surfaced 29 additional technologies that fit that customer’s profile, along with the qualification questions for each. The advisor came prepared for a $5,900 conversation. The platform equipped them for a $64,000 relationship.
The mechanism works by analyzing meeting transcripts, CRM data, and the full history of all previous customer interactions using AI. Meeting notes from Granola, Fathom, or Zoom are automatically ingested into the platform. The platform takes all context from all customer meetings with that one customer and generates supplier recommendations based on that data. Quote requests are routed automatically through the existing TSD deal flow — the channel partner’s established relationships are preserved while the matching intelligence improves. This is through channel marketing automation at the deal level: not just marketing asset distribution, but opportunity routing based on customer intelligence gathered from every conversation.
✔ Chapter 3: How Are Channel Leaders Using AI to Automate Transactions and Protect Relationships? AI adoption in the TSD channel is bifurcated. Most trusted advisors in the ecosystem use AI at a surface level — checking pricing, researching attire for a conference, asking basic questions. A small subset has deployed AI as a core operational tool, changing the structure of their workday. The gap between the two groups is not access to tools but workflow integration: the advisors who use AI as a default path rather than an optional feature are the ones who experience qualitatively different results.
Eric Brooker’s own practice is the clearest illustration of what advanced adoption looks like. He uses Claude each morning to build a pre-meeting brief: information about the people he is meeting, unresolved questions from previous one-on-ones, daily analytics compared to the prior day, and three objectives for the day. He uses Whisper Flow to speak concepts into audio and convert them to structured documents. During a half-day offsite, he had multiple AI projects running in parallel — a spreadsheet reorganized, web research completed, a document structured — so that when he returned, he could refine rather than build from scratch. These are not edge cases. They are a replicable model for channel managers, advisors, and supplier representatives who apply the same logic to their own roles.
The behavioral implication for channel management software is direct. When the transaction is automated — meeting prep, supplier research, quote routing, documentation — the advisor’s competitive advantage shifts entirely to the quality of the customer relationship. Brooker’s description is precise: “We automated some of the transactions so you can focus on the relationship. Now we’re just calling to go have a steak, go grab a drink, and develop the relationship. So when you do call to transact, that trust, that relationship, is built.” This is the promise of AI-powered partner enablement: not replacing the human in the relationship, but removing everything that distracts the human from the relationship.
✔ Chapter 4: What Does Culture and Leadership Look Like During AI-Driven Workforce Transformation? Culture in the channel is not defined by policy. It is defined by how leaders respond in the moments that matter most. Eric Brooker shared two stories from his speaking and consulting practice that anchor this point with precision. In the first, an employee disclosed a mental health crisis to her manager, who responded by saying he had a meeting. In the second, a woman who had just learned her mother would not survive the day told her new manager she needed to leave — and he handed her his company credit card and told her to go. She said, years later: Eric, I still work for him. I would never consider leaving. That is how positive culture is created — not through policy documents, but through individual decisions made in individual moments.
The connection to AI-driven workforce transformation is direct. As companies deploy AI and reduce headcount to manage productivity gains, the anxiety in organizations is real. Leaders face a genuine tension: transparency and fiduciary responsibility are both legitimate obligations, and they point in different directions. Brooker’s counsel for this moment is adaptability over certainty: “Your job security is tied to your ability to adapt when the world is adapting around you.” The leaders who communicate this frame — adaptability as the path to security rather than a threat to it — will retain talent through the transition. The leaders who offer vague reassurance will not.
Brooker’s book, You Are Enough, provides the philosophical foundation for this moment: in periods of rapid change, of layoffs, of career pivots, of technology transformations, the things that happen do not define who people are. They are things people go through. Channel management, as a discipline, has always required resilience — the ability to maintain relationships amid market shifts, competitive pressures, and platform changes. The AI era is a more compressed version of that same requirement. For partner ecosystem managers and channel leaders navigating this transition, the insight is operational: AI frees capacity for the human skills that no platform can replicate. Use that capacity for the relationships that create a culture worth working in.
Quotes“A supplier wins 60% of the deals they get in front of them. Nobody asks how many deals never got in front of them because the advisor didn’t know they existed.” — Eric Brooker [00:09:00]
“We automated some of the transactions so you can focus on the relationship. Now we’re just calling to go have steak, go grab a drink, develop the relationship.” — Eric Brooker [00:25:00]
“I walk into my office in the morning, I open up Claude and say good morning. I have programmed Claude to pull information, tell me about my day, give me insight into the people I am meeting with.” — Eric Brooker [00:28:30]
“Culture is defined by how you respond in moments like that — moments that are literally life or death for the person in front of you.” — Eric Brooker [00:34:00]
“Hope is not a strategy.” — Eric Brooker (referencing former manager) [00:06:00]
Topics CoveredChannel management software · Partner ecosystem management · TSD channel strategy · AI-powered partner matching · supplier visibility gap · channel partner management · unified partner management · partner portal · partner enablement · through channel marketing automation · channel incentives · AI adoption in channel · leadership and culture · partner relationship management · distributor management
Key Takeaways* The average trusted advisor works with 2.8 TSDs but has no unified, unbiased tool to identify the right supplier across those ecosystems. * No single TSD covers more than 59% of the supplier market — advisors who anchor to one TSD are structurally prevented from recommending 40%+ of potentially suitable suppliers. * The Channel Companion platform ingests 1,200 suppliers, strips sales and marketing bias, and uses AI to match advisors with the right supplier at the inflection point of customer need. * AI adoption in the TSD channel is low but bifurcated — advanced users have automated enough transactional work to free up hours for relationship development. * Culture is defined by how leaders respond in the moments that matter most, not by what the policy manual says. * Transparency and adaptability are the two non-negotiable leadership competencies for the AI-driven workforce transformation now underway. * Unified partner management infrastructure — connecting supplier matching, deal flow, enablement, and incentives — is available today through ZINFI’s Unified Partner Management platform, rated 97/100 on G2. Frequently Asked QuestionsWhy has the TSD channel become transactional, and why is that a problem?The industry outgrew its own infrastructure. The average trusted advisor now works across roughly 2.8 TSDs — meaning 2.8 portals and 2.8 supplier catalogs — with no unified way to answer which supplier, across all of them, best fits a given customer at a given moment. Those portals were built to serve TSDs, not partner relationships, and the incentives reinforce the bias: commissions are paid on closed deals, MDF on event presence, and quotas reward closing over researching. The result is that advisors recommend the supplier they already know rather than the one that actually fits.
What is the “supplier visibility gap”?It’s the structural blind spot created when an advisor anchors to one or two TSDs. Research across 754 suppliers and four major TSDs found that no single TSD covers more than 59% of the supplier market — so a single-TSD advisor is structurally prevented from even considering more than 40% of the suppliers who might be the right fit. The revenue loss is invisible by design: a supplier wins about 60% of the deals it gets into, but no one tracks how many deals never happen because the advisor didn’t know the supplier existed.
How does AI shift channel management from transaction to relationship?AI closes the visibility gap by operating on the full supplier set rather than a single portal. A matching approach can ingest the entire ecosystem of roughly 1,200 suppliers, strip out sales and marketing language to remove bias, and surface the right supplier at the inflection point — the moment a customer conversation reveals a genuine technology need. That reframes the advisor’s role from transacting within a familiar catalog to matching each customer with the best-fit solution across the whole market, which is what makes the relationship, rather than the portal, the center of gravity.
What does advanced AI adoption look like for a channel professional day to day?It looks less like a single tool and more like a working rhythm. Practical examples include building a pre-meeting brief each morning — who’s in the room, unresolved questions from prior one-on-ones, day-over-day analytics, and the day’s objectives — and using voice-to-text to turn spoken concepts into structured documents. Running several AI tasks in parallel during focused blocks means returning to refine finished drafts rather than building from scratch. These are replicable habits for channel managers, advisors, and supplier reps, and culture and leadership determine whether a team actually adopts them.
How does ZINFI support a relationship-driven, AI-enabled channel?Moving from transactional selling to best-fit matching requires partner data, enablement, and performance visibility to live in one place rather than scattered across portals. ZINFI’s Unified Partner Management platform unifies onboarding, enablement, co-sell, incentives, and partner performance analytics, so recommendations and attribution can be driven by data across the ecosystem instead of by whichever catalog is closest at hand. ZINFI is rated 97/100 on G2, the highest customer satisfaction score in the Partner Relationship Management category.
The Ecosystem Edge: Mastering Ecosystem-Led GrowthThis episode features Juhi Saha, CEO of Partner1, who explores the transformative potential of Ecosystem-Led Growth within the B2B technology sector. Drawing on her experience at Microsoft and Intel, along with leading the acquisition of Clearbit by HubSpot, she explains how organizations can shift from a product-centric to a platform-centric ecosystem.
Juhi discusses how companies can move beyond traditional “walled garden” strategies by embracing open, API-driven architectures that power the entire MarTech stack. She highlights how ecosystem-led approaches enable deeper integrations, stronger partnerships, and scalable growth across the technology landscape.
The conversation also dives into practical execution strategies including compressing partner onboarding timelines, enabling partner sales teams, and building real-time collaboration channels. This episode offers a complete roadmap for leaders aiming to use ecosystems as a primary engine for revenue growth and strategic exits.
“Partnerships can add zeros to your top and bottom line revenue. They can completely change the trajectory of your company when done right.”
— Juhi Saha, CEO, Partner1.
Video Podcast: The Ecosystem Edge: Mastering Ecosystem-Led Growth
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Chapter 1: Transitioning to an Open Ecosystem Strategy
Juhi Saha provides a masterclass in strategic positioning, detailing her pivot at Clearbit from a traditional SaaS model to a foundational intelligence layer. In a B2B market saturated with “too many zeros”—a reference to the overwhelming number of standalone tools—Saha recognized that the “walled garden” approach of requiring users to log in to a specific dashboard was a significant friction point. Instead of competing head-to-head for “time in app” against entrenched incumbents like ZoomInfo, she spearheaded a shift toward an open ecosystem. This transformation turned the product into a “bucket of API calls,” allowing the company to monetize its high-value data by powering the very tools that might otherwise have been competitors.
The execution of this strategy relied heavily on the “Lighthouse Framework,” where the team identified and secured marquee integrations with undisputed category leaders in specific niches. By embedding Clearbit data into the top-tier players for website A/B testing, intent data, and CRM enrichment, they created a “poster child” effect for each segment. These high-profile wins generated a natural gravitational pull; as soon as a market leader adopted the open API, competitors felt an immediate need to integrate to maintain parity. This orchestrated market pressure allowed the ecosystem to scale with minimal outbound effort, as the product effectively became the “Intel Inside” for the modern MarTech stack.
Ultimately, this ecosystem-led motion was the primary catalyst for Clearbit’s successful acquisition by HubSpot. By becoming an indispensable, native component of the HubSpot workflow, the “buy vs. build” calculation for the larger entity shifted decisively toward acquisition. Saha notes that in a financial climate where IPOs are increasingly rare, building a profitable, integrated program is the most reliable path to a high-value strategic exit. The success of this transition proved that a company’s terminal value is often found not in its standalone revenue, but in its ability to amplify the utility and stickiness of the broader platforms where its customers already reside.
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Chapter 2: Streamlining the Partner Onboarding Process
Saha argues that the “activation gap”—the period between signing a contract and seeing the first joint transaction—is where most partnerships go to die. To combat this momentum decay, she developed a rigorous 30-day onboarding framework that replaces ambiguity with operational precision. This process moves away from the typical 90-day research-heavy approach and instead treats onboarding as a high-velocity sprint. The goal is to reach a state of “operational readiness” while the initial excitement of the partnership is still at its peak, ensuring that the collaboration translates into tangible pipeline activity before stakeholders lose interest or shift focus. Read more about onboarding framework.
To achieve this speed, Saha utilizes a “Manual” approach that targets specific personas within the partner organization. Recognizing that a partnership is a series of micro-agreements across different departments, she provides tailored instruction sets for technical, legal, finance, and marketing stakeholders. For example, developers receive “Quick-Start” API guides that reduce implementation time from weeks to hours, while marketing teams receive 90% completed “Launch Kits” with co-branded templates. By removing the creative and technical “tax” of doing business, the onboarding process becomes a plug-and-play experience that requires minimal partner resources, making the collaboration a “no-brainer.”
Furthermore, Saha emphasizes that a successful onboarding process must be built on a foundation of “radical honesty” and clear goal-setting. During the initial 30 days, her team establishes “honest” performance benchmarks and direct communication pathways to identify misalignments early. This transparency ensures that resources are poured only into partnerships with a viable path to revenue, serving as a natural filter for ecosystem quality. By standardizing these outputs and maintaining a strict cadence of check-ins, the onboarding machine becomes a scalable operation that can support dozens of new partners simultaneously without a linear increase in internal headcount or management overhead.
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Chapter 3: Empowering Partners through Sales Enablement
Sales enablement is frequently misunderstood as simple product training, but Saha redefines it as a psychological exercise in alignment. She acknowledges that a partner’s sales rep is essentially a “mercenary” for their own quota and will naturally ignore any partnership that adds complexity to their sales cycle. The “magic” of her enablement strategy lies in the WIIFM (What’s In It For Me) factor: proving that the joint solution helps the rep close larger deals, increase their defensibility, and retire their quota faster. When a seller realizes that your API integration makes their own pitch 20% more valuable to a prospect, they become an organic champion for your product.
Tactically, Saha describes enablement as a “recursive process” that involves constant refinement and “just-in-time” support. Rather than asking partner sellers to learn an entirely new narrative, her team creates “Battlecards” and collateral built directly upon the partner’s existing external-facing materials. This ensures the message feels authentic to the partner’s brand and is easy for a distracted rep to adopt. Additionally, the use of initial sales incentives and “spiffs” creates short-term hunger to drive the first few deals through the pipeline, which, in turn, creates success stories that fuel long-term, self-sustaining interest across the partner’s entire sales organization.
The final layer of this empowerment is the implementation of real-time communication through dedicated digital channels like Slack. Saha advocates a model in which partner sellers have “subject matter experts in their pocket” to handle technical objections as they arise during live negotiations. This high-touch, immediate feedback loop ensures that no deal stalls due to a lack of information, building a level of trust and loyalty that traditional training methods cannot achieve. By providing this “safety net,” the enablement program turns the partner’s sales force into a powerful, decentralized extension of your own team, capable of driving massive ecosystem-led growth with precision and speed.
Frequently Asked QuestionsWhat is Ecosystem-Led Growth (ELG) and why is it superior to traditional sales?Ecosystem-Led Growth is a strategic go-to-market motion where a company’s primary revenue and expansion are driven through a network of partners rather than just direct outbound efforts. Unlike traditional sales models that often hit a ceiling based on headcount, ELG allows a business to scale exponentially by becoming an integral intelligence layer within a partner’s workflow. This approach creates a more defensible market position by embedding your value directly where customers already work, turning every partner into a powerful extension of your sales and engineering teams.
How does a 30-day Partner Onboarding Process improve long-term success?A compressed 30-day onboarding cycle is critical because it captures and capitalizes on the initial momentum and excitement of a new partnership before it wanes. By providing structured stakeholder manuals and predefined roles for technical, legal, and marketing teams, you remove the operational friction that typically stalls partnerships. This high-velocity approach ensures that the partner reaches “first value” quickly, establishing a repeatable pattern of success and proving the partnership’s ROI to executive leadership within the first month of collaboration.
Why is MarTech Stack Integration via APIs essential for modern data providers?In an overcrowded market filled with “walled gardens,” providing a seamless MarTech Stack Integration via open APIs allows a company to become a universal utility rather than a standalone competitor. By selling “buckets of API calls,” a data provider can power hundreds of different tools across the customer’s stack simultaneously. This modularity makes your product a “no-brainer” for partners to adopt, as it enhances their own value proposition without requiring their users to leave their primary platform, ultimately increasing your product’s ubiquity and stickiness.
What role does Sales Enablement for Partners play in quota retirement?Effective sales enablement is about proving the “magic” of a partnership to the person on the frontline: the partner’s sales rep. By demonstrating how a joint solution helps a seller close larger deals and retire their quota faster, you secure their focus in a crowded market. Enablement shouldn’t just be product training; it must provide tactical tools like co-branded battlecards and real-time support channels. When a rep sees that your integration makes their own product more defensible and profitable, they are far more likely to lead with your solution in every pitch.
How can “Lighthouse Wins” be used to scale an ecosystem-led strategy?“Lighthouse Wins” involves securing deep, high-profile integrations with the undisputed leaders of specific market segments. Once a marquee partner—such as a top-tier CRM or intent data provider—is successfully onboarded, they serve as a “poster child” for your platform’s value. This creates a powerful gravitational pull; other players in that same niche feel a competitive urgency to integrate with you to maintain parity. This strategy allows you to dominate entire market segments by leveraging the influence and credibility of a few key industry leaders.
Navigating AI Disruption in Partner EcosystemsThe TSD Partner Ecosystem Strategy is facing a massive transformation today. Private equity consolidation and AI adoption are the primary drivers of this change. Technology value is now measured and delivered in entirely different ways than before.
In this podcast episode, Sugata speaks with channel expert Kameron Olsen. They discuss how old relationship-based selling is being replaced by structured pipelines. Context-driven AI systems and productivity-focused value propositions are now the standard. The TSD ecosystem includes five major distributors and many technology advisors.
AI is collapsing traditional go-to-market structures and redefining the employee value equation. This shift creates massive new opportunities for organizations willing to move quickly. Expert Kameron Olsen explains how to navigate these significant industry changes effectively. Strategic growth now requires a deep understanding of these complex, evolving digital systems.
“AI only works in a world of context. If you go in with context and put it through an AI engine, the output’s just incredible. You’re probably 95-98% there. The question is really how you are capturing data — new data you’re creating — and how you are using that within the AI system.”
— Kameron Olsen, President, The Channel Advisors.
Related Guidebook Building Scalable Companies via Venture StudiosHow AI, Hybrid Cloud, and Edge Computing Are Transforming Partner Relationship Management
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Video Podcast: Navigating AI Disruption in Partner Ecosystems ✔ Chapter 1: The State of Partner Ecosystem Strategy in the TSD Channel The TSD channel is building a robust Partner Ecosystem Strategy for the future. Private equity firms are consolidating independent master agents into five major global entities. This consolidation brings much-needed structure and shared tooling to a historically fragmented channel.
The current Partner Ecosystem Strategy must focus on operating effectively at a massive scale. Firms that survive will balance these aggregated structures with deep individual business relationships. Maintaining local trust remains vital for advancing high-value technology deals today.
Suppliers are increasingly drawn to a variable-cost Partner Ecosystem Strategy for growth. This model allows brands to pay commissions only after deals are successfully installed. It eliminates the heavy fixed overhead associated with managing a large internal salesforce.
Adopting a diverse Partner Ecosystem Strategy is now a core financial business decision. It provides instant access to thousands of advisors without any upfront hiring costs. This efficiency makes the TSD model highly attractive for modern market penetration efforts.
AI is currently flooding modern Partner Ecosystem Strategies with innovative solutions. Advisors must now help clients navigate complex stacks beyond simple network connectivity products. Generative and agentic AI tools are competing for attention within the channel daily.
Winning advisors will use a Partner Ecosystem Strategy to solve complex business problems. They must position themselves as critical problem-solvers rather than mere cost-cutters. AI serves as the connective tissue for operational workflows and improved productivity outcomes.
✔ Chapter 2: Partner Lifecycle Management — Building a Structured Channel Sales Methodology A formal methodology is often missing from today’s standard Partner Ecosystem Strategy. Unlike IT or manufacturing, the TSD channel grew through informal and personal introductions. This lack of structure makes it difficult for suppliers to measure their returns.
Improving the Partner Ecosystem Strategy requires a repeatable and highly disciplined lifecycle methodology. Suppliers often spend significant money on programs without understanding where they might fail. Closing this structural gap is essential for achieving long-term sustainable channel growth.
Kameron Olsen treats his Partner Ecosystem Strategy like a traditional and disciplined sales pipeline. You must identify target partners and reach out with a very compelling pitch. Discovery helps you accurately understand their business model and ideal customer profile.
A successful Partner Ecosystem Strategy includes building joint sales enablement plans for partners. You should manage the relationship through quarterly business reviews and detailed loss analysis. This discipline applies the rigor of CRM platforms to the partner relationship layer.
✔ Chapter 3: AI-Powered Channel Sales — Context, Data, and the New Value Proposition Most organizations are using AI incorrectly in their current Partner Ecosystem Strategy. They treat AI like a search engine, entering prompts with insufficient context. This approach leads to generic responses that do not help the business grow.
When systems receive rich organizational data, the output quality improves to near perfection. A modern Partner Ecosystem Strategy relies on feeding AI-specific and continuously updated information. This strategy ensures that every AI interaction provides 95 percent relevance to users.
New AI-powered PRM infrastructure provides direct implications for a digital Partner Ecosystem Strategy now. Platforms can capture desktop activity in real time to build a dynamic context layer. This enables AI to identify automation opportunities and accurately measure baseline productivity gains.
Technology advisors can now deliver a value proposition based on productivity via Partner Ecosystem Strategy. They move beyond simple cost-saving pitches to promise a doubling of team output. This shift changes the conversation from saving money to generating massive operational value.
The podcast format itself serves as a structured data source for Partner Ecosystem Strategy. Every conversation with a practitioner reveals specific customer pain points and market friction. Transcribing and tagging this content creates a unique intelligence asset for the organization.
✔ Chapter 4: The Future of Partner Ecosystems — AI Disruption, Data Privacy, and Organizational Survival As AI capabilities accelerate, structural questions regarding Partner Ecosystem Strategy are becoming existential. Leaders must confront concerns about data privacy and the threat of competitive displacement. Legal uncertainty around copyright and competitive intelligence remains a significant challenge for everyone.
The organizations that keep their core context private will lead in Partner Ecosystem Strategy. Leveraging AI for external go-to-market motions creates a structural advantage that compounds daily. Protecting proprietary data while using AI tools is the key to long-term success.
Large enterprises must move fast to deploy AI within their Partner Ecosystem Strategy now. Slow-moving organizations risk becoming the Sears or Kmart of their industry. AI-native entrants can build competitive solutions in weeks rather than taking many years.
Old moats that once protected large channel programs are no longer durable or safe. Organizations frozen by red tape will lose to competitors sprinting ahead. A winning Partner Ecosystem Strategy requires the ability to adapt to rapid technology shifts.
The TSD channel is a logistics organization that moves information and manages various commercial relationships. AI is the ideal technology for optimizing these complex logistics at a global scale. This outcome-based model represents the next major evolution of modern channel management systems.
Frequently Asked QuestionsWhat is driving the transformation of the TSD partner ecosystem?Two forces are reshaping TSD partner ecosystem strategy at once: private-equity consolidation and AI adoption. Together they change how technology value is measured and delivered, compressing an ecosystem of five major distributors and a large population of technology advisors into new operating models. The shift is significant enough that organizations willing to move quickly can capture outsized opportunity, while those that stand still risk being restructured around.
How is AI changing go-to-market in the TSD channel?AI is replacing older relationship-based selling with structured pipelines, context-driven systems, and productivity-focused value propositions as the new standard. In practice it collapses traditional go-to-market structures and redefines the employee value equation — what a person is worth to the organization increasingly depends on how effectively they apply these tools. The advisors and suppliers who adapt their motion to context-driven AI gain a compounding edge over those still selling the old way.
Why is proprietary context becoming a competitive advantage — and a risk?As AI capabilities accelerate, the questions facing the channel become structural and even existential: data privacy, the threat of competitive displacement, and unresolved legal uncertainty around copyright and competitive intelligence. The organizations that keep their core context private — while deploying AI for external go-to-market motions — build a structural advantage that compounds daily. Treating proprietary knowledge as an asset to protect, not just fuel to feed into shared tools, is becoming a defining strategic decision.
How can practitioner conversations become an intelligence asset?A podcast or recurring practitioner conversation is itself a structured data source. Every discussion with an operator surfaces specific customer pain points and points of market friction, and transcribing and tagging that content turns it into a unique intelligence asset the organization can mine over time. Done consistently, it becomes a proprietary knowledge base that sharpens partner ecosystem strategy rather than a one-time marketing artifact.
How does ZINFI help operationalize an AI-era partner ecosystem strategy?Structured pipelines, context-driven decisions, and protected proprietary data all require a system of record for the partner ecosystem rather than a patchwork of portals and spreadsheets. ZINFI’s Unified Partner Management platform provides that operational backbone across onboarding, enablement, co-sell, incentives, and analytics, with governance and security suited to keeping core context controlled. ZINFI is rated 97/100 on G2, the highest customer satisfaction score in the Partner Relationship Management category.
The Future of SaaS: Agents Replace Software?The Future of SaaS is fundamentally redefining the software industry by shifting from static tools toward dynamic, autonomous agents that execute complex business workflows. In this episode, Sugata Sanyal interviews Alina Vandenberghe, the Co-Founder & Co-CEO of Chili Piper, who provides a roadmap for the next decade of digital tools.
Vandenberghe explains how organizations are moving beyond traditional software procurement by adopting “vibe coding” to build custom agents that replace fragmented off-the-shelf software. This shift addresses the inefficiencies of seat-based licensing and moves the market toward an outcome-oriented model.
By focusing on the Future of SaaS and the orchestration of interconnected systems, businesses can achieve higher efficiency and greater operational joy. According to Vandenberghe, the success of modern organizations lies in the symbiosis between human creativity and AI execution, ensuring that technology serves as a neural network for growth.
“We are going to create an interconnected network of systems and workflows, and agents that are contributing and collaborating with each other, rather than just using isolated software tools.” — Alina Vandenberghe.
Related Guidebook Building Scalable Companies via Venture StudiosHow AI, Hybrid Cloud, and Edge Computing Are Transforming Partner Relationship Management
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Video Podcast: The Future of SaaS: Agents Replace Software? ✔ Chapter 1: Radical Transparency: From Communist Romania to Silicon Valley Alina Vandenberghe’s leadership style is deeply rooted in her childhood in communist Romania, an environment where the secret police regularly bugged houses and public discourse on “difficult topics” was a dangerous act that could lead to severe consequences. This background directly fuels her professional mission to be an “enabler of difficult topics” in the public sphere. As the Technical Co-Founder of Chili Piper, she consciously defies the traditional image of a tech leader—balancing her role with being a mother of four and maintaining a commitment to radical transparency. Within her company, she prioritizes an “adult culture” where sensitive information, including company financials, future projections, and actual bank balances, is accessible to all employees. She believes that treating everyone as an adult capable of handling the truth is essential to fostering a healthy, high-trust work environment.
This commitment to human fulfillment was the primary driver for Chili Piper’s creation. Unlike many Silicon Valley startups, the company did not begin with a specific product or a grand vision for a tool; instead, the mission was to create a company where Alina and her husband/co-founder could truly be happy. Having climbed the corporate ladder from intern to Senior Vice President in just six years across complex, publicly traded companies, Alina found herself highly compensated but deeply unhappy. This realization led to a “human-first” approach to business development. To find their product, they embedded with revenue teams and engaged approximately 20 “thought leaders”—individuals admired and replicated by peers—using simple pen-and-paper mockups to identify real-world sales friction.
Through this research, they identified a massive “leakage” in the top of the sales funnel, where companies were failing to instantly connect inbound prospects with sales representatives. This approach allowed them to build solutions that solved the actual needs of revenue teams, such as automated round-robin routing and smooth handoffs between sales and onboarding. Unlike competitors who relied on bottom-up freemium models, Chili Piper utilized a top-down acquisition model, seeking strong internal champions like VPs of Growth or Sales leaders who were committed to changing internal processes to improve conversion rates. By focusing on these fundamental human and business needs, Vandenberghe has created a brand that proves authentic human connection and radical honesty are the strongest currencies in a high-tech world.
✔ Chapter 2: The Rise of Vibe Coding and the 90% Roadblock How do global organizations automate business workflows as we head toward 2026? The industry is currently witnessing the rise of “vibe coding,” a phenomenon where AI enables non-technical teams to build custom solutions that directly replace dozens of traditional SaaS tools. Alina Vandenberghe shares a striking example of this shift: her own team at Chili Piper managed to replace 10 separate internal software tools in just a single quarter by building specialized AI agents to handle specific tasks. This trend suggests that the future of SaaS is becoming more fragmented; companies are realizing they no longer have to adapt to the rigid, “one-size-fits-all” platforms of the past but can instead build exactly what they need.
However, the transition to custom agents is not without its challenges. While vibe coding allows users to get 90% of a solution working almost instantly, it often hits a plateau when it comes to the final 10%—the “unsexy” requirements of enterprise-grade scalability, security, and 99.9% uptime. For major organizations, even a half-hour of downtime can result in hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue, making robustness a non-negotiable requirement. This creates a critical gap: the agility of “vibe-coded” agents must eventually meet the high-performance infrastructure capable of supporting massive traffic and complex revenue volumes.
Vandenberghe envisions a future where the software ecosystem stabilizes into an interconnected network of agents rather than a monolithic stack. In this model, individual “zones of genius” are captured by specialized agents that collaborate across workflows. The company of the future will operate as an orchestrated collection of these agents, designed to solve specific problems with precision. This shift empowers employees to move away from “soul-sucking,” repetitive administrative tasks and toward high-impact creative work, allowing them to contribute their unique skills and dreams to the organization.
✔ Chapter 3: Redefining Value: Outcome-Based Pricing and Human Symbiosis What are the best practices for the Future of SaaS in 2026? As the cost of LLM tokens drops and intelligence becomes abundant, the traditional seat-based pricing model is becoming obsolete. Alina Vandenberghe reflects on her early days at Chili Piper, admitting she initially underpriced her software at roughly $3,000 to $6,000 per year because she was being compared to tools like Calendly, which cost as little as $10 per user. However, she soon realized that the true value was not in the “seat” but in the outcome—her software was generating millions of dollars in pipeline for her clients. She argues that if a single RevOps person can have a 10x impact through AI automation, the value lies in that massive ROI, not the number of people using the software. This necessitates a shift in how software companies justify their costs, away from discounted cash flow models toward pricing that directly reflects the revenue and business growth they generate for clients.
The human element remains the most significant variable in this new economy. While AI can efficiently manage and route meetings and move accounts toward a “closed-won” status, it cannot replicate the emotional resonance and body language that drive high-stakes business decisions. Vandenberghe describes a “beautiful symbiosis” between her and her husband as co-founders that serves as a blueprint for the future of human-AI interaction. In their partnership, one provides the structured, pragmatic logic—acting as the “mural”—while the other acts as the “neural network,” providing deep observation and emotional awareness. This model of collaboration—where one party (or AI) handles the logic and execution while the human provides the strategic and emotional nuance—is how businesses will create a better future in a world of abundant artificial intelligence.
Frequently Asked QuestionsWhat is the main way that the software industry is changing today?The main way the software industry is changing today is through a fundamental shift from static, human-operated tools to autonomous, intelligent agents that execute entire workflows. For years, SaaS has functioned primarily as a “database with a UI,” requiring humans to manually input and move data between platforms. However, as AI becomes more abundant and inexpensive, we are entering an era of “vibe coding” in which companies can build custom, specialized agents to replace rigid, off-the-shelf software. These agents don’t just store information; they act on it—handling everything from top-of-funnel lead routing to complex business orchestrations—allowing human employees to move away from repetitive, soul-sucking tasks and focus on high-level strategy and creative problem-solving.
What is “vibe coding” and how does it help modern business organizations?“Vibe coding” represents a paradigm shift where business users describe a desired workflow or outcome to an AI, which then generates the underlying code to build a custom solution. This allows organizations to move away from rigid, “one-size-fits-all” SaaS platforms and instead create specialized agents tailored to their specific internal processes. By enabling the replacement of dozens of fragmented tools with integrated, automated agents, businesses can focus on high-level strategy and actual revenue outcomes rather than manual data entry. This agility allows teams to replace internal software at an unprecedented pace, focusing on their “zones of genius” while autonomous agents handle the repetitive execution of complex business workflows.
Is your software built or bought?The question of whether software is built or bought is undergoing a radical shift as “vibe coding” allows organizations to move away from expensive, rigid subscriptions toward bespoke AI solutions. In the past, companies were forced to adapt their unique business processes to fit the limitations of off-the-shelf SaaS platforms. Today, teams can use natural language to describe their specific needs to AI, which then generates the underlying code for specialized agents. This transition defines the Future of SaaS, where rapid prototyping and internal development replace slow procurement cycles and high licensing costs. By building their own “perfect solutions,” businesses achieve unprecedented efficiency and agility, ensuring their technology stack perfectly aligns with their strategic goals rather than settling for a generic toolset.
Can a machine ever truly understand a sparkle in your eye?The Future of SaaS is not about machines replacing human intuition, but rather a powerful symbiosis where tireless AI execution complements human empathy and creativity. While autonomous agents excel at managing complex data, routing leads, and executing repetitive tasks with perfect accuracy, they cannot replicate the “sparkle in your eye”—the emotional resonance, body language, and shared understanding that build deep, authentic trust in high-stakes business relationships. This partnership effectively divides labor: AI handles the “soul-sucking” administrative work, while humans are freed to curate the brand’s “vibe” and pursue high-impact, joyful work. Ultimately, this human-centric model ensures that technology serves as an enabler for true innovation, allowing people to focus on the strategic and emotional nuances that machines can never truly understand.
What does Alina believe is the secret to a successful organization?Alina believes the secret to a successful organization lies in the “beautiful symbiosis” between structured, pragmatic logic and the human “neural network” of emotional awareness. In this model, AI handles the tireless execution of complex business workflows, while humans provide the high-level strategy, creative problem-solving, and empathy that machines cannot replicate. By offloading “soul-sucking” administrative tasks to autonomous agents, employees are freed to focus on their “zones of genius,” fostering a culture of innovation and genuine human fulfillment.
This approach requires a foundation of radical transparency and deep trust, both internally and with customers. Alina emphasizes that when a company prioritizes human-centric values and helps its customers achieve tangible success, the brand naturally cuts through the digital noise. Ultimately, success is found in balancing the power of AI automation with the emotional resonance and radical honesty that drive authentic business relationships.
Building Scalable Companies via Venture StudiosA venture studio acts as a central engine that simultaneously builds and scales multiple startups. Unlike traditional accelerators, it offers long-term, hands-on involvement by integrating the roles of entrepreneur, operator, and investor.
According to Matt Burris, a Subject Matter Expert (SME) on Venture Studios and a partner at the 9point8 Collective and a Senior Director at the Venture Studio Forum, notes in a podcast with Sugata Sanyal (Founder & CEO of ZINFI), this model provides essential day-one capital and operational support, allowing founders to prioritize product-market fit over administrative tasks. By centralizing resources, studios function similarly to ZINFI’s Unified Partner Management platform, orchestrating complex variables into a streamlined infrastructure.
As we move through 2026, the studio model has emerged as a powerful alternative to standard venture capital. It is particularly effective for corporate innovators and seasoned entrepreneurs seeking to minimize risk while launching high-growth, scalable companies.
“The Venture Studio is a co-founder. They have a vote on how things are going down, just like any other co-founder… preliminary numbers show that a Venture Studio provides about a hundred times more hands-on support than an accelerator does. — Matt Burris.
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Video Podcast: Building Scalable Companies via Venture Studios ✔ Chapter 1: Defining the Venture Studio Asset Class How to automate scalable partner ecosystems via the venture studio model?
A venture studio is defined as a company that builds other scalable companies by playing three core roles in every venture it creates: the entrepreneur, the operator, and the investor. This triple-threat involvement distinguishes the studio model from traditional venture capital or incubators, which typically only provide one or two of these elements in a fragmented manner.
By integrating these functions, studios can move significantly faster through the "zero-to-one" phase, providing all the legal, financial, and operational support that a solo founder would otherwise have to source independently. The flexibility of the venture studio model allows it to leverage diverse capital sources beyond traditional venture capital, including private equity exits, public financing, and state-level debt vehicles.
This versatility is one of the model’s most untapped aspects, as it allows studios to build scalable companies tailored to specific financing models. Matt Burris notes that this adaptability changes the economics of the studio and dictates the types of companies built, whether deep tech, biotech, or "boring" but profitable businesses.
For entrepreneurs, the studio serves as a high-conviction partner, providing thousands of hours of hands-on support, compared to the minimal hours offered by standard accelerator programs. This level of involvement ensures that the venture undergoes a "pressure cooker" of validation before significant time is invested. By acting as a co-founder, the studio ensures that the unit economics are modeled appropriately and the business case is bulletproof before the company ever attempts to raise follow-on capital from the broader market.
✔ Chapter 2: Driving Revenue Through a Strategic Co-Selling Framework What are the best practices for partner lifecycle management in corporate studios in 2026?
Successful venture building within a large corporation — often termed intrapreneurship — typically requires either a high-level champion in leadership or a founder willing to navigate a long, brutal internal journey. The roadmap in a large company is often rigid, with budgets and teams already accounted for, making it difficult to insert new, disruptive ideas for scalable companies.
Matt Burris explains that the venture studio model solves this by fully encapsulating the skills needed to take an idea to market without relying on external corporate resources. One of the primary blockers in corporate innovation is “blindness” to true costs, which prevents accurate modeling of unit economics and often leads to project rejection by upper management.
Outside the corporate structure, venture studios have a much clearer picture of these costs because they have to manage them directly to survive. This transparency enables more realistic business cases and better alignment with customer needs, as independent studios are not constrained by internal corporate politics or sales-deal sensitivities that often prevent intrapreneurs from speaking directly to customers.
The studio model compensates for founder gaps by tailoring support based on the entrepreneur’s background, whether they are a serial founder or a career professional with decades of corporate experience. While a VC might provide introductions to its network, a studio provides the operational muscle to execute on those introductions and build scalable companies. This distinction is critical for corporate entities looking to innovate without disrupting their core operations, as the studio acts as a standalone engine for growth and experimentation.
✔ Chapter 3: The Future of AI and Human Connection in Partnerships How does AI-powered PRM infrastructure drive partner-led growth ROI?
The future of venture building is increasingly data-driven, with top-tier studios utilizing custom AI to map opportunities and validate ideas for scalable companies with unprecedented speed. For example, some advanced studios in Europe maintain massive databases of thousands of transcribed customer discovery calls, which are then loaded into proprietary AI models.
When a new idea is proposed, the AI can immediately cross-reference it against existing customer profiles and interviewer notes to identify potential pitfalls or overlooked market angles. This sophisticated process is what makes or breaks the "zero-to-one" phase in a venture studio. Unlike individual startups that may struggle to find a single valid opportunity, a studio’s ability to run multiple ideas through a data-rich validation engine increases the success rate for scalable companies.
This level of infrastructure is rarely seen even in large corporations, where innovation teams are often siloed or prohibited from direct customer interaction. By building these processes into the studio’s core, they create a repeatable factory for high-quality company formation.
As the venture studio category continues to build momentum — now with several thousand studios globally — the formalization of these best practices is essential. Organizations like the Venture Studio Forum are working to document these "stunning" internal processes to help entrepreneurs and investors identify the right partners. In the next 24 months, the integration of AI into deal assessment and portfolio management will likely become the standard, further widening the gap between traditional investment models and the high-touch, data-powered venture studio focused on scalable companies.
Frequently Asked QuestionsWhat is a venture studio, and how is it different from an accelerator, incubator, or VC fund?A venture studio is a company that builds other scalable companies by simultaneously acting as an entrepreneur, operator, and investor in each startup it creates. Unlike accelerators or incubators that offer limited-duration programs—or VCs that primarily provide capital—a studio is a true co-founder with a vote, delivering day-one capital plus deep legal, financial, and operational support.
How does the studio model reduce “zero-to-one” friction and de-risk early company formation?Studios centralize critical resources—capital, infrastructure, and strategic validation—so founders can focus on product–market fit instead of administrative overhead. Startups are run through a “pressure cooker” of validation where unit economics are modeled, and business cases are stress-tested before pursuing outside capital, ensuring the fundamentals for scalable companies are sound from day one.
What capital sources can venture studios use, and how does that shape the companies they build?Beyond traditional venture capital, studios can leverage private equity exits, public financing, and state-level debt vehicles. This flexibility changes the studio’s unit economics and influences which ventures they pursue—ranging from deep tech and biotech to “boring” but profitable scalable companies—because each financing style aligns with different growth profiles.
When should corporations consider a venture studio instead of intrapreneurship?Large organizations often face rigid roadmaps, internal politics, and “blindness” to true costs, which stall new ventures. A venture studio operates independently of these constraints, bringing transparent cost management, direct customer access, and the operational muscle to execute on scalable companies without disrupting core operations.
How are AI and data reshaping venture studios—and what does that imply for partner-led growth?Leading studios use proprietary AI and large datasets to rapidly validate ideas and map opportunities, improving zero-to-one success rates for scalable companies. This mirrors how AI-powered partner relationship management (PRM) systems and platforms like ZINFI’s Unified Partner Management orchestrate complex ecosystem variables into a single, scalable infrastructure to drive better partner-led ROI.
Scaling Salesforce Growth Through Focused Strategic Partner Ecosystem OrchestrationPartner ecosystem orchestration is the strategic coordination of diverse partner entities within a technology environment to drive scalable revenue and customer success by aligning specific product solutions with vendor sales goals, ensuring every stakeholder achieves measurable growth and long-term market sustainability through shared resources and unified management processes. According to Sam Yarborough, an industry practitioner at Arcadia, effective orchestration requires moving from reactive management to a proactive co-selling framework. This approach ensures that technology partners provide specific value to account executives and solve clear customer problems.
Sam Yarborough highlights that focusing on specific industry verticals, such as healthcare and financial services, is more effective than broad, horizontal strategies. She demonstrates how this focus drives significant partner-led growth and ROI metrics. By aligning with ZINFI Unified Partner Management principles, organizations can transform complex ecosystems into predictable revenue engines.
“Any relationship that I had built the previous year, I could then go back and say, ‘What new accounts do you have?’ Staying close to people even if there is no immediate value is an under-utilized tactic.” — Sam Yarborough, SME.
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Video Podcast: Scaling Salesforce Growth Through Focused Strategic Partner Ecosystem Orchestration ✔ Chapter 1: How to Navigate Large Cloud Ecosystems Partner ecosystem orchestration requires starting with a very small and specific focus within large organizations like Salesforce. Sam Yarborough explains that many professionals feel overwhelmed by the technical complexities of massive hyperscaler environments. She suggests that partners should avoid trying to service every customer at once. Success comes from verticalizing your approach to a few key use cases. This method allows you to master a niche before you try to expand. Many companies fail because they spread their resources too thin across many industries. You must pick one area where your product solves a painful problem. This focused effort builds the foundation for long-term growth.
Industry teams in healthcare and financial services often have specific needs that a partner can address directly. Sam Yarborough emphasizes that delivering value on a small scale helps build the necessary trust for larger opportunities. Once you deliver results for one person, they will naturally refer you to other teams within the organization. This creates a snowball effect that drives long-term autonomous partner engagement. You should find one account executive who is willing to experiment with your solution. Prove your value to them with a real customer win. This success becomes your internal marketing tool to reach more teams. Most partnerships fail because they lack these early and visible wins.
Technology partners must understand the mechanics of the vendor program to be effective. Sam Yarborough mentions that her initial program was reactive and lacked a clear strategy before she prioritized data-driven decisions. By focusing on where leads were actually trickling in, she was able to rebuild a dying partnership into a core revenue driver. This demonstrates the importance of B2B ecosystem governance in managing high-growth channel relationships. You must study the compensation plans of the vendor sales team to align your goals. Knowledge of their internal processes makes you a more valuable partner. ZINFI Unified Partner Management helps you organize these data points for better decision making. Effective management turns a chaotic ecosystem into a predictable revenue stream.
✔ Chapter 2: Driving Revenue Through a Strategic Co-Selling Framework A co-selling framework is most effective when it removes all possible roadblocks for the vendor sales team. Sam Yarborough discusses her experience hosting lunch and learn events that quickly booked 20 customer meetings. This was more efficient than traditional BDR motions that might take a month to achieve the same results. High-impact co-selling requires making the vendor account executive the hero of the story. You must prepare all the marketing materials and customer data in advance. The account executive should only have to invite their customers to the meeting. Your job is to make their life easier while helping them hit their sales targets. This selfless approach builds deep loyalty among the vendor sales force.
The SME notes that partner managers must act as a bridge between finance, product, and sales teams. You must design your offering to make the sale as easy as possible for the partner. If you make the process difficult, you will fail to gain any traction within the ecosystem. Sam Yarborough highlights that her focus allowed her company to source 65% of its revenue through these strategic motions. You need to talk to every department in your own company to ensure alignment. Pricing must be simple and transparent for the partner to explain to their clients. Product features should solve the exact gaps identified by the vendor. Successful co-selling is a team sport that involves your entire organization.
Partner-led growth ROI metrics prove the value of this focused approach to executive leadership. Sam Yarborough explains that once you achieve a win, you must communicate that success across the entire organization. Telling other account executives about successful deals creates more demand for your partnership. This proactive communication is a core element of ZINFI Unified Partner Management. You should create case studies that highlight how the vendor salesperson benefited from the deal. Share these stories in internal newsletters and during team meetings. Visibility is the key to maintaining momentum in a large ecosystem. When everyone sees you as a winner, they will want to work with you.
✔ Chapter 3: The Future of AI and Human Connection in Partnerships Autonomous partner engagement is becoming a central theme as companies like Salesforce introduce tools like Agentforce. Sam Yarborough suggests that while AI is changing the landscape, human relationships remain the foundation of successful partnerships. Organizations are currently experimenting to find the right balance between automated processes and manual outreach. Staying open to these new technologies is essential to avoid being left behind. AI can handle the routine tasks of partner matching and data entry. This allows human partner managers to focus on complex strategy and personal networking. You must integrate these new tools into your existing workflows to remain competitive. ZINFI Unified Partner Management provides the platform to merge AI with human expertise.
Executive teams now expect AI to be part of the product roadmap and the partner workflow. Sam Yarborough notes that early adopters of AI tools will likely receive more attention and resources from large vendors. However, the ROI of new autonomous tools is still being calculated by many industry practitioners. Partner leaders must balance the hype of AI with the practical needs of their ecosystem. You should start small by using AI to automate your reporting and lead tracking. Test how these tools impact your daily productivity before rolling them out to the whole team. Continuous learning is necessary as the technology evolves every month. Understanding the limits of AI is just as important as knowing its capabilities.
The humanity of partnerships is a unique value that technology cannot currently replace. Sam Yarborough emphasizes that personal connections and tenacity are what allow new partners to break into established territories. AI can help with partner matching and data analysis, but it cannot replace a face-to-face relationship. Maintaining this harmony between tech and touch is a primary goal for modern B2B ecosystem governance. You should still prioritize taking partners to lunch and attending industry events. These personal interactions build the trust that is required for large enterprise deals. Technology should support these relationships rather than replace them. A balanced approach ensures that your partnership remains resilient in a digital world.
Frequently Asked QuestionsWhat is partner ecosystem orchestration in the Salesforce environment?Partner ecosystem orchestration within the Salesforce environment involves strategically managing various relationships, including Independent Software Vendors (ISVs), agencies, and technology partners, to drive mutual value. Rather than being reactive, effective orchestration requires a proactive strategy that focuses on verticalizing into key use cases, such as healthcare or financial services, to deliver specific impact. By aligning partner solutions with the needs of Salesforce Account Executives (AEs) and their customers, organizations can ensure higher platform adoption and more efficient business outcomes for the entire ecosystem.
How can an ISV successfully engage with Salesforce Account Executives?To successfully engage with Salesforce Account Executives (AEs), ISVs must prioritize a value-driven, highly specific messaging approach. Instead of generic outreach, ISVs should demonstrate exactly how their solution solves a customer’s problem and what that means for the AE, such as increased platform adoption or revenue. Building personal, face-to-face relationships at conferences and maintaining consistent contact is crucial, as the ecosystem is fundamentally a relationship business where trust accelerates business growth and opens doors to new opportunities.
How should partners manage Salesforce’s annual “Go for Growth” transitions?Salesforce’s annual “Go for Growth” period in February often involves account shuffling, promotions, and organizational changes, which can make previous account data obsolete. Partners should handle these transitions by leveraging existing personal relationships to quickly identify a contact’s new accounts and potential pipeline opportunities. By staying in close contact—even through informal means like texting—partners can follow their contacts as they switch industries or roles, ensuring they remain a trusted resource regardless of internal organizational changes at Salesforce.
Why is verticalization important for horizontal partners in a large ecosystem?For horizontal partners who can technically service any customer, verticalization is essential to avoid being overwhelmed by the sheer size of ecosystems like Salesforce. By focusing on specific industries—such as healthcare or financial services—partners can create tailored use cases that resonate more deeply with specialized industry teams. This targeted approach allows partners to deliver value more quickly, build stronger reputations within specific niches, and eventually snowball those successes into other verticals as they gain internal advocates and successful case studies.
What role do personal relationships play in technology partnership success?Personal relationships are an underutilized but critical tactic for long-term success in technology partnerships. Beyond technical integrations, staying close to individuals—getting to know their families, interests, and professional goals—ensures that the partnership survives personnel changes and company moves. These deep connections often lead to new inroads and use cases that might not have been considered initially. In a complex organization, being “more than just another email” to a counterpart is what differentiates a reactive partnership from a high-growth, orchestrated ecosystem.
Scaling Nonprofit Fundraising Through Strategic Partner Ecosystem OrchestrationPartner Ecosystem Orchestration is the strategic alignment of diverse third-party entities to deliver integrated value to a specific market segment. In the nonprofit sector, this involves connecting donors, charitable organizations, and technology providers to ensure efficient mission fulfillment. According to Jamie Mueller, an industry leader at FundraiseUp, scaling these ecosystems requires a shift from transactional referrals to deeply integrated business partnerships.
The nonprofit market represents approximately $1 trillion in annual global revenue. Managing this scale requires a sophisticated tech stack and a robust partner strategy. By leveraging ZINFI Unified Partner Management principles, organizations can automate the partner journey from recruitment to revenue influence. This approach ensures all stakeholders win while maximizing social impact through modern donation technologies.
“When we had a partner involved in a deal, whether they sourced it or were assisting or influencing it, we saw double-digit improvements in closed win rates.” — Jamie Mueller, SME.
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Video Podcast: Scaling Nonprofit Fundraising Through Strategic Partner Ecosystem Orchestration ✔ Chapter 1: Understanding the Global Nonprofit Landscape The global nonprofit market operates with approximately $1 trillion in annual revenue influenced by diverse organizations. This ecosystem includes major players like United Way, UNICEF, and Greenpeace along with thousands of local community groups. Industry practitioner Jamie Mueller notes that the nonprofit tech sector often lags behind for-profit industries by five to ten years. This gap creates a significant opportunity for innovation through specialized SaaS solutions like Fundraise Up.
Fundraising organizations range from medical research institutions to local food banks and social safety nets. Each entity requires secure ways to manage donor data and process financial contributions effectively. Technology partners must bridge the gap between legacy systems and modern e-commerce standards. Successful orchestration requires understanding these unique tax codes and regulatory environments across different global regions.
Modern nonprofits increasingly rely on an ecosystem of consultants, marketing agencies, and software vendors. These partners help organizations move away from traditional direct mail toward digital-first fundraising strategies. The complexity of these interactions necessitates a unified approach to partner relationship management. Orchestrating these players ensures that funds are generated and stewarded with high ethical standards.
✔ Chapter 2: The Quadruple Win Partnership Model Strategic partnerships in the fundraising space must facilitate a “quadruple win” to remain sustainable and profitable. First, the individual donor must feel a personal connection and see the measurable impact of their gift. Second, the nonprofit organization must maximize its revenue while minimizing the friction associated with collecting donations. Third, the consulting or technology partners must find value in recommending specific solutions to their clients.
Fundraise Up only succeeds when these three other stakeholders achieve their goals simultaneously. This transactional model creates a symbiotic cycle where program impact drives more donor engagement. Industry practitioner Jamie Mueller emphasizes that no company can thrive in the modern market without active collaboration. This model aligns business goals with social impact to create a scalable growth engine for all parties.
The Quadruple Win requires moving beyond simple referral fees to true business alignment. Partners provide the localized expertise and implementation services that software vendors cannot offer alone. By integrating Fundraise Up into a larger tech stack including CRMs like Salesforce, partners deliver a complete solution. This collaborative approach builds long-term trust and ensures the nonprofit mission remains the central focus.
✔ Chapter 3: Restructuring Teams for Revenue Influence Scaling a partner program requires a transition from purely transactional activities to tracking total revenue influence. In 2024, Fundraise Up focused on analyzing partner performance and establishing clear performance standards. This analytical phase identified that partner involvement leads to a 10% or higher increase in closed-won rates. Consequently, the team shifted its focus from just sourcing leads to influencing the entire customer journey.
The team structure now reflects a sophisticated partner journey model with specialized roles for success and hunting. A dedicated Partner Success Manager handles a small group of high-value partners that generate half of the channel revenue. This role provides white-glove service, including QBRs and direct access to the product roadmap. Meanwhile, Partner Managers act as hunters to recruit net-new partners in specific verticals like higher education.
Successful orchestration involves rotating partners between tiers based on longevity and business behavior. Industry practitioner Jamie Mueller utilizes tools like Crossbeam for account mapping to align with the direct sales team. This alignment ensures that partners are focused on the highest-priority enterprise logos. By prioritizing influence over simple referrals, the organization maximizes the strategic value of the entire ecosystem.
Frequently Asked QuestionsWhat is partner ecosystem orchestration in nonprofit fundraising?Partner ecosystem orchestration is the strategic alignment of diverse third-party entities — consultants, marketing agencies, and software vendors — to deliver integrated value to a specific segment, in this case nonprofit fundraising. Rather than each vendor selling in isolation, the players coordinate so that donors, nonprofits, and technology providers all benefit at once. Done well, it maximizes social impact through modern donation technology while ensuring every stakeholder in the chain wins.
Why does nonprofit technology lag, and why is that an opportunity?The global nonprofit market operates on roughly $1 trillion in annual revenue, spanning everything from medical research institutions to local food banks, yet its technology often trails for-profit industries by five to ten years. That gap is precisely the opportunity: specialized fundraising software can modernize how these organizations capture and process donations. The organizations that bridge legacy systems and modern e-commerce standards are positioned to serve a large, underserved market.
What role do partners play in fundraising outcomes?Modern nonprofits increasingly depend on an ecosystem of consultants, agencies, and software vendors rather than a single provider, which makes coordination among them decisive. The impact is measurable: when a partner is involved in a deal — sourcing, assisting, or influencing it — closed-win rates improve by double digits. That lift is the core argument for orchestrating partners deliberately instead of leaving collaboration to chance.
What must technology partners solve to serve nonprofits well?Nonprofit fundraising carries requirements that general e-commerce tools don’t address out of the box. Partners must handle donor data and financial contributions securely, connect legacy systems to modern donation experiences, and navigate the distinct tax codes and regulatory environments that vary across global regions. Understanding those constraints is what separates a viable nonprofit technology partner from a generic vendor.
How does ZINFI support orchestration across a nonprofit technology ecosystem?Coordinating consultants, agencies, and software vendors around shared fundraising outcomes requires a system that can register, route, and measure partner contribution across the whole ecosystem. ZINFI’s Unified Partner Management platform unifies onboarding, enablement, co-sell, incentives, and partner performance analytics, making partner-sourced and partner-influenced impact visible rather than anecdotal. ZINFI is rated 97/100 on G2, the highest customer satisfaction score in the Partner Relationship Management category.
Next Frontier of OT/IoT Ecosystem: AI & CybersecurityIn this crucial discussion, Sugata Sanyal, Founder & CEO of ZINFI, sits down with Barry Mainz, CEO of Forescout Technologies, to dissect the Next Frontier of OT/IoT Ecosystem: AI & Cybersecurity. Barry Mainz highlights how the threat landscape has dramatically shifted, noting that the exposure of Critical Infrastructure Protection is growing exponentially due to legacy vulnerabilities in OT devices. The conversation introduces how Forescout is adapting its Forescout Security platform and evolving its Channel Partner Strategy to meet the new demands in sectors such as manufacturing and oil & gas. Mainz also offers deep insights into shifting C-level priorities, where Cybersecurity Metrics like ARR and GDR now dominate. The discussion concludes with insights on the ROI of AI and the next major threats: Quantum Computing and Agentic AI. This is a must-listen for understanding the intersection of digital transformation and physical world security.
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Video Podcast: Next Frontier of OT/IoT Ecosystem: AI & Cybersecurity ✔ Chapter 1: Cultural Blueprint and Critical Shift to OT/IoT Security Barry Mainz outlines the Forescout Security culture, defining it not as an amorphous concept but as the company’s blueprint for problem-solving and establishing core routines. Forescout’s ethos is straightforward: one must constantly improve, as “there’s no staying the same” in the dynamic world of cybersecurity. A foundational routine involves executive engagement at the point of sale, or “where the money changes hands,” to gain the customer’s perspective. This unique focus on customer friction and ease of doing business drives cultural evolution and helps the organization refine its culture over time. This cultural commitment is crucial given the company’s 25-year history in a complex, global, and nation-state-involved space. The discussion shifts to the OT/IoT Ecosystem, highlighting the massive change driven by connected devices that extends beyond traditional IT. Mainz, leveraging his experience with embedded operating systems, notes that non-traditional devices, such as industrial controls (IOT/OT and medical OT), now have vulnerability issues (CDEs) exceeding those of standard IT operating systems. These critical infrastructure devices—from power grids to industrial robots—were not built for patching, creating significant, hard-to-remediate risk. Forescout recognized this shift early, transitioning from a core NAC company to a broad Forescout Security platform focused on network operations security for the world’s largest public and private companies.
This evolution into Critical Infrastructure Protection is accelerating due to the increasing frequency of severe breaches and regulatory pressure. The US Disclosure Act, for instance, has made CFOs and CEOs personally liable for non-disclosure of breaches affecting OT/IoT devices. This regulatory push is forcing mature organizations, which often deal with outdated, decades-old systems, to rethink their approach to security. Conversely, emerging markets (like META and India) frequently exhibit less ego and legacy lock-in, making them more open to modern, flexible solutions, which has led to them becoming Forescout’s fastest-growing regions. The complexity of the OT/IoT Ecosystem demands this cultural fluidity.
✔ Chapter 2: Channel Partner Strategy and Evolving Cybersecurity Metrics Forescout operates on a 100% partner-based go-to-market model. The ecosystem comprises distributors (essential for hardware logistics and export compliance), resellers, and strategic alliance partners, such as Siemens or Yokogawa. The channel is segmented by a combination of vertical alignment (e.g., dedicated reps for healthcare, federal government) and horizontal motion for down-market strategics. This network extends to strategic alliances for deep, technical integrations, often resulting in ODM or OEM relationships. The Channel Partner Strategy includes sell-with (integration) and sell-through motions, covering 700 alliance partners and 25 OEM/ODM relationships worldwide. Distribution partners have moved far beyond their traditional roles. Today, they are critical value-add partners, providing specialized professional services, Tier 0/1 support in local regions, and acting as thought partners to guide the proper go-to-market motions, especially in emerging territories.
The shift to a subscription-first business model (90% software) has fundamentally changed the financial metrics tracked by the board. Key metrics now include Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) and Gross Dollar Retention (GDR), along with contract length, which have superseded TCV and non-recurring revenue. While traditional hardware metrics, such as RMAs, are still tracked, they are less central to running the business. Other critical metrics include CSAT/NPS scores, pipeline coverage, and sales productivity indicators. Forescout’s product is ambidextrous, offering both cloud and on-prem deployment options, a flexibility that is proving critical as large enterprise customers begin to experience cloud repatriation—moving workloads back to cost-effective co-location due to CapEx/OpEx trade-offs on hyperscale platforms.
✔ Chapter 3: AI Investment, Talent, and the Next Big Security Bets Measuring the ROI of AI investment is a challenge. Forescout’s investment strategy is two-fold: Internal Productivity (e.g., advanced translation, co-pilot functions) and Product Feature Enhancement. In the product, AI is utilized as a tool to generate audit reports and prioritize events for the Security Operations Center (SOC). However, due to concerns over hallucinations and reliability, Forescout still doesn’t permit AI agents to execute direct network control (like blocking). A new element in the sales cycle is a customer checklist to ensure vendors are utilizing AI, indicating a shift in customer procurement requirements. The board-level dialogue has matured from hype to pragmatism, asking for “real facts” on AI’s impact.
The shortage of AI/ML talent is a significant struggle, reminiscent of past industry transitions. The challenge lies in the lack of maturity in the AI space—specifically, the need to change language models, system choices, and the understanding of correct application—making it challenging to hire and train the proper personnel. This talent gap must be addressed to leverage AI within the OT/IoT ecosystem successfully. Finally, Mainz reveals his subsequent big bets for the cybersecurity industry. The first is Quantum Computing, which is seen as a near-term existential threat due to its potential to allow “bad actors” to unencrypt vast amounts of data in seconds—a post-quantum encryption problem that demands industry attention. The second is Agentic AI. He also dispels the myth that “IOT and OT don’t matter” on campus.
Frequently Asked QuestionsWhy is OT/IoT security the critical new frontier?The threat landscape has shifted decisively toward operational technology and connected devices, where exposure is growing exponentially because legacy OT equipment was never designed to be networked or defended. Critical-infrastructure sectors such as manufacturing and oil and gas are especially at risk, since a compromise there affects the physical world, not just data. Securing these environments now depends on asset visibility, risk profiling, and control mechanisms purpose-built for OT and IoT rather than borrowed from IT.
What does a 100% partner-based go-to-market look like in cybersecurity?In a fully partner-led model, the ecosystem includes distributors that handle hardware logistics and export compliance, resellers, and strategic alliance partners such as major industrial vendors like Siemens or Yokogawa. The channel is segmented by vertical alignment — dedicated coverage for healthcare or federal government — alongside a horizontal motion for the down-market, and it spans hundreds of alliance partners and dozens of OEM/ODM relationships worldwide. Distributors have moved well beyond logistics into value-add roles, delivering professional services, local Tier 0/1 support, and acting as thought partners.
How is AI being used — and deliberately limited — in OT/IoT security?AI investment tends to split two ways: internal productivity (translation, co-pilot functions) and product enhancement, where AI generates audit reports and prioritizes events for the security operations center. But direct network control — actions like automatically blocking traffic — is often kept out of AI’s hands because of concerns about hallucinations and reliability in environments where a wrong move is costly. Notably, customer procurement checklists increasingly ask whether vendors use AI, and board-level conversation has matured from hype toward asking for real, measurable facts.
What are the next major cybersecurity threats to prepare for?Two bets stand out. Quantum computing is treated as a near-term existential threat because it could let bad actors decrypt vast amounts of data in seconds, which makes post-quantum encryption an urgent industry priority. The second is agentic AI, which expands both capability and attack surface. Underlying both is a persistent shortage of AI and machine-learning talent, which makes hiring and training the right people a strategic constraint in its own right.
How does ZINFI support a partner-led cybersecurity go-to-market?A 100% partner model with distributors, resellers, alliances, and OEM/ODM relationships only scales when onboarding, enablement, co-sell, and incentives operate on shared infrastructure across every partner type. ZINFI’s Unified Partner Management platform provides that operational backbone with the governance and security expected in regulated, critical-infrastructure sectors. ZINFI is rated 97/100 on G2, the highest customer satisfaction score in the Partner Relationship Management category, and serves cybersecurity vendors managing MSP and MSSP ecosystems.
Future of B2B Marketing: AI & Trust Redefining the JourneyThe world of B2B Marketing is undergoing a seismic shift, driven by rapid advancements in technology and a fundamental change in how buyers engage. In this insightful discussion, Sugata Sanyal, Founder & CEO of ZINFI, sits down with industry veteran Rick Wootten to dissect the forces shaping the future. They explore the journey of demand generation from its roots in Web 1.0 to the complexities of today’s multi-touch, multi-channel environment. Key topics include the disruptive impact of AI Marketing on content strategy, the critical challenge of building and maintaining trust with increasingly skeptical buyers, and the strategies marketers must adopt to navigate this new, decentralized B2B Buyer Journey. Tune in to learn how a multi-touch playbook can secure your success in the Future of Marketing and pipeline generation.
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Video Podcast: Future of B2B Marketing: AI & Trust Redefining the Journey ✔ Chapter 1: The Historical Arc of Demand Generation: From Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 The genesis of digital B2B Marketing was a far cry from the complex, data-driven systems of today. The early Web 1.0 era saw marketing websites primarily serving as little more than online brochures—a static catalog that users could browse, but not truly interact with. Demand generation at the time was predominantly manual and personal, relying heavily on in-person events and cold-calling. The shift began with pioneers who introduced the novel idea of a web form, allowing companies to capture customer interest and respond almost in real-time, effectively getting over the buyer’s challenge of having to call and listen to a sales pitch. This consumerization of IT, as it was called, marked a pivotal moment in which decision-making began to move online, providing a massive new opportunity for companies to capitalize on digital channels. This foundational change in how the buyer received information set the stage for the next phase of digital evolution.
The transition to Web 2.0 fundamentally reshaped B2B Marketing strategies by shifting the focus from simple online presence to building dynamic e-commerce businesses and, critically, customer relationships. This era saw the advent of marketing automation tools, such as Eloqua, which provided the first glimpses of intelligence—the ability to send personalized communications and track email opens or purchases. This increased sophistication enabled marketers to move beyond simple database emails and leverage new insights into buyer behavior, allowing them to tailor content and target individuals based on the problems they were trying to solve. The intelligence, though primitive by today’s standards, offered marketers a distinct advantage in improving conversion rates and revenue generation, even leading to aggressive promotional tactics that created channel conflicts that were common in 2005-2006. The key lesson learned was the critical need to adapt quickly and develop effective techniques for scaling campaigns.
The evolution from a static online brochure to an interactive online experience introduced the concept of the B2B Buyer Journey, a notion previously reserved for consumer-centric marketing. This period was characterized by a rapid, shared innovation where marketers constantly reviewed and copied the source code of interesting websites to build upon each other’s techniques, drastically accelerating the sophistication of platforms. By the late 2000s, this collective knowledge had laid the groundwork for advanced capabilities, such as lead scoring, which became a centerpiece of inbound methodologies promoted by companies like HubSpot. This trajectory confirmed that the B2B Marketing playbook was no longer a matter of a single interaction, but an increasingly intelligent sequence of engagements, moving the industry decisively away from purely manual demand generation methods.
✔ Chapter 2: Navigating the Multi-Touch, Multi-Channel B2B Buyer Journey With the arrival of the iPhone era around 2007, the marketing landscape splintered, demanding a fundamentally different approach to the B2B Buyer Journey. The security-centric trend of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) meant that employees were now interacting with B2B content across laptops and personal phones, presenting a profound challenge for marketers who could not easily track one individual across multiple devices. This cross-device gap was partially filled by leveraging ideas and brand-building concepts from B2C, which had already invested heavily in digital channels. While initial ROI on tactics like in-app and mobile advertising was often underwhelming due to poor data and targeting, the core shift was clear: the buyer was now reachable on exponentially more platforms, from SMS and various social networks to targeted ads seen while shopping on Amazon.
The central challenge in contemporary B2B Marketing is that the playbook is no longer a simple single-touch conversion, such as a web form lead, but a complex, multi-touch engagement model. Marketers must accept that a successful pipeline is often the result of a coordinated sequence of interactions across multiple channels. A company’s ideal playbook might involve seeing a person at an event, following up with content syndication, and then guiding them to a private executive dinner. Crucially, the effectiveness of any given channel is constantly in flux, making strategic re-evaluation essential. Channels previously considered obsolete, such as direct mail and radio, are now experiencing a resurgence in effectiveness precisely because they are not saturated, demonstrating that marketers must continually refine their tactics to maximize reach.
Despite the explosion of channels and tactics, the tooling for B2B Marketing has also advanced dramatically to manage this complexity, particularly with orchestration platforms. Modern tools from companies like Adobe, Sixth Sense, and Demandbase enable marketers to view all these touchpoints and gather signals they previously couldn’t. For instance, these platforms can indicate that a target buyer is in a purchase cycle by revealing they downloaded a case study from a third-party site. This capability means that while the buyer’s journey is much more complicated, the technological ability to manage, track, and optimize campaigns across a multi-touch B2B Buyer Journey has also evolved, moving far beyond the “stone tools” of early marketing automation.
✔ Chapter 3: AI, the Trust Deficit, and the Future of B2B Marketing Skills The rise of generative AI introduces polarizing elements and a significant trust deficit into the already complex world of B2B Marketing. With AI capable of writing content and creating videos, the challenge lies in the current lack of trust that buyers, particularly Gen Z, have for media and advertising. This distrust is leading to a profound shift in information validation, signaling a potential return to the most fundamental source of influence: peer-to-peer networks and personal relationships. It is projected that as this new generation of budget owners advances in their careers, their network of knowledgeable peers will become the primary source for information, referrals, and validation, making the “human element” of marketing more critical than ever. The long-term outlook is optimistic, as transparency mechanisms, such as tagging AI-generated content, will eventually help to rebuild that foundational trust.
Beyond content creation, AI is enabling practical B2B Marketing applications that fundamentally change the planning process and go-to-market engineering. AI’s real power lies in its ability to pull in and cross-reference massive, disparate datasets—such as census information, competitor office locations, and industry data—to generate actionable insights on which markets to enter quickly. This capacity for mass data analysis and orchestration is built into virtually every modern marketing tool, from Marketo to Sixth Sense, meaning that all future marketers must have a concept-level understanding of AI literacy. This analytical capability facilitates the ongoing convergence of marketing stacks and tactics between mid-market and enterprise organizations, where the complexity of the problems being solved remains the same.
In building out a modern B2B Marketing team, a CMO’s focus must shift from pure technical skills to foundational soft skills, which are the only constants in an ever-changing landscape. The three critical non-negotiables for a successful modern marketer are Aptitude (raw ability), Passion (loving the job you do), and Self-Awareness (commitment to lifelong learning and constant self-improvement). Combined with AI literacy and an unrelenting commitment to consuming industry content, these traits will determine who succeeds in the future. The volatility of channels, the power of AI, and the buyer’s demand for trust ensure that continuous learning and core human qualities will drive the success of the Future of Marketing.
Frequently Asked QuestionsHow has B2B demand generation evolved from the Web 1.0 era?Early digital B2B marketing was a far cry from today’s data-driven systems — websites were essentially online brochures, static catalogs users could browse but not truly interact with. Demand generation itself was manual and personal, leaning on in-person events and cold calls. The turning point was the web form, which let companies capture interest and respond in near real time, sparing buyers the friction of calling in to hear a pitch and moving decision-making online.
What made the B2B buyer journey multi-touch and multi-channel?The smartphone era, beginning around 2007, splintered the landscape and demanded a fundamentally different approach. Bring-your-own-device meant buyers engaged with content across laptops and personal phones, and marketers could no longer easily track one individual across devices. Teams borrowed brand-building ideas from B2C to fill the gap, and although early mobile and in-app tactics delivered underwhelming ROI due to weak data, the core shift was permanent: buyers were now reachable across far more platforms, from SMS and social networks to ads seen while shopping online.
How does AI create a “trust deficit” in B2B marketing?Generative AI can now produce content and video at scale, which collides with an existing lack of trust — particularly among younger buyers — toward media and advertising. That distrust is pushing information validation back toward its most fundamental source: peer-to-peer networks and personal relationships. As a new generation of budget owners advances, their network of knowledgeable peers is expected to become the primary channel for referrals and validation, making the human element more important, not less. Transparency mechanisms such as labeling AI-generated content should, over time, help rebuild the missing trust.
What skills define the modern B2B marketer?As channels and tools churn, the durable advantage is a set of soft skills rather than any single technical proficiency. The three non-negotiables are aptitude (raw ability), passion (genuinely loving the work), and self-awareness (a commitment to continual learning and self-improvement). Paired with AI literacy and a steady habit of consuming industry content, these traits determine who thrives as the buyer’s demand for trust keeps rising.
How does ZINFI help marketers navigate a decentralized, trust-driven buyer journey?When buyers validate decisions through peers and partners rather than vendor ads, a company’s partner network becomes one of its most credible marketing channels. ZINFI’s Unified Partner Management platform includes through-channel marketing automation — co-branded email, social syndication, and microsites — that lets partners carry consistent, on-brand messaging into the trusted networks where buyers actually research. ZINFI is rated 97/100 on G2, the highest customer satisfaction score in the Partner Relationship Management category.
RevOps is Dead: Why GTM Ops is the FutureIn this insightful episode, Sugata Sanyal, Founder & CEO of ZINFI, sits down with Andy Mowat, Founder of Whispered and former RevOps leader at Upwork, Box, Culture Amp, and Carta. They dive into the evolution of Revenue Operations (RevOps), which Andy argues is an overused term for what should be called Go-to-Market Ops. The discussion highlights the six core functions of a modern GTM Ops team and the move towards a Modern Data Stack. Andy shares his view that we are in the "dark ages" of systems like Salesforce and must prioritize AI Fluency and the right mindset over just skill sets when hiring. Listen in to understand the future of the operations function and what leadership skills matter most in the age of AI.
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Video Podcast: RevOps is Dead: Why GTM Ops is the Future ✔ Chapter 1: The Evolution from RevOps to Go-to-Market Ops The term Revenue Operations (RevOps) is often misapplied, with many teams simply performing Sales Operations under a trendier title. Andy Mowat and his peers prefer the designation “Go-to-Market Ops” because it properly encompasses the crucial functions of Marketing Operations (MOPs) and Customer Success Operations (CS Ops). This unified approach ensures coordination and prevents system conflicts, particularly as data flows from marketing systems into sales systems. A comprehensive GTM Ops function is defined by six core areas: Sales Operations (SOPs), GTM Systems, Sales Strategy, Post-Sales/CS Ops, MOPs, and Enablement. Each area plays a distinct but interconnected role, from territory design and commissions (SOPs) to using product data for efficiency (CS Ops) and managing marketing automation systems (MOPs). An effective GTM Ops leader must think strategically about both the systems and the processes by which the company sells.
✔ Chapter 2: Modern Data Stack and the Dark Ages of CRM Andy reflects on the technological journey of Revenue Operations across various unicorn companies, including Upwork, Box, and Culture Amp, noting that the discipline is constantly evolving. While early roles were focused on core systems, the need for a Modern Data Stack became clear to handle sophisticated concepts like pipeline coverage, which existing CRMs couldn’t manage without a dedicated data layer. He highlights tools like Fivetran, DBT, and Census as essential components for a modern GTM data environment, emphasizing that today, a rev ops professional needs fluency and understanding of how data works, often including SQL knowledge. Despite the proliferation of tools, Andy believes the industry is in the dark ages of systems, arguing that the user experience of dominant CRMs like Salesforce is “terrible” and not built for the modern world of unstructured and product data. This frustration with legacy systems has led to the emergence of next-generation solutions, with a prediction that the next CRM will likely be a data warehouse.
✔ Chapter 3: The Impact of AI on GTM Ops Talent and Mindset When hiring for Revenue Operations, particularly in the age of AI, mindset is significantly more critical than just skill set. Andy Mowat stresses that key traits include intensity, the ability to articulate, work cross-functionally, and a willingness to “get your hands dirty.” For junior roles, he often grows talent from high-performing CS or support teams, looking for that spark of logical thinking and structured thinking. At the director level and above, hiring managers require individuals who possess the skills to hire, manage, and develop other director-level staff, with a focus on managing up, making trade-offs, and articulating a clear strategy. The most significant shift today is the absolute necessity for AI Fluency. Failing to embrace and utilize AI is detrimental, leading to a demand for new, yet-to-be-fully-defined roles, such as the GTM Engineer. This new functional role is emerging because specialized tools, like Clay, can be complex, following a pattern where new tools create new jobs, which then prompts the development of more tools to make those jobs easier.
Frequently Asked QuestionsWhy is “RevOps” being replaced by “Go-to-Market Ops”?The term Revenue Operations is often misapplied — many teams are really doing Sales Operations under a trendier label. “Go-to-Market Ops” is the more accurate designation because it properly encompasses Marketing Operations and Customer Success Operations alongside sales. That unified framing matters operationally: it keeps systems coordinated and prevents conflicts as data flows from marketing platforms into sales systems and on through the post-sale motion.
What are the core functions of a modern GTM Ops team?A comprehensive GTM Ops function spans six interconnected areas: Sales Operations, GTM Systems, Sales Strategy, Post-Sales/CS Ops, Marketing Operations, and Enablement. Each plays a distinct role — from territory design and commissions in Sales Ops, to using product data for efficiency in CS Ops, to managing marketing automation in MOPs. Treating them as one coordinated system, rather than separate fiefdoms, is what distinguishes GTM Ops from a narrow sales-support desk.
Why are current CRM systems described as the “dark ages,” and what is the Modern Data Stack?Despite a proliferation of tools, the argument is that the industry is in the dark ages of systems — the user experience of dominant CRMs is poor and not built for a world of unstructured and product data. Sophisticated needs like accurate pipeline coverage can’t be handled by legacy CRMs without a dedicated data layer underneath. The Modern Data Stack fills that gap with components such as Fivetran, DBT, and Census, which is why today’s operators increasingly need genuine data fluency, often including SQL.
What should GTM Ops leaders hire for in the age of AI?Mindset matters more than a fixed skill set. The traits that stand out are intensity, the ability to articulate clearly, comfort working cross-functionally, and a willingness to get hands dirty; strong junior talent often grows out of high-performing CS or support teams. At director level and above, the priority shifts to hiring and developing other leaders, managing up, making trade-offs, and setting strategy. The defining new requirement is AI fluency — its absence is a real liability, and it is giving rise to emerging roles such as the GTM Engineer.
How does ZINFI fit a unified, data-driven GTM Ops function?If GTM Ops is about coordinating sales, marketing, and customer success on shared data, the partner motion has to be part of that same fabric rather than a disconnected silo. ZINFI’s Unified Partner Management platform unifies partner onboarding, enablement, marketing, co-sell, incentives, and analytics, with an open API and bidirectional CRM integrations that feed a modern data environment. ZINFI is rated 97/100 on G2, the highest customer satisfaction score in the Partner Relationship Management category.
Future of Managed Service Providers: Automation, Security, and AIIn this insightful episode, Sugata Sanyal, Founder & CEO of ZINFI, welcomes Michelle Accardi, CEO of Liongard, for a deep dive into the evolving world of channel partnerships and cybersecurity. Michelle shares her journey through significant scale-ups, offering critical insights on how managed service providers (MSPs) can maximize their business valuation. The discussion highlights the shift from one-time sales to recurring revenue, emphasizing the need for efficiency, automation, and a clearly monetized tech stack. They explore the impact of AI automation on service delivery and talent, concluding with a focus on human skills, curiosity, and the critical importance of a strong network in the channel ecosystem. Listen now to understand the future path for profitable MSP growth.
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Video Podcast: Future of Managed Service Providers: Automation, Security, and AI ✔ Chapter 1: Evolution of Managed Service Providers (MSPs) and Business Valuation The role of managed service providers (MSPs) has undergone a fundamental transformation over the last two decades. Starting as simple value-added resellers (VARs) focused on moving hardware, they evolved by adding services and, eventually, a software layer, creating new categories of service offerings. The key differentiator for success became the ability to capture recurring revenue, rather than relying on one-time sales. This transformation is critical because the central metric for valuing an MSP business today is its EBITDA (profit margin). Companies looking to be acquired for a reasonable multiple must establish strong fundamentals, focusing on growth and robust profit margins. Michelle Accardi, with her experience running roll-up MSP Logically, stresses that a healthy business is defined by its ability to generate revenue and maintain profitability.
A crucial financial benchmark discussed for these service businesses is the “Rule of 40,” a metric commonly used in the SaaS world. This rule suggests that the sum of a company’s growth rate and its profit margin (EBITDA percentage) should roughly equal forty percent. Many MSPs, however, struggle to meet both growth and profitability goals simultaneously. To achieve this level of performance, MSPs must focus on driving profit through either growth (by adding new services) or improving efficiency (through cost-cutting/automation). Ultimately, businesses aiming for the highest returns should target an EBITDA margin of 15% to 20% combined with a growth engine of 15% to 20%. This strategic focus on financial health is crucial for achieving long-term success and a favorable business valuation.
Driving efficiency is the cornerstone of a successful modern managed service provider (MSP) business. Outside of the Rule of 40 metric, core success attributes for an MSP include automation, a strong toolset, and the ability to leverage resources nearshore or offshore. However, the foundational element is having the right people in place who align with the core value proposition. Beyond operational efficiency, the most critical factor is the ability to monetize the technology stack. MSPs often experiment with new technology but fail to develop offerings around it to sell to their customer base. Every dollar spent on the tech stack must be viewed as an investment intended to generate more revenue and provide additional value to the end customer. This approach ensures that the business is not just technically capable, but fundamentally profitable and scalable for the future.
✔ Chapter 2: Cybersecurity, Asset Management, and AI Automation For growing managed service providers (MSPs), especially those with several hundred customers and a team of ten to twenty people, identifying areas for growth can be challenging in a brownfield environment where they must displace a competitor. Michelle Accardi suggests that the most critical first step, which sounds rudimentary, is for the MSP to understand what their customers truly have. This means taking a comprehensive inventory of all assets. From this inventory, MSPs can discover a wealth of information that informs them about what new, high-value services, particularly in security and IT automation, they should be selling. By understanding how a customer’s environment changes on a daily, monthly, or yearly basis, an MSP can help them rationalize their existing IT and security spending. This focus on a source of truth for assets, though unsexy, is where the real money is found in the services business.
Liongard’s core offering aligns perfectly with this need for a source of truth, establishing itself as a cybersecurity SaaS platform. Their platform automates asset discovery, inventory, and monitoring of configuration changes to identify vulnerabilities and risks preemptively. The company targets MSPs and MSSPs with more than twenty customers, as complexity in asset inventory and risk management increases with customer count. A key feature is the use of AI to generate asset summaries for account managers, enabling them to discuss customer environments intelligently without requiring a technical background. By integrating with over 90 different IT systems, Liongard becomes a reliable, central source of truth for MSPs, enabling them to build their own automation on top, whether through RPA or agent-based AI.
The discussion extends into the emerging concern of Shadow AI—users bringing their own unmanaged AI tools into the workplace, similar to the “bring your own device” trend. Managing these tools is complicated as they don’t fit into traditional hardware or human resource management systems. Michelle Accardi argues that the core focus for security shouldn’t be the AI tools themselves, but rather identities. Security must focus on identifying which identities have access to critical systems and underlying data and ensuring that access is properly tracked and controlled. Liongard is also integrating generative AI directly into its platform with the upcoming Answer IQ feature. This will enable partners to utilize natural language search to query the massive data lake for immediate insights, such as identifying which customers lack MFA-enabled accounts or determining which ports on a firewall pose a risk, thereby democratizing technical data for non-technical account managers.
✔ Chapter 3: AI in Service Delivery and the Future of Talent The immediate focus for managed service providers (MSPs) in adopting AI is two-fold: first, helping customers leverage available tools, such as Microsoft Copilot. Second, and more importantly for sophisticated MSPs, is utilizing AI internally to enhance their own service delivery and achieve efficiency. This internal automation, often achieved by mining data from a source of truth to identify new service offerings, must precede external services. Horizontal use cases, such as Copilot, are the current primary offerings, although some niche players are developing vertical-specific applications for industries like legal and hospitality. Ultimately, the goal is for MSPs to leverage AI to increase their efficiency before creating new bundled offers for their customers.
A significant area of transformation is the use of AI agents to handle basic, high-volume customer requests. Instead of logging a traditional ticket, customers can use a self-service interface, such as a ChatGPT-like bot, to resolve simple problems and escalate to a human technician only when necessary. This shift is already evident in margin-constrained businesses, such as the hospitality and retail industries. For MSPs, this means the first line of defense—solving common, simple issues like Wi-Fi connectivity problems—can be automated. While this automation helps drive necessary profit margins, it also presents a risk to entry-level engineers.
The changing landscape of service delivery has a direct impact on the talent pool. Historically, MSPs recruited frontline support from community colleges and trade schools. While new automation in the PSA (Professional Services Automation) industry created new categories and jobs in the past, the rise of AI agents means the path forward is complex. Michelle Accardi suggests a bifurcated path: some systems will utilize agentic AI to replace lower-skilled talent. In contrast, others will create new paradigms where talent focuses on roles such as training AI models. The consensus is that lower-skilled workers are most at risk. However, top-tier talent with critical thinking skills will remain indispensable for solving edge cases and complex problems that an AI model cannot efficiently address. The core skill set for future success encompasses not only technical knowledge but also curiosity, building a strong network, and understanding the economics of business.
Partner Data, AI, and Trust: The Future of Co-SellingThe future of partnership success hinges on precision, data, and trust in a hybrid channel world. This discussion, led by Sugata Sanyal, Founder & CEO of ZINFI, features two industry pioneers: Dina Moskowitz, CEO and Founder of PartnerOptimizer, and Theresa Caragol, CEO and Founder of AchieveUnite and author of Partnering Success.
They dive deep into how organizations can optimize their existing partner ecosystems and recruit the right partners by leveraging sophisticated partner intelligence platforms and AI-driven insights. The conversation emphasizes shifting from transactional partnerships to predictive Co-Selling powered by a foundation of trust and aligned business strategy. Listen now to gain key takeaways on achieving efficiency and effectiveness through more innovative partnering.
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Video Podcast: Partner Data, AI, and Trust: The Future of Co-Selling ✔ Chapter 1: The New Imperative: Efficiency and Precision in Partner Recruitment Partnership programs today face a critical need for efficiency and precision, driven by the current economic climate and the challenge of achieving “more with less.” Partner Ecosystem Optimization begins with the strategic task of identifying the Ideal Partner Profile (IPP) to avoid wasting time on the wrong alliances. Dina Moskowitz’s perspective on the common pain points is clear: companies struggle with an existing ecosystem but realize they are losing focus and wasting time on the wrong partners. The core mission of her platform is to develop innovative data mining techniques to profile companies, making it easier for partner organizations to target them precisely. This precision means understanding a partner’s average transaction size, their Ideal Customer Profile, and their ability to influence revenue, moving past a “wait and see and hope and pray” mentality.
Theresa Caragol adds the essential strategic framework for this build-out, introducing the science behind Channel Partner Strategy. She emphasizes that getting the strategy right is the foundation of success, encompassing a joint vision, trusted relationships, business acceleration (where data intelligence serves as a key propeller), and community building centered on lifetime value, rather than just transactions. Achieve Unite’s approach, complemented by partner data intelligence, dramatically accelerates this process, ensuring that new builds and segment expansion efforts reach the right partners more quickly. This joint work enables companies to transition rapidly from a general strategy to identifying specific partners and geographies for recruitment, ensuring that the foundational business proposition is right before making a significant investment.
The two use cases—building a new channel and optimizing a large, existing ecosystem—are both addressed by first getting the strategy right, then operationalizing it with data. Dina’s comprehensive database, which she refers to as a solution to map “Jay McBain’s blob of partners,” continuously mines B2B technology companies globally. This data is structured to allow granular searches across resellers, ISVs, MSPs, SIs, and more. The goal is to provide clients with a comprehensive view of their total addressable market of productive partners, enabling them to abandon the “spray and pray” approach and instead target alliances based on shared technical stacks (e.g., Cisco or Juniper partners) and customer objectives. This structured approach to identifying the right partners at the right time is the first step in accelerating successful partnerships.
✔ Chapter 2: Transforming Partner Enablement and Co-Marketing with Intelligence The success of any partnership program, once partners are recruited, hinges on effective enablement and Co-Selling motions. Theresa Caragol notes that generic training is no longer enough; enablement must drive behavior changes in people. This is where Partner Data Intelligence becomes a real-time, personalized tool. Partner Optimizer provides managers with territory-specific data and insights that can be used to form stronger, more relevant value propositions for the end customer and stronger business propositions for the partner. This intelligence, combined with AI, rapidly creates targeted messaging and strategic initiatives, such as identifying the best vertical markets to target, thereby accelerating the entire process from recruitment to activation. The difference is moving from talking at partners to talking with partners, building a foundation of trust based on a clear understanding of their business.
In co-marketing, the traditional one-size-fits-all approach is obsolete. The key determinant of success for co-op or MDF investments is a partner’s marketing competency, which necessitates a more precise approach to evaluation. Teresa and Dina both stress the need for a maturity model, which defines different activities for partners based on their stage of engagement—from a Stage One partner needing basic growth activities to a Stage Five partner who receives custom, high-touch attention for campaigns. This precision, or “precision-based” approach, moves past the random acts of marketing that dominated the past.
The shift in marketing spend is also a key theme. While 90% of buying research happens online, there is a resurgence of events, driven by the need for strategic, multi-party engagement. Theresa suggests that the future of go-to-market involves an ecosystem of partners (vendors, partners, hyperscaler) focusing on a strategic initiative, a set of accounts, and then a few highly strategic events, rather than a “peanut butter” spread of effort. This movement away from generic marketing and into highly targeted, account-based marketing, with digital channels like LinkedIn, is how to win. It acknowledges that direct selling is changing, as buyers use trusted advisors (who may not be transacting partners) early in the decision-making cycle, making influence and the Co-Selling motion more critical than ever.
✔ Chapter 3: The Co-Selling Revolution: AI, Hyperscalers, and the Human Element The conversation concludes with an in-depth focus on Co-Selling, emphasizing the roles of hyperscalers, AI in Partnering, and the irreplaceable human element. Dina explains that today’s Co-Selling often centers around hyperscaler marketplaces (Azure, AWS, Google Cloud). However, listing in a marketplace is not a “floodgate opener” for sales; it’s an infrastructure for transacting. Smaller companies still need to find partners within that ecosystem who match their IPP and can help them sell, as the hyperscalers themselves prioritize the top several hundred. Partner Optimizer’s intelligence, therefore, remains essential for identifying the best-fit co-sell partners for a given product or opportunity.
Theresa Caragol details how her new Co-Selling programs leverage AI and data to train sellers and partner marketers. The mechanics involve collecting data from multiple companies, feeding it into a private AI, which then generates joint value propositions, targeted messages for specific customers (based on their market activity), and tailored business propositions for partner executives. This integration of data and AI in Partnering dramatically accelerates the seller’s process—allowing them to focus on networking and building the funnel, not on generic prep work.
Both leaders agree on the critical role of AI in their platforms: Dina utilizes AI/ML for highly efficient data mining, finding partners globally, enhancing search algorithms, and transforming raw insights into conversational recommendations. However, a vital conclusion is that AI is a tool to augment the best human efforts, not a replacement. Dina cautions that while AI is great, without human intention and hypothesis—knowing why you are building a campaign—the AI can lead to “hallucinations” or simply a wrong path in partnership strategy. The future of Co-Selling lies in combining human intelligence with digital intelligence to deliver a quantifiable outcome, where trust remains the core driver of success.
Modernizing Channel Marketing: AI and Ecosystem EnablementThis episode explores the transformative landscape of the IT industry, focusing on how companies are modernizing their approach to the channel. Host Sugata Sanyal, Founder & CEO of ZINFI, is joined by Anthony Graziano, Senior Vice President, Marketing at D&H Distributing. With over two decades of experience in distribution and vendor partnerships, Graziano discusses the evolution from traditional "channel" strategies to dynamic "channel ecosystems." He highlights D&H’s investment in platforms like MKT+SHIFT to meet the changing needs of solution providers. The conversation delves into critical areas, including the impactful role of AI in channel marketing, strategies for engaging new talent amidst demographic shifts, and the essential lessons learned in aligning marketing, sales, and vendor alliances. Tune in to gain actionable insights into defining success in the evolving partner ecosystem.
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Video Podcast: Modernizing Channel Marketing: AI and Ecosystem Enablement ✔ Chapter 1: The Evolution from Channel to Ecosystems Anthony Graziano’s career has been at the forefront of distribution and channel marketing, providing a front-row seat to one of the industry’s most significant transitions: the shift from a traditional ‘channel’ approach to sophisticated, integrated ‘ecosystems’. This evolution is driven by the necessity for solution providers to deliver more comprehensive, consumption-based services and engage with a broader set of influencers beyond the traditional reseller. The modern channel marketing strategy must now support this complex web of relationships, recognizing that technology sales involve co-selling and co-innovating across multiple partners, rather than a simple, linear transaction. Graziano’s perspective, having moved from a global vendor role at Logitech back into distribution leadership at D&H, offers unique insights into how expectations for marketing have undergone drastic changes. Vendors now demand more quantifiable return on investment and broader market penetration from distributors, while partners require high-level enablement and accessible, modern tools.
D&H Distributing’s investments, such as the rollout of the MKT+SHIFT self-service marketing platform, are a direct reflection of these changing needs and the move toward an ecosystem-driven environment. This platform empowers partners to modernize their go-to-market strategies by providing scalable, integrated digital campaigns and tools they can execute independently. It moves beyond basic content syndication to offer a true self-service capability that is critical for a diverse partner base with varying levels of marketing maturity and resource availability. In an ecosystem where speed and relevance are paramount, the ability to quickly deploy professional, vendor-compliant marketing assets is not just an advantage; it is a fundamental requirement for solution providers competing in the digital age. The platform’s success demonstrates D&H’s commitment to reinforcing its position as a trusted enabler, directly addressing the pain points of modern channel marketing.
The transformation in the Information Technology landscape also necessitates a complete rethinking of how vendors and distributors collaborate on marketing initiatives. The old model of simply pushing products has given way to a focus on joint solution selling and value creation, requiring a deeper alignment of marketing efforts. Graziano’s experience underscores that distribution is no longer just logistics; it is an enablement engine that bridges the gap between vendor innovation and partner execution. This shift requires that distribution channel marketing not only drive demand generation but also provide the strategic guidance and technological infrastructure necessary for partners to thrive in specialized markets. The evolving landscape demands a blend of high-touch strategic support with high-scale, automated tools, ensuring partners, regardless of size, can effectively capitalize on growth opportunities.
✔ Chapter 2: Marketing Alignment and Avoiding Common Pitfalls A core component of D&H’s strategy is the successful deployment of self-service marketing automation, exemplified by MKT+SHIFT, while maintaining a crucial element of high-touch support. The most significant adoption and success in these self-service models are often seen with partners who are already digitally mature and understand the value of automated outreach and integrated campaigns. They leverage these tools to rapidly scale their outreach and capitalize on time-sensitive vendor promotions and emerging market trends. However, driving partner engagement can be more challenging with smaller or less digitally savvy partners, who may lack the internal marketing expertise or the time to integrate and utilize self-service platforms fully. For these partners, the high-touch support remains essential, focusing on education, co-development, and demonstrating the tangible return on investment of modern channel marketing practices. The lesson here is that technology adoption is accelerated when paired with accessible human guidance.
Graziano’s decades of experience across major distributors, including Tech Data, SYNNEX, and now D&H, highlight critical lessons regarding the alignment of marketing with sales and vendor alliances. A key takeaway is the need for complete transparency and shared metrics across these internal and external groups. Marketing must be measured not just by leads, but also by its contribution to the pipeline and revenue, directly aligning with sales’ objectives. Furthermore, successful vendor alliances require marketing efforts that clearly communicate the value proposition of the joint solution, not just the individual components. The most successful channel marketing organizations are those that break down traditional departmental silos, ensuring that the marketing strategy directly informs and enables the activities of the sales team and reinforces the vendor partnership ecosystem.
A common pitfall companies encounter when trying to modernize channel marketing is focusing exclusively on the technology platform without addressing the foundational issues of process and human capability. Another misstep is creating marketing programs that are too complex, too generic, or not specifically designed for the partner’s unique customer base, leading to low adoption rates. At D&H, the approach to avoiding these pitfalls involves three strategies. First, simplicity and ease of use are prioritized in the MKT+SHIFT platform to encourage broad adoption. Second, the focus is on providing highly customizable, regionally relevant content that partners can immediately leverage. Third, there is a continuous investment in training and communication to ensure partners understand how to use the modern tools to achieve their specific business outcomes, blending strategy with execution.
✔ Chapter 3: The Future: AI, Generational Shifts, and Ecosystem Success The emergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is poised to fundamentally reshape both marketing execution and customer engagement across the channel. Anthony Graziano envisions AI as a powerful tool in refining channel marketing by enabling hyper-personalization at scale. This involves using AI to analyze vast datasets of partner and end-customer behavior, delivering highly targeted content, and optimizing campaign timing to achieve maximum effectiveness. For partner enablement, AI will accelerate the creation of localized and customized marketing assets, drastically reducing the time and resources required for partners to launch sophisticated campaigns. AI also promises to improve sales-marketing alignment by providing predictive analytics on which leads are most likely to convert, ensuring sales teams are focused on the highest-value opportunities within the channel ecosystem. The future success of channel ecosystems will depend on the ability to integrate AI responsibly and effectively into the entire partner journey.
The IT channel is also confronting a significant demographic challenge, characterized by an aging partner base and a pressing need to attract and retain new, young talent. D&H is actively approaching this generational transition by ensuring its platforms and communication methods appeal to a new, digitally native audience. This means moving away from legacy marketing tactics and embracing integrated digital campaigns, social media engagement, and modern, accessible self-service tools. Channel marketing plays a vital role in engaging the next wave of solution providers by emphasizing speed, transparency, and a focus on emerging, high-growth technologies, such as cloud and security. By promoting a culture of inclusion, D&H aims to position the channel not as a traditional industry but as a dynamic, technologically advanced career path for the next generation.
Looking ahead, success for channel ecosystems in the next five years will be defined by agility and the ability to drive co-innovation and consumption models. The winning distributors and partners will be those who can seamlessly adapt to rapid technological change, especially the integration of AI, and effectively manage the transition to subscription and as-a-Service models. D&H is positioning itself to stay ahead of these shifts by continuing to invest in platforms that support sophisticated digital engagement, strengthening its partner enablement programs, and fostering a deep understanding of evolving vendor and solution provider needs. This holistic approach—combining strategic vision with the execution of modern channel marketing tools—ensures D&H remains an essential enabler in the perpetually evolving IT channel landscape.
Building a Partner Ecosystem for Digital & Agentic TransformationThis episode features a discussion between Sugata Sanyal, Founder & CEO of ZINFI, and guest Alex Richards, VP of Partnerships at Quantum Metric. They explore the strategic shift required to build a modern Partner Ecosystem for digital success. Alex shares his experience from companies like Medallia and SurveyMonkey, emphasizing that a successful go-to-market strategy must move beyond just tracking the pipeline. The conversation highlights how Quantum Metric’s Behavioral Analytics and Customer Journey Orchestration platform helps enterprise clients solve friction points across websites, apps, and kiosks. They detail a strategic co-sell and Co-Keep model with ISVs, GSIs, and agencies. Key takeaways include the substantial services opportunity for partners (40-45% of the deal value) and the future role of Agentic Capabilities in fixing fragmented tech stacks and accelerating Digital Transformation. Listen now to learn how to partner for genuine impact.
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Video Podcast: Building a Partner Ecosystem for Digital & Agentic Transformation ✔ Chapter 1: Ecosystem Strategy: Moving Beyond Pipeline Measurement Alex Richards explains why he chose the “hard path” of an ecosystem-based go-to-market strategy over traditional direct sales and marketing. He characterizes the Partner Ecosystem approach as a relationship-driven world that offers a strategic advantage by working with adjacent technologies. This collaboration allows companies to essentially “hack the path to success” rather than operating as a lone wolf, saying, “We’re the best”. For Alex, this strategy is exciting because it is go-to-market led and focuses on leveraging multiple touchpoints to drive sales, marketing, and audience improvements, moving beyond the transactional nature of purely direct sales. The Partner Ecosystem approach is viewed as a means to create a unified value proposition that is significantly stronger and more appealing to enterprise customers.
When evaluating a Partner Ecosystem, Alex insists that companies must look beyond simply generating pipeline efforts. Focusing purely on the pipeline is too narrow and misses significant opportunities for impact. A broader perspective involves leveraging partners to improve marketing activities, reach specific audiences, and build deeper integrations that enhance customer adoption. By telling a “better together story, Quantum Metric and its partners demonstrate how their combined solutions benefit customers and drive key performance indicators (KPIs), which is a much more compelling and strategic approach than just selling a single product. This strategy is particularly crucial when dealing with different geographic regions and specialized ecosystems. The effectiveness of a true Partner Ecosystem is measured by its comprehensive impact across all company functions.
The structure of Quantum Metric’s partner program is designed to support this holistic view, including both technology partners and solutions partners. The technology relationships—such as with Hyperscalers like Google and major ISVs like Adobe—are focused not just on simple integrations, but on driving Co-Sale, account mapping, and referral programs that lead to mutual sales success and customer value. On the solutions side, relationships with global system integrators (GSIs) and agencies (like Accenture and IBM) are about strategic solutioning and complementing Quantum Metric’s services. This part of the Partner Ecosystem is vital for filling service gaps in regions and verticals where a physical presence or domain expertise might be limited, ensuring comprehensive market coverage and service delivery.
✔ Chapter 2: Behavioral Analytics and Customer Journey Orchestration Quantum Metric’s core value proposition is focused on providing deep Behavioral Analytics and Customer Journey Orchestration for enterprise clients. The platform targets personas in digital product teams, marketing, analytics, CX, and the contact center, all of whom face challenges with fragmented systems and digital friction points. The solution is deployed via a JavaScript tag or SDK, which tracks the entire user journey and enables precise recreation, known as session replay. Crucially, the platform acts as a workflow engine that maps these digital journeys and triggers real-time actions when a user encounters friction. This ensures that teams can immediately identify and fix issues—such as a broken button or a malfunctioning funnel—that would otherwise lead to lost revenue, user frustration, and decreased loyalty. The solution is far more robust than simple heat mapping tools, offering a highly secure and actionable “on steroids” version of session analysis. A strong Partner Ecosystem is essential for broad deployment.
The application of Quantum Metric’s technology extends significantly beyond a traditional website or mobile app interface, covering both pre-login and post-login experiences. The platform’s ability to sit on and monitor Salesforce Lightning apps is a major differentiator. This capability allows customers to QA their customer service agents by seeing exactly where they get stuck, or to qualify that brokers are only accessing what they should within Salesforce. Furthermore, the platform can be deployed on self-service kiosks in locations such as Latin America, including ATM equivalents or ordering boards, ensuring that the self-service customer experience is optimized and frictionless. By covering such a wide range of digital and physical touchpoints, Quantum Metric provides a truly holistic view of the customer experience, which its vast Partner Ecosystem helps implement and customize.
From a competitive perspective, partnerships are essential for overcoming larger brands like Adobe and Salesforce. Quantum Metric strategically partners with these ISVs to avoid positioning its product over the overall impact and benefit it drives. The winning formula involves utilizing the Partner Ecosystem to highlight where customers reside and how joint solutions can effectively connect fragmented data points. This enables a better customer experience, such as arming a contact center agent with real-time session information about a caller’s recent frustration on a mobile app, eliminating the need for a generic, time-consuming series of introductory questions. By deeply integrating with partners’ platforms, the company ensures that its insights are actionable and readily available where users and agents live, speeding up resolution and improving efficiency.
✔ Chapter 3: Driving Partner Services and The Co-Keep Model A crucial element of the company’s Partner Ecosystem strategy is the services component, often referred to as Co-Keep. Given that applications and websites are constantly evolving, customers require continuous services, making the one-time sale insufficient. The relationship with partners must ensure they possess the same customer-centric mentality and culture as Quantum Metric to properly onboard and service clients. The company generally passes the entire services business directly to the partner, only “sucking up” the recurring Software as a Service (SaaS) subscription contract on their end. This model ensures that SIs and agencies are fully incentivized to provide high-quality, ongoing support and project-based work. The long-term success and retention of customers hinge heavily on the quality of these complementary services offered by the Partner Ecosystem, making the enablement of consultative engagements a top priority.
The financial opportunity for service partners is substantial. While the exact revenue is complicated to quantify due to varying customer needs and initiatives, Alex Richards estimates that the services component can represent a significant percentage of the total contract value in any given deal. Specifically, there is an opportunity for 40% to 45% on any deal where services are the equivalent value that an SI or agency could be sucking up. The scope can range dramatically; a full-blown Digital Transformation that spans 50 digital properties will generate far more service revenue than a retailer optimizing only one website and two apps. This significant and recurring service opportunity is what makes the Partner Ecosystem attractive to GSIs and specialized agencies, as it allows them to build a deep, profitable, and consultative relationship with the customer.
Beyond services, ongoing activation and enablement are critical for Partner Ecosystem success. The company works to ensure partners are not simply certified once and forgotten, but are instead constantly engaged through activities that make them realize the value of jointly closing a deal. Co-sell success requires the right story and message. For GSIs, enablement involves equipping them with messaging, personas, and competitive analysis, enabling them to identify customer “trigger points” or signals and position Quantum Metric effectively within a consultative or reseller engagement. This continuous engagement and provision of resources are vital to ensuring the Partner Ecosystem constantly drives new business and supports existing customers with the best possible service.
✔ Chapter 4: The Agentic Future: Fragmentation and Geo-Political Data Challenges The future of the Partner Ecosystem and customer experience is rooted in Agentic Capabilities—systems that take immediate, intelligent action. The focus is on automating a significant portion of manual tasks by presenting data in a way that eliminates the need for users to search and find insights manually. An agentic approach enables automated actions, such as notifying multiple internal teams, logging an issue in Jira, or sending an alert to Slack when a critical friction point occurs. This orchestrates a rapid response across the entire organization. The most significant area of impact is expected in collaboration, with the ability to “collaborate across the ecosystem” being where agentic technology is “most powerful”. The most significant barrier to this future is the widespread problem of fragmented tech stacks across companies. For AI to be truly effective, systems must be able to talk to one another and capture the correct information. This consulting opportunity is a significant growth area for the Partner Ecosystem.
The move toward Agentic Transformation must also grapple with global geo-political data challenges, particularly the divergence in data privacy laws. Alex Richards stresses that good practices are non-negotiable, highlighting that Quantum Metric automatically filters out Personally Identifiable Information (PII) on the user’s device before data is transferred. Europe, through its strong GDPR regulations, is currently a leader in setting the standard for data control and privacy. This difference creates a complex landscape where technology companies must be hyper-focused on what data they are capturing and how they are transmitting it, especially when connecting technologies to drive artificial intelligence. The Partner Ecosystem must maintain deep regional expertise to ensure compliance with local regulations.
Interestingly, emerging markets like Latam and APAC are expected to drive significant innovations in this space. Because these regions have less legacy technology to contend with, they are expected to address these privacy and AI concerns promptly. This could potentially lead to faster and more compliant innovation than in historically technology-driven markets, such as the US and parts of EMEA. The ability to integrate and connect different tools while maintaining strict adherence to varying global data privacy standards is essential for the future of the multi-national Partner Ecosystem. Partners in these regions will be key to developing best practices for the rest of the world.
First Principles Drive Modern Partner Ecosystem SuccessIn this insightful episode, Sugata Sanyal, Founder & CEO of ZINFI, sits down with Nelson Wang, Founder of Partner Principles, to discuss the critical evolution of the partnerships landscape. Nelson Wang, who brings over 20 years of operating experience at fast-growth and large public companies, explains why today’s Partner Leaders need to move beyond old playbooks and embrace First Principles Thinking. The conversation highlights that the modern Partner Ecosystem is more nuanced and complex, requiring a customer-centric view and strong cross-functional alignment to drive successful business outcomes. The discussion also covers the essential need for Data-Driven Partnering and Automation with AI to Simplify Complex Workflows and Achieve Massive Productivity Gains.
Key Takeaways include understanding how to apply core principles, such as customer centricity and "one team," across any organization, as well as the essential need for data-driven orchestration and automation with AI. The discussion contrasts the channel-heavy hardware approach of two decades ago with the multi-touch, complex nature of B2B SaaS and AI partnerships today.
Listen now to gain the strategic frameworks needed to lead a thriving Partner Ecosystem.
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Video Podcast: First Principles Drive Modern Partner Ecosystem Success ✔ Chapter 1: The Critical Shift to First Principles Thinking in the Partner Ecosystem Nelson Wang founded his consulting business, Partner Principles, to ensure Partner Leaders have the lessons, principles, and frameworks they need to be successful. He observed that many leaders rely on tactics and playbooks that often fail to translate successfully from one company to the next. The significant “light bulb moment” for him came from mentors who taught him about First Principles Thinking and frameworks, which radically improved the quality and outcomes of his work. This approach allows leaders to apply universal principles to any company, regardless of the ideal customer or partner profile. The core goal is to share lessons from 20 years of operating in partnerships, enabling people to achieve success more quickly and effectively, ultimately reducing stress and long hours.
The most important of these first principles is Customer Centricity. When consulting, Wang anchors companies on the customer by asking critical questions: Who is your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)? What is their customer journey? What specific pain are you solving, and what are the business implications of not solving that pain? Only by deeply understanding the customer problem can a company then determine the right partner types and strategy to put in place. A customer-centric view provides a clear focus on where to go, what resources to allocate, and where to invest energy, which yields a much better answer compared to testing multiple partner types and spreading resources too thin. This principle remains vital across the entire Partner Ecosystem and guides strategic decision-making.
Another foundational first principle is operating as One Team. Far too often, partnership teams operate in silos and do not work cross-functionally with other teams to augment and amplify their efforts. Integrating partnerships into the core workflows of these teams, such as marketing initiatives, can significantly amplify efforts. For example, if a partner is included in a webinar, they might double the attendance among their customer base, thereby immediately doubling the business impact. This strategic alignment ensures that the collective impact on the industry is magnified because teams worked together toward a common core principle, demonstrating how partnership success can be supercharged through a one-team approach.
✔ Chapter 2: The Nuance and Complexity of the Modern Partner Ecosystem The ecosystem has undergone fundamental changes over the last two decades, evolving from the clear-cut “channel” of 20 years ago to a much more complex and nuanced model today. Companies like Cisco and VMware once scaled by routing a massive percentage (80-90%) of their business through resellers using distinct “swim lanes” for a simple resale motion. Today, many B2B SaaS and AI companies employ a direct, Product-Led Growth (PLG) approach with customers, making it significantly harder to decide on a comprehensive sales channel approach with a resale motion. This has led to the development of more granular and tailored swim lanes based on specific customer needs, making the approach more nuanced and compelling.
The new swim lanes are often broken down by region, segment, capability, or vertical. For example, a region like APAC may be much more partner-led than the Americas. Segmentation can carve out services for the internal team that are upmarket, leaving all other services to partners, and targeting the mid-market and commercial segments. Capability-based swim lanes route customers to partners when there is a gap in a necessary capability that the vendor does not deliver. This deep understanding of the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and the pain points they are experiencing is required to map the right partners, making the current ecosystem much more complex, as a company could potentially have multiple swim lanes.
Despite the complexity, the core principles of partnerships still apply: the outcome of what the partner needs to do remains the same—to make customers massively successful and tied to those business outcomes. However, the skill set required has evolved dramatically. While 20 years ago partners focused on reselling and implementation services (e.g., data center virtualization), today partners in the B2B SaaS and AI space must provide services on how to deploy AI within an organization 31 effectively. This requires guiding customers on a framework to identify AI use cases based on feasibility, resourcing, and business impact. Partner organizations must continually adapt their skill sets to serve customers better and achieve the desired business outcomes.
✔ Chapter 3: Data-Driven Orchestration and the Future of Partner Leaders The biggest challenge facing the modern Partner Ecosystem is the massive operational difficulty of managing partnerships through manual, repetitive workflows, often using unstructured content in Excel or Sheets 34. This approach suffers from poor data integrity, siloed processes, and a significant expenditure of time on low-value work to achieve higher-value insights. The opportunity to transform the business lies in embracing.
Data-driven partnering and automation, specifically through AI, unlock a huge opportunity to accelerate automation and insights that were previously too time-consuming or overwhelming to tackle.
Embracing this requires a new mindset for Partner Leaders to identify and automate all repetitive manual tasks, thereby achieving higher value. For example, manually building Statements of Work (SOWs) and proposals for Service Partners (SIs) can take a whole week. With AI, a recording can be ingested, the transcript analyzed, and an SOW and a fully customized proposal can be created in one to two hours, often 80% complete. This massive.
A 10x productivity lift for the partnership company leads to high-value outcomes, including higher conversion rates, larger deal sizes, and improved customer satisfaction during the sales process.
Today’s Chief Partner Officer (CPO) needs to be a highly proactive, cross-functional leader —a significant shift from the more rear-view, fulfillment-driven channel chief of the past. Because modern partner motions often account for smaller, more nuanced percentages of the overall business, the CPO cannot rely on default resourcing or organic alignment. They must proactively establish an operating cadence with cross-functional teams, such as Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success.
The CPO’s role is to examine the entire customer journey—from awareness to purchase to retention—and identify where partners fill the gaps, providing a much broader view than a leader focused on a single partner type. This requires winning the hearts and minds of internal teams and getting them to agree to resource and prioritize partner-led initiatives as a unified “One Team” effort.
HP Reinventing the Future of Work through AI & PartnershipsThis compelling discussion delves deeply into HP’s channel strategy and how it is adapting to the future of work, driven by AI and evolving customer demands. Sugata Sanyal, Founder & CEO of ZINFI, speaks with Meg Brennan (of HP Inc.) about her extensive journey from the early days of the software "channel" business to leading a modern, complex partner ecosystem.
Meg Brennan provides key insights into how HP is leveraging its partners to launch the new AI PC, transforming hardware sales into solution bundles that include security and observability software. The conversation explores the massive changes in supply chain management and the shift from transactional metrics to a more strategic measurement philosophy, which Meg calls the "Artistry of ROI." Listen now to understand how the voice of the partner drives product design and go-to-market motions in a genuinely global, multi-segment enterprise.
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Video Podcast: HP Reinventing the Future of Work through AI & Partnerships ✔ Chapter 1: The Evolution of Partnering: From Channel to Ecosystem The foundation of modern partnering has fundamentally shifted from the simple definition of a “channel” to the complexity of a cohesive “ecosystem”. Meg Brennan recalls her early career in the nineties, where the channel was merely a sales route—a way to reach customers by selling physical, shrink-wrapped software. This transactional approach was based on the strongest distributors and resellers. Today, however, the concept is entirely different; a partner ecosystem is built around adding value. For a technology company like HP, this means relying on partners to add value in diverse ways, from selling products to designing software that works best on AI PCs. The modern ecosystem now includes ISV partnerships, MSPs, GSIs, and service partnerships, going far beyond the traditional reseller model. The core driving force behind this change is a dramatically increased focus on the end customer.
Understanding who the customer is and how to reach them is paramount, requiring vendors to ensure they are present everywhere the customer is researching solutions—not just on their own site, but also robustly represented on partner and retailer sites.
The speed of change in go-to-market motions has accelerated rapidly over the last decade, necessitating a corresponding change in how a global company like HP coordinates content delivery and campaign execution. While HP is a channel-centric company where over 80% of business goes through partners, the process still requires designing the direct content first and then adapting it for the channel. The modern toolset, particularly with advancements in AI, enables content localization and distribution to occur much faster than ever before. A significant part of the hardware world has also adapted, especially on the supply chain side, which has become significantly more nimble due to lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent use of AI-driven analytics to manage complexities like tariffs and manufacturing locations. This increased agility in supply chain management is now translating into a faster, more responsive go-to-market approach at the front end as HP advances its vision for the future of work.
This shift toward an Artistry of ROI is necessary because the customer journey is no longer linear, and partnerships are about joint growth, not single-transaction attribution. The focus is on aligning with partners that will deliver growth in strategic areas. This requires HP to look across its broad market segments—consumers, SMB, mid-market, and enterprise—and its various delivery channels—retail, MSPs, and SIs—to prioritize where it can have the most impact. In areas of stability, the goal is to maintain course and capture organic growth. In emerging regions, such as the MSP space, there is a deliberate decision to “build the plane while we fly it” to gain momentum. This strategic prioritization is critical for effectively managing the vast complexity of HP’s global partner ecosystem.
✔ Chapter 2: AI PC, Software Bundles, and the AI Masterclass HP’s strategy for driving the future of work is centered on the AI PC, which goes beyond a typical laptop by offering core features like superior battery life and the ability to run AI models locally. The ability to run AI locally is a significant value proposition for customers, offering enhanced privacy, security in secured environments like healthcare, and reduced cloud costs. Meg provided examples of its local application, such as an AI-powered camera that manages background blur and follows the user. To ensure this innovative technology succeeds in the market, HP strategically focused on winning the “hearts and minds” of its partners, recognizing them as essential influencers in this new technology space. This approach was immediately operationalized with the launch of the Amplify AI program.
A critical component of this enablement strategy is the AI Masterclass. This program was designed to educate partners on the fundamentals, such as what an LLM is and how AI works, effectively leveling up the entire industry together. The masterclass also provided partners with a sneak peek at HP’s own roadmap and how the applications on the AI PC would add value to their customers. The response has been overwhelming, with tens of thousands of partners completing the masterclass, demonstrating their enthusiasm and commitment to selling the new technology. This partner-centric launch successfully positioned HP’s solutions, where the value proposition is clear: even simple benefits, such as all-day battery life for frequent travelers, are a winning differentiator.
The conversation then extended to the evolution of software, which has undergone a complete transition from perpetual licenses in physical boxes to a cloud-based SaaS model, often featuring consumption-based billing. Meg used the analogy of a customer wanting to buy “a glass of wine at a time” rather than the whole case, emphasizing that modern models allow customers and partners to purchase and pay how they want. This software evolution necessitates that HP package hardware and software as a complete solution, known internally as “OneHP,” to solve problems related to the future of work. The enablement for partners focuses first on understanding the customer problem the software solves—whether it is HP Wolf security or the observability software WXP—to ensure they can articulate its value to the customer. HP offers partners financial incentives and rebates to align with this “OneHP” vision, ultimately promoting a win-win scenario that grows the partner’s business by selling more than just a box.
✔ Chapter 3: The Artistry of ROI and Partner-Driven Strategy The third central theme is the evolution of metrics, which Meg Brennan refers to as the “Artistry of ROI.” In her early career, measurement was straightforward, focused only on how much a partner sold. This later evolved into the more intensive, transactional attribution model, which measures how much a partner initiates and attempts to tie every dollar of MDF investment to a specific deal. Today, Meg has shifted away from this highly intensive, transactional approach, recognizing that a customer journey involves 25 or more marketing interactions, making single-activity attribution less powerful and overly complex.
The contemporary approach, the Artistry of ROI, is more nuanced and strategic. It focuses on overall program effectiveness and the success of joint “plays”. Instead of claiming “we caused that deal”, the focus is on whether HP’s investments influenced growth in the areas targeted by a strategic play. The key is to review the joint business plan and assess whether the investments are yielding growth in the business with those specific partners. This strategic mindset is critical for prioritizing programs across HP’s complex 4×4 market matrix, ensuring that the company focuses its investment where it can gain the most leverage and opportunity, such as the emerging MSP space or the federal system integrator market in Europe.
The Voice of the Partner heavily influences this strategic approach. HP relies on Partner Advisory Boards (PABs) and local advisory councils to bring direct feedback to its product leaders. The partners—often high-level executives—do not focus on granular product details, but on high-level business requirements, such as the need for multi-tenancy for MSPs or FedRAMP certification for Federal System Integrators (FSIs). Finally, the evolution of the team driving this strategy requires leaders who are curious about differentiating the company, are action-oriented (preferring execution over just talk), and, increasingly, have technical skills. The future operational employee will become more of an “agent manager” than an administrative worker, leveraging AI to automate tasks and enable frontline staff to focus on more valuable, partner-facing work.
The Channel’s Shift to Partner-Led With AIIn this episode, Sugata Sanyal Founder & CEO of ZINFI, sits down with Raegan Wilson, VP of Ecosystem Innovation and Solutions at Spur Reply. They delve into the dramatic transformation of the channel ecosystem over the last two decades. The discussion focuses on how the traditional model of “box builders” has given way to a partner-led approach, where partners now drive the go-to-market strategy for vendors. Reagan shares her unique perspective, having been in the channel for over 20 years, and offers insights into how new technologies, including AI, are further changing the landscape. The conversation touches on the importance of readiness and maturity for brands looking to build an ecosystem and the key role of automation in making the process more efficient.
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Video Podcast: The Channel’s Shift to Partner-Led With AI ✔ Chapter 1: The Evolution of the Partner Ecosystem: From Box Builders to Partner-Led Raegan Wilson describes her experience with the evolution of the channel over more than two decades, starting from the era of “Box Builders”. Back then, partners were primarily value-added resellers who would build computers and servers by assembling various components. Raegan recalls visiting partner offices and seeing their framed certifications and branded swag from different vendors. This was when vendors were in the driver’s seat, pulling partners along, and partners were seen as an extension of the vendor’s go-to-market efforts. The market has changed dramatically since then. Partners who failed to adapt to new technologies, like wireless networking, often went out of business. This shift highlights a critical lesson in the channel’s history: partners must continuously morph their business models to survive and thrive. This same pressure appeared with the change to cloud services and is now a factor with AI. The most significant change Raegan notes is the shift in power, with partners now driving the solution for the end customer. Instead of vendors leading, the partner-led model puts the partner in the proverbial driver’s seat, loading up their solution with vendors that fit the tech stack. This fundamental shift requires brands to change how they engage with their channel, acknowledging the partner’s central role in the solution delivery.
The modern channel is more complex than ever, moving beyond traditional reseller models to include various services, solutions, and integrations. The days of simply building a box are replaced by a focus on value-added services that solve complex customer problems. Raegan points out that this evolution has led to a higher barrier to entry for entrepreneurs in this space, as the risks and necessary security checks are much steeper than they were in the past. She also notes a trend towards consolidation, with larger organizations growing even bigger as they deliver value across the entire ecosystem. This environment demands that brands provide a clear value proposition to partners, making it easy for them to understand where they fit in, how they can make money, and where the opportunities are. The success of a partner-led strategy depends on the brand’s ability to communicate value and follow the partner’s go-to-market strategy rather than imposing its own.
Sugata and Raegan also discuss the differing maturity levels between IT and traditional manufacturing industries. While newer IT companies quickly adopt ecosystem strategies because they don’t have legacy tech debt, many conventional manufacturers struggle with antiquated systems and processes. This often makes it harder for them to get modernized and optimized. The interview highlights that even well-established enterprise companies, which one might expect to be well-oiled machines, often face significant challenges in implementing simple changes. Raegan reassures that this struggle is common and not unique to a single large player. The conversation also touches on the convergence of IT and OT (operational technology), particularly in manufacturing. It introduces new challenges like cybersecurity and data centralization that require a more comprehensive, leadership-level approach to automation. This complexity underscores the need for expert guidance in navigating the modern ecosystem.
✔ Chapter 2: Technology and the New Go-to-Market: Marketplaces and AI The discussion then pivots to the role of technology in the new partner-led reality, focusing on marketplaces as a critical go-to-market channel. Raegan explains that once seen as just a place to list an app, marketplaces have evolved into a channel with significant velocity. Partners are now instrumental in helping end customers manage their marketplace spend and private offers, making it easier for them to acquire technology and access budgets they might not have known were available. The challenge for vendors is understanding their partners’ readiness and maturity level before jumping into marketplaces. A brand might be four steps behind a competitor and should therefore consider other routes to market where they have higher partner engagement or readiness. Prioritizing a marketplace strategy should be based on looking at internal capabilities and resources, not just what a competitor does. It is also essential for brands to understand their position in the tech stack—are they the “burger” or the “ketchup”? Understanding where a solution fits the customer’s overall stack helps a vendor identify the right partners and opportunities for an attach play.
Raegan emphasizes that while finding complementary partners in the new ecosystem has become easier, the sheer volume of vendors also makes it harder to rise above the noise. A strong story and clear value proposition are essential to capture a partner’s attention. This is where the strategic use of AI comes into play. AI can be leveraged to find the right partners by analyzing data and creating detailed profiles. Using the right prompts, brands can get a list of potential partners, build value propositions, and tailor their recruitment messaging. This automation helps the recruitment process, but Raegan stresses that the following steps must also be automated to handle the influx of prospective partners. She also notes that the methods for reaching partners have changed, with phone calls being less effective and LinkedIn and email becoming more critical.
Looking at the technology platforms themselves, Raegan acknowledges that they have made significant strides over the past decade. However, she notes that the channel has always been a bit behind in adopting technology and that vendors often need to understand their customers’ specific needs better. Many companies are tempted to put the platform first, but Raegan argues that a solid foundation of people, processes, and programs is necessary to leverage technology successfully. Without this foundation, automating a flawed process can lead to problems. Raegan’s five P’s—People, Process, Programs, Partners, and Platform—provide a clear roadmap for success.
✔ Chapter 3: Optimizing Go-to-Market with AI and Partner Programs Raegan highlights key areas where AI is already significantly impacting partner-led strategies, starting with content. She calls content the “Achilles heel of channel” and explains that Gen AI is a game-changer for content creation and partnerization. One of the most powerful use cases is localization and translation. In the past, translating content into multiple languages was a costly and time-consuming process. Still, Gen AI has made it faster and more cost-effective, allowing companies to meet their global partners in their local language. Another key use case is making content more useful for partners. Gen AI can take internally facing training materials and shorten them to be more concise and practical for partners with limited time. The content can be tailored to acknowledge the partner’s expertise, a key element often overlooked in traditional training materials.
Beyond content, Raegan sees a massive opportunity for internal-facing AI agents to improve efficiency for channel account managers. These agents can help with various tasks, from aligning partners with specific opportunities to tracking compliance and identifying underperforming partners. For example, an internal agent can look across a CRM and other data sets to find the best partner in a region, check their performance, and even draft an email about relevant promotions. This is much faster than a human manually digging for this information. The ultimate goal is for these agents to become more partner-facing, providing real-time insights to partners about promotions, new products, and customer renewal opportunities across their entire vendor ecosystem. However, Raegan notes that this will require better data governance, as the channel has long struggled with data quality.
Raegan also discusses the evolution of partner compensation, which has shifted away from being tied to partner types or tiers. Instead, some brands reward partners based on the number of customers they touch rather than the size of a single deal. This incentivizes a broader reach and rewards behavior that aligns with the brand’s goals. This change reflects that many partners, like Raegan’s own firm, prefer to be compensated for their services and expertise rather than through vendor referral fees or incentives. This allows them to maintain a trusted advisor relationship with their customers. The conversation concludes with a forward-looking view, where AI’s most valuable application will help partners navigate the complex multi-vendor universe, making their jobs easier and their businesses more successful.
AI-Ready Enterprise: Scaling Your People StackThe cybersecurity landscape has undergone significant changes over the last three decades, evolving from hardware-based systems to complex, cloud-centric solutions. This evolution demands a new kind of leadership and a redefined channel strategy.
In this episode, Sugata Sanyal Founder & CEO of ZINFI, sits down with Joe Sykora, CEO of Coro Cybersecurity—a proven channel veteran and former founder—to unpack this shift. They discuss Coro’s modern cybersecurity solution, which brings simplicity and automation to lean IT teams. A core focus is Joe’s philosophy on the People Stack: why strong, loyal, entrepreneurial teams are the valid key to scaling high-growth companies and how he builds this crucial advantage. The conversation also addresses the harsh reality of MSP consolidation, career pivots, and why personal relationships remain the most important.
Listen now to gain deep insights into what it takes to lead and succeed in the next era of cybersecurity.
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Video Podcast: AI-Ready Enterprise: Scaling Your People Stack ✔ Chapter 1: The Channel’s Three-Decade Pivot: From White Box to AI-Ready Cybersecurity The cybersecurity channel strategy has undergone a fundamental transformation over the last 30 years. Early on, businesses relied on basic white box server reselling and physical, hardware-based firewalls. Partners operated through distribution channels, focusing on pick, pack, and ship logistics. The primary challenges were less about digital threat detection and more about network connectivity through expensive ISDN or T1 lines. This period was characterized by high hardware margins and a regional approach to business, where face-to-face relationships and physical stores were the primary channels for customer acquisition.
As the internet and bandwidth expanded, the channel shifted its focus toward managed services and security appliances. The modern reality of cybersecurity is one of overwhelming data and complexity, even with the aid of AI. Coro Cybersecurity, Joe Sykora’s current company, embodies this shift by offering an AI-Ready Enterprise solution: an all-in-one platform for lean IT teams who lack large budgets or deep staff. By building their own technology, they achieve a true single pane of glass, eliminating complicated API integrations and simplifying operations for both end-users and MSP partners.
This dramatic shift from tangible hardware sales to cloud-based subscriptions and specialized services has significantly impacted the margins and viability of new partners. Starting a new partner business is harder today because the switching costs and risks are higher in established markets compared to the greenfield opportunities of the past. The need for deep expertise, coupled with shrinking margins and intense price pressure on managed services, has fueled a wave of partner consolidation. The challenge for the AI-Ready Enterprise is managing both increasing complexity and the ever-present threat of human error, as people remain the weakest link in security.
✔ Chapter 2: The Hard Truth of Channel Consolidation and the Talent Shortage The current climate for the channel is defined by intense competition and a trend toward consolidation, making it difficult for new entrants. The high profitability of selling infrastructure and hardware in the early decades has given way to subscription models with lower margins. Partners are under continuous price pressure, forcing many to pivot completely to services. However, even the managed services market is seeing heavy competition and price compression. This challenging economic environment, combined with the aging out of many long-time partner owners, is driving a natural market consolidation, as attractive acquisition multipliers encourage exits.
A significant factor in this consolidation is the persistent global talent shortage in cybersecurity, a problem that has persisted for years. For smaller MSPs, competing with large organizations for highly skilled Security Operations Center (SOC) analysts is nearly impossible due to salary demands. This resource scarcity, in conjunction with the need for scale to maintain profitability, suggests that large, consolidated players may continue to dominate the market. However, this crisis in resources may also be solved by the very technology driving the threats: AI.
The hope for partners—both small and large—lies in next-generation AI-ready tools that can do a hundred times more with less labor. Platforms like Coro’s, which simplify multiple security functions into a single system, directly address the lean IT problem and level the playing field for partners. By operationalizing the back end for MSPs and eliminating time-consuming tasks, technology can help mitigate the impact of the talent gap. Success in this AI-ready enterprise era depends less on being first to market with new technology and more on successfully integrating and simplifying the existing, complex tech stack.
✔ Chapter 3: Scaling Your People Stack: The Blueprint for a High-Growth AI-Ready Enterprise Joe Sykora’s career, marked by multiple successful pivots from founder to C-suite executive and back to CEO, highlights the importance of a loyal People Stack as the most critical business asset. He consistently attracts and retains a core team of entrepreneurial individuals who are driven to “make a name for themselves” and chase success. This team is defined by a shared characteristic: a willingness to embrace change, a passion for continuous learning, and a desire to challenge the status quo. Joe’s approach is to execute a framework quickly, aiming for 90% accuracy, then making rapid tweaks, which contrasts with the slower, risk-averse processes of some large organizations.
A key lesson from his journey is the importance of relationships—not just with customers and partners, but with the loyal team members who move from one company to the next. Joe asserts that relationships are more important than processes, building a competitive advantage that allows a new organization to move much faster. For example, his international experience allowed him to quickly open new offices in APJ and Europe by leveraging his existing network for key hires and market insights. This ability to mobilize a trusted team enables the AI-Ready Enterprise to condense months or a year of planning into days or weeks.
As the complexity of the AI-Ready Enterprise grows, Joe recognizes the need to look for non-technical attributes in new hires, such as an openness to change and a willingness to learn new concepts like advanced AI. When hiring outside his network, his vetting process extends beyond checking technical boxes to include an actual conversation, ensuring a cultural and personality fit. This intentional focus on the People Stack—the right talent, culture, and relationships—is the foundational blueprint for achieving the hyper-growth Joe is pursuing.
Tech Mahindra’s Ecosystem: Driving Outcome-Driven AI TransformationsIn this episode, Sugata Sanyal Founder & CEO of ZINFI, sits down with Mayank Shekhar Choudhary, Senior Vice President of the Partner Ecosystem at Tech Mahindra in Europe. They discuss how Tech Mahindra is revolutionizing industries with its unique approach to digital and AI transformations. The conversation highlights the company’s focus on building a strong ecosystem of partners and delivering outcome-driven solutions rather than just focusing on traditional IT metrics. Mayank shares compelling examples from the manufacturing, telecom, and banking sectors, detailing how this strategy helps customers modernize legacy systems, reduce capital expenditure, and free up resources for further innovation. This discussion provides valuable insights into the power of collaborative ecosystems and the strategic use of technology to drive real business value.
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Video Podcast: Tech Mahindra’s Ecosystem: Driving Outcome-Driven AI Transformations ✔ Chapter 1: The Converged IT, OT, and Network Environment Mayank explains that Tech Mahindra’s services go beyond traditional IT and Operations Technology (OT) to create a converged environment that includes the network. He emphasizes that this three-pronged approach is crucial for achieving seamless digital transformation. Tech Mahindra works across various verticals as a system integrator, with a strong focus on telecom, banking and financial services, and manufacturing. The company aims to be a trusted, consultative partner in the manufacturing sector, providing an end-to-end journey from creating a future roadmap to real-world execution. The ultimate goal is to evolve the customer’s landscape while keeping the end customer at the center of every decision.
This comprehensive strategy is exemplified by Tech Mahindra’s work with a global chemical manufacturer, BASF, where they are transforming the company’s enterprise network across 600 sites in 72 countries. They implemented a “network as a service” model to achieve this massive project without disrupting business. This model allows the customer to pay for the service they consume rather than making a substantial upfront capital investment, a significant industry trend. By utilizing an ecosystem of partners, Tech Mahindra successfully re-engineered processes, managed people, and brought new technologies to transform the client’s infrastructure. This focus on outcome-driven solutions ensures that the customer realizes tangible business benefits.
The concept of a converged environment extends to the telecom space, where Tech Mahindra is helping a premier Dutch telco, KPN, to achieve autonomous operations. By bringing in process changes and innovative technology, the objective is to take the telco from a level three to a level five of autonomy. This doesn’t lead to job losses; instead, it frees employees to be utilized more effectively. This is a clear example of how Tech Mahindra’s digital transformation efforts are designed to create a single pane of glass for visibility, helping telcos manage their IT, OT, and network systems in a unified way and reduce their mean time to repair (MTTR).
✔ Chapter 2: The Power of Innovative Financial Models and Ecosystems A significant trend in the technology and services industry is the shift towards flexible financial models, such as pay-as-you-go. This approach is driven by customers’ desire to avoid tying up capital expenditure and to access specialized expertise that is constantly evolving. Tech Mahindra leverages its ecosystem of partners, including technology vendors and financing arms, to deliver these models. The financing arm often plays a critical role by taking ownership of the physical assets, like hardware, and managing their lifecycle, including refresh cycles and repurposing. This allows Tech Mahindra to focus on its core strength: delivering an outcome. It’s a win-win for everyone involved, as the customer gets the desired business outcome without the burden of heavy capital investment.
The recycling and repurposing of used assets, which used to end up in junkyards, is now a more structured process, driven by both financing and sustainability. This trend has accelerated in recent years, with much funding available to support it. For example, technology partners like Lenovo, HPE, and Dell are now seeing their equipment repurposed for data centers, as long as it meets quality standards. The rise of cloud computing and data residency regulations has also widened the scope for these arrangements. This evolution in the financial model of IT services is an integral part of the broader digital transformation that Tech Mahindra facilitates.
The discussion also explores how this convergence of technology and financial models impacts the banking and finance sector. Banks, the backbone of any economy, have been at the forefront of transformation and are not shy about investing. However, their capital is limited. Tech Mahindra helps them modernize legacy systems, such as mainframes, to free up cash. This freed-up cash can be reinvested in further transformation, such as implementing robotic process automation or enhancing anti-money laundering systems. By offering platforms like Temenos on a cloud-based, consumption-based model, Tech Mahindra enables banks to achieve their transformation goals without a massive upfront expenditure, reinforcing the importance of outcome-driven solutions in the finance sector.
✔ Chapter 3: Orchestrating a Complex Ecosystem and a People-First Approach Tech Mahindra prides itself on a culture of “drinking our own champagne” to deliver on these complex projects. This means they implement technologies and solutions internally before offering them to customers. For example, they transformed their internal service management system with ServiceNow and implemented SAP S/4HANA before bringing these solutions to their clients. This internal experimentation provides a crucial learning ground and builds confidence in their solutions. The company operates with a philosophy of “fail fast, recover faster” and uses lab setups to test new ideas. This approach to internal AI transformation ensures their readiness to help others.
Mayank describes his role in Europe as running the partner ecosystem and details how his team orchestrates a complex network of alliances. A key mantra is transparency, with a clear understanding that they either “sail together or fail together” with their partners. Before an RFP is even released, Tech Mahindra collaborates with its partners to strategize a win, as they know that without a pre-formed alliance, they have a 50% lower chance of success. They also engage in “co-opetition,” working alongside other system integrators on complex projects where each partner serves a different part of the solution. This model is gaining traction because it provides a flexible approach to delivering complex projects as long as the roles and responsibilities are clearly defined.
At the heart of Tech Mahindra’s success is its people-first approach. Recognizing that talent is a valuable and scarce resource, they prioritize a diverse workforce and focus on grooming internal talent. The company invests in making its people “future-ready” by providing certifications in new technologies. Mayank notes that they are not afraid of AI, but rather embrace it. They have a company-wide initiative to train the entire organization in AI transformation, from sales to delivery, and they have used AI to create a foundational large language model, therapeutic molecules, and apps for farmers, among other things. The goal is not to eliminate jobs, but to free up people to be utilized more effectively.
Mayank Shekhar Choudhary’s interview with Sugata Sanyal provides valuable insights into how Tech Mahindra builds partnerships, drives digital and AI transformations, and maintains a people-first culture.
Building a Partner Ecosystem-First Sales StrategyIn this episode, Sugata Sanyal, Founder & CEO of ZINFI, sits down with Matt Green, the co-founder and CRO of Sales Assembly. Matt shares his journey from finance to leading go-to-market teams in the B2B tech sector. The conversation dives deep into the power of a community-first approach and how a strong partner ecosystem can drive growth through word-of-mouth and referrals. They discuss the critical skills modern sales professionals need, contrasting product-led and sales-led growth motions. This episode is a must-listen for anyone looking to build a resilient and effective sales strategy in today’s fast-changing market.
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Video Podcast: Building a Partner Ecosystem-First Sales Strategy ✔ Chapter 1: The Journey from Finance to an Ecosystem-First Approach Matt Green’s career path is far from typical. He describes his transition from finance to tech sales as a “Forrest Gump” theme, where he simply bumped into opportunities that shaped his professional life. A key thread throughout his entire career has been his role in a client-facing or sales capacity. His decision to leave finance and enter the tech world was a conscious choice he made despite facing unemployment at the time. The inspiration for Sales Assembly came from hosting monthly coffee meetings with other sales leaders in the Chicago tech scene. They discovered that the leaders faced the same common problems regardless of their companies’ products. This insight was the genesis for Sales Assembly, which was initially built as a community-first model that offered little training.
The network became the core product, allowing revenue leaders to exchange ideas, best practices, and troubleshoot problems. This community-driven approach is deeply embedded in the company’s DNA and has been a key driver of its growth. As a bootstrapped organization, Sales Assembly relies heavily on referrals, introductions, and word-of-mouth from its network. The success of this model proves that a strong community and partner ecosystem can be a powerful engine for growth, even without extensive outbound sales efforts. This strategy resonates with the modern B2B landscape, where building a valuable network is often more effective than traditional selling methods.
Matt argues that a community is valuable for any SaaS company, regardless of its product or target audience. He recommends that companies find existing communities of their buyers and get heavily involved. Adding value to these sub-ecosystems allows a startup to break through the noise and differentiate itself from larger competitors. This approach of being a part of the ecosystem, rather than just selling to it, allows for a more authentic and impactful presence in the market. It’s not about a well-thought-out plan but about recognizing and acting on the opportunities that arise from actively participating in your industry’s community.
✔ Chapter 2: Selling in the AI Era: Skills vs. Process The rise of AI has raised questions about what parts of sales it can automate or replace. Matt believes that specific human skills, such as curiosity, trust, and empathy, cannot be adequately replaced by AI. These soft skills are becoming even more critical, especially in mid-market and enterprise sales, because they are the key differentiators between a company and its competitors. While the foundational sales skills remain the same, their deployment changes depending on the sales motion. For example, in a product-led growth (PLG) model, a sales professional might focus on expanding an existing relationship. In a sales-led motion, the focus is on establishing the relationship from scratch, going from “zero to one”.
The skills needed for sales are consistent across different segments like SMB, mid-market, and enterprise, but how they are used changes. For a lower mid-market or SMB sale, a salesperson might craft a single compelling story for one decision-maker. In a complex enterprise sale, the same storytelling skill must be adapted to address multiple stakeholders with different motivations. For instance, the story told to a finance professional should not be the same as that told to the CTO or sales leader because they all care about different things. This highlights the importance of multi-threading in today’s sales landscape, where the challenge is navigating a world of remote work and opaque buyer identities.
Matt emphasizes the importance of effective research to overcome these challenges. All the necessary information is available if a salesperson is willing to do the work to find it. A salesperson can manually find key contacts on platforms like LinkedIn by inferring information from similar companies and identifying traditional stakeholders. A BDR, for instance, needs a different set of competencies than an enterprise AE, as they are tasked with standing out in a “sea of sameness” and breaking through the noise. This blending of digital and soft skills is crucial for success in a world where AI is automating many of the tactical aspects of the job.
✔ Chapter 3: The Future of Sales: Skills, Technology, and Process The conversation explores how sales are evolving and what the future holds. Matt points out that sales are changing, with more businesses adopting a “B2C-ification of B2B”. Companies are now selling high-value products without ever talking to a prospect, much like buying a car on Carvana. In this new environment, skills like relationship-building and storytelling will become even more valuable because they differentiate a salesperson in a digital-first world. He believes that those with liberal arts backgrounds, who are skilled in communication and conversation, may have an advantage as the market shifts.
The discussion then turns to the post-sales cycle and the increasing commercialization of customer success teams. Organizations are realizing the potential revenue expansion within their existing customer base and are tasking their CSMs to drive it. This requires CSMs to learn sales skills like negotiation and more effective discovery, even if it falls outside their traditional comfort zone. The tech stack for sales is also becoming increasingly complex and expensive, with an average spend of $8,500 per salesperson. Matt believes the current state of sales tech is “messy” due to companies adopting too many inexpensive point solutions. He advises leaders to start small with new AI tools, focusing on specific, micro-level problems before scaling the entire organization.
Finally, the conversation concludes with advice for CROs on where to invest. Matt suggests that companies with around $10 million in revenue should allocate about 3-5% of their sales budget to training and enablement to keep their teams fresh and skilled. He highlights two key tech investment areas to watch in the next 12 to 18 months: leveraging conversational intelligence to create compelling business cases and using AI for in-depth pre-call research. These tools can help sales teams translate insights into tangible, shareable documents and equip them with a unique point of view, which is essential for differentiation.
Storytelling: The Heart of Partner Ecosystem MarketingIn this episode, Sugata Sanyal, Founder & CEO of ZINFI, is joined by Ffjorren Zolfaghar, VP of Alliances at IDMWORKS. Ffjorren shares her unique career journey from journalism to the forefront of technology alliances, highlighting how the art of storytelling remains a critical skill in B2B marketing. The discussion explores the rapidly evolving identity management landscape, the role of partners in navigating complex cybersecurity challenges, and the criteria for building successful, trust-based technology alliances. Listeners will better understand why focusing on business outcomes over technical specifications is key to engaging customers and partners. Tune in to learn how to cut through the noise and create a partner marketing strategy that resonates, drives value, and builds lasting relationships in a dynamic tech ecosystem.
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Video Podcast: Storytelling: The Heart of Partner Ecosystem Marketing ✔ Chapter 1: The Journey from Journalism to Tech Alliances Ffjorren Zolfaghar begins the conversation by introducing herself as the VP of Alliances for IDMWORKS, a services-led organization that handles reselling and managed services. She reveals that her tech career spans over a decade and is actually a second career. Her first was in journalism, a field she entered after studying at the University of Minnesota. She started in radio, TV, and newspaper, covering general news with an initial aspiration to become a reporter for the nightly news. Her journey then took a different turn, leading her to become a content editor and director for a publishing house, where she focused on alternative healthcare and lifestyle topics.
The transition into technology was initially driven by a practical need for a more lucrative career, a decision influenced by her younger brother, who made key introductions for her. Ffjorren acknowledges the irony of her current role. As a self-proclaimed lover of pen and paper who enjoys unplugging from all devices, she admits that many people would find her unlikely to work in the technology sector. Despite this, she quickly rose, leveraging her foundational skills. She believes that the communication and writing skills honed in journalism are a “lost art” that has been tremendously helpful in her career, first in marketing and then in partner sales and management. This unique background gives her a distinctive perspective on the power of clear and compelling communication in a technical and often jargon-filled industry.
She discusses the core principle that connects her two careers: storytelling. She explains that the objective remained the same whether she was writing a news story for an audience or creating marketing content for a consumer. The goal is to gain attention, provide information, and make the content relatable and digestible so the audience understands the message. From her perspective, everyone is telling a story and “selling something” every day, whether it’s themselves in a job interview or a company’s vision to a customer. She sees marketing and sales as interconnected, working hand-in-hand. This foundational understanding of narrative and audience engagement allowed her to pivot into marketing seamlessly and, eventually, into her current role in alliances, where she focuses on communicating value and building trusted relationships.
✔ Chapter 2: The Evolving Landscape of Identity Management and AI Ffjorren provides a comprehensive overview of the identity management space, noting the significant shifts over the last decade. She explains that identity, which dates back to the 1960s, has steadily evolved from being a standalone concept to an integral part of the security and cybersecurity world. Citing a common industry phrase, she states that “identity is the new perimeter,” a concept she advocated for years ago and which is now more relevant than ever. She highlights that over 85% of security breaches begin with a compromised identity. These breaches are not just about gaining access but about getting to the ultimate target: data. This underscores the critical importance of identity as the core of any robust cybersecurity strategy.
She further breaks down the core components of an identity program into three main pillars: Identity and Access Management (IAM), Identity Governance and Administration (IGA), and Privileged Access Management (PAM). While traditional vendors like Okta, SailPoint, and CyberArk dominate these spaces, Ffjorren points out that the market is now seeing an influx of new startups. These newer players often come in to “augment” or “overlay” existing solutions, filling gaps that traditional providers might have. While providing new solutions, this influx also increases complexity and confusion for the end consumer. The technology is rapidly moving to the cloud, and more SaaS offerings are entering the market, but legacy on-premise technology still exists, particularly in large enterprise companies. This creates a complex, fragmented environment where service providers like IDMWORKS play a crucial role in structuring a cohesive solution.
Ffjorren identifies the mid-market and SMB space as the most fertile ground for new opportunities. Unlike large enterprises burdened by legacy technology and still having many on-premise systems, smaller businesses often start their IT journey in a cloud-first, SaaS-driven environment. This makes them more receptive to adopting new technologies quickly. While IDM serves a broad range of clients, from SMBs to Fortune 500 companies, she notes that their sweet spot is generally low-enterprise to strategic-level accounts, focusing on specific verticals like financial services, healthcare, and education. The needs of these verticals can vary, especially concerning compliance requirements, with industries like healthcare and government needing to adhere to stricter regulations. This complexity further highlights the need for expert guidance in navigating the identity management landscape.
✔ Chapter 3: The Critical Role of Partner Alliances in a Fragmented World Ffjorren addresses the profound impact of AI on the technology landscape, noting that every vendor, from established leaders to new startups, is scrambling to incorporate AI into their messaging and solutions. She observes that this looks like adding an AI functionality to a pre-existing solution for many existing vendors, rather than being a core AI-native company. She contrasts this with a few new startups she has spoken with, whose entire existence is built on an AI platform. She believes this is just the beginning and that the next phase will see AI-native solutions that not only augment current offerings but have the potential to completely “rip and replace” the technology offered by top-tier incumbents. She also anticipates the emergence of new security technologies specifically designed to protect AI platforms themselves, a critical need as AI continues to grow and learn.
The discussion shifts to the role of a service provider like IDMWORKS in this chaotic market. Ffjorren explains her strategic approach to building alliances. While they maintain strong relationships with their current top-tier vendors, she is actively expanding their capacity to engage with and vet new startups. Her philosophy is that companies risk becoming stagnant if they don’t stay on the cutting edge and keep their senses “aware of everything happening around you”. She looks at market trends to identify gaps and potential growth areas, always seeking solutions that can either fortify existing offerings or, if necessary, replace them. This forward-looking approach is a key part of the value they provide to customers, as it ensures they are recommending not just a trusted solution, but an innovative one.
Compelling storytelling is the core challenge for vendors and service providers in this fragmented, noisy environment. To stand out, Ffjorren advises new vendors to do their research and understand their audience. For a company like IDMWORKS, this means knowing they are a services-driven organization and tailoring the message to what matters most to them—business outcomes, not just product features. This is also a challenge within large organizations, where she has observed a tendency for different departments—marketing, sales, alliances, product—to work in silos. She stresses the importance of breaking down these barriers and ensuring everyone is aligned with a consistent message. Ffjorren’s journey, driven by persistence and a desire for continuous learning, reflects this principle of adaptation and innovation, which she believes is the key to success in any industry.
Leading Microsoft Ecosystems at Scale in the AI EraIn this episode, Sugata Sanyal the main boss (Founder & CEO) of ZINFI, has a great chat with Nina Harding. Nina is a Corporate Vice President at Microsoft, overseeing how Microsoft works with partners across the Americas region. Nina shares her incredible journey in leadership, showing how partnerships have changed a lot over the years. They talk about how new AI technology has a massive effect on how businesses work and how companies help their customers. Nina explains how Microsoft is helping its many partners get ready for this significant change and thrive through it. You’ll learn how flexibility, working together, and focusing on good results make new things happen faster in the Microsoft world. Listen in to find out more about what’s next for AI and working with partners.
Related Guidebook Navigating the AI Revolution: A Guide for Partners in the Microsoft EcosystemYour Essential Roadmap for Growth and Innovation in the Age of AI
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Video Podcast: Leading Microsoft Ecosystems at Scale in the AI Era ✔ Chapter 1: Nina’s Career Path and Partner GrowthNina Harding talks about her long career, which includes working at big companies like Oracle, SAP, Google, and twice at Microsoft. Throughout these years, she has always focused on how different companies work together, which she calls “partnerships.” She has seen how these partnerships have changed significantly over 30 years. When she started in the early 1990s, she saw how new computer programs and databases were just beginning to be used, and this helped her understand how the digital world would grow. Because she worked for both huge companies and smaller new companies, Nina learned special ways to help partners use big market opportunities and create new things together.
Nina has noticed a significant shift in how companies work with partners. It used to be that companies focused on just a few special partners. The goal is to get a whole “ecosystem” of many different partners to work together and succeed. This raised a question: should companies tell partners exactly what to do, or should they let partners help lead the way? Nina says that at Microsoft, working with partners has always been a key part of how the company works, right from the start. This means that when Microsoft creates new products or sales plans, it always includes partners to ensure customers get what they need.
Microsoft, led by Nina, tries to build strong trust and long-lasting relationships with its partners, not just work with them for quick wins. This commitment shows up in many ways. Microsoft helps partners learn new skills and provides training. They also bring partners into their sales meetings and events. They ensure partners are part of how Microsoft sells its products and services and offer special rewards to help partners do well. This way of working together is based on the idea that “we are better together.” It allows the whole Microsoft world to work as one team, ensuring everyone wins.
✔ Chapter 2: How Leaders Make Change Happen Nina Harding discusses how big companies like Microsoft, Oracle, and Google have similar parts. No matter the company, she always has to work with different partners, like those who sell products or create new software. She needs to understand what each type of partner needs and how they can all help each other. Partners always want to know the big company’s plan and how they can fit into that plan. Nina feels her job is similar to being “the president of a country,” where she has to manage a huge global group of partners and ensure everyone works well together.
When Nina starts a new job, even if the company is already doing great, her first step is to listen carefully. For the first 100 days, she talks to many partners in groups and one-on-one. She asks for honest feedback—good, bad, and even ugly—and looks for new ideas. This helps her figure out what needs to change. Nina says she likes to shake things up a bit, but always in a good way, to make things better for the partners. This way of leading helps the company be flexible and quickly adapt, which is very important in today’s fast-changing world.
Nina believes in “building with” partners, not just making plans inside the company walls and then telling partners what to do. She invites partners to share their ideas, test new plans, and even look at early drawings of new systems or websites. They also discuss how to set up rewards and deals together. This means partners are part of the process from the very beginning. This open and honest way of working builds a lot of trust. It ensures sales plans and other programs help the partners succeed, especially as new technology like AI changes everything.
✔ Chapter 3: AI’s Big Impact on Microsoft and Partners Nina Harding returned to Microsoft in October 2022, when many people started hearing about ChatGPT. However, Microsoft had begun working with OpenAI, which made ChatGPT years ago. When Nina arrived, the main question for her team was no longer just about sales numbers. Instead, it was about figuring out what partners needed to be successful with this new AI technology. This meant helping partners learn new technical skills, improve their sales methods, and create better marketing. It was a massive shift in how they worked, making partners more like “imagineers” who help customers dream up new solutions with AI.
To help its many partners adopt AI, Microsoft has put a lot of helpful tools and programs in place. For example, they have a program called “Level Up.” This program offers online learning paths that partners can follow at their own pace. It includes hands-on practice, guided lessons, fun badges, and awards to motivate people. Over a million people have used this program to learn about AI. Microsoft also holds special “AI partner training days” where people can meet and talk about AI. The company has hired more technical experts to help partners build their skills and update their products with AI. This significant effort ensures that everyone in the Microsoft world is ready for the new age of AI.
Nina says that AI is spreading uniquely because both everyday people and big companies are starting to use it at the same time. This differs from how past technologies spread, which often began with governments or big businesses. She sees that younger people, even kids in school, use AI naturally in ways adults might not think of. This means that customers are pushing companies to use AI more. Microsoft is purposefully helping its customers use AI to do more, whether making employees’ jobs easier, improving how customers are served, changing how businesses operate, or finding new ways to invent things. This shows how AI is truly changing everything.
✔ Chapter 4: Real-World AI Changes and Future Work AI allows anyone in a company to help make changes, not just the top bosses or outside experts. This differs from before, when consultants often planned changes and took a long time. Nina gives an example of a marketing person on her team who used AI to create a tool in just 30 minutes. This tool made it much easier to understand how Microsoft offers rewards to its partners. This shows how AI is helping to make everyday business tasks faster and easier, letting people focus on more important work. It means that everyone can now help bring new ideas to life, no matter their job.
The idea of “change” itself has also changed. In the 1990s, when big companies tried to change things, people often worried about losing their jobs. They didn’t know what the future would look like. But today, change is seen as a way to make things better and more powerful. It’s easier now because the new technology is simpler, and people are excited about it. Nina points out that ensuring data is safe and organized when using AI is still essential. Today, learning quickly and using different skills is more critical than just knowing one thing very deeply. This helps companies be more flexible and takes away some of the old fears about change.
Nina talks about how partners like “3Cloud” use AI innovatively. Instead of just selling technology, they first speak with customers to understand their problems and what they want to achieve. They then find one or two quick projects that can show significant results. Only after that do they talk about the technology. This way, customers feel more confident because they see the real benefits first. This kind of approach helps customers overcome any worries they might have about new technology. Microsoft also uses AI internally to improve things for partners and employees, like helping plan partner goals, prepare reports, and find new business ideas. This shows how AI is making work easier and more effective for everyone.
Industry 4.0 Roadmap: Modernize, Optimize, TransformIn this episode, Sugata Sanyal Founder & CEO of ZINFI, is joined by Jeff Winter, Vice President of Business Strategy for Critical Manufacturing and a leading Industry 4.0 influencer. They dive deep into the core of the Industry 4.0 transformation, moving beyond the hype to discuss practical realities. Jeff explains that this new industrial revolution is not just about technology but requires a fundamental shift in people, culture, and leadership. Listeners will gain a clear understanding of what makes this era unique, with a focus on bridging the long-standing gap between IT and OT teams. The discussion explores the real-world application of AI and IoT in manufacturing. It provides a clear roadmap for any organization looking to navigate its digital transformation journey through the essential steps of modernizing, optimizing, and ultimately achieving true business transformation. Tune in to learn how to build a resilient and agile operation for the future.
Related Guidebook The Smart Manufacturing Playbook: Your Guide to Industry 4.0 TransformationA leader’s roadmap to leveraging people, technology, and strategy for competitive advantage
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Video Podcast: Industry 4.0 Roadmap: Modernize, Optimize, Transform ✔ Chapter 1: The People-First Mandate for Industry 4.0 The journey into Industry 4.0 is frequently mischaracterized as a purely technological endeavor. While advanced tools are a catalyst, the ultimate success of this industrial revolution hinges on a more complex and crucial element: people. The most formidable challenge in any digital transformation is not the deployment of new software or the installation of sophisticated sensors; it is the cultivation of a new mindset across the entire organization. Technology can be purchased, but a culture of innovation and adaptability cannot be. This essential cultural evolution must be championed from the highest levels of leadership. Executives must perceive Industry 4.0 not as a series of siloed IT projects but as a comprehensive business evolution that fundamentally reshapes how value is created, delivered, and measured. This strategic imperative shifts the focus from merely proving a technology works to demonstrating how that technology moves the entire business forward, delivering tangible results and a sustainable competitive advantage.
This transformation requires the broader workforce to embrace a new professional paradigm of continuous learning and cross-disciplinary thinking. The very nature of manufacturing work is evolving. An employee’s role is no longer confined to the repetitive operation of a single machine. Instead, they are becoming the managers of a connected, data-driven process that is constantly refined and improved. This demands newfound agility and a comfort with ambiguity, as change is the only constant in this new environment. The days of mastering and repeating a single task for years are over; future workers must be adaptable problem-solvers who can leverage data to make informed decisions. Organizations that invest in upskilling and reskilling their employees will be the ones that thrive, as they recognize that their human capital is the actual engine of innovation in the digital age.
This people-first mandate is not an abstract concept but a practical necessity for survival and growth. Without buy-in from the leadership team down to the plant floor, even the most promising technological initiatives will fail to achieve their full potential. Resistance to change, fear of the unknown, and a lack of necessary skills can immobilize a transformation project before it begins. Therefore, a successful Industry 4.0 strategy must include a robust change management component that addresses the human side of the transition. This involves clear communication, transparent goal-setting, and employee empowerment. By placing people at the center of the transformation, companies can build a resilient, engaged, and forward-thinking organization that is not just equipped to handle the challenges of today but is prepared to seize tomorrow’s opportunities.
✔ Chapter 2: Bridging the IT/OT Divide A critical and specific cultural hurdle in the Industry 4.0 journey is bridging the historical divide between Information Technology (IT) and Operational Technology (OT). These two domains have operated separately for decades, governed by different priorities, metrics, and vocabularies. IT teams, responsible for enterprise systems, networks, and data, have traditionally prioritized confidentiality, security, and scalability. In contrast, OT teams, who manage the control systems and machinery on the plant floor, have focused relentlessly on availability, safety, and operational reliability. In the past, this separation was manageable. Still, in an era where data from the factory floor must seamlessly integrate with enterprise systems, this siloed approach has become a significant impediment to progress. The convergence of IT and OT is no longer an option; it is the foundational backbone of any successful, brilliant manufacturing initiative.
To dismantle these long-standing barriers, organizations must move beyond simply mandating cooperation. The goal is to forge a new, unified operational model built on shared objectives and mutual respect. This begins by aligning IT and OT teams to the same overarching business outcomes, rather than separate departmental KPIs. When an OT engineer’s success is measured not just by machine uptime but also by the successful implementation of a data analytics platform, and an IT professional’s success is tied to reducing production line downtime, their incentives become aligned. This fosters a collaborative environment where decisions are made for the good of the entire business, not just one department. This alignment ensures that IT’s expertise in data governance and security is applied in a way that respects OT’s non-negotiable requirements for operational stability and safety.
Achieving this integration requires deliberate structural changes. One highly effective strategy is the creation of embedded teams, where IT and OT professionals work side-by-side on the plant floor and in planning sessions. This proximity builds trust and fosters a deeper understanding of each other’s worlds. Another key role is that of the “translator”—individuals fluent in both the language of technology and business operations. These translators can articulate the business impact of a new security protocol or explain the operational requirements for a cloud migration, ensuring that conversations are productive and focused. Ultimately, a successful IT/OT convergence results in a cohesive team leveraging its combined expertise to build a secure, scalable, and highly efficient production environment, turning a historic source of friction into a powerful transformation engine.
✔ Chapter 3: The Intelligence Layer: AI and IoT in Practice The transition from Industry 3.0 to 4.0 is defined by the infusion of intelligence into manufacturing, driven by two transformative technologies: the Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI). Industry 3.0 was centered on the PLC, which brought automation to individual machines. IoT took the next step by enabling mass connectivity, allowing machines, sensors, and systems to communicate with each other and generate an unprecedented volume of data. This created the digital nervous system of the modern factory. However, collecting data is only the first step. The actual value is unlocked when that data is turned into actionable insight, which is the role of AI. AI, particularly its subfield of machine learning, acts as the brain of the smart factory, analyzing the torrent of data from IoT devices to identify patterns, predict outcomes, and optimize processes in real time.
This harmony between IoT and AI creates tangible value across the manufacturing landscape, with predictive maintenance as a prime example. In the past, maintenance was either reactive (fixing things after they broke) or preventive (performing scheduled service whether needed or not). By deploying IoT sensors to monitor variables like temperature, vibration, and energy consumption, machine learning algorithms can analyze historical data to predict when a component is likely to fail. This allows maintenance teams to intervene proactively, scheduling repairs conveniently and avoiding costly unplanned downtime. This same principle extends to other areas, such as quality control, where AI-powered visual inspection systems can identify defects faster and more accurately than the human eye, and demand forecasting, where AI can analyze market trends to optimize production schedules and inventory levels.
The evolution of this intelligence layer is now moving toward its next frontier: autonomous operations. While predictive systems provide valuable guidance, the future lies in agentic AI systems that can automatically predict an issue and take corrective action. These “self-driving” processes can self-optimize and self-configure, learning from their environment and making real-time adjustments to maximize efficiency, quality, and output without human intervention. This represents the ultimate goal of the Industry 4.0 transformation—a fully autonomous, intelligent, and adaptive manufacturing ecosystem. While this vision is still emerging, implementing robust IoT and AI strategies today will enable companies to compete in the more autonomous landscape of tomorrow, turning their operations from a cost center into a strategic weapon.
✔ Chapter 4: Strategic Framework: Modernize, Optimize, Transform Many organizations use “digital transformation” as a catch-all for any technology-related initiative, which often leads to confusion and misaligned expectations. To bring clarity and strategic focus to the Industry 4.0 journey, it is essential to categorize projects into a clear framework: Modernize, Optimize, and Transform. Understanding the distinction between these three types of initiatives is crucial because they have different goals, require different resources, and, most importantly, should be graded with various metrics. Confusing them is why many transformation projects are perceived as failures, even when delivering value. The first stage, Modernize, is about building a solid foundation. This involves replacing outdated legacy systems, upgrading network infrastructure, and digitizing paper-based processes. Modernization projects are enablers; they might not deliver a dramatic, immediate ROI, but they are essential for future progress.
Once a modern digital foundation is in place, the focus can shift to the second stage: Optimize. Optimization is using technology to improve existing processes and get the most out of what you already have. This is where many AI and machine learning projects fit in, as they are applied to make processes faster, more efficient, and of higher quality. Unlike modernization, optimization projects are typically easy to measure with clear before-and-after KPIs, such as scrap rate reductions, cycle time improvements, or increases in overall equipment effectiveness (OEE). This is where companies can achieve significant incremental gains and build momentum for more ambitious initiatives. Many organizations spend the majority of their time and resources in the optimization phase, as it delivers predictable returns without fundamentally disrupting the existing business model.
The final and most ambitious stage is Transform. This is not about doing the same things better; it is about doing fundamentally new things. Transformation uses technology to create new business models, value propositions, and working methods. Examples include shifting from selling a physical product to selling the outcome it delivers as a service (e.g., “power by the hour” in the aerospace industry) or using data to create new digital services for customers. Because transformation is, by definition, creating something new, it cannot be measured against a historical baseline. Success metrics, such as market share expansion or new revenue growth, are longer-term and more strategic. By distinguishing between modernizing, optimizing, and transforming, leaders can allocate resources more effectively, set the right expectations, and build a balanced portfolio of initiatives that ensures short-term stability and long-term, game-changing growth.
Unlocking Partner Ecosystem-Led GrowthIn this episode, Sugata Sanyal Founder & CEO of ZINFI, is joined by Rob Moyer, Head of Partnerships at Gong, to explore the intricacies of building a modern, high-growth partner ecosystem. Rob shares his unique perspective, having built partnership programs at scale with Microsoft and from the ground up at startups like Gong. The discussion provides a detailed strategy guide on creating a successful channel strategy in today’s technology landscape.
Key topics include focusing on boutique partners before scaling, establishing a tactical framework for mutual success through collaboration docs and clear goals, and evolving beyond traditional co-sell models to a more integrated “co-close” approach. This conversation is essential for any business leader looking to drive significant revenue and customer value through strategic partnerships. Listen now to unlock Gong’s proven strategies.
Related Guidebook Hybrid Cloud and Edge AI Computing Impacting the Future of PRMHow AI, Hybrid Cloud, and Edge Computing Are Transforming Partner Relationship Management
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Video Podcast: Unlocking Partner Ecosystem-Led Growth ✔ Chapter 1: The Modern Partner Flywheel: From Boutiques to Scale The journey to building a scalable partner ecosystem does not begin with casting the widest net possible. Rob Moyer explains that the foundational step is to be highly selective and strategic. Instead of immediately pursuing large distributors or broad marketplaces, the most effective initial strategy is identifying and engaging with boutique partners. These smaller, specialized firms often have deep expertise and trusted relationships within a specific niche that aligns perfectly with your ideal customer profile (ICP) and, just as importantly, your target persona. This focused approach allows a vendor to secure critical early wins, build momentum, and refine its value proposition with deeply invested and aligned partners. It is a process of starting small to build a strong, repeatable model.
Once a successful and repeatable motion is established with these boutique partners, the next phase of the flywheel involves scaling the program. This is where broader platforms like major technology marketplaces and traditional distribution channels become valuable. However, simply being present on these platforms is not a strategy. The early work done with boutique partners provides the proof points, case studies, and refined messaging needed to stand out among the thousands of other vendors on a line card. The success in the initial phase creates the credibility and gravitational pull necessary to attract larger partners and effectively leverage their scale. This methodical, phased approach ensures that growth is built on a solid, validated foundation rather than premature, ineffective bets.
This strategy requires a significant mindset shift for partner managers, who must act more like sales development representatives (SDRs) than traditional relationship managers. Finding the right boutique partners involves proactive, targeted outreach. It requires building an ideal partner profile (IPP) and using modern tools, like LinkedIn, to conduct cold outreach and sell them on the vision of a partnership. It is about creating opportunities, not waiting for them. This disciplined, outbound effort to recruit the right-fit partners is the engine that powers the initial turn of the partner ecosystem flywheel, setting the stage for long-term, scalable success.
✔ Chapter 2: The Tactical Framework for Partner Success After recruiting the right partners, establishing a transparent, actionable, and mutually accountable framework is critical for turning potential into performance. The process begins with account mapping, not just identifying customer overlap. The initial goal is to validate the partnership’s potential by ensuring the partner’s customer base aligns with your ideal customer profile and personas. Once the potential is confirmed, the relationship is formalized not through a static business plan but with a living, breathing collaboration document, often a simple Google Doc. This document is a central hub for the partnership, containing the 30-60-90 day plan, the joint value proposition, target account lists, and mutual goals. This tool ensures both sides are aligned and accountable.
This commitment to mutual accountability is tested within the first 90 days. A key indicator of a partner’s investment is their active participation in managing and updating the collaboration document. If the vendor’s team is the only one driving the plan, it is a sign that the partnership is one-sided and may not be worth a significant long-term investment. Modern communication tools are essential to facilitate this real-time collaboration. At Gong, every key partnership is supported by a Slack channel where teams can ask questions, share updates, and quickly bring in the right experts to solve problems, ensuring that deal momentum is never lost. This creates a fluid and responsive working relationship.
Underpinning this framework is a simple yet powerful performance benchmark: the three-deal test. While anyone can get lucky with a single deal, achieving three deals together demonstrates an actual, repeatable process and confirms that the partner is committed to building a practice around your solution. It is the gateway to a deeper investment from the vendor, including introductions to the internal sales teams and co-marketing resources. This practical, results-oriented approach moves beyond promises. It focuses on tangible outcomes, ensuring that partner managers invest their limited time and resources in the relationships that deliver measurable results and are built for the long term.
✔ Chapter 3: Evolving Partner Models: Beyond Co-Sell to Co-Close Not all partners are created equal in a mature partner ecosystem, nor should they be managed with a one-size-fits-all program. Rob Moyer advocates for a “lanes” approach, where different types of partners—such as GSIs, agencies, private equity firms, and tech partners—are managed with distinct strategies tailored to their unique business models. A GSI’s needs and motions differ fundamentally from a marketplace’s, and a generic points-based program fails to capture this nuance. Instead of a holistic performance system, the focus should be on identifying and rewarding the best-performing partners within each lane. This ensures that investments are directed toward what drives success for each partner type, rather than forcing them into a single, ill-fitting model.
This nuanced view extends to how partner contribution is measured. While partner-sourced and co-sell deals are standard metrics, the industry must evolve toward a higher standard of collaboration. Rob strongly advocates for “co-close,” which represents a much deeper level of engagement than a typical co-sell motion. While a co-sell might involve introducing or speeding up a sales cycle, a co-close partner is actively involved from the beginning and helps you close the deal. This distinction is critical because it directly measures a partner’s tangible impact on winning business. It is far more valuable than a light-touch “influence” metric, offering little insight into sales performance.
This focus on tangible outcomes also reshapes the approach to partner incentives. The most powerful incentive is not an unnatural referral fee or a temporary bonus, but the partner’s ability to build a profitable business around your product. A healthy partnership exists because the partner can make significant money by providing services, selling complementary solutions, and driving transformation for their clients. For a product like Gong, a partner’s profitability comes from modernizing a client’s tech stack and enabling sales transformation, not from a small, one-time fee. If a partnership requires artificial incentives to survive, it is not a sustainable, long-term relationship. The real goal is to create an ecosystem where partners thrive because your success is fundamentally tied to theirs.
Talent Recruitment for Startup: Missionaries & MercenariesIn this episode, Sugata Sanyal Founder & CEO of ZINFI sits down with Mark Bartlett, Co-founder and CRO of HireClarity, to explore the powerful parallels between military discipline and startup recruitment. Mark, a former naval officer, shares his unique journey and the transferable skills he gained, from clear communication to decisive leadership. The discussion dives into the critical distinction between hiring “missionaries” driven by purpose and “mercenaries” motivated by financial gain. They discuss how a mission-based approach to building a team can lead to greater success and a stronger company culture. This is essential for any founder looking to make a resilient and dedicated team.
Related Guidebook Startup Founder’s Guide to Talent Recruitment: Hiring Missionaries, Not Mercenaries Best PracticesYour blueprint for building a resilient, mission-driven team.
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Video Podcast: Talent Recruitment for Startup: Missionaries & Mercenaries ✔ Chapter 1: The Foundation of Leadership and Military Discipline The initial segment of the podcast lays the groundwork for Mark Bartlett’s unique perspective on leadership, drawing heavily from his 13 years of service in the Australian military. He describes his decision to join the military as an almost whimsical choice made during a period of uncertainty as a university student. This experience, however, proved to be formative, instilling in him skills that are “transferable to the commercial world”. His journey from an enlisted soldier to a naval officer gave him a structured environment emphasizing discipline and clear, concise communication. He highlights that military leadership isn’t just about giving orders and influencing people to achieve a common goal. This early discussion sets the stage for understanding his core belief that effective leadership is rooted in a structured approach to communication and teamwork.
Mark’s military career, particularly his time with the United Nations peacekeeping force in East Timor, is a crucial case study in diverse collaboration. He recounts working at a headquarters with 75 members from 27 countries, forcing him to navigate cultural differences and communication styles. A key anecdote involves an Australian colonel who advised him to slow his speech because only “half the people understood half of what you said”. This experience taught him the importance of adapting and embracing different perspectives, a lesson he found invaluable. This segment emphasizes that true partnership and collaboration require more than just clear communication; they demand an understanding of cultural nuances and a willingness to be open-minded.
The discussion transitions to a specific moment of conflict during his last tour, highlighting the importance of a leader’s ability to adapt quickly under pressure. He describes a situation where his and his Thai friend’s interpretations of the same event differed due to their contextual backgrounds. This experience reinforced his understanding that people see the same situation through “separate sets of eyes” and that a leader’s role is to help the team understand each other’s viewpoints to find common ground. This intense, high-stakes environment helped him break down communication barriers and make quick, informed decisions. This section of the podcast showcases how Mark’s military experience shaped his understanding of situational leadership and the importance of fostering a unified perspective despite disagreement.
✔ Chapter 2: Navigating Civilian Life: Transition & Leadership in the Corporate World Mark’s transition from the military to the civilian corporate world was challenging, requiring him to adapt his direct communication style. He explains that leaving the military and moving countries simultaneously made the change even more difficult. He found that the “curt” and “too direct” communication effective in a life-or-death military environment was not always appropriate in a corporate office setting. This necessitated a significant pivot in his approach, learning to moderate his communication and slow down. This adaptation wasn’t a “binary switch” but a gradual process that took him “two, three years to adapt” and embrace the corporate way of doing things. This segment provides a compelling look at the hurdles of career transition and the need for self-awareness and practice to succeed in a new professional landscape.
Despite the challenges, Mark found that specific skills from his military background were highly transferable to the corporate environment. He highlights the importance of being transparent and succinct with written communication and having the confidence to present in front of large groups. These skills, honed in a regimented environment, were directly applicable and practical. However, he found that the “regimentation” and intense military structure were not transferable. He had to learn to be more open-minded, take his time with decisions, and embrace the thought leadership of others. This part of the discussion underscores the idea that a successful transition isn’t about discarding past experiences but rather about selectively applying and adapting them to new contexts.
The podcast also touches on how Mark’s leadership style evolved in his role as a father, further illustrating the continuum of control and influence. He jokingly refers to his early parenting style as a “drill instructor, military type way of doing things” that wasn’t very effective. This realization made him adapt and become “much more relaxed” as a parent. This analogy extends to his corporate leadership, where he learned that people are volunteers who need to be motivated and developed rather than simply ordered. He stresses the importance of understanding individual motivations and being vulnerable as a leader, sharing successes and mistakes to help others learn. This section shows how his personal life and leadership experiences are deeply intertwined, reinforcing his belief that effective leadership is fundamentally about understanding and connecting with people.
✔ Chapter 3: Future of Talent Recruitment and Hiring with AI The final section of the podcast focuses on the intersection of Mark’s leadership philosophy and his current work at Higher Clarity, a company designed to solve “selection challenges” in recruiting. Mark explains the company’s product uses generative AI to synthesize all available information about a candidate—including resumes, interview transcripts, and LinkedIn profiles—to provide deep insights to hiring managers. This technology helps to overcome the problem of limited information when making a hiring decision, providing a “full picture” of a candidate. The tool’s primary purpose is to make the talent acquisition process more efficient and data-driven, enabling a hiring manager to quickly determine a candidate’s fit for the job and culture.
Mark introduces the “missionary versus mercenary” analogy, arguing that for a startup, missionaries are crucial. He believes these individuals must “believe in the cause” and the company’s mission, especially during the early stages before product-market fit is established. He acknowledges the difficulty of screening for these qualities. Still, he asserts that gathering as much information as possible with a candidate’s consent is the best way to determine if they are a “fit for the mission”. This part of the conversation directly links his military experience of intelligence gathering with his current work in recruitment, highlighting that both processes are about building a comprehensive picture to inform a critical decision.
The podcast concludes with a thought-provoking discussion on the role of AI versus the human element in recruitment. Mark believes that the future of talent acquisition is a combination of both. He posits that AI is excellent for analyzing data and increasing efficiency, but it lacks intuition and the ability to build rapport. He suggests that as AI becomes more sophisticated, there’s a risk of an “arms race” where bots interview bots, leaving humans to step in at the end to assess things like body language and genuine connection. Mark ultimately asserts that humans will always better understand the “nuances” of other humans. This final segment of the podcast emphasizes that while technology can streamline processes, the human touch remains an indispensable part of the hiring journey.
Partner Performance: Measure What MattersIn this episode, Sugata Sanyal Founder & CEO of ZINFI, welcomes Chris Messina from QuarqAI in this talk. They discuss how hard it is to measure what partners do. Chris talks about starting QuarqAI to fix this problem of “invisible” partnerships. This episode shows how to look past just leads and money to see the full value partners bring.
Listen to learn how a straightforward way to measure things can change how company leaders see and pay for partner programs.
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Video Podcast: Partner Performance: Measure What Matters ✔ Chapter 1: The Problem: You Can’t See What Partners Do Chris Messina starts by talking about the main problem QuarqAI wants to fix: you can’t see what partners do. He says that for 15 years, he built partner programs. They often looked like they failed on paper, even when doing well. It was hard to show his work and prove the value partners added that didn’t involve direct sales. He explains that partner teams do many things that don’t easily appear in sales numbers. It is hard to get company leaders to trust them and invest more. The challenge is to show all the good things partners do that don’t fit into regular reports.
Chris felt this problem strongly. In early 2024, he realized the most significant issue was “nobody believes us”. He left his job to solve this problem. At first, he thought about a top-down plan. But then, he saw that AI could help fix the issue from the ground up. The name “QuarqAI” comes from this idea. It means proving value at the smallest level. If they can show value there, they can show all the value that other tools miss. This will help company leaders trust and invest in partner programs.
Chris says partnerships live “inside everybody else’s metrics, KPIs, tools”. This means partner teams must try to show their value after the fact. Also, since these tools belong to other teams, there’s a problem where other teams say, “That’s my credit”. These tools also set the rules for what success means for those teams. Partner teams don’t have their own clear goal. QuarqAI wants to make partnerships visible and create one clear way to measure success that everyone understands. This will give partner leaders the tools to prove their worth and become important company leaders.
✔ Chapter 2: Measuring Partners: Big Companies vs. Small Companies Chris explains that measuring partners is hard for massive and tiny companies, but in different ways. For big companies that spend billions on partner programs, the problem is knowing what most of their partners are doing. He gives examples: a company with 5,000 partners only knows what 50 are doing. Google has 100,000 partners, but only truly understands 5,000 to 10,000. So, big companies can’t easily show the value of most of their partners. Partners also want to be valued for more than just sending leads. They do other essential things that don’t get noticed. QuarqAI wants to help by showing how partners affect important company goals (KPIs). This allows companies to group partners by what they do, instead of just seeing them as one big group.
For smaller companies, the problem is getting noticed by bigger companies and proving their value when they don’t have many resources. Here, the numbers they show are key proof of how they help. For a small partner team, QuarqAI lets them “show my work”. Chris jokes about being asked, “What the hell are you doing all day long?”. It’s hard to prove value beyond just leads. With QuarqAI, they can show what they are doing, why, and what they expect from it, all the time. This helps them avoid feeling like they’re being tricked when they can’t show direct impact.
Chris says we shouldn’t force one set of measures on everyone, because each company has its own key goals (KPIs). He uses a fitness example: if you want to look strong, you track small steps like diet and exercise, not just the final look. Companies need to see how partners affect their specific goals. If your company’s KPIs are good, money will come in. So, the important thing is how partners help with your company’s goals. Many big companies, even those selling only through partners, still have trouble seeing and showing their partners’ value beyond leads and money.
✔ Chapter 3: QuarqAI’s Way to Measure All Partner Value QuarqAI helps with many types of partners and ways to measure them. They start with a list of “value exchanges”. These are all the ways companies and partners share value, like helping customers or working on new ideas. Not all companies will do all these things. First, QuarqAI learns what a company values, where it is strong or weak, and what resources it has. This also shows how much effort partner activities take, which is often hidden. Chris says it’s key to convince the CFO with good numbers. By mapping strengths with partners, QuarqAI helps them trade value better.
After this, QuarqAI connects to the company’s computer systems. They pull data from different places like sales tools, partner management tools, and emails. The AI then determines where partners show up and how they add value. Setting up QuarqAI is easy because it works with Syncari, which connects to over 250 apps and makes data ready. QuarqAI doesn’t do a lot of direct consulting. Instead, they work with other experts who can help companies understand these changes. QuarqAI is an AI service that gives brilliant insights, without needing people to log in all the time.
A key part of QuarqAI is the “shared value index”. Think of it like a credit score for partners. This score looks at three types of data: first-party data (your company’s records), second-party data (from tools like Crossbeam that map accounts), and third-party data. Third-party data includes info from sites like Crunchbase, G2, and a company called BuyerCaddy (for tech info). It also looks at how people feel about a company. The goal is a clear score, not a secret one. It shows all the ways partners make an impact. This helps companies know which partners are best and where to put their money to get the most back. The score goes from 0 to 100, making it easy to understand. It also helps companies set a minimum score for partners they will work with.
Debunking the Entrepreneurship Myth: Entrepreneurship’s Past, Present, and FutureIn this episode, Sugata Sanyal Founder & CEO of ZINFI speak with Michael Gerber, the legendary author of the E-Myth, and Richard Chambers, a channel sales expert, about the foundational principles of business success. The conversation explores the crucial differences between being a technician and an entrepreneur, revealing why 90% of startups fail within ten years. They highlight the universal need for a business system and a compelling vision, regardless of industry or scale. The guests also discuss how timeless principles apply to today’s rapidly changing, AI-driven world. Tune in to discover the critical mindset shift required to move from working in your business to working on it.
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Video Podcast: Debunking the Entrepreneurship Myth: Entrepreneurship’s Past, Present, and Future ✔ Chapter 1: The Origin Story of the Entrepreneurship Myth The concept of the E-Myth did not begin as a formal theory but as a practical observation of a real-world problem. Michael Gerber recounts his early experience assisting his brother-in-law, Ace Remus, whose clients could not convert the leads created for them. When Michael met with one of these clients, he discovered that the business owner, a brilliant technician, did not understand what a business was. The client had no “selling system,” leading to the realization that many startups are founded by technicians suffering from an entrepreneurial seizure, not true entrepreneurs. This initial discovery led Gerber to uncover the missing piece in the small business picture, culminating in his influential methodology.
Gerber’s exploration revealed a fundamental truth: the business itself is a product that must be designed, built, and launched with a clear system, much like a product or a service. The entrepreneur’s role is to act as the “imagineer,” creating the foundational vision and structure for the enterprise. This vision is not just about the product but about creating a predictable and repeatable system that can be replicated successfully. The model for this, as Gerber explains, is a business format franchise, or a prototype, that can scale from a company of one to a company of a thousand. As articulated by the E-Myth, this system-level thinking became the core principle for his business development firm and all his subsequent work.
Richard Chambers’ journey was intertwined with Gerber’s. Richard worked for Gerber’s start-up for 7 years, starting as a technical consultant and ultimately running the client services organization responsible for the customer success of hundreds of small business programs. With a background in psycholinguistics, Richard later went on to start his own company, creating a “selling system” that used a common language for collaboration and co-selling. “The S.A.L.E.S.® System” has become an important standard in the IT partner ecosystem.
✔ Chapter 2: The Evolving Sales System and Entrepreneurship Myth The conversation shifted to the specific context of the technology channel, where Richard Chambers has spent most of his career. He notes that this vertical is predominantly driven by entrepreneurs who are, at their core, technicians. While highly skilled in their craft, they often close their eyes to the necessity of building a scalable business system. He shares that as technology evolved from PCs to client-server networking to cloud computing, and to AI, the sales process became increasingly collaborative, requiring multiple specialists—salespeople, engineers, and marketers—to sell a solution. This collaboration created a new challenge: the need for a common language and a simple, repeatable process to prevent mistakes and ensure alignment among all parties.
Richard’s S.A.L.E.S. model was designed to be that common language, a simple framework the human mind could contain and follow. He observed that businesses that succeeded were the ones that pivoted from a transactional mindset to a solutions-oriented one. They learned to charge for assessment, configuration, deployment, and support services, rather than relying on hardware margins. This shift was a direct result of adapting to the changing needs of the end user, who was no longer just a buyer but a client seeking a complete solution. Smart partners recognized the need to develop these specialized in-house service capabilities to stay relevant and grow. Further, they learned to collaborate with complementary specialized partners in co-sell motions, where S.A.L.E.S. provides a common language.
Today, this evolution continues with the rise of “customer success” as a critical function. The old sales model focused on the transaction, but the new reality demands a focus on the entire customer lifecycle. Richard emphasizes that true customer success goes beyond Customer Lifetime Value, a measure of cash flow during the life of a customer relationship. You must also flip that to measure the long-term impact on your customers’ lives, aimed at helping them achieve their desired outcomes. He notes that the truly successful partners are the ones who consistently return to this fundamental question: “What is the customer after?” By doing so, they build long-term value not just for the customer’s business, but also for their personal lives, yielding “raving testimonials” that speed revenue from new customers.
✔ Chapter 3: Roles and the Journey from Infancy to Maturity Michael Gerber clarifies the distinction between the three essential roles within a business: the technician, the manager, and the entrepreneur. The technician is the doer, the one who performs the work, whether a salesperson, a bookkeeper, or a janitor. The manager is the one who oversees the work of the technician, and the entrepreneur is the creator of the overall system that the manager oversees. The vast majority of business failures occur because the technician, in a moment of “entrepreneurial seizure,” starts a business to escape a boss, only to find they have created a job for themselves where they are both the boss and the technician. This lack of understanding of the distinct roles and the need for a system prevents the business from progressing beyond its infancy.
Gerber highlights that the journey from one company to a company of a thousand depends not on the roles or the systems themselves, but on the entrepreneur’s perspective and understanding of their purpose. The key to overcoming systemic failures is to constantly “go back to the beginning” and reconnect with the core dream, vision, purpose, and mission that inspired the business in the first place. This process awakens the “entrepreneur within” the founder and provides a living foundation for growth. Without this spiritual and soulful connection to the business’s purpose, the systems, no matter how sophisticated, will remain artificial and lifeless, unable to sustain proper growth.
The framework that Gerber outlines for this journey consists of eight distinct personalities of an entrepreneur: the dreamer, the thinker, the storyteller, the leader, the designer, the builder, the launcher, and the grower. Each personality is responsible for a specific phase of business development, from having a dream to building a turnkey enterprise. The failure to nurture these different personalities or to understand their roles in the business’s life cycle leads to stagnation. The companies that leap from infancy to maturity are those where the entrepreneur intentionally and consciously embraces these roles, building a company that is not dependent on their labor but operates as a fully functional, self-sufficient system.
✔ Chapter 4: The Timeless Principles in a Changing World A recurring theme in the discussion is whether the principles of entrepreneurship have changed in a world of rapid technological advancement and AI. Michael Gerber asserts that the core principles remain “eternally true” and that the bar for success is no different today than it was 40 years ago. He believes the essential journey begins with a “blank piece of paper and beginner’s mind.” The challenge, as it was then, is to approach business with a teachable spirit, to be a student of the process rather than a technician who believes they already know how to do the work. This fundamental mindset separates those who build great, lasting enterprises from those who remain stuck in a job they created for themselves.
Richard Chambers supports this view, drawing from his experience adapting to technology shifts like from PCs to client-server networking to cloud computing and now AI with new distribution ecosystem models. He observes that the resilient businesses could “turn on a dime” and remain agile in the face of change. The constant thread of their success was their ability to help other companies succeed, which he now defines as positively impacting their customers’ lives, not just their bottom line. This focus on a deeper purpose aligns with Gerber’s philosophy. It demonstrates that the most successful entrepreneurs prioritize the human element and a customer-centric vision above all else.
The conversation concludes with a reflection on the foundational entrepreneurial spirit of America’s founding fathers, whom Gerber calls the “quintessential entrepreneurs.” They created a new enterprise from scratch, a system that had never been conceived before, and provided the rules of the game in the Constitution. This story is the ultimate metaphor for what an entrepreneur should strive for: to create a world, or a business, that is built on a grand, inspiring vision. It is a reminder that the greatest enterprises are not just about profit but about a purpose that transcends the day-to-day challenges, and in doing so, they inspire others to join in their mission.
Future of Marketplaces: Apps, Agents & Alliances Marketplaces: Apps, Agents & AlliancesIn this episode, Sugata Sanyal Founder & CEO of ZINFI, and Roman Kirsanov, CEO of Partner Insight, delve into the evolving landscape of digital marketplaces. They explore the significant shift from traditional distribution models to dominant cloud marketplaces, particularly those managed by hyperscalers like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. Roman shares his expertise on how these platforms are reshaping go-to-market strategies and the critical role of distribution. The conversation highlights the increasing importance of marketplaces for software, hardware, and service providers, touching upon key concepts such as private offers and cloud commitments. They also discuss AI agents’ emerging role and impact on future marketplace dynamics. This episode is a must-listen for anyone who understands digital marketplaces’ intricate workings and future trajectory.
Related Guidebook Cloud Marketplaces: A Leader’s Guide to Unlocking Growth and AI Innovation Best PracticesMastering the New Frontier of Digital Distribution
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Video Podcast: Future of Marketplaces: Apps, Agents & Alliances Marketplaces: Apps, Agents & Alliances ✔ Chapter 1: The Dominance of Hyperscaler Marketplaces Five years ago, the role of marketplaces in corporate distribution was largely uncertain, with many companies questioning their impact on growth and market penetration. Today, however, the landscape has dramatically shifted, clearly demonstrating the undeniable dominance of these platforms. Marketplaces have evolved from niche channels to pivotal ecosystems, with countless companies achieving significant scale and market reach primarily through their presence on these platforms. This transformation underscores a fundamental change in how businesses approach their distribution and sales strategies, prioritizing integration with these powerful digital hubs. The strategic imperative for vendors has become less about whether to engage with marketplaces and more about how to effectively leverage them for maximum impact and sustained growth in an increasingly digital-first economy.
The discussion particularly emphasizes the overwhelming influence of cloud hyperscalers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. These entities have not merely provided infrastructure but have cultivated vast and intricate ecosystems that dictate much of the digital economy’s flow. Roman Kirsanov focuses on these three giants due to their sheer scale and projected financial commitments; their collective cloud commitments are forecasted to reach an astounding half a trillion dollars by late 2025 or early 2026. This monumental financial scale illustrates their foundational role in the digital infrastructure. While other companies like Oracle, Salesforce, and Atlassian operate their marketplaces, their relative size and market impact are considerably smaller when compared to the expansive reach and financial gravity of the hyperscalers. This stark contrast highlights where the true power and growth opportunities lie within the marketplace ecosystem.
This burgeoning influence has led to a significant shift in power dynamics across the industry. Hyperscalers have grown in market capitalization and effectively centralized a substantial portion of the digital distribution landscape. A compelling example of this shift is Salesforce, which has historically championed its marketplace model. Despite its established presence, Salesforce has strategically embraced the AWS Marketplace, transacting an impressive $2 billion. This move by a major SaaS player like Salesforce underscores the indispensable nature of hyperscaler marketplaces. It signifies that even well-established companies with proprietary platforms recognize these dominant cloud providers’ unparalleled reach and customer base. This trend indicates that the distribution power is increasingly consolidating in the hands of a few major cloud players, dictating new rules for market entry, growth, and sustained success for vendors across all sectors.
✔ Chapter 2: Understanding Marketplace Mechanics for Growth The operational mechanics of hyperscaler marketplaces are primarily driven by “private offers,” which account for the majority of their substantial transaction volume. These private offers are essentially enterprise contracts specifically negotiated and executed directly through the marketplace platforms. This method provides a streamlined and secure channel for large-scale business-to-business transactions, allowing for customized terms and pricing agreements that cater to the unique needs of enterprise clients. The emphasis on private offers highlights that these marketplaces are not just public storefronts but sophisticated environments designed to facilitate complex, high-value commercial agreements between vendors and large organizations. Understanding and leveraging the private offer mechanism is crucial for companies aiming to capture a significant share of the enterprise market through these powerful platforms.
A key aspect enabling the widespread adoption of these marketplaces is the concept of “cloud commitments.” These commitments allow customers to utilize their pre-negotiated spending with hyperscalers to purchase third-party solutions on their marketplaces. This functions similarly to having a pre-funded digital wallet, where allocated cloud spending can be flexibly directed towards acquiring various software and services that independent vendors offer. This mechanism creates a powerful “flywheel effect”: as customers increase their spending through the marketplace, they often unlock greater discounts and more favorable terms on their cloud commitments. This incentive structure encourages continuous engagement and deeper integration with the marketplace ecosystem, fostering a self-reinforcing cycle of increased adoption and expenditure for customers and vendors.
Regarding the buyer persona, while IT departments and technical buyers are undoubtedly involved, particularly for public offers and initial explorations, procurement departments frequently emerge as the ultimate decision-makers for larger enterprise contracts. This signifies that vendors must tailor their strategies to appeal not only to technical evaluators but also to procurement teams’ financial and contractual considerations. Furthermore, there’s a discernible increase in the involvement of line-of-business stakeholders in purchasing decisions, indicating that business units are directly seeking solutions to meet their operational needs through these marketplaces. Roman Kirsanov also notes that, contrary to some expectations, there isn’t a significant trend towards commoditization on these platforms. He points out that the vast array of third-party products far exceeds the hyperscalers’ offerings. This suggests a healthy and diverse ecosystem where specialized solutions continue to thrive and command value, resisting a race to the bottom based solely on price.
✔ Chapter 3: Strategic Imperatives and the AI-Driven Future of Marketplaces Strategic readiness is paramount for vendors looking to capitalize on the burgeoning marketplace ecosystem. Regardless of their current maturity level, companies should actively consider establishing a listing on the cloud provider platform upon which their solutions are built. This foundational step is crucial for visibility and accessibility within the hyperscaler’s vast network. However, merely having a listing is insufficient; deliberate and sustained effort is required to gain genuine traction. This includes adopting product-led growth (PLG) strategies, which enable users to experience the value of a product directly, and actively engaging in co-selling motions with the hyperscalers. These combined approaches help vendors list their offerings and proactively drive customer adoption and leverage the cloud provider’s sales channels for accelerated growth and market penetration within their ecosystem.
A fundamental principle guiding vendor strategy should be a deeply customer-centric approach. Deciding which marketplace to prioritize hinges significantly on understanding where your target customers are already operating and transacting. “Following customers” is not just a best practice but a critical determinant of success, as it ensures that vendor efforts are aligned with existing customer behaviors and preferences. While marketplaces initially emerged primarily as efficient vehicles for procurement and transaction processing, their role is steadily evolving. There’s a clear trend towards these platforms attempting to become powerful discovery engines, allowing customers to find new solutions more organically. However, despite this evolution, companies must drive customers to their specific listings through various marketing and sales initiatives. Organic discovery, while increasing, still complements, rather than replaces, active customer acquisition efforts on these platforms.
Looking ahead, Roman Kirsanov identifies marketplaces as the ideal infrastructure for companies to innovate, deploy, and effectively sell AI agents. This foresight positions marketplaces at the forefront of the AI revolution, as pivotal hubs for the next generation of intelligent applications. Google Cloud Marketplace, for example, has already established an AI agent marketplace, demonstrating this future in action. A critical factor influencing the deployment and purchase of these AI agents will be “data gravity”—the phenomenon where data tends to attract applications and services to its location. This means that existing trust relationships and where a customer’s primary data resides will heavily influence which AI agents they adopt and which marketplace they procure. Roman remains optimistic, believing that while hyperscalers undeniably consolidate power, the overall market “pie” expands. This growth creates ample opportunities for players, including traditional service providers, who can now package their specialized services as intelligent agents and leverage these marketplaces for distribution.
AI in Sales: Navigating the Silent Buyer's Journey The landscape of enterprise sales has dramatically shifted, with buyers making most of their decisions long before engaging with a sales representative. In this new era, where the buyer's journey is increasingly silent and digital, understanding how to adapt and leverage technology is paramount. This podcast explores how AI is not just a tool for automation but a critical enabler for sales professionals seeking to connect, build trust, and close deals in a complex, virtual world. Join Sugata Sanyal, Founder & CEO of ZINFI, in an insightful discussion with Krysten Conner, an experienced sales coach who works with mid-market and enterprise companies. Krysten shares her unique journey from teaching to becoming a successful enterprise sales representative at Tableau, Salesforce, and Outreach. She delves into the profound changes in sales over the last decade, particularly post-COVID, emphasizing the need for reps to be more analytical, proactive, and adept at building trust in a fragmented buying environment. Listen to the full episode to gain actionable insights into developing the human skills and strategic approaches needed to thrive in AI! Related Guidebook AI in Sales: Navigating the Silent Buyers Journey Best Practices Navigate the Silent Buyer's Funnel with AI-Powered Precision. Download your COMPLIMENTARY COPY of AI in Sales: Navigating the Silent Buyer's Journey Best Practices Guidebook. Navigate the Silent Buyer's Funnel with AI-Powered Precision. Download for FREE Video Podcast: AI in Sales: Navigating the Silent Buyer's Journey ✔ Chapter 1: The Evolving Landscape of Enterprise Sales and the Silent Buyer Enterprise sales have dramatically transformed over the last decade, significantly accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Previously, closing a $100K deal often involved flying to meet decision-makers in person, where physical presence helped establish rapport and understanding of the business culture. Today, virtual interactions are the norm, with decision-makers frequently joining Zoom calls without video, making it harder to build personal connections. This shift necessitates that sales representatives become far more analytical and prepared, developing a sharp point of view on how they can add value, rather than relying solely on personality. Extensive upfront research and analysis are now critical to earn the right to engage with potential buyers. The buyer's journey has become overwhelmingly digital, with Gartner reporting that up to 95% of a decision is made before a buyer engages with a sales representative. Buyers spend an enormous time online researching reviews, case studies, and white papers to educate themselves thoroughly. This means the marketing team acts as a "silent salesperson," profoundly influencing the buyer's perceptions and choices long before a human interaction occurs. Buyers increasingly seek unbiased information, often prioritizing third-party reviews and peer recommendations over what a company says about itself. This evolution has also led to significantly larger buying committees, even for relatively minor deals. This trend is partly driven by market uncertainty and internal politics, where individuals seek multiple sign-offs to de-risk purchases. IT departments are also more involved earlier in the process, ensuring new solutions integrate seamlessly and do not disrupt existing systems. Sales professionals must now articulate a distinct value proposition for each stakeholder within these complex buying units, putting themselves in the shoes of different departments to address their specific concerns and demonstrate relevance. ✔ Chapter 2: Redefining Sales Interaction...
Leadership at a Global Scale: ServiceNow Partner Marketing In the dynamic world of technology and global business, effective partner marketing is no longer just about campaigns; it's about strategic leadership, fostering collaboration, and leveraging cutting-edge technology to achieve unprecedented scale. This podcast dives into how a global leader builds and nurtures a vast partner ecosystem, transforming challenges into opportunities for growth and innovation. Join Sugata Sanyal, Founder & CEO of ZINFI, in an insightful discussion with Meaghan Moore, Vice President of Global Partner Marketing at ServiceNow. Meaghan shares her extensive career journey across hardware, software, and services, and her passion for building thriving partner ecosystems. Discover her strategic approach to leading global marketing initiatives, adapting to digital transformation, and harnessing the power of AI to drive impactful, integrated partner programs worldwide. Listen to the full episode now to gain actionable insights into mastering global partner marketing at scale! Related Guidebook Elevating Partner Marketing: Strategic Leadership in the AI Era Best Practices Master Global Partner Ecosystems with AI-Powered Strategies. Download your COMPLIMENTARY COPY of Elevating Partner Marketing: Strategic Leadership in the AI Era Best Practices Guidebook.Master Global Partner Ecosystems with AI-Powered Strategies. Download for FREE Video Podcast: Leadership at a Global Scale: ServiceNow Partner Marketing ✔ Chapter 1: Navigating Tech Career Evolution and Partner Channel Development The podcast opens with an engaging introduction to Meaghan Moore, setting the stage for a deep dive into her remarkable professional journey. From her early fascination with Japan and technology, Meaghan's narrative illustrates a career built on adapting to and leading through significant industry shifts. Her formative years in Silicon Valley laid the groundwork for a robust understanding of the tech landscape, beginning with foundational roles in hardware-centric companies like Quantum. This initial phase provided invaluable exposure to core business operations and the mechanics of bringing technology to market, shaping her pragmatic approach to subsequent leadership challenges. Her commitment to understanding the nuances of tech's evolution became a hallmark of her career, preparing her for the expansive roles that followed. As the conversation progresses, Meaghan eloquently describes the pivotal transition from a hardware-dominated industry to the burgeoning software and services sector. This shift was not merely a change in product focus but a fundamental reorientation of business models and partner engagement strategies. Companies like Veritas, Motorola, HP, and SAP became critical stages in this evolution, where Meaghan honed her expertise in channel development and ecosystem building. She emphasized the profound difference between selling physical products and delivering intangible solutions, requiring a more collaborative and integrated approach with partners. This period solidified her reputation as a "builder" in the channel space, capable of constructing effective frameworks for growth in complex, rapidly changing environments. Meaghan’s deep experience across various facets of the technology industry, including hardware, software, and professional services, gave her a unique, holistic perspective on partner ecosystems. Her early career taught her the discipline of tangible product management, which later informed her strategic thinking when dealing with more abstract software solutions. This comprehensive background is crucial to her role at ServiceNow, where she leverages years of diverse experience to drive global partner marketing initiativ...
Humanizing Brands: Authentic Stories for Connecting & Partnering In this episode, Sugata Sanyal Founder & CEO of ZINFI, hosts a compelling discussion with Ademola Adelakun, Founder of A2 Media, and Will Taylor, Co-founder & Chief Partner Officer at Audience-led. The trio delves into the importance of humanizing brands through authentic storytelling for effective partnering. Key insights include how entrepreneurs establish a genuine online presence, the raw realities of building a business, and the evolving communication strategies within complex partner ecosystems. They emphasize moving beyond transactional interactions to foster genuine connections. Listeners will gain valuable perspectives on leveraging personal narratives and emotional impact to build trust and drive engagement, ultimately enhancing partnering efforts in today's multi-generational and multi-channel business environment. Tune in to discover actionable strategies for forging deeper, more meaningful collaborations. Related Guidebook Humanizing Brands: A Guide to Strategic Partnering Best Practices Cultivating Authentic Stories for Connecting & Partnering Success Download your COMPLIMENTARY COPY of Humanizing Brands: A Guide to Strategic Partnering Best Practices Guidebook. Cultivating Authentic Stories for Connecting & Partnering Success. Download for FREE Video Podcast: Humanizing Brands: Authentic Stories for Connecting & Partnering ✔ Chapter 1: Cultivating Authentic Brand Presence The discussion begins with the personal journeys of Ademola Adelakun and Will Taylor into the realm of online content creation, highlighting the initial hesitations and subsequent embrace of authenticity as a core tenet of their brand presence. As an engineer by background, Sugata Sanyal shares his discomfort with abstract online spaces compared to live audiences, leading to an exploration of how individuals and, by extension, brands transition into public online personas. Ademola recounts his early experiences with Will on Snapchat, where they organically built a community by simply "showing up as ourselves." Surprisingly, this casual approach led to a loyal audience that experienced the same authentic offline interactions as online, sharply contrasting with content creators who adopt personas that lead to burnout and negative real-life encounters. This segment underscores the foundational belief that genuine self-expression is preferable and essential for sustainable online engagement and humanizing brands. Will Taylor further elaborates on his initial disdain for social media, particularly LinkedIn, finding it "cringy" and "dry." However, he quickly recognized an opportunity to learn and grow by sharing his experiences and hardships, embodying the principle that "the best way to learn is to teach." This vulnerability led to an expanding network, increased "luck surface area," and ultimately, the ability to build his business, a feat he believes would have been impossible without consistent online posting. Ademola and Will, having studied psychology, emphasize the importance of sharing emotions and being vulnerable to foster deeper connections and trust, ultimately allowing them to be more of their true selves online and off. This authenticity, they argue, brings significant business ROI by bridging gaps between people and creating relatable content, which is crucial for effective partnering. The conversation also touches upon content creators' strategic choices regarding the type of content they share. Sugata probes whether Ademola and Will have ever deleted posts, revealing that while minor adjustments might occur, the core of their content remains. A significant point of agreement is the deliberate avoidance of political or religious content on professional platform...
Mastering LinkedIn: Building Personal Brands for Social SellingJoin Sugata Sanyal, Founder & CEO of ZINFI, hosts a compelling discussion with Chelsea Olsen, Founder of CLOHZ, a leading expert who trains B2B teams on leveraging LinkedIn for pipeline building and closing deals. Chelsea shares her journey into Social Selling, from early cold outreach in 2010 to realizing the critical role of content in a buyer's journey by 2022. The conversation explores the evolution of LinkedIn from a contact identification tool to a vital platform for building credibility and driving revenue. Key takeaways include strategic content creation, the importance of personal branding over follower count, and effective outreach methods for B2B sales. Listeners will gain actionable strategies to transform their sales approach by mastering Social Selling on LinkedIn, ensuring their efforts translate into tangible business results. Related Guidebook Mastering LinkedIn: Building Personal Brands for Social Selling Best Practices Unlock the Power of Authentic Engagement for B2B Revenue Growth. Download your COMPLIMENTARY COPY of Mastering LinkedIn: Building Personal Brands for Social Selling Best Practices Guidebook. Unlock the Power of Authentic Engagement for B2B Revenue Growth. Download for FREE Video Podcast: Mastering LinkedIn: Building Personal Brands for Social Selling ✔ Chapter 1: The Evolution of Social Selling and Content Strategy The discussion opens with Chelsea Olsen's unique journey into what is now known as Social Selling, a path she embarked upon in 2010 by leveraging LinkedIn primarily for booking meetings. Initially, her methods blended traditional cold outreach tactics like cold calling and direct mail, with LinkedIn as a crucial tool for identifying and connecting with prospects. She used the platform to put "a face to the name" during cold outreach, a rudimentary yet effective strategy in the early days. However, the landscape of B2B sales has significantly evolved over the past eight years. Chelsea realized the paramount importance of content in the buyer's journey only a "couple of years ago" or "maybe like three years ago," marking a significant shift in her approach. The role of content has become increasingly central, transforming LinkedIn into a platform that supports and amplifies all cold outreach efforts.This realization stemmed from a noticeable decline in cold outreach conversion rates by late 2022 and early 2023. The widespread adoption of AI and automation led to rampant spamming, rendering once-effective tactics less potent. This forced Chelsea to step back and re-evaluate her strategy, leading to the discovery that today's buyers are vastly different. Modern B2B buyers conduct 70% of their purchasing research before engaging with a sales representative. Furthermore, during this critical research phase, they consume a significant volume of information, at least 13 pieces of content. Understanding this fundamental shift highlighted what both her teams and she, as a founder, were missing: the crucial element of content. This new understanding underscored that effective Social Selling in the current environment demands a robust and well-thought-out content strategy that caters to the buyer's self-directed research phase.The pivotal change for Chelsea involved actively posting on LinkedIn, but with a strategic understanding of "how to create content for LinkedIn" specifically. She emphasizes that simply posting to post is ineffective, as she experienced years of content creation without engagement or results. Her focus remained solely on LinkedIn, avoiding other platforms like Instagram or Twitter, believing that a singular focus on one platform can be highly effective for many businesses in supporting their sales teams.
AI-Powered PartnerOps: The Next RevOps FrontierIn this insightful episode of the ZINFI Partner Ecosystem Podcast, Sugata Sanyal, Founder & CEO of ZINFI, sits down with Kyle Edmund Hayes, Founding Partner at Ecosystem Revenue Dynamics. Together, they explore the fast-changing world of PartnerOps, fueled by AI and driven by the foundational principles of Revenue Operations (RevOps). With nearly two decades of experience spanning Microsoft, Infor, and Avanti, Kyle brings a powerful systems engineering lens to revenue alignment. He shares how today's mid-market and enterprise organizations are overwhelmed by tool sprawl, data debt, and operational silos—and how AI, ecosystem orchestration, and RevOps engineering are converging to solve this.Listeners will gain deep insight into the rise of PartnerOps as the next evolution of RevOps, the challenges of modern tech stacks, and the frameworks needed to simplify go-to-market complexity. This is a must-listen if you're a CRO, partner leader, or RevOps strategist. Related Guidebook AI-Powered PartnerOps: The Next RevOps Frontier Best Practices Discover How Top B2B Brands Are Transforming Engagement, Trust, and Revenue. Download your COMPLIMENTARY COPY of AI-Powered PartnerOps: The Next RevOps Frontier Best Practices Guide. Discover How Top B2B Brands Are Transforming Engagement, Trust, and Revenue. Download for FREE Video Podcast: AI-Powered PartnerOps: The Next RevOps Frontier ✔ Chapter 1: From Engineering to Ecosystem Thinking Kyle Edmund Hayes shares a compelling journey that blends engineering expertise with operational strategy. Starting at IBM, his early fascination with systems design and IT infrastructure evolved through hands-on roles supporting enterprise data centers. These formative years helped Kyle develop a systems-level perspective. He explains how this foundation shaped his understanding of how technology supports business functions, a theme central to his later work. His transition into software engineering was driven by coding and the desire to understand how complex systems serve broader business outcomes.Kyle shifted from pure engineering to client architecture and program management as he moved through roles at Microsoft and other firms. This evolution was marked by a desire to bridge the communication gap between business teams and technical departments. At Microsoft, he worked on early Azure and SaaS migration projects, giving him a front-row seat to the evolution of enterprise cloud and partner engagement strategies. These experiences formed a unique blend of technical depth and business alignment that set the stage for his eventual founding of Ecosystem Revenue Dynamics.Sugata highlights how this trajectory positions Kyle as an ideal thought leader for PartnerOps, which requires engineering precision and strategic coordination. Kyle has carved out a niche in orchestrating partnerships, channels, and go-to-market motions by fusing operational complexity with ecosystem thinking. This first section sets the foundation for understanding why PartnerOps isn’t just a renamed channel function but a critical extension of RevOps designed to handle the growing intricacy of the modern partner ecosystem. ✔ Chapter 2: What RevOps Got Right—And What’s Next In this section, Kyle outlines the timeline of RevOps’ emergence and its growing importance since around 2016. Initially an evolution of traditional sales operations, RevOps expanded to include customer success, marketing ops, and more, transforming into a hub that touches every revenue-driving function. He credits this shift to changes in customer behavior, particularly in subscription-driven economies. The rise of SaaS and recurring revenue made it essential f...
Sales Development: AI's New PlaybookThe world of sales has undergone a seismic shift, transforming from traditional cold calling to a nuanced, tech-driven, and human-centric approach111. In the age of AI, Sales Development isn't just about making dials; it's about navigating a complex buyer's journey, building authentic relationships, and leveraging intelligence to cut through the noise. This podcast uncovers the new strategies and essential skills required for success in the modern sales front lines.Join Sugata Sanyal, Founder & CEO of ZINFI, in an insightful discussion with Gabe Lullo, CEO of Alleyoop. As a former SDR who built his way to CEO, Gabe leads one of the world's largest SDR agencies, specializing in front-line prospecting. He reveals how Alleyoop helps clients build and scale their sales development function, focusing on human dynamics, content creation, social influence, and the strategic application of AI to drive qualified leads and appointments in today's rapidly evolving market.Listen to the full episode now to discover the new playbook for Sales Development and transform your outbound strategy! Related Guidebook
Tech Partnerships: Driving Integration-Led GrowthIn today's complex and evolving digital landscape, strategic Technology Integration Partnerships are no longer a luxury but a necessity for business growth. This podcast delves into the meticulous process of building these vital alliances from the ground up, focusing on how seamless data flow and collaborative solutions can deliver immense value to customers and unlock new revenue streams.Join Sugata Sanyal, Founder and CEO of ZINFI, in an insightful discussion with Rachel Collie, Director of Technology Partnerships at Unanet. Rachel shares her unique experience building a technology partner program from scratch, navigating highly verticalized markets like GovCon and AEC. Discover how Unanet identifies ideal partners, manages complex compliance requirements, and leverages integration-led growth strategies to drive mutual success and customer stickiness, even as a "team of one."Listen to the full episode to gain actionable insights into building and scaling successful Technology Integration Partnerships!Related Guidebook Blueprints for Vertical Success Best PracticesA Strategic Guide to Technology Partnerships.Download your COMPLIMENTARY COPY of Blueprints for Vertical Success Best Practices Guide. Unlock Vertical Growth with Proven Partnership Strategies..Download for FREEVideo Podcast: Tech Partnerships: Driving Integration-Led Growth ✔ Chapter 1: Building Technology Partnerships from Scratch: A Strategic Blueprint Rachel Collie builds Technology Integration Partnership programs from the ground up, consistently stepping into roles without existing frameworks. Her fascination lies in the intricate data flow between disparate systems, observing how customers leverage these integrations, from an ERP to a CRM or a CRM to a project management tool. Over the last decade, she has witnessed the evolution of this space from manual spreadsheet-based tracking to the ubiquitous adoption of APIs. This hands-on experience has honed her ability to define ideal partners and customer profiles and to build the foundational onboarding and enablement tools that are now considered standard yet vary significantly from company to company.At Unanet, her first 100 days were crucial for establishing a strategic blueprint based on three key pillars for evaluating potential Technology Integration Partnerships. The first pillar focused on functional software that Unanet would never build itself, such as payroll platforms, leading to partnerships with companies like Paylocity, ADP, and UKG to serve a broad customer base. The second pillar targeted companies with many joint customers, where existing integrations made sense and offered clear potential for driving new revenue through collaborative efforts. The third pillar explored "cool, interesting technology" – innovative solutions like AI-powered proposal generation tools – representing speculative investments that could eventually address emerging customer needs and potentially lead to future acquisitions.A critical challenge in this initial phase was managing limited bandwidth and roadmaps internally and externally. Rachel emphasizes that "whoever makes the phone call first" often dictates whether an integration gets built. The team deliberately took a strategic, small-scale approach to ensure product teams could build integrations that delivered real value instead of becoming unused logos on a website. Her primary frustration lies in inactive partnerships that fail to generate real value through integrations or revenue. The goal is always to cultivate active Technology Integration Partnerships that yield tangible benefits. This meticulous, phased approach to program building, driven by clear strategic pillars and a focus on actionable integrations, has been fundamental to Unanet's success in establishing its partner ecosystem. ✔ Chapter 2: Navigating Compliance and Customer Needs in Vertical Marke...
Beyond the Dark Web: Zero Trust for Enterprise SecurityCyber threats evolve unprecedentedly, and bad actors even weaponize AI. Traditional security approaches are no longer sufficient. This podcast dives deep into the critical need for a Zero Trust Security model, focusing on blocking first and permitting later to build truly resilient enterprise security defenses. Discover how understanding modern cybercriminals' methods, including those operating on the dark web, is essential for implementing proactive and effective protection strategies.Sugata Sanyal, Founder & CEO of ZINFI, discusses this in an insightful discussion with Danny Jenkins, Co-founder and CEO of ThreatLocker. With over 20 years in cybersecurity, Danny founded ThreatLocker on the principle of denying by default, offering an endpoint cloud protection platform that hardens digital environments. This conversation explores the shift from reactive detection to proactive protection, the changing landscape of attack vectors, cybercrime's organized nature, and AI's critical role in offense and defense for enterprise security.Listen to the full episode to gain actionable insights into fortifying your enterprise security posture against advanced cyber threats!Related Guidebook The Zero Trust Imperative: Fortifying Enterprise Security Against AI-Driven ThreatsProtect Your Business by Blocking First, Permitting Later.Download your COMPLIMENTARY COPY of The Zero Trust Imperative: Fortifying Enterprise Security Against AI-Driven Threats Guide. Protect Your Business by Blocking First, Permitting Later.Download for FREEVideo Podcast: Beyond the Dark Web: Zero Trust for Enterprise Security ✔ Chapter 1: The Shifting Landscape of Cyber Threats and Endpoint Protection The cybersecurity landscape has fundamentally evolved, moving beyond simple viruses to sophisticated and aggressive attacks like ransomware that steal data and hold businesses hostage. While signature-based intrusion prevention was once a primary defense, the constant evolution of malware, now even accelerated by AI generation, means that relying solely on detection is a losing battle. The focus for effective enterprise security must shift from trying to detect everything bad to simply blocking everything that isn't explicitly known and permitted. This proactive approach, known as "protect first, detect later," is a core principle for hardening endpoints and preventing initial compromises.ThreatLocker's core strategy centers on endpoint and cloud protection, recognizing that the endpoint (computers and servers) is the primary point of entry for attackers. Unlike network traffic, which can be encrypted, an compromised endpoint grants access to everything the user can access. The challenge of a dissolving traditional network perimeter means endpoints travel outside the office, necessitating robust security directly on the device. By stopping unauthorized software, malware, and suspicious activities directly at the endpoint, ThreatLocker aims to limit the damage even if an attacker gains initial access, preventing lateral movement and further compromise.This includes addressing behavioral indicators of compromise, not just known malware. Tools like Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) identify suspicious activities (e.g., IP scanners, enumerating network shares) that, while not malware, indicate potential attacker presence. However, an EDR is only effective if its alerts are actively monitored and responded to 24/7, either by an in-house Security Operations Center (SOC) or a Managed Detection and Response (MDR) team. The ultimate goal is to enforce a deny-by-default posture, where any unapproved software or activity is blocked, rather than relying on the hope of detecting every new threat, which has proven to be a failing strategy for enterprise security. ✔ Chapter 2: The Organized World of Cybercrime: Mimicking Go-to-Market Strategies Cybercriminals,
Sales Enablement with EQ in the AI EraThe digital landscape is rapidly changing, redefining sales and leadership. This podcast explores how emotional intelligence (EQ) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) fundamentally drive sales enablement and organizational growth. Discover how human skills and cutting-edge technology create a new frontier for business success.Join Sugata Sanyal, Founder & CEO of ZINFI, in an insightful discussion with Joni Wickline, a seasoned consultant and former Chief Channel Officer. Joni brings decades of experience improving employee performance and engagement. She shares expertise from leading global positions at organizations like Leadership Circle and Blanchard and is renowned in leadership development. Joni highlights the critical shift in corporate learning from traditional methods to a focus on soft skills like resilience, communication, and collaboration. She also explains how technology presents both a challenge and an opportunity in this transformation. Listen to the full episode now to gain actionable insights into developing the human skills and strategic approaches necessary to thrive in AI! Joni Wickline, a Chief Channel Officer and consultant, fosters human skills for growth in the digital age.Related Guidebook The Future of Partner Enablement: From Enablement Gaps to Global AdvantageUnlock the full potential of your partner ecosystem with proven strategies for global enablement, scalable infrastructure, and behavior-driven transformation.Download your COMPLIMENTARY COPY of The Future of Partner Enablement: From Enablement Gaps to Global Advantage Guide. Unlock the full potential of your partner ecosystem with proven strategies for global enablement, scalable infrastructure, and behavior-driven transformation.Download for FREEVideo Podcast: Enabling Sales with EQ in the AI Era ✔ Chapter 1: The Evolution of Corporate Learning: From Hard Skills to Human Skills Traditionally, corporate training focused on measurable, hard skills and efficiency-driven productivity. However, the landscape significantly shifted, with organizations now prioritizing "soft skills" such as resilience, communication, innovation, and collaboration. These are fundamentally EQ-driven attributes, making them much harder to measure and teach than the more mechanical skills of the past. This shift directly responds to technological advancements, including AI, which increasingly automates routine tasks, elevating the importance of uniquely human capabilities in the workforce. Learning providers find it increasingly difficult to attach specific training to these nuanced skills because each organization's needs and desired outcomes differ.This change in focus also impacts how learning providers interact with their clients. In the past, HR typically bought training, and while HR departments remain central, the decision-making process has become more sophisticated, often involving "people officers." Selling to organizations now requires a deep dive into uncovering their specific needs, understanding the desired outcomes, and, most importantly, identifying the key metrics they aim to move. This consultative approach is essential because, despite clear recognition that these human skills are game-changers for organizations, measuring their direct return on investment is complex and challenging. The industry evolves to partner with organizations, co-creating solutions tailored to unique pain points or business opportunities.This profound shift from IQ-driven, mechanical productivity to EQ-driven human behavior marks a new era for corporate education. While traditional education models, often characterized by rote memorization and standardized testing, still prevail, the demands of the modern workforce necessitate continuous upskilling in areas like resilience and complex communication. The challenge lies in retraining a workforce educated in the "old way" for the new frontier of sales ...
Smartsheet's Ecosystem Growth: Powered by PartnerOps ExcellenceThe dynamic world of enterprise software demands precision, strategy, and robust PartnerOps for scaling growth and managing complex partner ecosystems. This podcast delves into Smartsheet's meticulous approach to building, evolving, and optimizing its global partner network, revealing how a strong operational framework translates into tangible business success.Join Sugata Sanyal, Founder and CEO of ZINFI, for an insightful discussion with Rachael Travis, Director of Global Programs at Smartsheet. Rachael shares her extraordinary journey from serving in the U.S. Army, including deployment in Afghanistan, to leading partner operations and channel strategy in corporate America. She provides a unique perspective on translating military-grade problem-solving and leadership principles into designing and executing effective partner programs. Discover how Smartsheet has strategically pruned and grown its partner base, leveraging data and innovation to meet evolving market demands.Listen to the full episode now to gain actionable insights into developing a resilient and scalable partner operations strategy for your business!Related Guidebook PartnerOps Excellence: The Definitive Guide to Scalable SaaS EcosystemsBuild a PartnerOps function that delivers strategy, structure, and AI-driven execution across your partner ecosystem.Download your COMPLIMENTARY COPY of PartnerOps Excellence: The Definitive Guide to Scalable SaaS Ecosystems Guide. Build a PartnerOps function that delivers strategy, structure, and AI-driven execution across your partner ecosystem.Download for FREEVideo Podcast: Smartsheet's Ecosystem Growth: Powered by PartnerOps Excellence ✔ Chapter 1: From Military Leadership to Corporate Partner Strategy: A Unique Journey Rachael Travis's journey into leading global partner programs at Smartsheet is deeply rooted in her six years of service in the U.S. Army by way of the United States Military Academy at West Point. Her time at West Point focused on honing leadership capabilities and building high-performing teams, skills she has carried forward throughout her career. A pivotal experience was her 15-month deployment to Afghanistan in 2007, during a challenging period when resources were primarily focused on Iraq. This environment demanded immense grit, creativity, and the ability to work across nations and diverse cultures to achieve a common mission, teaching her critical lessons in leading with empathy and collaborating under immense pressure.Her military experience provided invaluable transferable skills for her civilian career in partner operations. One key lesson was the ability to break down large, ambiguous missions into smaller, bite-sized tasks that individual teams can execute against. This is particularly relevant in partnerships, which often present comprehensive, strategic concepts that must be translated into actionable plans. Furthermore, the military taught her how to build relationships and influence others without direct authority, a crucial skill in complex partner ecosystems where success relies on rallying diverse stakeholders around a shared vision.The transition from managing physical logistics and equipment in the military to dealing with bits and bytes in a pure-play software world revealed that while the "widgets" are different, the underlying concepts and frameworks for problem-solving remain consistent. This includes planning, deploying the best resources, and optimizing for efficiency and effectiveness. Her consulting background, which followed her military service, further solidified her understanding of go-to-market strategies and customer-centric growth, laying the foundation for her channel and partner operations expertise. ✔ Chapter 2: Designing Strategic PartnerOps (Partner Operations): Effectiveness vs. Efficiency A core principle in designing a partner operations framew...
Second-Party Data: AI Unlocking Ecosystems In the fast-evolving landscape of modern business, the strategic use of data is paramount for sustainable growth. This podcast dives deep into the power of second-party data and how artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming its utility to unlock unprecedented opportunities within partner ecosystems. Discover how companies move beyond traditional data sources to leverage shared insights for competitive advantage and accelerated revenue.Join Sugata Sanyal, Founder & CEO of ZINFI, in an insightful discussion with Bob Moore, founder and CEO of Crossbeam. Bob shares his unique journey as a "data nerd" who built two successful SaaS companies in data analytics before founding Crossbeam, the world's leading platform for account mapping. He explains how Crossbeam helps companies compare their CRM data with partners while preserving privacy, which over 30,000 companies globally use. This conversation explores the evolution of data from first- and third-party to highly valuable second-party data and how AI is now a critical differentiator in leveraging these insights for more intelligent business decisions.Listen to the full episode now to gain actionable insights into how second-party data and AI are reshaping the future of partner-driven growth! Related Guidebook Second-Party Data: AI Ecosystems Unlocking Best Practices Your Essential Guide to Transforming Partnerships and Revenue Growth. Download your COMPLIMENTARY COPY of Second-Party Data: AI Ecosystems Unlocking Guide. Your Essential Guide to Transforming Partnerships and Revenue Growth. Download for FREE Video Podcast: Second-Party Data: AI Unlocking Ecosystems ✔ Chapter 1: The Entrepreneurial Journey: A Foundation in Data Analytics Bob Moore's entrepreneurial journey is deeply rooted in his background as a "data nerd," having studied computer science and operations research. His career began at a venture capital firm, Insight Partners, where he quickly recognized a significant gap: many highly successful businesses lacked sophistication in data analytics, struggling with concepts like customer lifetime value and cohort analysis. This observation led him to manually assist these companies in analyzing their data using SQL and Excel, eventually sparking the idea for his first company, RJ Metrics. Launched in 2008 with co-founder Jake Stein, RJ Metrics aimed to productize this analytical work, bringing "venture capital grade analytics" via SaaS to a broader audience. This early experience laid the groundwork for understanding how businesses could leverage their data more effectively.The second company, Stitch Data, emerged directly from challenges observed at RJ Metrics. Businesses often had their data scattered across various systems, such as Shopify, inventory platforms, payment processors, and marketing automation tools like HubSpot or MailChimp. This fragmentation made it incredibly difficult for companies to consolidate data to answer complex business questions, like whether a marketing campaign led to refunds. We designed Stitch as an intuitive platform for extracting data from these disparate API endpoints and depositing it into a centralized data warehouse, coinciding with the rise of cloud data warehouses like Amazon Redshift and Snowflake. This low-friction product achieved rapid success, and Talend acquired it in 2018.The experiences at Stitch, particularly the realization that Stitch was often purchased as part of a broader data stack (e.g., alongside Snowflake or Looker), directly led to the genesis of Crossbeam. This insight highlighted that the most qualified prospects for Stitch were those who had just invested in complementary technologies. The problem of effectively collaborating with these partners through traditional,
EQ + AI: The New Formula for Partner Ecosystem Success In this episode of ZINFI’s podcast series, Sugata Sanyal, Founder & CEO of ZINFI, hosts Jason Glass, Global Head of Partner Sales at SugarCRM, for a deep dive into the next wave of innovation in the partner ecosystem. The two explore how emotional intelligence (EQ) and artificial intelligence (AI) are not just shaping go-to-market strategies but redefining leadership, operations, and revenue growth.Jason shares insights from leading partner programs at industry giants like NetSuite, Oracle, and SugarCRM. The conversation highlights how human connection, technical fluency, and marketplace orchestration converge to create a new operating system for partner-led success.Whether scaling a channel, rebuilding partner enablement, or navigating hybrid sales motions, this conversation is your blueprint for building a high-performing, AI-ready, EQ-driven partner ecosystem. Related Guidebook The Modern Partner Ecosystem Discover how EQ and AI combine to transform leadership, operations, and growth in today’s partner-led, marketplace-driven ecosystem. Download your COMPLIMENTARY COPY of The Blueprint for Revenue Leadership Guide. Discover how emotional and artificial intelligence converge to redefine partner ecosystems, enhancing leadership, operations, and growth strategies. Download for FREE Video Podcast: EQ + AI: The New Formula for Partner Ecosystem Success ✔ Chapter 1: From Direct Sales to Ecosystem Thinking The episode opens with reflections on an early sales career at ADP and Epicor. In those early days, the focus remained almost exclusively on direct sales. Most organizations controlled the customer journey, and partner relationships appeared secondary or optional. The discussion highlights how this linear model fractured over time, giving way to a more holistic view where partner ecosystems play an essential role in modern go-to-market strategies. Simple reseller engagements evolved into diverse, dynamic models involving co-sell, marketplaces, and solution integrators.The shift didn’t occur solely at an organizational level—buyer behavior played a significant role. With more access to information, buyers now demand flexibility, integrated solutions, and expert guidance throughout the journey. This behavioral shift pushed companies to diversify their routes to market and invest more deeply in partner ecosystems. Success no longer hinges on who owns the customer but on how multiple players collaborate to deliver consistent value across the lifecycle.This opening segment establishes why traditional direct sales tactics no longer suffice. Leaders must now embrace partner ecosystems as a core strategic pillar. The era of linear pipelines and single-vendor dominance has ended. Companies that leverage the strength of their partner communities gain broader reach, richer insights, and faster time to market. The conversation transitions from isolated transactions to interconnected value creation, setting a compelling tone for the podcast's remainder. ✔ Chapter 2: EQ-Driven Partner Leadership in a Digital World The conversation shifts to the rise of emotional intelligence (EQ) in partner sales leadership. Partner management once focused on operations—contracts, quotas, and enablement kits. As partner ecosystems became integral to success, interpersonal dynamics gained importance. Effective leaders now stay deeply attuned to the human side of partnerships. Trust, empathy, vulnerability, and active listening distinguish top-performing partner leaders from the rest.The COVID-19 pandemic triggered a seismic shift when face-to-face interactions disappeared overnight. The screen replaced the boardroom,
AI Disrupts Telecom Channel and Workforce Impact In this high-energy episode, Sugata Sanyal, Founder & CEO of ZINFI, hosts Kameron Olsen, a seasoned telecom entrepreneur and expert in the TSD (Technology Solutions Distributor) ecosystem. Kameron brings two decades of experience in the telecom channel, covering everything from analog phones to SaaS-based UCaaS platforms. This insightful conversation explores how AI transforms customer experience and disrupts workforce models and operational dynamics.They discuss the convergence between TSDs and MSPs, the evolution from CapEx hardware to OpEx cloud, and how telcos adapt to customer demands for cybersecurity and automation. With AI reshaping contact centers, sales models, and digital infrastructure, this episode delivers critical takeaways for anyone in the channel.Listen in to understand why telecom's next wave of value lies in advisory-led, AI-powered ecosystems and how partners can lead in this shift. Related Guidebook Unified Communications: The Backbone of modern digital growth Discover how telcos adapt to customer demands for cybersecurity and automation. Download your COMPLIMENTARY COPY of Unified communications, cybersecurity, and channel convergence drive secure, scalable growth in today’s digital business landscape. Download for FREE Video Podcast: AI Disrupts Telcocom Channel and Workforce Impact ✔ Chapter 1: From Prem-Based Phones to the SaaS-Driven Telecom Channel The discussion opens by tracing the transformation of telecom from its legacy roots in on-premise phone systems to a modern, cloud-driven, SaaS-enabled ecosystem. Telecom professionals who once focused on selling hardware have evolved into strategic channel leaders facilitating cloud-hosted communications. The shift from CapEx-heavy deployments to OpEx-friendly models marked the turning point—ushering in a new era where unified communications, voice over IP (VoIP), and managed services took center stage.Cloud-hosted platforms replaced physical equipment, reducing upfront costs and allowing for flexible, scalable service delivery. Technology Services Distributors (TSDs) began to bundle connectivity, voice, collaboration, and mobility solutions, making it easier for advisors to deliver end-to-end communication services. These trusted advisors transitioned from box sellers to business problem solvers, managing provisioning, implementation, and contract renewals.The discussion highlights how pivotal events—like 9/11—accelerated the need for infrastructure redundancy and disaster recovery. Enterprises, burned by data and communication outages, began prioritizing resilience. This urgency paved the way for cloud-first thinking well before the industry officially labeled it "digital transformation."In today’s telecom channel, advisors do more than activate accounts or push products. They assess risk, craft continuity strategies, and offer a consultative layer around service architecture. This segment establishes the foundation for future topics like automation, AI, and convergence—demonstrating how the channel’s value has expanded beyond connectivity to encompass strategic business continuity. ✔ Chapter 2: COVID, Bandwidth Shifts, and the Rise of the Digital Workplace The COVID-19 pandemic served as the ultimate stress test for global infrastructure. Practically overnight, organizations had to move entire workforces online. Everything—enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer support systems, virtual meetings, and online commerce—had to run over personal home networks. Telecom providers faced skyrocketing demand yet scaled rapidly due to years of investment in scalable, software-defined backends.While end users dealt with the immediate challenge o...
How to Exponentially Scale the Value of Managed Service Providers Business In this insightful episode of the ZINFI Partner Ecosystem Podcast, Sugata Sanyal, Founder & CEO of ZINFI, interviews Tim Conkle, Founder & CEO of The 20 MSP, to explore how managed service providers can scale effectively and profitably. Drawing from over three decades of experience, Tim walks us through transforming MSPs from 5-person shops to national powerhouses without losing agility or customer focus.He shares how The 20 MSP model leverages standardization, brand building, and a simplified business approach to tackle three significant challenges: lead generation, sales execution, and operational scale. The episode provides a roadmap for MSP leaders looking to move beyond technical excellence and build resilient, scalable business infrastructure. Tim also outlines the leadership mindset required to transition from “king” to “wealth creator” and how to lead teams through cultural transformation.Listen in to discover how MSPs can evolve, thrive, and dominate by doing less — but doing it better. Related Guidebook Scale Your Success: The Strategic Guide for Managed Service Providers Best Practices Unlock Exponential Growth and Transform Your MSP Business. Download your COMPLIMENTARY COPY of Scale Your Success: The Strategic Guide for Managed Service Providers Guide. Unlock Exponential Growth and Transform Your MSP Business. Download for FREE Video Podcast: How to Exponentially Scale the Value of Managed Service Providers ✔ Chapter 1: The Foundational Pillars of MSP Growth: Lead Generation, Sales, and Scale Tim Conkle, Founder and CEO of The 20 MSP, opens the discussion by sharing his extensive journey in the IT industry, stretching back to 1992. He transparently recounts the early struggles of his company, Roland Technology, mirroring the challenges many Managed Service Provider businesses face in achieving substantial growth. Conkle identifies lead generation as his initial "Achilles heel," acknowledging that despite his strong sales abilities, consistently getting in front of potential clients proved difficult. His breakthrough came after years of refining a single, effective "oil well"—Google pay-per-click—which dramatically accelerated his company's expansion and highlighted the critical role of reliable demand generation for any aspiring MSP. This personal experience underscores the foundational importance of a robust marketing engine to initiate and sustain business development.As Conkle began teaching other MSPs his successful lead generation strategies, he uncovered two further, equally critical challenges that many in the industry faced: the ability to close deals and the capacity for operational scale effectively. He cites examples of MSPs generating numerous appointments but failing to convert them into sales, or those who rapidly grew their revenue but saw no corresponding increase in profit because their internal operations could not keep pace with demand. This realization led him to conceptualize the "three-legged stool" of MSP success: lead generation, sales execution, and operational scale. Conkle argues that while technical knowledge and tools are abundant in the IT sector, successful businesses must first master these fundamental building blocks.This more profound understanding of business fundamentals inspired Conkle to found The 20 MSP, based on a whiteboard idea 13 years ago. The name reflects his "better together" philosophy, drawing from the 80-20 rule, where the "20 percenters"—the high-performing individuals and companies—achieve far greater results when they collaborate. Conkle passionately articulates that a fragmented industry allows external entities to "mine the gold" that MSPs often overlook within their businesses.
Vision to Velocity: A Systems Thinking Playbook for Scaling Startups In this insightful episode of the ZINFI Partner Ecosystem Podcast, Sugata Sanyal, Founder & CEO of ZINFI, sits down with Bruce Eckfeldt —former architect turned entrepreneur and founder coach—to discuss how startup founders can apply systems thinking to scale effectively. Drawing from his background in design and coaching, Bruce unpacks the structural, psychological, and strategic components needed to transition from vision to operational velocity. Sugata and Bruce explore the key moments that challenge founders, the systems that support rapid scaling, and the leadership mindsets required for sustained growth. Whether facing growing pains or preparing for scale, this conversation provides a tactical and philosophical guide.Tune in to learn how to scale your startup like a pro. Related Guidebook Building Scalable, Trust-DrivenPartner Ecosystems Discover How Top B2B Brands Are Transforming Engagement, Trust, and Revenue. Download your COMPLIMENTARY COPY of Building Scalable, Trust-DrivenPartner Ecosystems Guide. Discover How Top B2B Brands Are Transforming Engagement, Trust, and Revenue. Download for FREE Video Podcast: Vision to Velocity: A Systems Thinking Playbook for Scaling Startups ✔ Chapter 1: From Architecture to Entrepreneurship: Discovering Systems in Everything The mindset of an architect revolves around understanding how structure influences function. That same principle applies powerfully in business—especially in scaling startups. Entrepreneurs who approach their business with a systems mindset quickly gain an advantage. They recognize that structure is not a constraint but a blueprint for success. As architects design spaces that shape behavior, startup leaders must design workflows, feedback loops, and decision-making structures that shape organizations' operations and growth.Founders in early-stage startups often drive growth through passion, product innovation, and relentless hustle. As the company scales, complexity grows with it. Fast decisions, informal communication, and gut instincts that once fueled success now create risk. To sustain growth, scaling startups must replace instinctive chaos with structured clarity. They must embrace systems thinking as an essential survival skill.Adopting a systems perspective allows founders to shift focus from fighting fires to building fireproof operations. They start to see their companies not as a collection of tasks but as interdependent systems: marketing connects to sales, sales connects to success, and success connects to retention and expansion. Every touchpoint becomes an opportunity for design and optimization. The power of this shift lies in its scalability. Startups grow not by doing more of the same but by building repeatable, reliable processes that elevate performance across teams.This section highlights that the best scaling startups don’t just develop great products—they build great systems around those products. They understand that customer experience, team dynamics, and operational rhythm require intentional design. Founders who think like systems architects build organizations that are not only innovative but sustainable. ✔ Chapter 2: Coaching Founders: Letting Go to Scale Up One of the most significant challenges for founders in scaling startups is learning to let go. At a certain point—often between $1M and $5M in revenue—the founder must stop being the hero and start being the architect. That means designing the company so that it can operate independently of any individual, including themselves.This transition can be emotionally and operationally complex. Founders often equate personal involvement with quality.
Scaling Partner Ecosystems with Strategy, Programs & PartnerOpsIn this insightful episode of the ZINFI PartnerOps Podcast series, Sugata Sanyal, Founder & CEO of ZINFI, speaks with Kristin Carnes, Vice President of Global Channel Programs & Operations at Netskope, about the critical role of PartnerOps in scaling global partner ecosystems. With over a decade of experience in high-growth security companies, Kristin offers tactical insights into how operations, strategy, and programs converge to enable scalable partner success.From foundational alignment to advanced automation, Kristin outlines her phased approach to building a robust partner ecosystem—starting with structured PartnerOps systems and evolving toward AI-powered infrastructure. Whether you’re leading partner operations at a startup or a global enterprise, this conversation delivers strategic takeaways and practical frameworks for building resilient, high-performance partner programs. Related Guidebook Scaling with PartnerOps Operational Excellence for the Modern Channel. Download your COMPLIMENTARY COPY of Scaling Partner Ecosystems with Strategy, Programs & PartnerOps Guide. Operational Excellence for the Modern Channel.This guidebook was built from a robust podcast conversation with Kristin Carnes, a leader in partner operations strategy. It captures her insights and real-world examples to help you architect a high-performing PartnerOps function. Download for FREE Video Podcast: Scaling Partner Ecosystems with Strategy, Programs & PartnerOps ✔ Chapter 1: Standardizing PartnerOps at Scale When Netskope began formalizing its global partner operations, it quickly became clear that the absence of a standardized framework led to fragmented regional approaches. Each geography operated in silos, resulting in inconsistent partner experiences and inefficiencies across the channel ecosystem. The organization’s first significant strategic move was to launch a globally tiered partner program that unified discounting policies, deal registration processes, and partner classification standards.This initiative brought equity to the partner experience and embedded operational rigor directly into pricing and quoting systems. By aligning systems and PartnerOps functions, Netskope established a scalable foundation—demonstrating that operational discipline is not a backend process but a strategic pillar for successful channel execution.Once the structure was in place, the next focus was enforcing it across systems. The company addressed issues like poor partner data quality and fragmented contract management within platforms like Salesforce. Leaders introduced mandatory contract uploads, validated partner records, and rolled out consistent workflows—transforming data into a strategic asset and building cross-functional alignment. The result is clearer insights, stronger segmentation, and a unified PartnerOps function that supports global growth.Another critical element was guiding regional teams through operational change. The approach prioritized empathy, communication, and a clear value proposition tied to data-driven outcomes. Leaders navigated entrenched legacy processes with sensitivity, presenting a future vision centered on scalability and improved partner outcomes. The lesson: PartnerOps isn’t just about automation—it’s about aligning people, processes, and platforms for global impact. ✔ Chapter 2: Expanding Routes to Market through Operational Agility As Netskope’s channel matured, PartnerOps evolved from internal cleanup to strategic expansion. The team enabled new go-to-market pathways, including Managed Service Providers (MSPs), telcos, and Global Systems Integrators (GSIs).
The Future of Managed Service Providers in the Age of AI and AutomationIn this insightful episode of the ZINFI Podcast series, Sugata Sanyal, Founder & CEO of ZINFI, welcomes Erick Simpson, an MSP industry veteran and thought leader, to discuss the radical evolution of Managed Service Providers (MSP) and the pivotal role of AI and automation in shaping their future. Drawing from his two-decade journey in the MSP world, Erick provides a masterclass on transforming from break-fix support to strategic, consultative, subscription-based services.The conversation traces key turning points—like the rise of remote monitoring, vendor management innovation, and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic—while focusing on what lies ahead. From smart dispatch to agentic AI, this episode breaks down the tools, tactics, and team transformations defining modern MSPs.Whether you're a vendor, systems integrator, or partner program leader, this discussion delivers actionable insights into where MSPs have been, where they are now, and how they can navigate what’s next in a world increasingly shaped by automation and intelligence. Related Guidebook The Future of Managed Service Providers in the Age of AI and Automation Discover How Top B2B Brands Are Transforming Engagement, Trust, and Revenue. Download your COMPLIMENTARY COPY of The Future of Managed Service Providers in the Age of AI and Automation Guide. Discover How Top B2B Brands Are Transforming Engagement, Trust, and Revenue. Download for FREE Video Podcast: The Future of Managed Service Providers in the Age of AI and Automation ✔ Chapter 1: The Rise of Managed Services and the Shift to Recurring Models The discussion opens with a look into the foundational era of Managed Service Providers (MSPs), spotlighting the dramatic shift from traditional break-fix support to flat-rate, bundled services. In the mid-2000s, the industry was still defining itself. Offering IT support through a recurring subscription model was considered radical—especially to small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) accustomed to paying per hour for troubleshooting. Many MSPs faced skepticism from price-sensitive clients who viewed long-term commitments with caution. Yet this transition laid the groundwork for a scalable, predictable service delivery model.As the MSP model matured, service providers began refining their value proposition. Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) tools, automated patching, and dedicated helpdesk software became essential to delivering consistent, reliable IT support. Equally important was the evolution of vendor management—MSPs began solving not just technical problems with client-owned infrastructure but also coordinating across third-party solutions to streamline IT environments. This holistic approach—combining helpdesk operations, proactive monitoring, and third-party vendor liaison—became the industry standard and repositioned MSPs from reactive troubleshooters to strategic business enablers.In those early days, go-to-market strategies were often reactive, and the vendor landscape was underdeveloped. Unlike today’s mature distributor ecosystems with tiered pricing and partner enablement resources, early MSPs struggled with one-size-fits-all licensing and little room for scalability. Despite these limitations, thought leaders and industry pioneers established frameworks that educated the market. Through boot camps, events, and dedicated training initiatives, these early contributors helped guide over 30,000 MSPs globally—establishing best practices for service packaging, delivery optimization, and revenue modeling. These efforts laid a strong foundation for a resilient and highly adaptable sector. ✔ Chapter 2: COVID-19: The Tipping Point for MSP Maturity
Building Scalable, Trust-Driven Partner Ecosystems In this insightful episode of the ZINFI Partner Ecosystem Podcast, Sugata Sanyal, Founder & CEO of ZINFI, is joined by Bryn Jones, Co-founder and CEO of PartnerStack. Together, they explore the evolution of partner ecosystems and how trust, transparency, and scalable infrastructure redefine the future of B2B partnerships. Bryn shares PartnerStack’s 10-year journey—from building a basic affiliate tool to becoming a global ecosystem platform that powers modern partner relationship management (PRM). He discusses the shift in market perception, especially post-COVID, the rise of partner onboarding networks, the complexity of partner incentives, and how PartnerStack uses AI and data to match the right vendors with the right partners. With compelling insights into the challenges of fraud, global payments, and network-building, this episode is a must-listen for partnership leaders. Tune in to discover how modern PRM platforms are scaling trust and driving partner-led growth. Related Guidebook The Definitive Guide to Modern Partner Relationship Management & Ecosystem Best Practices Unlock Exponential Revenue & Resilient Growth Through Strategic Channel Partnerships. Download your COMPLIMENTARY COPY of The Definitive Guide to Modern Partner Relationship Management & Ecosystem Guide. Unlock Exponential Revenue & Resilient Growth Through Strategic Channel Partnerships. Download for FREE Video Podcast: Building Scalable, Trust-Driven Partner Ecosystems ✔ Chapter 1: The Genesis of a Partner Ecosystem Bryn Jones’s path to Partner Relationship Management was anything but typical. Starting as a competitive swimmer on Canada’s national team, Bryn shifted gears during graduate school when he discovered a passion for technology and entrepreneurship. His first venture, a nonprofit collaboration platform called Pod, unintentionally led him to the world of partnerships. A simple “refer-a-friend” feature became that business's most effective growth tool—prompting him to realize the untapped potential of affiliate-driven go-to-market models. In 2015, after conversations with Shopify’s early partnerships team and a successful pitch to Y Combinator, Bryn co-founded PartnerStack with a mission to transform how software is sold. The platform began as a basic referral tool but evolved into a full-fledged ecosystem management solution, addressing critical gaps in partner tracking, payout integrity, and top-of-funnel enablement. Today, Bryn leads PartnerStack as it powers thousands of B2B SaaS partner programs with scalable affiliate marketing infrastructure. His approach has been rooted in trust, transparency, and the belief that partner ecosystems are not just a sales channel—but a strategic, data-driven growth engine. From athlete to ecosystem architect, Bryn’s journey underscores the importance of curiosity, resilience, and long-term vision in building the future of PRM. ✔ Chapter 2: The Evolution of SaaS Partnerships and Ecosystem Management PartnerStack’s early launch in 2015, tagged “get paid for recommending products you love,” quickly revealed a deeper market gap: B2B companies lacked infrastructure to support partner relationships. A turning point came when a partner reported $60,000 in unpaid commissions, highlighting the urgent need for financial transparency. This led PartnerStack to evolve beyond simple referrals, integrating affiliate marketing technology into a robust, commission-based platform that prioritized cash payouts and partner trust—distinguishing it from competitors focused on gift card incentives. From 2015 to 2020,
Hyperscalers, ISVs, and AI: Shaping the Future of B2B Software Distribution In this insightful episode of the ZINFI Partner Ecosystem Podcast, Sugata Sanyal, Founder & CEO of ZINFI, sits down with John Jahnke, CEO of Tackle.io, to explore how hyperscalers, ISVs, and AI are redefining the way B2B software is sold, bought, and scaled. With cloud marketplaces experiencing explosive growth and co-sell motions becoming essential to partner success, John provides a behind-the-scenes look at the evolution of go-to-market strategies and why traditional software sales must evolve. From enabling partner ecosystems to automating co-sell workflows with hyperscaler field teams, the conversation unveils key trends that every partner leader should be watching. This podcast is a must-listen for anyone looking to thrive in the cloud commerce era, where hyperscalers act as the new distribution layer, AI drives scalability, and ISVs unlock unprecedented growth. Tune in now to understand where B2B software distribution is headed and how to stay ahead. Related Guidebook Hyperscalers, ISVs, and AI: Shaping the Future of B2B Software Distribution Discover How Top B2B Brands Are Transforming Engagement, Trust, and Revenue. Download your COMPLIMENTARY COPY of Hyperscalers, ISVs, and AI: Shaping the Future of B2B Software Distribution Guide. Discover How Top B2B Brands Are Transforming Engagement, Trust, and Revenue. Download for FREE Video Podcast: Hyperscalers, ISVs, and AI: Shaping the Future of B2B Software Distribution ✔ Chapter 1: Partner Programs and Hyperscalers as the New Fulfillment Engine Partner programs are entering a new era shaped by hyperscalers' disruptive influence. Cloud giants like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud have moved well beyond their origins in infrastructure. They now play an integral role in enterprise software procurement by transforming their marketplaces into frictionless fulfillment engines. These marketplaces are becoming the default procurement channels for large enterprises. Why? Because they simplify software acquisition, align with pre-approved cloud budgets, and eliminate lengthy legal and procurement cycles. Enterprises are eager to streamline vendor onboarding, consolidate billing under existing cloud commitments, and access software that integrates directly with their operational environments. Hyperscalers offer all of that—and more. For independent software vendors (ISVs), this shift is profound. Instead of navigating multi-month procurement processes, they can now sell directly into cloud environments, embedded into workflows where buyers are already transacting. This dramatically accelerates time-to-revenue and increases internal alignment with customer procurement and finance teams. Hyperscalers have also activated massive co-sell programs, leveraging extensive field organizations that support partners throughout the sales cycle. This makes them more than distributors—they are now strategic GTM partners, capable of influencing the pipeline, unlocking new buyers, and amplifying brand visibility. This dynamic represents a new distribution layer that enables direct, scalable, and repeatable revenue generation. Innovative ISVs capitalize on this transformation by listing their products early on hyperscaler marketplaces, gaining quick wins and internal momentum. These early transactions often serve as proof points that build organizational confidence and stakeholder buy-in. Over time, they generate a flywheel effect, making cloud marketplaces central to the partner program strategy. Success in this environment depends on more than simply listing a product—it requires active orchestration.
Leading Global Partner Programs Transformation at ScaleIn this insightful episode of the ZINFI Partner Ecosystem Podcast, Sugata Sanyal, Founder & CEO of ZINFI, sits down with Craig Patterson, Global Channel Chief at Exabeam, to discuss the intricacies of transforming and scaling global partner programs. With over two decades of experience building high-performing partner ecosystems, Craig shares valuable insights from his leadership journey across the telco, cloud, and cybersecurity sectors.Listeners will gain a front-row seat to Craig’s strategic approach to ecosystem design, channel transformation, KPI alignment, and the integration of AI into go-to-market strategies. From the merger of LogRhythm and Exabeam to the launch of Exabeam 2.0, Craig unveils how data, trust, and culture drive success in modern PRM environments.Don’t miss this opportunity to learn how to lead through complexity, scale with precision, and build world-class partner programs. Related Guidebook Leading with Partner Programs: A Framework for Cultural and Operational Excellence A Framework for Cultural and Operational Excellence. Download your COMPLIMENTARY COPY of Leading with Partner Programs Guide. A Framework for Cultural and Operational Excellence. Download for FREE Video Podcast: Leading Global Partner Programs Transformation at Scale ✔ Chapter 1: The Evolution of the Partner Ecosystem Over the past two decades, Partner Programs have evolved dramatically. Once seen as order-fulfillment engines, today’s partner ecosystems serve as strategic drivers of enterprise growth. Early programs often supported direct sales, but the rise of complex technology stacks shifted this dynamic. Now, companies depend on Partner Programs for specialized expertise and hands-on implementation support. Partners no longer just execute—they solve business problems, apply domain knowledge, and deliver agile solutions. These changes have turned Partner Programs into growth engines embedded in go-to-market strategies.A modern Partner Program must deliver more than transactions. It must offer enablement tools, co-selling strategies, and frictionless onboarding. Managed service providers lead this evolution in cybersecurity and other high-complexity fields by delivering continuous optimization and full lifecycle support. As a result, Partner Programs now offer structured frameworks across consult, design, deploy, and manage stages. To help partners succeed, vendors must equip them with training, technical support, and actionable insights. Today's Partner Program is a service layer—empowering the ecosystem to innovate, scale, and sustain value creation.Trusted advisors within partner ecosystems rely on well-built Partner Programs to deliver impact. Their success depends on access to tools, coaching, and performance data. Companies must ensure their Partner Programs adapt to changes in cloud, AI, and data-first initiatives. This requires personalized engagement at scale, tailored incentives, and strong co-selling frameworks. As specialization deepens and vertical knowledge becomes critical, Partner Programs must remain agile and globally scalable. ✔ Chapter 2: Building High-Impact Global Partner Programs Building a high-impact global Partner Program involves assessing internal strengths and aligning with external partner needs. Organizations must define their ideal partner profile by region and align it with the perfect customer profile to ensure relevance. Strong programs begin by asking difficult questions, gathering unfiltered feedback, and aligning design with practical needs across ecosystems.A strong Partner Program creates measurable value. Partners must see how joint go-to-market efforts impact their busi...
The Art of Scaling Culture: Building Like a Product, Letting Go Like a LeaderIn this insightful episode of the ZINFI Partner Ecosystem Podcast, Sugata Sanyal, Founder & CEO of ZINFI, engages in a rich conversation with
The Rise of AI Agents in Partner Experience Management In this insightful episode of the ZINFI Partner Ecosystem Podcast, Sugata Sanyal, Founder & CEO of ZINFI, hosts Naomi Dreifuss, Founder & CEO of Zugit, for a dynamic conversation on the evolving landscape of Partner Experience Management. Naomi shares her path from SaaS sales into launching Zugit, a platform redefining how organizations use AI to power more innovative partner ecosystems. The discussion unpacks why traditional PRM tools fall short, how AI agents transform data into actionable intelligence and the strategic importance of partner transparency and engagement. Naomi brings unique insight into how organizations can leverage analytics and automation to scale partnerships without friction. Whether managing a long-tail partner network or rethinking your go-to-market strategy, this podcast delivers sharp, practical insights on succeeding in the AI-powered partnership era. Tune in to learn how AI can elevate your partner programs to the next level. Related Guidebook The Definitive Guide to AI in Channel Partnerships: The Future of Partner Relationship Management Revolutionizing Channel Partnerships with AI in Partnerships and Modern Partner Relationship Management. Download your COMPLIMENTARY COPY of The Definitive Guide to AI in Channel Partnerships: The Future of Partner Relationship Management. Revolutionizing Channel Partnerships with AI in Partnerships and Modern Partner Relationship Management. Download for FREE Video Podcast: The Rise of AI Agents in Partner Experience Management ✔ Chapter 1: The Journey to AI in Partnerships In this episode, Sugata Sanyal, Founder & CEO of ZINFI, welcomes Naomi Dreifuss, Founder & CEO of Zugit, for an in-depth discussion about her journey from enterprise SaaS sales to launching a transformative AI-powered partner experience platform. Naomi reflects on her decade-long career in B2B sales, with notable stints at data-centric companies like Sisense, where she first encountered the systemic challenges of working with channel partners. At Sisense, Naomi struggled with the inefficiencies of indirect sales—complex processes, lack of alignment between sales and partnership teams, and minimal trust between vendors and partners. The pivotal moment came when the company announced it would cut parts of its direct sales force to expand its channel partner program. Realizing the future lay in mastering this flawed system, Naomi sought to understand and ultimately redesign it. She discovered her frustrations were widely shared among peers in similar roles, revealing a broader industry problem: channel partnerships were broken, weighed down by poor data sharing, misaligned incentives, and outdated processes. This insight fueled her decision to found Zugit, named after the Hebrew word Zug (partner). Naomi’s vision is to build an agile, modern framework for partner relationship management akin to how Salesforce revolutionized software delivery. ✔ Chapter 2: The Evolution of the Partner Ecosystem Naomi Dreifuss identifies a major transformation underway in the channel landscape: the era of efficiency has arrived. She explains that the pressure to generate faster return on investment (ROI) is no longer coming just from sales leaders, but from company boards and investors. Organizations are demanding smarter, leaner go-to-market (GTM) strategies—whether direct or indirect—that can scale quickly without consuming disproportionate resources. Naomi stresses that this requires a complete mindset shift: partnerships must adopt the same agile, iterative approaches already embraced in software development and marketing.
Partner Marketing at Scale: Insights from 23,000 SAP PartnersIn this insightful episode of the ZINFI Partner Ecosystem Podcast, Sugata Sanyal, Founder & CEO of ZINFI, hosts Andrew Kisslo, SVP of Global Partner Marketing at SAP. With 23,000 partners globally, SAP’s ecosystem offers a masterclass in orchestration, scalability, and growth-focused strategy. Andrew shares how SAP redefines partner roles across selling, building, enabling, and servicing—while driving co-marketing and co-selling initiatives through multi-partner engagement models like the “Power of Three.” The conversation also explores leadership transformation, the changing face of B2B buyers, and how AI empowers partners at every maturity level. From segmentation to strategy and measurement to enablement, this episode distills decades of field experience into practical takeaways. Learn how SAP uses frameworks, data, and storytelling to turn complexity into growth. Related Guidebook Next-Gen Partner Marketing: Automation, AI, and Alignment Your strategic playbook for building intelligent, scalable partner ecosystems. Download your COMPLIMENTARY COPY of Next-Gen Partner Marketing: Automation, AI, and Alignment Guide. Your strategic playbook for building intelligent, scalable partner ecosystems. Download for FREE Video Podcast: Partner Marketing at Scale: Insights from 23,000 SAP Partners ✔ Chapter 1: The Evolution of the Partner Ecosystem The opening segment discusses how the structure of partner ecosystems has undergone a foundational shift. Two decades ago, vendor-partner relationships were largely linear, often revolving around a simple sell-implement-support cycle. Today, ecosystems are complex webs of collaboration, co-creation, and shared execution. SAP’s partner framework now accounts for VARs, GSIs, ISVs, and technology enablers—each bringing distinct value propositions. Many partners function in multiple categories, requiring marketing and operations teams to think beyond static partner types. Orchestration now involves dynamic capability mapping instead of just contractual tiers.The SAP model is driven not by one-to-one partner relationships but by multi-role alignment. For example, an ISV may be a go-to-market partner in one market and a service provider in another. These layered roles require SAP to build systems that adapt to partner behavior across customer journeys. The company's partner orchestration approach is rooted in modularity, integration, and localized execution.The discussion also explores how SAP’s position as an application-layer leader directly influences the ecosystem design, in contrast with Microsoft’s platform-layer ubiquity. SAP focuses on mission-critical business applications—ERP, supply chain, and procurement—meaning its partners must specialize in high-trust deployments. This influences partner segmentation, the depth of enablement, and customer expectations. The shift from transactional execution to collaborative solutions is central to how SAP defines its ecosystem today. ✔ Chapter 2: The Power of Three: Driving Co-Marketing and Co-Selling at Scale This section explores SAP’s "Power of Three" strategy. In this distinctive approach, SAP partners with both a service integrator (like Accenture) and a cloud infrastructure player (like Azure) to deliver integrated solutions. This model strengthens credibility and accelerates deal velocity. Each party has a clear role in these arrangements: SAP provides the application logic, the SI manages deployment and customer transformation, and the hyperscaler delivers infrastructure. Such multi-party collaboration requires deep marketing orchestration—shared metrics, unified content tracks, and aligned branding.
From TikTok to LinkedIn: Social Selling Across the Generational DivideIn this engaging episode, Sugata Sanyal, Founder & CEO of ZINFI, welcomes Amelia Taylor, founder of The Revenue Table, for an in-depth conversation on how social selling has become a cornerstone of modern B2B success. They explore how a multi-platform presence—spanning TikTok, LinkedIn, Instagram, and more—is essential for connecting with today’s multi-generational buyers.Amelia shares her journey into content-driven selling, revealing why authenticity and emotional intelligence outperform polished sales pitches. They unpack the psychology of platform engagement, brand trust, and the unspoken rules of social channels. More importantly, they explore the overlap between social selling and the partner ecosystem—where co-selling and brand alignment drive profound pipeline impact.This episode is a must-listen for marketers, partner leaders, and sales professionals navigating the noisy digital marketplace. Learn how to bridge age gaps, speak your buyer’s language, and build a presence that converts connection into commerce. Related Guidebook From TikTok to LinkedIn: Social Selling Across the Generational Divide Discover How Top B2B Brands Are Transforming Engagement, Trust, and Revenue. Download your COMPLIMENTARY COPY of From TikTok to LinkedIn: Social Selling Across the Generational Divide Guide. Discover How Top B2B Brands Are Transforming Engagement, Trust, and Revenue. Download for FREE Video Podcast: From TikTok to LinkedIn: Social Selling Across the Generational Divide ✔ Chapter 1: The Rise of Personal Brands in B2B Social Selling The podcast begins by exploring the increasing importance of personal brands within B2B social selling. In a landscape where buyers crave authenticity and human connection, personal branding has emerged as more than a marketing asset—a sales differentiator. Rather than relying on playbooks, the conversation champions emotional intelligence, storytelling, and lived experiences as core drivers of trust in the digital world.Today’s most effective social sellers don’t follow templates. They write from experience, share their values openly, and connect through stories that resonate personally. Posts that feel “unpolished” or raw often outperform polished thought leadership pieces because they feel more relatable. These moments of vulnerability—sharing a failure, a lesson, or a behind-the-scenes glimpse—foster genuine relationships and open the door to meaningful engagement.This segment also argues that social selling now lives at the intersection of brand and sales. A consistent, authentic presence on LinkedIn or other platforms can build trust before any cold outreach. It’s not about chasing algorithms—it’s about creating resonance. With every post, comment, or message, sellers create micro-touchpoints that guide buyers deeper into the funnel. In short, the sales process often begins not with a meeting but with a moment of visibility and shared values. ✔ Chapter 2: Platform Psychology and the Multi-Channel Shift The conversation then pivots to platform psychology—the idea that each social channel operates with its logic, tone, and user expectations. In the context of social selling, understanding these nuances is critical. What captivates audiences on TikTok might fall flat on LinkedIn, and what thrives on YouTube may not even register on Instagram. Effective sellers must, therefore, become students of each platform, tailoring content not only in form but also in emotional appeal.Today’s B2B landscape is multi-generational. With five generations coexisting in the workplace, each brings different habits and content preferences.
Building Partner DNA Inside Organizations In this engaging episode, Sugata Sanyal, Founder & CEO of ZINFI, speaks with Theresa Caragol, CEO of AchieveUnite, about the strategic evolution of partner relationship management (PRM). As the author of Partnering Success and a global thought leader in the channel space, Theresa shares her path from building global partner programs at tech giants to founding AchieveUnite. The conversation covers how trust-building, AI-driven enablement, and joint value creation redefine PRM for today's partner ecosystems. Theresa shares her framework for embedding partner DNA across organizations and reflects on how data, automation, and co-selling can unlock long-tail partner productivity. From marketplaces to private equity consolidation, she offers insights into what’s next for PRM software, services, and strategy. Watch now to learn how your business can scale smarter and stronger through effective partner relationship management. Related Guidebook Unlock Scalable Growth with The The Partner-First Blueprint: Scaling Trust, Intelligence, and Ecosystem Growth Partner Relationship Management Unlock the Future of Partner Relationship Management in the Marketplace Era Download your COMPLIMENTARY COPY of Unlock Scalable Growth with The The Partner-First Blueprint: Scaling Trust, Intelligence, and Ecosystem Growth Partner Relationship Management Guide. Download for FREE Video Podcast: Partner Relationship Management Strategy ✔ Chapter 1: The Evolution of Partner Relationship Management and Ecosystems Theresa Caragol reflects on her extensive journey in the technology and telecommunications sectors, highlighting the profound transformation of channel strategies over the decades. She discusses her early experiences at companies like Bay Networks and Nortel, where the concept of channel leadership began to take shape. Her transition to Sienna, a company initially focused on direct service provider sales, provided a unique challenge and opportunity: to pivot a direct-centric organization towards a more leveraged, partner-oriented approach. This foundational work laid the groundwork for understanding how to effectively integrate partners into a sales motion, moving beyond the traditional customer-vendor dynamic to foster true partnership. This historical context underscores the significant shift in the industry's perception and utilization of channel partners, emphasizing the increasing importance of a well-defined partner relationship management strategy. The conversation delves into the distinct buying motions across SMB, mid-market, and enterprise segments, and how these necessitate a universal approach to building a partner ecosystem. Regardless of the target market, Theresa asserts that a robust partnering strategy is non-negotiable for any tech company aiming for sustained growth. She contrasts the binary, linear, and hierarchical sales models of the past—where a Rolodex and physical events were primary networking tools—with today's multifaceted, digitized landscape. The advent of social media, AI, and other digital tools has created numerous points of leverage, enabling a synergistic effect where one plus one plus one can truly equal ten for the customer. While offering immense opportunities, this modern complexity also demands a more sophisticated and integrated approach to partner relationship management, moving beyond simple transactional relationships. A significant point of discussion revolves around acquiring Ronor & Associates and integrating Ron Roner's 35 years of intellectual property into Achieve Unite's AI engine. Theresa emphasizes that while external factors and phenomena may change, the core concepts of partnering remain constant: joint value proposition...
Partner Marketing: AI’s Role in B2B Lead GenerationIn this engaging episode, Sugata Sanyal, Founder & CEO of ZINFI, sits down with Terry Hedden, Founder and CEO of Marketopia, to discuss the transformative impact of AI on B2B lead generation and partner marketing. Terry shares his journey of building Marketopia into a global leader, supporting technology vendors and resellers. He also explores how AI, combined with persistent telemarketing and digital outreach, redefines the future of B2B sales. Key takeaways include the evolution of marketing technology stacks, strategies for mid-market success, and how embracing AI creates competitive advantages without replacing human ingenuity. Tune in for real-world insights and actionable strategies to supercharge your partner marketing programs. Related Guidebook Unlock Scalable Growth with The Partner Marketing Growth Blueprint Proven strategies to drive ROI, improve partner engagement, and build a high-converting channel ecosystem Download your COMPLIMENTARY COPY of Unlock Scalable Growth with The Partner Marketing Growth Blueprint Guide. Proven strategies to drive ROI, improve partner engagement, and build a high-converting channel ecosystem. Download for FREE Video Podcast: Partner Marketing: AI’s Role in B2B Lead Generation ✔ Chapter 1: Building a Demand Generation Powerhouse The founding story of a major partner marketing company, Marketopia, highlights a desire to provide affordable marketing solutions for IT resellers, ultimately building a comprehensive marketing powerhouse. Initially focused on digital marketing through HubSpot, Marketopia expanded into offering integrated telesales and lead generation services to boost sales appointment conversion rates. An emphasis on recurring revenue models, such as managed IT services, helped set the foundation for long-term client partnerships.Over time, Marketopia realized that simply generating leads was not enough. Sales teams required support to nurture and convert leads into real opportunities. This led to an expansion of services, including telemarketing and business development resources, helping clients close deals more effectively. Combining digital and tele strategies created a more complete lead generation ecosystem, driving more substantial ROI for technology partners.This evolution positioned Marketopia as a unique player in the partner marketing space. Its “Growth Machine” platform now centralizes website hosting, email marketing, CRM integration, and telesales activities, providing vendors and resellers with a seamless way to scale. Early experiences and a willingness to adapt created a blueprint for success in partner relationship management. ✔ Chapter 2: The Evolution of Tech Stacks and Integration Power Over the past decade, the marketing technology stack evolved significantly, progressing from basic email personalization to fully integrated platforms that combine website engagement, CRM, telemarketing, and AI. This transformation has enabled partner marketing programs to operate more precisely and efficiently.A significant milestone was the introduction of AI-augmented lead generation strategies. AI enhances teams’ abilities by providing deeper customer insights and automating repetitive tasks rather than replacing human work. When leveraged correctly, AI can significantly lower cost per lead while maintaining high engagement quality in B2B demand generation.Maintaining high-quality lead databases and adhering to compliance standards like GDPR remains critical. The combination of disciplined telesales and digital outreach continues to be essential for building strong relationships within global partner ecosystems.
Partner Marketing: Evolution of Marketing Through PartnersIn this episode of our ZINFI Podcast Series, Sugata Sanyal, Founder & CEO of ZINFI Technologies, sits down with Jon Rivers, Co-Founder of Marketeery, to explore the evolution of marketing through partners. Together, they dive deep into how traditional channel marketing has shifted into today’s partner ecosystem, reshaping how SMB marketing, partner enablement, and partner co-marketing operate. They discuss the explosive role of AI, business process automation, and the increasing verticalization of SMB solutions. This podcast provides essential insights for professionals developing or expanding a partner-focused go-to-market approach. Whether leading a large tech ecosystem or supporting SMBs, this conversation will help you stay ahead of evolving partner marketing trends.Listen now to understand how partnerships are redefining business growth! Related Guidebook Partner Marketing: Evolution of Marketing Through Partners Best Practices Unlock SMB growth with business process automation, vertical SaaS, and AI-powered marketing strategies. Download your COMPLIMENTARY COPY of Partner Marketing: Evolution of Marketing Through Partners Best Practices Guidebook. Unlock SMB growth with business process automation, vertical SaaS, and AI-powered marketing strategies. Download for FREE Video Podcast: Partner Marketing: Evolution of Marketing Through Partners ✔ Chapter 1: Partner Marketing and ERP Transformation in the SMB Sector The conversation introduces a marketing agency that works exclusively within the Microsoft ERP and CRM ecosystem. This agency helps Microsoft partners in the SMB sector by delivering services that include strategy, content creation, website development, and lead generation. The agency’s unique value comes from its technical background, which ranges from software development to channel operations. This experience allows the agency to create highly targeted campaigns that align with its client's business goals and technical realities. By speaking the same language as ERP consultants and developers, the agency streamlines go-to-market execution.Over the years, traditional channels evolved into broader partner ecosystems. Instead of simply reselling products, partners now engage in co-innovation, integration, and joint marketing. Business process automation, once the domain of enterprise IT teams, now finds a home in small and mid-sized companies. With affordable cloud solutions, these businesses automate core functions such as billing, scheduling, and customer communications. As these capabilities become mainstream, they reshape solution providers' expectations and marketing needs. Companies now seek marketing strategies highlighting efficiency and innovation, not just product features.Today, even the smallest businesses access tools that once required large IT budgets. Microsoft’s cloud platforms, especially Business Central, allow partners to deploy scalable solutions with minimal friction. These tools include out-of-the-box integration, customizable workflows, and automated analytics. As a result, service providers must elevate their messaging and emphasize how technology enhances business agility. Partner marketing is critical, helping providers showcase success stories and drive demand through relatable use cases. This shift creates new opportunities to connect with digitally aware buyers in underserved markets. ✔ Chapter 2: AI Automation and Its Role in Partner Marketing for SMBs AI automation creates fresh possibilities for small businesses to operate more efficiently. With the help of AI agents, companies streamline functions such as inventory management, purchase orders,
Scaling Partner Ecosystems: Lessons from Cisco & SonicWALL In this compelling episode of ZINFI’s Partner Ecosystem Podcast, host Sugata Sanyal, Founder & CEO of ZINFI, welcomes Michelle Ragusa-McBain, a global channel leader with executive roles at Cisco, SonicWALL, and more. Michelle shares first-hand insights on how major tech players like Cisco and SonicWALL built, scaled, and evolved their partner ecosystems over the past two decades. From partner enablement and PRM tools to market development funds and the role of AI and cybersecurity, Michelle breaks down the strategic thinking behind building a robust, agile ecosystem. She also dives into her passion for diversity and inclusion in tech and how leaders can mentor the next generation. Tune in for practical, high-level takeaways to apply whether you’re in a $200M mid-market firm or a global enterprise. Listen now to learn how to scale and future-proof your ecosystem. Related Guidebook Scaling Partner Ecosystems: From Enablement to Intelligence Your Essential Guide to Building AI-Driven, Scalable, and Outcome-Focused Partnerships Download your COMPLIMENTARY COPY of Scaling Partner Ecosystems: From Enablement to Intelligence Guide. A strategic guide to building smarter, faster, and more secure partner ecosystems. Download for FREE Video Podcast: Scaling Partner Ecosystems: Lessons from Cisco & SonicWALL ✔ Chapter 1: The Evolution of Channel to Partner Ecosystems Companies like Cisco defined the early days of the technology channel, with value-added resellers (VARs) serving as the primary go-to-market route. Vendors emphasized "partner-first" strategies, and ecosystems grew from networking roots to broader service offerings and solutions. A fascinating anecdote about the Internet’s origins highlights Cisco’s foundational role. Infrastructure development during this era created ripple effects that shaped the entire channel ecosystem. As the industry matured, partner expectations and business models evolved. VARs transitioned into Managed Service Providers (MSPs) and later into Managed Security Service Providers (MSSPs), responding to shifts in how customers consumed technology. Subscription and consumption-based revenue models started to dominate, accelerated by digital transformation. Vendors needed to offer new support and enablement to maintain loyalty and performance. Specialized partners such as ISVs and integrators emerged, playing crucial roles in multi-vendor deals. Partnerships evolved into orchestration rather than linear sales. The rise of cybersecurity and AI became significant ecosystem drivers. Cybersecurity became central to every organization, while AI shifted from a buzzword to an operational necessity. These forces reshaped go-to-market strategies, partner enablement, and vendor-partner relationships. The channel transformed into a diverse, interconnected ecosystem requiring continuous innovation and adaptation. ✔ Chapter 2: Building a Partner Office from the Ground Up Building a "partner-first" organization, especially as companies scale from mid-market players to global enterprises, starts with understanding the buyer persona and identifying the partner types needed to reach them. Companies must assess their geographic operations and determine how partner types—VARs, MSPs, GSIs, ISVs—can support regional expansion across North America, EMEA, LATAM, and APAC. Distribution plays a critical role and varies by region. In North America, companies often operate through distributors and direct-to-partner channels, while in Europe and Latin America, distributors are essential connection points. Traditional distributors (e.g., Ingram Micro,
Partner Ecosystem Playbook: Build, Scale, SucceedDiscover How Apollo.io Built & Scaled Its Ecosystem.In this episode of ZINFI’s partnership ecosystem leadership series, Sugata Sanyal speaks with Jennifer Rhima, Head of Partnerships at Apollo.io, about how she built a global partner ecosystem from scratch. Jennifer shares her unique journey from launching her partnerships career in Dubai to leading high-impact partnership initiatives in the U.S. With practical insights into defining ideal partner profiles, streamlining onboarding, activating partners, and leveraging PRM software, this is a tactical masterclass for anyone in B2B SaaS.Whether you're just beginning to build your partner programs or looking to scale globally, this conversation will give you a step-by-step framework to grow your ecosystem effectively and efficiently.Listen now to learn how to operationalize your partner strategy with PRM software. Related Guidebook Partner Ecosystem Playbook: Build, Scale, Succeed Best Practices A strategic guide to building high-impact partner programs with PRM software. Download your COMPLIMENTARY COPY of Partner Ecosystem Playbook: Build, Scale, Succeed Best Practices Guidebook. A strategic guide to building high-impact partner programs with PRM software. Download for FREE Video Podcast: Partner Ecosystem Playbook: Build, Scale, Succeed ✔ Chapter 1: The Global Roots of a PRM Mindset Jennifer Rhima’s introduction to partnership strategy started in an unconventional place—Dubai. Working in early-stage startups and FinTech environments, she realized that while the terminology of “partner relationship management” didn’t exist then, the fundamentals were the same. Businesses relied heavily on trust, repeatable communication, and relationship-building cornerstones of what PRM software now helps organizations achieve at scale. Jennifer’s early experience in building relationships without formal tools provided her with deep insight into how vital structure and consistency are for growing ecosystems.Upon moving to the U.S., Jennifer’s understanding of partner ecosystems matured as she encountered the full breadth of PRM software capabilities. She observed how American SaaS companies used software platforms to streamline everything from partner onboarding to campaign tracking. The contrast between manual relationship management abroad and systematized partner engagement in the U.S. clarified the need for scalable PRM software solutions. This inspired her to reimagine how she would approach partnerships when she joined Apollo.io.Jennifer’s global lens influenced how she approached her role at Apollo. While many companies focus on acquiring partners quickly, she knew that success depended on building a repeatable partner lifecycle with the help of PRM software. They automated communications, tracked engagement, and delivered enablement resources efficiently. Her background in high-touch, manual relationship models helped her recognize the immense value of PRM platforms in scaling consistent, measurable partner experiences. ✔ Chapter 2: Laying the Foundation: From Onboarding to Enablement When Jennifer joined Apollo.io, there was no formal partner program in place. As a one-person team, she had to create an entire partner ecosystem from scratch. Jennifer prioritized designing a partner onboarding framework using PRM software to ensure every new partner received a consistent, automated, and branded experience. With PRM tools, she could automatically deliver welcome messages, educational resources, and account setup workflows—saving time and reducing drop-off in early engagement.Once onboarding was systematized, Jennifer turned her attention to partner enablement.
The Evolution of PartnerOps: Past, Present & FuturePartner operations (PartnerOps) have transformed from traditional resale models to dynamic, AI-driven ecosystems that accelerate business growth. In this episode, Sugata Sanyal, Founder & CEO of ZINFI, speaks with Antonio Caridad, Head of Global Partner Operations at Tricentis, about how PartnerOps has evolved over the years. They discuss key trends in partner enablement, co-marketing, and co-selling, as well as the impact of automation and AI on partner relationship management. This conversation provides crucial insights for companies looking to optimize their partner strategies. Listen now to discover how the future of PartnerOps is shaping the next generation of partner ecosystems. Related Guidebook The Evolution of PartnerOps: Past, Present & FutureYour Essential Guide to Building AI-Driven, Scalable, and Outcome-Focused Partnerships Download your COMPLIMENTARY COPY of The Evolution of PartnerOps: Past, Present & Future Best Practices Guidebook. A Comprehensive Guide to Scaling and Optimizing Partner Ecosystems.Download for FREE Video Podcast: The Evolution of PartnerOps: Past, Present & Future ✔ Chapter 1: The Origins of PartnerOps Partner operations (PartnerOps) began as a transactional model, primarily driven by resale and distribution. Companies depended on resellers and distributors to expand their market presence, often with minimal strategic collaboration. Antonio Caridad shares his experiences at IBM, where partner relationships were initially volume-focused rather than strategically aligned. The early PartnerOps framework lacked automation, leading to partner tracking, onboarding, and engagement inefficiencies.Over time, businesses recognized the need to segment partners into categories such as value-added resellers (VARs), managed service providers (MSPs), and solution integrators. This allowed companies to tailor partner programs to specific needs, enhancing the effectiveness of their partner strategies. The introduction of structured partner relationship management (PRM) systems helped streamline processes, providing companies better visibility into partner performance and engagement.Despite early challenges, the foundation of PartnerOps was laid through trial and adaptation. Companies started investing in tools and processes to manage their partners better, setting the stage for a more sophisticated partner management approach. The shift from simple resale relationships to value-driven partnerships marked the first step toward the modern PartnerOps ecosystem. ✔ Chapter 2: The Present: Scaling Partner Ecosystems with Automation The modern partner operations (PartnerOps) era is defined by automation, data-driven insights, and seamless partner experiences. Businesses have moved beyond manual partner tracking, leveraging PRM software to manage partner recruitment, onboarding, enablement, and performance evaluation. Antonio and Sugata explore how AI and automation transform partner ecosystems, making collaboration more efficient and effective.With the growing complexity of partner relationships, organizations are integrating PartnerOps with revenue operations (RevOps) to create a unified go-to-market strategy. Sales, marketing, and customer success teams now work closely with PartnerOps to drive co-selling and co-marketing initiatives. This alignment ensures companies maximize partner contributions while maintaining a frictionless partner experience.As partner ecosystems grow, businesses must refine their strategies to ensure long-term success. Investing in scalable PRM platforms, implementing structured partner incentives, and leveraging AI for predictive analytics are critical to staying competitive.
AI’s Next Move: Private Cloud & Edge Computing In this episode, Sugata Sanyal speaks with Vineet Sharma, Global Alliances & Ecosystems Lead at Cloudera, about the transformative role of AI in private cloud and edge computing. As businesses rethink their partner relationship management (PRM) strategies, they are shifting workloads to private cloud for cost, compliance, and security advantages. Vineet shares insights into emerging AI trends, the evolution of PRM, and the impact of edge computing. This discussion explores how enterprises are adapting their partner networks for AI-driven growth and operational efficiency. Listen to gain insight into the next wave of AI infrastructure and PRM advancements. Related Guidebook Hybrid Cloud and Edge AI Computing Impacting the Future of PRMHow AI, Hybrid Cloud, and Edge Computing Are Transforming Partner Relationship Management Download your COMPLIMENTARY COPY of Hybrid Cloud and Edge AI Computing Impacting the Future of PRM Best Practices Guidebook. How AI, Hybrid Cloud, and Edge Computing Are Transforming Partner Relationship Management.Download for FREE Video Podcast: AI’s Next Move: Private Cloud & Edge Computing ✔ Chapter 1: The Rise of AI in Private Cloud & Edge Computing The rapid evolution of AI and cloud computing has transformed the way enterprises manage their partner ecosystems. While public cloud has dominated AI workloads, businesses are now reconsidering private cloud and edge computing due to increasing data security concerns, compliance regulations, and cost management. Many companies initially moved AI workloads to public cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, only to realize the high operational costs and governance challenges associated with these environments. As a result, organizations are now embracing hybrid and private cloud infrastructures that allow them to maintain greater control over data while optimizing costs. The shift toward private cloud and edge computing is being driven by industries that require real-time AI processing, low-latency decision-making, and strict compliance requirements. Sectors like banking, healthcare, and government agencies are particularly focused on keeping data within secured environments to ensure regulatory compliance. This shift has forced enterprises to rethink their partner relationship management (PRM) strategies, as partners play a key role in integrating and optimizing AI workloads across hybrid cloud environments. Additionally, the rise of edge computing is pushing AI processing closer to where data is generated. Retailers, manufacturers, and telecommunications providers are leveraging edge AI to process data locally, reducing the need for constant cloud connectivity. This trend allows businesses to reduce latency, enhance real-time decision-making, and optimize network bandwidth usage, making partner collaboration more crucial than ever in AI adoption. ✔ Chapter 2: The Evolution of Partner Relationship Management (PRM) in AI As AI adoption accelerates, PRM platforms are evolving to support more complex and dynamic partner ecosystems. Unlike traditional PRM models that primarily focused on deal registration and partner incentives, today’s AI-driven PRM strategies incorporate predictive analytics, automation, and AI-powered insights to enhance partner engagement and productivity. Enterprises are leveraging AI to automate partner onboarding, personalize training content, and optimize co-marketing campaigns, ensuring that partners can quickly become productive in selling and deploying AI solutions. One of the biggest transformations in AI-powered PRM is the ability to provide real-time partner insights and performance track...
Partner Marketing: Control the Scroll, Control the Outcome In this episode, we explore partner marketing strategies with Justin Zimmerman from Partner Playbooks. He reveals how marketers can control the scroll and capture audience attention using multi-channel tactics, including LinkedIn, email, WhatsApp, and webinars. Justin breaks down the Partner Pod model, a scalable co-marketing framework that aligns sales and marketing efforts across multiple partners. We also discuss demand generation, partner enablement, and marketing automation as essential tools for success. Tune in to gain actionable insights on driving partner engagement and maximizing revenue through a strategic partner marketing approach. Related Guidebook The Ultimate Guide to Partner Marketing SuccessYour Essential Playbook for Scalable, Data-Driven Partner Growth Download your COMPLIMENTARY COPY of The Ultimate Guide to Partner Marketing Success Best Practices Guidebook. Gain actionable insights, strategic frameworks, and best practices to optimize partner engagement, co-marketing strategies, and demand generation for measurable success.Download for FREE Video Podcast: Partner Marketing: Control the Scroll, Control the Outcome ✔ Chapter 1: The Power of Controlling the Scroll Partner marketing success starts with controlling the scroll—the ability to capture and hold audience attention in an age of endless distractions. Every day, decision-makers are bombarded with marketing messages on LinkedIn, email, WhatsApp, and Slack. Without a strategic approach, partner marketers risk getting lost in the noise. To stand out, brands must create engaging, relevant content that immediately speaks to their audience’s needs. Whether through social media posts, emails, or targeted ads, partner marketing efforts must be designed to stop the scroll, keep potential customers engaged, and lead them toward meaningful actions that drive revenue. A crucial part of partner marketing is mastering attention retention. Once a prospect engages with content, the next challenge is keeping them interested long enough to convey a compelling message. Marketers can do this by leveraging storytelling, interactive experiences, and data-driven personalization. By tailoring content to the specific pain points and interests of their audience, companies can strengthen partner engagement and improve conversion rates. When executed effectively, this strategy transforms passive viewers into active participants, increasing brand trust and fostering long-term relationships between companies and their partners. The scroll culture of modern marketing means attention spans are shorter than ever, making engagement strategies more critical than ever. Successful partner marketingrequires a multi-channel approach that integrates social media, personalized emails, and direct messaging to reinforce brand presence. By optimizing content across these platforms, companies can improve visibility and stay top-of-mind for their audience. The key is consistency—brands that maintain regular, high-value interactions with their prospects and partners will see higher engagement rates and improved demand generation. ✔ Chapter 2: The Partner Pod Model: Scaling Partner Marketing The Partner Pod model is a revolutionary approach to partner marketing, bringing together multiple non-competing companies with complementary solutions to form a unified go-to-market motion. Instead of relying on isolated marketing efforts, this model allows brands to collaborate strategically, share resources, and amplify their reach. By aligning partner engagement strategies, companies within a Partner Pod can benefit from shared audiences, co-marketing initiatives,
Winning with Partner Advisory Councils In this episode, Mary Catherine Wilson, CMO of Future Tech Enterprise, Inc., joins Sugata Sanyal to explore the impact of Partner Advisory Councils on vendor-partner collaboration, partner enablement, and business growth. Drawing from her experience leading partner programs at Accenture, Dell, and Future Tech, she shares strategies for structuring councils, engaging partners effectively, and implementing feedback-driven improvements. The discussion covers how AI transforms partner engagement, best practices for balancing vendor and partner priorities, and the principles of simplicity, predictability, and profitability in partnerships. Whether launching a new council or optimizing an existing one, this episode provides a blueprint for success in the evolving partner ecosystem. Related Guidebook Winning with Partner Advisory Councils: Best Practices for Partner Engagement & GrowthUnlock the Power of AI & Partner Collaboration Download your COMPLIMENTARY COPY of Winning with Partner Advisory Councils: Best Practices for Partner Engagement & Growth Guide. Gain actionable insights, proven frameworks, and expert perspectives on how Partner Advisory Councils (PACs) can transform vendor-partner collaboration.Download for FREE Video Podcast: Winning with Partner Advisory Councils ✔ Chapter 1: The Strategic Importance of Partner Advisory Councils Partner Advisory Councils are crucial in strengthening vendor-partner relationships and enhancing the partner ecosystem. Mary Catherine Wilson, CMO of Future Tech, discusses how her experience at Dell and Accenture shaped her understanding of partner enablement. She highlights that councils provide a structured communication channel for partners to voice concerns, share insights, and collaborate on strategies. Establishing practical councils fosters partner engagement and ensures vendors remain responsive to partner needs. Businesses that actively listen to partners through advisory councils gain a competitive advantage by continuously improving their partner programs.The conversation shifts to the evolution of partner advisory councils over the past decade. Initially, many organizations treated councils as informal partner discussions, but today, they are structured groups driving strategic decision-making. Vendors must ensure councils are inclusive and representative of different partner segments. Future Tech balances participation across top-tier, mid-market, and distribution partners to maximize value. These councils offer unique insights into co-marketing strategies, partner incentives, and go-to-market initiatives, aligning vendor strategies with partner needs.Mary Catherine explains that transitioning from the vendor to the partner side has reinforced her belief in partner-centric business models. Effective Partner Advisory Councils are more than just discussion forums—they are platforms for co-innovation and growth. Vendors must view partners as customers and work collaboratively to ensure their success. Companies can drive long-term ecosystem success by prioritizing partner enablement, co-selling opportunities, and streamlined partner onboarding. ✔ Chapter 2: Structuring a High-Impact Partner Advisory Council Building an effective Partner Advisory Council requires careful planning. Mary Catherine outlines key steps, starting with identifying the right partners to participate. The most successful councils feature diverse perspectives from partners in different segments—enterprise, mid-market, and specialized verticals. Selecting engaged and experienced partners ensures councils provide valuable, actionable insights. Organizations must define clear objectives for councils,
5 Keys to Building a High-Impact Marketing Funnel A high-impact marketing funnel is essential for driving engagement, generating leads, and increasing customer conversions. In this episode, Bryant Walker, CEO of Tavo Media Group, shares the five critical keys to building a successful marketing funnel that aligns content, media, and execution. Join Sugata Sanyal as they discuss brand positioning, messaging, content strategy, sales alignment, and ROI measurement. Bryant also reveals real-world strategies used by startups, mid-market companies, and enterprise brands to create scalable and effective marketing systems. Whether you're a CMO, founder, or marketing leader, this episode provides actionable insights to optimize your funnel and maximize growth. Video Podcast: 5 Keys to Building a High-Impact Marketing Funnel ✔ Chapter 1: Positioning – Defining Your Unique Value Proposition A high-impact marketing funnel begins with clear positioning. Bryant Walker emphasizes that before launching any campaign, businesses must define why their audience should care. This requires uncovering a unique value proposition (UVP) that differentiates them from competitors. Without a compelling reason to engage, marketing efforts risk being ignored. Positioning starts with answering fundamental questions: What problem does your product solve? How does it differ from alternatives? Why should your target audience choose you? Bryant discusses how many mid-market companies fail to revisit their messaging regularly, causing brand stagnation. He advises companies to reassess positioning every 6 to 12 months to stay aligned with market shifts.Successful brands also simplify their messaging. Bryant warns against too many stakeholders diluting brand identityand suggests a centralized framework for consistent communication. When companies define their core message clearly, their marketing funnel gains traction by attracting the right audience and driving higher engagement rates. ✔ Chapter 2: Messaging – Crafting Content That Resonates Once positioning is clear, the next step is building messaging that connects with your audience. Bryant explains that messaging should be audience-centric, focusing on how customers benefit rather than product features. Companies often make the mistake of talking about themselves instead of addressing customer pain points. Effective messaging requires a deep understanding of customer psychology. Bryant shares that Tavo Media Group begins each engagement by defining customer personas and pain points before crafting content. A well-structured marketing funnel guides prospects through awareness, consideration, and decision-making stages, ensuring that every touchpoint reinforces the brand message. Consistency is key in scaling a high-impact marketing funnel. Bryant highlights the importance of aligning messaging across multiple channels, from website copy and social media to email campaigns and paid ads. A fragmented message confuses potential buyers, while unified storytelling builds trust and conversion momentum. ✔ Chapter 3: Content Strategy – Aligning Media with Business Goals Content is the backbone of any high-impact marketing funnel. Bryant stresses that content should not be created for the sake of volume but must align with business goals and audience intent. The most successful brands map out a structured content plan before investing in execution. At Tavo Media Group, Bryant and his team categorize content into two core buckets: Content Strategy (what to say and who to say it to) and Media Strategy (how to distribute it).
AI-Powered PRM: Transforming Partner Ecosystems for the Future of Business In this insightful episode, Sugata Sanyal, CEO of Zinfi Technologies, hosts Mei Zhou, CEO of WoW Consulting Agency, to discuss the evolution of Partner Relationship Management (PRM) and the role of AI in shaping modern partner ecosystems. With decades of experience at Dell Technologies, Mei shares deep insights into partner sales, distribution optimization, and OEM strategies. Listeners will gain valuable knowledge on how enterprises can leverage AI-driven PRM to drive co-marketing, co-selling, and solution-based partnerships. This episode is a must-listen for businesses looking to future-proof their partner networks in the AI era. Related Guidebook The Future of Partner Ecosystems: AI, Industry Specialization & GrowthYour Essential Guide to Building AI-Driven, Scalable, and Outcome-Focused Partnerships Download your COMPLIMENTARY COPY of The Future of Partner Ecosystems: AI, Industry Specialization & Growth Best Practices Guidebook. Your Essential Guide to Building AI-Driven, Scalable, and Outcome-Focused Partnerships.Download for FREE Video Podcast: AI-Powered PRM: Transforming Partner Ecosystems for the Future of Business ✔ Chapter 1: From Tech Support to Partner Ecosystem Leadership Mei Zhou’s journey: 22 years at Dell and launching WOW Consulting Mei Zhou’s career began humbly in tech support at Dell, assisting customers over the phone before modern tools like screen sharing were available. This experience gave her a deep understanding of customer pain points and the importance of clear communication in technology adoption. Over the years, she transitioned through various roles, including sales operations and enterprise strategy, giving her a 360-degree view of Dell’s evolving business model. After 22 years at the company, Mei took a leap to start WOW Consulting, where she helps large enterprises refine their partner sales and go-to-market strategies. She aims to bridge the gap between innovative technology companies and the complex partner ecosystems they need to scale effectively. Drawing from her extensive experience, Mei advises companies to accelerate their market entry, improve partner engagement, and build strong co-selling strategies that drive revenue and long-term success. How early experiences in tech support shaped her partner-first mindset Mei entered the tech industry when customer support was highly manual and required strong problem-solving skills. She learned firsthand how customers struggle with technology, an insight that shaped her approach to business. Mei quickly recognized that no single company could provide all the answers—partnerships were essential. As she moved into sales and operations, this belief only deepened. She saw how businesses of all sizes relied on channel partners, distributors, and system integrators to deliver complete solutions. This understanding formed the foundation of her partner-first mindset, which she carried throughout her leadership roles. By the time she was managing large-scale partner operations, she had developed a firm conviction: successful businesses don’t just sell products; they build ecosystems. Today, through WOW Consulting, she helps companies harness the power of partner networks to optimize sales, improve customer experience, and navigate the complexities of modern technology distribution. The shift from direct sales to partner-led growthThe technology landscape has changed dramatically over the past two decades. When Mei started at Dell, the company primarily operated on a direct sales model, shipping computers directly to customers. However, as technology became more complex, Dell—and the broader industry—recognized the need to collaborate with partners to ...
7 Key Trends Shaping the Future of Partner Ecosystems & Channel Tech The partner ecosystem landscape is evolving rapidly, with channel technology and AI driving significant transformations. In this episode, Sugata Sanyal and Jay McBain discuss seven key trends shaping the future of partner ecosystems, from AI-driven PRM solutions to the rise of co-marketing and subscription-based business models. Learn how companies can leverage technology to enhance partner engagement, streamline operations, and drive revenue growth. This episode is a must-listen if you want to stay ahead in the evolving partner ecosystem space! Video Podcast: 7 Key Trends Shaping the Future of Partner Ecosystems & Channel Tech ✔ Chapter 1: AI-Powered Transformation of Partner Ecosystems AI is revolutionizing partner ecosystems, enabling businesses to automate partner onboarding, optimize engagement, and improve performance tracking. Companies leverage AI-driven PRM (Partner Relationship Management) platforms to streamline workflows, reduce manual effort, and personalize partner experiences. AI helps analyze partner performance data in real time, providing actionable insights into deal progression, sales influence, and revenue attribution. Partner ecosystems are becoming more data-driven, agile, and scalable with AI.The integration of AI in partner ecosystems is also enhancing co-marketing efforts. AI-powered predictive analytics help vendors identify high-potential partners, segment audiences effectively, and tailor marketing campaigns for maximum engagement. With AI automating lead distribution and partner outreach, companies can ensure that partners receive the right opportunities at the right time, increasing conversion rates and ROI. AI-driven insights enable personalized partner experiences, optimizing engagement at every touchpoint.Beyond automation, AI is reshaping channel strategy and partner incentives. AI-driven PRM platforms can dynamically adjust partner incentives based on performance data, ensuring that the most valuable contributors are recognized and rewarded appropriately. AI also enables companies to predict partner success rates, identify at-risk relationships, and optimize their partner engagement strategy for long-term growth. The future of partner ecosystems will be deeply influenced by AI-driven intelligence, automation, and personalization. ✔ Chapter 2: Data-Driven Partner Ecosystem Management Partner ecosystems rely on real-time data analysis and intelligence to drive growth, engagement, and profitability. Businesses that harness data-driven PRM solutions gain a competitive edge by tracking partner interactions, deal velocity, and sales influence. With AI-enhanced PRM platforms, companies can analyze partner performance metrics, ensuring efficient resource allocation and incentive distribution.One significant advancement in partner ecosystem management is the rise of second-party data sharing. Vendors and partners can exchange valuable customer insights, intent data, and sales forecasts, leading to more targeted and effective partner strategies. AI-powered PRM solutions facilitate secure and compliant data sharing, allowing businesses to align their marketing, sales, and enablement efforts with real-time partner activity.By centralizing partner data, companies can create a single source of truth within their PRM system. AI-driven data analysis tools help businesses predict partner success, measure channel impact, and optimize engagement strategies. Organizations that invest in data-driven partner ecosystem management will stay ahead by making strategic, insight-driven decisions that maximize partner collaboration and revenue generation. ✔ Chapter 3: The Evolution of Co-Selling and Co-Marketing
5 Secrets to Scaling a SaaS Unicorn Scaling a SaaS unicorn requires a deep understanding of market needs, a strong go-to-market strategy, and right technology investments. In this episode, Sal Sferlazza, CEO of NinjaOne, shares five critical secrets that helped him scale multiple startups. He reveals how product-market fit, partnerships, sales execution, product expansion, and culture drive hypergrowth. Join Sugata Sanyal as they discuss the power of channel partnerships, the role of AI in IT management, and how to build a world-class SaaS company. Whether you’re an entrepreneur, investor, or executive, this episode is packed with scaling insights for high-growth businesses. Video Podcast: 5 Secrets to Scaling a SaaS Unicorn ✔ Chapter 1: Finding the Right Product-Market Fit Scaling a SaaS unicorn starts with nailing product-market fit. Sal Sferlazza explains that understanding customer pain points is essential before developing a product. At NinjaOne, his team conducted hundreds of customer interviews to validate market demand. By focusing on zero training time and ease of use, they created a product that solved real-world IT challenges. A strong product-market fit ensures a clear value proposition that attracts early adopters. Sal emphasizes that iterating based on customer feedback is the key to refining a product. Startups that rush to market without deep customer insights often struggle with adoption. NinjaOne’s early customer engagement strategy allowed them to identify critical product features before launch. To scale a SaaS unicorn, businesses must continuously evaluate market needs and expand accordingly. Sal shares how NinjaOne’s initial focus on MSPs eventually led to broader adoption in internal IT departments. Recognizing when to pivot or expand is essential to maintaining long-term growth. Companies that master market timing can create sustainable competitive advantages. ✔ Chapter 2: Leveraging Channel Partnerships for Exponential Growth For startups focused on scaling a SaaS unicorn, channel partnerships are a powerful growth accelerator. Sal highlights how selling through Managed Service Providers (MSPs) gave NinjaOne instant credibility. Rather than struggling with direct sales, they leveraged trusted relationships in the IT ecosystem. This strategy allowed them to scale quickly without massive marketing spend. Successful SaaS companies recognize that partner ecosystems drive exponential growth. By building strategic relationships with MSPs and VARs, NinjaOne created a repeatable sales motion. Sal explains that choosing the right partners ensures consistent customer acquisition. Scaling a SaaS unicorn requires a highly scalable go-to-market strategy, and the MSP model provided an ideal foundation. As NinjaOne expanded globally, channel partnerships played a key role in market entry. By working with top-tier resellers like CDW, SHI, and Carahsoft, they unlocked new revenue streams. Sal emphasizes that channel conflict must be managed carefully. Companies that respect partner relationships can scale faster while maintaining strong brand loyalty. ✔ Chapter 3: Scaling a High-Velocity Sales Engine A core driver in scaling a SaaS unicorn is building a high-velocity sales motion. Sal reveals that the ideal early sales team consists of 8 SDRs (Sales Development Reps) and 3 AEs (Account Executives). This structure ensures that sales reps focus on closing deals while SDRs drive pipeline growth. A data-driven approach to sales accelerates revenue. As NinjaOne scaled, they segmented their sales motion to improve efficiency. Initially,
7 Ways HubSpot Scales Partnerships for Growth In this episode, Sugata Sanyal hosts Kelly Sarabyn, Director of Technology Partner Programs and Strategy at HubSpot, to explore how HubSpot scales partnerships for growth. With 1,500+ app partners and a thriving solutions partner network, Kelly highlights the strategies that have propelled HubSpot’s ecosystem to the forefront of the industry. From co-marketing initiatives to aligning technology with SMB needs, this podcast offers invaluable insights for anyone looking to build or grow their partner ecosystem. Video Podcast: 7 Ways HubSpot Scales Partnerships for Growth ✔ Chapter 1: The Foundation of HubSpot’s Partner Ecosystem HubSpot’s partner ecosystem is a cornerstone of its business strategy, driving customer growth and retention through a network of solutions and technology partners. Kelly Sarabyn explains how HubSpot’s partner-first approach has created a collaborative environment where ISV (independent software vendor) partners and solutions partners work together seamlessly to serve a diverse customer base. The ecosystem caters to SMBs and mid-market companies, with HubSpot’s DNA rooted in making its platform accessible and extensible for these businesses.Over the years, HubSpot has evolved from a marketing automation provider to a comprehensive CRM platform, making it indispensable for businesses looking to scale. Its ecosystem supports this evolution by enabling partners to enhance HubSpot’s functionality through integrations and customizations. Kelly highlights the importance of collaboration within the ecosystem, where developers, agencies, and app partners contribute to solving customer pain points. This integrated approach ensures customers access tailored solutions that fit their unique needs.The ecosystem’s success lies in its openness and accessibility. HubSpot provides extensive documentation, developer tools, and an academy to train partners. This inclusivity attracts many contributors, from large-scale ISVs like Gong and PandaDoc to smaller agencies specializing in digital marketing or RevOps. With over 1,500 app partners and thousands of solutions partners, HubSpot’s ecosystem demonstrates how a platform-led approach can drive mutual growth for all stakeholders. ✔ Chapter 2: Supporting Technology Partners for Success HubSpot’s technology partner program is designed to empower ISV partners to thrive within its ecosystem. Kelly discusses how HubSpot’s robust developer tools, including SDKs, APIs, and features like user interface extensions (UIE), enable partners to create seamless integrations that elevate the customer experience. These tools enhance the functionality of HubSpot’s core platform and open new revenue streams for ISVs.One of HubSpot’s standout initiatives is the Partner Growth Accelerator program. This program collaborates with technology and solutions partners to co-create marketing campaigns and leverage mutual strengths. For example, an ISV specializing in conversational intelligence might collaborate with a solutions partner to offer a complete sales and marketing solution for shared customers. Such collaborations exemplify how HubSpot fosters co-innovation among its partners.Kelly also highlights the investments HubSpot has made in its app marketplace, which receives over a million monthly visits. HubSpot ensures its technology partners can reach the right audience by improving discoverability and functionality within the marketplace. The marketplace isn’t just a distribution channel; it’s a hub for connecting customers with apps that address specific business needs, driving adoption and customer satisfaction. ✔ Chapter 3: Driving Co-Marketing and Co-Selling Initiatives
From Analog to AI: Telco's Journey In this compelling episode, Sugata Sanyal sits down with Eric A. Brooker, a seasoned channel advisor and leadership expert, to explore five transformative strategies telcos must embrace to stay competitive in 2024. Together, they dissect the industry's journey from analog to AI, emphasizing the convergence of channels and the critical role of cybersecurity. With actionable insights into co-selling, marketplace integration, and leadership adaptability, this discussion sheds light on how telcos can thrive in a fast-paced, digitally driven world. Learn how evolving customer expectations, AI technologies, and robust ecosystems redefine the future of telecommunications. Video Podcast: From Analog to AI: Telco's Journey ✔ Chapter 1: Understanding the Shift: From Analog to AI Telecommunications has come a long way, transforming from analog systems to the modern AI-driven ecosystem. This section highlights the historical journey, starting with the Telecom Act of 1996, which disrupted AT&T's monopoly and opened the market to innovation. The analog era, defined by limited-service options, has given way to digital convergence. Now, AI is revolutionizing operations, customer experiences, and decision-making processes. Eric discusses how telcos can utilize AI to enhance offerings such as UCaaS (Unified Communications as a Service) and CRM platforms. These technologies improve customer retention and streamline operations through data analytics, predictive insights, and automated workflows. The challenge lies in leveraging AI as a value driver rather than just a buzzword. Telcos must move beyond price-based competition, focusing on AI-powered solutions tailored to industry-specific needs, such as PCI compliance for financial institutions. The conversation emphasizes that telcos must continuously innovate to meet the demands of tech-savvy, younger buyers while navigating a highly competitive market. ✔ Chapter 2: Convergence and Collaboration: Breaking Down Silos The concept of convergence dominates the modern telecommunications landscape. Historically, telcos operated in silos, offering distinct services such as phone or internet. However, the current demand for unified solutions drives the need for convergence, both within telcos and across adjacent industries like managed service providers (MSPs). Eric outlines how customers increasingly prefer a single trusted advisor for all their technological needs. This trend necessitates bundling services such as voice, data, cybersecurity, and cloud solutions. Convergence eliminates inefficiencies and fosters long-term customer relationships. Additionally, private equity and venture capital investments in telco channels fuel innovation, further blurring lines between traditional services. Eric explains how this shift challenges telcos to redefine their go-to-market strategies. Success lies in fostering collaboration among ecosystem partners, adopting methodologies to streamline operations, and investing in the training of sales teams. Convergence is no longer a choice but a necessity in delivering comprehensive, value-driven solutions. ✔ Chapter 3: Cybersecurity as a Standalone Stack Cybersecurity has emerged as a critical area for telcos, particularly as businesses of all sizes rely on interconnected systems. Eric notes that the shift to remote work exposed vulnerabilities in unsecured home networks, highlighting the need for robust security measures. While enterprises often have dedicated teams and resources to address these threats, SMBs are particularly vulnerable to ransomware and data breaches. Interestingly,
How to Start and Scale Partner Ecosystems In this episode, Sugata Sanyal, CEO of ZINFI, talks with Eleanor Thompson, founder of Branchworks, about the crucial steps in establishing and expanding a partner ecosystem. With over a decade in partnership management, Eleanor shares her insights on identifying ideal partners, timing partner program development, and setting up a clear value proposition. Eleanor’s strategies for effective onboarding, structured business planning, and financial incentives provide a roadmap for companies seeking long-term success through partnerships. Listeners will gain actionable advice on scaling partnerships sustainably, leveraging automation tools, and adapting partner ecosystems to match business growth objectives in a constantly evolving landscape. Related Guidebook How to Start and Scale Partner EcosystemsYour Essential Guide to Building AI-Driven, Scalable, and Outcome-Focused Partnerships Download your COMPLIMENTARY COPY of How to Start and Scale Partner Ecosystems Best Practices Guidebook. A step-by-step building guide, enabling and scaling successful partnerships. Unlock the Power of a Thriving Partner Ecosystem. Download for FREE Video Podcast: How to Start and Scale Partner Ecosystems ✔ Chapter 1: Laying the Foundation: The Ideal Partner Profile Eleanor begins by addressing the importance of creating an Ideal Partner Profile (IPP) that aligns with a company's core customer base and long-term business goals. She emphasizes that companies must identify potential partners who complement their offerings and can grow alongside them. Companies can pinpoint partners who can genuinely support and expand their reach by aligning the IPP with an existing Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).Eleanor advises early-stage companies to take customer feedback seriously in the IPP creation process. Engaging customers for insights on whom they trust or already work with can reveal partnership opportunities within a company's existing ecosystem. This approach helps businesses to connect with partners who may already share a mutual customer base, allowing for a smoother integration.In addition, she encourages leaders to analyze the strengths, weaknesses, and target market segments of prospective partners. This analysis should form the basis of an IPP that defines the right partner attributes and emphasizes long-term alliance. Eleanor believes that companies who invest time aligning their IPP with their ICP can better ensure partnerships that add value over time. As Eleanor explains, refining this partner selection process can prevent wasted resources and enable companies to avoid incompatible or poorly suited partnerships down the line. ✔ Chapter 2: Timing and Phases: When to Build Partnerships Eleanor outlines when companies should consider building their partner ecosystems, suggesting they begin after securing product-market fit and paying customers but before a complex direct sales structure is entirely in place. According to Eleanor, initiating partnerships while still in the early stages of sales operations allows companies to incorporate partners seamlessly into the existing framework.She advises businesses not to delay partnership development until they have hundreds of employees and an entrenched sales process. Eleanor argues that this approach can hinder flexibility and create friction between partners and a large sales team accustomed to direct-selling models. By integrating partners at a stage with only a handful of sales staff, companies can prepare to support both direct and partner-driven sales, establishing cross-collaborative systems and procedures from the outset.Eleanor compares this timing to the three typical phase...
4 Pillars of GE Healthcare’s Partner Ecosystem Success This episode features Mahdi Menous, Senior Director of Digital Commerce Strategy and Operations at GE Healthcare, as he unpacks the four pillars driving success within their partner ecosystems. Host Sugata Sanyal delves into Mahdi’s experience, exploring how GE Healthcare leverages strategic onboarding, development, growth, and loyalty to create enduring partnerships. Learn how innovation, AI-driven insights, and process optimization empower GE Healthcare to meet the diverse demands of global markets, from advanced economies to emerging regions. This podcast offers actionable strategies for fostering collaboration and driving healthcare excellence. Video Podcast: 4 Pillars of GE Healthcare’s Partner Ecosystem Success ✔ Chapter 1: Onboarding: Setting Up for Success Effective onboarding is the foundation of GE Healthcare’s partner ecosystem strategy. Mahdi highlights the critical role of regulatory compliance in an industry as sensitive and diverse as healthcare. With a presence in both developed and emerging markets, GE Healthcare must ensure its partners meet international and local regulatory standards.The onboarding process emphasizes speed and precision, particularly in time-critical healthcare environments. Mahdi explains how leveraging technology, legal compliance tools, and partner evaluation frameworks helps streamline the process. GE Healthcare collaborates with regional experts to assess market needs, selecting partners who align with their high standards. Once onboarded, partners receive tailored training, equipping them with the skills and resources necessary to represent GE Healthcare effectively.By integrating new partners into its digital platforms, GE Healthcare ensures a seamless connection between partner ecosystems and its internal processes. This technology integration eliminates bottlenecks, enabling partners to serve clients faster and with greater accuracy. Mahdi underscores the importance of agility, noting that the ability to act quickly and align with partners’ local expertise is vital for maintaining operational excellence in the fast-paced healthcare industry. ✔ Chapter 2: Development: Empowering Partners with Knowledge Once partners are onboarded, GE Healthcare invests in their development to ensure long-term success. Mahdi explains how the company provides partners with comprehensive access to resources, including documentation, training, and marketing support. This approach allows partners to better understand GE Healthcare’s offerings and deliver exceptional service to end customers.Technology plays a pivotal role in partner development. Mahdi discusses the integration of partner ecosystem with GE Healthcare’s order management and service platforms, which simplifies operational workflows and enhances efficiency. By connecting these systems, partners can process orders, manage inventory, and access real-time data with ease.AI and automation also enhance the development phase by improving how partners interact with GE Healthcare’s systems. For example, AI-driven feedback loops enable the company to provide personalized recommendations to partners, helping them address challenges and adapt to market shifts. Mahdi emphasizes the value of customer feedback, noting how it informs partner development strategies and ensures continuous improvement.GE Healthcare’s development initiatives go beyond technical support to include strategic alignment with local markets. By offering region-specific insights and customized training, the company empowers partners to address unique challenges and capitalize on opportunities in their respective regions. ✔ Chapter 3: Growth: Scaling Partner Capabilities
Past, Present, and the Future of Cybersecurity In this engaging episode, we explore the dynamic world of partner ecosystems, examining their critical roles in advancing cybersecurity and propelling significant business growth. The podcast presents Joe Levy, CEO at Sophos, who brings decades of tech industry expertise, alongside ZINFI Technologies’ CEO Sugata Sanyal. Together, they provide deep insights into developing cybersecurity strategies and the vital importance of partnerships in spurring innovation and broadening market reach. Listeners will understand how strategic collaborations form the foundation of sustainable business models and how emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, are reshaping the cybersecurity arena. Related Guidebook Cybersecurity for the 99%: Strategies from the Frontline Best Practices Practical insights and expert strategies to protect SMBs from modern cyber threats. Download your COMPLIMENTARY COPY of Cybersecurity for the 99%: Strategies from the Frontline Best Practices Guidebook. Practical insights and expert strategies to protect SMBs from modern cyber threats. Download for FREE Video Podcast: Past, Present, and the Future of Cybersecurity ✔ Chapter 1: The Genesis of a Cybersecurity Veteran This chapter begins with a nostalgic journey back to the early days of our expert's career, highlighting his initial interactions with technology. Starting as a young enthusiast disassembling household gadgets to uncover their workings, he quickly became captivated by the intricacies of computer programming. His narrative illustrates a deep-rooted passion for technology, shaped by early experiences with computing platforms like the Atari. These formative years were critical, instilling a knack for problem-solving and an innate curiosity about technological systems, which later defined his approach to cybersecurity. Listeners will discover how foundational experiences can spark a lifelong career in technology, emphasizing the value of curiosity and hands-on experimentation. ✔ Chapter 2: From Modems to Modern Security Reflecting on the technological milestones of his career, this chapter covers the transition from the early days of dial-up internet to the advanced cybersecurity frameworks of today. It charts the rapid technological advancements that coincided with his professional growth, from configuring early modem setups to designing sophisticated security networks. The discussion also touches on crucial historical moments, such as the adoption of the Internet in business operations and the resultant security challenges. This backdrop contextualizes how cybersecurity needs have evolved with technological progress, highlighting the necessity for continuous learning and adaptation in the field. ✔ Chapter 3: Navigating Career Shifts: Insights and Adaptations In this chapter, our expert discusses pivotal moments in his career where he had to adapt to new roles and challenges. From technical positions to executive roles, each transition brought new insights and required adjustments to align with the evolving tech landscape. He shares strategies for career development in tech, emphasizing the importance of adaptability and continuous skill enhancement. Listeners will gain advice on managing career transitions, the importance of mentorship, and strategies for lifelong learning in the rapidly changing tech sector. The chapter is enriched with anecdotes and lessons learned from navigating various technological eras and job roles. ✔ Chapter 4: The Role of AI in Cybersecurity
Leveraging AI and Innovation in Partner Marketing In this insightful podcast, Heather K. Margolis, a seasoned channel marketing expert, joins Sugata Sanyal to discuss the evolving landscape of partner marketing. They explore how AI is reshaping demand generation, partner enablement, and recruitment, particularly for mid-market companies. Heather emphasizes the importance of personalized marketing, scalable partner support, and leveraging marketplaces effectively. She also shares her experiences as a woman in tech, offering valuable advice for the next generation of leaders. This podcast provides actionable insights on how businesses can navigate the complex dynamics of today’s channel ecosystem. Video Podcast: Leveraging AI and Innovation in Partner Marketing ✔ Chapter 1: The Evolution of Partner Marketing and AI's Role In this chapter, Heather K. Margolis shares her journey from financial services to becoming a key figure in the partner ecosystem, having founded two companies. She discusses how AI has transformed the landscape of partner marketing, making processes more efficient while still requiring human oversight. Heather emphasizes the importance of customizing marketing strategies to meet specific partner and customer needs. AI can streamline many aspects of partner marketing, but human intervention is essential for ensuring the right messaging and alignment with business goals. Heather also explores the diversification of the partner ecosystem, where different types of partners like MSPs and hyperscalers require more tailored approaches. This chapter highlights how AI, when thoughtfully integrated, can elevate partner marketing efforts. ✔ Chapter 2: Demand Generation in Partner Marketing: Past, Present, and Future Heather delves into the evolution of demand generation in partner marketing, contrasting older methods of simply passing leads to partners with today’s more complex, AI-driven approaches. She discusses how AI has enabled personalized marketing strategies that are more effective at engaging partners. MSPs, in particular, have become proficient in inbound marketing, thanks to these new tools. Heather predicts that demand generation will continue to evolve, with AI playing an even bigger role in the next three to five years. She emphasizes that vendors need to align their marketing strategies with their partners’ needs and capabilities to stay competitive. This chapter offers a look at the growing sophistication of demand generation within partner marketing. ✔ Chapter 3: Scaling Partner Enablement: Best Practices for Mid-Market and Enterprise This chapter explores the strategies mid-market and enterprise companies should adopt to scale their partner marketing efforts. For mid-market companies, Heather highlights the need to provide scalable resources that are easily accessible to partners. Education and training are crucial, and AI can help automate these efforts to offer personalized support without overloading resources. For enterprise companies, Heather cautions against over-investing in larger partners while overlooking smaller, high-growth potential partners who can offer a better return on investment. She advises businesses to focus on the actual usage and effectiveness of the tools they provide to partners, rather than just tracking lead generation. Scaling partner marketing effectively requires balancing technology with tailored support. ✔ Chapter 4: Partner Recruitment and Engagement in the Mid-Market Heather shares insights into partner recruitment and engagement, particularly for mid-market companies. She explains that traditional recruitment meth...
Mastering SaaS Sales in a Demand-Neutral Market In this engaging podcast episode, Chris Orlob, CEO of pclub.io, and Sugata Sanyal, Founder & CEO of ZINFI Technologies, explore the rapidly changing landscape of SaaS sales. As the market shifts to a demand-neutral environment, traditional sales strategies face new challenges. Chris and Sugata discuss advanced techniques essential for SaaS sales professionals to remain competitive. Their conversation offers valuable insights into adapting strategies, mastering new skills, and thriving in this evolving market. This episode is a must-listen for anyone looking to stay ahead in the SaaS industry. Related Guidebook The Channel Sales Playbook: Skills, Strategy, and Growth A strategic guidebook for driving partner performance, enabling value-first selling, and scaling growth in a buyer-resistant market. Download your COMPLIMENTARY COPY of The Channel Sales Playbook: Skills, Strategy, and Growth Guide. Unlock Strategic Sales Execution.Gain insights into building resilient partner ecosystems, enabling high-impact co-selling, and adapting to the complexity of today’s buying committees. This guidebook equips channel sales professionals with the tactical skills and mindset required to thrive in a demand-neutral world. Download for FREE Video Podcast: Mastering SaaS Sales in a Demand-Neutral Market ✔ Chapter 1: The Shift from Demand-Positive to Demand-Neutral This chapter delves into the significant transformation of the SaaS sales landscape as the market shifts from a demand-positive to a demand-neutral or even demand-negative environment. Previously, sales professionals operated in a high-demand market, with businesses actively seeking new solutions to enhance productivity and growth. However, this environment has dramatically changed, with companies exercising greater caution in spending. Budgets are tighter, and purchasing decisions are subject to more rigorous scrutiny. Chris Orlob discusses how this shift has fundamentally altered the dynamics of selling in the SaaS industry, making traditional sales strategies less effective. They emphasize that in this new reality, it is no longer sufficient to respond to existing demand merely. Instead, sales professionals must actively create demand by identifying and addressing the most critical needs of potential customers. This requires a deep understanding of the market, a keen awareness of customer pain points, and the ability to present solutions that are not just desirable but essential. The chapter sets the stage for the rest of the podcast by underscoring the importance of adaptability and the need for sales teams to reevaluate their strategies to stay competitive in a more challenging and complex market environment. It’s a call to action for SaaS sales professionals to embrace change and develop the skills necessary to succeed in this new landscape. ✔ Chapter 2: The Evolving Role of the SaaS Sales Professional As the market changes, so too must the role of the SaaS sales professional. This chapter explores how salespeople's responsibilities and required skill sets have evolved in response to the new market dynamics. Sales professionals could often rely on traditional techniques and strategies to close deals in a demand-positive environment. However, these approaches are no longer sufficient in today's demand-neutral environment. Sales professionals now need to develop a more sophisticated set of skills to navigate the increasingly complex buying processes within organizations. Chris highlights the importance of mastering advanced discovery techniques beyond surface-level questioning to uncover the deeper, mission-critical challenges driving purchasing decisions.
In this podcast, Craig Booth, a Channel Expert and Founder of Channel Force, discusses the importance of structured performance in partner ecosystems with ZINFI Technologies’ CEO Sugata Sanyal. Booth emphasizes a three-step model—alignment, activation, and acceleration—to boost channel partner engagement and revenue. He highlights the shift from unstructured to structured models, the role of AI and digital selling platforms, and the necessity of building trust and leveraging relationships.
Partner ecosystems enable companies to share resources, reach new customers and innovate faster. However, to fully reap the benefits of a partner ecosystem, companies need to empower their partners by building strong relationships, nurturing loyalty and using automation to improve partner performance. In this video, we discuss how to build strong relationships with partners, how to develop long-term relationships with partners via loyalty programs, and how to fine-tune partner performance with data analytics and artificial intelligence.
In today’s business world, companies increasingly rely on partners – such as affiliates, influencers, and resellers – to reach their end customers through indirect channels. This podcast explores the crucial role that partner recruitment and onboarding plays in expanding business opportunities and increasing market reach. We also examine the benefits of advanced software solutions that unify partner relationship management and ecosystem management activities, including reduced complexity and costs, accelerated time to market, and integration with third-party systems like CRMs.
Affiliate marketing software has become an essential tool for businesses looking to leverage independent affiliates to promote their products or services. However, with so many software solutions available, it can be overwhelming for businesses to choose a platform that aligns with their needs and objectives. In this podcast, we share a list of the top affiliate marketing solutions in the marketplace and provide an overview of each product’s features, pros, and cons to help businesses evaluate and compare different options.
Partner relationship management and partner ecosystem management are crucial for organizations relying on a distributed partner network to sell their products or services. In this podcast, we look at the historical challenges and the core benefits of partner ecosystem management. The challenges include fragmented technical infrastructure. The benefits include reduced complexity and cost and increased customer satisfaction. Implementing partner relationship and ecosystem management software is essential to building a high-functioning partner ecosystem.
Partner ecosystems enable companies to share resources, reach new customers, and innovate faster. However, to fully reap the benefits of a partner ecosystem, companies must empower their partners by building solid relationships, nurturing loyalty, and using automation to improve partner performance. In this video, we discuss how to build strong relationships with partners, develop long-term relationships with partners via loyalty programs, and fine-tune partner performance with data analytics and artificial intelligence.
Successful organizations prioritize partner productivity as a key performance indicator. This requires a strong focus on partner enablement, encompassing crucial activities like training and certification and providing sales and marketing tools. In this podcast, we will explain the significance of partner enablement and explore how state-of-the-art digital infrastructure, specifically a partner relationship management (PRM) SaaS application, plays a pivotal role in driving productivity and growth.
Deal registration programs are commonly employed by companies to incentivize and reward their sales partners for bringing in new business opportunities. However, despite their good intentions, these programs often fail to deliver the desired outcomes. In this video, we explore 10 of most common reasons programs fall short, including lack of clear guidelines, complex registration processes, inadequate incentives and rewards, limited partner enablement, and internal competition and channel conflict, among other reasons.
Traditionally focused on banking and warehousing, technology distribution now embraces a platform-centric approach in the wake of emerging subscription-based models and major hyperscaler platforms such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure Cloud Services, and Google Cloud. This transformation has revolutionized the technology industry, enabling more integrated and efficient delivery of software and services to end customers. This podcast explores the ongoing metamorphosis of technology distribution and its profound impact on the technology sector.
Affiliate marketing is playing an increasingly important role in partner ecosystems, and businesses are discovering they need a dedicated tool to manage the complexity of these relationships. In this podcast, we discuss a number of critical areas of collaboration between businesses and affiliate marketers, including marketplaces, onboarding, personalization, promotion, performance, payment, and analytics. An affiliate marketing tool should have robust features to manage these activities to ensure effective collaboration between businesses and their affiliate partners.
What is channel management and why does it matter? In this podcast, we go back to fundamentals by looking at various meanings of the word “channel” and then offering our own formal definition of channel management. We then provide a quick overview of the primary activities or stages of channel management, and consider the degree to which these activities must be localized when an organization goes beyond the start-up phase and operates its channel program on a global scale.
Have you ever wondered why most partners don’t use market development funds? Our research shows as much as 60% of market development funds are not used each quarter. In this podcast, we look at a number of reasons for this phenomenon, including partners’ short-term focus, lack of digital marketing expertise, insufficient resources and vendors’ failure to provide tools and marketing concierge services. We also discuss four key steps vendors can take to drive usage rates up.
What are the most important factors in effective partner relationship management? Over the years, we have identified seven Ps that are most crucial to success: product, profitability, placement, programs, promotions, profile and performance. In this podcast, we discuss each of these factors in detail so you have a logical and sequential foundation for your channel programs and can make sure you are addressing the key drivers for engaged partners and sustained revenues.
Channel management activities tend to vary considerably from one country or region to another. Have you ever wondered why? In this podcast, we take a detailed look at variations in channel management activity in a global context. There are several reasons for these variations, including different channel structures, specific solutions, regional or national culture, and visibility or forecasting capabilities. We also look at the ways in which channel activities are similar regardless of region.
Through channel marketing automation (TCMA) is about enabling channel partners to generate leads using marketing assets and a set of marketing tools provided by a vendor or company. This podcast discusses core TCMA functions, including dynamically managing content, assigning groups and users different levels of access, managing partner profiles, setting up lead generation tools, managing leads and lead distribution, integrating leads with a CRM system, managing market development funds (MDF), and using analytic tools to generate actionable insights.
Onboarding partners in a channel ecosystem can be complex. Onboarding new partners includes activities like contract signing, business planning and training. But you should also have a structure in place for onboarding existing partners. That’s because you are likely to have new products, programs and promotion launches almost every quarter. This podcast discusses onboarding of both kinds of partners in comprehensive detail. It also explains why PRM software is indispensable for managing the onboarding process.
While the success of a channel program depends on factors like end user value proposition, partner business proposition and overall market growth opportunity, it takes an integrated partner relationship management (PRM) framework to realize the true revenue potential of any organization selling through the channel. This podcast takes you through the entire framework, from the partner portal and partner recruitment to training, engagement, performance management, multi-partner demand generation, deal registration and more.
There are plenty of mistakes vendors can make across the channel as they pursue a partner relationship management strategy, but this podcast focuses on the five most common ones: overdistribution, overpromising and underdelivering, complex incentive programs, condoning unethical behavior and insufficient channel infrastructure investment. We recommend you keep these mistakes top of mind and make sure that both existing employee channel employees and newly hired employees go through an orientation program to understand these how to avoid them.
What are the core capabilities that any best-of-breed partner relationship management (PRM) platform must have? In this podcast, we discuss five key phases of the partner management lifecycle that a robust PRM platform can bring together to help your partner program succeed: partner recruitment, partner onboarding, partner training, partner marketing and partner incentives management. Focusing on these five phases in an integrated and unified way will ensure your program is structured, and has clear policies and programs.
Have you thought of using your customer relationship management (CRM) system to manage your partner network? In this video, we explain why that approach is a bad idea that will result in poor functionality and little or no ROI. Partner relationship management has a number of core requirements that today’s CRM systems simply don’t offer. These include modules for partner recruitment, engagement and training, as well as tools for offering campaigns, sales assets, MDF programs, reward and rebates to partners.
Macro, micro or what?2023 will be a challenging but exciting year for partner relationship management, and while many forces are at play, it is clear a few major trends are accelerating. However, before we deep dive into the top 10 trends for partner relationship management in 2023, let’s take a moment and look at the broader macroeconomic context that we all have to live in, and what it means to strategies and technology platforms related to partner relationship management.From a macroeconomic perspective, well, what a decade the 2020s have been already. We kicked the decade off with Covid-19, which had severe impacts on millions around the world, but also led to breakthroughs in medical sciences, including mRNA vaccines. We can also point to Covid for making hybrid work the norm, creating major supply chain blockages, collapsing cryptocurrencies (with the help of post-Covid stimulus and speculative investments) and rapidly increasing the rate of inflation. Covid has also contributed to accelerating demographic trends in the West, the phenomenon of jobless growth in developing countries (due primarily to automation) and a new energy crisis driven by the war in Ukraine and a declining global growth rate tied to the rise in interest rates. No wonder when you turn on the news everything looks depressing.But hold on a sec: It may not be as bad as the media make it out to be.
Yes, part of the media’s job is to obsessively focus on how bad everything is because bad news drives reader and viewer engagement, but consumers keep spending, inflation seems to be slowing, the Federal Reserve has just indicated it may slow the pace of rate hikes, and courageous Ukrainians have kept a dictator at bay with a massive sacrifice of lives and everything else.
Work from wherever – really?While it is easy to drown in the negative news from around the world, we should also pause for a moment and celebrate the massive progress that we’ve made in spite of these obstacles. Consider, for example, our progress over the past three years in taking remote work into the mainstream. Three-day onsite work weeks are quite normal across the board, and many tech companies plan to remain fully remote. If you are in the business of partner relationship management, then chances are you are working from home already, and very likely it will stay that way for most partner managers.
The shortage in low-skill workers has led to massive innovations in retail, hospitality, manufacturing, agriculture and every other muscle-intensive sectors, and real wages finally rose last year after decades of stagnation.
More people are pursuing online education than ever before, resulting in an expanded pool of skilled workers and a reduction in the overall cost of education. Despite rising interest rates, growth rates, while tapering off, have not crashed. When you consider these trends alongside the acceleration in green energy development, continued progress in artificial intelligence and computing, the global roll-out of 5G mobile networks and the fact that Covid has become more of a nuisance than a mortal threat, at least for vaccinated people, around the world – there is a lot we can hopeful about in 2023.
Yes, we are seeing layoffs across the board driven by the over-hiring of workers tied to unrealistic growth forecasts over the past couple of years, a trend which will likely continue for another couple of quarters. But in general jobs remain plentiful in both the developed and the developing worlds. Among our customer base, those organizations in partner relationship management are hiring – maybe at a slower pace, but nevertheless still hiring. Energy and computing transitions are creating massive new opportunities, so despite the probability that energy shortages will persist in Europe and the war in Ukraine will be prolonged by a stubborn dictator, 2023 will very likely mark the beginning of a massive reset for rest of the decade.Normal is new again?Considering all these economic headwinds and the fact that we are still emerging from a once-in-a-lifetime black swan event like Covid-19, not everything will be back to normal in 2023, but most leading indicators should start settling and the C-suite will start focusing on managed and predictable growth for the next several years, making digitization a cornerstone of their strategy.
With this as a backdrop, let’s take a moment and take a deep dive into what we see happening in the partner relationship management space in 2023. Most of the trends we discuss here were already in play in 2022, but most of them have been accelerating due to a convergence of multiple drivers. The changes in partner relationship management are occurring both in the broader macro context that I have laid out so far, but also at the micro level as reflected in a distinct shift in strategy in this space and an evolving technology stack.Where will this end up?After all this talk, you may be wondering where it all ends up in 2023. Well, wonder no more. As I said earlier, most of 2023 partner relationship management trends are truly an acceleration of a few core drivers that have been gathering steam for a while, and in 2023 you can expect them to come together in a more forceful and market-defining way. Here are the five major strategic trends I see happening in partner relationship management in 2023:1. Rising marketplaces – Over the past few years we have seen a rapid rise in marketplaces. In the consumer space, Amazon and Shopify are the two leaders, but we are also seeing similar developments in the B2B area with cloud marketplaces like Microsoft Azure, AWS, Salesforce AppExchange, NetSuite, SugarOutfitters and others. We are also seeing aggregators like Ingram and Tech Data create their own private marketplaces in the technology space, and marketplace providers like Tackle or AppDirect are enabling brands to create their own solution-centric micro-marketplaces. Expect to see this trend accelerate in 2023. While I have referred to some examples related to technology, the concept of micro-ecosystems, aka marketplaces, is everywhere. In the automotive, retail, hospitality and transportation industries, collective sets of brands are coming together to create more holistic solutions for the end-buyer. Instead of a mega online marketplace like a mall, we will see a proliferation of marketplaces across multiple verticals and sub-verticals. Sometimes the same brand will end up in multiple marketplaces to be part of an end-user solution set that varies from one marketplace to another. This will have a profound impact on partner relationship management. 2. Evolving ecosystems – In 2023, partner ecosystems are likely to transition from being the subject of hype to something more real and consequential driven by hyper-personalized partner programs and pathways. Jay McBain, Chief Analyst for Channels at Canalys, has written extensively about the rise of ecosystems. While the term remains confusing for many, at the most basic level it refers to an aggregation of individuals and companies that work together to offer a complete, customized solution for the end-buyer (whether the buyer is an individual or an organization). So, in the consumer space we will see an increase in “super apps” like Uber, but in the businesses space we will see a rise in aggregate entities comprised of both transacting and non-transacting partners. This trend of delivery fragmentation will accelerate, driven by both macro and micro economic factors. On the technology fronts, we will also need unified applications for partner relationship management, which we will discuss later in the technology trends for 2023. 3. Rewarding loyalties – In the partner relationship management space, we have seen several companies over the past few years roll out partner programs centered around critical factors that influence partner behavior based on partner types and activities instead of focusing on sales volume alone. We will continue to see brands rethink how they reward their partners to drive loyalty based on who they are and the value they add to the brand’s customer base. This will require realignment of partner programs from the typical medallion tiering system – e.g., bronze, silver, gold – to a more specialized and activity-based stage-driven partner enablement system. This means, for example, that while referral (affiliate) partners may be rewarded for promoting a brand, resellers will need to go through more enablement activities, and service partners will be rewarded for excellence in customer care. The rise of millennial buying power will also drive the emergence of more micro and regional franchises tied to the groundswell of entrepreneurship and the availability of capital for proven (and profitable) business models. 4. Everything is software – When you think about deployment of technology during the last decade, it basically happened at two levels – big companies focused on logistics and inventory optimization and the rise of social media (micro-targeting). Some of you may also mention the cloud in this context, but I think of it as more of an enabler of end-user applications. End-user applications have certainly moved to the desktop and mobile fully powered by the cloud. However, from a broad perspective it is really the delivery chain that is being re-optimized and customer engagement (B2B and B2C) that is being redesigned. In the 2020s we are seeing much more last-mile innovation in both the consumer and the business areas. Uber is a classic example of last-mile innovation, and the rise of partner relationship management by verticals is an analogous example in the B2B area. This trend is leading to an explosion of independent software vendors (ISVs) driven by major cloud ecosystems like Azure, AWS, AppExchange and others. While this is happening in B2B world, the same is happening in the B2C world. If you have kids who love to live in the reality of Roblox, then you are fully aware how rich those marketplaces are and how many apps drive the Roblox ecosystem. 5. Partner-fed versus partner-led – Due to the rise of digital technologies and tools for reaching customers directly, brands have much more direct access to end-buyers than they did a decade or two ago. As a result, marketing has gone substantially digital. Most CMOs have a clear understanding of their ROIs now – something they lacked a couple of decades ago. In fact, the rise of digital CMOs has led to a rethinking of the role partners play in generating demand. Traditionally, partner organizations have been starved of marketing resources and competencies, and the brands have offered programs, funding, and tools to bridge this gap. The challenge is demonstrating a return from these partner-led activities; hope-based investment will have a tough time in 2023 where ROI will be driving conversations in the C-suite. The increasing importance of digital marketing has nearly eliminated the need for partners to have these assets and made partner-led demand generation relatively obsolete. Don’t get me wrong: marketing with and through partners will not disappear, but the nature of these activities will evolve quite substantially. Yes, there are still major aggregators who can provide value to brands, but when you set aside these entities and focus on the partner ecosystem, it’s much more common today for brands to drive lead generation and hand over those leads to their partners, unless you have an “Intel Inside” type of campaign where the primary brand relies heavily on the solution aggregator to build awareness.
What will get us there?Now that we have discussed five dimensional changes in strategies for partner relationship management in the context of macro and micro drivers, let’s spend a few minutes discussing four major technology trends that are enabling these strategies.
- ROI or else – Gone are the days of free money. Companies can no longer borrow for free, do financial engineering and provide dividends to shareholders. Current cashflow is valued a lot more than future growth. We have moved from a resource-rich financial environment to a much more austere environment. Every CEO is now tasked with generating intrinsic value from operations, creating net income, generating free cash flow and paying dividends. How do you do that in a slow-growth economy with high labor and material costs? The only way is to drive profitable growth by reducing operating costs and increase revenue by lowering customer acquisition costs. In the partner relationship management context, you do that by going indirectly through a partner network, but also by focusing resources on highly effective partners and lowering headcount costs to effectively support partner relationships. This is where digitization and hyper-personalization come in to play. These are the primary means of driving ROI in a broad range of partner relationship management activities and technologies.
- Planet of the apps – Over the past two decades we have seen a proliferation of applications related to partner relationship management, through-partner marketing automation, partner incentives, loyalty management, and so on. Most mid-size to large enterprises today have a fragmented technology infrastructure built with a hodge-podge of legacy hard-coded applications. Such infrastructure may be generously labeled “hosted,” but is a long way from true SaaS. In the partner relationship management context, this situation has led to a substantial increase in unnecessary tech stack investment and very poor partner experiences. As a result, we will continue to see companies get rid of their “Frankenstacks” and replace multiple applications with cloud-based, fully integrated, unified partner relationship management platforms. Doing so will not only reduce operating costs for these organizations, but also substantially improve the partner experience and, therefore, partner productivity, leading to higher ROI. While tech stack shrink, we will see an increase in super apps – i.e., unified partner relationship management platforms designed to address hybrid ecosystems and end-to-end partner pathways.
- Through-partner marketing reimagined – Covid changed how partners market. Gone are the days of “lunch and learns” in B2B partner marketing activities. Similar changes have occurred in the B2C arena. Digital dominates today. Whether we are talking about social media or mobile app-based marketing, the way brands reach consumers and businesses is changing rapidly. We will see this trend accelerate in 2023. Over the last three years we have seen an increase in curbside pickups and home deliveries, and that will only accelerate the introduction of super apps. We will observe a similar phenomenon in the B2B area. Diverse customer needs will need to be addressed with a diverse set of solutions, aggregation at the partner level will drive through-partner marketing and customer acquisition, and the tools and techniques for these activities will need to be rethought. While traditional email-based marketing will still exist, social, syndication and mobile engagement will take up a disproportionate share of marketing-through and marketing-with activities in the partner ecosystem. We are already seeing this trend in the consumer area with franchises like food, retail and hospitality, where the primary brand drives traffic to franchisees. We will start seeing the same phenomenon with megabrands in the B2B area.
- Communities, bots and workflows – Sprinkle in some AI with that. Yes, we will continue to see a rapid increase in workflow automation tools that allow brands to create hyper-personalized pathways for their partners. Bots will start replacing the partner support network to answer obvious questions like, “How do I do this?” or “How do I find that?” As brands drive pathway-based engagement, they will have to create complete digital experiences where time-starved partners can get answers at the point of value and execution. Therefore, dependency on humans will be reduced and we will see completely digital pathways assisted by virtual digital concierges. If the user question is frequent and the answer is straightforward, delivery will come from bots. We will also see an increase in brand-specific partner communities where partners collaborate seamlessly with each other and vendor bots help them navigate through various partner programs and activities. As the marketplaces rise, partner networks will go hybrid and loyalty will be increasingly point-based –tied to points of value – and we will see hyper-personalized workflows. Different types of affiliates will get registered and onboarded, and will then be provided with appropriate tools to promote the brand. Service partners will go through extended training and certifications aligned with point systems, and each of these use cases will require unique workflows and approval flows. This will lead to increased demand for workflow automation tools that allow brands to design and deploy customized digital pathways for their diverse universe of partner types and specialties. In the end, the entire experience for each partner type needs to be deliberate, unique and specific. Also, because the C-suite on the vendor side will stay narrowly focused on ROI (inclusive of labor), you can expect an equally rigorous focus on ROI from the partner network.
While the world remains relatively uncertain in 2023, we are beginning to see the emergence of a global economy that recognizes the need for sustainability, diversification of the supply chain, rational financial management, acceptance of partner diversity and activity-based loyalty and rewards infrastructure. The enablement led by cloud ecosystems will be replicated and modeled across multiple verticals. We will also see a return to sane financial management as the world weans itself off the “free money” fantasy and focuses on customer and partner value.
While the media will remain confused and focused, perhaps deliberately, on negative news, 2023 will continue to lay the foundation for a massive global transformation led by green energy, digitization, and the rise of rich and diverse partner ecosystems. If you can ignore the buzzing of the news industry and stay focused on driving this transformation, the future looks bright, exciting, and professionally and financially rewarding. Now that is something to look forward to, don’t you think?
What is an affiliate? An “affiliate” is an individual or organization that does not report to you but represents you in the marketplace. In most cases, an affiliate tends to be associated with marketing activities, but some affiliates also provide services. In this article, we will explore some strategies for selecting software for onboarding affiliate marketing partners.Essentially, affiliate marketing involves the promotion of your product and/or services brand to a target audience. Affiliates tend to have a captive base of customers or followers or leaders. An obvious example in the consumer space would be some kind of celebrity – say, a movie star or an athlete promoting a brand through their Instagram or Twitter or YouTube account. While an affiliate can certainly promote a brand via advertising in traditional media like TV, radio and newspapers, the proliferation of social media channels, blogs, podcasts, and vlogs (video blogs) over the past decade or so has created a completely new generation of affiliate marketing partners.
With that background in mind, here are the five most important things you should think about when selecting onboarding software for your affiliate marketing network:
- Audience: If you are considering increasing your reach by building an affiliate network, before you start onboarding a random set of partners you clearly need to establish who your target audience is. For example, if your audience consists primarily of Gen Z consumers, then chances are they are not on Facebook; very likely they are on Instagram or YouTube. In that case it will be essential that your affiliate marketing onboarding software can easily accommodate these social media platforms.
- Market To: Once you know who you want to target as an audience and select your ecosystems – whether they are consumer ecosystems like Facebook and Instagram or business ecosystems like blogs, vlogs, LinkedIn and SlideShare –you will need to figure out who the key influencers are, and you will need to target those influencers for recruitment. In the consumer space you may have several dozen influencers, but in the business space it might be only a handful.
- Onboarding: After you have figured out your audience and who to target as an affiliate, you will need to look at a platform that can stair-step your affiliate marketing partners through your overall programs, including your brand, your implicit promise to customers, the tools affiliates can use to promote your offerings and the commissions that they will earn. The onboarding steps need to be automated in a seamless way so that an affiliate partner who is interested in promoting your brand can quickly sign up, upload their individual or company information, and actively participate in programs that are relevant to them and to their followers.
- Beyond Onboarding: Onboarding a partner into your program is only the first step in effective affiliate marketing. Once a partner is onboarded, your affiliate marketing software should be able to regularly provide them with new opportunities for learning, engagement, promotion, and payment. Some platforms even provide affiliate partners tools for them to extend their own networks, giving them the ability to reach out to additional partners.
- Analytics: Finally, in today’s digital age, no marketing initiative is complete without understanding who your audience is, how your affiliate program is working, how successfully you are generating referrals and other metrics. Before selecting a platform, it’s essential that you to test drive the software’s reporting tools to make sure you will be able to thoroughly understand your target audience and the progress of your affiliates through their step-by-step onboarding journey with the insight of dynamic analytics.
Now that you know the five most important factors in selecting affiliate marketing onboarding software, I should point out that the first two out of these factors – audience and affiliate – comprise the cornerstone of your marketing strategy, which must be focused and sound regardless of the software you use. Audience and affiliate must be defined carefully and strategically. If they are not, even the very best software will not be able to help you achieve your objectives.
A final consideration: In addition to the features I have already mentioned, your affiliate marketing onboarding software needs to be easily configurable. Every partner program necessarily changes over time. Whatever software you choose, be sure it is not hard-coded or has guardrails that are too narrow. You want software that makes it easy to change your onboarding workflows and programs, adapt your local programs to a global network, or make other changes as business conditions evolve.
If you are ready to evaluate onboarding software for your affiliate marketing program, I would also suggest that you think beyond the initial onboarding process. For example, your affiliate marketing software should be able to track referrals, pay commissions and provide monthly, quarterly, and annual reports. In a future article, I will explore several other dimensions related to payment management in the context of affiliate marketing management.
Affiliate marketing essentially refers to an activity where a third party – a person or an organization – promotes your brand to their connections or networks or audiences. Affiliate marketing management software allows you to automate the process of recruiting, engaging, enabling and managing such a marketing partner. In this article, we will explore what affiliate marketing management software is and how it works.
What is affiliate marketing and how does it work?
As we hinted at in the introduction, an affiliate represents your brand. Your brand could be a product or a service or even a person. Celebrities are individuals, but they are also their own brand. The goal of an affiliate marketing partner is to represent the brand and get paid in return for promoting it. This is the basic give-and-take relationship between an affiliate and a brand.
Now, let’s talk a bit about what a brand is. When we think about brands, we traditionally think of big names, like Coca Cola, Nike, Samsung or Apple. All of these brands represent a group of products, and some also offer services. Some brands, like Disney or Niagara Falls or the San Francisco Zoo are called hybrid brands – a combination of products and services, but essentially an “experience.” When you take a Viking Cruise or board a United Airlines jet you are not actually buying a product that you can own, but rather you are paying for an experience.
People can be brands, too. Perhaps the most obvious example is Michael Jordan. Remember Air Jordans? Nike made millions from selling a simple shoe, merely by associating the shoe with a famous name. In this example there are two brands at play – Michael Jordan the athlete and Nike the shoe company. In this particular case, even though Michael Jordan is himself a brand, he is also an affiliate insofar as he is promoting the Jordan-branded shoes sold by Nike.
I could keep going with various examples, but I think you get the point. In today’s world, there is are many brand types, ranging from a simple product like an iPhone or a combination of products and services like Disney to a micro-brand like a local boy band—you name it. Every one of the brand examples I have mentioned so far are promoted by someone.
If a marketing agency is promoting a brand directly, that is called direct marketing. However, if a person or another company is promoting a brand, the promoter is called a brand ambassador or a spokesperson or an affiliate. Whatever the case, when a brand gets promoted by a third party, someone does it and money exchanges hands. Affiliate marketing management is, essentially, the oversight of that process.
Now that we have discussed what affiliate marketing is, we should talk a little about affiliate marketing management software. This category of software is relatively new, even though affiliate marketing has existed for a while. Historically, most affiliate marketing management software has been offered by small, specialized software companies. However, with the rise of the channel and the evolution of partner-driven marketing and selling, affiliate marketing is now being recognized as a more mainstream software category, and organizations like ZINFI have begun to develop affiliate marketing management software as part of a more comprehensive package of channel management tools.
What is affiliate marketing management software and how does it work?
I have written on this topic before, so I won’t go into a lot of detail about the various capabilities of affiliate marketing management software, but here are its core functions:
Affiliate Recruitment – One of the very first steps in developing an affiliate marketing program is to identify a set of partners who are able and willing to promote your brand. These partners can range from individual influencers to companies or agencies. You need to make a list of these target individuals or organizations and present them with a business partnership propositio...
This decade is about the growth of the ecosystem. With rapid changes in technology, continued deglobalization and the redefinition of supply chains, the channel as we know it will transform our economies in terms of both demand and supply. That’s why onboarding of partners on a continuous and regular basis will become a central theme for most organizations, and onboarding is an important area is where partner management software can be a tremendous help. However, before we delve into multiple aspects of partner onboarding software and how it can help accelerate partner onboarding and time to revenue, let me provide some background on partner onboarding. As markets evolve, businesses digitize more and more to reduce operating costs while increasing access. In the process, they tend to de-leverage their direct go-to-market structure and emphasize an indirect model instead. As a result, we are now seeing a proliferation of various types of partners, such as affiliates, agents, consultants, wholesalers, resellers, brokers, retailers, etailers, franchises, system integrators and more – there are too many to name. However, all do essentially the same thing: they represent a brand to a buyer. Sometimes these third parties focus exclusively on generating brand awareness, but in other cases they carry inventory and resell a product, and sometimes they also provide services beyond the sale.
When you have a thriving partner network, it is highly likely that you will have a mix of various partner types. Therefore, as you design programs and processes and invest in people to manage your indirect go-to-market model, it is important that you have the right technology infrastructure – namely, partner management software – to automate these workflows in a deliberate and structured way.
Partner onboarding applies to both existing partners and new partners. Why? Because you are marketing and selling solutions that are constantly changing; even long-time partners will need to complete training or recertification processes or territory realignment from time to time to continue to sell effectively. Now when it comes to new partners, of course you need to recruit them, train them and put them through structured onboarding programs, much like you do with your new employees, but there may be a lot of differences between your new and existing partner programs. Without a solid partner management software infrastructure it is very difficult to rapidly redesign, redeploy and globally manage an infrastructure that can accommodate these differences.
Typically, a partner onboarding process goes through the following steps, which your partner management software should be able to flow through seamlessly:
Partner Recruitment: This is where you conduct outbound and inbound marketing activities to drive awareness with your existing or potential new partners about your offers, programs and business proposition. Partner Registration: Once the promotional phase is over, partners move into the next phase of signing up on your partner portal – your first digital hello. Partner Signup: Once the registration process, powered by your partner management software, is complete, you may want your partner to apply for certain programs, products or other offerings. Once approved, they are “signed up” to market and/or sell and/or service your target buyers. Partner Training: After sign-up, training them on your partner portal is critical. Your partner management software will need to have a learning management system and guide partners through certifications training. Partner Enablement: If you have recruited affiliate partners, you will need to provide them with assets and tools to promote your brand across the web or off the web. Partner Referrals/Deals: Once your partners start marketing, they will generate leads and deals for you. You need a way to keep track of those activities. This is a key area where partner management software can auto...
It is an exciting time to be in the world of partner management. As the worldwide GDP grows and more advanced technology proliferates, go-to-market motions are being rethought constantly. Who would have thought a decade ago that Instagram would be a major influencer platform and companies would invest billions in promoting their brand ambassadors? Today’s partner management (PRM) software is a part of that economic evolution, and a state-of-the-art PRM platform can enable seamless management of various partner types, including influencers and affiliate partners. In this article, we will explore what affiliate marketing is and how partner management software can help organizations onboard these types of partners. “Affiliate” is a term that has been around for centuries. The word comes from the Latin stem affiliare, meaning "to adopt". From a marketing perspective, affiliate refers to a person or an organization that is associated with your brand and willing to promote that brand to their customer base. In consumer marketing, affiliates have traditionally been celebrities, but over the past several years we have seen the rise of YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and Twitter influencers. Every country has their influencers, but the specific social media platforms that are most widely used by influencers tend to vary by country or region. Influencers can have a huge follower base and, depending on their specific focus and the size of their audience, may provide enormous value to brands by reaching a loyal base in a much more targeted way than traditional mass marketing is able to do. Today, there is partner management software in the marketplace that focuses exclusively on consumer affiliate marketing and management.
When it comes to businesses, affiliates tend to be individuals who are consultants or experts in a specific domain; technology bloggers are great examples of that. However, the majority of affiliates tend to be smaller organizations or individuals who consult with and/or support their client base in various aspects of a solution, rather than carrying a product to resell. The primary difference between a B2B affiliate and a reseller is that the latter not only promotes a brand and finds a customer, but also actually completes the transaction. Affiliates, on the other hand, tend focus on promoting a brand and finding prospect buyers rather than completing a transaction. However, in many cases a partner may be both – an affiliate as well as a transacting partner. There are a handful of companies today providing partner management software that can manage both affiliates and transacting partners. ZINFI is a leader in both areas.
Given this context, if you are thinking about automating your onboarding workflows, you should take some time to think through what you need from your partner management software. To make your onboarding highly personalized and adaptable, here are the capabilities you’ll need from your partner management software:
Groups and Profiles – You must be able to create access rights to your partner portal based on whether the partner is an affiliate, a reseller or both. Your groups and profiles capabilities will need to address partners’ specialization, which countries they are coming from, their medallion status or their status in a point-based system. Unless you have partner management software that allows you to manage groups and profiles in a highly granular way, you will not be able to adequately manage a mixed channel environment with both resellers and affiliates. Programs – We have noted in other articles that onboarding programs may vary greatly based on who you are onboarding and how you are onboarding. If you are onboarding an existing partner into a new program, then you have one set of workflows, which may be shorter and focused, but if you are onboarding a new partner into the company, then your onboarding program needs to be quite comprehensive.
More and more companies are marketing and selling through the channel to increase reach and velocity of product distribution. With that said, implementing this sales approach is a very complex undertaking, and it’s easy to get off track. Here are the 5 core partner relationship management best practices to help you scale.
Know Your Partners
Before you can put together a solid partner relationship management framework and strategy, it is essential for you to understand who your partners are, how they make money, how they differ in the marketplace they sell to, and what keeps them awake at night. Without understanding these fundamental drivers, it is almost impossible for an organization to get true engagement from its partner base.
In addition to understanding their business drivers, it is also important for you to figure out how your products fit into their product portfolio. If your solution is the primary product in their portfolio, they will engage accordingly, but if you are just an add-on, your approach to managing the relationship will have to be different. For example, if your partner sells burgers, and you provide French-fries, then you are essentially providing an add-on. However, if you sell beef patties then you provide something that’s core to the partner primary solution, i.e., burgers. Any partner relationship management strategy needs to focus on this strategic versus contextual offer.
Understand the Mathematics of Reach
Sometimes it is tempting to go for the widest distribution possible by signing up as many partners or resellers as you can. However, this approach brings challenges like over-distribution, channel conflict, and potential lawsuits. So, your partner relationship management strategy needs to center around profitable growth, i.e., what’s the minimum number of resellers that would give you the maximum reach.
Needless to say, it poses the risk of creating a lot of unproductive and unhappy partners. Therefore, it’s very important to understand in detail how you are going to distribute your products to end buyers and calculate how many partners you need to hit your revenue growth goals. You would be surprised how few companies sit down and do this math.
Calculate Training and Incentives Requirements
Just like any new relationship, onboarding new partners can be quite exciting in the beginning. Eventually, however, companies realize that it actually takes more to train an indirect sales force than it does to train your own employees. The reason for this is very simple:
Learning about your products is the primary focus of a direct sales force, but partners typically are learning about and selling products from multiple vendors.This makes it difficult for them to invest the time in learning about yet another product, especially if the product is constantly changing due to new capabilities, new versions and so on.
The fact is, partners tend to spend more time selling existing or mature products more than new products. This is a major insight that many companies overlook at first, often realizing it only after they have failed to reach the sales velocity of new products they had hoped for. Your partner relationship management approach needs to focus on understanding partners sales mix and velocity and how you can help them accelerate revenue with minimum changes.
Manage the Loyalty of Partners
It is important for you to understand that a partner’s primary loyalty is to their customer base and their employees. No matter how great your products and services are, if your activity in any way undermines a partner’s relationship with their customers, you risk losing them.
So, while you must put your partners in the middle of your service and support infrastructure, you absolutely need to make sure their end customers are treated with a white glove approach. This is essential in building a reputation with your partner base.
The concept of a channel has existed since the Stone Age–when one person bartered with another. While technology has evolved rapidly over the past few thousand years, for many companies the state of their channel maturity still resembles antiquated methods that stifle growth. Based on our engagement with thousands of channel partners worldwide and our evaluation of how vendors deploy channel management, we have come up with a basic four-step framework for partner lifecycle management (or activities). We break down this lifecycle into four core areas: partner recruitment, partner engagement, partner enablement, and partner management. As a part of the channel management maturity evaluation, it is essential to understand which phase a company is in when it comes to these four different areas of activities. This serves as a starting point with the idea that the channel will evolve and grow. Phase 1: Laying the Foundation This is the start-up phase of channel development. When you look at the activities at this level, it covers the following:
Partner Recruitment The company has some basic partner recruitment capabilities in place by running tradeshows, webinars, and call-out campaigns. Recruitment is ad hoc, and not really focused around partner profiling or competency development, but more opportunistic. Partner Engagement The company knows how to provide a basic infrastructure. In many cases the following are homegrown:
Partner portal- Tends to be patched together using either open source software, SharePoint or some other web development tools. However, the portal is monolithic, not localized and cannot offer personalized content. With that said, at this stage the basic content exchange capabilities are in place. Some companies in this phase deploy a basic level of partner relationship management automation. Partner onboarding- Signing contracts, training partners on how to sell and putting business plans together are the core steps in this phase, but most of these activities are done manually and there are no systems in place to track the progress of partner engagement. Partner communication- A weekly or monthly newsletter goes out to partners, but communication is not broadly aligned with strategic initiatives and intent. Most content is highly tactical, and not necessarily controlled and aligned with broader corporate initiative. Very rarely at this stage do we see deployment of partner relationship management automation.
Partner Enablement The company provides a basic level of marketing and sales tools.
Marketing and sales enablement- Price lists, product data sheets, marketing templates are available for partners to use. However, content is not mobile-friendly and not easy to search, tag and find at this level. Partner training- A basic partner certification and training mechanism is in place, but there is no structured learning management system (LMS) to digitally train, track and certify partners across multiple countries and languages.
Partner Management The company has a loosely defined partner incentive structure in place, primarily using market development funds. Incentives are available on an ad hoc basis, but no structured quarterly programs are in place, nor is there any competency alignment.
Phase 2: Refining the Structure to Scale Companies entering this phase have a significant portion of their revenue (perhaps more than a few hundred million dollars) coming from the channel, and the channel is a strategic piece. Also, we see more prevalent deployment of automation to streamline multiple areas and workflows globally.
Partner Recruitment Partner recruitment is a strategic initiative–structured in a few countries, but ad hoc in others. Some partner profiling analysis is done to understand what territories need pruning, and where new partners needed to be added.
When managing any team, you must have processes in place to support your initiatives and help you streamline tasks more efficiently. This is especially true in the channel management.
Each type of channel’s lifecycle is essentially the same – recruit, onboard, enable, transact, and manage. It’s important that each of these components is considered when mapping out an overall channel strategy. After all, growth depends on the success of distribution partners.
Here, we highlight the 6 C’s of channel management and how you should be applying them.
- Create
The first step of your channel strategy is to know who your target partners are and how you’re going to create programs to support them. Channel programs serve as a foundation – for both the product you’re trying to sell and training. Consistently curating programs and relevant content can keep your partners engaged, and most importantly, informed. Knowing that you’ll have the latest information to aid in their efforts will undoubtedly keep them coming back. Consider frequently including assets like web pages, documents, and videos.
Utilizing a platform to easily update and house these documents makes the process of educating partners even easier. ZINFI, for example, boasts a content library module in its partner portal platform that enables vendors to upload and update any collateral as needed.
- Communicate
Communication is two-fold in channel management. You need to have both a communication strategy for new partner recruitment and existing partners.
Recruitment Communication
To penetrate a market of new resellers, you’ll likely have to rely on social advertising, online events, trade shows, etc. There should be a concerted effort to target verticals that will market your product directly to those most likely to become partners. You will need to know who you want to bring on as your reseller, and what would entice them to partner up with you. Your messaging needs to focus on what business value you bring to them, and how you will help them win in the marketplace.
Communication with Existing Partners
When you launch a product when you acquire a company, when you roll out an incentive program, when you launch a training program, you have to have a clear set of communication plans tied to those activities, initiatives, and programs.
It may seem overwhelming to have communications in place for each, individual initiative. But this is crucial to ensuring partners have the information they need to sell. Many channel management teams make it easy by utilizing a partner marketing automation platform that streamlines the process for you. Is it a social campaign? An advertising campaign? A trade show campaign? A partner marketing automation platform can enable you to create dedicated campaigns for each initiative and does the communicating for you.
- Connect
You should be constantly keeping your partners informed. They need to know what's new, what's changing, what must get done, just like the way you communicate to employees on a regular basis for a management infrastructure–what the company goals are, what the quarterly objectives are, etc.
Consider connecting on a regular forum–whether it's an online event or regular email communications. You can also invest in a channel management platform, like ZINFI, that enables you to connect through mobile alerts and pop-ups so you have multiple touchpoints with partners.
- Cooperate
Cooperation means working with partners to create a plan so that they can enter a market segment they may not be competent in. These are large partners that you’ll want to cater to as smaller partners may not produce the results to make the time commitment worth it to build entry into new segments.
Remember, the point is that it needs to tie back to your overall channel strategy. In the end, the entire goal of your channel management investment is to sell faster and at lower costs...
The discipline that embodies the principles and tactics of managing channel partners is called partner relationship management (PRM) or channel relationship management.
At the foundation of channel management, you’ll find partners. Partners fuel channel marketing, sales, and service efforts–their success is directly correlated to the overall channel’s success. While finding ways to manage them efficiently can be challenging, it’s a crucial component that can enable your organization to recruit and retain more partners, as well as, increase revenue at a much lower cost of sales and services than a direct sales and service model.
The Partner Journey
The word journey means it has a roadmap–with a beginning and an end. When it comes to partner relationship management the roadmap is all about attaining higher sales velocity and better customer satisfaction at a lower cost of sales and services. The beginning of this journey starts with partner recruitment and it ends with a high performing channel.
The truth is it really never ends, because channel is a living and breathing entity. It’s always changing. So, yes you start with a roadmap and you execute, but there are constant changes, detours, and optimization that you have to do with the new focus.
A successful and growing organization is always introducing new products, acquiring new partners, realigning their groups and incentives, etc., to achieve higher level of performances. So, while you don’t want to make changes every ninety days, you certainly don’t want to stick with a stale channel program year after year either.
That’s why the notion of a partner journey revolves around a framework, but it’s highly dynamic–not like a Disney roller coaster ride, but more like a seasoned traveler that ventures through dozens of countries with a pre-determine budget to attain certain specific goals. In this case those goals are to make more revenue at a lower cost with a higher customer satisfaction rate and very little business risks or (legal) exposures.
With this said, there are few things that are constant. For a channel focused organization, partners are always going to be a critical component to any business strategy, whether it’s a vendor just starting out or an organization that has been established for years. After all, the productivity of the partners determines the success of the channel. This is where a well-tuned partner relationship management (PRM) software or system can truly help an organization to realize its channel strategy and business goals.
With this in mind, let’s go through an overall partner journey with a vendor organization–starting with partner recruitment, training, enablement, sales and ongoing relationship management.
Partner Recruitment
This is the first step in a partner journey–joining a vendor organization or partner recruitment. You can’t expect to scale without adding new channel partners to your organization. There must be an ongoing and proactive effort to build relationships with potential channel partner organizations that can sell and support a vendor’s solution. This includes both outreach and onboarding processes. A well-designed partner relationship management (PRM) platform should allow you to do this well.
Rather than targeting any available partner, outreach efforts should be built around a strategy–one that seeks out channel partners who are likely to perform. But recruiting is only half the battle. Once you’ve signed on the dotted line it’s time to give them all the resources and knowledge they need to begin actively selling as soon as possible.
Partner Training
The goal here is to ensure partners’ functional teams are properly trained on how to market, sell, deploy and support a specific solution. This means more than just a two-day conference in a hotel.
To properly give new partners the tools they need to sell you need to take a more holistic and ongoing approach.
A lot has changed around the world in all aspects of our life over the past 18 months, and that includes how lead management works in a distributed partner network. Before we delve into what has changed, what will change further and how to prepare for it, let me take a moment to describe what channel lead management is: If you are selling through a channel then you have one or more types of partners, such as resellers, value added resellers (VARs), agents, sub-agents, distributors, wholesalers, affiliates and more. Nearly all of these types of partners have an impact on your sales, either directly or indirectly.
In general, there are two types of partners:
Transacting partners – These are the partners who are actually actively selling your products on their website or through their business services. They may or may not provide additional post-sales customer care or services, but most do today because they can get recurring revenue from a sale. Since transacting partners are selling, they will have need to have access to your lead management system.Non-transacting partners – These are the partners who “refer” or a “send” a prospect to your company via your web site or some sort of a lead management system. These partners tend to be called affiliates, but some of them may also simply be pure service partners. They don’t necessarily sell your products, but they nevertheless serve your customer base. Mortgage services companies are great examples of this.
Now, both types of partners will have some form of engagement with a lead management system, and in some cases they will also engage with a deal registration management system. (We will not discuss deal registration here; you can find many articles on deal registration on our website.)
During the pandemic, as the world coiled back to a quarantine mode, face-to-face engagement has pretty much disappeared or has been curtailed substantially for business transactions. There is no longer a reliable way to generate leads from a “lunch and learn” or from a local fair or some sort of an event. All events have moved online, and therefore generation of leads has also moved online. As a major provider of lead management software, we at ZINFI have seen a rapid rise in demand for the lead management modules we and other software developers provide.
As we get closer to a post-pandemic world, we are very likely to see the evolution of a hybrid world. Physical interactions will not disappear. Humans are tribal in nature and require social face-to-face engagement. We can expect physical events to come back, but they will rely on many of the digital tools we are currently using. It’s sort of like this: Instead of having your dinner delivered by Uber Eats, you place the order online but go pick it up yourself. The app will still be there in your life. A similar dynamic will emerge in lead management, where much activity will take place online, but there will still be some space for in-person interaction.
This is great news, because traditionally it has been hard to get channel partners to adopt new software and automate their processes. This fundamental shift towards the adoption of lead management software will ultimately make the channel more efficient and effective. Leads are like fish out of water— if you or your partners are not moving quickly, most of these leads will die. Time is of the essence, and lead management can make lead processing super-fast and accurate.
Finally, once you have an online lead management system in place and you move away from Excel or email- or phone call-based manual tracking, you can monitor all activities online and spend your time focused on driving programs that increase your leads and ROI.
This is a whole new world. While the last 18 months have been horrible for most, the world of lead management will get substantially better. That’s another silver lining to look forward to as we gradually get back to normal.
Salesforce is an amazing company led by its founder and CEO Marc Benioff. What started as a CRM-focused SaaS company has evolved over the past several decades into a business process automation ecosystem. Salesforce’s core strategy is to provide a few core applications around customer relationship management (CRM), service management and marketing, and allow independent service providers to connect to its platform and augment its core capabilities to create a more niche application. Salesforce also provides basic partner relationship management (PRM) capabilities, and in this article we will explore the pluses and minuses of Salesforce PRM.
Before we proceed further, let’s take a step back and understand Salesforce’s overall strategy. As I said in the beginning, it started as CRM platform in a SaaS package—an alternative to on-premise software that had to be installed and configured on a company’s physical servers. (Yes, remember those days? Not so long ago, eh?) More recently, Salesforce has followed the lead of software platform providers like Microsoft in offering customers a development environment called Force.com, with its own software built on that. In much the same way Microsoft provides Windows as an operating environment, but then also sells Microsoft Office applications like Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook, Salesforce provides a solid CRM platform and allows third-party providers to build and run applications on its Force.com platform and connect to its core applications. In fact, ZINFI’s own PRM application connects to Salesforce CRM as well as Salesforce PRM.
Now, over the past decade or so has Salesforce dabbled in the area of partner relationship management. At one point in time, it had a dedicated product, but according to industry analysts achieved only lackluster sales, and therefore decided to roll that into the Salesforce Community Cloud business line. Salesforce PRM today is essentially an extension of Salesforce Community Cloud, rather than a purpose-built PRM platform. Salesforce PRM has unique strengths and weaknesses, and if you are considering investing in it you should understand what they are.
There are basically three core positive areas for Salesforce PRM. They are focused on a) extending your direct selling motion to the channel via Salesforce PRM, b) minimizing or eliminating any integration work for another application if you are a Salesforce CRM house already, and c) giving you powerful tools to build custom workflows for your channel applications, in much the same way you can build workflows for direct sales automation activities.
Let’s take a moment and explore these three areas in a bit more detail:
Extending Direct Selling – If your organization has chosen Salesforce CRM for sales and/or marketing automation and you are looking to provide some basic capabilities for sharing information with your channel partners, then Salesforce PRM is certainly worth a look. Using Salesforce PRM community capabilities, you can build some basic collaboration capabilities and share content with your channel partners. This allows your direct sales team or inside sales team to easily collaborate with partners using a few basic communication tools.Eliminating Integration Work – If your organization is already using Salesforce CRM, then turning on the PRM capabilities is quite simple. Even though Salesforce PRM is not a purpose-built application and may require you to do a lot of configuration and customization work, in the end you can eliminate any integration requirements. While ZINFI’s PRM platform—along with other third-party purpose-built PRM platforms—comes with easy-to-connect PRM to SFDC connectors, in the end some organizations simply don’t want to manage another application. If you are in that boat, Salesforce PRM is a reasonable option for you to consider.Powerful Workflow Tools – even though it comes with very limited PRM capabilities,
Partner relationship management (PRM) tools have existed for more than a decade right now. Although early in the 2000s there were a few companies trying to build applications to manage a distributor channel, the actual proliferation of PRM software didn’t really happen until about five years ago. The primary focus for PRM tools is automating workflows between a vendor and a partner to make it easy to do business. Most PRM platforms come with a whole bunch of application modules ranging from onboarding, contracts and learning management to asset sharing, deal registration, incentives and more. In this article we will explore the concept of co-branded assets and how co-branding can help vendors streamline distributed sales activities as well as increase sales.
You may be wondering what exactly asset co-branding is. Let me explain - Co-branding allows your channel partner to put their logo next to your logo on specified assets and share those assets with the end-customer. This allows the partner to claim a formal association with your brand and gives them an opportunity to ride on the halo of your logos. However, vendors who enable co-branding need to make sure their brand and logos are protected and don’t get distorted— whether intentionally or not—when assets are shared. It’s critical for vendors to maintain control over their branding and be able to enforce co-branding guidelines.
Vendors recruit channel partners for one primary reason: to sell the vendor’s products and services. For the relationship to work, the vendor needs to help the partner learn to sell the vendor’s product and services. In order to succeed in that mission, sales reps from the partner organization need to have access to a set of sales tools and sales materials or “slicks.” Traditionally, the vendor provides these through their partner portal, assuming they have one. However, in most companies where the channel organization is in its early stages of formation and doesn’t have a PRM tool, the channel team ends up sharing these documents via Dropbox or other file-sharing tools. This makes the experience pretty cumbersome, because the partner has to go through a flat file structure to figure out what’s what. Also, this reliance on file-sharing sites makes it easy for partners to make mistakes when they select an asset, co-brand it and share it with their end-customers.
This is exactly where a co-branded asset module or application becomes very useful. Most PRM tools or platforms today include some sort of a co-branding capability. If you’re evaluating a PRM tool with co-branded asset capabilities, make sure the core features are capable of addressing your needs as well as your partners’ needs. You should consider:
Types of assets: When you’re evaluating a PRM tool, make its co-branding capabilities are world class and can accommodate multiple types of assets, such HTML, HTML5, PDFs and other common document types.Asset preview: Your partners should not only be able to co-brand assets with different types of logos and insignias but should also be able to preview assets easily before they download them for offline use. They should also be able to share these documents, if required, directly from the system.Co-branding of assets: Co-branding should be easy. Partners should be able to select a set of assets you have provided to them and quickly add customized content in specified areas, based on their edit and access rights. You should be able to configure access and editing rights so, for example, your Gold partners are allowed to modify more areas than your Approved partners and add their own content.Print quality: Assuming your partners send out printed materials to their customers, you will need the ability to provide high-resolution print quality assets to your partners for their co-branding activities. Unlike ZINFI, most PRM vendors in the market today are not able to do that.Analytics: Finally,
Partner relationship management (PRM) tools are gaining traction across multiple verticals. While PRM tool adoption started predominantly in the technology segment, over the past few years other verticals—including manufacturing, finance, insurance, real estate, franchising and others—have adopted various versions of partner relationship management (PRM) tools. However, despite the rapid growth of this category over the past few years, onboarding partners into a PRM tool remains a major challenge for most companies. In this article, we will explore what you can do to drive adoption of your PRM tools by onboarding your partners.
Organizations market and sell through a network of channel partners primarily to generate revenue and provide support to an end-user base that a customer cannot reach directly. Using the channel tends to lower sales and marketing costs at a unit level but increase reach exponentially. Reach is the fundamental reason a company decides to go through channel. There are other reasons, however. By default, products and services that have to be bundled with other products rely solely on a partner network.
Depending on whether you are selling a product that can be used on its own, like a computer, or are selling an application that runs on a server or is dependent on another primary instance of software, the nature of your go-to-market strategy will vary. Your PRM tool needs to be able to address this selling motion in a highly focused way. To keep things simple, in this discussion we will not address the different approaches required for different products, but instead focus on a broad set of principles you should consider when you are trying to drive adoption of your PRM tool via partner onboarding.
There are basic five principles a company needs to consider to think through partner onboarding. Onboarding is not just a one-time event. It is more of a process that needs to proceed through a phased definition, development, execution and improvement cycle to be a true value-added activity. The channel evolves on a continuous basis, and as a result your onboarding program should be continuously bringing partners onboard to your PRM tool in a structured and logical fashion.
Here are the five most important principles to consider when you are thinking about onboarding your partners into your PRM tool:
Business value: For your partners to log into your partner relationship management (PRM) tool, the tool itself has to offer a specific set of business values. If you are only sharing news and updates, it is not a compelling offer. However, if you are providing market development funds (MDF), sales and marketing tools, or leads, then your business value to your partners will go up by multiples. Therefore, it is very important to start with the basics of channel development when you are launching a partner portal using a PRM software tool. You need to initially provide training, sales and marketing tools, and eventually provide leads and incentives such as MDF and co-op funds.
Ease of use: Your partner portal powered by a PRM software tool needs to be easy to use. Partners are incredibly busy and typically handling multiple priorities at once. If your partner portal is a patched-up solution made up of open source software or a variety of distinct tools like SharePoint and Dropbox, then ease of use will be minimal. Your partners will have to jump through hoops and log into and out of these tools using multiple passwords to find the right information and content. On the other hand, if you deploy a state-of-the-art Unified Channel Management platform that has a seamless interface, and if your partners can easily move from one area to another within a single interface, then utilization will go up substantially. We see this in our customer base all the time. When customers transition from an environment of hodge-podge tools to ZINFI’s PRM tool, partner adoption goes up exponentially.
In this age of digital and remote work, partner training has moved online via partner relationship management (PRM) tools. Gone are the days when you used to travel for roadshows or have the partners fly into a training center for hands-on instruction. Whether you are dealing with hardware, software or service, a lot can be done online. Yes, certain trainings do require face-to-face engagement to connect the blue wire with the blue socket and the red wire with the red socket, but most training can now be done online. This is where a state-of-the-art PRM tool can make a big difference.
Whether you are building a new channel or upgrading the skills of your existing channel, training is the most critical and strategic activity that you can perform. Just as well-trained sales and service staff are crucial to the success of your direct sales operations, a well-trained partner base is essential to your channel success. While it’s true that many companies make training too complex or don’t invest enough in training programs, we have repeatedly seen companies achieve substantial ROI with a structured, consistent, high-quality training program, whether partners are being trained in demand generation, marketing, selling or servicing a customer base. To manage an effective training program in a digital world you need a state-of-the art PRM tool that can help you align your programs to your process so your people can efficiently and cost-effectively deliver programs locally and globally.
Let’s go through the five critical success factors for an effective partner training program. While these are not the only factors that you need to consider, they are the most significant drivers for most organizations trying to train a large group of people in a methodical fashion.
Learning management system (LMS) – One of the core requirements for digital training is a PRM tool that has a state-of-the-art LMS. Your LMS should be able to provide tracks, courses and certifications. It should also be SCORM-compliant and be able to serve customized content based on various partner groups and profiles. The ability to personalize content to specific audiences is essential. Be sure that the PRM tool that you pick is flexible and configurable enough to address this aspect of your partner training needs.
Face-to-face trainings – In addition to providing online training and an LMS, your PRM tool should be able to provide you with a robust offline training and event management platform. Unless you are selling software and can do the entire training online, you will have to consider at least some face-to-face training. This is essential for hardware or other goods. In the areas of retail and hospitality especially, live in-person face training will play a critical role in your success. Your PRM tool should be able to integrate online digital and offline physical training in a seamless way.
Aligned incentives – Any kind of training will entail expenses. A fully trained partner base can drive more sales and lower service costs, but let’s not forget that training involves time (which you pay for) and resources. Because of that, whether a partner organization is going through online or offline training across multiple functions or vendors are offering training to partners, both the channel organization and the partner organizations must have appropriate incentives to benefit from meaningful, integrated training and reap the results from it. That’s why our PRM tool needs to be able to help you set up and track various incentives programs, and link them back to specific training events and programs.
Lead distribution & management – One of the best ways to incentive partners is to give them leads once they are certified with specific product categories. Nothing excites more partners to make more money than the prospect of converting the knowledge they receive in training programs into real dollars. Your PRM tool needs to be able to link your training ...
More and more vendors are focused on an indirect sales (channel) model. Beyond the initial stages of fulfilment and support engagement, a major activity for these vendors is lead management. Channel marketing software can be a big help when it comes to lead generation and management. In this article, we will explore a variety of lead generation and management techniques that companies can pursue using channel marketing software.
Channel marketing software focuses on three core sets of activities: marketing to partners, marketing through partners and marketing with partners. The latter two activities are focused primarily on lead generation, which typically entails generating demand from a partner’s installed base of customers or getting new prospects into the partner’s and company’s pipeline.
We will explore in more detail the tactics partners can use to drive lead generation from their installed base and net new prospect segments. But before we do that, let’s take a few minutes to consider some tactics channel marketing software should be used for based on average selling price, solution complexity and market segments.
Small business (100 employees or fewer): Small businesses purchases tend to be owner- or CEO-driven. Assuming average revenue is around $100,000 to $150,000 per employee, the revenues for these organizations range from about $1 to $15 million. Companies of this size tend to engage in less structured buying as opposed to on-demand or needs-based buying. Many small businesses also tend buy based on relationships. Selling into these segments means staying connected. Standard tactical tools offered by channel marketing software platforms—like social, syndication and email platform—tend to be quite effective.
SMB market segment (100–500 employees): As a company grows and revenue starts to fall into the $10 to $100 million range, processes evolve. Most purchases in this segment fall into two categories: scheduled maintenance or strategic investments. Most transactional purchases in this segment are driven by price and quality, while strategic investments tend to rely on overall solution complexity. Partners selling transactional products tend to do poorly in this segment, because most companies buy directly based on pre-agreed pricing for things that they need–whether it’s gloves for hospital staff, coffee for morning breaks or paper for printing. Strategic purchases, on the other hand, are driven by partner competencies, so event-based channel marketing software tools facilitating activities like webinars and road shows tend to come in handy here.
Mid-market (500–2,500 employees): Revenues for these companies are in the $100 to $500 million range. Most purchases are planned and reserves are maintained. Very rarely do these companies seek new vendors in mature categories and purchase. However, in emerging industry segments, new vendors—and therefore new resellers—can participate in a request for proposal (RFP) process and thereby get a foot in the door. Channel marketing software in this category can help build reach through continuous marketing via social media and syndication of thought leadership content, followed by tactical campaigns for opt-in email, microsites and events. Online advertising on LinkedIn and Google AdWords can also drive traffic from this segment in a focused way. LinkedIn campaigns tend to fare better with narrowcasting, while Google AdWords tend to work well with broadcasting campaigns.
Large enterprise (2,500–10,000 employees): Many of these companies grow through acquisitions, because the kind of organic growth that companies like Google, Facebook, Tesla and others have achieved is hard to come by. During acquisitions, companies actually reduce the number of vendors they work with and tend to target their preferred vendor list for transfer of purchases. This is a classic installed base marketing scenario, and regular newsletters, webinar-driven education,
2020’s pandemic changed the world in many ways—especially when it comes to channel marketing. Traditionally, a significant portion of channel marketing activities have focused on face-to-face engagements in the form of events, tradeshows, roadshows, partner training, etc. However, the pandemic lockdowns and social distancing pretty much eliminated most face-to-face events. This led to a rapid evolution of digital marketing in a very short period of time. As part of this trend, the adoption of channel marketing software that offers a variety of remote marketing tools also accelerated. In this article, we will explore how and why the adoption of channel marketing software accelerated due to COVID-19.
The world has been on a rapid digitization trend over the past few decades, but 2020 rocket-fueled the adoption of many digital platforms starting with tools like Zoom, Microsoft Teams and other types of collaboration software. Leading channel marketing software platforms have always been at the center of channel collaboration, because you can use them to seamlessly digitize workflow and content sharing across various groups of partners and channel stakeholders. Remote collaboration in the channel has been always focused on driving partner ease of use and lowering friction across various parts of the channel value chain.
With the advent of integrated partner relationship management (PRM) tools and through-channel marketing automation (TCMA) tools, channel marketing software has focused on all aspects of remote marketing, including “market to,” “market through” and “market with” activities. Let’s discuss these activities in a bit more detail and explore how channel marketing software can help:
“Market to” – Traditionally, marketing to partners or prospecting for partners put a premium on advertising and events where a vendor promoted its wares as well as its programs. If prospective partners had interest, they would call into the vendor channel support line and sign up for a program to see if they qualified. This required a kind of mass marketing approach; narrowcasting was not available. However, with today’s leading channel marketing software tools, a vendor can laser-target a set of potential partners directly (via newsletters and other vehicles) or narrowcast via various social networks and channel content sites. This engagement can be fully digital, and traffic from those sites and sources can be driven to a central site where a vendor can run webinars (live or on-demand), showcase various customer and partner success stories, and have very specific calls to action to sign up for programs.
These tools were around in the pre-pandemic world, but COVID-19 pushed marketers back home and made these tools a central part of outbound marketing. Needless to say, as we exit the pandemic constraints and start mixing again in face-to-face events, digital will continue to dominate and channel marketing software will be able to provide a seamless, integrated platform to channel marketers for both digital and physical activities. Based on customer usage data and ROI, we can also confidently forecast that digital ROI will always outpace the ROI of physical events, although the latter will probably still be necessary to maximize reach. The pandemic won’t stop physical events forever, but we have now shifted decisively to a digital space and we will all be trying to optimize activities around it.
“Market through” – When a vendor grows, and its channel partner ecosystem grows, it tends to focus on partner-led demand generation activities. In early stages of growth, most vendors drive awareness of their products and solutions to the end-buyers themselves, but as the brand and category awareness increase, vendors tend to focus more on their partner base as a major source of new lead generation and business. This is where channel marketing software can significantly augment a vendor’s lead generation effort by providing partners wit...
Organizations selling through the channel always worry about one primary thing: driving more sales at a lower cost. The entire purpose of a channel organization is to extend reach to every part of a market where the product or service has value, ideally piggy-backing on other organizations that already have invested in generating demand and capturing it through their sales and delivery teams. A major focus for any partner relationship management (PRM) program is a unified lead management capability for generating leads and distributing them to partners—but also for allowing partners to generate leads and close deals on their own. In this article, we will explore how partner relationship management automation can help organizations generate more leads at a lower cost and then manage the lifecycle to attain a higher sales closure rate.
The primary purpose of lead generation and management is to identify prospects who have a pain point that a specific product or service can fulfill. Entire armies of marketing personnel and libraries of marketing content are optimized to find and educate prospective buyers who may be interested in a company’s solution. This has become a combination of art and science in direct marketing, but when it comes to generating leads through a partner network, it requires more tools and more attention. This is where partner relationship management (PRM) software comes in. It helps vendor organizations manage the complexity of distributing content to their partner base, training them properly and managing them to close the leads that are provided to them. There are two primary ways this can be done:
Vendor-Led Lead Management – This is when a vendor organization does all the heavy lifting of driving awareness and interest from a target audience, and then distributes the resulting leads to the partner base for closure. This is accomplished in a couple of ways:
Open Accounts (Shark Tanks) – In this lead distribution system, a lead is given to all qualified partners, and whoever reaches out to the prospect first ends up owning that opportunity. While this may appear relatively simple, the nature of this distribution method tends to vary—not only across organizations, but even within a single organization based on product type, certification requirements, the nature of the promotions and many other factors. However, a state-of-the-art partner relationship management (PRM) platform should be able to handle any of these scenarios in an artful way. Named Accounts – In this scenario, a specific lead from an end-user company is given to a specific account. This could be based on contracts that the organization has with a specific partner, or it could be based on a special program, the nature of the product, partner qualifications or territory in an under-distributed environment. At times, end users may also request a specific partner for an opportunity and the organization may make that exception. Again, a state-of-the-art partner relationship management (PRM) platform should be able to automate these lead selection and assignment workflows based on partner critieria in a seamless way.
Partner-Led Lead Management – When a partner is able to generate end-user demand and leverage a vendor’s product or service as part of their core offering to the end-customer, it generally makes sense for the partner to lead the process. Here, too, I should mention a couple of common scenarios:
Standalone Offer – When a partner is primarily selling a service centered around a specific product—say, insurance, retail, hospitality or technology—where the product is the core offering and a partner’s services only augment the core product, for the most part the partner can leverage marketing content and tools from the vendor to sell its product or service. In order to enable its partner base, the vendor would need to look for a partner relationship management platform that either connects to through-channel marketing automati...
Over the past 40 years the world has been speeding up the pace of digital adoption. While it may seem like Amazon was founded yesterday, it was actually founded in 1994—about 25 years ago. Microsoft was founded a couple of decades earlier than Amazon, in 1975, and Oracle was founded in 1977. About a decade earlier than Microsoft, Intel was founded in 1968. I think you get the point: The advent of digital goes back about 30 to 40 years—roughly half the span of an average human life—but the pace of change keeps getting faster, most recently with the explosion of cloud-based applications and solutions (hardware and software working together). This is also true of technology that addresses partner relationship management (PRM).
As we adopt more and more digital tools in our lives—at work, home and school, and while travelling away from home—silently but surely we are rebuilding how we work, live, learn and enjoy our leisure. Partner relationship management (PRM) software is no different. Partner management has existed since commerce existed in pre-historic times, but over the past few decades, with the adoption of digital tools and digitization of commerce, more and more companies have focused on automating their channel management and partner relationship management activities. In this article we will explore how we can manage the partner base remotely and globally using state-of-the art partner relationship management tools.
Here are the core activities we need to engage in to build and manage a channel remotely:
Partner Profiling – Once an organization figures out who to recruit, the goal is to target, engage and educate prospective partners for recruitment. Gone are the days of hanging around in trade shows and randomly throwing out business cards hoping partners will sign up, or aimlessly running banner ads on channel magazines. Today, the tools are much more precise and they are all digital, even though physical trade shows, recruitment roadshows and similar events can certainly augment the digital presence on the ground.To run an effective partner recruitment program, an organization needs to have profiles of the kinds of partners that they want to recruit. Target profiles can be created by researching existing partners’ firmographic profiles and/or establishing capabilities the organization needs a potential partner organization to have—characteristics like certifications, regional coverage, go-to-market sales models and so on. Once this target profile has been created—a process we call partner profiling—then the recruitment journey can begin.
Partner Recruitment – With the specific target in mind, an organization now will have to target prospective partner audiences via various digital tools, such as social marketing tools (LinkedIn, Facebook, SlideShare, Twitter, etc.), online advertising of various kinds and outbound newsletter placement tied to subscription lists. Outbound emailing is becoming more difficult because of emerging privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA, but opt-in lists for digital publications are still good vehicles for extending reach to a potential target audience. Once a prospective partner has expressed interest into a company’s partner program, then engaging with those partners with compelling digital content via a partner relationship management platform is critical. This is where a partner portal comes in really handy. Any state-of-the-art PRM platform will provide a full-featured partner portal where users can create a zone for prospective partners to learn and educate themselves on the company’s offerings wherever they are working from.If a prospective partner is interested, they may apply and go through a simple or a comprehensive review process to be registered as an authorized partner to sell the organization’s products. In case of captive distribution, this could be a franchise model where a partner has to pay to play, but in other cases—e.g., agents,
It has been almost two decades since customer relationship management (CRM) applications began to be adopted as a powerful way to automate sales processes. Meanwhile, we have also seen marketing automation grow rapidly over the past 10 years or so to augment the CRM process experience for direct sales teams. However, the rise of partner relationship management (PRM) SaaS applications like ZINFI’s has demonstrated where an application like Salesforce often falls short. While the development of a Salesforce-like CRM applications that can be customer-configured to address many partner relationship management requirements has been a big step forward, companies still need to invest substantially to customize these solutions successfully. The fact that CRM systems also lack built-in applications essential for PRM means they fall short of providing true Unified Channel Management (UCM). This is why connecting an existing CRM infrastructure like Salesforce to a PRM infrastructure like ZINFI’s makes a lot of sense. In this article, we will explore the core common points of connection between a CRM and PRM.
When you think about sales automation, the first thing that comes to your mind is the word “revenue.” Yes, sales is all about generating revenue by closing deals from the leads that marketing generates. That’s pretty much what a CRM does. CRM takes a bunch of leads that the marketing automation system feeds it, and then allows the sales team to nurture those leads in a systematic way through various sales stages like discovery, qualification, demo, trial, review, agreement, purchase, renewal and support. Sales managers can run various reports across their sales representatives and determine who is most effective, what is working and what needs changing. Automation also allows the elimination of repetitive tasks such as sending out a reminder to a prospect or offering sales collaterals or coming up with automated pricing. There are multiple use cases that a Salesfsorce-like CRM system can address, and its functionality can be extended by using a large number of applications available in Salesforce AppExchange. Some of the standalone applications that plug into Salesforce address other aspect of sales and marketing needs, including rewards, incentives and analytics. This is where ZINFI’s partner relationship management (PRM) comes in.
ZINFI is an AppExchange-approved PRM application provider. While Salesforce also lists a few other PRM applications, unlike those other applications ZINFI’s PRM features an architecture and user interface that closely follows the logic of a CRM system. This allows a seamless flow of data flow back and forth between a Salesforce-like CRM and ZINFI’s PRM.
Let’s explore three core connection points in more detail here:
Lead Management – As I began this article, I mentioned the primary purpose of a CRM system is to generate revenue by systematically managing the entire sales process from lead to close. The automation of this process is the focus of lead management in a CRM. Now, using a CRM for lead management works great for a direct sales team, but the moment you try to do lead management for channel sales using a CRM, things can quickly get quite complicated and expensive. This is where a purpose-built PRM like ZINFI’s platform can help tremendously by seamlessly connecting to a Salesforce-like CRM system. The integration allows the direct sales team to use the CRM as they always do, while the indirect channel sales and partners can use ZINFI’s PRM for lead managementDeal Registration – One unique use case for channel sales is protecting an opportunity for a specific partner. We have written multiple articles on deal registration, so I won’t get in the details of it here. Let me just point out that the entire focus of deal registration is to eliminate channel conflict and allow a specific partner to pursue an opportunity from lead to close. Unlike CRMs,
In the early 2000s we saw the rise of multiple CRM solutions. Most of them were on-premise, but some were cloud-based, even though at that time “cloud” was not the buzz word it is now. Over the past couple of decades, Salesforce stayed focused as a cloud CRM provider, and evolved into a massive SaaS ecosystem featuring a variety of business applications. Over the years, others like Microsoft and SAP followed suit, either through organic (built in-house) or inorganic (acquired) offerings. Some of these direct sales automation tools—for example, SAP—also introduced a bare-bones application for partner relationship management (PRM). Eventually, Oracle and Salesforce did as well, but none of these PRM applications could fully address automation requirements for the entire partner lifecycle.
Now, while this was going on in the market space, HubSpot came into existence about a decade ago as an alternative platform for marketing automation, and over the past five years has evolved into a complete marketing and sales automation platform. HubSpot’s superior ease of use and its much-needed native integrations between marketing and sales have allowed it to capture a significant portion of the SMB and mid-market customer base. Many of these SMB and mid-market organizations are now looking for a full-featured PRM application. In this article, we will focus on how you can integrate your HubSpot with your partner relationship management application to create a seamless business process automation platform.
In this age of working remotely—but also for the business folks on the go—sales operations move at the speed of digital. The days of keeping tabs on a sales pipeline in an Excel spreadsheet and updating those cells one at a time to create a report are gone. Today, customer relationship management (CRM) applications are table stakes for sales organizations. The scope of CRM has expanded into marketing (pre-sales) and services (post-sales). The goal of this category now is to provide a wholistic view of a buyer from engagement (prospect) to close (customer) to renewal (advocate). While there are many patchworks of tools that are available in the marketplace to slap onto a CRM platform, it requires significant process and interdisciplinary knowledge, integration of resources and, of course, additional money for different app subscriptions to extend a CRM like Salesforce into a multi-app business environment. This is why HubSpot is thriving as a single integrated platform that provides marketing and sales automation in an end-to-end fashion. I would not be surprised if their next offering is in the service management space—it simply makes sense.
Partner relationship management (PRM) platforms today have a similar scope—a complete end-to-end management of the partner lifecycle. ZINFI’s PRM platform not only focuses on providing a bare-bones partner portal for organizations that are starting up their channel program, but also enables highly advanced and complex channel organizations to deploy a wide range of programs and workflows. Large, complex Fortune 1000 enterprises not only need sophisticated workflow capabilities, but also content personalization and program deployment across various sales and language territories around the world. A state-of-the-art PRM like ZINFI’s solution is able to handle simple yet complex deployments using a configurable and modular architecture. However, the scope of a PRM or a CRM remain quite separate, as both are purpose-built. We have written other articles on why PRMs are different from CRMs, and won’t get into those details here; however, there is a set of natural points of intersection between CRMs and PRMs. We will now explore how to integrate HubSpot CRM with a PRM that is similar to the state-of-the-art solution that ZINFI provides.
If we consider for a moment the core elements that are common between PRM and CRM systems, we realize that both address one simple thing—how to generate more ...
If you manage a distributed network of partners and they are more than just a fulfillment arm for you, then chances are you have considered through-channel marketing automation (TCMA). In this article we will explore one of the core tactics of TCMA—email marketing—and how it can be used as a part of your overall TCMA strategy. While email marketing has been around for a while, it’s not always used effectively. Refining your email marketing tactics can enable your channel partners to generate leads in a low-cost, highly effective fashion. First, let’s briefly discuss what email marketing is and how TCMA-based email marketing tactics may differ from your direct email marketing efforts. We all know that email marketing was very likely the first digital marketing tool that marketers used, starting in the early 2000s. While we suffered through a plague of spam emails during much of that period—and even today a few of those spam emails get through the spam filters—it’s important to emphasize effective email marketing is NOT spam. Email marketing today relies heavily on obtaining end-users’ or target consumers’ email addresses through some sort of an opt-in mechanism, as opposed to various nefarious harvesting mechanisms that spammers use to collect or spoof email addresses. Once a proper prospect or buyer has signed up to receive emails from a provider, then and only then can a marketer use that medium to reach out in an appropriate way. This kind general leverages some kind of a marketing automation tool that relies on text-based or HTML-based email templates. In most cases, these templates are highly customized to convey a set of news, messages and/or offers that is likely to attract the interest of the targeted audiences.
Now, when it comes to email marketing tools for TCMA-related activities, it is important to have several critical features that are not necessarily relevant for direct email marketing tactics. These TCMA-specific capabilities include:
Template setup: In the case of direct email marketing, you set up templates predominantly for your own use or for a set of peers to use. However, in case of TCMA email marketing, you set up a master template that can be used by your channel partners, and you may decide to set up multiple templates for multiple partners and allow them to customize or not. Approval routing: This is a critical feature in TCMA. This is used in cases where you may want your partners to send you their changes before allowing them to use a modified version of your master template. The primary purpose of approval routing is to maintain control over your message and brand positioning Co-branding: If you are requesting that your partners use your email templates, they will very likely want to add their logos and contact information, and some may also want to add customized content to augment your offer in order to, for instance, showcase their own expertise around your solutions. Multi-touch: Drip marketing began to appear in the mid 2000s. This is a tactic where—based on the action a targeted consumer of your email—you may send a second or third follow-up email or “touch.” This tactic has evolved rapidly since those early days and is often an important part of integrated campaigns deploying a range of tactics. Drip marketing is a particularly effective tactic for through-channel marketing automation. Click metrics: One of the most important features in email marketing for TCMA is the ability to track who opened and clicked through emails. When you are running multi-touch email campaigns, it is often very useful to track the success of your follow-on tactics and so you can identify the most effective messaging and offers and focus on that.
In addition to these core five areas, other features that tend to be important in a through-channel marketing automation (TCMA) email marketing tool include things like multi-tenant capabilities, copying, editing, reviewing, tagging and searching.
In today’s business environment, every organization is asking its channel management team to do more with fewer resources. This is a common challenge for any channel organization. It’s not enough just to get busy—the key is to figure out how to drive partner recruitment, enablement, management and sales growth in a focused way. This is where partner relationship management (PRM) software can help significantly. In this article, we will explore some of the core activities that PRM software can help automate. Before we take a deep dive into the specific activities that PRM software can automate, let’s discuss briefly how the activities tend to vary by company size.
Focused channel (100 – 500 partners) – Companies in this category tend to sell through the channel independent of their own size. In our customer base at ZINFI, we have multibillion-dollar organizations that have only a couple of hundred partners, but we also have much smaller customers who have a few thousand partners. In a focused channel where there is a relatively small number of partners, the level of engagement and focus by the vendor organization is generally high. We will discuss later how PRM software can automate the core activities for a focused channel. Scaled channel (500 – 2,500 partners) – In this category, the higher total number of channel partners is generally a function of two main factors: a low-price product with a high reach that allows partners to build service revenue, or moderately complex solutions with a medium and focused reach that require specialized global delivery and support. There are always hybrids, of course, but for the sake of simplicity it makes sense to define a scaled channel in terms of these two primary scenarios. PRM software typically automates more activities in a scaled channel than in a focused channel. Broad channel (1,000s of partners) – This category describes the channel for organizations with many products that are highly horizontal and broadly distributed. Prominent examples would include organizations like Microsoft, Google and Dropbox where usage of their products is quite horizontal. Certain household product companies are also good examples , although their products tend to get distributed through broadliners —e., large retail chains in developed countries, as well as lots of “mom and pop” stores in emerging countries. Overall, broad channels have higher levels of complexity and more demanding automation requirements than most focused or scaled channels. However, the right PRM software can significantly streamline and automate broad channel activities.
The key to operating successfully in a focused or scaled or broad channel is understanding how your distribution strategy will ultimately support the growth ambitions of the company. For an organization with a niche product that has a relatively narrow focus, too many partners can create an over-distribution problem and make the product more difficult to sell. Therefore, before any PRM software can effectively automate and optimize channel activities, the organization’s channel strategy has to be closely aligned with the nature of its channel.
The critical factor in moving from a focused channel to a scaled channel and eventually to a broad distribution network is to have highly streamlined programs and an automation tool—namely, PRM software—that can effectively automate more activities as the organization’s business evolves. We know that automating a channel can be sequential: You start small and then build on your successes. This rule is most applicable to fast-growing companies. However, if your organization has already been around for a while and is already selling through a channel—focused, scaled or broad—you absolutely have the same opportunities to optimize effectiveness through automation by selecting the right set of tools.
Let’s review briefly what you can do for each of the three main channel types—focused,
If your company (or even country) is under a travel ban due to an epidemic like the coronavirus outbreak—or perhaps because of budget restrictions—and you have to cancel your road shows to train and enable your partners, don’t despair. There are multiple ways to enable your partners remotely without meeting face-to-face by leveraging partner relationship management (PRM) software. In this article, I will explore how you can deploy a set of pragmatic PRM channel automation tools to enable your partners in a few easy step. There are essentially two types of enablement involving collaboration with channel partners using PRM software: tactical and strategic. Let’s briefly address both.
Tactical enablement: Tactical enablement includes activities like pushing a promotion through the channel, rolling out sales incentives for partner sales reps to sign up for and execute on, or creating programs to train partners on new product launches. Within 4–6 weeks you can easily deploy a partner relationship management (PRM) platform with built-in tools that allow you to effectively collaborate with your partners remotely on these and other tactical initiatives. We will discuss these tools in a bit more detail later on.
Strategic enablement: This is about driving systematic improvements like sales reach and lead generation from greenfield opportunities as well as building technical or solution competencies for certain strategic product or services rollouts. These activities can also be performed using PRM software, but to do so effectively you will need to carefully consider your overall channel programs, policies, promotions and key performance management metrics. An appropriate PRM platform will allow you to set up advanced training by product categories and other criteria, but if you lack an overall integrated strategy, much of this work will turn out to be tactical, rather than strategic, enablement.
With this as a framework, it’s time to consider some of the PRM software tools that can be used for both strategic and tactical enablement. These tools can address a broad range of activities related to partner life cycle management, including partner recruitment, partner onboarding, partner enablement, demand generation and partner management. In each of these areas, we can apply both tactical and strategic approaches by using various PRM tools.
Now we’re ready to consider some of the PRM software tools that can help us with each of these activities and allow us to collaborate remotely:
Partner recruitment – In this age of digital content and media—especially when partners may be working from home, from the office or another location—they are very likely connected to their mobile and other computing devices. “Marketing to” the partner is a core activity, and PRM modules created specifically for social marketing, email, Google AdWords, microsites, events (online live and on demand) all enable core tactics that can be deployed for both tactical and strategic engagement. Partner onboarding – Onboarding a newly recruited partner with a step-by-step onboarding process is critical, and this is where PRM automation can help a lot. Your PRM software should allow you to quickly set up various partner onboarding programs and establish tracks within those programs to move the partner automatically from one stage to another. Laborious process steps like contract signing, business planning and more can be highly automated. Partner enablement – One of the most common facets of partner enablement is partner training, which, if it cannot be done face-to-face, can easily be carried out using SCORM-compliant learning management systems (LMSs). When you are selecting a PRM tool, make sure the LMS module is SCORM-compliant so you can easily and build effective step-by-step training courses. Demand generation – Partner enablement also includes demand generation, which should include a set of integrated tools and campaign content that partner...
If you suddenly find yourself relying on Zoom, Teams, Outlook and Excel to manage your channel in a world that has suddenly shut down completely, you are not alone. This article explores how you can get started on a remote management strategy for your channel partner network that suddenly needs more support faster as some deals appear to be on the verge of evaporating. My goal here is to help you set priorities for virtual collaboration so that you can be ready to respond in a fast-changing world. Much in the world today is outside your control, but you can quickly take control of your channel management approach by following a few sequential steps.
Before we begin, let’s just reflect for a moment on the intrinsic challenges that were already a part of channel management even before the pandemic damaged our economy and took away thousands of lives. We are all beginning to realize that, while managing a direct sales force is tough, managing an indirect sales force—what we all call a channel—is even tougher in times like these. This is due to the fact that resellers, agents, and other types of partners set their priorities primarily around cash flows, customers, competencies (employees) and competitors. So, while a vendor brand may be an integral part of their overall revenue plan, in the end there is always a broader (and more personalized) set of business objectives that drive any partner business. This is where the main conflict lies.
If, as I am suggesting, a partner business is not centered predominantly on a specific brand—that is, if the partner can exist without a specific product or switch it out with a different one—then brand loyalty is almost non-existent. (I realize this may not entirely be the case for captive brands or franchises, but the challenges of managing a franchise are more complex than those for a multi-product resale business or an outlet.) But whether we are talking about a captive or multi-brand channel partner, channel management is a lot more complex world than direct sales. So what can you do in times like this when resources are scarce and will possibly shrink more over the next 12–18 months—and when we are forced stay home and put channel events, trainings and various other activities on hold?
First things first – We all need to prioritize ruthlessly to remain profitable because the world is highly leveraged today. Burning more cash and hoping to get there is certainly not a prudent strategy with so much uncertainty in the air. Yes, some companies like Zoom, which was in a position to scale its data center’s capacity as its user load exploded, have thrived, but their investments scaled with their direct sales demand. When it comes to a channel business, it is crucial at times like this to focus on the producers versus the non-producers in your partner base. To do that effectively, you will need a partner profile management capability that is dynamic and gives you a dashboard that will instantly tell you which partners are winning, why and how you can make more partners win.
Second – We need to focus on selling and eliminating deal losses as fast as possible. This can only happen when you have a focused set of partners who care about your brand and are willing to learn and compete aggressively in the marketplace for every deal that is within their reach. To do that you have to make sure there is no channel conflict, and that means you must protect every deal that partners bring in and have trust in your support network.
Finally – Make sure your reward structure is crystal clear, and then put your money where your mouth is. Stay away from complicated training, enablement and incentive programs. The entire focus for the incentive program should be on motivating partners to sell more to make more. As a partner once told me, “Loyalty can always be purchased.” So, follow the money, provide a path to make it easy for partners to make money, and align all the incentives so there is absol...
The word “channel” indicates a passageway through which something flows. Channel management is a discipline in management science in which a vendor organization or “brand” creates, captures and fulfils market demand via another set of organizations who act as channel partners and ecosystem players for the subject vendor. These channel partners act as a kind of mechanism that enables the orderly “flow” or distribution of products and services for the vendor to the end customer. In this article, we will expand on this basic view of channel management and attempt to explain in more detail how it functions in real-life scenarios. Any for-profit organization—and even some non-profits—that depend on providing products and services to customers in order to survive require two core functions: sales and support. In today’s world, most organizations that sell products and services also require a marketing function. The entire goal of a commercial organization, in fact, is to find buyers, make them aware of the vendor’s products and services, provide those products and services for a fee, and then, as a part of this transaction, make a reasonable profit. Now, we all know profit is a function of revenue minus cost. If the cost to acquire, deliver and serve exceed the revenue the company generates, then it becomes unprofitable to serve a specific group of customers. This is where a “channel” organization and channel management come into play by enabling cost-effective sales and support for vendors on a larger scale than is possible through direct selling alone.
The primary purpose of a vendor’s channel organization is to build relationships with a set of other organizations that can resell and support the vendor’s products and services. The core feature of this relationship between the vendor and the partner organization is their mutual interest in increased profitability. For the relationship to succeed, the vendor organization should be able to reach, acquire and serve a large number of end customers at a relatively low cost compared to selling directly, and the partner organization should be able to increase profitable revenue by providing the vendor’s products and services, along with the other products and services the partner sells.
With this as a backdrop, we can now see that channel management basically entails five core phases, as outlined below:
Partner recruitment – The focus of this phase is to reach out to and build relationships with potential organizations that are able to sell and support a vendor’s solution. Partner training – The focus of this phase to ensure partners’ functional teams are properly trained on how to market, sell, deploy and support a specific solution Partner enablement – This phase focuses on making sure the partner marketing, sales and technical personnel have the right tools to do their job. Partner sales – The entire focus of this phase is to drive increased sales via partner organizations via new accounts and partners’ existing customers. Partner management – This phase focuses on introducing effective performance enhancement incentives and programs tied to training, certification, sales improvements, quota attainment, etc.
Channel management is a discipline all its own, but it also tends to build up all other cross-functional areas of an organization, such as marketing, sales, operations, finance and legal. In the case of a channel organization, the traditional direct functional disciplines must undergo adaptations to fit a specific channel requirement, as follows:
Channel marketing – This functional group focuses on driving awareness in the partner base to recruit and enable partners with new programs and initiatives. This group also takes content from the direct marketing team and adapts that content for partner use in end-user lead generation. Channel sales – The focus for this functional group is to train and help a partner close a new transition or grow an existing acco...
In our earlier articles on lead management, we discussed why it is essential to have the right strategy, structure, staffing and systems. As a part of building the right systems, we talked about aligning channel programs, processes and platforms. In this article, we will dive a little bit deeper into the automation aspect of lead management. Picking the right lead management software is critical to making an overall lead management program a reality. The primary objective of lead management software is to streamline workflows, approvals and tracking processes from end to end. This is what we will discuss in detail here. To begin, let’s briefly revisit our earlier framework on lead management where we talked about the need to have product-, segment- and market-focused strategies. We discussed in detail how lead management for an SMB transactional product or service is necessarily very different from high-end enterprise lead management for a complete solution. In this article, we will expand on this fundamental theme of purpose-focused lead management and discuss how to select automation software that can address a specific set of objectives.
Small business lead management automation – As we noted before, in most cases management of leads for the channel comes down to simple deal registration. Most organizations that are starting to build a channel need a simple deal capture form to be used by the channel partner while submitting deal details information. These organizations may also require some simple approval flows and processes, with one or two people from the channel sales organization reviewing the specific aspects of a deal and approving it. In very rare circumstances you may require comprehensive—and therefore more complicated—lead capture forms or lead approval flows. Mid-market lead management automation – As an organization matures and reaches a size where it has more than 100 partners and between 100 and 1,000 employees, it probably needs more comprehensive lead management automation. Management of leads in this scenario is no longer just about automating deal registration; it also becomes important to automate the distribution of leads to partners. Approval processes also tend to vary by segment and region, and the lead management automation software must be able to address these additional requirements. Enterprise lead management automation – This is where management of leads tends to vary quite a lot. Depending on the size of an enterprise and the breadth of its offerings, some products may require only simple deal registration, while others may require lengthy tracking and automation from cradle to close. There may also be legal requirements to automate certain parts of the end-customer notification process to comply with various industry segments the vendor sells to. With large enterprises, for every $2 to $5 billion in incremental revenue, it is logical to expect different lead management and deal registration forms and flows. Any software system chosen for management of leads in this context must have the flexibility to accommodate multiple forms and flows.
So far, our discussion has provided a high-level overview of the reasons that picking the right software based on lead management use cases is critical for success. However, beyond use cases, you will also need to consider five core capabilities of lead management automation platforms: data privacy, security, mobility, alerts and reports.
Data privacy – In today’s world of data regulations driven by many countries, it is essential that your software to comply with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and other, similar regulations. Data security – Your lead management software must have not only multi-tenant architecture, but also industry-standard encryption for data in motion and rest to comply with various data privacy and security requirements.
Most companies selling through an open channel tend to implement deal registration programs. While some deal registration programs are helpful and actually help channel partners close deals and serve their own interests, many programs are inward-looking initiatives that don’t seriously take partners’ core business goals into account. In this article, we will briefly discuss why most deal registration programs fail and explain some of the fallacies associated with them. Failure of most deal registration programs can be attributed to one or more the following reasons:
Complex process – Most deal registration programs have too many steps or hurdles for partners to deal with. These programs tend to fail because going through the burden of protecting an opportunity outweighs the risk of losing it. If the deal registration process involves more than a simple form and a few approval steps, chances are that partner organizations have decided the extra effort is not worth it and they don’t participate. Small deals – Unless there is a large service component attached to a specific opportunity and the partner (reseller) who fails to register the deal stands to lose a large amount of services revenue, the 15%–20% commission may not be enough of an incentive for a partner to register. That’s why thinking through how your partners make money and what their financial incentives is a good foundation for planning a deal registration program. Lack of automation – In today’s world, it is surprising to see many companies are still using archaic tools like Excel and email for the deal registration review and approval process. This is not only inefficient, but also fails to provide sufficient transparency to partners. Faced with a complex approval process that lacks full transparency, partners tend to skip. Vendors who deploy a simple lead management and deal registration automation platform can eliminate this friction completely. Allowing direct sales to poach the deal – Channels have everlasting memory. If a company has ever violated a deal registration program by shifting an opportunity from the indirect (channel) sales team to its direct sales team, the word gets out very quickly. Fear of losing an opportunity to a vendor’s direct sales team will last forever. This is why it is usually better in the long run to give an opportunity to a partner than to get into a situation where your sales team is competing with the channel. Failure to truly protect the deal – Finally, vendors sometimes fail to keep their promises in protecting a deal. When an end-user decides for some reason or other they would like to switch to a different partner-based provider in the midst of their selection process, too often vendors jump in to make the switch happen rather than trying to work with the first partner to resolve the issue or conflict. While in the end buyers have the right to choose the provider they prefer, a vendor also needs to play the referee sometimes to make sure there are proper business reasons for the switch rather than a personnel-based issue that is getting in the way.
These five examples are not the only reasons deal registration programs fail, but they are the most common ones we see in the channel today. The best way to design a program is to begin by talking to your partner base. A channel is not a true democracy, so it is impossible to design a program that satisfies everyone, but if you ask questions, listen to your partners and work with them to build a program that meets the needs of most of them, very likely you will end up having a high adoption rate where more than 50% of intended users will end up using it. In the channel, anything higher than that is a real success.
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Partner relationship management (PRM) is a complex process, but when vendors get it right they can drive truly profitable growth via a network of distributed channel partners. Unfortunately, most companies marketing and selling through the channel tend to rely on their existing customer relationship management (CRM) software infrastructure to manage their partner base instead of using a dedicated PRM platform. This is simply a bad idea. Before we jump into explaining why, let’s take a few minutes to describe what a state-of-the-art PRM actually does. A purpose-built PRM platform should allow an organization to recruit, engage, enable and manage their partner base seamlessly. Most organizations using CRM to manage partner relationships end up resorting to various point applications, attempting to integrate them into their CRM in order to automate their workflow. The primary goal for partner relationship management (PRM) automation is to provide a portal that partners can access to learn about the vendor’s solutions, download assets, run marketing campaigns, generate leads and register deals, and get paid via various incentives, rebates and rewards programs. The primary use cases for all of these activities have been in existence for the past couple of decades. However, they have failed to deliver a high-performing automated solution for most users who rely on CRM to automate the processes involved. So, let’s take a deep dive into why this is the case.
Cost: The licensing model for CRM software is user-based. It is almost impossible for any organization to predict how many users from a partner organization will access their portal. As a result, in most cases organizations end up buying either too many seats or not enough. Budgeting becomes a nightmare, and costs can easily go through the roof. On the other hand, purpose-built PRM software like ZINFI’s partner relationship management solution has a price structure based on the total number of partner companies accessing the platform instead of user-based pricing. Band-based pricing in particular (which ZINFI offers) makes it easy for organizations to budget because all they need to do is estimate whether 100 or 250 or 500 partners will be using the portal.In almost every case, PRM beats CRM pricing by anywhere between 10 to 50 times (yes, 50 times!), depending on the size of the channel. The CRM providers simply can’t match this; if they tried, their core revenue in the direct sales market would drop dramatically. This is the fundamental reason most CRM companies have failed to actively participate in the PRM market. Complexity: I noted earlier that purpose-built PRM offers applications as a suite to provide an integrated experience for partner recruitment, engagement, enablement and management. Unlike PRM, CRM requires that vendors either undertake a significant amount of customization or bring additional point applications into the mix. Either approach increases integration and implementation time dramatically, and the user experience and administrative experience tends to be highly complex. Complexity drives up costs, and performing upgrades to incorporate advanced features and capabilities can be become a nightmare. In almost every case, PRM beats CRM on ease of use, simply because all applications are integrated in much the same way Microsoft Office is. Think about the analogy to Microsoft Office for a moment: While Excel, PowerPoint, Word, Outlook, etc., are all independent applications, the navigational flow, menu structure, compatibility (cut/paste/edit) and many other functions are seamless across all of the applications. You simply can’t get this kind of integrated experience with a CRM platform that’s been patched up to perform PRM functions. Purpose-built PRM software like ZINFI’s partner relationship management platform, on the other, can deliver a completely unified and easy-to-use experience from the outset. Connectivity: This is a huge issue.
If you are selling through the channel and wondering how to do more with less and how to drive better performance through partner relationship management, then you are not alone. All of us who have lived and thrived in the channel have had to face this fundamental question, and we continue to face it today across the many clients we serve globally. As I step back and look at the core success factors that drive a high-performing channel, I find I can group those factors into seven categories. That’s what we will explore here today.
Product – If you are selling through the channel and partners, the fundamental reason for that business model is that you have a product or a service that you want to distribute to a broader audience. However, for a group of businesses—your partners—to successfully distribute that product or service, your offering must be unique and stand out.While there are doubtless a lot of me-too products/services that get distributed via channel networks, those relationship are not sustainable and they will eventually negatively impact the financial performances of all involved parties. Therefore, the first most important success factor for partner relationship management is a uniquely positioned product or service that can enable another organization to build a business around it. Profitability – Beyond having a unique reason for engagement from an offering perspective, the next most important success factor for partner relationship management is having a truly strong business proposition that defines how the partner organization will make money. It is easy to launch a purely transactional product in the channel, especially in a new market segment; however, those relationships with partners really don’t scale or sustain over time, because at the end of the day it doesn’t drive the partner’s bottom line. This is where a vendor clearly needs to understand how the product or service by itself—or in combination with other offerings—can actually create more profitable opportunities for the partner organizations. Placement – Once an organization has introduced a unique offering into the marketplace and created a strong profitable partnership position for its channel, the next focus for successful partner relationship management is to determine how the product or service should be distributed. This varies greatly based on the type of channel. In the case of consumer products and services, this is typically done by territories. That’s why, when you think about franchises, you don’t see two franchises opening up shop next to each other. You typically have to go 5 to 10 miles to find the same franchise, because the vendor carves out the market space.However, in the case of certain business products that are sold through resellers or agents or the like, overdistribution can be a problem. This means multiple partners may be trying to sell to the same business. This creates an unhealthy foundation for partner relationship management. Yes, a certain level of competition is good. But overdistribution can lead to both end customer dissatisfaction and highly frustrated business partners who eventually stop selling a vendor’s products or services. Programs – Once the foundation has been built to create a successful partner relationship management framework by launching the right product, creating a profitable framework and having appropriate placement, the next big success factor is the programs that a vendor rolls out. These programs need to cover areas like marketing, sales, training, and product and service promotions. These programs are incredibly important for nurturing the vendor-partner relationship, and for helping partners successfully market, sell and serve the end customer base that they’ve build their business on.Without the right programs, beyond the first few months of the honeymoon, most of these vendor-partner relationships quickly die on the vine. In today’s hypercompetitive market,
Most organizations selling through a channel don’t realize that partner onboarding is not a one-time event but an ongoing activity. This is where partner relationship management software, or PRM software, can greatly help. The purpose of PRM software is to automate four core workflow activities related to partner recruitment, partner engagement, partner enablement and partner management. The major step between partner recruitment and partner engagement is proper onboarding. In this article, we will explore how PRM software can significantly streamline this onboarding activity. Before we explore in detail how PRM software can accomplish this, let’s start with a basic question: What is onboarding, and how can it impact your partner base? Wikipedia defines onboarding as “the process of bringing a new employee on board, incorporating training and orientation.” Pretty comprehensive—right?
When we apply this to channel marketing, “employee” would refer to employees from the partner organization across marketing, sales, technical and support areas. Since a channel partner is essentially an indirect sales and services organization, getting partner employees on board, trained and oriented to a vendor program is incredibly important in order for the partner to be able to sell successfully. PRM software can play an essential role in these three core areas—onboard, train and orient.
With this as a backdrop, let’s take a look at how onboarding existing partners is different from onboarding new partners. Then we will discuss how PRM software needs to be able to adapt to a broad range of onboarding-related circumstances. We’ll start with the process of recruiting and onboarding new partners.
New partner onboarding – When it comes to onboarding a new partner, the process of engagement starts with partner recruitment campaigns and programs. (While we will not discuss how to drive partner recruitment here, there are multiple articles on the ZINFI website that you can explore on partner recruitment using PRM software.)Let’s assume for the moment that a partner has been recruited, and has been invited to the partner portal to log in and start filling out a new partner agreement form. This is almost always the first step for new partners. Once a partner logs into an existing partner portal, the PRM software needs to be able to show only the forms and contractual agreements that are relevant for this particular partner. That means if a vendor has different agreements for different types of partners distinguished by various competencies or verticals, or by the nature of business they are in—and has different forms that reflect those differences—then the PRM software needs to be intelligent enough to differentiate one partner from another and provide only applicable contracts.Now, once this new partner has signed forms and applied, the partner will have to be approved by the vendor organization, and that may involve various cross-functional teams, such as channel sales, channel operations, channel marketing, marketing, finance and, in some cases, even human resources. If the contract is being modified by the partner, perhaps because it is a very large organization, then legal may also have to be involved.It is almost impossible to manage this process manually using simple email and office software like Word. PRM software not only streamlines this activity significantly, but also keeps a history of all changes. This kind of documentation—which can capture the entire contract negotiation process digitally—may become important later for a variety of legal reasons and historical verification purposes. If your organization should ever need to refer back to what you have agreed upon with your new partners, all of these back-and-forth conversations (as well as the intent of the partnership) will be fully captured in digital form, even if there are personnel changes in the interim. Without PRM software you simply cannot do that.
As a provider of a leading SaaS-based channel marketing management (CMM) platform, we get asked a lot about the right set of metrics an organization should consider when they are deploying such a platform globally. Our answer is always, “It depends.” Do I sound like a lawyer? If I do, then I am sorry, but I am not trying to be mysterious. It is truly an honest answer. While there are core metrics tied to return on investment (ROI) that any organization should look for to measure the impact from their channel marketing management platform, the answer is not really that straightforward. With that said, let me see if I can lay out a logic and a path that will help your organization pick the right set of metrics to drive ROI from a recently procured channel marketing management platform.
First, let’s briefly define business metrics, and then we’ll discuss the importance of thinking through what makes sense for your organization. As per Merriam-Webster, “metrics” refers to “a standard of measurement.” On online search for “business metrics,” yields the following definition from TechTarget: “A business metric is a quantifiable measure businesses use to track, monitor and assess the success or failure of various business processes.” Or Investopedia: “Metrics are parameters or measures of quantitative assessment used for measurement, comparison or to track performance or production.” All three of these definitions suggest that, when it comes to setting metrics (or measurements) for business activities, the goal is essentially to monitor progress and measure success.
To clearly identify the right metrics for the deployment of a channel marketing management platform, I would like to focus on two activities associated with business metrics. First, monitor progress. You do that essentially on a core set of input and output metrics. Second, measure success. Essentially, you quantify success in terms of dollars and cents to make sure the investment is providing the anticipated return.
So, let’s begin with a set of metrics that you may want to consider monitoring. Typically, when you are deploying a channel marketing management platform, you will need to consider three main phases of deployment. For each phase, you should have clear business objectives that define what you are trying to achieve. Once you have your objectives, then and only you can establish metrics to monitor progress and measure success. So, let’s go through these three phases in sequential order, but at the same time let’s also address both business objectives and business metrics.
Launch phase – During this phase, the primary goal is to drive quick success so that you can show progress, build buy-in and generate excitement within your organization and share success. It is essential to pick a pilot group of partners—ideally, in a large horizontal market segment—where you can launch, learn, adapt and tweak for ramp.Your goal will be to drive utilization of your channel marketing management platform as broadly as or narrowly as you think necessary. However, instead of worrying about the end state, let’s keep the focus on near-term success. We have repeatedly seen companies that try to launch with too many objectives and with too broad a vision lose momentum and traction, because they were never able to show success from immediate launch. (Of course, there may be other factors at play as well, including unforeseen internal organizational changes.)Yes, we are all taught to begin with the end result in mind, but if you launch with too broad a scope, the end of your channel marketing management effort may be near. Therefore, while it is important to know where you want to go in the launch phase, it is even more important that the metrics be relatively manageable, logical and measurable over a short period of time. It is absolutely crucial to build organizational support and buy-in. Launching a channel marketing management platform is not easy,
Partner Relationship Management (PRM) software has been around for about a decade or so, but only a handful of organizations selling through the channel have actually deployed PRM software. The primary reason behind this is that neither the use cases nor the business benefits from such automation are clear to most channel professionals. In this article we will try to provide that missing information and discuss how PRM software can drive partner performance. There are basically four primary phases that matter when it comes to channel partner lifecycle management: recruitment, engagement, enablement and management. Most organizations selling through the channel today work through all of these phases. Now, each of these phases may vary considerably for different organizations, depending on the countries and regions represented in their channel. Use cases will also vary according to the different products and solutions that they sell. In general, the larger the organization selling through the channel, the more variation there will be in the use cases. Managing this variability is an area where PRM software can help significantly. It is impossible for any organization selling through the channel to unify their go-to-market approach across all geographies, business units, etc. The varied nature of their engagement with their partner base is inevitable. However, there is a common thread across all of these variations: how they communicate with their channel partners. Most organizations interact with their partner base via some kind of a partner portal. They email partners on a regular basis, and they take partners’ phone calls to provide support for partners go through training and various incentive programs. These basic steps are more or less universal. The specific details of each step may vary from one region to another, and among various business units, but every organization must go through them. And here’s where PRM software can make a big difference. PRM software can completely automate these steps to bring in efficiency, transparency and repeatability, thereby reducing costs and minimizing friction between the vendor organization and its partners. The entire world is going digital. Whether you are trying to recruit partners or train them, you need a digital engagement model. Fighting this trend is like fighting gravity. However, if you are trying to create a digital engagement model using a patchwork of tools, software and yesterday’s approaches—without purpose-built PRM software—you will struggle. It doesn’t have to be that way. With the right tools, you can increase the ease of doing business, make your engagement model more visible to your partner base, understand which partners are most productive and why, and enable your partners to succeed. This is the primary focus of PRM software. When companies selling through the channel deploy PRM software, they see nearly instant results in terms of reductions in operating costs and increases in partner satisfaction. Anecdotal channel feedback no longer drives an ad hoc quarterly agenda. Now, data-driven decisions help the organization focus on what truly drives results. PRM software makes this possible. It also enables improved channel performance by providing partners with personalized access to partner portal content, creating partner competency-specific programs and offers, and tracking program performance in real time. Today, many organizations are waking up. They realize conducting business at the speed of digital requires elimination of redundant steps and reduction of operating costs via automation. They know they must provide great access, care and support to their partner base, which is under pressure to complete transactions at a lower cost and with less time and resources. PRM software help organizations selling through the channel do all of that—continually and significantly enhancing partner performance while reducing operating costs.
While the Internet was invented almost 50 years ago in a research environment, it wasn’t until the late 1990s, with the advent of the dot-com era, that organizations were able to embrace technology to thoroughly automate their business processes. Partner management software is a prime example of business process automation. This is a standalone category that didn’t really exist a decade ago. Since then, however, purpose-built partner management software has emerged as an important component in the evolution of business process automation.
Today, partner management software tends to have three core capabilities: partner relationship management (PRM), partner marketing management (PMM) and partner sales management (PMM). We at ZINFI call these three categories together Unified Channel Management or UCM. Each of these solutions—PRM, PMM and PSM—tends to focus on one aspect of channel management. Together, they drive end-to-end channel management. Any organization considering deployment of business process automation software for their channel marketing activities should understand how each solution can impact your channel.
Partner relationship management (PRM) software can help to reduce internal operating costs while improving partner recruitment, onboarding, training and incentives management via a dynamic partner portal capability.
While lead management and distribution also tend to be part of PRM software, the primary focus for PRM software is to enable partners to learn how to sell and to provide partners with access to various incentive programs to motivate selling activities. PRM is often the best important starting point for an organization considering the deployment of partner management software.
Partner marketing management (PMM) software tends to focus on enabling a partner to drive demand by leveraging co-branded assets and marketing tools. Today’s prospective buyers look for solutions primarily online.
Gone are the days when tradeshows and magazine advertising drove leads to B2B sellers. Today’s business buyers are no different from consumers when they research purchases—they invariably search online. Therefore, it is critical for resellers and other channel partners to be able to tap into a vendor’s knowledge of the marketplace and to have access to a dynamic marketing platform. This is where partner management software can help tremendously.
Partner sales management (PSM) software helps channel partners learn by providing them with a set of dynamic sales enablement tools. These tools teach them how to sell while they are selling, and give them the ability to track prospects’ engagement with the products and services they offer. Most of these sales enablement tools are available to direct sellers, but partner sales management software brings these capabilities to the channel side of the business. PSM is a very important and practical third component of a three-pronged partner management software capability.
Hopefully, you can now see how deploying any one of these three core solutions from the partner management software category can significantly streamline both your internal and external partner-related activities. Partner management software not only reduces your operating cost, but also increases partner satisfaction—and performance—levels substantially.
Companies selling through the channel, especially in the technology segment, need to make sure that a potential end buyer is not being approached by multiple partners unnecessarily. While competition is healthy, end customer satisfaction is paramount. Therefore, most organizations with a distributed and mature channel deploy deal registration software to protect specific deals for specific partners. This eliminates a potential waste of resources. More importantly, it increases satisfaction among both customers and partners. In this article, we will explore a few ways a deal registration software can be deployed.
Before an organization deploys deal registration software, it is essential they identify the specific criteria required for deal registration. These criteria may focus selected business verticals, partner specialization aligned with those verticals, deal value, and the total number of deals or distribution of deals in specific geographical locations.
In addition to setting such parameters, the vendor also needs to think through the deal registration process itself. For example, if the organization has a direct sales force but also sells through the channel, then it is essential to determine who will have preference based on specific criteria.
Sometimes channel partners will pursue certain prospects, only to learn the vendor’s direct sales force has taken a specific deal away. Once this happens, partners may not only complain about a conflict with the direct sales force, but also may actually stop selling certain products and services into a specific segment or to the overall market place. Therefore, it is essential for organizations that have a direct sales force but also sell through the channel to clearly identify on what basis a deal may be protected either for the direct sales force or for a partner.
In some cases, a deal may also have to be reviewed by multiple individuals within the organization who have the power to approve or reject a specific deal. This escalation process may be a function of deal size, deal complexity, requirements for additional resources, special prices, a special bundling request, or perhaps post-sales support and training. Again, in order for deal registration software to fulfill its purpose, the organization must clearly define the escalation process before implementation.
Once market parameters, partner criteria, deal protection logic and the review process have been clearly defined, this information should be communicated to both internal and external stake holders – including all partners. This process needs to be completed transparent, and the organization will need to ensure both internal and external staff are fully trained. A partner organization may have to be properly incentivized, provided with appropriate training and monitored for adherence to the overall program.
In some cases, a deal registration program may evolve over time or may change on a bi-annual or an annual basis, or when certain new products are launched or acquisitions are made. In these scenarios, the deal registration software will have to be dynamic enough to address special business needs both in short- and long-term frameworks. Remember, the goal of automation is always to reduce friction between the vendor and the partner and make it easier to do business by making the entire process transparent, repeatable and reproducible.
Finally, properly designed and deployed deal registration software can also provide an array of analytical measures to show both the vendor and its partners how well the entire program is working. By addressing what is not working, and properly reconfiguring the deal registration program, process and software, an organization can remain flexible and dynamic, and stay relevant to its own business needs as well as the needs of its partners.
Because it can address core business needs and partner interests in a highly dynamic and realistic way,
Partner relationship management (PRM) is an important tool. The key question, however, is which application within the PRM tool is the most important. Before we delve into details, it may be helpful to step back for a moment and consider a broader question: “What is the purpose of a channel?” You may be thinking the answer is quite obvious—to sell more of our products and services. Yes, you are absolutely right! The primary purpose of a channel is to extend your reach above and beyond what you can sell directly to an end buyer. In fact, the reason companies build a channel network is to expand their global reach and lower their sales costs. While a channel can also provide additional services, such as planning, installation and maintenance support, the ultimate purpose is to sell more. If selling more is the primary purpose of a channel, then it follows that the most important application in your PRM tool should be about sales management—right?
There are several essential components of sales management. It starts with identification of a market segment, putting together a value proposition and generating leads. Then it’s a matter of approaching potential buyers with the right messaging and solutions, and putting those prospects through a sales process to convert them into leads. This is where any PRM tool plays a very important role, but it is the sales-management-related applications within the PRM tool that take center stage in driving performance.
To get a partner to sell you will have to provide assistance in a number of ways. You will need to help them target the right audience, train them on how to sell, provide incentives for them to sell and then, of course, enable them to sell.
However, among all the sales-related activities the most important is tracking sales. That’s right: If you don’t know what your partners are doing and how much they are selling, the other activities aren’t going to help much. It may sound obvious, but you would be surprised how many organizations do not invest properly in figuring this out. This is where a PRM tool can make all the difference.
If you have proper sales management capability in your PRM tool, then at the center of that capability is your lead distribution, management and deal registration program. While deal registration applies to organizations with a broad base of channel partners where multiple partners compete for the same opportunity, lead distribution and management applies to all types of channel partners.
Whether the partner is generating the sale from start to finish or you are giving the partner an opportunity to close, your PRM tool needs to be able to track all of these activities in detail. If you cannot track sales details—and understand which products are selling at what pricing, and tied to which promotions or programs—it is almost impossible to build the foundation of a high-performing channel.
We see it repeatedly in our client base, and we constantly hear from the best performers in the channel. The most important application of your PRM tool is always related to your ability to distribute leads, manage their progression through various stages of closure (allowing partners to register deals where it make sense to protect them from other partners or your direct sales force) and analyze the results to understand what is driving sales.
The purpose of a channel is to drive sales, and this is where multi-partner prospecting programs can enable an organization selling through the channel globally to scale quickly. Your partner relationship management (PRM) tool can play a very important role in this effort. In this article, we will explore briefly how a PRM tool can help you recruit partners into a prospecting program, train them with the right tools and approaches, enable them with demand generation kits and then reward them for building your sales pipeline. Your PRM tool should have distinct process automation capabilities that allow you to recruit and onboard partners, and then train them on various aspects of your channel programs, particularly prospecting programs. Once you have recruited and trained them, the next focus needs to be on making sure they are capable of driving leads and closing sales. This is another area where your PRM tool needs to be very robust.
Most PRM tools in the marketplace tend to focus only one or two aspects of partner management. However, there are providers like ZINFI who provide end-to-end management. When you are looking at a prospecting program, be certain your PRM tool can go above and beyond in partner recruitment, onboarding and training.
Once you have recruited and onboarded your partners, it is important that you load up your PRM tool with a comprehensive set of marketing campaigns that the partners can use for prospecting. In other articles, we have discussed how to drive partner adoption with horizontal campaigns. This is the right starting point. You should load up as many horizontal campaigns into your PRM tool as you think your partners will use.
However, once you have built up some marketing “muscle” by running prospecting programs quarter after quarter, you can also begin to provide niche campaigns. These campaigns can be tailored to smaller segments of the channel for alignment with current business objectives.
Once the partners are recruited, trained, and enabled with marketing campaigns, the next most important step is to run the prospecting program over a period. Use your PRM tool to communicate to partners when the prospecting day or period begins or ends.
Companies that run prospecting initiatives successfully tend to run them over a couple of months every quarter, and then they celebrate success on a specific day of each quarter. On this day of celebration, you will want to hand out awards. Your PRM tool should be configured for these activities, and it should be able to track them in a very dynamic way. You can use your PRM tool to promote activities to partners participating in the program. More importantly, you can also use it to engage partners outside the program to bring them into the fold over multiple quarters.
The purpose of a prospecting program is to scale multi-partner demand generation. We have repeatedly seen from our client base that the organizations that take a multi-quarter approach—and leverage their PRM tool to drive partner recruitment, onboarding, training, demand generation and rewards—can quickly build a formidable demand generation and sales initiative by using PRM tools and prospecting programs. In fact, this is probably the most effective way to engage partners, drive results, celebrate success and, of course, scale globally.
Most companies selling through the channel want their partners to generate demand for them. However, now that the world of marketing has gone digital and marketing has evolved into a science, it is quite difficult for most partners to drive marketing activities and generate demand in a consistent fashion. This is where through-partner marketing software (TPM) becomes essential. Through-partner marketing software can significantly streamline demand generation activities by allowing a vendor to load a set of campaigns into a portal where partners can log in and easily carry out demand generation activities. Typically, most through-partner marketing software comes with a basic set of tools for specific activities like search marketing, social marketing, email marketing, event marketing and content syndication.
The key for a vendor is to make sure that campaigns loaded into a through-partner marketing software platform are complete and effective. Partners generally do not like experimenting with new campaigns, because they lack resources and time. Therefore, when a vendor loads up a set of campaigns into a through-partner marketing software platform, the campaigns must work. Otherwise, partners lose interest and program adoption drops very quickly.
In addition to loading up the right campaigns in the TPM software, another key requirement for vendors is to offer localized content. If a vendor is selling globally, it is very important to provide content not only in English, but also in other languages. And localization should not be limited to content alone. The entire user interface of the through-partner marketing software should be fully localized. Today, very few vendors can provide that, so when you are evaluating through-partner marketing software, you should make sure the user interface is fully localized and not just using Google Translation, which tends to introduce a lot of mistakes and errors.
Here’s another capability to look for when considering through-partner marketing software: Can it integrated with other channel marketing automation applications like CRM, ERP, incentives management systems and the like? Most organizations today have a number of such systems. If you plan to implement through-partner marketing software, be certain that the platform you choose fits smoothly into your existing infrastructure, and that you can track program performance end to end.
Finally, one of the most important aspects of TPM software is to provide real-time analytics. Using this capability, a vendor can quickly learn what is working and what is not, and replace or refine programs and campaigns to drive better results. When a campaign works, state-of-the-art through-partner marketing software also allows efficient scaling of that campaign, not just to multiple local markets but globally.
You must be saying, “What?” This article title makes no sense, right? Well, let me assure you: you’ve read it right. I firmly believe B2B marketing is taking over B2B selling, and I’ll explain why this makes sense. The primary research of all the major analyst firms (including Forrester, SiriusDecisions and Gartner) definitively shows (doesn’t just assert) that more and more buyers are relying almost exclusively on online, digital engagement as they go through the buying process. In many cases, buyers proceed through the entire process without ever talking to a seller.
As consumers, all of us can relate to this phenomenon. For the vast majority of buyers, long gone are the days of getting a Sears or Land’s End catalog in the mail and then calling up an 800 number to place an order. In the consumer world, we go through the buying process online nearly 100% of the time. You can actually buy and sell a house that way, not to mention more routine purchases like cars and boats. The entire consumer experience is now online, and marketing runs that world. Sales departments take orders and provide support. So why should it be any different in the B2B space?
In recent history, the B2B marketing and selling environment has been quite divided functionally. The marketing world operated on a half-yearly and annual cycle, while sales operated on a quarterly cycle. Figuring out how to pass qualified leads generated by marketing to sales has always been a challenge. This is no longer the case in the B2C world, however. Why not? Because marketing runs pretty much everything, and B2C sales is all about fulfillment and customer support and care. Sales support and customer care include growing the relationship and educating the customer about potential recommendations and add-ons, but they are no longer primarily about closing the sale.
“But what about B2B sales?” you ask. “The B2B sales process is highly complex. How can you not have sales people interact with the customer?” Well, actually, when you ask B2B buyers this question, most will now say that they prefer doing research on their own until they reach the point where they are absolutely sure who they want to engage with. Larger business organizations sometimes go through a more complicated request for information (RFI) or request for proposal (RFP) process, and in that case the buying process looks quite different, but organizations that are directly evaluating what to buy and do not need an RFI/RFP process can get the information and support they need through marketing alone.
Yes, only marketing – because when B2B marketing is done competently, all of the questions a buyer has can be answered digitally via online assets. These assets might be of an overview of the product via data sheets, reference validation via customer success stories or actual product demos in the form of recorded videos. The irony is that when we think about the traditional buying process steps (awareness, interest, trial, purchase, repurchase), we still tend to believe that marketing generally stops at awareness generation and perhaps some level of interest creation, but in truth every one of these prospect/customer engagement steps can be digitized without the involvement of salespeople.
So, to be successful in today’s fully digitized B2B selling environment, you invest in digital B2B marketing to build trust and educate the buyer. This is where most of your investment will go, and because of that it makes sense that marketing runs the show. Whereas in the past, businesses selling to other businesses invested more robustly in sales and only incrementally in marketing, today and in the future the reverse is — or will be — true. You can bet on it.
Hopefully I’ve got your attention now, and maybe you’re at least willing to consider the notion that B2B marketing should be driving the sales process. It’s not that big a leap to imagine creating entirely digital engagement scenarios for a variety of prospects,
The entire world is getting digitized—from supply chain to manufacturing to service delivery to customer acquisition—but when it comes to the last mile of product and service delivery via a channel partner network, it is amazing to see that most companies haven’t deployed partner relationship management (PRM) automation to any significant degree. This leaves a lot of low-hanging fruit related to growth and productivity, but also neglects a crucial part of the vendor-partner relationship: partner satisfaction levels. That’s what we will explore in detail in this article. Before providing specific recommendations, let’s briefly look at the lifecycle of partner relationship management (PRM). This relationship starts with an organization signing up to resell products and services from another. Just like any new relationship, in the case of PRM there it’s important to recognize there are certain expectations that partner organizations have with respect to a vendor’s program. Over time, as the partner organization learns how to sell, market and serve, it’s not uncommon for a number of issues or conflicts to arise, accompanied by a drop in partner satisfaction. As satisfaction drops, partner engagement drops, and eventually the partner organization stops selling the vendor’s products and services or reduces the transaction level substantially.
So what can a vendor organization do to sustain and increase partner satisfaction over time, and how can PRM automation help?
Make it easy to find. Business relationships are complex, and vendors tend to rely on the partner organization to search through their partner portal to find various documents, programs, plans and other assets and features. Most partner portals are difficult to navigate, primarily because content is poorly categorized and laid out. A state-of-the-art PRM software platform should allow a vendor organization not only to provide various categories of content, but most importantly to deliver them on a mobile-friendly platform using partner-specific profile information. This way, the only content that a partner sees is relevant to that partner, and the partner is not overwhelmed with a plethora of content that it may or may not need. Make it easy to learn. Learning applies to all aspects of a new relationship between a vendor and a channel partner. The first thing a partner organization needs to learn is how to apply to specific programs, get trained on new products and services, how to sell them and how to market and serve the end-customers. Partner relationship management (PRM) software can automate all of these processes end to end and make it very easy for a partner to learn about all aspects of the vendor’s products and services. Most PRM software today comes with an built-in learning management system (LMS), as well as additional tools related to partner sales management (PSM) that emphasize gamification, leader boards, rewards alignment and other features that enable and incentivize sales. Enable customer acquisition. The commitment to resell a vendor’s products and services requires significant investment from a partner organization. Therefore, the more the vendor can help a partner to get in front of new customers,—and not just settle for providing additional solutions to their existing line of products and services—the better the chance that the early relationship between the vendor and the partner will be mutually beneficial. We often hear channel partners praise vendors who make it easy to attract new customers by providing effective marketing and sales automation capabilities via PRM automation platforms. Grow existing accounts. Getting new customers is hard, but getting existing customers interested in new products and services is even tougher, and it can also pose risks. A partner may instantly lose credibility with an established account if they push new products and services that don’t work very well.
If your organization has built a patched-up partner management system by adding applications (or objects) to your existing CRM infrastructure, then it’s likely you are investing enormous resources to answer basic business questions. This is where a purpose-built partner relationship management (PRM) platform can significantly improve your business performance while reducing cost. How does it work? That’s what we will explore in this article. Until recently, most companies selling through the channel relied on automating their partner management workflow by using their existing CRM infrastructure instead of deploying partner relationship management (PRM) automation. However, when you try to manage certain program-related activities—things like marketing, lead management, incentives management, training and so on—with this kind of patched-up infrastructure, you will encounter three main problems.
Lack of data flow – When you use an object-based (i.e., application-based) approach to expand your current CRM system as a PRM platform, it makes the flow of records—and therefore business intelligence—very hard to develop. This, in fact, is the fundamental reason you are not realizing your business performance, because your infrastructure is failing to give you the right information at the right time. Enormous maintenance costs – Every time you want to make any addition or change to a part of the platform, you have to worry about what components you will end up breaking. Also, limited IT resources prevent you from making the changes you need to keep moving forward as your channel evolves and changes are required. This can quickly make your organization’s channel infrastructure obsolete. Poor partner experience – If you have six different applications (yes, we have seen it) patched to an existing CRM infrastructure, it is highly likely that each of these applications have their own business logic flow and therefore different user interfaces. It becomes a nightmare for a partner to learn all these different apps.
If you are reading this, nodding your head and saying, “Yes that's us, but we can never get out of this mess”—well, the reality is that you can get past the mess, provided you have courage, vision and true commitment. But how?
Courage – To truly get out of the tangled web that you have woven over the years, you first need to muster organizational courage. Yes, I know. It's not easy, but the best approach is to engage multiple executive sponsors (cross-functional) and have this conversation. Lay out examples of poor partner experience, IT costs and change-management issues, but most importantly explain how these issues are affecting the organization’s ability to make the right decisions and perform at an optimal level. Vision – Once you have been able to muster executive support to start an evaluation process of what the end state could be, reach out to vendors like ZINFI and analyst firms to build a vision of what your PRM infrastructure should look like. Focus the discussion on key business questions you need to answer on a dynamic basis and the objectives you need to satisfy. Don’t get carried away looking at PRM features. Instead, begin by prioritizing key processes that are ripe for automation. Commitment – This is where a fully funded plan can make your vision a reality. When you have cultivated executive sponsorship, and you have created a vision of the end state and how it can drive profitable growth and a much better partner experience, now you need to focus on how to get there step by step. Your CRM didn’t get tangled up overnight; likewise, you can’t expect to untangle it in a quarter. Have a clear four-to-six-quarter implementation plan and then go at it in a focused manner.
Once you have a migration plan to transition from your existing patched-up CRM system to a unified channel management framework using PRM, then you will need to focus on a few additional details regarding the sequence of the up...
Budget is tight everywhere. Investment dollars in infrastructure are particularly hard to come by, especially when it comes to channel marketing automation investments. Partner relationship management (PRM) is a necessary starting point for any organization trying to reduce costs and increase partner productivity and ramp up sales. However, most organizations today are still running on yesterday’s channel marketing infrastructure, and are not able to secure executive support for such an investment. The status quo may be frustrating, but change is even harder, so most organizations—despite enormous need—fail to understand and are unable to articulate how new investments can drive channel productivity and growth. In this article, we will explore how you can champion such investments in PRM software and associated automation and secure executive support. When you step back and look at your channel with an eye toward increasing partner productivity, your first task is to figure out what the overall organizational directions and objectives are. Most companies have specific organizational goals every year. These may be essentially a continuation of goals from the past year or they may comprise a new set of initiatives going forward. These initiatives may be related to recruiting new partners, training existing partners better with a new product that is being launched, or leveraging a recent acquisition the company may have made. The goals might be tied to lead management and tracking, or perhaps enabling partners with better marketing programs and other assets. The point is, you have to figure out what the key initiatives are, and then find one or two core initiatives that you can start digging into deeper to enhance your understanding, so you are in a better position to articulate a direct relationship between organizational goals and the many benefits of PRM automation.
In general, PRM software automation helps with three core areas:
Increase partner revenue. Automation can drive more revenue per partner through efficiencies like better engagement, ease of doing business and better training. What you measure is what you get, and automating your channel workflow gives you great visibility into what you are doing well and what isn’t working. Because PRM software provides this kind of business intelligence, you can use it to make the right decisions as you try to figure out which aspects of your channel programs need to be changed. This may include recruiting different partners, increasing training or perhaps changing your incentive programs. With automation, you will be able to make all of these judgements based on the data and insights that your PRM software dynamically gathers for you instead of basing decisions on gut feelings or anecdotal evidence. Reduce operating costs. For most organizations seeking savings and efficiencies in their channel marketing processes, operating costs represent another big missed opportunity. It is a proven fact that software can eliminate costs by automating repeatable steps and providing a more streamlined set of activities. This has already happened in nearly every aspect of most businesses—whether you are talking about financial accounting, customer relationship management, manufacturing or inventory control—but for the most part it hasn’t happened yet in channel management. PRM software can have a huge impact in eliminating costs related to channel sales and marketing operations, and it typically drives nearly instant return on investment. Increase predictability and scalability. Perhaps the biggest challenge in channel management today is the inability of organizations to accurately forecast what will happen weeks or months down the road. However, proper PRM automation can provide complete visibility into the progress of partner recruitment, training, demand generation, lead management, incentives return and other key measurements, and it can show the trends related to these metrics...
The acronym PRM stands for partner relationship management; CRM stands for customer relationship management. PRM and CRM are quite similar in nature, both architecturally and in terms of their functionality. However, there are some fundamental differences between the two types of platforms. Let’s begin by discussing some of the similarities between PRM and CRM, and then we will discuss the differences between the two. Core Similarities between PRM and CRM
Here is a high-level summary of how PRM tends to behave like a CRM, mostly from an architectural and workflow perspective:
Architecture – Both PRM or CRM use software that is built on the latest web services technology. Both employ a three-tier architecture (database layer, application layer and web presentation layer). They also tend to run on software as a service (SaaS) infrastructure. Application framework – Both PRM and CRM have a core platform which houses records—records of partners in the case of PRM, and records of end users in the case of CRM. However, additional applications can be plugged into this framework to do more. A common example is quote-processing software that you can plug into a basic CRM application, allowing the sales rep to send quotes directly from the CRM to the client. Similarly, with PRM you can plug in a learning management system (LMS) or partner incentives management (PIM) software to keep track of partner training or incentives programs. Records structure – The records structure for both PRM and CRM are pretty much identical at a core level, including fields for things like contact name, title, company name and address. Like a state-of-the-art CRM platform, a best-in-class PRM platform also allows records customization and the addition of various customizable fields. This is essential to allow adaptation of a basic record structure into a specific organization. Since each organization is different, chances are most of the fields that are used and tracked are also going to be different. Workflow – Both CRM and PRM provide a logical workflow where you can automate various internal activities, such as lead management, pipeline review, authorization of pricing, quotes, training, incentives, etc. As I noted earlier, fundamentally a PRM works just like a CRM in many aspects, especially when it comes to workflow. If you are considering investing in a PRM platform, make sure it flows like your CRM. Business intelligence – One of the most important areas of similarity between CRM and PRM is analytics. Any state-of-the-art PRM or CRM platform should allow users to run customized reports and analytics. Both types of platforms are designed to automate an organization’s workflow, but running analytics allows them to optimize their automated processes by identifying what is working and what is not.
When you are picking a PRM platform you need to make sure the fundamentals are sound and will work seamlessly with your CRM platform.
Core Differences between PRM and CRM
With the similarities in mind, let’s now focus on what’s different between CRM and PRM platforms.
Purpose-built – A CRM system is, by definition, designed for customer relationship management, so in most cases the way accounts are set up is designed for a direct sales team to prospect, sell and grow existing end-customer accounts directly. On the other hand, PRMs are built for partner relationship management and the structure, workflow, applications, etc. are all designed for partner network management or channel management. Architecturally the two systems have a number of similarities, but functionally they are two very different applications. Pricing – Most CRM solutions are sold with per-user, seat-based licensing. This doesn’t work nearly as well in the partner management universe, simply because it is very hard, if not impossible, to predict utilization rates. If an organization pays too much to provide user licenses to all of their partners,
Partner relationship management (PRM) is an important set of activities in channel management. Over the past decade, multiple SaaS vendors like ZINFI have brought significant innovation to market in the PRM software segment to enable a vendor selling through the channel to automate partner relationship management activities. In this article we will explore some of the basic capabilities that your PRM software must have to give you a solid start. When you think about channel management and selling through a partner base, one of the most important factors is keeping partners informed and involved in your company’s programs and activities. Getting mind share from a channel partner is the first hurdle. The next hurdle is to generate interest and engagement—ideally, leading to a transaction. This is where a start-of-the-art partner portal is essential. Your PRM software should come with a set of core capabilities allowing you to set up a dynamic partner portal.
With that in mind, here are the key criteria that your PRM software must satisfy to make sure the partner portal you set up will address all of the core requirements:
Personalized access – It’s very important to make sure the content and application modules (such as incentives, planning, marketing and sales) that you provide to partners are highly focused and personalized to specific partner types or characteristics, including partner tier, specialization, geographical location, and so on. This is a fundamental requirement for your PRM software—it must be able to link content to the partner profile. Mobile responsiveness – Why is mobile responsiveness important? Because your partners are always on the move, and more than 50% of portal access is now achieved via mobile devices. Therefore, your PRM software must be able to provide mobile-responsive web content in an application user interface that is optimized for mobile devices. Personalized communication – We’ve already mentioned the importance of personalized access to web content and application modules. Similarly, when engaged in outbound communication, you need to make sure all touches (email, calls, direct mails, campaigns, etc.) are highly personalized. For example, you don’t want to be sending information or appeals to your silver partners that are actually relevant only to your gold partners. That’s a waste of effort and resources, and will only frustrate your partners. That’s why your PRM software must be set up to allow you to personalize communication. Localization – One of the most important features of your PRM software should be to allow complete localization of applications, content and the user interface. In order for you to provide truly personalized and mobile-responsive access to your partners, you need to make sure that you can offer content and a seamless user experience in key languages other than English. Access and utilization tracking – This is a critical requirement for your PRM software, allowing your sales and marketing team to figure out what programs and assets are working and what are not —and to track success metrics by various partners groups, types, locations, geographies, etc.
In other articles we have emphasized the need for your PRM software to provide several core applications—like partner onboarding, training, marketing and sales enablement, and incentives management. As you can see from the brief list above, it is also crucial that your PRM software can be customized to different partner types or profiles, with features like personalization, mobile access in a localized environment, and the ability to track asset and application utilization for your internal sales and marketing stakeholders.
Once you have the right applications and right capabilities in your PRM software, you can truly begin to automate your channel management activities end to end. We at ZINFI live and thrive by the creation and leadership of Unified Channel Management (UCM) capabilities.
The partner portal is possibly the single most important tool for a vendor selling through channel. While channel programs, policies and people are all very important ingredients for partner relationship management, in our digital world a properly built, state-of-the-art partner portal can make the difference between a successful channel program and one that fails. However, the majority of partner portals today never realize their full potential of serving the needs of the channel partners and enabling a vendor to scale its business globally. Why is that? Let’s examine some of the primary reasons behind this failure.
Portals are not localized. Most companies that are selling globally today may have some localized web content, but typically the user interface of the partner portal is not localized. As a result, partners that are more comfortable doing business in English are absolutely fine, but in countries where English is a secondary language or where partners are simply not comfortable using English, those partners can be very hesitant to use the partner portal. At ZINFI, we have observed that localizing the portal consistently increases utilization by 30% to 40% on a worldwide basis. Lack of mobile responsiveness. We know most partners are out and about seeing their customers. While some of the technical staff may be using the partner portal via the web on a desktop computer, most individuals at partner organizations today access the partner portal via a mobile application. Therefore, the partner portal needs to be—at the very least—mobile responsive. Ideally, vendors will provide a mobile app that delivers some core functionalities tied to things like partner onboarding, training, lead management, deal registration, incentives management and some basic reports. While the goal is not necessarily to replicate the entire partner portal in mobile form—an unrealistic and ultimately be overwhelming objective—there are several core features and functionality that it makes sense to deliver via a dedicated mobile app. Confusing content distribution. A typical vendor that generates a few hundred million dollars in revenue selling through a partner base may carry anywhere from ten to several hundred product lines. Each product or solution is associated with specific content in the form of product data sheets, service sheets, pricing guidelines, competitive positioning, and so on. How is this content actually categorized, tagged and distributed? That’s an incredibly important variable. Another crucial consideration is how new content within the partner portal is tagged and separated from older, less immediately relevant material. For example, if there’s a new launch of a specific product or service, all of the content related to that should be promoted through the partner portal so it’s easy for partners to find as soon as they log in, and is both web responsive and mobile responsive. Lack of robust search capabilities. When partners come to your partner portal, they are already busy. They are carrying multiple product lines and are likely accessing multiple partner portals. When it comes to the partner portal, they do so with a specific purpose in mind. Our data shows that the number one reason a partner logs in to the partner portal is related to customer support: Either they’re creating tickets or checking the status of their tickets because they want to monitor how they’re doing in helping their customers. Other common reasons for logging in include learning about different products and services offered by the vendor, and accessing marketing and sales materials. In each of these scenarios, the partner is thinking of a specific purpose and a specific solution. The partner portal is rich with content, but if specific content is not easy to find via a quick keyword search, it defeats the purpose of having the content and the partners get frustrated and leave. That’s why having great search capabilities within the partner...
Selling via an indirect sales channel is never easy, especially if you are trying to do it at a global level with multiple product lines catering to all kinds of verticals. The complexity of managing such a channel can be overwhelming, and that complexity can also make it really hard for partners to do business with the vendor. This is where purpose-built partner relationship management (PRM) software can help. In this article, we will explore how PRM software can significantly enhance the ease of doing business for a vendor’s partner base. Before we discuss the benefits of PRM software, however, let’s explore some of the core challenges partners face as they do business with a vendor selling through the channel.
Complex program and partner relationship management requirements – Most vendors selling through the channel have built their channel program over the years, and the cost of change and/or the fear of change have prevented vendors from simplifying their channel programs. The combination of program complexity, a patchwork of partner portal applications, and a lack of purpose-built PRM software can make doing business very complex. The portal is not mobile-friendly – The partner portal is the first and last handshake a partner has with the vendor. However, if you are not using purpose-built PRM software, it’s likely your portal is not fully mobile-responsive and the patchwork of applications you use to manage your partner relationships is really hard to navigate via a mobile interface. This is a critical hurdle that partners must struggle to overcome every time they log on. Hard–to-find content – A primary purpose of your partner portal is to allow your partners to self-serve and access the many vendor-provided channel programs that are in place without calling the vendor for assistance. Without a purpose-built partner portal powered by world class PRM software, however, searching for and finding relevant marketing assets, programs, sales materials and other content can be very difficult. Complicated navigation – If your partner portal has evolved over the years and has become a patched-up quilt of discrete applications, chances are most of the applications (partner contracts, training, incentives, deal registrations, etc.) come from different vendors and there is little navigational consistency. The multiplicity of interfaces can be downright confusing. This is where purpose-built PRM software that encompasses end-to-end channel management can make a big difference, providing users with a clean, consistent, logical interface that remains the same wherever they are within the portal. Lack of dynamic alerts – Keeping partners informed in a way that us useful to them is critical. That’s why partners need to be able to configure and manage alerts for their own unique purposes—whether the alerts have to do with deal registration or incentives approval or training certification expirations. Unfortunately, most partner portals do not allow this to happen. If you deploy purpose-built PRM software, however, you can absolutely overcome this issue and enable partners to manage their alert-based workflows much better and faster.
All in all, doing business is hard, even frustrating, for your partners if have not properly deployed and configured PRM software to power your partner portal and programs. So now let’s explore in more detail how state-of-the-art PRM software can help your partners overcome these challenges.
Streamline partner onboarding – Partner engagement starts with the recruitment of new partners into current programs and existing partners into new programs. Properly built PRM software can significantly augment and automate the partner onboarding process. Make agreement management easy – The first step in getting a partner onboarded is signing agreements. For many organizations, this is a painstaking, manual process that is difficult to keep track of. However,
The concept of partner relationship management software has been around for a couple of decades. However, most of the platforms really haven’t taken off for some pretty specific reasons. The primary reasons have revolved around the cost and complexities involved in deployment. However, over the last five or 10 years or so, several companies offering partner relationship management software have made considerable progress—not only in reducing cost but also in modularizing the software functionalities in a way that allows vendors to deploy the software in a logical and sequential order that makes sense for their own organization. In this article, we will talk about the six main benefits of deploying partner relationship management software. Streamline partner onboarding: If you are in a company with a large channel or if you are in a company that is trying to expand your channel, chances are you’re trying to recruit new partners. If you’re trying to recruit new partners into your channel programs and they’re using a manual process, you are wasting a lot of internal resources by doing things manually that properly configured partner relationship management software can do much more efficiently. You’re also creating friction within each engagement and with the partners that you are trying recruit. Properly configured partner relationship management software can significantly streamline your onboarding process. It reduces costs, it increases partner satisfaction and it also increases visibility into the entire partner onboarding process.
Realize new efficiencies from automating the learning management and certification process: Today most vendors selling to the channel have some kind of learning management system (LMS) in place. However, typically these systems do not connect properly with other subsystems. Therefore, the LMS is often managed as an island by the training and learning team, and is rarely fully integrated into the overall channel management process, especially when it comes to channel account managers or business manager infrastructure. Properly configured partner relationship management software can significantly increase the efficiency with which you manage your partner base and the learning and certification processes associated with it.
Speed up distribution of co-branded assets: Today most vendors have a partner portal which they use for communicating with the partners about programs and about the progress that the vendor is making with the business. But as a part of the process they also distribute co-branded assets. A properly configured partner relationship management software platform will significantly increase the speed with which these assets are distributed from the agency that is creating them to the partner marketing team that is going to use them. But that's not all. The partner can also log in and co-brand an asset online, which increases partner satisfaction. It also allows vendors see which partner is downloading which assets, and whether they are working or not.
Reduce the labor and complexities associated with lead management: If you are selling to the channel—say, the mid-market and enterprise markets across all verticals—chances are you have some sort of a deal protection program in place. If your partners are accessing your CRM, or some other homegrown online tool, it’s likely the process is cumbersome, creates conflicts, lacks visibility and doesn’t give you the control you need to operate like a 21st century organization. Here again, a properly configured partner relationship management software platform can significantly streamline your lead management distribution as well as your deal registration program—thereby reducing the costs and labor involved, but also increasing partner satisfaction and eliminating the channel conflicts that arise when you try to manage by using spreadsheets or some other documents that are not fully automated.
Companies selling to the channel need to understand some of the core principles of partner relationship management. In other articles we have discussed why partner relationship management fails, and why it is important to avoid those failure modes. It is even more important to avoid a few core mistakes that many organizations make either intentionally or unintentionally. In this article we’ll explore the five core mistakes that we see vendors across the channel making consistently. These are mistakes that can easily be avoided with some thought and pre-planning.
Overdistribution: If your organization is focused on partner relationship management and you want to drive high-level partner satisfaction, it is essential to make sure your partners know you care about their business and not just your own. It’s common for vendors to send the wrong signal to their partner base by announcing a recruitment and expansion program. While this makes perfect sense if you are trying to expand territories where you have no presence and want to add geographies or countries where you don’t currently do business, it is incredibly important to make sure in a market where you already have a presence that you don’t send the wrong signal and undermine your partner relationships. One of the best ways of avoiding this kind of mistakes is to perform partner profile and potential analysis. For example, if you’re selling into large countries like the US, Germany, France or the UK, and have been doing so for a while, chances are you already have a decent infrastructure for partner relationship management. If you have data that describes your partners in a great degree of detail--who they are, what their competencies are, what they do--then you can analyze your partner profiles to determine the potential of that base. Instead of recruiting more partners to go sell into those markets, you may be better off making investments with existing partners to help them sell more and become more engaged. Or you may want to focus on the partners that have potential to sell more but still haven’t lived up to that potential in actual sales. You can make these distinctions by actively analyzing your partners’ profiles and their potential, which will help you avoid the mistake of over-distribution. Overpromise and underdeliver: This is a deadly sin when it comes to partner relationship management. Just like you, partners are busy. If you make a promise, they’re going to rely on you to deliver. If you or your organization is not capable of delivery—whether it’s a bug fix in the technology or improvements in B2C segments or a revised incentive structure that customers have asked for—don’t try to avoid a near-term conflict by agreeing to improvements even though you know that you are unlikely to be able to deliver. Just like in any relationship, in partner relationship management overpromising destroys trust instantly. Therefore, it is better to take the bullet now rather than get completely drowned later on in mistrust and issues associated with it. You are friends with your partners. Tell them honestly why you cannot address certain problems immediately. As long as they understand that you have empathy and you have a business reason for prioritizing specific ideas and needs over others you are currently working on, they will understand. They are business people—just like you. Now, in the process you may lose certain partners, which is okay. But in the end, you’re going to end up having a loyal partner base that values your open communication style. So follow the “underpromise and overdeliver” mantra--not the other way around. Complex incentive programs: We see these mistakes related to incentives programs being made in partner relationship management again and again. This can be avoided with an annual review of your incentive structure to make sure what partners have to do to earn incentives is in alignment both with your business objectives and your partners’ busi...
If you are selling through the channel, it is probably safe to assume that you have a partner portal. There’s nothing ground-breaking about that. However, this is 2016. Do you know when your partner portal was built and with what technologies? Why does it matter? Well, do you still use a typewriter? I doubt it—typewriters are obsolete. So why would anyone want to use a partner portal built on obsolete software? I’ll have more to say on that later, but before we get into the weeds here, let’s step back for a second and look at the history of partner portals and how they have been built over the years. Past (1985 to 2000)
If you were selling through the channel in 1990s, chances are you had an extranet whose purpose was to provide your partners with access to price lists, datasheets, collateral, etc. so that they wouldn’t have to wait for printed materials to arrive. The partner portal software was very basic. Actually, it was essentially a website with external login capabilities connected with some sort of a directory systems that mapped users. That’s about it.
Now, during this phase a few companies like Channelware (which actually coined the term “partner relationship management”), Channel Wave and Blue Roads raised millions of dollars in funding to create more sophisticated and functional portals, but they eventually went out of business due to lack of business adoption, lack of complete solution sets, high prices, complicated deployment and a lack of a full web services infrastructure. So despite the fact that several organizations had the right idea, the market was not ready for widespread adoption—or one could argue these companies couldn’t supply what the market needed at that point with their versions of a partner portal software solution.
Present (2000 - 2015)
Most companies who started in the late 1990s to build and develop partner portal software were not successful and shut down by early to mid-2000s. However, with the explosion of Internet-related businesses in the dot-com boom and the proliferation of enterprise application companies, point solution products tied to incentives management, rewards, rebates, etc. started to evolve. Companies selling through the channel realized that they could use their customer relationship management (CRM) platform to automate some of the workflow as well. So naturally, due to lack of any integrated end-to-end solutions, companies started to patch together partner portal software of various types.
However, this patchwork of discrete point solutions created complexity, made the partner experience less than desirable, and made the total cost of ownership unbearable for organizations selling through the channel. Also, due to long buying cycles—and given the past failures of other vendors—very few new vendors for partner portal software entered the marketplace. Most players in the partner portal software space today are left over from the second wave of patched-up solutions and very few have a truly complete vision of what the future of partner portal software will look like.
Future (2015-2030)
Nils Bohr, a Nobel laureate in physics, was once quoted as saying, “Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future.” Well, we have also heard that the best way to predict the future is to create it. So I’d like to talk about what we at ZINFI believe about the future of partner portal software and what we are doing to create that future. We believe the future of partner portal software requires seven MAGICAL elements. The partner portal software of the future will be…:
Modular: That’s because enterprises are not going to rip and replace their entire infrastructure, and because there will be very few companies who can compete without a fully end-to-end automation platform in place.
Adaptive: As companies turn on different modules of the partner portal software, these modules have to fit into an existing infrastructure and have to adapt to data flows on both PC...
Based on a recent estimate, we believe about 300 or so enterprises have deployed some level of channel marketing automation, and most of these companies have quickly realized a substantial benefit from these investments. If you’re selling through an organization and do not have some level of automation in place, chances are your channel marketing processes are quite antiquated and require substantial upgrades to stay relevant to your partner base. Certainly you can address this by creating homegrown tools, but before you continue to invest further in that direction, and as you look at the year ahead you should seriously consider some of the options that are available in the marketplace for channel marketing automation. In other posts we have discussed in a great degree of detail some of the core features and functionalities of channel marketing automation, but in this article we're going to focus primarily on the business benefits that you can derive by deploying such a platform. A typical channel marketing automation platform requires an investment of about $100,000 per year. However, when you compare that figure to the total return on investment, the benefits are really quite substantial. We will discuss those ROI-related benefits in greater degree detail throughout this article.
Efficiency of deployment: Speaking of business benefits, one of the most important aspects of channel marketing automation’s impact on an organization is improvement in efficiency—how fast you can get things done and how you can do more with less. When it comes to channel marketing automation, you’re primarily trying to manage a few core activities—for example, lead management and distribution, campaign asset management, co-branding and ROI tracking. It is easier for you to make that happen for hundreds and thousands of partners if you have an automation platform in place. If you don't have one today, chances are you're managing everything via e-mail and your partners have to download marketing content, and then they have to co-brand, and then they have to go educate prospects using their own individual platforms. A properly designed and configured channel marketing platform can integrate these processes, and dramatically impact your efficiency and how you enable your partners to market.
Visibility of partner engagement: Today, if you are offering various types of campaign kits through your partner portal for your partners to download, co-brand offline and market using their own individual systems, you have no visibility into the impact those assets and campaigns are having within the partner base. If, however, you have a channel marketing automation platform in place, you will have complete visibility: how many emails are going out, how end customers are responding to certain assets, how your social media syndication is working, how your web content is working, how effective the events are in terms of driving leads and creating pipeline, and so on. Having that information represents a huge step forward for you in gaining control of the partner marketing process, and that level of visibility empowers you as you try to determine the right level of investment and as you continue to build new campaigns assets and distribute them to your partners.
Control of brand promise: A typical channel marketing automation platform will give you substantial control of your brand image and presence through your partner network. If you allow a partner to download an asset and co-brand it offline, you have no way of controlling what will happen to it. Maybe a brand image will get distorted, or maybe something will get added that is not in alignment with your core brand values. Maybe partners will send something by mistake that doesn't truly represent your company. However, if you have a channel marketing automation platform in place, you can maintain complete control over how these assets are distributed.
Speed of execution: Today,
Lately there has been a lot of buzz about channel management automation, which comprises partner relationship management, channel marketing automation and channel sales management. However, since this is a relatively new area of business process automation, the definitions are not always clear to channel marketing professionals. In this article we will discuss briefly what channel marketing automation is all about and describe the many business benefits it can provide. Definitions
Channel marketing automation focuses on automating two groups of activities for organizations selling via a channel network. The first group of activities is focused on “marketing to the partners” or what we call “to-partner marketing automation” and the second group of activities focuses on “marketing through the partner” or “through-partner marketing automation.” Let’s review briefly how each of these works.
To-partner marketing automation – The goal for these activities is to recruit, engage and excite partners so that they are aware of a vendor’s programs, policies, people, etc. Here are the areas in which you can deploy channel marketing automation for to-partner marketing activities:
Partner recruitment: If you are trying to recruit new partners into your company or existing partners into new programs, you need a set of marketing automation tools to drive these programs. This is where various inbound and outbound marketing activities can be integrated and automated end-to-end to drive results.
Partner engagement: Let’s say you have rolled out a new product or a new program, and you need to train your partners to be aware of those programs. You very likely have a learning management system (LMS) in place, but you still need to drive partners to these training session. A channel marketing automation platform can help you do that.
Partner management: If you have an incentives management infrastructure in place, from time to time you will roll out special incentives, rewards or other programs. Instead of relying on your direct marketing team to send out communications, having access to a channel marketing automation platform with to-partner marketing automation capabilities gives you the means to seamlessly manage your partner base by integrating your channel marketing automation platform with your incentives management capabilities.
Through-partner marketing automation – The primary focus for through-partner marketing actives is on enabling your partners to build their pipeline by leveraging your marketing assets and programs. The following is a brief summary of how you can deploy channel marketing automation for through-partner marketing activities:
Inbound marketing automation: Most channel partners do not have digital marketing capabilities in place—especially when it comes to optimizing search marketing. This is where integrated (search, syndication) tools can greatly enhance your partners’ abilities to generate leads from their prospect and customer base.
Outbound marketing automation: While most partners know how to do telemarketing or events, they rarely take a structured approach to nurturing their installed base or prospects who are in the mid-market and enterprise category and have a long buying cycle. This is where email marketing automation with multi-touch drip campaign capabilities transforms marketing into a process rather than an event.
Core Requirements
In order to drive both to-partner marketing activities and through-partner marketing activities, you will need a robust channel marketing automation platform with at least the following core features:
Partner lead management – This allows you to distribute leads to partners; it also allows partners to upload their own records for demand generation activities.
Campaign content management – Using this module you can build “market-through” (end-user facing) campaigns using various digital tactics and allow your partners to co-brand and launch quickly....
Rock and roll musicians, and the industry that has grown up around it, have always been perceived as trailblazers. Innovative ideas and expression have always been a big part of the development of popular music, and getting broader acceptance has been a challenge that has motivated musical acts and performers to come up with new ways of getting the word out. One important marketing method that grew out of the music industry is the use of loyal followers to help spread the word about a band or act. That’s where the concept of the “street team” came from, after all—and if you really think about it, this was one of the first true forms of channel marketing. What is a street team? In the music industry, it’s a group of fans and followers who help spread awareness of a performer or act through local and regional efforts. Corporations and major brands are now starting to pick up on the concept and develop their own “street teams” to help promote and market their own products. Let’s take a look at what makes up a street team from an operational standpoint, what makes teams successful and how channel marketers can learn from them.
Any given act might have local street teams set up in various cities across the country or even the world. Street team members are, first and foremost, advocates of the act. Their role is to go out and create brand awareness and adoption. In fact, very organized regional teams have often established guidelines and strategies, and they train or “onboard” other members in these approaches. Typically, they distribute marketing materials, which are either self-generated or provided by the performer, and those materials are sometimes co-branded. They also are likely to handle sales in a localized way—say, by running a merchandise booth at a local performance or festival. Furthermore, team members are often incentivized or compensated for their efforts and allegiance with offers of free tickets, merchandise, rewards and so on. They can even petition the act to create their own “deal,” perhaps negotiating for a local appearance at a particular venue.
Is this starting to sound familiar? Not only are street teams often quite successful as a grass-roots, localized and dynamic resource, but they also operate in ways that reflect many of the core principles that form the basis of partner or channel marketing.
So, what specific street team principles can we apply to channel marketing?
Focus on direct one-to-one customer base engagement. Regional teams or networks are local to the customer base of that geography, and they are engaging with the target audience in a more in-person and close-touch way than global vendors who do business out of central hubs. They collect feedback and audience reaction to the act or brand and use that feedback to adjust their efforts, tactics and approaches—often passing this information back up to the act themselves, or networking with other regional teams to share insights for success. Unfortunately, these same activities are not often seen in traditional corporate channel marketing or partner marketing. Partner portals and channel platforms often lack a mechanism to pass insights back up to vendor—let alone share marketing insights and success stories with other partners in the network. “Boots on the ground” engagement in various global areas is very useful in gaining valuable metrics and insight, and this tactical data can help focus and empower the collective local success of a brand. Intranetwork sharing of best practices can only help the OEM to develop a more powerful channel by providing successful methodologies as demonstrated by high-performing partners. Pull regional success up to global efforts. To elaborate on the discussion above: When local or regional paths to success have been identified, sharing with other partners to strengthen their efforts is great. But the vendor or OEM itself should pull this methodology up to analyze and adapt to the global channel marketin...
Partner marketing automation platforms have been around for some time now. In this article, we will talk about how you can drive partner performance around the world by leveraging your partner marketing automation platform. Before we get started, however, let’s take a close look at the evolution of partner marketing automation platforms over the past decade or so. With the advent of the Internet and, subsequently, the setup of extranets, starting in the early 2000s many companies began to integrate their in-house CRM software with their extranet to create partner portals. The intent behind setting up these partner portals was mainly to facilitate one-way communication—informing partners of available assets and programs that the company was launching. However, this approach presented a major challenge. Most of the content available in these portals was not customized or localized, and it had no mobile responsiveness. Also, additional applications were plugged in over a period of time to address a variety of aspects of partner relationship management. Applications like partner training, partner incentives, deal registration and more all got patched into this legacy infrastructure and created a hodge-podge workflow that resembled a patched-up quilt. This had a significant (and negative) impact on satisfaction with regard to the quality of the user experience.
Unfortunately, even now most large organizations selling through the channel have not made significant efforts to invest in their partner marketing automation platform and create a best-in-class experience for their partners. While there are plenty of point products that can be patched together and integrated into a partner portal, each and every one these applications—whether it’s partner training, partner business contracts, business planning, incentives management, marketing campaigns or sales enablement tools—has a different interface. From the partner perspective, the enormous complexity associated with this multiplicity of interfaces is a big problem. Not only do partners have to navigate through a massive amount of content to find what they’re looking for, they also face a completely different experience when moving from one application to another. While it may be understandable that a vendor would be reluctant to “rip and replace” the entire partner marketing automation platform, there are plenty of options that exist today—like those provided by ZINFI—where a vendor can lay out a roadmap and migrate their existing partner portal over to a state-of-the-art partner marketing automation platform over a period of time by turning on different modules successively.
In this article, we’ll explore the three most essential areas to focus on—ease of use, partner enablement and business analytics—as you work to upgrade your partner marketing automation platform to a next-generation level. Your platform should be able to provide an end-to-end solution that incorporates and integrates these three key areas. If you are trying to solve these challenges by cobbling together different applications, chances are you are already creating a level of complexity that will be hard to resolve because of the user experience issues we discussed earlier. If you have different applications patched up together, each user interface is different, and your partner marketing automation platform will not provide a seamless user experience from end to end. Therefore, as you begin to address the crucial issue of ease-of-use, think about putting together a roadmap and selecting a partner marketing automation vendor that provides partner relationship management, partner marketing management and partner sales enablement tools under a single umbrella.
Now let’s look more closely at each of three core elements:
Easy-to-use partner portal – To attain true ease of use you have to address three key requirements: localized interface and content, personalized content and mobile responsiveness.
All telemarketers, whether they like it or not, have entered a high-stakes game. In every exchange or interaction by phone, someone is going to come out victorious. The question really comes down to who winds up controlling the energy and the conversation. A great telemarketer tends to jump on the phone and dance in front of prospects while effortlessly navigating barriers and obstacles. While this is absolutely more natural for some than others, a few key telemarketing tips can make all the difference. Below are 10 telemarketing tips to help you take control of your conversations and win:
Have a clear goal for the call. This sounds waaay too simple, but quite honestly it is one of the most crucial of all telemarketing tips. Often, ill-conceived campaigns try to accomplish too many things or do not have a clear definition of success. While a tele-qualified lead campaign will measure success by the ability to verify information and/or the interest level of the prospect, a sales-oriented campaign will be pushing to set a sales appointment. An audience acquisition campaign will be looking to drive traffic to a specific event. All three campaigns have different measures of success. Before you ever start your campaign, you need to have a very clear idea of what measurable return on investment (ROI) looks like. Don’t sell to the gatekeeper—E-V-E-R. Repeat after me: “The gatekeeper does not care how great you, your products or your services are, and is not the decision-maker.” While you absolutely should be polite and respectful when speaking with a gatekeeper, remember that at the end of the day it does not benefit the sale to pitch to the gatekeeper. You can banter, you can dance, you can talk about the weather, you can even use a familiar tone, but the gatekeeper is going to decide two things: whether you were kind and respectful if their boss or colleague inquires, and whether or not they will connect you directly to the prospect or put you through to voicemail. When you are looking to grab your prospect’s attention, DO NOT set the primary focus of the call as a sales call. Sales is a tricky business. The odds that anyone you call for the first time will give you time to do a proper sales pitch are slim to none. At the end of the day in sales, your goal should never be about a cold, hard sell anyway. Instead, you should always be looking to match prospects with a product or service that clearly benefits them. A great telemarketing tactic is to use a phrase like, “I’m looking for a strategic partner and wondering if you might be a fit.” Remember that your first sale on any telemarketing call is to convince the prospect that they have a reason to listen. Show excitement. Often overlooked among viable telemarketing tips, excitement and passion in the voice of the caller amount to the telemarketing “X factor.” Have you ever wondered why some telemarketers can magically pass through gatekeepers and book their appointments with ease? Quite often these individuals are “bringing it all to the table” through their voice. While a caller cannot see you smile, they certainly can hear it in your voice. People can also tell the difference between those who are genuinely passionate about a product or service and those who are not. Watch your pace. This is a crazy-common mistake made by beginning telemarketers. In an effort to follow #4 of our telemarketing tips (“Show excitement!”), callers will start to speak too fast and raise their voices. The ability to control your speed shows poise, professionalism and confidence. Speaking slowly and clearly also gives a prospect time to digest what you are saying. Listen for any sign of emotion and address it. Hey, let’s face it, we are only human. Human beings can follow every sales and marketing playbook on the planet and lose a huge deal because of the prospect’s feelings or moods. If you happen to hear a prospect laugh, compliment them; if you hear them sigh,
I am about to make a bold statement: No one has gotten digital marketing right so far. No one.
Bam! Gauntlet thrown. That’s right, it has been said. Now, after you snicker and roll your eyes at me, let me lay it down in a way that might make those rolling eyes look forward again and generate some introspection. Make sure your coffee is still warm, or that you still have some of that banana muffin next to your laptop. Sit back and read, oh marketer extraordinaire.
First, let me qualify my claim by saying that my intention here is not to say that all digital marketing has failed in all instances (no, no…even a stopped clock is right twice a day). In fact, I think there have been some excellent advances in inbound and outbound marketing strategies and campaign architectures. What I mean by saying “no one has gotten it right so far” is that there IS no way to “get it right.” Despite all the digital marketing articles and books that have been written touting “10 sure-fire techniques,” “secret insights stolen from the vaults of Al Capone” and “hot tips your mama doesn’t want you to know” (most of which are redundant and harken back to the same handful of best practices), there is one universal truth. Marketing, in all shapes and forms, is about generating interest with your audience, and what is of interest for a global audience is always changing. There is no way to devise a clear, solid strategy to appeal to a goal that is always moving, shifting and redefining itself. So, if your audience—and their interest markers—are always changing, how do we market to such a chaotic landscape?
Monkeys on Typewriters
We have all heard the old theory that if you put 1,000 monkeys in front of 1,000 typewriters and have them randomly bang on the keys for 1,000 years, eventually one of them will come up with an exact rendition of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet.” This is an attempt to illustrate the “infinite monkey theorem” which states that any effort, given enough resources for enough time, will eventually hit a target goal—no matter how specific. So it is with digital marketing, at least to the casual viewer. Behind the scenes, we marketers know about the endless data analysis and metrics review sessions that go into concepting out a new campaign, and the countless hours we spend writing just the right content. Once we launch our shiny vessel out into the world, we hope it will float and bring back lots of passengers. Basing everything on past performance indicators can help us feel confident about its effectiveness, but in truth whether we wind up appearing in front of the right eyeballs at the right moment is more about luck. The daily traffic across the Internet and the characters that make up that endless parade are ever-changing and there is no way to mathematically quantify exactly what will or won’t work. The best way to compensate for this is to bank on being memorable rather than incisive. A narrow arrow may miss the target, but a unique missile will be pointed at and remembered, even if it falls to the ground. Make sure your content marketing is noticeable and widespread, and make sure it captures the attention of whoever it may land in front of in a personal and human way. This will not only help you catch the eye of your intended audience, but also increases the chances your content will prove valuable enough for someone else to repost or refer a friend to – and that might indirectly get you through to the right prospect.
The Incredible Shrinking Attention Span
In this frantic ADHD age we all live in, media and web access to instant data has… oh wait, I want a lollipop! Seriously, this plethora of saturated media has created a “fast food” culture characterized by indulgence and absorption. We are bombarded with dozens of email sales pitches every day. We are distracted by digital ad boards in restaurants and subway stations, and we consume upwards of 8 to 10 ads per screen as we browse the web. Studies have shown that, on average,
When you look at the sales landscape and the worldwide marketplace, it is obvious that things have changed A LOT over the past 10 to 20 years, particularly when you consider the impact of the Internet and the utilization of websites, social media and technology. One role in particular, the role of the inside sales representative, has changed drastically. By definition, inside sales is professional sales done remotely or virtually. But inside sales representatives are absolutely not “smile and dial” B2C single-touch telemarketers. They are generally selling larger, more complex and more expensive B2B products or services. Great inside sales representatives are socially savvy, educated individuals who understand how to build relationships and trust by utilizing proven email or phone techniques. While their pitch is typically not scripted, the path to success generally requires several touches and has changed considerably in the last two decades.
To master any game, you must continually examine the changing landscape and understand HOW it has changed. Below are five huge new developments in the landscape of inside sales that you need to understand in order to compete effectively:
You can now pre-research the target person or company. Great inside sales reps now understand a little investigative work can go a long way. With the invention of the Internet and social media, there is a lot of information you can find on companies and individuals that can help quickly warm a conversation. Three minutes of research can make all the difference in determining whether or not you open the door to a 30-minute conversation and start building a relationship with your prospect. Inside sales reps are flocking to social media. The new breed of inside sales representative understands that social media is a crucial way to stay in front of clients. Not only does social media let your buyers find out more about you, it gives you a platform to educate them about your product and service while you continue to build the relationship. Inside sales reps now know that their job is not just to provide information about their product or service—it is to refine their value proposition. Because the Internet gives potential customers vast amounts of information about the products or services they are investigating, most customers these days are already 60% of the way through the buying process before they ever speak to an inside sales rep. What does this mean for the rep? General info about your product or service is not going to be enough. A good inside sales rep is going to push to differentiate their product or service with use cases and client success stories, industry analysis, and by evaluating the competitive landscape. Collaboration solutions have opened up the playing field to selling “anytime, anywhere.” With new cloud meeting software capabilities, inside sales representatives now have a huge leg up on their past counterparts. If the need arises for a presentation, they can easily log into a meeting solution and share their presentation digitally. With the Internet, the sales agent can be in any time zone in any part of the world. Learning to leverage the full capabilities of cloud collaboration can allow the inside sales agent to provide expertise anytime, anywhere. Inside sales reps are now becoming “great facilitators.” These days in sales, there are really only a few points in a client relationship (the demo, the quote, the contract negotiation) that require an inside sales rep to “sell.” Much of the game in inside sales is to be accessible to provide expertise. If a customer needs reviews or research done, often a good inside sales person will help facilitate the sharing of information. They will also recruit colleagues as resources for discussions and expertise.
Today, good inside sales representatives can wear many hats. They can cross into being product managers, social media marketers or content gurus,
Over the past decade — and particularly over the past five years — many channel marketing automation SaaS startups have entered the marketplace with the hope of garnering the interest of channel organizations looking to drive more demand through their channel. The first-generation tools rightfully focused on a missing gap — marketing resources at the channel partner organization — and addressed the promise of channel marketing automation by providing ready-to-launch, co-branded assets and campaigns for partner organizations to use. However, even with as they began to deploy a number of marketing automation tools, partners found they still needed to perform certain activities that require marketing resources or the allocation of resources from another area. As a result, with very few exceptions, most of these deployments delivered lackluster results. Organizations had switched channel marketing automation vendors in search of a better tool or platform but failed to address the need for a major behavioral shift in the partner base. Partners are called resellers for a reason. They are not called remarketers. Most partner organizations (system integrators, VARs, resellers, franchises, agents, etc.) are resource-strapped and lack proper training, skills and marketing resources. So, despite the availability of sophisticated channel marketing automation tools, adoption of these tools has been tepid. That doesn’t mean vendors should abandon these platforms and go back to the dark ages of ZIP-file-based asset sharing. However, it is the duty of the channel marketing automation platforms to rise to the next challenge and address the core issue of sales enablement. It is fair to assume the channel will look roughly the same over the next five years as it did over the past five. Until and unless a game-changing platform suddenly appears on the horizon or some other disruption takes place, changes in the channel are likely to continue incrementally. Despite seismic shifts tied to the cloud, mobility and the digitization of buyers’ engagement, it is highly unlikely that partner organizations will suddenly end up having abundant marketing resources. Therefore, channel marketing automation platforms need to address this gaping hole that the lack of marketing resources presents and convert that challenge into an opportunity. Instead of looking at the glass as a half-empty (partners lack marketing resources), I’d suggest we look at it as a half-full (sales resources are available) and focus on enablement activities.
Most vendor organizations selling through the channel provide some mechanism for lead distribution. Whether the industry is automotive, real estate, insurance, finance, technology or pharmaceutical, chances are there is a program in place for multi-channel lead generation, capture and lead distribution. When these leads are distributed, vendors should make it a priority to ensure the partner organization is capable of closing those leads in a highly competitive environment. In reality, most leads that are distributed to partners are not properly nurtured and followed up to be closed. This testifies to a lack of training and enablement in the sales organization, and reflects a significant shortcoming in many channel marketing automation platforms that are offered today.
Once we accept this premise that there is major opportunity that can be addressed by investing in partner sales enablement, the next logical question is to ask is: What is partner sales enablement? Partner sales enablement is a critical step in Unified Channel Management. It is about developing and deploying an integrated process that guides partners through a logical sequence of steps or stages required to close transactions, from the simplest to the most complex. This means providing not only structured training but also access to the necessary sales tools at each stage of the selling process.
From a functional perspective,
As vendor organizations trying to sell through the channel deploy channel marketing automation platforms to enable their partners to drive demand from their prospect and customer base, vendors may become frustrated by the lack of adoption of these state-of-the-art tools. Why don’t more partners use channel marketing automation platforms to take advantage of the various tools and assets vendors provide? In other articles we have discussed in detail a variety of factors that may be at play in the lack of adoption among partners (see, for example, Why Partner Marketing Fails Most of The Time), but in this article we will focus on one specific solution that in many cases can solve the problem. First, let’s quickly define what a channel marketing automation platform is and list its basic components. Then we will explore why partners do not use many of these tools and why broader adoption is always a challenge. A state-of-the-art channel marketing automation platform should be able to address both inbound (e.g., search, social and web syndication) and outbound (e.g., email, telemarketing and microsite) marketing tactics. The channel marketing automation platform should also be able to provide different campaigns to different groups of partners so that only relevant campaigns are available to individual partners, depending on their profile. And finally, lead management will play a central role in driving the marketing activities forward so vendors can truly track return on investment from these integrated tactics.
The challenge, however, is this: When a vendor launches a channel marketing automation platform, after the initial excitement the adoption typically drops quite dramatically over a period of time. What are the primary reasons for such a failure and what can be done about it? To answer, let’s first identify the most common types of failure that prevent widespread adoption of a channel marketing automation platform.
Awareness – If you have a broad channel with a few thousand partners, chances are the majority of them are not aware of your channel programs and tools. So, if you are trying to deploy a channel marketing automation platform, you need to focus on driving awareness first. In order to do this you need marketing concierge capabilities that will drive integrated campaigns (search, social, email, webinars, etc.) to drive awareness among your partner base. It is always good to start with the most valuable partners (MVPs) first and then work your way down to your broader list in some sort of a logical fashion. Engagement – Driving awareness is one thing; driving engagement is another. It is essential, once your partners are aware of your channel marketing automation platform, to make sure your concierge infrastructure engages the partner through proper training. This is where the partners should not only learn how to use the tools by themselves, but also understand how to pick the right campaign for their market segment and how to drive prospect and buyer engagement. This is a very important step for the success of your channel marketing automation platform. Execution – Once you have crossed the first two major hurdles of making partners aware of how your channel marketing automation platform can help and then showing them how the platform can positively impact their sales pipeline, the key next step is to help them execute campaigns. Since partners are busy, you have to provide help on demand so they can reach out via email, chat or phone during business hours to get support, but also get support during off hours using online help and other means to educate themselves. This support needs to be available locally in the various countries where you are providing the channel marketing automation platform. Rewards – One great way to drive awareness and engagement is to celebrate success. We talk about this a lot because it is incredibly powerful. If partners cannot see how the channel marketing automation platf...
Over the past decade or so, many large organizations have deployed channel marketing automation tools involving partner relationship management (PRM) and partner marketing management (PMM). If you are currently considering whether to make such an investment, there are a few things you need to think about before you make that jump. You may have the budget, but is making an investment in channel marketing automation the right next step for your channel management team? Let’s take a few minutes and discuss what channel marketing automation is, and then we will lay out a framework for you to use to figure out whether this makes sense for you or not. Most organizations selling through the channel need to recruit, engage, enable and manage their partners. A channel marketing automation solution focuses primarily on the marketing aspects of this equation. Whether you are marketing to your partners to recruit and engage them or marketing through those partners to engage prospective buyers of your products or services, you need a set of channel marketing automation tools not only to make your marketing processes more efficient execution-wise, but also to provide the business intelligence that will help you understand what is working and what is not. That’s the basic premise for considering a channel marketing automation platform.
A typical channel marketing automation platform will have several integrated modules designed for you to run campaigns to and through your partner base. These modules are:
Lead management: You should be able to upload a set of records—whether partner records or end-user records—to distribute via your partner network to drive campaign execution and closure using lead management tools. Search and social marketing: While these are two independent sets of modules, you will need core capabilities in these areas to truly drive awareness of your target audience. Your channel marketing automation platform should start with these search tools as the core inbound marketing tactics. Email marketing: Email marketing tools should allow you to run multi-touch email marketing campaigns to and through your partner base to engage your target audience with compelling content. Microsite marketing: Chances are you sell a whole bunch of products and have multiple channel programs. It is challenging to promote all of these programs at the same time with the same level of intensity. If your channel marketing automation platform comes with microsite or landing page marketing capabilities, then you should be able to set these up on the fly and drive engagement using the email marketing engine that I talked about earlier. Event marketing: Partner recruitment efforts rely heavily on road shows and webinars. If you are trying to recruit existing partners to new programs or new partners to the company, you need a robust event marketing platform. A proper channel marketing automation platform should be able to provide that to your channel team. Web syndication: If you are trying to make sure your product and solution showcases are extended beyond your own website, then you need to think about distributing that content via a partner network. This is where web syndication becomes a very important element of your channel marketing automation platform. Intelligence & reporting: Knowing which specific parts of your marketing programs and activities are actually driving results is critical for optimizing those programs and activities to get a better return on your channel marketing investment. Your channel marketing automation platform must be able to provide a robust analytical engine to provide business intelligence and reporting.
Now that we have outlined the core features that a state-of-the-art channel marketing automation platform must have, the next step is to understand the benefits of such a platform. (Once we have discussed the benefits, we will explore whether investment in a platform fits in with your own channel...
Over the past decade or so, many companies selling to the channel have invested in some sort of marketing automation tool or platform for their channel activities. More recently, over the last five years or so, many of these vendors have come to realize that a direct marketing automation platform doesn’t work that well for a multi-tenant, channel-based marketing infrastructure. As a result of that, several large organizations—especially in the technology space—have begun to invest in channel marketing automation infrastructure. Most first-generation channel marketing automation platforms had some form of email tool, a web syndication tool and some basic event capabilities. However, buyers have moved online rapidly, and the ability to deploy a complete integrated set of tactics has become absolutely essential for any channel marketing automation platform to be successful. The next-generation platform—such as ZINFI’s partner marketing management platform—provides a core set of capabilities that not only make it possible to integrate diverse marketing tactics like email, events, search, social media and so on, but also bring in other elements to make the deployment and adoption of the channel marketing automation platform more successful. In this article, we will explore five fundamental capabilities you need in your channel marketing automation platform
Partner profiling – You have to be able to dynamically create and manage your partner tier information. Many vendors tend to upload static partner tier information—e.g., platinum, gold or silver. But the partner base is dynamic. If you have a few hundred or perhaps even thousands of partners, managing the partner tier on a dynamic basis becomes very difficult. Therefore, you need to make sure that your channel marketing automation platform has partner profiling management capabilities. This is very important, especially as you try to provide personalized content—which we will elaborate on in the next sections below. Campaign library – Another essential element to ensure partners adopt and use your channel automation marketing platform is a preloaded campaign library that provides personalized content. This is an area where you need to tap in to the capabilities of a good partner profile manager. You may have hundreds or thousands of partners, but not every partner should have access to all of the campaigns in your library. Instead, you need to have the ability to tag campaigns by partner type or partner profile. The campaign library should not only be localized (by geography) but also personalized (by partner tier or type).We know from market research that 40% of buyers today go online to perform searches before the buy. Because of that, your channel marketing automation platform needs to provide your partners with a fully integrated set of inbound and outbound tactics like search, social, email, event, syndication and collateral co-branding. These are foundational capabilities that every campaign library should offer so that partners can run campaigns that are relevant to their unique requirements, and do so easily. Lead management and deal registration – As partners run campaigns, they need to be able to upload a list, put it through various cycles of the process, register a deal, and inform the vendor so they can get it approved and protected. In many cases, when a partner closes on a deal they may also be eligible for rewards and rebates—an extension of the lead management and deal registration capability. But your channel marketing automation platform needs to have—at minimum—a basic lead management and distribution capability. In addition to making it easy for partners to upload lists and run campaigns, you may also want to distribute leads to your partner base. This is where granular partner profiling and list management capabilities come into play. You need to be able to group and partition partners by various types and competencies; not all leads will be distri...
If 2015 was known as “The Year of the Video”, 2016 has also delivered consistently on that promise. Virtually every social media network is pouring money into their video capabilities. In social marketing, videos are being used to create interest, raise brand awareness, generate leads and spark online engagement. Companies everywhere are flocking to video in social marketing, whether it’s on YouTube or Facebook or Vine or Instagram or wherever. And while it seems obvious that video will eventually become a part of our mandatory marketing repertoires, the question burning for most is when and how we make the jump to video marketing. Below are 10 ways to know if you are ready for video:
You have the means (both time and money) to publish videos regularly on a schedule. An important thing to remember about social marketing is that it takes time to build an audience. To build a brand, raise awareness and spark online engagement, you have to be willing to show up in the same place regularly. In the case of video, you need to consistently deliver new material and your audience needs to get used to consuming their information in a new way. If you set out to do video, the best recommendation is to start small and deliver consistently. Once you master that schedule you can get even more aggressive. You have a regular following on various social media channels. So let’s say you take the time and money to make videos on a regular schedule… then what? If you do not already have a following on different social media channels, the first suggestion would be to go win an audience, channel by channel. As you get involved in social marketing in different channels, you will begin to understand the culture of each channel and learn the do’s and don’ts before you turn to video. You also should write comments and follow others in each network. Video will help you acquire an audience, but it isn’t a magic solution; it probably makes more sense after you’ve already built an audience in a particular network. Winning in social marketing is a marathon, not a sprint. You have customers who you can interview or your sales associates have industry stories to tell. One of the best social marketing rules, particularly in video, is that you should not be the only one talking about your brand. Before you journey to video, think about your customers and your sales associates as voices that can help you tell your brand’s story. Whether an associate offers industry expertise or a customer offers a heartfelt testimonial, video will always have more impact when you recruit the help of others. You can speak frankly and have a plan for emotional connection. The worst mistake in video is thinking only about product, product, product. The immediacy of video gives you the ability to bring social marketing to a whole new level with humor and emotion. In television there is an expression, “Make me laugh, make me cry.” While you may not want to go that far when you are just getting started, presenting a “human” story about your brand or product that touches viewers’ emotions will help you make the most of the medium. If you miss the mark, viewers will just tune you out. You have messages in mind that you can communicate quickly. In social marketing, a video viewer will decide within seconds if they are open to hearing your message. Video can be particularly brutal because the viewer can simply opt to shut down the video or stop loading it. If you cannot come up with brand-appropriate ideas for micro videos (remember, sites like Instagram only allow 3 to 15 seconds at most) you might want to rethink the decision to invest in video. You have set keywords to optimize your content and have researched video SEO. There are tricks with every form of media, but video absolutely has its own set up rules. Among the tricks in social marketing that you need to consider are uploading to each individual network, and learning to tag your video to make it searchable.
It is no secret that content is still king in the world of digital marketing. There is absolutely no way to get around the need for content to boost search engine optimization (SEO) over the long haul. Everyone is trying to get attention for their products and brand by leveraging SEO strategies and tactics. The name of the game is to improve your website’s page ranking by driving visitors to your site. Digital marketers know they can boost SEO through paid banner ads and keywords, but unlike content, these are short-term wins. A paid SEO campaign only lasts as long as you pay for it. Content, on the other hand, has teeth and staying power. A unique article with strategic keywords can create organic SEO that lasts as long as it is posted on your website. Great digital marketing executives are quickly learning that there is really no way to escape the “content war.” Not only do you have to continually develop and distribute content just to stay in front of your audience, but the content you create also needs to be compelling and relevant to your target audience. To this end, it’s important to be up to date on industry trends and developments, and write compellingly about them. It is equally important to create a coherent digital marketing content strategy. Here are 10 strategic steps you can take to engage in—and win—the digital marketing content war:
Grab a set of keywords that are relevant to your target audience and use them as often as possible across your website and in published content. Gone are the days that digital marketers write articles just for the sake of producing content. The new game is to leverage keywords that potential prospects may use to search for products or services like yours and distribute those keywords strategically throughout your content. Post provocative digital marketing content that is targeted to make decision makers THINK. These days, business decision makers prefer to get information from content rather than advertisements. You can no longer win simply by advertising on a two-dimensional platform. As social communities grow, so does social selling. Industry leaders and decision makers are responsive to digital marketers who approach selling in an educational and conversational way. Use your digital marketing content to push brand awareness, presence and reputation. The benefit of one article extends well beyond the content and keywords on your website. As your content library grows, you will begin to catch the attention of potential customers as they search for information. This effect will reinforce perceptions of your company as an industry thought leader. Push digital marketing content that supports major events or announcements to regularly stay in front of your prospects on a schedule, and create how-to and self-help documentation for products and services. While diversity of content is important, content should always be created with a specific purpose in mind—to gain attention at a strategic moment, for example, or to deepen a prospect’s understanding of specific offerings or solutions. Encourage and reward “likes” and “shares” on social media. Content sharing on social media is the new form of word-of-mouth (WOM) advertising. Now more than ever, people look to their friends for advice and recommendations. End users who share content are your most reliable messengers when it comes to referring products and services. Leverage your internally produced content to save money. Why not benefit from lower marketing costs? When you use internal staff to develop content, it helps them gain confidence and expertise. Content marketing requires some savviness, but can it be done by multiple employees and is typically much, much cheaper than a new advertising campaign. Not only will you save money in the creation of content, you will also create a long-term ROI. Send your content to existing customers as a part of your digital marketing customer retention program.
Email marketing is still a very effective method of lead generation, even though other methods like social engagement, content marketing through thought leadership and group dialoguing on networking sites are rapidly gaining momentum. The tried-and-true solution of email is still about as personal as you can get for a first-time touch. But this is not “spray and pray”…one template will not work for everyone! Not everyone likes pizza, so make sure you also have a hamburger or grilled cheese handy. When developing a cold email template, keep in mind that you are often going to create a set of them—to be used for various audiences or approaches—in order to add some custom touches and answer important questions. Most marketing automation platforms and solutions these days have emailing tools that allow you to segment your mailing list and deliver different versions of your email marketing template(s) based on audience type. Here are 5 tips, in the form of questions that your recipient might ask themselves (and that you should anticipate!) when you create your cold email template(s):
Are you talking to me?
Hang on, this is not Robert De Niro threatening you. No need to start fearing taxi drivers. What this question implies is that the recipient of your email might begin to read your email and wonder who you are talking to. Are you talking in third person, in a general “scripted” sort of way (like a generic, operational-type sales pitch), or are you actually speaking to your target reader in a personal and connected way? The best emails come across as conversational. Speak in first person, refer to yourself in a way that emphasizes your humanness, and talk about what needs or solutions might be personal to your audience. You can do this in a cold email template by personalizing the speech, using your marketing automation platform to insert the recipient’s name and job title, and customizing the email content to the recipient’s industry. One template won’t cover all titles in all industries; if you segment your mailing list by job title or industry, you can craft a handful of templates that will customize to your audience much more effectively.
Why should I care?
The only reason someone would open your email is if the subject line speaks to their interest, and the only reason they would respond to the call-to-action (CTA) or engagement promoted in it is if they see it as a solution that provides them some sort of business value. Even if you offer a value pitch that may benefit recipients at some point in the future, the fact that you are in their mailbox means that they are currently looking at you from within an immediate and categorical reference point. People scan emails and always have their finger on the delete button. You have to speak powerfully, and you have to speak to the “right now.” You might have the best BAND-AIDs in the world that are waterproof up to 300 meters deep and will adhere even during a gorilla attack…but I have little use for them unless I have a cut at that exact moment. Yes, people do look for valuable products and services that they think they might need down the line, but at best they’ll make a note of items that come across their radar for later research when the need arises. If your cold email template does not speak to them right now, you lose the lion’s share of its potential power and urgency and often find yourself in the trash folder.
Am I taking a risk here?
Okay, let’s say you got them to open and now they are actually reading your email. Bravo! Give this marketer a chocolate bar. At this point they have seen some value in what you are providing, but the next question that comes up is if it is worth the risk of going down the rabbit hole and beginning a conversation with you. What are the inherent benefits of your solution? How does that solution fit into the recipient’s current growth or revenue needs? What is the possible downside of engaging with you?
Over the past few years there has been a lot of excitement about partner relationship management (PRM) process development and automation. However, this segment hasn’t really grown as fast as the marketing automation platform (MAP) or customer relationship management (CRM) segments. What is holding back the growth in deployment of partner relationship management (PRM) automation? Here are some key factors that present barriers to deployment and are frequent causes of failure:
Short-term focus. Most channel organizations are busy managing activities by the quarter, and typically very few dollars are invested in mapping channel processes that require redesign and redevelopment to build out a state-of-the-art partner relationship management (PRM) infrastructure. The channel is a great way to go to market, but when the market changes (as it inevitably does) and organizations fail to remap their channel infrastructure accordingly, they struggle to stay relevant. We have seen this repeatedly over the years across multiple Fortune 1000 customers. Those who are adaptive and constantly redesigning their channel—not just quarterly, but whenever necessary and in anticipation of opportunities—tend to outperform those who are chasing market evolution. Inadequate resources. It is one thing to remap a go-to-market model—e.g., by adding an OEM channel to sell via OEMs or adding franchises to increase reach—but without significant investment and patience these activities really doesn’t produce results. As a result, most deployments of partner relationship management (PRM) automation tend to be underfunded and underdeveloped. This leads to frustration within the channel sales and support organization and, of course, a poor partner experience. Lack of a unified approach. The channel is a complex way to go to market. While it’s true that having a robust channel can not only increase reach but also provide a huge competitive edge, it takes time to develop relationships and competencies to truly be a channel leader. This is where a unified approach to partner relationship management (PRM) comes in. Organizations need to think carefully about how to set up partner onboarding, training, enablement and management by deploying end-to-end process steps, most of which should be fully automated to reduce variability and cost of operations. Having a unified approach also increases the self-service nature of the engagement, which not only reduces operating costs but also significantly increases partner satisfaction. Homegrown automation. Most organizations today have some way to automate their partner relationship management (PRM) activities. Too often, however, automation is achieved by using SharePoint or some other portal as a primary interface with a document library, deal registration and other homegrown applications tied to partner training, incentives management and so on. The total cost of ownership (TCO) for patchwork arrangements like these tends to be significantly higher than for the purpose-built partner relationship management (PRM) automation platforms like ZINFI and others provide today. Lack of simplification. We have talked about the importance of simplicity and ease of use in many previous articles. Too often a channel program gets bloated with archaic partner recruitment policies, training, incentives and demand generation programs. Premier channel organizations systematically revamp their partner relationship management (PRM) initiatives to eliminate redundant and confusing programs and process steps. This is essential for keeping partner relationship management (PRM) fresh and relevant to the partner base. Keeping things simple also reduces costs and increases transaction velocities substantially.
In summary, a thoughtful approach with a passion for continuous improvement can keep your partner relationship management (PRM) program fresh and relevant to the partner base. However,
Over the past couple of decades, two major channel management automation platforms have attracted widespread attention: partner relationship management (PRM) automation and partner marketing management (PMM) automation. However, the most important area in channel automation—an area that has been neglected and remains a major opportunity—is partner sales enablement or partner sales management. If you are considering an investment in channel automation, you should look at partner sales enablement automation first. Why? It’s simple: If you can make your current reseller even 10% more productive (selling more at the same channel investment rate), the result will be a huge impact on both your top and bottom lines—and it can happen almost instantly. Before we delve into the details, let’s very briefly discuss partner sales enablement and how you can make this happen, either through the infrastructure you have today or by investing in a partner sales enablement automation platform. Partner sales enablement has two core points of focus: 1) contextual sales training and enablement (i.e., during the selling process), which leverages the relative wealth of sales resources vs. technical or marketing resources; and 2) buyer engagement tracking and measurement to assess how the end buyer is engaged in the sales process. In addition to this two core areas of focus, your partner sales enablement program or platform should have other core capabilities such as a content management system (CMS) for you to upload and set up training materials, sales slicks, price lists, battle cards and other tools. But in the end, the primary focus of partner sales enablement is driving sales productivity by using all of the content and resources you have today, making those resources available when the sales rep needs it, and gaining insight into the interaction and engagement with the end buyer. Why does all of this matter? Because of the following reasons:
Sales people are overwhelmed. Most sales people have to deal with half a dozen product lines, if not more. With the rate of changes that are happening in the market place, it is almost impossible for them to be fully conversant with every product or service they are selling. All sales people are not created equal. While many great sales people are highly organized and can absorb a lot of complex content, they are not all equally capable. Therefore, making relevant content available for them to learn from as a part of the sales process reduces the overload. It also makes them better learners in the long run. Sales people should be treated as consumers of content. Product marketing tends to create volumes of materials and content, but organizations rarely understand what is actually effective or not. When they have a system that allows content delivery in stages, as well as precise tracking of consumption patterns, product marketers can become much more effective in creating useful content Sales people should be able to track engagement. It is not unusual in the B2B selling process for buyers to disappear, leaving sales people wondering whether they did something wrong or whether the buyer simply lost interest. Disappearing buyers are not necessarily a reflection of the inability of a sales person to make the buyer confident. B2B selling is complex, and at times the decision process halts or slows down internally due to a variety of reasons. That’s why it’s so important for the sales person to be able to track interactions and outcomes in detail and gain a more systematic and nuanced understanding of what’s working and what isn’t. Selling is a competitive sport. An effective partner sales enablement platform can offer leader boards, gamification, rewards alignment, and other motivators to create a highly competitive—yet sharing—environment. Gone are the days where sales people are expected to smile, dial and close. Today most B2B sales people are assumed to be sales or solution consultants,
Recently I saw a bumper sticker on a slow-moving vehicle on the highway that read, “I am not in your HURRY!” While I respect the slower-paced lifestyle of this driver, it made me think of making another bumper sticker: “I am not in your LAGTIME.” It’s all about perspective. I am not looking to rush you, so please move out of my way. To get respect, you have to give respect. Each of us has our own intentions and behavioral choices, and we need to see things from each other’s perspective in order to communicate and get the proper results. This is a critical principle to keep in mind as a marketer as you consider your B2B lead generation efforts. When preparing your marketing approach to B2B demand or lead generation, whether in channel marketing or any marketing area, remember that you are trying to create awareness and interest based not only on the merits of your product or service, but also on how your prospect might perceive the product or service from their own value set. It’s also important to keep in mind that you are rarely trying to appeal to an individual, but instead are trying to capture the interest of a team. This team typically consists of several decision-makers, so you have to think of how to get through collectively—on their level, and in a way that helps them achieve their goals. Here are 5 questions to answer when devising a lead generation strategy that will help you personalize and capture your target customer’s interest:
Who will consider my product/service, and how does it fit into the larger scheme of their company?
As I mentioned above, B2B lead generation campaigns often have to appeal to a team rather than an individual. So it is important to think of the target team as a facet of the larger corporate picture—position your product/service as a benefit that has helped similar teams achieve departmental goals that align with what your prospects might be looking for when searching for solutions similar to yours.
How can my marketing come across as solution rather than a sales pitch?
It’s understood that you might want to jump right out there and have your B2B lead generation campaigns start extolling the amazing features and results that using your product/service can bring to any client, but this self-proclaimed praise might not speak to the needs of your potential customer. Of course, you can’t get their attention and have them consider your company as a vendor unless they hear about the wonderful things you can bring to them—but the primary message should be positioned to emphasize how useful your SOLUTION has been for other clients, not how great your PRODUCT is. Your toast-making and butter-churning modules may be the most innovative in the industry, but your story should focus on how your toast and butter is the superior fit for your customer’s breakfast buffet and has helped it become the most successful one in town.
What influences might be relevant to the prospecting process of my customer?
The influential factors that feed into a company’s or team’s decision to engage with a vendor are both internal and external. Of course, the final decision to reach out to a provider will likely be made by a key individual, but the data and research that informs the decision is often the result of a group effort. Crowd-sourcing is a common approach to business research these days, so positive external opinions, feedback and reviews are important. Your marketing must speak to your audience in both direct and indirect ways. What the public thinks of your company will get back to and sway your prospects’ interest level. Make sure that your B2B lead generation marketing has a two-pronged approach: a) specific beneficial solution messaging that will appeal to your customer and b) widespread corporate awareness and thought leadership that will educate the public about the position and value of your company.
How can I get my customer(s) to see my product/service as an investment?
A best-of-breed partner relationship management platform should address the management of the partner lifecycle in a highly efficient and effective way. The five core elements are partner recruitment, partner onboarding, partner training, partner marketing and partner incentives management. In addition to addressing these five core elements individually, a best-of-breed partner relationship management platform should also be able to unify the lifecycle management across these five core stages. Let’s take a look at these core elements and see how they fit together.
Partner Recruitment - I’ll begin with partner recruitment. In this phase, a company needs to be able to upload a list of prospective partners collected from various sources or set up a search and social campaign to drive traffic, via both inbound and outbound methods, to a destination microsite. On this microsite, the company needs to articulate in a very clear way why a potential channel partner should consider joining the company’s program. As a part of this process, the company may also hire outsourced telemarketing or event marketing, or an inside sales team may be engaged to reach out to the targeted list of partners and engage in dialogue to get them excited about various aspects of the company’s partner program. This process of recruitment can last anywhere between a couple of months and several years, depending on the company’s overall channel strategy. Often, large organizations end up acquiring smaller entities, which creates the need to re-recruit existing partners for new product categories. Here’s the bottom line: A partner relationship management platform should be able to provide an integrated set of outreach components—e.g., microsite, events—that inbound and outbound marketing teams can use to engage and excite potential partners and motivate them to join the partner program.
Partner Onboarding - Once a set of partners have signed up for an existing channel program, the next step is to provide a high-quality experience to the partner base related to partner onboarding. During this phase, partners will need to sign a contract with the company based on the products and categories they will carry. They will also very likely have to put together a business plan, depending on what type of partner they are and the goals they are pursuing. The next step would be to make sure they can track their progress as they move through onboarding and initial training stages. The vendor who has recruited the partners should also be able to track the status of partners at various stages. Automating all of these onboarding steps is critical to providing a high-quality experience from the very beginning as partners begin to engage with the vendor. A state-of-the-art partner relationship management platform should address this need clearly and comprehensively.
Partner Training - The third core element of the partner lifecycle is partner training. This applies both to new partners and existing partners. Very likely, a company with a robust channel program is constantly introducing new programs, new products, new offers and new pricing strategies. Accordingly, channel partners need to be continuously trained on various aspects of the changes a company is making to its channel program. This is where a learning management system (LMS) can play a huge role. A best-of-breed partner relationship management platform should provide modules for course creation, course management, learning path management and certification management. Training is a very important aspect of partner relationship management. A highly trained partner also tends to be a highly satisfied and successful partner. Therefore, it is critical to be able to create various training programs on a regular basis. It’s also critical to use other integrated marketing tools like search, social, events, microsites and so on to promote training programs and keep partners engaged in various aspects of traini...
Channel management is complex. We have explored this complexity from a variety of perspectives in previous articles. However, let’s not forget that with the right channel management solutions you can tame the complexity and truly unleash the power of the channel. That’s exciting. When you begin thinking about various types of channel marketing solutions, it’s helpful to think in terms of two key categories: the channel marketing automation platform you will deploy and the channel marketing services you will require. Together, these two components should be designed to work together to provide an integrated lifecycle management approach to channel marketing. In this article we will explore the core components of channel marketing solutions that you should consider to be successful. So let’s begin with channel marketing automation. How does it fit in with the overall channel marketing solution? Lifecycle management in channel marketing really needs to address several distinct components: partner recruitment, partner training, partner enablement and partner management, which focuses primarily on incentives management. If your organization is operating on a worldwide basis, the complexities involved in these four lifecycle stages—recruitment, training, enablement and management—require that you leverage an automation platform that can replicate your core processes across multiple countries without worrying about having to train various team members in multiple countries at various times on the same topics, issues and capabilities. A channel marketing automation platform basically automates core workflow in these four areas and will doubtless be an integral part of the overall channel marketing solution you need. An effective channel marketing automation platform can also reduce your operating costs substantially. When you are trying to put together a set of channel marketing solutions that really address your core channel growth and productivity needs, keep in mind that before you select and deploy a state-of-the-art channel marketing automation platform you must have your core channel programs properly defined and structured, and you must have documentation available so you can automate each of the four lifecycle stages we have identified earlier. Make sure you have a clear view of the approach and the policies you want to apply to recruiting partners, training them, enabling them through integrated marketing tools and tactics, and managing them by providing incentives and aligning those incentives with partner performance. Now let’s talk about how the channel marketing services component fits in to your overall channel marketing solution set. The basic question here is: What are you going to insource and what are you going to outsource? When you consider insourcing a specific set of channel marketing services for your channel marketing solution kit, you need to determine what your overall goals are—for the year, or preferably for the next three years. Are you primarily trying to expand your reach? You’ll require many more partners to accomplish that, and therefore you’ll need to take steps to drive recruitment. Do you already have a rich partner base across multiple countries? You may need to do a better job of making them aware of the latest products and services you’ve rolled out so they will be better capable of selling them. Do you want to drive performance through incentives? You’ll need specific programs to provide those incentives like market development funds, rewards, rebates and the like. Here’s where you have to carefully consider what elements of your channel marketing solution make the most sense to address internally, and what elements you would be better off outsourcing to marketing agencies. For example, when it comes to partner recruitment, if you are undertaking a specific country-level effort, you may be better off outsourcing the entire component to a reputable agency that can drive the recruitment campaig...
Let’s begin this discussion by taking a stab at defining through-channel marketing automation (TCMA). What does it really mean? Basically, it’s about enabling channel partners to generate leads by using marketing assets and a set of marketing tools provided by a vendor or company. The entire purpose of through-channel marketing automation is to enable partners to create brand presence by leveraging the vendor brand and associating it with their own brand, and then driving demand for a set of solutions that include offerings from the vendor. For a through-channel marketing automation (TCMA) platform to be successful, it must have a core set of application modules. In this article, we’ll take a look at what each of those application modules must be able to do and how they can help you automate processes to drive profitable growth at both the local and the global level. Before you can begin to market through partners and make them aware of the campaigns and assets and tools are available, you need to be able to set up a partner-facing website. That’s where content management comes in. The website or portal needs to have relevant, up-to-date content, and your team should be able to dynamically manage those web pages facing the partner from a web content management perspective. Content management and group & user management go hand-in-hand. Once you have created content for users to access, your through-channel marketing automation (TCMA) platform will need to be able to assign groups and users different levels of access depending on the role of those groups and users. Different types of partners will have access to different kinds of content, depending on who they are. You may have global channel marketing people in your own organization who need to access certain parts of the platform relevant to their role, and global sales or marketing people who need access to content uploads and modules for tracking results. You may have agencies at both the global and the local level who need access rights so they can go in directly and upload content. You will also need operational levels of access, whether it’s for channel account managers, partner business managers or solution managers, or for some other job function where people are managing partner entities, such as a dealer network or reseller network, system integrators, VARs, etc. All of these people need to have access to the platform, and you need to be able to define their access rights at various user levels that specify things like which web pages, which integrated tools and which campaigns they can the access. This is complex stuff, and a good automated tool will help you manage the process much more efficiently. Partner profile management capabilities should address the challenge of setting up dynamic parameters like partner size and specialty, number of technicians, number of salespeople allocated to a product, total number of products sold by a specific partner over the past 12 months, and so on—establishing a set of parameters that can be used to define a partner’s medallion status, such as platinum, gold, silver, bronze and so on. The profile management module of your through-channel marketing automation (TCMA) platform will be critical in ensuring you can dynamically create and manage these groups and assign them to specific sets of content within the portal, as well as the campaigns and other modules that are appropriate for them to access. Once you’ve taken care of content management, group & user management and partner profile management, you can now focus on setting up lead-generation tools. First among these are digital assets for co-branding. These may include print assets, email templates, event templates, etc. These are assets that partners can co-brand, customize and download for use in an offline system. If you have large partners, chances are they have marketing automation tools like Eloqua, Marketo and ExactTarget,
What is channel marketing automation? It’s about automating core channel marketing process steps that allow vendors to recruit, onboard, train, enable and manage their partner network or channel network on a worldwide basis. “Partner” refers to resellers, systems integrators, value-added resellers (VARs) and others in the technology or manufacturing channel, or dealers, agents and other types of partners in other industry segments. With the advent of SaaS-based automation software, it is now quite easy to deploy worldwide channel marketing automation in a step-by-step manner. However, to be successful in this effort companies need to think through the core areas they want to focus on first, and then deploy the channel marketing automation tools sequentially. The most logical way to begin is to align the automation needs with the business needs of the organization. But before we talk about that alignment, let’s take a step back and take a look at the overall partner lifecycle management, which is independent of channel maturity, but highly dependent on the company’s ability to drive sales through a channel network. Partner lifecycle management has five basic steps: partner recruitment, partner onboarding, partner training, partner enablement (marketing and sales) and partner management. Let’s go through these areas step-by-step and see how channel marketing automation can help in each area.
Partner recruitment. With partner recruitment, it’s essential to think about the process—whether you are recruiting resellers, agents or dealers who are reselling or distributing products from a vendor—as something similar to the process of acquiring new customers. In today’s digital marketing environment, recruitment needs to happen using both inbound and outbound marketing techniques. Therefore, channel marketing automation needs to address the core process steps related to search, social media and other online digital marketing, including email and events.
Partner onboarding. Once partners have been recruited, they need to go through a set of core steps, a process that also requires automation. Channel marketing automation software should be able guide partners through these steps. The first step in partner onboarding is signing onto business contracts. The partner must agree to the terms and conditions related to the channel program. The next step focuses on putting together business plans so the partner can communicate to the vendor how they will sell, market and support the vendor’s product or solution. The third onboarding step consists of partner training, and the final step relates to incentives, so that when partners are fully trained in the sales, marketing and technical areas, they can learn about the channel marketing incentives that are available, such as market development funds, rewards and rebates.
Partner training. Almost every vendor today involved in B2C or B2B marketing provides enormous amounts of material that channel partners need to go through to learn how to market, sell and provide support for the products and services they are selling. A channel marketing automation platform should be able to provide a complete learning management system with both training and certification management modules integrated into the system.
Partner enablement. There are two core dimensions here that channel marketing automation needs to address: 1) marketing—driving demand and creating brand awareness, and 2) selling—following up on leads and closing them. Whether we are talking about in-store sales in the B2C environment or face-to-face closing in B2B sales, partners need enablement tools in both their marketing and their sales efforts in order to consistently drive demand and close sales. The right channel marketing automation platform can have a significant impact on these efforts.
Partner management. This is probably the most important area of channel marketing automation.
Inbound marketing is all about bringing in leads. Right? The whole purpose is to drive demand and begin communication with prospective buyers of your product(s) or services(s). In discussions of inbound marketing best practices, a lot of attention and strategy is aimed at driving more traffic to your website. Get more outreach, appeal to a broader audience and get the right people to come to you! Everybody wants to get more traffic to their content and website, but a critical focus that is often overlooked is converting those people once they DO come to you. What is the point of opening the flood gates and having crowds of people stand in your lobby if all they do is mill around and refuse to enter your offices and talk to you? The goal of lead generation is conversion—getting people to take action and reach out to you. Driving loads of new visitors via inbound marketing is necessary, but the most important prospects are those who are already on your site! So, if you think of new traffic as your gold currency, then the people currently browsing the website are your diamonds. I would much rather see my “unique visitors” statistics stay consistent and watch as my form fills and conversion ratios skyrocket than see daily traffic numbers go up even as nobody takes action on the site. How can we increase user engagement? How can website conversion be factored into inbound marketing? Industry averages suggest that a conversion ratio of 5% to 10% is a good target goal. If your average visitor-to-prospect ratio is below that, things need to change. Let’s take a look at some tips to for getting—and keeping—a dialogue going between you and your potential buyers or clients: Make sure your messaging speaks to the needs of the client. First impressions are everything. Data has shown that your website has 10 seconds or less to capture a visitor’s attention before they consider leaving. In the world of inbound marketing, there is so much syndicated content and so many social media and website properties out there, the average person floats through a sea of data and imagery every day. As a result, your audience’s attention span and their tolerance for processing information is extremely limited. Getting through in seconds with the right message that speaks to users’ needs and addresses their questions is imperative:
Use “human speak.” Avoid getting too technical with public pages. It is fine to relay the inner workings of your technology product or software and provide IT or engineering details, but save all that for the inner pages where more technically minded people will navigate to. Keep the main pages of the website on a conversational level, relaying use cases and easy-to-understand reasoning and marketing language. Think of the scenario of the average consumer buying a new car: Talk about the driving experience, not the schematic of the engine. If your messaging and written content can be quickly understood and feels like the beginning of a conversation, prospects will be more likely to continue poking around. Tell users how you can make their life better. Focus on the consumer benefits of your offering; don’t focus solely on product features or service processes. Tell website visitors WHAT your offerings can do for them instead of focusing on HOW you do it. People have an inherent need to solve their problems. In the B2B environment, the customer’s goal is to find the vendor—whether through outbound or inbound marketing campaigns—that will solve a pain point or increase profitability. If you can capture attention right away by having website content that speaks clearly to the benefits of your product or service, you will make prospects comfortable and instill confidence. No matter how forcefully you extoll the amazing and innovative ways your product is built and the revolutionary features it has, all that will be lost on someone if they can’t quickly and easily understand the results they are going to achieve using it.
We‘ve already explored in multiple earlier articles the complexity of channel management. It is even more complex for companies that are selling globally, because there is tremendous variability in requirements and parameters from region to region. We’ve also written about how global market requirements can have a tremendous impact on channel policies and programs, and on how a company goes to market. In this article we will explore how a unified approach to channel management can greatly improve channel performance. Before we delve into the solutions, however, let’s talk a bit about the sources of complexity in channel management, particularly on in the global context. First of all, a channel management infrastructure needs to account for different types of partners—whether they are alliance partners, go-to-market partners, solutions and services partners, or training partners—and how they form different parts of the ecosystem. Channel management needs to address the unique requirements of these different partner types. It also needs to take into variations in market and industry requirements, which depends in part on whether the vendor operates in a business-to-business (B2B) or a business-to-consumer (B2C) environment. We also know that markets vary considerably by country. For example banking, finance and insurance are industries that are highly variable by geography, depending on the maturity of the country as well as local laws. Similar dynamics are at play in healthcare, education, government and other verticals in the B2B space. When a vendor is selling to consumers, channel management tends to be a bit more horizontal across countries and regions. However, there are big differences between developed countries and developing countries in terms of how B2C channels are managed. Finally, the constant changes and evolution in products, services and solutions introduce still more complexities for channel management. For example, when a specific product like shampoo is rolled out globally, requiring significant localization of marketing and messaging, the approach is going to differ substantially from the approach required for high-tech products like manufacturing devices or network components or software, which are sold to businesses and marketed in a way that typically requires less localization. Differences like these have an impact on the level of information that needs to flow through the channel and the complexity of managing the channel as you pursue channel marketing goals and initiatives. So, I hope you can begin to see that one of the most important steps in establishing a unified approach to channel management is to take a broad, longer-term view. “Rome was not built in a day” may be a cliché, but it expresses a particularly apt principle for channel management. To be truly successful in channel management, you need to have an overarching business strategy in place. One of the first things a company needs to decide is whether they are going to market directly to end users or via the channel. Most companies that sell consumer products market, by default, through some sort of distributor network. But even then they need to decide whether they are going to sell through franchises (e.g., Burger King or McDonald’s) or sell directly through captive outlets (e.g., Starbucks). The same kinds of considerations apply when selling complex solutions through the channel, especially in the technology segment. The direct vs. channel discussion needs to be clear and upfront from the beginning, and then the strategy needs to be communicated repeatedly to the channel partners. Otherwise, they may feel their business is being undercut by the company. This is why, for example, high-value products like the Apple products are generally sold directly to consumers through Apple retail stores. When they are sold through channel partners the products are rarely discounted to eliminate any pricing conflict or share-shifting.
Each of us knows what it feels like to receive a cold call and know that the caller is reading questions from a uninspired script. While from a process standpoint it makes sense to have a standardized example of what you expect from your callers, for maximum effectiveness we should always be looking for new ways to innovate and improve cold calling scripts. What many people fail to realize, however, is that there is a key ingredient most companies completely overlook when writing a cold calling script. Over and over again, we have heard the expression, “People follow other people,” but that statement is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to sales and marketing techniques. The very best salespeople and marketers understand the implications of the statement and how to apply that knowledge, which is that people will instinctively be attracted to and follow the values of other people. While it may not be feasible for a company looking to do telemarketing to allow callers to go completely off-script, it is absolutely feasible and effective to create a short bullet-pointed list of the values they want their callers to communicate through their cold calling script. While only you and your company are going to know the exact values you would like communicated, whenever you deliver a cold calling script to your telemarketing team or outsourced demand generation partner, it should always include a list of the values that you want your caller to communicate on your behalf. It is beneficial to add this list not a only as an addendum to your cold calling script, but also as a way to double-check the suitability of each of the suggested script statements and questions. Below are four examples of values that “just sell well” when worked into a cold calling script.
Transparency and trustworthiness. These two values really are inseparable. Whenever your write a cold calling script, you should account for some element of transparency in the call. For example, who are you? Why are you calling? This first step can easily be accomplished in the initial point of contact by having callers quickly identifying themselves. A prospect will not trust without some element of transparency.
Respect. While respect can be demonstrated in several ways, one of the most important acknowledgements a caller can make when using a cold calling script is the understanding that prospects are giving their time when taking a call. It doesn’t matter whether this is accomplished by asking about the convenience of the time of the call—e.g., “Did I catch you at a good time?”—or by asking permission to continue the call. What matters is that you find a way to clearly demonstrate respect for the prospect.
Confidence in yourself and your product. What a cold calling script can do is help the caller differentiate the product or service. What the caller needs to be told is that how they communicate this information is crucial. What those who write tend to forget when writing a script is something similar to stage directions that you would give an actor. While a good script can ask leading questions and bullet-point relevant information, at the end of the day the caller needs to understand that they have a piece of important information that can help the prospect. A great example of how to incorporate this into your cold calling script is to add a leading question about the proposed value of your product or service—e.g., “Did you know that our company can probably save you 50% of what you are currently spending?”—but also add a statement in parenthesis: “(communicate this statement with excitement and confidence).” Don’t ever forget that how something is communicated can make or break any script.
Fun. Don’t we all really have enough to do? If you are going to spend a few minutes on something, wouldn’t it be great to be approached by someone who is jovial and who enjoys talking to other people? Some of the very best callers naturally will veer off script ...
When social marketing arrived in the landscape of sales, many thought that it was a phase or a fad that would eventually fade out. While the landscape will continue to evolve with social media innovations, I think it’s safe to say social marketing is here to stay. A huge majority of corporations are now deeply engaged in social marketing, and the funding and incentives to stay online are not going away. In an age where humans are increasingly forced to live online to conduct regular daily tasks and business, it only makes sense that they would congregate in communities. Social media is a combination of two common practices: socializing and marketing. Social activity reflects the deep human need for communities and connection, while marketing tries to catch the attention of individuals and communities with the intent of making money. While many online communities in social media are free to join, they could not exist if they were not somehow sustainable and profitable. Never underestimate the platform’s ability to influence the sales cycle. Today’s new demand generation efforts for sales leads are now a collaborative effort to impact social communities while pushing a product or service to the forefront. A savvy social media marketer lives in communities online, creates relationships and waits for opportunities to push the sales incentive. While social media is a relatively new phenomenon in the world of sales, it is really very similar to traditional word-of-mouth (WOM) advertising. It is becoming increasing obvious that the less time people spend face-to-face or communicating on the telephone, the more WOM advertising is going to be accomplished through social marketing. In fact, a closer look reveals that social marketing has taken on many of the characteristics of traditional WOM referrals.
Great WOM advertising and great social marketing both start with building relationships. Humans are social creatures and live in communities. Have you ever heard the expression “people follow people?” The trick in social marketing is gaining trust through relationships. Great salespeople are great listeners. Becoming an integral part of any online community requires the same skill set. It is no wonder that, in a day and age where online communities are forming and thriving, social marketers are quickly catching on to the impact that they can have simply by engaging in conversations from the comfort of their own space. Half the battle of getting a WOM referral is simply showing up and staying present and engaged, which is why you see the presence of large corporations and their representatives in social marketing. Similar to WOM, social marketing starts by giving the audience something to talk about. If you have ever found yourself online killing time, you will have noticed the plethora of post and article titles vying for your attention. Chances are you have clicked through to a story or a post and thought, “Why am I reading this?” Humans are always interested in things that go above and beyond expectations. In the past, a typical WOM referral may have been the result of an organization going above and beyond with excellence. Nowadays, when a social marketer posts in a way that is captivating and entertaining and the results are shared by friends, that activity can have the same psychological effect (and potential impact on the sales cycle) as a traditional WOM referral. Great WOM campaigns and great social marketing campaigns always ask for referrals. Have you ever noticed the “Like” and “Share” buttons—calls to action (CTAs)—at the bottom of each post on social media platforms? Of course you have. Social marketing platforms are built to grab WOM endorsements. It’s interesting to me that the CTA doesn’t just say “endorse me.” While your intention of sharing content may not have been to draw attention to a product, service or individual featured in a post, you may be doing just that.
B2B marketing has a reputation for complexity. Because B2B transactions occur between two businesses, with diverse groups of people on each side, B2B marketing requires some savviness to get decision-making parties on the same page. Unlike a traditional direct consumer sale, a good B2B marketing campaign will often deploy multiple touches and use multiple channels to communicate a relatively simple message in an effort to unify decision-makers and raise brand awareness. While B2B marketing will always be a little complicated, there certainly are ways to simplify your marketing efforts and “up your game.” Below are 10 ways you can sharpen you B2B marketing game:
Educate your buyer. With the invention of the Internet, most B2B buyers and their associate teams are more than halfway through the buying process before your salesperson ever meets with a customer. While a good marketer always wants to have clear calls to action, consider educating your buyer—the new version of B2B marketing “foreplay.” If your team cannot provide useful tips and ideas early in the buying process, the chances of persuading a customer to buy plummet drastically. Create open-ended topics or propositions that leave the buyer wanting more. If education is the new version of B2B marketing foreplay, then it follows that something you are saying to a potential buyer needs to generate a thirst for more information. All good sales and marketing teams know that the ultimate goal in a transaction is for the client to start to ask questions. That is where the power shift that leads to a sale occurs. The person asking the questions is usually the party who is more interested in the sale. By offering provocative and intriguing ideas and statements, you can shift the power sooner in the sale. Remember that marketing materials should avoid industry slang or jargon. In B2B marketing, you should never forget that the end goal is to simplify your message into something that can be easily shared with a customer’s internal teams. Instead of focusing on information complicated with industry jargon, use language an average eighth-grader can understand. This will help you keep the messaging simple and it will result in a message that can be easily shared. Whenever possible, justify your product or sale with use cases. At the end of the day, your job in B2B marketing is to get into the mind of your client. Try to remember that the person researching the new product or service is looking for a way that they can justify the sale to THEIR boss. By providing success stories, you are giving the buyer the tools THEY need to close the sale on their end. Use digital marketing methods, but don’t forget to also shake hands and introduce yourself. One of the most common B2B mistakes that people seem to make over and over again is to think that an advertisement is enough to generate a sale. A great B2B marketing team will make room for a human component in their campaigns, remembering that ultimately people buy from other people, not just from advertisements. Ask your sales people which customer needs they are hearing about before launching ANY campaign. Think of it this way: good marketing is all about projecting the right message at the right time. How can you possibly understand the B2B marketing message you need to send to prospective clients without speaking to your sales team and gathering all the latest feedback from the front lines? Understand the future of your business, but don’t forget to sell to right now. In the technology vertical, a great example of this quandary in B2B marketing was the push for all information to be moved to the cloud. While storing information in the cloud is absolutely the future of the IT industry, most companies were not ready to put all of their sensitive information into an untested space. The advertising teams that remembered to include options accommodating slower growth and change were the most likely to get the phone call for the sale.
What is the most important part of your job as a B2B marketer or business development professional in the tech space today? Generating leads! They are the lifeblood of your business model and the food that feeds your revenue pipeline. It’s a lot like a restaurant: Marketers get the public to take notice and walk through the front door, business development gets them to sit at the table and sales takes their order and serves them their dinner. But if the marketers can’t find potential customers with an appetite, there will be no sales. B2B lead generation is dependent on good digital marketing strategies. Inbound marketing has the staying power of unlimited presence and searchability on the web, whereas outbound marketing is usually time-restricted, expiring when the budgeted funds run out. That’s why you need a good strategy that helps you find the best prospects. If done right, your digital marketing can net you targeted audiences and response to conversion. Here are some tips to follow when deciding how to structure your B2B lead generation approaches: Be a Social Media Wizard! Social marketing can be a powerful tool, if done correctly and if platforms are chosen wisely….
Choose an effective social platform. Social media is a sea of potential. There have been many studies done in the B2B space about the effectiveness of social media in B2B lead generation. Some reports proclaim excellent lead conversion on sites like Facebook and Twitter, and some warn against the waste of advertising dollars on these platforms due to non-targeted click-throughs and inflated analytics. The overwhelming consensus is that social media is an excellent medium for outreach, generating much discussion and brand awareness—but very few actionable leads. Out of all the social platforms, LinkedIn is far and away the best for B2B lead generation. It’s the site where you should focus your digital marketing efforts. Although there is plenty of casual social chatter and personal posting bubbling up on LinkedIn these days, it has remained very focused on B2B connections and communications. The percentage of external non-business content represents only a small fraction of the cat pictures and infernal “I’m at Starbucks!” selfies on Twitter and Facebook. LinkedIn remains a viable source of genuine lead-generation potential. Two tips to using it correctly:
Be active. Once you establish a presence on LinkedIn (whether through your personal profile as a thought leader or through your company page) remain active and engaging. Post articles to Pulse, share articles written by others that you find relevant and can tie back to your own content, and comment on related postings and articles. Engage in conversation. Make sure you don’t let several days or weeks go by without making some kind of a mark. Inconsistency will only cause you to be overshadowed and pushed down the page by those who post regular writings and commentary. Join groups. The best, and quickest, way to find a target audience is to research and join discussion groups that are formed around central topics pertinent to the content you are creating and sharing. This puts you in a more intimate space of communication and engagement, and can be an excellent form of B2B lead generation by attracting interest from a) potential prospects or b) influencers whose ear you might catch and who can help get you additional attention by commenting on your behalf.
Allow newsletter signups via your social media presence. Newsletters have always been an effective method of B2B lead generation, but finding engaged subscribers has been a bit of a struggle. Why add scraped contacts from database queries and add them “cold” to your newsletter distribution when you can have “warm” recipients actively opt in via social media registrations and collect leads that are ready to talk to you? Distribute video content as tech talks. YouTube, with over 1 billion viewers, is a heavy hitter in video distribution,
The only thing that is consistent in the competitive landscape of the global marketplace is that things are constantly changing. While supply and demand will constantly shift, the one thing that won’t ever change is the need to implement strategic selling techniques. Strategic selling is about learning to focus your formal and informal initiatives to gain new business in your prospective market. While we have all read countless tips for strategic selling initiatives, it’s interesting that most people forget the two main goals of any sales process. The first goal is simple: Get into the head of your customer. As a salesperson, you need to understand your target market inside and out. Goal number two is a bit harder: Create a sales strategy or recipe with a process that is always visible, logical and repeatable for continued success. Keeping those two primary goals in mind, let’s take a look at five frequently overlooked strategic sales techniques that can greatly add to your sales game and help you improve your closing ratios:
Start with who you are and focus on what is right in front of you. Have you ever heard one of your parents say, “Don’t try to be something you are not”? The same mantra applies here. What most people tend to miss in strategic sales is that prospects are often closer than they think. By putting a foothold down in your real life, or spending time with your existing contacts on social media, you will often find that new sales are at your fingertips. Not only do people like to have a firm understanding of who you are, your existing network often knows much more than you think they do. Some of the best salespeople I have ever met are constantly connecting with other people to establish a firm identity, reputation and social network. Once that is established, climbing into new territory is much easier because you already have support. Forget fancy industry terminology and focus on H2H (human-to-human) communication. The most attractive person in the world is a confident person. It can be incredibly hard to remain confident if you are throwing around big words or trying to impress people with fancy industry terminology and expertise. Often, like most things, the answer is as easy as KISS: Keep It Simple, Silly. Strategic selling is not about getting fancy—it is about creating a winning process. A winning sales process remembers that people follow people. Even more to the point, people follow CONFIDENT people. Segment leads by deal size for maximum efficiency. While not all salespeople are good at cold calling or generating their own leads, all salespeople need to prioritize deals they have in their pipeline. One of the basic principles in sales is understanding the difference between the effort it takes to close a small deal versus a larger deal. Typically, the larger deal just takes more work. When hunting both “rabbits “(smaller sales) and “elephants” (larger sales), a strategic sales professional will learn to aim for a ratio of about 80% rabbits to 20% elephants. By focusing more time on the rabbits, salespeople can ensure they continuously meet their sales quotas. Ask for the sale AND the referral. All sales start with one simple question: “Do you want to buy my product or service?” The truth is a lot of people actually forget this over time. However, another equally important principle people tend to forget is to go after the low-hanging fruit! “Do you know anyone else who may be interested in my product or service?” is an equally strategic sales question. Engage prospects and clients for feedback. A strategic sale does not end when the sale does or does not close. A great strategic seller understands the importance of feedback. Not only does feedback help you find out why you lost a sale and what you could do differently next time, it can also alert you to another low-hanging prospect that may generate a sale. Quite often, retention is that new acquisition.
Over the last decade or so, a new category of software called partner relationship management software or PRM software has been evolving rapidly. What’s the primary driver behind this evolution? Organizations are recognizing the need to build a direct sales force that can increase their reach and drive sales at a lower cost. PRM software tends to address four basic areas of partner lifecycle management: partner recruitment, partner engagement, partner enablement and partner management. In this article, we will explore how to effectively manage incentive programs that are designed to enhance partner behavior and performance. As part of that discussion, we’ll examine the core requirements and capabilities of PRM software in more detail. But before we begin to specifically address incentive management, let’s talk a bit about channel management, and why it’s so complex. (For a more detailed discussion of the challenges of channel management, please refer to our on the topic.) Challenges At a high level, when a company is selling through an indirect reseller channel or a franchise network in multiple cities or even countries around the world, it will likely have to deal with various types of partners who sell into different segments and verticals, and these partners may have different sales philosophies. Some may sell a lot, some may sell a little and some are in between. Different organizations may have different sales requirements. Most importantly, the sales programs may also be changing on a quarterly basis. As an organization introduces new products, and as it acquires new companies and capabilities, it may have to drive sales by launching new programs designed to change behaviors and by offering rewards for specific behaviors. Just as employee incentives are critical in driving performance within the organization, partner incentives are an essential element in driving the performance of partners. There are basically three types of incentive programs that companies need to manage:
Market development funds (MDF). These are funds that are given to a partner—usually based on their sales volume—to engage in additional marketing activities to generate demand. Rebates. These are provided when a partner’s sales exceed a specified level: the higher the level of sales, the larger the rebate and the better the partner’s margin. Sales rewards. These are typically given to individuals who achieve large sales volumes. The goal with these rewards is to ensure that each sales rep or technical rep is financially incentivized to drive adoption of certain products and solutions.
Interestingly, most vendors today still manage these incentives using email or Excel files or other types of tools, and they lack an automated infrastructure to drive the process. Because these tools are not integrated and not designed specifically for handling partner relationships, managing and measuring the ROI from incentive programs is a major challenge for many organizations—and that’s where PRM software can make a significant difference. Solutions How can PRM software solve this problem? It allows a vendor to significantly streamline activities associated with people, processes, programs and automation.
Programs: Channel programs tend to fall into the categories we discussed earlier: MDF, rebates and sales rewards. For these programs to be effective, they need to be closely aligned with sales and marketing objectives. For example, when a company launches a specific product, it may want to provide incentives of various types or levels simultaneously. They may offer development funds to a specific group of partners who are most capable of selling those products. In addition to MDF, they may give rebates to partners that sell at a certain level. They might also offer sale rewards to reps, who will likely have to learn how to sell a new product and may be motivated by financial incentives to do so. When managing incentives at these various levels,
Why is multi-touch marketing important? Customers today live in a complex buying world. They now have the option to buy in traditional brick-and-mortar stores as well as online, by phone, via social media and more. Making it easy for the customer to make a purchase has been taken to the next level. While this is great news for most consumers, it requires a new thought process in the world of marketing. In order to reinforce their company’s brand and message, marketers are now required to reach out to consumers in a variety of different ways at the same time. While most marketers these days are aware that they will need to communicate across a variety of channels, many forget that for maximum effectiveness they should be doing it all at same time. Below are some of the most prominent reasons why multi-touch marketing is no longer optional for successful campaigns.
Your customers want a choice. In an age where digital marketing and integrated campaigns emphasize the importance of a good website, it is important to consider that your competitors are going to meet your prospects in a variety of different communication channels. Your website just isn’t enough. As a rule of thumb, you truly can’t afford not to be present in at least two spaces other than your website. While we all will spend time examining our organic and paid SEO, you should really consider that your website is just like the goal on a soccer field. While it is nice to have a goal to aim for, if you focus all of your efforts just on that you are leaving the rest of the field wide open. It’s is crucial to consider using complimentary methods of communication to get in front of your customers. If you don’t, someone else will….
Multi-touch marketing increases the ROI of your campaign. Let’s face it. We all want our campaigns to “stick” with our consumers. There are a million ways that we, as marketers, can increase the likelihood of this happening, but one way is constantly overlooked: Just try squeezing the bottle of glue. While a marketer’s first attempts at multi-touch marketing communication may be awkward or slightly ineffective, over time the skills will improve. The point is to keep trying. Going back to the analogy of a soccer field, you can’t score until you get in the game and start leveraging the efforts of multiple players on the field. Any new attempt at multi-touch marketing is going to increase your chance of success by exploring a new channel for reaching potential customers, and that automatically ups your likelihood of better campaign ROI.
Buyers are naturally suspicious. Basic human psychology tells us that human beings like to minimize risk. The more familiar something is to them, the more likely they are to be less suspicious of it. While there is no “set” number of touches that ensures the conversion of a lead, we do know that multi-touch marketing is an easy way to help a prospect feel more familiar with a brand and its value proposition.
Gone are the days of 2D selling. Multi-touch marketing is now considered one of the most effective methods to increase brand awareness and ultimately bring in more sales. Over time and with practice, it’s a great way to find out which marketing techniques will ultimately yield the highest response. In a world where multi-touch marketing has become the norm, your next step may be to explore available tools and services to help you thrive and generate qualified leads of the highest value. For more information on marketing automation or demand generation services, please visit us at ZINFI.com.
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Telemarketing has been around for decades, and everyone is very familiar with the dinnertime “Are you happy with your long distance service?” phone call. A proven technique for drumming up widespread sales and awareness, telemarketing has become a cultural norm. The evolution of marketing in recent years has marked the emergence of a new term, “inside sales,” that refers to a more focused, prospected and targeted approach to lead development—not just churn. Teleprospecting grew out of inside sales and has now become a first-tier technique used in conjunction with other lead and demand generation efforts to not only commence dialogue but also achieve qualification of new leads that come across any vendor’s radar. Teleprospecting best practices to ensure sales success are now a focal point for any good sales enablement scenario. It is important to differentiate between the goals and definitions of teleprospecting versus telemarketing. The two terms are often used interchangeably. Both are seen as a phone-based sales technique, but in reality the approaches and end goals are vastly different. Telemarketing is a one-shot “spray and pray” tactic that is crafted to cover a vast audience base, using a templated script and with a focus on generating a lead to pass on to sales—but with little consideration of the path of that lead takes once it is passed along. It is a rapid, repetitive and funneled approach. Whereas the primary goal of the telemarketer is to quickly resonate with the target audience and close a sale, teleprospecting is about connecting with leads, identifying their “pain points” and qualifying areas of need that the service or product addresses. The teleprospector is tasked with calling a very focused, crafted list of leads that have been pre-identified as market prospects, and spending time to communicate one-to-one to establish a true qualification so the sales team is equipped to take the lead to the next tier of the sales process. This initial communication may start with an introductory script, but unlike the telemarketer who sticks to the tree structure of the finite pitch, the teleprospector quickly moves on to appropriate next-step questions based on the lead’s answers. The idea is to guide the dialogue to a point where the lead realizes a particular service or product is needed. Let’s take a look at four key considerations in guiding your teleprospecting reps as they work to establish a successful relationship between qualifying a lead and closing a sale:
Align prospecting and sales teams regionally. Companies that are moving toward a large global footprint tend to have sales teams that were fostered based on industry or market segments. When teleprospecting teams come on board to begin qualifying leads in these new areas, these reps may be aligned with sales team members accordingly. This creates a disjointed regional approach, with lead lists spread over dispersed countries. A better practice is to review your global reach and reassign sales teams to regional groupings—and have the teleprospecting reps align accordingly. This will create better cohesion between prospecting and sales, and allow for coordinated approaches in a unified and timely manner. Adaptation to cultural norms and traditions can also be achieved and carried through contiguous efforts between both teams.
Develop a pass-back conduit between sales and teleprospectors. Once a lead has been qualified and passed to the sales team’s queue, it should be handled or prioritized according to company policy or quarterly goals. Often a lead may become stale or cold to the sales rep, whether immediately (due to handoff change or lag time) or as an effect of not having been nurtured for some time. In cases like these, passing the lead back to the teleprospecting team to “reignite” would be advantageous. The rep had previously developed a relationship with this lead through the prospecting cycle, and hearing from a familiar contact may warm t...
Wouldn’t we all rather have customers willingly walk through our door instead of having to stand on the sidewalk and wave our arms for attention? Once upon a time, business had a solid advertising model to get an audience—you have a product, so you pay for print ads, billboards, television time and radio spots to get the word out. Commerce had to rely on well-placed advertisements to show up and be positioned where the target audience was. But now, in the Internet age, people are surfing in droves on the web. We know where they will be, and the savvy marketer can now get a very clear view of their searching and browsing behavior. So, instead of making a lot of noise with paid marketing and vying with your competitors for ad space (outbound marketing), you can carefully place attention-grabbing content in key online venues and—in very targeted ways—engage your audience, intrigue them and get them to come to you. Welcome to inbound marketing. Let’s be clear on the difference between these two approaches. Outbound marketing requires outreach on the part of the marketer through concerted efforts such as paid and search engine marketing techniques. You find the customer and try to actively capture their attention. Inbound marketing is the opposite, wherein intelligently placed content (blogs, articles, syndicated content on sharing sites, social media posts, etc.) is distributed and made available for the public to find and digest, hopefully influencing their decision to come to you to find out more. Whereas outbound marketing is typically “live” only for a finite period through budgetary spending and rented digital space, inbound marketing content is perpetual and available for discovery without boundaries. Because of this key difference, it is important to make sure the everlasting content you put out there to drive people to you is of high quality, is relevant to your target audience and provides genuine thought leadership in your industry. Let’s take a look at some helpful questions to ask yourself as you attempt to strengthen your inbound marketing strategy and gauge its effectiveness:
What are current trending topics? Thought leadership is an important part of inbound marketing. People will gravitate towards your content and follow through to your website or offer if they recognize authority and influence in what you have to offer. Can they learn something? Can they benefit from what you offer? And why would they listen to you? The best way to be a thought leader is to put out relevant content on a regular basis that revolves around topical and trending discussions in your industry or space. Spend some time researching and thinking about the current topics of interest in your industry space, and then create assets that answer or speak to those discussions to distribute on sites like LinkedIn, SlideShare, YouTube and Facebook. Be timely, be relevant. What are your competitors talking about? Listening to what your audience is talking about is not enough. You also need to pay close attention to what your competitors are saying and what kind of buzz they are creating. Like you, they are probably distributing their own content on hot topics, but what if they’re missing the mark? If your service or product does a better job of addressing a trending issue or pain point, then jump on it. Use your inbound marketing resources to enter the discussion and show you have a better solution, and do it in a way that ties back to your offerings. Instead of coming off as a veiled ad, your content should position your offering as a more intelligent and beneficial approach to the specific problem or issue under discussion. What are industry analysts and influencers blogging or commenting on? Every industry has its share of analysts and influencers. Analysts (who make a living performing primary and secondary research on specific industries) and influencers (who have authority based on reputation and public acclaim) can be your best fri...
The very first thing that scares most people about sales is the initial cold call. Often it can turn away a potential salesperson before they ever get their feet wet in the business. Cold-calling can be hard! What if I told you that a few simple cold calling tips can be the difference between sinking and swimming? Give these tips a try.
Start with a smile. Have you ever heard the expression, “You will attract more bees with honey than vinegar?” The simple truth is that people are just more attracted to someone who is smiling—and, yes, you can actually hear a difference in the tone of a voice when someone you are talking to on the phone is smiling. Here’s another interesting thing happens to someone who is smiling: They will automatically be more expressive with their words, their tone and their demeanor. The first three seconds of cold calling contact are all about likeability. Smile! Remember to ask, “Am I catching you at a good time?” The very first thing that puts people on edge is the perception that you are treading on their personal time, space or safety. One of the easiest things you can do to warm up a sales prospect is to communicate respect for their time. Remember that the first 30 seconds of a cold call are about communicating respect and safety and appearing trustworthy. Pre-think your call to action. If you are lucky enough to get through by following the first cold calling tips, don’t lose sight of what are you hoping to accomplish the first time you talk to the prospect. Within three minutes you need to clearly identify the purpose of your call. Expect objections. The name of the game in cold calling is remembering that people do not spend their money easily. This is not personal; it’s business. If you remember to expect objections before you get started it will be much easier to remain polite under all circumstances. Propose value. Whether you are selling a product or a service, remember that value usually begins with proposing something that’s better than what the competition has to offer. That value proposition usually comes back to either speed of delivery, price or the overall quality of the product or service. Know what your value proposition is before you call. Always ask open-ended questions. In the best possible scenario you are trying to get your prospect to talk to you and give you key information to make the sale. You cannot gain key information if you are not asking questions and avidly listening. Cast a wide net. In a large sea, there are millions of fish. How many fish you catch really comes back to how many times you drop your line with bait on it. One of the key principles in cold calling is resiliency: You have to keep fishing, over and over again. Eventually you’ll catch something. Take your time and hope that the power will shift. Another tactic you can utilize in cold calling tips is to be short on words and to draw out the conversation. The best possible result is that you stop asking the prospect questions and the prospect uses that time to start asking you questions. In cold calling this is where the power shift happens that allows for sales conversion. Take detailed digital notes and leave the door open. In this new day and age most cold-callers are taking notes in a CRM or CRM portal. If one is not available to you, the next best thing is to jot digital notes with feedback about interest level, objections and the next best time to contact the prospect. Why digital notes? They are faster to take, and they are easy to search. Repeat after me: “The gatekeeper is your new best friend.” Never, ever fail to recognize the importance of the gatekeeper. You can use all of the tips above to create a separate “sell” to get from the gatekeeper to the decision-maker.
The most effective cold calling tips help you turn your sale into a “game.” It can actually be fun! While the ideal outcome is always to connect with your prospect, remember not to let it discourage your process if you do not.
What is a partner portal? What are the primary components of today’s partner portal? Where does program content end and relationship automation begin? And why are so many systems needed to make it work (even though in reality we know that most of the elements of the partner portal don’t actually work well together)? In truth, most partner portals today require too much work and too much dependency on subsystems like CRMs and learning management and incentive management tools that are all patched together. We know they don’t flow together well, they don’t work together well and ultimately they create a very complex experience for all users. As a result, partners are frustrated, vendors are frustrated, programs are not updated on time, and it’s hard to find price lists or product information or the latest training information or events. Basically, it’s a nightmare. What if we took a different approach? What would the next-generation partner portal look like? What about adopting a unified approach that creates an entirely different user experience? If you had a magic wand, perhaps you could wave it and rebuild your partner portal today in a way that would make it really easy for your partners to log in, find the information that’s relevant to their role, search for and easily find the tools they need to do what they need to do and then get out—and all of this within few minutes. Wouldn’t that be wonderful? In this article, we’ll explore the seven essential components you need to make available to your partners in a high-functioning partner portal, and then seven additional capabilities that your own organization requires in order to manage that partner portal effectively. The Unified Partner Experience When a partner logs in to the partner portal, he or she will access multiple tool related to program information, product pricing, product details, training, incentives, marketing plans, sales plans and so on. That entire experience needs to happen in a seamless way. When a partner goes from one zone to another—say, from the marketing zone to the sales zone—the experience shouldn’t change. However, the prevailing reality today is that each of these zones are supported by different systems that are poorly integrated, and so they repeatedly encounter different user interfaces and different workflows. For example, partners may have to enter the same information multiple times as they move from zone to zone within the portal, despite the fact that the information is already in the system. It’s really a clumsy experience. The goal of the unified partner experience is to eliminate all of these issues. To get there, your partner portal needs to address seven key requirements:
Personalized access. When a salesperson logs in to the partner portal, all of the elements of the partner portal available to that individual should be about sales. There is no point for that person to be reading about technical issues or marketing programs and plans when that individual is not responsible for those aspects of the business. Similarly, if a technical person logs in and is fully focused on technical content or content related to products and solutions, there is no point for that individual to have access to content related to sales incentives or marketing development funds or any other sales- or marketing-related materials. Personalized access is the most important way to simplify the user experience. As a part of that requirement, it’s essential that the entire engagement with the partner portal always be fully localized—i.e., it needs to appear in the user’s own language. Onboarding automation. This is a huge enabler, especially if you have a broad channel with hundreds or perhaps thousands of partners and are constantly launching new products and bringing new partners into the program that you frequently have to stair-step on 30- or 90-day cycles on various aspects of your programs. When you can automate these steps,
Content marketing has become the cornerstone of marketing effectiveness, and content syndication provides amplification via an extended network. Organizations selling through the channel can reach an audience of unprecedented size if they put together a cohesive strategy to distribute relevant content for strategic audiences. Rising above the noise is very important, but so is building a content-based relationship with target buyers via a distributed network. However, many companies flounder when it comes to pulling together a comprehensive content syndication strategy. In this article we will explore seven core mistakes or pitfalls that can be avoided to maximize the benefit from content syndication via a distributed network of partners:
No overarching content strategy. Often, companies will dive right in and begin leveraging content syndication to drive awareness and reach, but without taking the time to think through how their overall strategy, both from a cadence perspective—daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly cycles—and from the perspective of media channel alignment. Because of that, content syndication often ends up just amplifying the noise while failing to connect with the proper audience. The best remedy for this is to step back and think through a couple of key questions: Exactly who is the target audience you are trying to reach? And what are the media channels they typically go to? Once you’ve answered those questions, the next challenge is to put together an overall marketing/messaging framework—perhaps on a quarterly and annual basis—that’s tied directly to core business objectives and events that are happening in the organization. Once you’ve addressed those alignment issues, you’ll be in a much better position to define a clear content strategy that will help you not only expand your reach via content syndication, but also amplify the core messages that you’re trying to distribute through various channels. Unprovocative storytelling. Too often, we get carried away tweeting about product features or events or specific items that, frankly, are not that exciting. A savvy marketer once told me, “No one wants to hear about the lock, but we all want to hear about the burglary.” We all know news is all about sensationalism, but so is content marketing. If it’s not provocative, doesn’t grab attention and doesn’t engage, increasing your reach is actually going to hurt content syndication activities in the long run because your audience is going to tune out. Therefore, it’s essential, once a broader messaging architecture has been created, that companies think about what kinds of stories they’re going to tell to their target audience, and then proceed from there. Failure to know—and act on—what’s actually working. Once you’ve figured out your overall content syndication cadence on a daily/monthly/quarterly basis and have determined the channels you need to reach, and once you have a clear idea of the stories you want to tell to your target audience, the next step is to figure out what is really working. When you’ve done that, instead of creating new “stuff,” the most important task is to figure out how to get the messages that are already working out to your entire audience. Unfortunately, many companies have a tendency to overlook what has worked and instead continue to create new content—just for the sake of creating new content. These organizations not only lose the investment they made in previous content syndication activities, but also fail to capitalize on the continuity of discussion through a variety of channels. A much better approach to driving content syndication via a partner network is to focus on the specific types of messaging and channels that are already producing good results and replicate those efforts. Inability to effectively repurpose content by channel. There is now sufficient data to show that, for business audiences, LinkedIn, SlideShare and Twitter are the three most effective ch...
Leads, leads everywhere—but not a single one to close. Isn’t this what you hear almost every day from vendors and their partners? Vendors spend millions on end-user marketing to generate leads, while partners rarely follow up to close on them. That’s what a vendor would say. On the other hand the partners say, “Well, I never get a good lead from my vendor. How can I grow their business without decent leads?” This is where good lead management can save the day. A channel is primarily a fulfillment mechanism. Yes, it can generate demand to extend a run rate business, but the primary purpose of a channel is to close and deliver. The job of marketing really belongs to the vendor. This is why lead management is so important. If it is not done right, not only do millions go to waste, but partner satisfaction—and ultimately business growth—drops substantially. The good news is that there are now state-of-the art lead management systems available in the marketplace for channel professionals. Once you deploy an end-to-end lead management system, it will not only increase lead-to-revenue conversion rates substantially, but also it will reduce the hours you spend in managing leads manually or via an existing CRM system. While CRMs were designed for lead management, they are primarily a tool for indirect sales. That’s why a purpose-built lead management system for channel managers is essential to drive channel sales productivity to the next level. Let’s explore in a bit more detail how this can be done.
Partner profile management: Before you deploy a lead management capability, it is essential to profile your partner base and organize them into groups by determining their sales competency, revenue velocity, market focus and other parameters. Once you have created these groups in your partner portal or in a partner relationship management system, you are now able to assign these groups for various lead management activities that match their profile.
Lead distribution policy: Once you have your partner groups set up, the next step is to figure out who gets what. Your organization may be generating thousands of leads per month. Do all leads go to a handful of partners, or are the leads distributed to all partners, or is it somewhere in between? Do you want to allocate healthcare leads to partners who have deep practices in healthcare? That would make sense, right? Are you going to have “open accounts” (all can pursue) or “named accounts” (dedicated to a few partners)? There are many other elements that should be considered in your lead distribution policy. So, thinking through your lead distribution policy in detail is the second most important step for your lead management activity.
Lead lifecycle management: Once you have distributed a lead, your lead lifecycle management approach will clearly define how you manage the response behaviors of your channel partners. Do your partners get seven days or 30 days to follow up and close out a lead or take it to the next level? What happens if they don’t follow up within a given time? Do you take the lead back and give it to another partner? What happens if the first partner continues to follow up despite your transferring that lead to some other partners? You will have to think through these lead management implications to make sure that when you automate the processes, they reflect your true channel policy.
Automating lead management: Once you have figured out how you will drive lead management, then you need to look for a purpose-built lead management system. The same old CRMs we’re all familiar with don’t really work for a distributed channel organization. Even though you can technically make your existing CRM work (see Why CRMs Don’t Work as Partner Relationship Management Systems), the cost and complexity of doing so always makes a dedicated lead management system a much better choice.
Lead management reporting: Once you have deployed lead management policies and automat...
Over the past decade or so, organizations that rely on channel infrastructure to reach their end buyers have been making significant investments in unified channel management activities. However, they seldom consider the fact that these channel management activities can vary quite a bit across countries—not only from a deployment perspective, but also in terms of their effectiveness. Why is that? How can the organization recognize these differences and adapt accordingly? Before we answer those questions, let’s quickly review the areas in which channel management activities tend to do the same, regardless of country or region. There are several basic principles that apply across all geographies around the world:
When a company sells through a channel network, they will generally sell through either a one-, two- or three-tier system. Yes, multi-level distribution (more than three tiers) exists, but that tends to be more for business-to-consumer products than they are for business-to-business products and services. Vendors provide core solutions. Partners, on the other hand, are selling products or solutions as-is or perhaps extending them with their own capabilities Partners typically make most of their money after they sell the product, rather from a specific transaction. A prominent exception is franchises, where vendors actually make money no matter what happens because they have a fixed amount of franchise fees coming in. So, while a franchisee may not be making large amounts of money, the brand that is franchising through a network can nonetheless generate a decent return if they have a good solution to offer. Generally, the lower the price of a product the more transactional it is. With higher prices there tends to be more complexity, and this is where solution selling comes in. We see this consistently across all segments, whether it’s insurance, finance, manufacturing or technology. When it comes to lead generation, partners are generally not very effective at generating demand. Around the world, a consistent challenge is the need for a vendor to focus on brand awareness, product and solution awareness, and even leads. There is no doubt that in certain parts of the market, partners may be capable of generating leads on their own, but that’s not a core competency that most partners have in all markets. Therefore, this is a common element a vendor needs to understand and address, especially in the context of demand generation. The relationships in channel management generally are between companies rather than between people. What this means is that policies aligning the financial objectives of one or more entities that are actually forming the links between those entities. This tends to be fairly consistent around the world, independent of market segment.
So what are the ways in which channel management varies? The first type of variation is the structure of the channel. This is something that varies greatly across global geographies. The differences are primarily a function of market maturity. Developed countries like the US, the UK, Germany, Japan and Australia tend to have a one-, two- or three-tier distribution system. There is a high level of financial transparency, tight financial controls to address corruption and other money-related issues, with sufficient laws and regulations and enforcement mechanisms in place. In these countries the channel generally behaves in a very mature way. On the other hand, when you look at emerging markets—places like Southeast Asia, certain parts of China, Eastern Europe, and parts of Africa—laws and regulations and enforcement are inadequate to control corruption, especially with respect to intellectual property and financial regulations and controls, and channel management activities tend to vary quite a bit from place to place. As a result there are important differences in how companies market and what they need to think about when doing so.
Most vendors that are selling through the channel depend on their partners to generate demand instead of just relying on leads generated by the vendors. However, the sad reality is that the channel often remains as a fulfillment arm. Despite heavy investments that many vendors have made in channel marketing—particularly in automation and concierge services—most partners do not use marketing development funds (MDF). In fact, our worldwide channel survey data shows as much as 60% of market development funds (MDF) are not used on a quarterly basis. In this article we explore the key reasons why. Before we delve into the issues, however, let’s spend a few minutes on the 40% of the cases where market development funds are claimed and used. In the majority of these cases, the funds are used by large partners who know how to navigate the MDF approval process and have a much larger bucket of funds. These tend to be large channel partners who have deep relationships with the vendors and have competencies in place to market, sell and fulfill demand. Also, these large channel partners usually have dedicated marketing resources in place to apply for funds and utilize them properly. While corruption tied to misuse of market development funds remains a major issue in the channel, with proper auditing and personnel management organizations can ensure that funds are being used appropriately. This part is not easy, but is highly necessary. Now let’s take a look at the 60% of the cases where funds are not being claimed or used. Why is this the case? Market development funds (MDF) are available primarily for partners who have achieved a certain level of sales output. And this assumes that such partners have developed specific competencies in selling products and services for which market development funds (MDF) have been provided. However, as we noted earlier, most of the time these funds remain unused. Based on our research we have discovered a set of core barriers that prevent market development funds (MDF) from being claimed and used.
Partners are not focused on selling vendors’ products. Most of the time partners sell a vendor’s product as an alternative to the core solution or as an add-on. This scenario is quite common in banking, insurance, finance, technology and many other sectors where partners (agents, resellers, brokers, etc.) typically represent multiple vendors in order to provide choices to their client base. This lack of primary engagement leads to partners focusing on marketing the primary solution, but skipping any marketing activities for the add-ons as a standalone initiative. In most of these cases, partners do not apply or claim for market development funds (MDF). Partners tend to focus on the short term. Most channel partners who generate less than $5 million to $10 million in annual revenue and lack dedicated marketing resources tend to focus their business activities on quarterly intervals. However, we know that effective marketing is not just about running events; it’s about putting together a comprehensive, 360-degree approach tied to inbound and outbound activities over the long term. The focus on quarterly initiatives can cause partners to bypass a structured approach to marketing, thus failing to apply for market development funds (MDF). Partners do not have digital marketing expertise. Marketing has changed dramatically during the past 10 years and even more so over the past five years. In the past, B2B marketing relied heavily on telemarketing and lead generation, and B2C marketing depended heavily on advertising. However, both marketing approaches have changed—primarily due to the evolution of social media, content marketing and social selling activities. In spite of the changes, most partners are not equipped properly with the appropriate tools and techniques to exploit the advantages of digital marketing. Instead, many partners tend to rely on old techniques, like telemarketing and running events,
There is no doubt that channel management is complex. (For more on this, see our previous posts, 5 Myths of Channel Management and Challenges of Channel Management.) However, it’s made more complex when it is managed through a set of tools and systems that can easily be compared to a patched-up quilt. In many organizations, channel management systems actually consist of a hodgepodge of diverse systems that have evolved over a long period of time. As a result of that, most companies today that try to implement a unified approach to their channel management struggle to make it work and get a decent return on their investment. The primary reason underlying this problem is a lack of available end-to-end systems that can readily adapt to each organization’s unique needs. Every company is different. So, for example, a horizontal product like a customer relationship management (CRM) system cannot really address the requirements for unified channel management. As a result of that—while marketing automation systems have evolved quite a bit over the last few years, and CRM systems have also progressed—no company has completely addressed the need for unified channel management. So, how are organizations managing the channel today? Partner portal: Most companies that are selling through the channel today have a partner portal. They build this partner portal over a period of years with various sets of tools, but there are no consistent standards that address how a portal should be built, and requirements also vary considerably across different types of channels. For example, if you’re looking at a dealer network where the relationship is highly transactional, the partner portal will look very different from a portal in, say, the tech industry, where a solutions provider is working very closely with one or more technology providers to bring in complex, integrated solutions to the market. Similarly, a partner portal in the retail and franchise segment of the marketplace will be unique to those kinds of businesses. Because of this diversity in needs across segments, no vendor has been able to address the requirements for all segments. Partner records: If we look at how most companies are selling through the channel, and in particular how they manage their partner records or their channel records, we find that most of them are using a CRM or some sort of home-grown database. In fact, based on a survey we conducted, more than 40% of companies actually end up managing their partner list on an Excel spreadsheet. That’s kind of scary, but that’s where the market is today. Partner onboarding: When it comes to building and growing a channel, partner onboarding is a critical first step. Yet most companies today try to manage partner onboarding with some sort of combination of CRM and Microsoft Office tools like Excel, and some even resort to keeping track through paper records. Partner programs: To manage partner programs, some companies have started to use marketing automation tools like Oracle Eloqua or Marketo for direct marketing. However, those tools are way too complex for most organizations and they are not flexible enough to be deployed in a multi-tier channel where corporate can load campaigns and content, and then distribute those materials to their partners and execute marketing initiatives in variety of shapes and forms. Partner training is another area where very few companies have structured systems in place. But what’s the point of recruiting partners if you don’t have a structured way of getting them trained and increasing their competencies? Many large enterprises today have some sort of learning management system (LMS), but when you take a step down to companies below the $500 million level, or to companies that sell to other segments, they typically have serious issues managing partner training. A final, and very important, area of concern is partner incentives management. This is yet another area where it’s quite commonplace t...
As more and more companies add channel to their sales equation, the competition to reach the end user via channel has increased substantially. New partners enter the marketplace in the same way vendors do, but in the end what matters is having access to a group of successful partners who have been in business for a while. This is not easy without a structured channel management approach. That’s where automation comes in. Organizations need to pick the right channel management software platform, not only to make sure their go-to-market approach via channel is fully optimized and earns the respect of their channel partners, but also to substantially increase sales productivity. With that as a backdrop, let’s look at some things to consider when selecting a vendor. It’s important to keep in mind that channel management software is a new category. While partner relationship management (PRM) software concepts and even tools have been around for more than a decade, until recently truly affordable solutions didn’t really exist. Also, PRM by itself does not address the full range of channel management challenges, but requires a complimentary solution that most analysts call today through-channel marketing automation (TCMA). So, for channel management automation to be complete, an organization needs to select the right vendor not just for PRM, but also for TCMA. This increases the complexity quite a bit, especially in light of the fact that not a lot of data exists about most of these vendors. So what is the right approach in selecting a vendor for channel management software? That is exactly what we will explore in the five steps outlined below.
Select the right criteria for your organization. Before you can begin vendor selection, you need to think through your own channel strategy and objectives for the next three years. Is your strategic focus going to be primarily partner recruitment? Partner training? Partner enablement (like demand generation, etc.)? Managing the partners for maximum productivity? You may also have one or more objectives. Before you can begin to engage with a channel management software vendor, you truly need to think this part through. A channel management software vendor can help you execute your strategy better, but they cannot develop one for you. That’s your job, and it’s a very important step. Plan your deployment in sequence. Once you have figured out what your priorities are, the next step is to make sure you plan the deployment of your channel management software in sequence. Why is this important? Before deployment you are likely to have a lot of manual processes in place, so ripping everything out at once could cripple your ongoing operations. Therefore, you need to make sure that your channel management software vendor does all installation work and maintenance work in a stepwise fashion—and before or after normal work hours—so you can integrate automation into your workflow one module at a time with minimal disruption to everyday business. Define channel requirements three years out. Once your deployment plan is in place, the next step is to project where you want your channel management automation to go beyond the first year. In fact, you may be better off thinking through the first three years before you turn your focus to the first year. It’s not unusual for an organization to seek a channel management software vendor without having a clear picture of what their objectives are for the next three to five years. I realize that in today’s fast-paced business environment, five years may seem like a lifetime. But you should be able to articulate at least a one-to-three-year vision that establishes your channel management priorities. Are you going to focus on recruitment? Do you have plans for segmenting the partner base in multiple ways? Is there a specific geographical evolution that is going to drive your investment strategy? Are you planning a major product launch in the next 12-18 month...
Most organizations selling in a business-to-business (B2B) environment today have implemented customer relationship management (CRM) software. While proper deployment of a CRM system is highly dependent on an organization’s ability to streamline its own internal sales processes, in many cases ineffective use of automation systems can also be attributed to an organization’s poor sales enablement capabilities. This is where content syndication can play an important role and lay the foundation for sales enablement—that is, when it’s done right. In this article we will explore what steps an organization can take to build on their CRM foundation and engage a cross-functional team to properly enable its sales team via content syndication. Whether an organization is selling technology, insurance, financial products or other B2B solutions, in most cases the sales process can be broken down into stages for each of the three primary types of sales cycles: for small and medium business segments, for mid-market and enterprise, and for very large enterprise and government organization. With each of these segments, it is important to break down the lead-to-revenue cycle into proper stages to make sure that the sales process has been properly mapped to the targeted customer’s buying behavior. Before any content syndication strategy can be successfully implemented for sales enablement, it is essential to complete this task. With this principle as a backdrop, let’s briefly explore how content syndication can enable sales teams to achieve higher levels of performance. When you think about a sales process—or perhaps you find it more useful to think about a buying process from the buyer’s perspective—the nature of engagement is directly dependent on the nature of the solution. Whether you are an SMB, a mid-market business or an enterprise, if your what you’re selling is a transactional product that generates somewhere between a few hundred and a few thousand dollar for each transaction, then it is not possible to provide a high level of sales touches. In this scenario, a company’s website has to do most of the selling, and this is where content syndication can play a critical role—not only by generating leads, but also by moving the buyer through a journey of content engagement that typically follows the classic buying cycle: awareness, interest, trial, purchase, repurchase. Most online retailers today have invested heavily to syndicate content at various stages of the buying cycle to ensure the buyer is gradually educated and engaged, trust is built and the transaction is completed. On the other hand, if the transaction is essentially for a solution-centric product—for example, a financial product worth thousands of dollars or a complete technology solution or a medical device—then the human touch, by default, becomes increasingly important. Even during this process of human-led sales engagement, it is critical to provide syndicated content via a wide network of social, search and other appropriate engines to drive traffic to the site. However, once a lead comes in, sales needs to jump in immediately and engage, walking the buyer through appropriate steps. At this point, most companies tend to rely on their CRM systems, but the nature of the CRM systems makes it almost impossible for a sales person to access appropriate sales documents, marketing collateral, and other materials to support specific stages of the buying/selling process. Typically, the sales team ends up undertaking a frustrating search, looking through an internal portal or intranet, or perhaps searching for files saved in a folder on a shared drive. This is where content syndication from various corporate functions like marketing, product management, service management, finance and so on can be made instantly available at the right stages of the sales process. Assuming the organization has properly classified its selling/buying steps (discovery, qualification, development,
Over the past few decades, companies have invested considerable sums in building out an inside sales infrastructure. During this same period, we have also seen increases in demand for marketing automation. However, in many cases those two organizational investments have not come to fruition, and companies are asking whether they have the right investment mix to move forward as buying journey has changed completely over the past decade or so. We all know there has been a recent shift in the marketplace, a relatively new phenomenon in which buyers are going online, searching for what they’re interested in, doing research, finding possible vendors and then checking out vendors online to come up with a short list of who to call. That entire process used to be a function of the traditional sales process. An inside sales rep would call up a potential prospect—essentially a cold call—to set up an appointment designed to educate the buyer. Today, that entire buying process today is completely visible. It follows that the selling process also needs to be completely visible, especially when it comes to engaging with a potential buyer upfront during the buying cycle. This monumental shift has been happening quietly and steadily over the past decade and, as a result, telemarketing no longer works the way it used to. These days when a telemarketer calls a potential customer, the prospect hangs up on them 9 times out of 10. The remaining 10% who do accept the call are likely to get highly irritated that someone has called them during the middle of the day. This is where digital prospecting comes in. Digital prospecting is all about giving the buyer choices. Once the buyer has engaged and demonstrated a specific set of interests in certain products and services, the inside sales person can reach out and schedule appropriate conversations. How can you make this happen? Here are four specific requirements companies need to fulfill in order to drive the digital prospecting process forward.
Companies need to have a clear content marketing strategy. A significant portion of the content marketing strategy needs to be about digital content. It is not just about your web site anymore. It is about what and how you share across multiple social channels, blogs, media and other content distributors in your industry to cast a much wider net. There has to be a decent level of investment in automation. Now, I don’t mean automation just for the sake of automation. Instead, I’m suggesting companies take a careful look at their marketing and sales workflows and analyze how those two elements overlap, how they work together and how leads are generated and handed over. That entire process needs to be mapped and automated where it makes sense. There have to be sales enablement tools that specifically provide content across the complete prospecting lifecycle. When a potential buyer engages with a company looking to buy, say, a specific technical solution, that buyer typically does not jump right into a specification sheet or a product brochure. Most likely the buyer will also go through use cases and try to figure out whether the company addresses certain core pain points before they delve into product features, details, etc. Once that discovery process has happened and the buyer has determined that there is a possible fit, then he/she will start digging deeper. This is where product demos, solution videos and other necessary elements become absolutely critical. Now, during this engagement process, if the salesperson is aware and interested and actively interacting with the buyer, then instead of being another pushy inside salesperson, that individual can evolve into a more consultative role, being present to answer questions a buyer may have but without necessarily trying to close the sale in a hurry. The sales team needs to be retrained. The first three steps are about adjusting marketing strategy, deploying process automation and making content-based sales...
Many vendors today are deploying channel marketing software solutions to drive partner marketing activities. The goal for this class of software is to get partners actively engaged in various channel programs and enable them to drive demand generation activities. However, there are multiple options available in the market today from as many as 30 different vendors, which makes it very hard for an organization to determine the core set of features they should look for. This article will explore 10 critical features a channel marketing software platform must have. Requirements
Portal content management. The goal for this capability is to allow an organization to set up a mobile-responsive, dynamic portal through which various assets and information can be communicated to partners that are in the channel program. Without a platform that can be completely localized across multiple countries and used in a mobile-responsive environment, the potential of a channel marketing software platform is rarely realized. It is perhaps the most important feature a organization must look for. Campaign upload and setup. Once a dynamic portal has been set up, the next key area to focus on is the ability to upload campaign content that can allow the vendor to market to—as well as market through—their channel partners. Vendors considering an investment in a channel marketing software platform must ensure that any platform they evaluate has a dynamic content management system. Single sign-on. A vendor may already have an existing infrastructure in place to which a current or new portal may need to connect, either temporarily or in the long term. Because of that, it is extremely important to provide unified access and a seamless user experience. The channel marketing software platform must be able to connect to existing infrastructure via a single sign-on mechanism. CRM integration. Often an organization will have an existing enterprise resource planning (ERP) or customer relationship management (CRM) infrastructure in place, which could be based on Salesforce.com, NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics, SAP or some other similar platform. The channel marketing software platform must be able to connect and integrate with any of these systems without a hitch. The data from the CRM system must be able to flow to the marketing software platform, and the activities being carried out by the channel partners must in turn be tracked and reported back to existing CRM infrastructure. Seamless integration at every step is absolutely essential. Email marketing. When a vendor is trying to enable a group of partners with a set of channel marketing tools, one of the most important capabilities the channel marketing software must have is a multi-touch email marketing and nurturing feature. The email marketing engine should be configurable as a multi-touch tool, so when a prospect comes to a partner website and engages in some way, the system should be able to automatically send a follow-up email based specifically on the prospect’s activities. The email engine should also accommodate complete, dynamic co-branding capabilities so that a partner can easily edit existing content provided by the vendor and send out customized emails to prospects and the customer base in a few clicks. Event marketing. Most partners today—particularly those selling in the B2B area, but also those selling in the B2C marketplace—put on events to market products and services. They may be small events in a lunch-and-learn format, or they may take the form of much larger consumer events like award shows and ceremonies, where the entire event needs to be dynamically managed. In the latter case especially, the partner may end up using all the vendor’s campaign assets, but it can be difficult for the partner to co-brand that material and customize the launch and event, as well as manage it successfully in an integrated way. Good channel marketing software can do this,
Vendors selling to a channel need to enable their channel partners to generate and drive channel partners. This has been a challenge for almost all vendors, whether they are selling to vendors or consumers. While partners are a great fulfillment arm, few of them generate enough leads to drive demand on their own. To address the problem more companies over the past few years have been deploying channel automation platforms. However, the adoption of these platforms in the channel has been quite poor, and this has led to a lot of speculation and frustration. It has also led a number of companies to switch providers of channel marketing automation platforms, thinking that the move from one platform to another might help them attain higher levels of adoption. However, the issues generally lie elsewhere. Yes, the channel marketing automation platform needs to be robust, scalable, easy to use, etc., but only rarely is the failure to achieve widespread adoption of automation in the channel tied directly to the channel automation platform itself. In this article we will explore the core issues that underlie channel marketing automation adoption and outline steps vendors can take to generate ROI from the investment they are making in channel marketing automation platforms. Challenges
Lack of partner resources. Most channel partners have neither resident marketing experts nor sufficient resources to create and execute campaigns on their own. As a result of that, most marketing channel automation platforms that are introduced into the channel are simply not used. The problem is not that the platforms are difficult to use, but that partners don’t have the resources—namely, time—to sit down and learn a tool and then go execute a campaign or a program. Also, in the case of large partners that do have sufficient resources, often those resources go into vendor management and relationship management rather than into the proper use of channel management automation software. Lack of horizontal campaigns. Vendors typically deploy a marketing channel automation platform with new or niche products. Partners, on the other hand, generally do not want to squander whatever limited time and resources they have on programs that are not time-tested. In fact, one of the main challenges in spurring adoption of channel management automation is that deployment is often tested with campaigns that lack excitement on the partner side. Lack of partner incentives. Vendors will often have several campaigns, assets, etc. uploaded on the marketing automation platform, but without aligning any specific incentives with those campaigns. As a result, partners fail to see the benefits of putting in all the hard work of executing a campaign when the easiest thing they can do is just have the vendors hand over qualified leads. From the partner perspective, that’s a more efficient way to go. Lack of internal organizational alignment. It’s quite common in many organizations for the internal sales team or channel account management team or partner business management team not to be fully aligned with the channel marketing management automation system. In those cases, even when marketers load up a campaign on the platform, without inside sales or channel sales buy-in the campaign doesn’t go anywhere and the channel marketing platform is rarely discussed in a face-to-face partner meeting or in a phone conversation. As a result, channel marketing automation remains a “sidebar” conversation rather than a mainstream focus. Lack of public celebration. Most vendors have annual partner conferences where they try to promote the use of the channel marketing automation platform. However, most partners attending such conferences choose to attend such events for other reasons. Very rarely do they attend in order to check out all the cool features and functionality of a channel marketing automation tool, or to investigate the campaigns in such a tool or the services provided a...
Over the last year or so, there has been much talk about another impending recession and how it could impact channel management. The recession theory is based upon historical trends, which suggest business cycles tend to last around five to seven years each. That means every five to seven years we experience some sort of a recession. Eventually the economy recovers, and then something else happens to triggers another recession. Current discussions are predicting another slowdown soon. This article explores how you can get your organization—and your channel management team —ready for the moment when another recession arrives. Channel management is complex (see our article Challenges of Channel Management for more on this), but with proper preparation you can address many of the problems and even succeed in the face of the next recession. Is recession coming? The current state of affairs Bear market rallies Over the last few weeks, the global markets have seen a series of bear market rallies, and several analysts are suggesting that when the market rises again in the near term, holders of securities should sell because the market has not yet reached its bottom. In several countries, markets are already down quite substantially. China: borrowing from the future to stimulate growth China, for example, has lost more than 50% of its market value over the last year. The Chinese economy is currently the second largest in the world, valued at around $9 trillion per year. Over the past five years or so, the Chinese government has provided multiple stimulants to drive economic growth. The biggest challenge for China, however, is that it has borrowed from the future to build its economy out, yet consumption has not increased substantially. Because of that dynamic, as the worldwide economy slows down, China as “the factory of the world” can no longer sustain growth due to weakness in demand—not just domestically, but abroad. This has led to a substantial slowdown of the Chinese stock market. Slowdown in many of the world’s largest economies Most recently, Japan has entered a recession again, tied primarily to demographic forces, and most developed countries have a huge amount of national debt, which is preventing them from developing in the future. Outside of BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) and MINT (Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria and Turkey), the rest of the world is not large enough to compensate for the slowdown in most of the world’s large economies, even though commodity prices, including oil prices, have dropped substantially. Wage stagnation in the middle class weakens consumption… Basic consumption patterns have changed dramatically over the last 30 years, because of the amassing of wealth within the top one or two percent of society. At the end of the day, a rich person consumes on a daily basis roughly the same amount of commodities, energy or materials—exclusive of the luxuries associated with conspicuous consumption—as a middle class person does. However, because of wage stagnation in the middle class, incomes have not increased substantially, and thus demand for goods has stagnated as well. …while productivity gains are being diverted to corporate profits While technology continues to drive productivity, that productivity contributes more to corporate profit margins than to wage growth, and this has slowed down consumption substantially across the world. While Japanese and Chinese consumers tend to save more than consumers in developed countries like the U.S. and the U.K., some developed countries like Germany also have high rates of savings. As a result, especially after World War II, the engine that drove prosperity and growth—middle-class consumption—dropped substantially. What does this mean for channel management? For businesses, channel management has in many ways become more challenging, even as companies have taken various measures to reduce their sales cost and increase their reach—both in the bu...
Appointment setting has actually existed for nearly two decades. Over the last five to seven years, however, it has undergone a dramatic transformation. When appointment setting began, it focused primarily on the business-to-business environment, where an inside or outside sales rep would cold call into an account to set up a face-to-face appointment. Even today, it is common to observe salespeople knocking on the doors of small businesses, trying to drop off their business cards—whether they are selling copiers or cleaning services or maintenance and repair services. The goal of securing a face-to-face meeting is still quite common today. However, traditional methods of appointment setting require a huge investment of sales resources, and from that perspective these methods are simply not productive anymore. The fact is, traditional appointment setting wastes a lot of money and time today. However, when conceived as the last step of a structured digital prospecting process, appointment setting can be totally reconfigured and drive significant ROI, and it also can substantially increase customer satisfaction. The future of appointment setting depends heavily on integration with inbound marketing. In other words, successful appointment setting in today’s marketplace requires a proper balance between inbound and outbound marketing tactics. Appointment setting traditionally has been considered on outbound marketing tactic, but recently it is more common for it to be incorporated as the last step of inbound marketing. For this article, I’d like to focus on seven critical principles for making an appointment setting campaign successful:
Appointment setting must begin with an inbound marketing approach. Traditionally, inbound marketing refers to the integrated use of search, social media and a website to drive the awareness of prospective buyers and generate interest among those buyers in reaching out to a specific vendor, asking them to initiate contact. This where an integrated appointment setting strategy can drive real results. The website is your 24x7 salesperson. Traditionally the website has functioned as a summary of what a company does at a high level, with explanations of products and solutions, a section with information about the company’s office presence and contact information, a description of the leadership team and so on. However, over the past five years or so the company website has morphed into what I would call a “digital salesperson” who can sell on a 24/7 cycle. Most companies that are now focused on content marketing to drive lead generation are using their website as a digital salesperson. What does that mean? Today’s website is structured to engage buyers at various stages of research that they are undertaking to determine whether or not the vendor can meet their needs. For instance, in a classic scenario the buyer goes through a series of phases on the path to purchase: awareness, interest, trial or demo, engagement with the vendor and procurement—followed by renewal or repurchase. In the earliest phase where the buyer is developing awareness and interest in a vendor’s solution, the conversation needs to be very different than in other stages. Traditional appointment setting has done a poor job of addressing the multiple stages the buyer may be progressing through. An effective website, on the other hand, can address those stages with different types of content. Search is king and queen. After the website, the next most important function for appointment setting is search. Search engine optimization is what actually drives traffic to the website. When buyers begin their journey to look for a solution or pursue an interest, they go online and search using certain keywords. That’s why a website needs to be fully optimized—to ensure that when a buyer searches, the vendor’s name pops up. Ideally it appears on the first page of search results, but it definitely must appear by the second page.
Many organizations selling through the channel today are trying to determine how best to automate their partner relationship management (PRM) process. In order to do so, quite a few are getting online and searching on Google and other search engines for “PRM software.” When you do so, multiple vendors pop up. How do you distinguish among them? And how do you select a PRM software vendor that can satisfy your needs? In this article, we will explore in an objective way five key capabilities that PRM vendors must provide in order to meet the needs of most organizations.
Flexibility, localization and scalability. When you think carefully about PRM software and what it is supposed to do, you realize the main purpose of PRM software is to truly automate the PRM process end-to-end. True PRM automation would not only bring a structured approach to partner recruitment, partner engagement, partner enablement and partner management, but it would also offer visibility and scalability on a global level. A company that automates PRM processes should be able to deploy a common set of programs globally and execute them locally in each country using local languages. An organization that’s selling through the channel needs to be able to meet the unique requirements of each country where it operates. While much of the time partner programs are consistent across all countries, it’s important to remember there is a degree of variability among different geographies. Therefore, any organization selling through the channel on a global scale needs to be certain its PRM vendor can complete flexibility, localization and scalability across multiple markets. Modularity. Most organizations selling through the channel today have some level of existing infrastructure in place. Very rarely would a company find it desirable or practical to rip and replace everything they have in place. As a result, the PRM software vendor must be able to provide a modular architecture whereby an organization can pick and choose which PRM software modules they want to deploy, and decide which they will configure first and then successively turn on. Modularity is key for a PRM software vendor. Partner marketing management capabilities. While most PRM software vendors provide some sort of functionality for partner records management, business planning, contract management, training management and incentives management, almost none — except ZINFI — provides full integration of partner management capabilities. Why is this important? Once you manage “market to” activities, such as partner recruitment and partner engagement, which are focused primarily on training, and partner management, which is organized around partner incentives, you eventually need to turn your focus to enable partners to drive leads and build pipelines on their own. Partner marketing management is a natural extension of PRM that completes the partner relationship management framework. Therefore, a PRM software vendor must be able either to successfully integrate with an existing partner marketing tool or provide additional feature sets with incremental cost to turn on multi-partner demand generation capabilities. Multi-tenant architecture. While most PRM software vendors provide a basic framework for multiple PRM modules and partner records management, very few provide a complete, CRM-like capability which allows not only the channel management folks from the organization—e.g., a channel account manager or a business manager—to manage the partners, but also provides a structure that can be deployed on the partner side—by, for example, a partner marketing manager or a partner sales rep—opening up access to the information in a seamless way within the PRM software software. Almost no vendors today provide this specific capability. A company can spend millions of dollars configuring their CRM infrastructure to do this, but a state-of-art PRM software vendor like ZINFI can provide this capability right ...
Introduction Channel management is complex primarily because of what it tries to manage. The word “management” implies some level of control to achieve performance from an individual or from a team, either through inspiration or through some level of enforcement. The meaning of “management” varies greatly when it comes to an organization’s structure—depending on whether it’s a startup, a more mature company or a governmental organization like the military. However, in every one of those instances there is a direct relationship between the manager and the subordinate or employee or team member. In the case of a reseller network or a partner network, that relationship is very different, and it presents some unique challenges. Let’s take a moment to explore those challenges.
Challenges 1. Channel partners are companies, not people. Ordinarily when we talk about management, where there is some level of control over employees or consultants or contractors, we are exerting some level of control over people. But when we talk about managing a channel, the level of control is much lower: first of all because it’s an indirect sales force and, second, as I’ve already noted, we’re managing companies, not people. Of course those companies are made up of people—sales people, technical people, marketing people—but in the end we’re trying to manage an entity rather than individuals. That’s an important difference that creates a huge amount of complexity. 2. Channel partners do not report to vendors. In the case of a direct sales force, there is a hierarchy. You have a manager who reports to a director who may report to a VP, but with a channel organization, you have a company reporting to a channel account manager or a partner business manager. That reporting relationship is indirect. If some partners don’t perform over one or two or three quarters, they don’t get fired for missing their mark. They may miss some incentives, but they don’t get fired for poor performance. Eventually, if a partner doesn’t perform over a long period of time, that partner may be replaced, but it doesn’t happen as quickly as it would when you’re managing a direct sales force. 3. Channel partners have their own priorities. The challenge here is that those priorities do not necessarily align with the priorities of a vendor. If a vendor is trying to promote a specific product or trying to penetrate a specific market—say, verticals like manufacturing or healthcare or whatever–it may or may not be in the interest of the partner to carry out those activities. So it’s crucial for the organization to understand what the priorities of those partners are instead of randomly pushing programs and deploying resources. 4.There are different types of partners, and they require different engagement models. Some partners sell to small and medium-size businesses (SMBs), some partners sell to midmarket organizations, some sell to enterprises and some sell to all or a combination of two or more segments. For an organization to align behind the needs of various types of partners, have appropriate programs and make them meaningful requires a significant level of thinking and homework which, a lot of times, companies skip. Therefore, many of the initiatives that are rolled out in the channel don’t really have an impact. In addition to differences in types of partners—what we might call practices or areas of focus—there are also differences in relationship based on revenue. Partners who are larger—larger in the sense that they carry a bigger portion of a vendor’s revenue—tend to more important to the vendors than those partners who don’t carry a lot of products. Aligning the appropriate level of resources with high-velocity and high-volume partners vs. low-velocity, low-volume partners is critical, and that can make channel management quite complex. 5. A partner’s loyalty is driven by financial motives. Just like in a startup environment, where people may be partly motivated by a beli...
With the rise of content marketing as a primary way to engage the target audience and drive sales, channel marketing is also evolving rapidly. A decade or two ago, channel marketing pretty much meant running events (for recruitment, training and lead generation) and giving away market-development funds to those who knew how to leverage them. Today, unified channel management is changing the way companies invest, track and improve ROI from their channel marketing activities. A core set of channel marketing metrics play a critical role in driving better ROI. Before we take a deep dive into the channel marketing metrics that truly matter, let's step back and clearly define the objectives of channel marketing. If marketing is about driving awareness, engagement and customer intimacy, channel marketing essentially means the same thing, but it operates in more dimensions: The first two dimensions are the channel partners who resell the products and services, and the end users who procure them. To that you add a third dimension: increasing reach at a lower cost. Channel marketing metrics need to address all three core dimensions, measuring ROI from partner marketing, ROI from end user marketing and expansion of reach.
Partner engagement – This channel marketing metric focuses on how well you are engaging partners across various partner types, geography and channel programs. A state-of-the-art channel marketing automation platform should dynamically show clear engagement metrics. Program utilization – Every company has ongoing programs in place to drive channel marketing. They key is to figure out the core metrics of those programs, in terms of partner recruitment, partner training, multi-partner demand generation and incentives programs. It's essential to have a channel marketing automation platform in place that can allow the channel management team to slice and dice the data to understand what is truly going on in the channel. Program effectiveness – Unlike program utilization metrics, which focus on the ways in which partners are engaged in program activities, program effectiveness metrics are focused on measuring the ROI delivered by specific programs. This applies to both indirect marketing channels (e.g., search and social) and direct channels (e.g.., collateral, email, telemarketing, etc.) as well as marketing programs. These are key channel marketing metrics, and they should allow the channel management team to understand how well each program is meeting its objectives, as well as driving ROI. Partner portal effectiveness – Partner portals play a critical role in communicating to the partners what is going on with the various aspects of the company's channel marketing They also provide partners with access to all necessary tools related to program components like marketing, sales and incentives. Sales reach – The very purpose of a channel is to extend reach, but very rarely do companies run territory analysis to understand over- and under-penetration from an end-user demand perspective. We will discuss in detail how to do this separately, as it requires partner profiling. The important point here is that sales reach is an essential metric when it comes to channel marketing program selection. If you don’t understand what is selling where, program selection and execution is a little like shooting in the dark. Return on incentives– These very important channel marketing metrics measure the effectiveness of three core incentives programs: co-marketing funds (or market development funds), sales rewards and rebates. Without a proper partner relationship management platform, it is almost impossible to track these metrics dynamically. That’s an important consideration, since most channel incentives change dynamically on a quarterly and bi-annual basis. Companies that can track incentives dynamically can make rapid adjustments, quickly realigning behind successful programs and redirecting resources from programs that ...
When it comes to business-to-business (B2B) social network, LinkedIn is the gorilla, and has certainly started to act like one. Why do I say that? Well, it's based on a lack of innovation. The stock price is down, and the analysts are no longer sure – the future is not as clear as it used to be. Believe it or not, LinkedIn has been around for well over a decade now. It is older than YouTube. In the beginning, it was an incredible tool for upgrading your static Rolodex into a dynamic database of personal contacts, but then it morphed into an online resume, networking tool and much more. Thanks to Reid Hoffman's brilliance in pulling a team together that was incredibly successful in harnessing the untapped potential of a B2B social (or should we say also B2B social marketing?) network, LinkedIn became a valuable tool for the professional world. Certainly some of its success was attributable to timing, as Malcom Gladwell points out in Outliers, but a lot of its success was tied to the uniqueness of its original vision. Vision, timing and execution to date have been almost flawless for LinkedIn – a B2B social network whose business model was based on a pure connectivity platform for job seekers and recruiters. As digital social behavior evolved, LinkedIn did an amazing job of capturing feature ideas from Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and others, but it also added original solutions that logically built on its core strengths. All of this has been great until recently, but I have started to wonder why the experience needs to be so complex when the core activities are relatively simple. While LinkedIn is being touted for both personal (career) and professional (sales and marketing) uses, and data shows that it tends to drive more traffic to a company website than other social media, the social marketing aspect of LinkedIn still is in its infancy, leaving much to desire both for ordinary users and “hyper-users” like myself. Can it be true that, 450 million users later, LinkedIn is now struggling to innovate and differentiate? Yes, the stock price is up almost 100% from the day of its IPO, but it’s down significantly from its highs in early 2015. Could it be possible that the company needs to radically rethink how to increase its utility further for users and increase usage (minutes) per day per member? Lately, the innovation has been far from what you expect from a leader. The recent mobile release is questionable at best, as is the current focus on fully monetizing the user base using a freemium model. Now don't get me wrong: I love LinkedIn. I log in every day for personal and professional uses, but also to keep up to date on industry activities. But I think we should expect a lot more from a leader in B2B social networking. As a hyper-user in recruitment, sales, marketing and more, if I were running product management at LinkedIn I would simplify the offering into two core areas: recruitment and social marketing. I would get rid of the hodgepodge of other features and offers, which are too complex and add no real value. This approach, allowing LinkedIn to focus its resources on two core offerings, should liberate the company and solidify its future for some time to come. And now for some specific suggestions:
Focus on the user – Yes, monetization is important for LinkedIn – and for that matter, for any organization (profit or non-profit) – but the products and solutions need to flow together. LinkedIn needs to work hard to move away from the disjointed experience it offers today across its solutions (recruitment, sales and marketing). Fifteen (15%) percent of LinkedIn users pay for the eighty-five (85%) percent who are using it for free; maybe LinkedIn needs to segment its use cases that way. Today, LinkedIn products try to reflect how the organization is structured: different product groups and lines of business vs. a unified experience from a "paid customer" perspective. At the same time,
The most recent trend in channel marketing automation has been the rapid deployment of Partner Relationship Management (PRM) Software along with Partner Marketing Management (PMM) capabilities in multiple industry verticals. In this article, we will focus specifically on the value of Partner Profile Manager (PPM) as a core feature for PRM Software. Before we begin, let's discuss the rationale for using a Partner Profile Manager (PPM) and how it can help. The primary use for a Partner Profile Manager (PPM) in PRM Software is to make sure the vendor selling through the channel has detailed records for each partner company and their team members. This functions almost like CRM software, but with a lot more data and search capability associated with a specific partner profile. We have discussed earlier how partner profiling can boost channel sales. The main objective of the Partner Profile Management tool in PRM Software is to give a vendor the ability to profile or segment their partner on a dynamic basis, and use that segmentation data to take different business decision and actions.
Partner Profile Management plays a very important role in PRM Software by helping users understand the following:
Firmographics of the partner company – This typically covers how many employees the partner company has, the key office locations, the market segments they serve, how long they have been in the business, what their credit rating is, etc. This information can be collected dynamically in the PPM tool of the PRM software from various database sources that are publicly available in most developed countries. In developing countries, this information will need to be pulled together manually from various sources, including telephone research and surveys. Business mix – Once you know who your partners are, the next most logical parameter for profiling is to understand their business mix – i.e., product versus services. A partner's ability to sell services directly depends on their ability to understand a specific vertical. As a result, partners who sell services also tend to specialize in certain verticals. These partners tend to work with a group of vendors and carry their solutions as a bundle. The right PRM Software can capture this information for you. Technical competence – A specific partner may sell into multiple industry verticals, such as healthcare, finance, insurance, real estate, manufacturing and education. If the product or solution the partner is selling varies by segment, then the partner will need specific marketing, sales and technical ability to sell that specific solution. It is crucial to dynamically track this data in PRM Software via the PPM tool. Sales velocity – One of the core capabilities of your PRM Software is the ability to access your point-of-sales data and dynamically show the sales velocity of your individual partners. Once you align this data with data about partner firmographics, business mix and technical competency, you will be able to see a storyline that will start making sense. Having this storyline allows you to differentiate partners by programs, capabilities, etc., so you can focus on partners with different storylines in different ways. This differentiated approach will not only help you increase your sales velocity, but will also enhance partner profitability by allowing them to differentiate from each other. Growth potential – Last but not least, the most important outcome of the partner profiling capability embedded in your PRM Software is continued engagement with your partner base, getting their feedback and linking feedback to their performance data to predict the growth potential of each and every one of your customers. You cannot control how a partner will run their business and where they will invest specifically. However, you can clearly lay out investment criteria by informing the partners what the rules of engagement are and where your organization is willing to invest to ma...
With the passage of every day, month and year, content marketing continues to take over marketing (branding and lead generation). Unfortunately, most channel marketers still remain stuck in the archaic 20th century model for lead generation, using appointment setting for their business-to-business (B2B) channel partners. This model still requires a phonebook, a telephone and a script-driven telemarketer. What's wrong with this picture? Actually, a lot. But there is a much better way. Before we explore what the alternatives are, let's take a look at how we got here. Over the past three decades, as channel became an important asset to go to market in an efficient way, channel partners began to recognize they needed to build their own pipeline. In the 1980s, the proliferation of business database companies led to the evolution of a whole new segment of lead generation companies. They focused primarily on appointment setting, putting sales people behind a telephone and equipping them with a list and a script to cold call at random to find potential buyers. In the beginning this method worked quite well, because the market was not saturated and information was hard to come by before the advent and maturation of the Internet. Business buyers at this stage got hold of information to procure new solutions primarily via magazines, tradeshows, peer groups and random telemarketers calling them with offers. Then the Internet happened. Buyers started to move online, and they began their buying journey by searching on Google and other content sources. This has now become the primary way that buyers find out about solutions. No one waits for a poorly trained, highly scripted appointment-setter to call. In fact, appointment setting is considered to be a nuisance when it comes to most business buyers. But old habits die hard, so it's understandable that people who saw results a decade ago from appointment setting campaigns still hope the same strategy will yield similar results today. However, reality tells a different story. The good news is that there are many options for a channel marketer to use today to enable their partners to generate leads and develop the sales pipeline. While it's easy to repeat what we know, as marketers we must continuously ask whether what we know is relevant or not. And the reality is that telemarketing-based appointment setting is becoming less and less effective every day. Channel marketers must realign their thought process and go-to-market approaches around integrated inbound marketing instead of age-old telemarketing-based campaigns. While it is understandable that a seasoned channel marketer may have doubts and may suffer, potentially, from withdrawal symptoms when moving from tactical appointment setting to more integrated strategic campaigns, the reality is that a state-of-the-art channel marketing automation platform can make lead generation using content marketing quite effective, and it can happen quickly and affordably with minimal implementation steps or roll-out risks. The question is how to provide an integrated marketing approach to hundreds – may be even thousands – of partners on a worldwide basis. The answer is that it can be done in seven easy steps. 1. Focus on a two-pronged approach:This should include the entire partner base with a focused fund and activity allocation: a) Do-it-yourself: Enable partners who have market development funds and follow-up sales capabilities with an outsourced marketing services agency (MSA) model that can run integrated campaigns over multiple quarters for the partners and build their pipeline. b) Do-it-for-me: Set up campaigns that partners can use with a few clicks, but make the campaigns simple and tactical – e.g., email, microsite, postcards, events, search and social. 2. Develop multitouch campaigns by segments and pick the right marketing tactics: a) Small and medium-sized businesses (SMB) – If the transaction price of the solution is low,
Managing a direct sales force is tough, let alone managing an indirect (channel) sales force. The concept of a channel has existed since the existence of fire, when one person bartered with another. While technology has evolved rapidly over the past few thousand years, for many companies the state of their channel maturity still resembles how the channel was managed in the Stone Age. That doesn’t need to be the case, however. If you are considering building a channel to sell your products and solutions, or upgrade an existing one, channel marketing automation can significantly increase the efficacy of the deployment and management of your channel network globally. I consider the Internet as the second Big Bang. Yes, really. It has transformed how we look at the distributed world, and now the evolution of cloud-based software solutions is automating distributed workflow at a rapid pace. Please refer to our article on “Channel Marketing Software – Why The Rapid Emergence?” where we talk about what is truly driving the adoption of channel marketing automation tools and solutions. However, as the great saying goes: Before you automate, think through the steps manually. With that principle in mind, I’d like to share with you a framework that every company must consider before they can deploy mature, end-to-end channel marketing automation that’s comparable to what we provide at ZINFI. Based on our engagement with thousands of channel partners on a worldwide basis and our evaluation of how vendors deploy channel management, we have come up with a basic four-step framework for partner lifecycle management (or activities). We break down this lifecycle into four core areas: partner recruitment, partner engagement, partner enablement and partner management. As a part of the channel management maturity evaluation, it is essential to understand which phase a company is in when it comes to these four different areas of activities. Phase 1: Laying the foundation – This is what I call the start-up phase of channel development. When you look at the activities at this level, it basically covers the following:
Partner recruitment – The company has some basic partner recruitment capabilities in place by running tradeshows, webinars and call-out campaigns. Recruitment is ad hoc, and not really focused around partner profiling or competency development, but more opportunistic. Partner engagement – The company knows how to provide a basic infrastructure. In many cases the following are homegrown:
Partner portal – Tends to be patched together using either open source software, SharePoint or some other web development tools. However, the portal is monolithic, not localized and cannot offer personalized content. With that said, at this stage the basic content exchange capabilities are in place. Some companies in this phase deploy a basic level of channel marketing automation. Partner onboarding – Signing contracts, training partners on how to sell and putting business plans together are the core steps in this phase or in short - partner onboarding, but most of these activities are done manually and there are no systems in place to track the progress of partner engagement. Partner communication – A weekly or monthly newsletter goes out to partners, but communication is not broadly aligned with strategic initiatives and intent. Most content is highly tactical, and not necessarily controlled and aligned with broader corporate initiative. Very rarely at this stage do we see deployment of channel marketing automation.
Partner enablement – The company provides a basic level of marketing and sales tools.
Marketing and sales enablement – Price lists, product data sheets, marketing templates are available for partners to use. However, content is not mobile-friendly and not easy to search, tag and find at this level. Partner training – A basic partner certification and training mechanism is in place,
When selling through a channel, chances are every now and then you will need to run partner recruitment (existing and new partners) campaigns into your channel program. Automating your recruitment and onboarding activities via purpose-built partner relationship management (PRM) software will significantly increase your speed to revenue and reduce ramp-up costs substantially by streamlining many of the activities and eliminating manual steps. Partner recruitment basically has five core steps: partner profiling, partner outreach, partner qualification, partner sign-up and partner onboarding. The focus of this discussion is on partner onboarding. Assuming that you have qualified a partner and are ready to onboard them onto your channel program, let’s explore how partner relationship management (PRM) software can significantly speed up sign-up and onboarding steps. We’ll talk about these two steps in sequence.
Partner sign-up – Most organizations today have some sort of a sign-up form, whether it is a Word document, a spreadsheet converted into a form or a PDF file that partners need to manually fill in. Once a partner has signed up, expressing interest, the next step is for the partner to sign a "terms and conditions" agreement, which has all the legalities.
Now comes the biggest challenge most organizations face when they have a manual process: If the terms of the channel programs change, and we all know they do, it is very hard to go back and re-enroll existing partners to make sure they have agreed to recently changed terms and conditions. If this is a manual process, it can take months to get some partners to sign it. This is where a partner relationship management (PRM) software platform can significantly help by automating the entire process. If your partners have access to your partner portal, and if that partner portal is managed via a partner relationship management (PRM) software platform, then you can effectively control their access and make sure they always agree to the latest terms-and-conditions document before they can log in, or before they’re able to continue after logging in. As users, we are all accustomed to this "agreeing to terms" process with our own computers and mobile devices, and your PRM platform should be able to establish this same process for your partners in a seamless way.
Partner Onboarding – Once your partners have signed on to your agreement, the next step is to accelerate their ramp-to-revenue in the program that you have recruited them for. This is where purpose-built partner relationship management (PRM) software can significantly help reduce time to market and ramp-up costs. You can take your channel program and break it down over a 30-60-90-day cycle. Here is an example of how a PRM software platform can automate this workflow for you:
Partner mapping – Once a partner has signed onto a program, either the partner already reports to an existing territory manager, or you will need to map that partner under a specific territory manager. This is critical to make sure the territory manager has complete visibility into where the partner is and what they are doing during the ramp-up cycle. Partner tracking – This is a critical capability of your partner relationship management (PRM) software. It will allow you to see where your partners are in their training and competency development cycle, and when they are ready to complete their business planning and marketing activity planning. Results tracking – The purpose of recruiting a partner into a program is to sell more products and services, and tracking results is critical. Having the right partner relationship management (PRM) software enables you to see which marketing and sales steps the partner has taken and what opportunities are being generated.
As you can see, having the right partner relationship management (PRM) software can dramatically reduce the number of manual steps you need to perform.
Before we delve into the reasons why you should consider insourcing your event marketing management activities, let’s take a moment to define clearly where this logic could apply and where it wouldn’t work. In our experience, companies tend to outsource events because they have been working with a provider for a long time and think that’s the easiest way. But as a company using both our own marketing automation software and external agency services, our experience tells us that outsourcing may not always be the best option. While the prospect of managing an event may initially be daunting, the actuality is less so. Depending on the scale and frequency, many B2B events can be insourced quite effectively as long as you follow a few simple processes. Of course, there are other events – like major trade shows or global sales or partner conferences – that need to be outsourced, until and unless you have a full-blown event management team. In these cases, it makes far better sense to outsource some or all of the related activity to a major event marketing management firm. However, if your events do not fall into the mega production category, there are some good reasons why you should consider insourcing them.
Begin with the end in mind - The purpose of most B2B events is demand generation or rewards and recognition. There are a very few – even the charity golf tournaments - that do not have a purpose. No one else but you and your marketing team has a clear idea of what you hope to achieve from each event. You need to know what success looks like before you start, and without this you won’t do any better by outsourcing to an event marketing management firm. If you want to run the event internally and are looking for ideas, there’s a lot of great advice on the B2B event organizers’ websites. Skip the noise - People don’t come to a B2B event for bells and whistles, but for substance. They do expect seamless organization, a professional and well set up venue, interesting speakers and reasonable food. So, just make sure that the purpose and agenda of the event is reflected by the way you set it up. If it is a training event, for example, a venue in a 4 or 5 star hotel ball room with good meals and a projector would do the trick and the hotel staff will help with all the practicalities like basic audio visual equipment. The skill of the trainer or the speaker will determine the successf of the event. An event marketing management company can’t add a lot of value to these smaller and less intricate gatherings, unless you don’t have any in house resources or are running a lengthy series in multiple locations. Rely on automation - Five years ago it was hard to run an event all by yourself because you needed to pull so many pieces together, starting with the headache of invitation and registration. However, these days if you have an access to a great event marketing automation platform that can send outbound emails and manage responses automatically, as well as promote your event on various social networks, then you actually require far less support than you might think. Yes, you may have to hire a telemarketing firm to do some dialling-out for you, but if your event marketing automation platform has in-built rapid dialing capabilities then your inside sales team might even be able to drive traffic to the event without extra cost. And there is the added advantage that, since they understand your organization, they will do a much better job promoting your events than a scripted telemarketer. Manage execution - There are three core pieces that require your close involvement and management, whether or not you have hired an event marketing management firm. These are, a) creating compelling content tied to the objective of your event, including the agenda; b) working with internal or external design teams to create the graphical themes and assets that you will use to promote the event; and c) if you are going to hold an awards ceremon...
Consumer and business buyers all go online to do their research before committing to a purchase, reading peer reviews and comparing products as a normal part of their decision making process. The entire sales cycle has turned upside down: now it’s a buying cycle. This dependence on online research has made web content syndication critical for content marketers. In the B2B and B2C spaces, sales success is no longer dependent on how you reach out to prospects, generate leads and forecast your pipeline. These days, your sales pipeline only begins at the last stages of buying, so if you are to have a prayer of influencing the process, your marketing cycle must be in complete alignment with the buyers’ buying cycle. A strategic approach towards web content syndication is of great benefit in helping to manage this cycle. In the old days, content marketing essentially consisted of creating advertising, packaging, promotional flyers, tradeshow materials, and maybe issuing occasional press releases. The advent of the Internet changed the way the business world viewed the distribution of content, and press releases took more importance. About a couple of decades ago we started to hear the word web content syndication, but it primarily meant distribution of press releases, along with some occasional blogging. However, during the past couple of decades, buyers’ behavior changed - especially with the evolution of search engines and advent of social media. Therefore, it is very important to understand the impact of the following two critical factors:
Evolution of Search Engines- Let’s talk about the evolution of search engines, and importance of web content syndication first. Most buyers - starting with consumers - started to search online about fifteen years ago. This enhanced Google’s advertising revenue growth, and an entire industry evolved to support keyword-based content optimization and web content syndication. Today it is taken for granted that your website must be keyword optimized unless you are to rely on expensive and – frequently – untargeted advertising campaigns. Websites are most commonly seen as a dynamic platform for web content syndication and a vehicle for a web content syndication based content marketing strategy. Impact of Peer Influenced Buying- The second major wave that has now changed how we buy is social media, and it is not just through sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, but through peer review sites and content. Peer influenced buying has become the most critical influencing factor in purchasing, a trend that has been led by customer reviews on Amazon, Yelp, eBay and others - including most recently the evolution of G2Crowd for the B2B software space. Many organizations today use web content syndication to distribute customer reviews, comments, and technical observations via various social media sites to differentiate themselves from the competition. It is easy to imagine, as the years go by, that the influence of market and industry analysts will wane; to be superseded by crowd sourced reviews as the key influencers of the solution research phase before purchase.
So, the critical question is how do you win in this age of search and social media driven buying? The answer is very simple - with great content. But what does that mean? Well, great content can be categorized into three primary categories:
A clear web content strategy- It is about developing a website strategy that is focused on optimizing your entire web content around a set of keywords for which your buyers are constantly searching. You need to attend to this as a priority, before applying your thoughts to web content syndication. Content distribution strategy- Once you have optimized your web content, the next step is about distribution of content using your choice of a variety of web content syndication engines. Some of the social media and blog management tools allow you to post and stream content from your own site,
Organizations selling via networks of channel partners (resellers, VARs, distributors, wholesales, agents, or other third party arrangement need to have a systematic approach towards partner relationship management (PRM) if they are to achieve long term success. This starts with the three primary stages of partner recruitment, partner enablement and partner management, all of which require a set of internal processes, structure and tools. Today, almost all organizations selling through the channel have deployed Customer Relationship Management (CRM) automation platforms for both direct and indirect sales teams. If you are in an organization that hasn’t yet deployed a purpose-built PRM software platform, and do not have a budget to do so in the near term, then you may want to consider configuring your existing CRM platform to support your PRM efforts in the following way.
Partner Recruitment – The first step in deploying PRM is to employ a step-by-step approach to partner recruitment and onboarding. Partner recruitment activities typically entail an outbound reach to or inbound engagement with potential new partners who are willing to carry your solutions and resell. The two most important elements of this process are Partner Profiling (please refer to our article How Partner Profiling Can Increase Your Channel Sales) and Partner Onboarding (our article on 7 Critical Factors for Partner Recruitment).If you are using a CRM application to manage lead flow for your end-user marketing, then you can create a separate lead type called ‘Prospective Partners’ and assign all new partner leads into that category. This is a roundabout way of overcoming gaps in partner marketing automation, but if you don’t have a partner relationship management platform it helps you to get by for a while until budget or other issues are resolved.Also, in addition to inbound lead management for the Prospective Partner category, you can require your inside sales team or channel account managers to update the status of the partner as go through a 30-60-90 day onboarding process and you ramp the partner to their first revenue.Needless to say a purpose-built PRM platform would automate the process, making this process significantly easier, but if your organization is not ready to commit, you can certainly demonstrate the value of automating PRM workflow by reconfiguring your CRM platform.
Partner Enablement - The two most important areas of partner enablement for partner relationship management are - partner training and demand generation. Both training and demand generation automation are critical to make sure your partner organizations are capable of generating leads and closing them. This applies to any organization that is selling through the channel using your channel partners as your indirect sales force.Regarding automating partner training, if your organization has a learning management system (LMS) for the internal sales team, you can create a separate group called ‘partners’ that you can leverage for partner training. You may have to procure additional licenses per user; however, if you do not have an LMS platform then you will have to figure out if you can use the documents module, which most CRMs have, that can be used for uploading videos, documents or other assets, to train your partners on your products and services. Again, a purpose-built partner relationship management platform will give you the desired ease of use for rapid deployment of an end-to-end partner training process, but you can work around this using the point tools available within your organization.When it comes to demand generation activities, it is essential to decide what lead generation campaigns you want to make available to which countries and partner types. Once you have determined what’s going to work for you, then again you can use your CRM application. If you have a documents module you should be able to upload campaign assets (email templates,
A significant portion of both B2B and B2C sales are made through a network of partners and resellers. Even today, however, most companies have antiquated channel management tools that do not live up to the full promise of their partner network. Only a very few organizations adequately invest in upgrading their channel management infrastructure, due to certain channel management misconceptions. In this article we will explore some of the common myths that impact not only the operational efficiency but also undermine the real truth about all channel networks.
Partners are my indirect sales team - Nothing could be further away from the truth. While partners do have sales capability and most organizations tend to treat their partners as if they are an extension of their sales force, the reality is that partners are customers. While partners are certainly vocal and their feedback is critical because they run their own businesses, they do not regard a vendor as their equal. Maybe this is not the case if you are running a multi-outlet franchise, but when it comes to a traditional, two or three tier distribution channel, partners are their own bosses. There is no question that they do not work for their vendors. They work for their customers and for themselves. It follows that the way you manage your direct sales force as opposed to this indirect sales force should be planned and executed differently. This is where you need state-of-the-art channel management infrastructure. My partners are loyal - Yes, it is true to some extent, but their loyalty is really directed towards their own customer base and their employees. At the end of the day, their loyalty to a vendor comes last. Organizations that perceive their partners’ lack of receptiveness to competitors may perceive this as loyalty are completely misreading how the partner truly feels about the relationship. Yes, they may be engaged, and sell a lot of products, but their loyalty is to themselves and their relationships are based on the logic of what works for them. They are running a business, but not a frat house. Building partner loyalty requires deeper understanding, based on a structured approach towards channel management - starting with partner profiling, offer alignment, partner enablement and incentives management. Just as, if you want to build employee loyalty you need to think about their needs, in the same way it is critical to understand and deliver what partners care about. Most channel initiatives tend to be company centric vs. partner centric, and this is why they tend to fail. Partners will drive demand - Until and unless your partners are large distributors or national retailer/retailers, do not expect your partners to have the marketing capability to drive demand. Mature channel management organizations do not expect their sales people to drive their own demand; rather they deploy fully capable marketing processes, automation, programs and people. Similarly, your partners are your fulfillment arms, so you have to bring either a fully integrated marketing capability to them or provide them with sales-ready leads. The general expectation is that if a partner is getting commission they will naturally generate leads and close deals. This is a fallacy, but one which most organizations are not willing to relinquish. This expectation is not realistic, because it’s outside the resources and competency of most partners. The partner council knows it all - Most vendors selling through the channel tend to create partner councils to stay connected with the market place. While this is certainly an appropriate channel management approach in that it helps keep a pulse on the channel, it should also be kept in mind that this is only a small cross-section (and may not be a true and complete representation) of the entire channel. We have seen companies making grave mistakes in product pricing and distribution strategies when they listen to a small group of highly influe...
Lead management is one of the top marketing keywords that is searched on Google every day, which is a clear indication of the huge and growing amount of interest in the topic. Are we clear on what lead management means? Basically, lead management is an organized way of generating, distributing and managing contacts with potential prospects, and engaging with those prospects to identify or generate an opportunity for a sales team to pursue. Lead management is one of the most important business functions, bridging both marketing and sales, through a combination of people, process and automation. Just like a fish out of water, a lead has a specific and limited lifetime. Once a lead has appeared, it needs to be nurtured, managed and closed systematically. A typical lead management system will allow an organization to manage five critical phases of the lead life cycle, as follows:
Lead Generation - Content marketing has displaced the old model of telemarketing to generate leads. Today’s marketers know that buyers search online and, by the time they contact a vendor, they have a very clear idea about what they are looking for. This is the precise point where the first step along the path of systematic lead management, using an integrated approach to lead generation, must be taken. Integrated tactics like social marketing, search marketing, email marketing, direct mail marketing, and online banner ads, are all critical methods of generating awareness and create a solid foundation for inbound marketing. If you combine inbound marketing with outbound telemarketing towards your installed base of existing customers and interested prospects, you can exponentially increase the effectiveness of your lead generation efforts. Lead Distribution - With leads in the pipeline and interest from prospective buyers, the next key step in lead management is lead distribution. I can’t emphasize how essential it is to have an automated mechanism for lead scoring and distribution. Not all leads are ready for sales contact, so either they need to be nurtured further (please see Point 3, below) before being handed to an inside or outside sales rep or, in the case of channel-based organization, must be distributed to the right channel partner. This is where a rule-based lead distribution engine comes in. Any state-of-the-art channel marketing automation platform should be able to distribute a set of leads to a group of partners based on various criteria, such as partner type, partner location, partner competencies, or interested buyers’ segment, e.g., SMB, mid market, enterprise, vertical or geography. Lead Nurturing - Another critical component of lead management is lead nurturing and scoring. A marketing automation platform should be able to automatically create a multi-touch engagement with a potential buyer based on their purchase behavior. A prospective buyer’s online persona should be scored in a systematic way, and appropriate sales people (whether internal captive or external partner-based sales reps) should be alerted when a lead is ready for contact. This systematic approach towards lead nurturing is critical to drive sales efficiency, increase closure rate and build the reputation of an organization as a responsive provider in their marketplace. Lead to Opportunity Creation– Once a marketing-qualified lead has been converted to a sales-qualified lead, the next big step is to develop the opportunity. This is the moment for exact deployment and fit analysis. This is a critical sales step, and also an essential part of the lead management process. Most existing CRM systems provide an effective way of tracking and managing opportunities, but they aren’t designed with the channel in mind. If you are selling through the channel, make sure that you use a Partner Relationship Management platform that can drive opportunity creation and management through the channel in a dynamic and distributed fashion.
Every organization selling through a network of partners; be they resellers, system integrators, agents or franchise holders, struggles with partner engagement. And, one of the main areas of challenge for them is to make a partner log into the partner portal for content consumption and program awareness. There are multiple reasons why partners don’t use a vendor’s partner portal (please see our earlier article on How to Make Your Partner Portal More Partner-Friendly); however, there are simple techniques that you can use to increase partner portal access by multiple folds. One of the main techniques that is underused, or not used consistently - is social media marketing. While most organizations selling via a channel tend to use social media, our conclusions after observing multiple deployments are that social media is more often treated as a mechanism for publishing snippets of information rather than a holistic medium for partner engagement and marketing. The use of social media in the B2B space is fundamentally different from how it works in the B2C space, because of one primary issue; lack of available time for content consumption by the target audience. Most vendors tend to push news and other types of content via Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and even sites like Pinterest but the key to increasing partner portal adoption is to make sure there is a holistic publishing strategy. This is how it works. Assuming that an organization has an overarching strategy for using social media for end-user marketing (both in the B2B and B2C spaces), and since content marketing has become the de facto norm today, it is important to ensure that your strategy for driving partner portal usage is integrated within your overall plan. There are a few simple ways of doing this.
Segment content - Channel partners may follow an organization through various channels on the same social media sites, so you need to avoid mixing different types of information in your feeds. For example, if you use Twitter to promote company news and events, you need to make sure you don’t muddle this channel by delivering technical or product releases, bug fixes, or other tactical announcements that you have already posted in your partner portal. Also, if you have inbound engagement via any of the channels related to support, partner or customer complaints, it’s essential to direct that conversation to the correct social media site, for example to your customer support portal. Actively managing the type of content and where it’s viewed is a critical part of segmenting content appropriately, and driving relevant traffic to your partner portal. Localize engagement - Partner portal usage tends to be highest in the English language, partly due to the prevalence of English in the technology industry but also due to lack of localized interfaces and content for non-English-speaking countries. This assumes you have picked the right partner management platform (please see our earlier article, Must-Haves for Your Partner Portal). It is important that you only promote English-language content where it can be understood, and local-language content only in the appropriate country channels. It makes no sense to push an English-language globally when you know very well that in certain countries like China, Japan or Korea it will be wasted. This thoughtfulness is critical in making sure that the reach of social marketing is not abused and engagement is strategically planned and managed. Reduce overload - Not every news item or sales program is relevant to partners, so they don’t all merit a push via social media. Selecting what’s critical to know and strategically valuable in social media engagement is crucial if you want to rise above the noise. So, if you have a big announcement – like a company acquisition, major new product launches, or mega price reductions, use social media to push that news out and drive traffic back to your partner portal. However,
Many vendor organizations today are considering the implementation of end-to-end partner marketing automation tools. What’s more, many have already put in place a set of point-tools that are trying to make them all work together. The key for both of these scenarios is to make sure that partner marketing automation doesn’t take a life on its own and serve as a means to an end. The primary purpose of a partner marketing automation platform is to drive profitable growth, so yes, it must increase your partner-led demand generation activities, but it also must reduce costs by introducing more streamlined processes and greater efficiency. However, the success of a partner marketing automation platform depends directly on organizations’ following specific, sequential steps in order to deploy such capabilities globally. The following is a brief overview of the five critical choices a vendor organization must make before an integrated partner marketing automation platform can be deployed worldwide.
Plutocracy vs. Democracy - When you are planning to build your pipeline via your partner network using partner marketing automation, the first question to ask is ‘who sells my product?’ Do the majority of my sales come from 20% of my partners? If that is the case, then you should focus first on enabling the top tier partners who do most of the selling. Making them more efficient will be the logical way to get results from rolling out your partner marketing automation. On the other hand, if half of your partners do half of your sales then you will have to roll out partner marketing automation for most of your channel. In both cases, eventually you want to make sure the partner marketing automation platform can be available for all partners but, in the beginning, being selective and applying a strategic focus helps you to get to those wins faster, and promotes success to drive broader adoption at a later stage. Global vs. Local - The next question for deployment of your partner marketing automation platform is where does it make most sense to launch? While launching in a large market like the US or Germany or China has the benefit of high volume and high opportunities, there are times when you may be better off launching into smaller market such as Canada or Singapore. This highly targeted approach allows you to test campaigns and perfect your messaging and positioning before you undertake a mega launch of your partner marketing automation. At ZINFI we have often seen global teams roll out campaigns that are barely used at individual country levels. This waste of resources can be easily avoided by taking a strategic approach about when to launch local as opposed to global campaigns. Quarterly vs. Bi-Annual- The next critical question is the ideal frequency of your campaign refresh rate. Most companies launch multiple products and solutions every quarter but often less is more. So, before you load up a continuous stream of fresh assets into your partner marketing automation platform, the key is to make sure you have the right assets to enable the right partners be most successful, and that will also enable your local country teams to prioritize what they know is most effective for their particular geography. One of the best ways to balance the tension between not enough fresh content and not overwhelming your partners with too much, is to take a bi-annual approach – a first half and second half refresh. This gives you breathing space to align your sales incentives over a period of six months rather than rushing to meet quarterly deadlines, which may suit the transactional nature of SMB-focused product but don’t allow you enough time to gain traction with co-initiatives in the enterprise space. So, thinking through your campaign upload and refresh is critical for partner adoption and success. Manual vs. Automated - We at ZINFI provide complete end-to-end partner marketing automation capabilities at a flat price. However,
The process of selling has changed, because the process of buying has changed. No longer do we wait for our phone to ring and to be interrupted by a pushy telesales or telemarketing person, or expect to find out about a product through advertising; today we proactively search for what want to buy. This change in the selling process has given social syndication a key role in helping organizations to get the word out through a network of followers rather than randomly hoping to gain results from interrupting someone. This is the new age of social selling, which requires a new and differentiated approach using social syndication capabilities. It’s worth spending a few minutes defining what social syndication is before discussing how you can deploy it across your organization to drive more sales. When social media erupted onto our desktops about a decade ago, most of us thought of it at most as a way to share family photos and amusing videos of cats. However, organizations like LinkedIn, SlideShare and a few others had a different goal in mind: serving business users in a very different way. While groups in Yahoo and other sites were already in existence, allowing professionals to exchange ideas, thoughts and peer reviews, there was no single unified platform available to promote the YOU brand - the brand that most deeply matters to most of us. Sharing a cool cat photo is entertaining, but sharing a high impact article with the potential to influence many people’s professional development is a more important opportunity to grow awareness. Social syndication plays to this intrinsic desire for professional growth by its core proposition of tribal or community enhancement: sharing of content that is relevant to individuals sharing common goals. The reason I use the word “tribe” is because the majority of social anthropologists are in agreement that many of our behaviors in social media - the need to share, self reflect, boast or display humility to a group - are a true reflection of who we are as humans, whose ability to feel alive and satisfied with our lives rides on our intrinsic need to connect and communicate. This innate human need creates a unique opportunity for sales people to move from an intrusive or interruptive telemarketing process, which is an innately negative experience, to a more needs-fulfillment based approach. This takes the fundamental premise that a buyer only buys what he or she (knows) they need. It follows that, before steps are taken to procure anything, the natural first part of any buying process is research, in the quest to understand what would solve someone’s needs = problems. Content marketing plays a huge part in meeting this need to understand before purchase, and a well-constructed social syndication engine can work wonders in satiating this need and, therefore driving sales. How do today’s social syndication capabilities work? The ability to distribute relevant content, to anticipate and answer questions from potential prospects, and scale to a national or global level, can be met by a scalable and flexible social syndication engine. To meet these criteria, the core components of any social syndication engine should be as follows:
Connection to existing social content- Most organizations today have multiple social channels through which they distribute content to their target audiences. However, the ability to auto connect to an existing stream of content, and then to amplify it via a distributed network, is a critical part of building your audience. It is not practical for all sales channels (direct or indirect) to create original, primary content, but with access to social syndication streams both direct sales teams and channel partners can distribute content easily and effectively. Access to a social syndication network- Any organization may have a few thousand followers through corporate social networks, but when you multiply those by tapping into the networks of direct or indirect sales t...
Over the past few years, we have gained some fascinating insights into shifts in channel dynamics using our Unified Channel Partner Management Software and Concierge Services to run a number of partner profiling programs for our technology clients. And as we compare this data with the information we’ve gleaned from the dozens of worldwide studies that we have done, we have uncovered an amazing set of characteristics that distinguish the partners who tend to sell the most (and most profitably) and why they do so. These statistics are referenced from a different perspective in our previous articles, including 3 Macro Trends That May Put Your IT Channel Partner Out of Business and 7 Risks Your IT Channel Partner Must Manage To Stay In Business, but in today’s article we want to focus on the successful channel partner. In every case, what we see is a true commitment to: 1. Relentless focus on customer value - In the technology solutions space, we consistently see that the most predominant success characteristic for channel partners, whether they are system integrators or management service providers or with deep vertical expertise, is their clarity of insight regarding their target customer segments, how they can meet customer needs, and the imperative to stay ahead of the competition by providing better solutions. The technology space is always in flux, but even within the space the pace of evolution varies profoundly. Traditionally, enterprise has been the early adopter of cutting edge technologies, but the fundamental shifts in the technology channel business environment (as discussed in 3 Macro Trends That May Put Your IT Channel Partner Out of Business) today mean that partners who do not constantly evaluate their competitive position and customer value proposition are most likely to be the first to lose their momentum and edge. 2. Deep domain expertise - In the technology channel, success is derived from not just deciding what to do, but rather what not to do. As technology becomes more and more complex, and cloud services drive a tectonic shift in the channel service delivery model, partners who do not focus on a manageable set of areas in favor of pursuing horizontal opportunities across many verticals tend to risk losing the potential to build on core capabilities that are essential to maintaining relevance with their customers. In 1930 there were 1800 car companies in the US. Today we have five US car companies and about 30 international companies. The technology space is following this pattern very closely. Following that analogy, if you are setting up service shops to service cars, you have to pick which automotive companies you will support, as each car is built differently and cars today are more like computers on wheels than mechanical constructs. In the same way, building strategic domain expertise is far from a frivolous choice for a partner makes. The strategic selection of the right technology vendor can make or break a solution provider’s future survivability. This is a really hard choice for a partner, and mistakes are easily made despite the best intentions, but without a thoughtful approach to vendor selection the partner’s risk is massive. 3. Complex service capabilities - Having settle on the right ecosystem of technology vendors, partners’ next success factor hangs on developing deeper technology competencies. One of the most telling examples would be that of partners who formerly managed and maybe also sold servers and storage components to their end customers, but who have transitioned to delivering cloud-based products and services and gradually built up competencies in those areas. Their revenue mixes have shifted, dropping dramatically for transactional components like hardware, software or warranties, but substantially increasing for higher margin service businesses. If something is harder to do, yet you have mastered it and all the underlying service and support elements,
At ZINFI, we work for major global brands and every day help thousands of their channel partners improve productivity. This is not as straightforward as it might be. One of the main complaints we hear constantly from channel partners is how hard it is to use most vendors’ partner portals. Yes, a few are great, but most partner portals are complex to understand. When we ask partners what they would like to see in an ideal partner portal, the five things we consistently hear are not surprising, but somehow only rarely delivered:
Ease of navigation - Far too frequently, vendors use cool marketing lingo that is utterly confusing. Why use non-specific terms like “engage” or “excite” about your channel process steps when you can use simple, unmistakable words like “welcome”, “join”, “on-board” or “train”. Calling a spade a spade is the first step in simplifying navigation in your partner portal. Also, categorizing your partner portal by straightforward functional areas like sales, marketing, technical or incentives is logical and doesn’t require an effort to understand. Being too cool isn’t clever. Ease of navigation starts with making things easy to grasp. Mobile access- More than two-thirds of the partners consistently access a partner portal while they are away from their desk. So, while it is easy to make your portal mobile-compatible, don’t forget to make the rest of your portal smartphone- or tablet- You don’t have to go all the way in building apps for your portal. Many vendors have gone far down the app route, and it has turned out to be a pretty wasted investment, as very few partners click through all the apps. So, while apps can work as a Band-Aid to push out some news streams, events, training, etc., don’t get bogged down: focusing on the broader issue of easy mobile access is the key. Personalization - Your partners must be able to pick and chose the content they want to see in your partner portal. To start with, the portal should allow partners to filter out content that is not relevant - by region, country, or partner tier type using content tagging, but partner portals should also provide focused content to specific groups of partners by function, g. sales, marketing, or technical. The more streamlined the information in your portal, the easier it will be for your partners to use. At ZINFI we see that more than 70% of vendors are still using a flat, or non-targeted content profile in their partner portals, which is overwhelming for most partners. Simplifying promotions - Vendors with multiple product lines are constantly running a wide variety of promotions via their partner portal. However, if the partner doesn’t see a logical connection to the vendor initiatives, and furthermore if the promotions are not related to the differing maturity stages of the partner, then you are anesthetizing the channel with an avalanche of information that has nothing to do with them. Tracking metrics - We are now in the age of content marketing. This means that it is the value your partner portal brings to the channel is dependent on your understanding of what content is useful to specific groups of partners, and what isn’t. Yes, you need a dynamic partner portal content management capability, without which you cannot serve up the right content to the right partner. For a vendor with global reach, this may require an incremental investment of a few thousand dollars per month, but within a few months you are going to reap significant benefit from your partner base by stimulating them to self-educate, improve their knowledge and manage better – all because you will be able to identify how to help them based on data, rather than on opinions or anecdotal feedback.
The great news is that you now have a choice of best-in-class partner portal content management systems that you can deploy to migrate your partner portal piece by piece. This doesn’t need to be a multi-year program, nor does it need to be one mammoth effort.
Vendor organizations that sell through a network of channel partners (resellers, VARS, affiliates and agents) know that most of their partners do not have dedicated marketing resources to keep their respective websites updated with fresh content from their vendors. This is where content syndication can play a significant role, allowing vendors and their channel partners to significantly enhance brand presence, control and engagement with end prospects. To make this work, an organization will need to focus on seven core areas:
Deciding what to syndicate- The objective of content syndication is not to replicate a vendor’s website. On the contrary, the goal is to do two just things right: provide a set of core content that is relevant to a specific partner’s customer base, and make sure the content stays fresh and up to date. This is not the easiest of tasks, since many vendors have hundreds or even thousands of pages of content that can potentially be syndicated. Prioritizing is key. Setting up showcases- Once you have determined what pages to use for your web content syndication program, the next step is to determine how many content syndication showcases to set up. Again, the goal here is not to push your entire web site through your partner’s site, but to select relevant groups of content, either by vertical market (healthcare, real estate, education, etc.) or by industry segment (small business, mid-market, enterprise, and so on). Allowing customization- If all of your partners do not sell all of your product lines, you will need to provide your partners with the means to customize your content syndication showcases. This customization capability is critical to ensure partners can show the specific set of products, pages, collateral and other content that is relevant to their business. Capturing leads- While protecting your brand message and getting the right content out to multiple end-users via your channel network are both critical, it is also important to make sure you and your partners can track leads. For this, you need to have in place a channel marketing automation platform that not only allows you to deliver dynamic content syndication, but also to track the leads that are being captured from different showcases. Promoting showcases - With relevant showcases being syndicated via the partner website, the next most important task is that the partner is provided with the ability to promote those showcases via digital networks such as social or search. To make this happen, you should pick a channel marketing automation platform that allows you to provide marketing elements such as web banners, buttons and connectors to promote the showcases. Also, the content syndication capability should include an integrated email marketing capability to drive outbound campaigns to a partner’s installed base of customers and prospect Running reports - No matter what content syndication platform you chose, you need to make sure the dynamic reporting engine gives you a complete sense of what is really going on with content marketing campaigns. The important thing is, once a partner is syndicating content, you need to be able to run analysis to see what showcases generate the most leads and what changes can make to render this investment even more effective. For this, you need powerful content syndication reporting capabilities. Refining your approach - As you begin tracking your partners content syndication activities, you will come up with your own ideas on how to improve the layout of your showcases, what product to include or exclude, which market segments to emphasize, and how best to align your content development strategy - beyond what‘s on your corporate website - with how you leverage a distributed content network to maximize partner success.
The main benefits for content syndication activity are threefold - control or expansion of your brand via a distributed network,
As the world gets more and more digitized, and technology touches every aspect of our lives, one evolution that is consistent across all segments of lives is software driven automation of work steps. Whether it’s in the connected home or connected work place or intelligent manufacturing processes or financial management, business automation is here to stay, and will only increase with time. Within this fundamental change the most recent evolution has been in the area of automated channel marketing software. So why is the category of channel marketing software growing and why is it needed? And, who should consider deploying it? Before we answer these questions in detail, let’s look at the underlying factors that are driving the evolution of this new category. Over the past two decades, the Internet has become not only a medium for content distribution, but also a utility that - just like electricity, water, air conditioning or heating - keeps an organization running. Today the Internet is a utility that allows businesses to distribute content and people to communicate, but it also has become a medium for distributing software that automates business workflow. Software that used to run on our desktop, gradually moved to centralized servers and, over the past decade, outside the organization to the cloud. This trend accelerated due to the abundance of bandwidth and storage and the evolution of web services platforms that can run software in the cloud, eliminating the need to install programs onsite. A brief summary of the evolution of enterprise automation software looks like this:
Phase 1 (Broad Enterprise Automation)- The first category of enterprise automation software has been in the area of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), which included Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Manufacturing Resource Management, Financial Resource Management, etc. This is where companies like SAP, Microsoft, Oracle and IBM have created technologies, and continue to dominate end-to-end automation and management of business processes. In this phase we also saw the evolution of Business Intelligence software that pulls data together from multiple systems to give a holistic view of the enterprise, with the goal here of enabling data-driven management decision-making and resource allocation. Phase 2 (More Deeper and More Specialized Tools)- During the past decade, we have seen the evolution of marketing automation software designed for the mid-market and enterprise space from players like Eloqua (acquired by Oracle), Pardot and ExactTarget (both acquired by Salesforce.com), Marketo, Hubspot, Act-On Software and many more. Most of these organizations today boast multi-billion valuations representing the future potential of growth in their respective segments. There also has been innovation in small business marketing automation areas - driven by players like ConstantContact and Vertical Response. As a result, it is now accepted that when it comes to core business processes like sales, marketing, manufacturing and finance, automation is critical not only to reduce cost, increase repeatability and reproducibility, but also to create competitive advantage against other players in the market place.
Amazon is first a software company, and secondarily a reseller of products and services. We have seen business like bookstores – for example Borders in the U.S. – going out of business, simply because they did not compete in the arena of digitized content and distribution of goods and services via Internet process automation. The same thing is happening with all companies that are not adopting digital sales and marketing processes using end-to-end automation, and the same logic applies to the recent evolution of automated channel marketing software. If you are selling direct, the chances are you have already automated your sales and marketing processes, or are in the process of doing so. Otherwise you risk going out of business,
Over my three decades’ experience in channel sales management, I have watched some people rise to the top, while others just don't know why they are not getting promoted. Based on from-the-trenches observations, I have some suggestions about how to break the deadlock if you feel you haven’t achieved the recognition you deserve. I have identified nine typical behavior patterns that our organization has consistently observed to be drivers of individual growth and promotion by effectively developing core channel sales management skills.
Integrity Comes First - We are all under pressure to perform, but it is absolutely vital to avoid the temptation to take shortcuts. We have all heard hair-raising stories of attempts to trick the system: fake invoices sent to fake email addresses to book fake revenue; asking a partner to buy product and side-sell to another to make profit and share commissions; having a partner buy at the end of the quarter and then return via another service provider. In the end, whatever the pressure or the short-term justification, it rarely works out in the long run. These practices all eventually come to light. Once anyone’s credibility takes a hit, the word spreads fast, and reputation repair is a long and tough process. No matter what, put your reputation first. Your professional reputation is your key to success in channel management.
Focus on Relationships– Channel sales success is built upon relationships. Before a channel partner cares about what you know, or what you need to close your quarter, they first need to know what you can do for them. I can’t count the number of times channel partners have told me, “I never hear from my channel rep till the end of the quarter, when they want me to buy something immediately so that they can meet their quota. And you know what I do then? I ask for deep discounts because I know their backs are against the wall and they end up selling product to me at whatever price I want. If the rep really cared about me and had shown they were going to help me grow my business, I might not only buy at full price, but possibly do something more ambitious.”
If you figure out how you can integrate your priorities with a strategy to help your partners grow, you will be able to work towards mutually beneficial end results.
Feed the Run Rate- Channel sales is a run rate business. There is very little you can do this quarter to impact this quarter’s numbers. Yes, of course you need to support your partners to drive deals, but use automation as much as you can to analyze and strategize for the future. Chances are you have a CRM system, and if you do then use it! Figure out how best you can leverage it to track what is going on a day-to-day basis with your territory or region, and what needs to change. Partner profiling tied to dynamic analytics and reports can greatly enhance your insights about your run rate business. This will give you a clear picture of who is performing and who is not, and will give you insights into patterns and trends that require further investigation and resolution.
Build A Bridge Towards Future- While you feed your run rate business, you also need to build a process for understanding your partner base. This is achieved via partner profiling to work out who has the potential to move up to the next tier. You can do this by sending a simple survey asking about their concerns and needs.
This allows you to identify the high potential and high-risk partners. You can then actively plan ahead, working with select sets of partners to address their issues, which may vary from technical support (our article on Are You Relevant To Your Channel Partner?), sales support, marketing support, etc. It is incredibly important at this stage to prioritize, take a structured approach focused on your channel sales management goals, and not get sucked into the day-to-day crisis management cycle, which tends to be very common in the channel - something is always blowing up ...
If an Information Technology (IT) solution provider doesn’t manage a few key technology trends effectively (please read our previous article "3 Macro Trends That Could Put Your IT Channel Partners Out of Business"), the significant opportunities they create may be dwarfed by the seven major risks associated with these changes, and could result in the partner’s going out of business. These seven risks barriers remain pretty much the same as they were during previous business cycle changes in the channel in reference to Channel Marketing Automation. This time round, the big difference, is that it’s getting much harder for a solution provider to fight this current wave of changes because complexity and specialization in the channel is driving a more permanent and far-reaching alteration in business models.
Loss of Existing Clients - Let’s start with a simple example of Office365. If you are a 150-person organization - like ZINFI - you’ll be familiar with the scenario. We needed IT support to make sure our Microsoft enterprise license could be deployed and supported globally with our IT staff. From time to time, our IT team reached out to our Microsoft reseller for support. However, as we made the migration to an Office365 infrastructure, the need for external support for this core productivity tool dropped to zero.Today, this has happened across most business applications like voice, video, or collaboration software. However, we have also added new applications like CRM, and as a channel marketing automation company, of course also make extensive use of our own SaaS-based marketing automation software. Now if you take our example and apply to all 100-500 employee organizations where a significant proportion of IT support is outsourced, it becomes evident that the need for support is decreasing rapidly for traditional applications, but is growing for business process automation solutions. The CRM/ERP market continues to accelerate, but most solutions are SaaS based. In most cases, horizontal applications are moving to the cloud at a fast pace. It follows that what you sell through the channel and the capabilities of those who resell your product will have a profound impact on your channel partner’s ongoing ability to succeed in business.
Loss of Key Personnel – Let’s continue with our example of Office365. When customers stop buying a fully managed services offering from a provider and get it directly from their IT vendor, the first thing that happens is the channel partner lets its specialist technical staff (e.g. Microsoft Exchange technician) go, because there is no longer enough work to support that position. This changes the profitability dynamics of the channel partner. They are forced to make choices, such as whether to continue to support Exchange or move on to other things. While low-level tech support work like forgotten passwords or laptop crashes may remain available, the amount of revenue and profitability for such service tasks continues to shrink. And most importantly, the channel partner who was completely focused on providing services not only experiences shrinking opportunities, but sees no incentive to sell hardware or applications to organizations that have their own IT resources. The pace of this shift is accelerating. Excessive Optimism - When a channel partner is caught between a rock and a hard place and beginning on a downward spiral, the most important thing for a partner is to recognize the signs that a business is in difficulties and that something needs to change radically. Most partners who have ten employees or fewer have basically just two choices: shut down or sell/merge with a bigger solution provider. Yes, some can go through the transition of retraining existing staff, or hiring new ones; however, we repeatedly see that it is almost impossible for most partner organizations make this transition effectively due to current, day-to-day operational commitments that get in the way of thei...
Whether you are selling through the channel to end businesses or consumers, chances are you may be grappling with one or more of the following challenges: too much churn in your partner base, lack of partner marketing and sales competencies; poor marketing ROI from co-marketing activities; loss of sales velocity due to increasing channel management costs. While the success of a channel program depends on a multiplicity of factors like end user value proposition (product and solutions), partner business proposition (predictable profitable growth) and overall market growth opportunity, it takes an integrated partner relationship management (PRM) framework to successfully realize the true revenue potential of any organization selling through the channel. In this overview, we will address multiple aspects of the partner relationship management framework, starting with partner recruitment and also covering partner training, partner engagement, multi-partner demand generation and performance management. Needless to say, at the epicenter of this partner relationship management framework is a very strong business proposition for the partner. (Please refer to our previous article on How to Stay Relevant To Your Partner Base to learn more about the core elements of a successful channel program.) Here are some guidelines on how you can build a partner relationship management framework step by step:
Partner Portal - The first step in launching a partner relationship management framework is setting up a dynamic partner portal that can be used for partner recruitment, training, performance management and demand generation activities. Most companies today have some sort of a partner portal. However, lacking a dynamic content management system that can not only make content mobile-responsive, but also visitor-specific to reduce the time needed to find the right content, most partner portals fall short of meeting the objective of engaging and communicating channel programs and content to the target audience. It is vitally important that the partner portal not only incorporates a dynamic content management system but also provides a set of secure web services communication interface so that it can connect to other tools for functions like partner training and incentive management. Partner Recruitment - Whether you are an organization with a large channel network trying to engage existing partners into a specific set of channel programs, or an emerging start-up trying to build your channel, partner recruitment is always the first process step that to initiate a structured approach towards partner relationship management. Without a proper partner recruitment framework and the appropriate onboarding steps, the entire relationship can get off on the wrong foot. But if your organization follows a logical 30-60-90 day onboarding approach, it can increase partner satisfaction in these early stages of engagement, but also build partner engagement, resulting in substantial revenue acceleration. Partner Training - After recruitment, the next most important step is to provide a structured approach towards training the partner organization effectively with your channel programs. If you are recruiting a new partner, you could base your partner relationship management program on a combination of face-to-face training events plus online learning management systems (LMS). There are several reputable online LMS tools available, if you don’t have one already. Partner Engagement - Your partner relationship management platform must have effective engagement tools which should include a mobile-responsive dynamic partner portal, role-based content delivery, social marketing connectors, partner community, multi-touch email marketing, event marketing and microsite marketing and more. You need all these to effectively promote the various aspects of your channel programs. Partners are too busy for irrelevant content, so the more you can make your content and communi...
The Information Technology channel has gone through three profound changes over the four decades or so of its existence. The first was the channel’s transition from being largely white box resellers to a more organized computer retail model. During this first phase, anyone with some cash and a lot of enthusiasm could build a personal computer. Remember the days of Computer Shopper? The next wave arrived with the advent of networking and the Internet in the late Eighties/early Nineties. This change drove several white box resellers out of business, propelled by the emergence of worldwide vendors like Dell, Compaq, HP, Toshiba, etc. The third and the last wave primarily started in the mid 2000s when a set of network management and monitoring tools burst out onto the market, allowing resellers to evolve into service providers and ultimately created a new breed, managed service providers. The recession of 2008 sparked further change for many channel partners. Large numbers of service providers closed their doors in the face of the increasing complexity of the technology. This required higher levels of competence, and exposed a severe shortage of technical talent. Difficulties in recruitment, development and retention became a major issue for the channel, while business remained choppy largely due to lack of sales and marketing skills. We at ZINFI have heard this story so many times that for the past year or so we have been talking to channel partners in an attempt to identify what and when will be the next wave. We have also undertaken a worldwide survey on this topic with about five thousand channel partners of various large vendors. The big picture answer is that we are now in the middle of another major channel shift. And the shift is, as we’d expect, as a direct result of the rapid evolution of cloud and cloud-based offerings. This shift towards the cloud has three profound implications for the channel:
Where end-users work- In most countries the numbers of remote workers are growing, though of course at varied rates. The widespread adoption of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policies is now integrated with ‘work from anywhere, anytime’ culture. Setting aside highly sensitive assets (like manufacturing, security, or healthcare), most general-purpose infrastructure is now accessed by business users remotely. This trend has clearly been driven by three underlying technology factors: an abundance of bandwidth (both land and cellular), an exponential reduction in data storage costs, and the rapid evolution of web-based applications. What and how the infrastructure is changing - Fundamental changes in data center architecture, the emergence of software defined networking, and proliferation of triple play (voice-video-data) convergence at end points have radically changed the way the overall network topology looks today. This doesn’t even address the profound shift that is being driven by web services infrastructure offerings from organizations like Amazon Web Services, HP Services, Microsoft Azure, Salesforce Developer Platform, and plethora of smaller data centers powered by cloud services platforms from Red Hat, Citrix, VMware, and others. How they are supported - With the proliferation of hacking and major security breaches – a surprising number of which are initiated by government agencies with deep pockets trying to break into the networks of companies, organizations and other governments - the need for a robust infrastructure is even greater, and the skill levels required not only to support remote workers, but also to protect network assets, are almost impossibly high. This is leading towards intense vertical specialization in the channel, because solutions are increasingly domain-specific: think healthcare, retail, hospitality, insurance, or finance. A lot of what used to be outsourced to external providers is now insourced due to availability of various network monitoring management capabilities from vendors like HP,
“What you measure is what you get” is a great business mantra. And when it comes to sales, it becomes much more than that: it’s a practice that drives the future sustainability and growth of a company. To make an impact, metrics need to be applied across multiple business areas by deploying channel marketing automation, of course. For example, if you are managing sales operations through a channel partner network, you need to look beyond simple sales out. Failing to track critical channel sales metrics listed below could lead you down a blind alley where you end up not knowing what’s going to hit you next. Channel success comes as a result of setting up realistic, if ambitious expectations with your channel sales force and partner network, but these mean nothing without the ability to monitor a core set of performance metrics. Output metrics are driven by a set of processes, programs and people directly linked to their related input metrics. These will provide you with essential insights into what is actually happening in your channel; however, you need to correlate input metrics to output metrics in order to understand the impact of each of these metrics on overall results. A best of breed channel marketing automation platform should enable you to track the metrics described below, as well as to use dynamic dashboard capabilities to run multiple analytics that will enable you to fine-tune your channel program for optimum results. Here is a brief overview of the 15 core input and output metrics, and how you can use the data to drive profitable sales growth.
Total and Average Revenue Per Partner – This is almost equivalent to the commonly used revenue-per-employee metric. When you perform this analysis, you will see that productivity varies greatly across the top, medium and entry level partner tiers. Tracking revenues on a dynamic basis is a critical first step towards improving sales engagement. Revenue Mix Analysis – This is predominantly undertaken by product line, geography and territory. Most companies use this data primarily for market share analysis, but if you directly correlate the data with other partner input and output metrics you can draw a more complete analysis of partner engagement and potential. Percent of Revenue Growth Rate of Partner Tiers – This is a high priority output metric that you need to track in order to see how your channel sales partners are growing across your different product lines. The variables include partner level, product type and geographical location. The resulting data enables you to make strategic resource changes to drive better results. Gross Profit Per Tier - At the end of the day it is about more than revenue alone: the key lies in the absolute profit that you are able to generate via the channel sales force. Calculations of partner profitability vary greatly depending on how you are able to track your internal costs. These might include technical support, channel sales, channel marketing, programs, special events and more. You also need clarity about the relative levels of profit generated by the different partner tiers, e.g. how much is generated by your top 10%, 11-25%, 26-50% and so on, and what your relative level of investment was for each tier. Percent of Year over Year Increase In Channel Revenue and Productivity – This is your ultimate measure of progress on a year over year basis. In order to do this you will need to be able to calculate your revenue growth, which all companies do, but beyond this you will need to factor in the detailed cost infrastructure required to support your channel - which at times is a bit harder to achieve due to product and process complexities. However, efforts spent in this area are critical to drive a much more finely tuned approach towards metrics-driven channel sales management. Percent of Active Resellers - Most companies, whether they have a broad or a narrowly focused channel sales model,
It’s hard to get a true picture of how your channel partners feels about you as a vendor just by sending out a survey. As we discussed in a previous post, most requests for feedback yield responses from only the top-performing channel partners. But the ones you really need to know most about are those who are selling little or nothing at all of what you have to offer. The upside of converting just a few of these into high performance partners will be huge. The path to breakthrough lies in understanding what prevents channel partners from committing to a relationship with a vendor, starting with those who have dropped your solutions completely. Getting to these channel partners takes time-intensive, though high ROI work. On behalf of many large companies, we have reached out personally thousands of channel partners world wide to ask the most important question: Why did you stop reselling for us? The results of our research showed that the top reasons for dropping a vendor were, in order of importance, poor technical support, lack of lead flow, and inadequate sales assistance. Fixing these problems will go a long way towards building bridges with disaffected channel partners, but paying attention to the following five areas will secure your position as a highly relevant vendor with a loyal and engaged channel.
Special Pricing - One of the biggest hurdles for channel partners worldwide is special pricing. The larger the deal, the more resellers need to be able to offer special pricing because the buyer wants to know and show to management that the price was unbeatable. We have often seen channel partners lose deals to competitors because of overly complex special pricing processes. Delay and uncertainty about pricing will drive the end customer – who after too long a sales process is usually feeling that their requests are not being heard – to dump the original vendor and go with someone else. It is critical to make sure you have put in place a complete and transparent process for special pricing, beyond the list price. This is less the case with SMB transactions, but is critical for complex and large deployments. Marketing Funds & Programs – Once you have convinced the partner base that you are there for them through world-class technical support, lead distribution, sales assistance and special pricing, the next essential is helping the channel partners to drive leads on their own - although don’t expect them to become digital marketers overnight!
We have repeatedly seen that the vendors who are most successful in encouraging channel partners to market on their own are those who take a pragmatic, multi-quarter approach to building out their demand generation programs across horizontal products that sell in the highest volumes across all market segments, and then (only then) add specific, targeted vertical campaigns. This approach also calls for a state-of-the-art partner relationship management platform, which not only include a set of tools to train the partner on various aspects of the solutions, but also a set of do-it-yourself marketing campaigns running on a fully integrated marketing automation platform.
Ease of Doing Business - We hear this again and again from channel partners. Most partners feel there are too many hoops and obstacles to go through to be able to sell a vendor’s products. Challenges ranging from technical certification, demo purchase requirements, license key issues, availability of technical and sales support and accessibility of sales tools all make it far from easy for a partner to form a relationship with and stay on board with vendors.
While vendors may want to try to remove all these hurdles at once, the more realistic way forward for a successful channel programs is to take a pragmatic approach. Start by determining what the partner is actually going to sell. If it is a transactional product, there is no place for complexity. Drop as many of the hurdles as possible,
When new opportunities beckon, many companies are tempted to jump in too early, and try to boost new product sales by building a massive channel partner network rather than examining whether the channel is equipped to deliver on expectations. Very often, in fact, a more discriminating approach yields better results. In a previous post, we discussed the necessity for channel-driven companies to balance their hopes for new products with an understanding of the economic and margin goals, the growth opportunity, the partner value proposition and their ability to ensure partner differentiation as the product matures. In the next stage of launch preparation, the focus needs to be on how to equip the channel for long-term success. There are five key checkpoints for this phase.
How will you help partners to develop? - Developing a channel partner network takes time, and few organizations are equipped or ready to wait out the time for their network to mature. More frequently, we see major changes rather than incremental adjustments to a long-term plan. As a result, many vendors suffer significant partner attrition. New partners may join with fanfare and enthusiasm, but without proper nurturing and strategic development, over time they become disgruntled and abandon the program because they feel that they are valued for fulfillment only, while the organization has no skin in the game to help the partners develop. In fact several successful ecosystems exist today, where a strategic channel partner development approach that focuses on a smaller number of partners, helping them create business plans to develop their competencies over a multi-quarter cycle really pays off. Once a partner has made investments across the sales, marketing and technical training functions, they are highly unlikely to abandon that investment by switching to another vendor simply because the cost of switching is too high. Therefore, partner development not only engenders loyalty, but also much higher long-term return than over-distribution through an underdeveloped organization. Though challenging, focus pays well, when done well.
Direct or channel sales? - Once you have the entire foundational framework for your channel partner network in place, you will need to decide what you sell via the channel partner network and what you sell direct. In the early days it’s usually simple to fix on one. However, as an organization grows and introduces higher value and more complex products, at times it makes sense to sell direct. The moment this happens, partners start looking at their vendors with skeptical eyes. So, you need to be very clear about how you are going to deal with this scenario when or if you do decide to sell directly to certain products or certain segments - like the federal government or major enterprise. If you do go directly, you will need to determine how you will segregate deals from a partner - and who, ultimately, wins? We have seen repeatedly that the deal registration programs that allow a partner to close rather than an internal sales team always end up with a higher partner satisfaction rate. This is a discussion that needs to happen sooner than later, and when it comes to the channel the better way is always early conflict and early resolution. Don’t wait for things to blow up - address this upfront and head on when you are launching a new product or solution. How do you reward high performing partners - Most companies offer some sort of partner reward program, financial or incentive-based, like President’s Club or Partner Council Membership, or a combination thereof. However, clarity about how to reward different functions within an organization is critical to building the loyalty of the entire partner base. If you offer sales rewards, but no marketing or technical rewards, then there’s little incentive to engage with you in other dimensions. It follows that resisting the temptation to offer multiple,
The primary challenge for any reasonably large technology company with global presence, marketing in a business-to-business (B2B) channel environment, is making sure that marketing assets that are created centrally for global use can actually be deployed locally. Most companies would also like to see substantial content development and deployment at a country level to boost the local sales efforts. So, how do you do that in today's resource-constrained environment? This is where a global channel marketing automation platform and concierge services come in. In today's resource constrained environment the constant focus is on greater accountability and ROI tracking from marketing investments. Traditionally, an army of marketing resources is needed not only to develop campaigns, but also to execute them and track results. Surprisingly, very few organizations take a structured approach to marketing and few apply marketing automation or, indeed, sufficient resources to their campaigns. As a result, they resort to running impromptu campaigns that are insufficiently strategized and coordinated to drive predictable results or report ROI on a central or global level. As a result, far too much channel marketing investment ends up being questioned. And to complicate this further, lack of insight at global level into country-by-country activities leaves the last mile in a cloak of invisibility, where it’s impossible to see whether content is touching prospects or customers via channel partners. This inability to monitor campaign results and ROI leads to further poor decisions regarding the future of campaigns: how can the marketing teams know which horizontal or broad-brush campaigns can be leveraged globally, and which are better suited to a vertical market approach (e.g. education or retail) that will need to be developed locally. In fact, there is a relatively simple fix for this problem. The goal of loading global marketing assets and then allowing different countries to augment these with local content can be easily addressed with a well-structured and systematic channel marketing automation program. These are the core elements to look for:
Group and Role Management- Your channel marketing automation platform should allow you to set up different groups, e.g., global, country or territory teams, as well as assign specific roles in the process to channel partners, channel marketing managers, distribution managers, or channel account managers. Setting Access Rules- The channel marketing automation platform should allow you to set access rules, i.e., define who can upload, edit, view and use content and campaigns for marketing activities. Assignment of Campaigns by Access Rights- You should also be able to assign certain campaigns and assets to certain groups and roles. This graded access and rights management capability is critical for your channel marketing automation platform, because providing personalized campaign access significantly improves partner experience, creates greater control and better reporting. Content Localization- Once you have uploaded global campaigns to the channel automation platform, your local country teams should be able to access this content to localize or customize it - without, of course, being able to change the master copies and assets. The ability to copy existing material from a global library, and create a local content library is a must-have capability for your channel marketing automation platform Campaign Usage- Your channel marketing automation platform should be able to track detailed usage reports that show who is accessing your global content, who is creating local campaigns, and how they are working. This knowledge can be applied in many ways, for example in ‘reverse engineering’ local campaigns. You might be able to take a successful local campaign and go global or regional with that material, with or without modification. Visibility into campaign usage is critical to drive bet...
Customer relationship management (CRM) has evolved into a multi-billion dollar segment, with good reason. However, the Partner Relationship Management (PRM) category is relatively new, even though channel programs have been around for many decades. Why is that? Well, phone systems for tracking and taking better care of customers were essentially started by the airline industry back in the late Sixties and early Seventies as the volume of ticketing requests and changes began to grow. Next, in the Eighties and Nineties, as computers took over the business environment, contact management software evolved as the better version of a Rolodex. Starting in the mid-Nineties, contact management software started to evolve into the precursor to what we now know as a customer relationship management. This development was driven by companies like SAP and the like, who were focused also on processes like inventory management and financial controls as features of their enterprise resource management software. Salesforce.com took a visionary role in taking on-premise sales management software to the cloud and deservingly became market share leader in this category. This category further evolved to provide a combination of three core functionalities - marketing automation integration, sales process automation and support. However, comparatively little time or resources have been devoted by the CRM market leaders to building a purpose-built application that addresses the workflow of channel management. Focused on solving the horizontal problem of Salesforce automation, the bigger players have overlooked the need to address channel marketing automation by development purpose-built applications like partner relationship management (PRM). Typical CRM software includes core management and tracking functionality such as leads, contacts, opportunities, tasks and projects, that allow a sales person to develop prospects and track them through to close a sale. Most CRM systems do a good job of sales tracking and post sales account management activities by linking modules like tasks, calendars, quotations and invoicing. There is a plethora of other applications that can be added to extend some of the core CRM functionalities for channel management purposes. However, the main challenge with this approach is to take a horizontal product that works for B2B sales, and make it functional in a very different environment. Channel sales, for a start is a two to three tier process, and it gets even more complex than that. Channel marketing entails a whole different set of requirements for functions including partner recruitment, partner engagement, partner enablement and partner management, that are not addressed by current CRM systems. Almost all CRMs provide excellent functionality for contact management, tracking sales activities, reducing labor needed to send out a quote, close a sale, or grow a current account, but almost none are able to adapt to the dynamic, multi-tenant environment that is a prerequisite for any channel management structure. Almost all channel management activities require constant recruitment of existing and/or new resellers into a specific set of programs, plus integrated outbound marketing tools that none of the CRM tools offer today. Once a partner has been recruited, they must be properly classified, or profiled and to be clustered into a specific group of vertical or other classifications, but most CRMs today are not flexible enough to complete this profiling activity. As a further example, it is essential to track training progress and development of that partner’s competence. While there are standalone learning management systems that could potentially be patched into an existing CRM program, the majority are not flexible enough for this. As a result, CRM software doesn’t allow channel account managers to determine their partners’ evolving technical skill level, which is a critical requirement for B2B IT solutions sales.
One of the realities of channel marketing, of which vendor organizations are all too painfully aware, is that the majority of channel partners do not have dedicated marketing resources. So, when a vendor wants their channel partners to run marketing campaigns, it is not only essential to provide a channel marketing automation platform, but also to give the partners the means to make it happen by providing partner marketing concierge services. Now the key question is, once this preliminary phase of deployment has happened, how can a vendor optimize ROI from their programs by learning locally and then scaling globally? This article looks at the key steps to be taken. To build a state-of-the-art channel marketing platform, a vendor needs multiple core components - a channel program, partner profiling, channel marketing automation, partner marketing concierge services, proven and tested end user marketing campaigns, and marketing and sales rewards. The great news is that many of these elements can be replicated across multiple countries using a single, unified approach. While it’s important to localize the language and content for each country, the program won’t scale or provide sufficient return unless a significant portion of the program dollars can be reused in multiple countries. Engaging a global partner marketing concierge organization is critical to make this scalability and localization a reality. Any successful channel development program requires the creation of a sequential approach to delivering various program elements, and should build upon the basic partner program framework elements, which should include partner recruitment, engagement, enablement and management strategies. Here, we will focus principally on one critical aspect of a channel initiative: how to enable partners to generate more demand by using partner marketing concierge services. The following seven core elements will help any vendor to use the same dollar to receive multiple returns.
Deploy Channel Marketing Automation - Ensure that you deploy a platform that can be localized, and allow country teams to access, upload content and programs without being reliant on centralized, global teams. While global content can be easily uploaded and shared via a channel platform, an effective automation platform will enable the reverse to happen – when country teams can upload local promotions or campaigns to the platform. These can be tested in one market, and if successful can then be deployed in other markets. Leverage Horizontal campaigns - The best way to get return out of campaign dollars is to figure out which campaigns have horizontal potential, i.e. which campaigns will be effective in multiple countries, enabling the use of the same graphical and creative assets in multiple languages. Many vertical campaigns - finance, real estate, healthcare, etc. - tend to be highly country-specific and tied to local market dynamics. So, to build momentum faster, look for horizontal campaigns that can be used in multiple countries. Globalize core campaigns, localize in-country offers – Any channel marketing automation platform should allow you to customize global content at a local level, for example, to include country-specific offers, before the country team pushes the global content out to the channel. A global partner marketing concierge agency can help with the localization process. Develop menu-based campaign options - Channel partners not only lack marketing resources, but also don’t have the expertise to set up effective integrated or transaction campaigns without expending considerable time and effort. This is where menu-based offers can significantly help channel partners, providing a means to enable them to quickly select and deploy campaigns. Once you have analyzed what is working in one country, and that has the capability of being deployed in other countries, leverage your partner marketing concierge agency to roll out menu-based campaigns in other ...
Most channel partners don’t have a marketing department, a marketing specialist, or even an outsourced marketing provider, and even if they do, these resources tend to operate not as marketing strategists, but more as vendor interface managers - handling multiple vendors and a variety of product lines. This is where a partner marketing concierge comes in. It is fair to say that most channel partners don’t really have the capabilities to execute vendors’ marketing programs or even specific campaigns effectively. What’s more, most channel partners don’t receive enough market development funds (MDF) at the right time to hire dedicated resources for a specific campaign or program. While some large distributors and a few, very large channel partners may receive funding for certain marketing resources on an annual contract; this is more of an exception than the rule. It looks like an impossible dilemma, but there is an easy way around this: provide the channel with partner marketing concierge services in bite-sized chunks. Setting aside their lack of marketing resources, most channel partners don’t even have any kind of marketing automation infrastructure to drive a flow of leads in a consistent fashion. As a result, most partners, if they do any kind of marketing at all, tend to default to running events from time to time, coupled with random email or telemarketing campaigns. When these don’t produce leads or results, partners get frustrated with marketing and abandon their own efforts, as well as ceasing to engage on co-marketing efforts with vendors. Over the past decade - following the lead of larger organizations like HP, Cisco, IBM and other major players - mid sized IT vendors have also started providing marketing tools, campaigns, assets and collateral to their channel partners. However, lack of dedicated resources on the channel means that adoption of these assets is very rare. The only way to overcome this impasse is to provide partner marketing concierge services to the channel base as an add-on capability. While the first step in enabling channel partners should always be the introduction of an end-to-end integrated channel marketing automation platform, without the provision of additional marketing enablement services, for the most part the potential of these platforms remains unrealized. While top tier partners usually have access to market development funds (MDF) (please read our article What Can You Do to Drive Your Market Development Funds Utilization?), most do not take a strategic approach towards marketing. They tend to engage on transactional campaigns like email marketing or event marketing, which may work for small and medium deals but fail to deliver for higher value solution selling. We have recently seen some of the larger IT vendors starting to provide partner marketing managers to channel partners via their field organization, but this is not a scalable model above and beyond a handful of partners. So, if your channel is doing 80% of their sales via 5-10% of your partner base, and the revenue generated per partner is in excess of a few million dollars per year, then dedicating marketing personnel to specific channel partners can provide ROI. However, that leaves hundreds or thousands of partners with no meaningful marketing support. (Further information is available in our article – How Partner Profiling Can Increase Your Channel Sales. One resource-efficient way to resolve this issue is to provide outsourced partner marketing concierge services which partners can acquire on a temporary basis - say for a quarter or two - for an affordable, modest sum that could vary anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars and is funded by vendor MDF. When a vendor aligns their market development funds (MDF) process behind such a concierge effort, they can create a menu-based marketing catalog, incorporating pre-approved campaigns and activities which partners can select and execute independently,
The short answer is – maybe. It really depends whether you are trying to use email marketing to reach a stranger or to contact someone either you know or who knows you. The whole notion of opt-in email marketing evolved almost a couple of decades ago but email marketing is often viewed as spam because so very few people actually follow the rules. Too often we see email marketers sending out emails to a broad list of recipients that they have procured either from multiple sources or from random traffic to their website. The real characteristic of email marketing is that it is an interruptive process. Suppose you are in the middle of your workday; you are waiting either for a phone call or you are actually making a call or in a conference call and an email arrives. If you look at it and see that it is from an organization you don’t know, for the most part you simply delete the email without reading it. Data shows, however, that when an email comes from an individual, even if we don’t know them, there is more likelihood that people will open it a lot more than an email coming from John Smith than one from a generic email ID such as “Marketing”, “Sales” or “Tech Support”. Why is this? Because we relate to people. It follows that, if the recipient of the email knows you, they are far more likely to open the email than if it came from a stranger. The success of email marketing is heavily linked to relational or relationship marketing. But the question is, how do you build a relationship with a potential prospect when you have not previously interacted with that individual? That’s where social marketing comes in. Over the last decade, and especially over the last 5 years, various channels of social marketing have evolved. Today, most prospective buyers of solutions tend to look online for what they need. They search based on vendor names, or on category topics, but once they start searching they tend to focus on the set of sites that are presented to them through search engine results pages (SERP). If your company crops up within the top 10,15 or 20 results, chances are that a prospective buyer will click through to your site, as long as the topic they are searching for is aligned with the theme of your website or blog. When a prospect lands on your website, you have a unique opportunity to start forming a relationship. It is very important for you to capture two sets of information from prospects: their company name and the nature of their interest category. You can do this very easily by giving them the option to sign up for a newsletter. If they do sign up, you have confirmation of their category of interest. This enables you to start sending these prospects value-added email content focused on that specific topic of interest. If you are sending an email newsletter you can tweak the subject line to more closely reflect the topic in which the prospect was interested, even if the body of the newsletter will contain other articles or other topics. For example, if you are a hardware manufacturer selling networking products, switches, routers and firewalls, and the prospect expressed an interest in information on firewalls. Then the follow on communication should highlight firewalls in the subject line. You still have the freedom in the body copy of the newsletter or email marketing piece to include other articles on routers or switches or a security solution, because the prospect may also be interested in other, ancillary areas. Whenever prospects land on your website as a result of your email marketing efforts and navigate to topics that interest them, you need to be able to automatically configure and push content that is relevant to that specific reader. Providing information of value to the end user is an important step in building a relationship, keeping the reader engaged, and coming back to your site for more. Email marketing may not guarantee a quick sale, but it is certainly not dead when it comes to relationship-based mar...
Lackluster returns from a marketing campaign are common, but understanding why this is the case is not always clear-cut. Traditionally, poor results are usually attributed to three failures - ineffective targeting, improper implementation (failure to use integrated marketing), and diffused messaging without a clear call to action. In this article we will focus on the approaches and tactics. Marketing Automation platforms today allow any business to pick the right tactic for the right segment. Assuming you know whom to target (very important), the next step is to understand how your targets buy, and to pick the right approach for engagement. From time to time we get calls from prospective B2B clients who just want price details and a high-level services summary. Almost every time this happens, it turns out that they are just looking for information to fill a hole in a comparative vendor chart, and we don’t have a chance to bid for that deal because the inquirer usually has already made up their mind. On the other hand, when we are able to engage with prospects at an early stage through an integrated marketing process and build relationship and trust, we close opportunities almost two out of three times. When we engage at the last stage, we close one out of ten times - because very likely we were the 2nd or 3rd choice vendor, based on information over which we have little direct control. This is true for all organizations and this is where appropriate marketing plays a big role. Whether we are a business or a consumer buyer, we all pretty much go through a classic purchasing process. Almost all of us go through the traditional cycle of awareness, interest, trial, purchase and repurchase. The engagement process for each varies quite a bit depending on what segment of buyers we are targeting and what kind of products we are offering via an integrated marketing process. These are the two primary selection factors that need to be remembered:
Customer Segment, e.g., Small Business (<100 employees), Mid Market (100-1,000 employees), Enterprise (1,000 to 10,000 employees) & Large Enterprise (>10,000) Solution Types, e.g., requires involved purchase (complex solutions) or uninvolved purchase (simple transactions)
How you use integrated marketing approach to promote transactional products to a small business is very different from the way you promote solutions to large enterprises. The marketing and sales processes for both vary considerably, and picking the right approach is critical in engaging the buyer at the right stage. Before we take a deep dive into the topic of alignment of integrated marketing tactics with customer segments and solution types, let’s visit the purpose of integrated marketing. As Philip Kottler once said, "Marketing simply does two things - build brands and drive demand". Now what is brand building? It’s nothing but relationship building, which leads to the setting of price premiums and lead generation for future engagements. Most branding activities tend to be awareness centric, and this is where public relations activities come in to play. It’s complicated at the front end (awareness-building) of the funnel because the communications channels have become very fragmented - though the later part of the buying process for business still follows a more predictable structure. Before you worry about awareness building tactics, the first question that needs to be answered is, what is the purpose of the campaign? Is it building a brand for the future, or is it about driving demand within a much shorter time frame. While branding activity through multiple communications channels certainly impacts the probability of closing a transaction, what can also drive brand awareness is sales. The more you sell, the more people are using your products and services, and that increases general awareness among the very important target group: users. Don’t forget that, in today’s social media environment,
Growing revenue is a top priority for most B2B IT solutions providers. New customer acquisition is one way of accomplishing this, but we all know that winning new accounts in today’s hyper competitive IT market is really hard. So what else can drive this growth? The simple answer is: taking better care of existing customers. I know it sounds obvious, but the reality is, very few IT solutions providers have client management resources that are focused on growing existing relationships and do a good job with installed base selling. In our work with IT resellers we see a consistent set of characteristics among those who are successful and are capable of growing revenue. Here is a brief summary of what we believe to be the ‘success DNA’ of solution providers who have successfully grown their revenue through installed base selling.
Focus on quality of service- IT is not a hit and run business. The days of shipping a product and going dark until the next time the customer needs something are gone. Even – or especially - for small to mid-sized IT solution providers, it’s important to put some energy towards building a technical team that is highly focused, trained and certified and able to solve problems. The quality of the service resources you provide to your customers will drive the ongoing relationship, so hiring resources on the cheap or economizing on training and certifications is not a long-term strategy: eventually, it always backfires. Investing in competent technical resources, and paying good market rates is a winning formula for installed base selling. Understand the business scenario- Whether you are selling a server as a transactional product or a SaaS application, it is very important to understand your customers’ overall business, their IT pain points and the usage pattern of their current solutions. The goal for installed base selling is not to sell something at any cost: it is to understand customers’ business goals so that you can recommend a set of solutions that will truly help them. Many IT solution providers claim they are trusted advisors, but to advise wisely you need to know your client well. Understand the competition- We are all tempted to say that we are better than the competition, but the reality is that, for the most part, our competitors are just as smart as us. Very rarely in today’s market is there a market niche for which there is only one provider. Therefore, it’s crucial to maintain a broad perspective - understanding how your competition might want to help your customers, focusing constantly on service expansion and quality improvement, and not placing all your dependence on relationship-based engagement is vital for installed base selling. Solve for today but build for tomorrow- While it’s a given that you need to make sure you deliver what your client asks for, be analytical: think through whether they are asking for the right solution or product, and what else they might need to achieve the expected result, or better. For example, the simple addition of a maintenance contract - especially for hardware - is the most common missed opportunity. IT providers sometimes think that if they sell a maintenance contract, the client may go directly with the technology vendor in case of faults or breakdowns. On the contrary. End customers buy maintenance contracts to protect their investment, but when repairs are required, its an opportunity for the service provider to re-engage with the client and for further installed base selling. Build domain expertise - Many times we hear from IT providers that they are a general service provider – “We sell all things to all people” - especially in SMB segment. But, can you really be great at everything? Are you at risk of mediocrity by not specializing? The complexity and variety of IT solutions and software, and the relevant certifications, make it unlikely that one provider can be a universal expert unless they are a huge organization like CDW.
How things have changed during the past decade! Just a few years ago, outbound business-to-business (B2B) selling to the mid-market and enterprise – was mostly an exercise in cold calling. Now, with the advent of digital marketing and the evolution of CRMs and B2B list providers, the way that super-effective sales people sell today is very different. The sales process has evolved into an integrated social selling exercise, and it’s far more complicated. The question is what steps do we need to take to be effective sales persons today? It boils down to seven critical tactics that, if they are aligned step-by-step, will increase sales effectiveness many times over... While the sales process has always been about building trust with a potential buyer who is interested in a seller offer, how that trust is built today is totally different:
Social Networking - The first step in social selling is about building your social network. In the old days, we used to call it the Rolodex, a highly personal but time-consuming and fallible system of keeping track of contacts. LinkedIn has completely changed all that. It’s second nature to send a ‘connect’ invitation to new business acquaintances and potential prospects. But it is incredibly important to manage this network carefully, not only to maintain brand awareness, but also to stay relevant as a professional connection. Social Sharing - Once you have built a network, it’s tempting to share content. The question is what content is appropriate to share? What will truly interest your contacts? Do you need to write it yourself or can you share or reuse content from other sources? Sharing relevant, valuable content on a regular basis is incredibly important because it allows you to stay on top of mind and connected to your target prospect and customer base. Social sharing is the beginning of social selling. And, to do this right you need a Social Syndication capability that allows you to share relevant posts via multiple sites in a couple of clicks and track necessary metrics. CRM - Yes, I know. Mentioning CRM as a critical sales tool nowadays is like saying we need to drink water to survive. There are many great CRM options available to choose from and I’m not going to recommend one over another. Just pick one and truly use it. Drinking water is not enough - you have to have eight glasses a day. Learning to use your CRM tool effectively is critical for success. List Scrubbing - Now that you have a lead flow (from your marketing team, social networking and sharing etc.), you want to make sure that your target list is as accurate as possible. Don't spend time cleaning this list by yourself. Your time is valuable. Find a list services vendor and get your target database scrubbed a couple of times a year. In most businesses today, people change jobs every 3-5 years, so every year 20-35% of your contact database needs cleansing. You need a professional organization to do this for you. Email Marketing - The goal is not to make you an email marketer, but a more effective hunter-gatherer. You can’t complete your social selling process without an effective email marketing tool. An office email application like Microsoft Outlook is a terrible way to prospect! You need a state of the art email marketing tool that allows you to send emails from a set of pre-populated templates and that allows you to track open rates, click-throughs, etc. This intelligence is critical for your efficiency and success. Rapid Dialer - With 1-5 covered, now is the time to make sure you dial out using a modern, purpose-built sales platform that increases your connect and conversion rate. It takes a lot of effort to build a funnel of potential prospects, so make sure you reach out to them effectively. An industry-leading platform such as ZINFI's Automated Rapid Dialer, should allow you to dial out 20-30 calls an hour, leave or email pre-recorded voice mails, and send follow up emails with just a click or two.
Wikipedia defines trifecta as “a parimutuel bet in which the bettor must predict which horses will finish first, second, and third in exact order.” The good news is that when you are running a digital marketing program you don’t need to be quite so precise in order to win the bet as long as you are properly using three key tactics: Social Marketing, Search Engine Marketing & Email Marketing. And in fact, if you upgrade your usage of just one, you can make the others work more effectively as well. Over the past couple of decades, the way we track down a good B2B vendor has changed completely. Where once we sifted through magazines or asked industry forums, now almost everything happens through online searches. In recent years, multitudes of social marketing channels like Slideshare, Facebook, or LinkedIn groups, have emerged to create a rich source of interest-specific content. These channels not only offer a value added source for news and product information, but are also a great way to listen into peer reviews and conversations. As a B2B marketer today, it is almost impossible to run an effective digital marketing campaign without an integrated approach for using the trifecta of search marketing, social marketing and email marketing. Sifting through the mass of information on the topic, I’ve found that we can distil the key ingredients of a successful digital campaign into five key picks:
Picking the right content strategy- It is vital to plan a content calendar would stretching out for at least a six to twelve month cycle, and identify what products or solutions will be promoted, and when. It’s easy to get sucked into the habit of creating content for content’s sake, but without a cohesive content marketing strategy and calendarized plan it is almost impossible to get high ROI from digital campaigns. Picking the right tactics- Once you have figured out your content framework, then you need to work out how best to promote the content that you would like your prospects or customers to consume. Content types and approaches differ widely for Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter or Pinterest. Slideshare or YouTube can have high worth as value added tools, but need to be clearly aligned with content strategy in order to make an impact. Initiating search optimization- While there is value in spending advertising budget on paid search, organic search can yield much better results and broaden the funnel to include people who may not be ready to buy, but are ready to engage with your content. Therefore, when a content calendar is being developed, it is important to understand what key words you are going to focus on for the next six to twelve months – not just today - and optimize around that longer term objective. Being socially prudent- More is not more when it comes to social marketing. The goal is not to push random content and dilute the engagement. We need to be strategic about separating substance from noise. Substance, for example, would be a success story, and noise would be a low-priority version update announcement that doesn’t align with your overall solution marketing message. So, when you build your social marketing network, you need to be clear about how you will deploy content via each channel. Your content will drive user or reader engagement, which in turn will build your relationship with a future customer. Optimizing the balance - You can leverage different social marketing channels to promote solutions and products, while still mapping them to defined keywords and an overall content strategy. Make room within your plan for tightly defined tactical activities as well as more strategic, long-term communications. The one-off approach might be an email prospects to a webinar or an event or announce a buy one get one free promotion. Or introduce a weekly or monthly newsletter offering value added content to potential and current buyers. Just remember to tie in these approaches with your search and social market...
Most vendors spend millions of dollars in generating end user awareness and inbound leads. However, very few have systems in place for getting those leads effectively to channel partners. Instead, many of those leads tend to be pursued by inside sales teams, but lack of an integrated channel lead management system substantially reduces marketing ROI. At ZINFI, we regularly do channel partner satisfaction surveys and ask them how vendors can help them grow their businesses. The number one item on the list is distribution of good leads to partner sales reps. What we’ve found is that, even where leads are forwarded to top tier partners, very rarely do they have a structured system in place where leads are distributed, nurtured, qualified, tracked and closed. However, a good Channel Marketing Automation platform can significantly increase sales closures through a proper lead management system. Before we delve into this topic, let’s make sure we are clear what we mean by a lead management system. It is an automated, programmatic way of generating, allocating and tracking the performance of end user leads that have been provided to channel partners. Without an end-to-end automated platform, all this would be really hard to achieve. A state of the art lead management system should have a few core components:
Prospect Records Management - Since most lead management systems need to connect to a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform, it is essential that the prospect records management system is built upon a CRM-like structure. This greatly enhances data flow between the lead management system as well as other CRM platforms on the vendor or partner side. Records Life Cycle Management - Once leads have been distributed to partner’s sales team, it should be possible to move the record through various sales cycles and track progress from stage to stage. Vendors should be able to log into the platform to check the progress of each record and the overall status of the pipeline. The partner should be able to record events like converting a prospect to a contact and adding opportunities to create a pipeline forecast. Lead Distribution and Withdrawal - This is a critical feature for vendors, first of all to make sure a set of leads can be given to a set of partners, but also, if partners are not following up after a certain time, to be able to withdraw the leads back into the Prospect Records Management system for redistribution to other partners. Lead Distribution Rule Set - A vendor should be able to push leads manually or automatically to a set of partners based on the lead type (SMB, Mid-Market, Enterprise, or other categorization) and also to match partner competencies, locations, and so on. This ability to create rule sets adds an important layer of automation to lead distribution, which gets the leads to partner team as soon as they are generated. Account Protection - Certain end user accounts are managed by large or premier partners and a vendor may want to protect these accounts. The lead management system has to be able to protect one or multiple accounts and automatically push leads from those accounts to specific partners and sales people. On the other hand, if a vendor wants to have partners compete for certain accounts, they should be able to keep these leads as open records. Rewards Integration - By integrating proper rewards and incentives, a vendor can greatly drive partner engagement and status reporting. We all know sales reps are busy and they have their own preferred CRM systems. However, a proper incentive structure around reporting can substantially enhance a vendor’s ability to track lead status, by using sales rewards to motivate individuals to enter lead status details into the platform - either manually or by automatic synchronization by connecting their CRM accounts to the lead management system. Dynamic Reporting - A state of the art lead management system should be able to provide dyn...
We frequently see vendors and providers struggling to figure out what would be the right set of programs to use Market Development Funds (MDF) or Co-operative (Co-op) Marketing Funds effectively to drive value for their partners and agents, and also provide high level of marketing ROI. In fact, there are a few insights that make it easier to do the right things right. Over the years we have seen organizations that can sell through a channel in almost a sure fire way and increase their return on investment from Market Development Funds (MDF) by focusing on a core few programs. These seven programs and ideas certainly do not rule out the opportunity to innovate in other ways, but a good approach would be to allocate more significant portion of your MDF budget across these areas first while setting aside the remainder as discretionary budget for other, creative marketing programs.
Partner Training – If you have a fee-paid certification program in place, one way to increasing return is to allow up to 80% reimbursement of strategic training programs. This can certainly vary quarter by quarter, as you emphasize certain business lines or product lines, but overall, running promotions to waive certification fees is a great way to increase competencies with your partner organization. It also helps create sales momentum as fully trained technicians can engage their internal sales resources to generate demand. Installed Base Sales – Organizations with large number of end customers and a broad channel at times struggle to deploy Market Development Funds (MDF) to drive demand. However, the easiest way to drive near term return is to create upgrade promotions and add-on campaigns for your installed base. In this way, you enable your channel to drive focused campaigns. If you have the ability to track point-of-sales data from your sales organization or your channel teams (distribution, etc.), you can very quickly track return on investment from these programs. End User Webinars – Webinars are the most cost effective way to generate demand – yet very few vendors effectively uses this mechanism. If you have the right Channel Marketing Automation platform, you are better equipped to drive high levels of attendance to centralized webinars. The Channel Marketing Automation platform allows the vendor to present a centralized webinar, while partners are able to drive their existing base of customers and prospects to attend. Security settings mean they don’t need to worry about losing those records to the vendor’s sales team or other partners. Creating a regular webinar series where you present, but partners drive traffic and follow up to close can provide tangible ROI. Appointment Setting for SME and Enterprise Campaigns – To get return from your tele-campaigns, the average selling price needs to be at least 20-30x of the program cost. You don’t want to spend telemarketing or tele-prospecting budget on SMB campaigns, as the average transaction cost tends to be higher in mid-market and enterprise solutions. So, if your tele-campaign cost per partner varies from $2,000 to $10,000 (depending on the activities and countries where you are running the campaign) then you have to be able to close one or multiple deals in the $40,000 to $300,000 range. Therefore, handpicking the campaigns that you want to fund is critical to drive near term results. SMB Roadshows – Allowing partners to run modestly funded lunch-and-learn events (20 people attending with $1,500 budget) can be quite effective. However, this doesn’t work ROI-wise with transactional products – like firewalls, switches, etc. – that do not have a higher life cycle value. Picking the right products for SMB-focused roadshows is therefore critical, but with the right mix, this can certainly drive consistent deal flow and pipeline increase both for partners and providers. Social Selling – The right Channel Marketing Automation platform can help your partners to sell socially.
There’s a pot of gold waiting for IT solution providers – and technology vendors are almost uniformly frustrated in getting their channel to make use of it. Vendors who sell through a channel or an agent network allocate between 1 and 2% of their top line revenue as Market Development Funds for their partners. However, for the most part, these Market Development Funds (MDF) fail to realize their potential. There are many reasons, chief among which are the lack of organized ways to allocate funds, track activities and measure outcomes. As a result, MDF is notorious for yielding the worst return in comparison to other direct marketing activities. Through our years of engagement in channel programs around the world, we have observed that companies who take the following steps to get the highest return from their MDF programs.
Understand where MDF will be relevant – Vendor companies provide clear directives for their direct marketing teams that, in turn, should dictate how funds are allocated across business lines, product lines and activities. Some of these direct marketing budgets may be allocated for branding, with a portion also reserved for demand generation. This is an important dividing line. In a B2B environment, MDF initiatives focused on branding rarely produce good return, until and unless a large – possibly huge - amount of fund is allocated. The ‘Intel Inside’ campaign, which is based solely on generating brand awareness, is an example of the behemoth branding approach. On the other side of the line, focused demand generation activities with specific sales or lead generation goals and defined time windows are more likely to produce measurable results. Set a clear strategy – Once you have determined where to allocate your funds, you need to determine where and how you want to drive return: marketers always need to begin with an end in mind. Identification of markets, business lines, products, customer types and partner capabilities are all critical elements. The majority of vendors open their MDF programs to all partners and offer a 50 to 80% reimbursement rate for approved activities - but often the funds are wasted in unproductive activities, or unused because partners can’t get beyond the planning stage. A better approach would be to pick a tightly defined solution or product set, focus on a market area, narrow the partner qualification criteria, and work within those boundaries with proven programs that you know will drive results. Stick to tried and tested campaigns – Marketing is a blend of art and science, and new campaigns often need adjustment in the initial stages. The road to success takes experimentation with campaign targets, messaging, methods and offers. Since partners are invariably time-constrained and lack marketing resources, using the partner network to experiment with new campaigns and programs is a sure way to fail. Yes, there are exceptions, but if you want to ensure return, test new programs with your direct sales teams, and only then promote successful campaigns via your indirect channel. Set guidelines and reporting requirements – We often see organizations allocate MDF, roll out programs, pay out on MDF claims and then move on to other initiatives without requiring partners to report back on activities and results. An effective MDF process requires a structured plan approval followed by an equally structured proof of perform and ROI reporting process. These must be enforced if the MDF program is to succeed. Channel account management team members need to have regular reviews with the partner base to make sure partners understand that they are not only responsible for driving execution, but also are on the hook for reporting results. Otherwise, you will not be able to track ROI. Deploy localized, automated tools– We are all busy, but there is way to create more time: by strategically deploying Channel Marketing Automation tools to reduce workload and streamline tracking and repor...
Most organizations who sell through the channel have both productive and unproductive partners. One of the easiest ways to grow revenue is to figure out how to transform some of the partners from unproductive into productive. Partner profiling is an excellent way to unlock this potential. If you have a channel that has hundreds or even thousands of partners, it is reasonable to assume that majority of your sales come from a small, core group of partners. While there are exceptions to this rule in some specialty cases (like niche vertical solutions resellers or those working with early stage companies), the majority of the time a significant portion of the partner base only sells once or twice a year, rather than regularly or even every day, as the most productive partners do. Over the years we have performed many channel partner profiling studies and the results show that there are three primary reasons why a partner is not productive:
Lack of engagement - Vendors don’t have the resources to engage with all partners equally to provide the same level of support: it's just not realistic. As a result, most vendors’ sales and technical efforts tend to be focused on a core group of high-performing partners - some vendors call this group ‘managed partners’ or ‘premier partners’. With this structure, a significant portion of the channel is left untouched and unengaged. Lack of business focus - Most partners tend to have core areas of focus competence. If we use the burger, fries and coke analogy then the vendor needs to clearly understand into what category their products fall for different partners. Partners tend to sell products that are core (burgers) to their business in a very different way, than when they sell solutions to which the vendor’s products are add-ons or options (fries or coke). The partner support process needs to vary according to the partner's business focus. Partner maturity - Sales people sell what sells. So for example, if a partner has been selling storage and virtualization solutions over the past five years, it's a significant investment for them to add new categories, e.g., wireless infrastructure or security. They may have customer access, but lack of competence in other areas gets in the way of building sales success and velocity outside their niche specialization.
This goes to show that engagement with partner base in a monolithic way really doesn't work to unlock the true potential. The best way to do this is to undertake a partner profiling campaign, using both primary and secondary data and then truly segmenting that information to understand who the partners are and how they can be helped. A proper Channel Marketing Automation tool is a powerful way to enable an organization to carry out partner profiling in a consistent fashion, and tier their partners on the basis of potential – not just sales out. Currently, most organizations structure their partner profiling into monolithic tiers like platinum, silver and gold, basing the rankings on sales velocity alone. Recently, some organizations have started to add other elements to their partner structures, e.g., technical certification or segment specialization, but this needs both a cohesive approach, and constant management. Just as an organization manages its human resources through a constant performance management process, a similar approach is needed via regular partner profiling and partner management. ZINFI’s unified Channel Automation platform has two core application sets: the first for Partner Relationship Management (PRM) and the second for Partner Marketing Management (PMM). ZINFI’s PRM application set has a profiling engine that allows companies to actively profile and manage their partner base by using multiple parameters and criteria. This can also be substantially augmented by ZINFI’s Partner Marketing Concierge services that can significantly reduce organization internal workload by performing high value,
Most partner portals today are a reflection of how the world used to be versus how they need to be. As we talk to our client base and their channel partners, we hear a high level of dissatisfaction with vendor portals, whether it's the technology platform, ease of use or how the content is uploaded, managed and used. Yet in every aspect of portal management, huge opportunities exist to drive more ROI by lowering cost and increasing usage by making it relevant to partners. We have been doing partner research for the past few years to understand what would improve usage of partner portals, and make them a true value added tool for channel partners. Across all partner types we have consistently found demand for a core set of capabilities that would rapidly drive up portal and content utilization. Here is a two-part summary of our findings:
Localized Experience – While most large vendors tend to have somewhat localized partner portals and user interfaces, the majority of the vendors today do not provide a fully localized experience. English tends to be the language of choice, and it does work for about half to two thirds of the worldwide market, but products that are sold globally through a large channel network really need to have a completely localized user interface, as well as localized content. While content localization is relatively easy, most portals do not take that extra step of providing a localized user interface and experience. To achieve this, it’s essential to pick the right Partner Relationship Management platform offering localized software user interfaces for key languages. Single-Sign-On (SSO) - Since most current portals are built up over years, using multiple discrete point solutions, these portals essentially end up acting as a gateway to various other tools, e.g., learning management systems (LMS), marketing development funds (MDF), Deal Registration, Sales Rewards, Rebates, etc. While a vendor may not be ready to switch to a completely new platform that provides all integrated tools in one platform, they should at least consider working with their other platform vendors to provide SSO connectivity. Why? Simply because partners do not remember passwords to all of these standalone platforms, so utilization rates go up instantly when you provide SSO. Unified Platform – If you are starting early in the game (like many early stage start-ups) or organizations that have recently decided to provide a state of the art partner platform, then you are already thinking about what a change you can make to partners’ experience. Look for a Partner Relationship Management (PRM) vendor with a good reputation in the market place, and that has successfully completed small, mid and large size deployments. Size matters because use cases vary a lot, so while you may be a large organization you may be working with countries that have smaller set up needs. Therefore, a vendor that only addresses large markets in the English language may not be the right for you if smaller, lucrative countries like Korea or Poland are not properly supported. Mobile Responsive – Most partners are out of the office at least fifty per cent of the time, and therefore access emails, websites and documents over their handheld devices – be it a smart phone or tablet. Therefore, making sure partner portals and the tools to which they connect are fully mobile responsive is absolutely critical. Data from our in-house research shows that mobile responsive partner portals experience three times more access and usage.
ZINFI’s Partner Relationship Management (PRM) and Partner Marketing Management (PMM) applications give you a state of the art platform with solid performance records from dozens of localized deployments that can address your partner portal needs in a holistic way. Please read more in Part 2.
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At ZINFI, we do a bi-annual worldwide channel survey across a broad range of channel partners and resellers to understand various opportunities related to marketing and sales activities. One of the core areas we ask questions are tied to Market Development Funds (MDF). The typical questions we ask are tied to how easy it is to apply, what partners want to do, etc. In one of our recent surveys we asked the partners who had access to Market Development Funds (MDF) about how frequently they use such funds. The answer was not at all surprising. As a part of this survey we reached out to about 4,000 partner contacts on a world-wide basis and asked whether they have Market Development Funds (MDF) or not. Those who said that they have MDF (which was about 30% of the total respondents) were then asked how frequently they use MDF. The attached graph shows, most partners do not use MDF. There are a few things a vendor can do to drive better utilization and return on marketing investment.
Keeping it simple – Very often there are too many criteria to be satisfied to be eligible for a Market Development Funds (MDF), which is a major turn off for partners to participate. So, keeping things simple and performance-focused helps to drive MDF adoption. Setting up the right program – Once you have built a simplified MDF access process, the key is to identify a core set of programs that the partners could apply for, based on your sales objectives. While competency development (training, etc.) are top MDF usages, above and beyond that there are other things a vendor can do to select the right program. Contacting the right partner – Once you have set up the right programs, it is essential that you do not do a broad communication and try to tell everything to everyone. You need to make sure that you have the right Partner Relationship Management (PRM) platform in place that allows you to send segmented messaging to the right partner – based on their tier and competency profile to drive demand in a category. Contacting the right person – Too often a vendor selling through a channel doesn’t have the right marketing contacts at the partner organization. So communications related to various programs funded by Market Development Funds (MDF) tend to go to the wrong people or don’t reach the target organization at all. It is essential to make sure that you have the right up-to-date marketing contact information from the partner organization you are targeting. You can do that by regularly scrubbing your partner contact database. Paying for performance only – Be clear, be fair, but be tough in paying off for MDF claims that do not have clear proof of performance. Many times we see partners with no proof of performance submit claims and get paid because of their status or relationship. The word spreads pretty quickly and it's unfair to the partners who are working hard to drive results. So, be very selective on who you pay based on performance. Programs like Prospecting BlitzTM can drive tangible results across many partners, and also drive MDF utilization. Sharing success broadly – Once you have reached the right partner contact with the right program and approved a plan to execute, sharing success from a program also drives adoption. Many horizontal programs – like training and certification, horizontal products, etc., that can scale globally drive success with clear and definite ROI. Rinse and repeat – We say this a lot when it comes to Market Development Funds or Channel Programs because too often vendors get carried away in running new campaigns and miss out on the opportunity to scale on campaigns that have already worked. Therefore, make sure before you drop one and add another campaign, that your high performance programs have been fully utilized and scaled across as many targeted partners as possible. Too many is too much for the channel.
ZINFI’s Partner Relationship Management (PRM) platform can provide you with a complete set o...
While high-end Web Content Syndication tools have existed for more than a couple of decades, the introduction of simple product showcase syndication for partners’ websites is relatively a new weapon in the Channel Marketing Automation arsenal. Web Content Syndication is a very important technology and can quickly distribute a large amount of branded content via multiple partners’ websites. It is very easy to set up and can be highly effective for branding and lead generation purposes. Web Content Syndication isn’t guaranteed to succeed, though; in fact the majority of the pure play tool providers fail to build brand and generate leads simply because channel partners do not get enough traffic to their sites. On the other hand, integrating Web Content Syndication as a part of comprehensive Channel Marketing Automation process has been shown to drive significant results and scale quickly as demand grows. Web Content Syndication usually fails to work because of one or more of the following failure modes:
Websites are used as digital brochures – Most partners do not focus on digital marketing as a core way to grow their business. Even when partners run special campaigns, promotions or events, they use standalone registration sites, while the corporate sites remain separate, without any linkage. Partners do not generate enough traffic – The overwhelming majority of partners – unless they are large regional or national providers – do not have a comprehensive, dynamic web presence. Digital marketing is not integrated into their business processes and only in rare cases do they focus on driving traffic to their websites for generating and converting leads. Most partner websites experience very low traffic rates, and therefore syndicated content remains hidden and unnoticed. Vendors change showcases but partners do not update – A partner may use syndication content for one instance, but since they do not see any significant resulting business value they tend not to update the codes on their website to pull down fresh syndicated content. As a result, many partner websites end up with vendor showcases displaying nothing but page (404) errors.
Overcoming these challenges is, frankly, tough, especially since changes in business processes and behaviors are needed in order to turn things around. Instead, vendors can take an alternative approach that is more likely to deliver a significant positive impact by selecting the right Channel Marketing Automation platform. Here are the criteria for success:
Give partners choices – Yes, web syndication is important, but it is even more vital to provide showcases that the partners can quickly modify to fit into their existing web infrastructure. Beyond multiple showcases, the ability to customize each showcase is critical for broader adoption of Web Content Syndication. Provide an integrated set of tools – Since the primary challenge is to drive traffic to a partner website, making it easy for the partner to use integrated Search, Social, Email, Event and Microsite marketing tools is also critical. Provide lead alerts in real time – Since most partners lack dedicated marketing resources, it is essential to provide them with both online dashboards, and instant, email-based lead alerts. This enables partners to quickly follow up with leads and pursue them through the sales cycle in a timely and effective manner. Localized showcases – English is used in about 60% of the worldwide vendor markets, but the remaining 40% require the use of at least a further dozen languages. An effective Channel Marketing Automation tool must be able to provide showcases in various languages - including a localized user interface - to drive global partner adoption and web traffic. Localized concierge services – The right Channel Marketing Automation platform is half the battle, but the other half is all about having appropriate resources in the field: localized concierge services are crucial resour...
Many Channel Marketing Automation vendors today provide tools such as email marketing, event marketing, and web and social content syndication. However, it’s questionable whether these tools are enough in themselves to stimulate demand and channel engagement. So what else is needed to complete the demand generation tool set, and how can a technology vendor make sure they buy the right system, and pay the right amount to achieve the desired ROI? These are important questions; moreover, for larger vendors they need to be considered in a global context. First-generation Channel Marketing Automation tools typically offered web syndication, event marketing and email marketing. In the ensuing phase, most Channel Marketing Automation vendors – like ZINFI – introduced tools like social syndication and on-demand webinars. While these tools were somewhat effective in building sales pipeline, their impact was only moderate. In an effort to understand more, ZINFI last year undertook an extensive, in-depth channel partner survey, which has provided useful insights on the elements needed and changes necessary to drive higher utilization and better return from channel marketing automation platforms. Time is a prime concern. Channel partners are tightly focused on sales and technical support and only in comparatively rare instances have dedicated marketing staff. So while vendors offer easy mechanisms to issue simple email blasts or implement pre-prepared web content syndication, they can’t overcome the fact that the partners are busy – VERY busy – elsewhere. Most vendor tools are potentially useful, but not sufficiently so – they don’t go far enough. Technology vendors therefore need to look at other ways to energize their partners to undertake marketing. One effective way is to provide a set of integrated tools that is not only easy to use but also preconfigured for various types of campaign. Any effective demand generation platform must incorporate the following tools and functionality:
Lead Management– While most Channel Marketing Automation platforms offer basic capabilities to upload leads (or records of potential prospects or existing customers) a true lead management platform needs to include a traditional customer relationship management (CRM)-like interface, for two main reasons:
For ease of use, the lead management system needs to connect both to the technology vendor’s and the partners’ own CRM system in order to enable data to flow seamlessly back and forth Most partners today use a CRM system such as Salesforce.com, so providing them with a CRM-like interface for lead management will drive adoption faster.
Lead distribution– Most vendors provide leads to their top tier partners, but to build pipeline and promote best practices beyond this rarified level, it’s critical to create a competitive environment for lead distribution. The Channel Marketing Automation tool must be able to distribute leads to pre-defined partner sets, whether to a small segment or to all partners, e.g. in a shark tank mode. Campaign-specific tools– Not all tools are relevant for everything, so it’s important to determine the purpose of each campaign. Social and search marketing are effective for awareness generation. Email, Events and Content Syndication showcases are primarily used to generate engagement with prospects. Deep dive training or product usage videos work well for gauging trial interest and qualifying leads. Also, depending on the target segments – SMB, Mid-Market or Enterprise – one or more tools may be needed to make a campaign productive. Multi-touch campaigns– Most mid-market and enterprise buying has a long evaluation cycle. In order to stay in the game – not just be included at the last stage for price comparison purposes – a Channel Marketing Automation platform should have multi-touch capabilities. This is essential to automate DRIP campaigns and provide successive content-driven engagement stages to move the buye...
It is getting harder every day to cut through the clutter that exists in our email inboxes. Most business users get hundreds of emails every day. Many email programs allow auto filtering of newsletter into different folders – let alone the spam filters cutting out many legitimate emails due to improper set up. However, there are a few effective ways to reach potential prospects via email marketing. It’s still the most efficient ways to get in touch with new prospects and existing customers.
Build opt-in subscriber list - Yes, this is hard to do, but can be done. The easiest way to do is to build a social presence via various groups, start participating in group conversations, redirect (where allowed) traffic to a blog post, and request users to sign up for email newsletter on relevant topics. This is the only way to engage with new prospects. Test for spam scores and rewrite - Did you know that more than two thirds of the emails that are sent via various email marketing software are never tested for their spam scores? Simple words like “free”, “promotion”, etc., trigger spam filters very quickly. As per Return Path only 81% of the emails that are sent reach an inbox. It is quite easy to check for spam scores and rewrite an email. Send from an email account of a real person - A lot of times we receive Emails from generic account, e.g., sales@abccompany.com or marketing@abccompany.com. Statistics show that emails from a real person, e.g., joe.smith@abccompany.com would be twice more likely to be opened than generic accounts. It’s very easy to set this up in many email marketing automation platform; however, organizations still skip this very simple step. Focused subject lines - Why do newspaper companies spend so much time in coming up with the headlines? Simple – headlines sell news. Same exact way, subject lines drive open rates of emails. Ideally a subject line should be ten words or less. Based on the focus of the email copy, questions based email, e.g., “did you know”, etc., may perform better than statement based subject lines, e.g., do this and get that, etc. Writing purpose built email copy - There are primarily two types of email campaigns – sales centric (with clear offer to buy) and marketing centric (primarily with the purpose of building brands and relationships). They need to be written very differently and sent with different objectives. Sales centric emails can be simple text based emails without any heavy branding or designs. On the other hand, relationship centric emails could be informational, e.g., newsletter format.
At ZINFI we not only provide a state-of-the-art channel marketing platform, but also a global marketing concierge service that can help you and your partners to run email marketing effectively. Our concierge services will work with your partners and help them to pick subject lines, custom design the body copy of the email with your content and their branding to make sure when it reaches an end prospect it realizes its full potential of converting that reach into a true prospect.
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Most channel partners do not have marketing resources and, as a result, rarely use content marketing as part of their lead generation efforts. At most, they may have technical blogs or a social media program. But effective content marketing requires a holistic approach, and the best way to achieve this is with a Channel Marketing Automation platform that incorporates all the relevant content and integrated marketing tools for a complete campaign. In situations of high demand and low competition, content marketing is not essential. The market will come to you as long as you are able to provide simple information distribution to prospects and customers. But for most areas of IT, this is how the world was fifty years ago. How things have changed! Most markets today are ardently contested by multiple providers. Unless you are a Google with 70% market share and a business model built around your monopoly as an information enabler, as a technology vendor you will need an active content marketing campaign if it is to grow and thrive. This means a lot more than just distributing information about products and services to existing customers or interested prospects. Content marketing is all about creating an active engagement that allows you to remain top of mind with potential buyers through a stream of valuable insights and information. Easy to say, but hard to do, since not only must compelling content be created, but you must also control content distribution and track its consumption. The good news is that over the past decade content marketing techniques have improved dramatically with digitization of content, and multiple methods of online distribution. As consumption of digital content has evolved into a three screens experience (mobile, desktop and TV), new content marketing – creation and tracking – tools have also emerged allowing the vendor/content provider to track consumption patterns, behavior and audience demographics with a high degree of precision. Nevertheless, the challenge remains as to how you provide a content marketing platform within a channel marketing environment. Organizations that sell through a distribution network almost invariably find it difficult to provide content marketing tools that work efficiently as a channel marketing enabler. The key requirement to stimulate partner marketing efforts is for an integrated platform that distributors, resellers and IT solution providers can use without spending too much time or money. At ZINFI we have dedicated ourselves for the last decade to solving this dilemma. Today, our Partner Relationship Management (PRM) platform provides a set of integrated channel marketing tools, including search, social, landing pages, events, web syndication, and more, that not only allows a vendor organization to provide digital marketing content to their channel partners, but also enables IT solution providers with no marketing expertise to get the attention of hundreds or thousands of buyers, using just a few clicks. Leveraging acomplete set of integrated content marketing tools is is a completely revolutionary and highly successful approach in channel marketing today. More and more IT vendor customers are adopting ZINFI’s PRM platform as a way to enable their channel and drive ROI up substantially.
It doesn’t matter how big or small your channel is: chances are that once in a while you need to run partner recruitment campaigns – especially when you launch a new product or acquire a new company that your current channel is not equipped to sell. However, partner recruitment is not an easy task. We at ZINFI can help you with this or do it on your behalf either on a national level or globally by using our Channel Marketing Automation and concierge services. Most vendors want to recruit channel partners who have marketing, sales and product capabilities in place to sell the vendors’ specific set of products. Research statistics show that channel partners bringing in average revenues of between $2-10 million carry products from anywhere between six and 40 vendors. So, for a partner to add another product to his portfolio, it is a major strategic decision that is never taken lightly. Vendors therefore need to be highly selective about the partners they select and what to do to make the engagement meaningful. There are seven success parameters that we know to be critical to create a meaningful engagement with a prospective partner that leads to successful recruitment.
Know your partners – Channel marketing is about building repeatable motion, so if you already have a set of partners that are selling your product, the best thing to do is to understand what makes your best partners successful before embarking on partner recruitment. How? Well, you can do a simple survey using a Channel Marketing Automation platform, asking them what other products they sell, who their premier vendors are and what distinguishes them from the rest, and how much and what type of service they provide. Since the survey tool is part of your Channel Marketing Automation platform, the data collected remains yours, and you can use it over and over again as a basis for reaching out to the right targets. Build your target list – Once you know your target partner profile, it is easy to build a list of companies to begin your partner recruitment. You can use LinkedIn, data.com and other data sources to find this information. We at ZINFI can also help you to build customized partner lists by using our Channel Marketing Automation platform, which connects – among other sources - to multiple social and database sites. Create your message – Partner recruitment must engage your potential prospects. It requires a very specific business proposition that must answer three fundamental questions if a new partner is to engage: i) how would this solution help me differentiate my company in my market place, ii) how much investment would I have to make to sell this product and iii) how much revenue and profit would I make from an average transaction. If these three items are not answered clearly, then the rest of the channel program from rewards and rebates to MDF and more will not be enough to engage a prospective partner. Make it a yearly goal – Most often vendors run partner recruitment campaign for three to six months and then stop. A short-term campaign is rarely effective. But if you take a long-term approach, and continue to reach out over 12 months to a targeted set of partners with specific messages, engage them into multiple conversation and help them understand how they can differentiate and make money, you will start seeing returns from the campaign. This may occur anywhere from three to six months down the road, but be prepared for a longer haul. Make ramp up easy – Maybe your partner tiers have many qualification criteria, multiple product certification requirements, complex rebate structures and more. This is not productive. The best way to accelerate partner recruitment is to simplify. The more the new partner has to do to sell the first product, less they will actually sell. So, while it is possible to induce many new partners to quickly fill out a form to join your program, if the road to selling takes too many steps you will lose the op...
Most technology vendors struggle to keep their partners informed about product and program changes via their Channel Marketing Automation platform. This happens mostly when the vendor relies too heavily on Email Marketing based communication. While all Channel Marketing Automation tools provide Email Marketing as a core tool of communication, very few provide a set of alternative or supplementary communication tools, and this is a problem, because email is easy to ignore and ineffective as a single communications medium. ZINFI’s Channel Marketing Automation platform provides realistic, alternative tools to bridge this gap. An average channel partner with $2 million to $10 million in annual revenues will probably carry products from between six and forty technology vendors. Each vendor provides multiple products that go through product refresh, updates, and end of life announcements on a quarterly basis. On top of that each channel program has multiple updates related to market development funds (MDF), rewards, rebates, training, etc. Multiply that by a factor of six, or – even worse - forty, and you can see that the stream of information will be excessive, confusing, and easily forgettable. If vendors try to communicate to channel partners via emails only, it becomes almost an impossible feat to create an informed channel. The average email open rate is only 10-15% for most email blasts to the channel. So what can be done? Here are 5 options:
Mobile Responsive Portal– Almost all partners today live by their smart phones, and like any other business users they access a lot of information on their mobile devices. Therefore it makes sense for vendors to separate daily and weekly communications on to a web-based mobile platform, and encourage partners to bookmark that site on their handheld devices. Mobile Applications– It is relatively easy to develop branded mobile applications, but only if you have a structured way to push fresh content. Product and program related content can easily be sent to a mobile application, and this creates a secure way of pushing content to partners – including sales videos, product training, and program announcements. However, content segregation is the key for success via mobile devices. You only want to push relevant content to relevant partners – not everything to everyone. Social Communities– Most vendors are engaged in social communities targeted towards channel partners; however, information is not often distributed through these communities in a strategic way and much content is pushed randomly. A better tactic is to create multiple communications streams for topics like sales, marketing, training, or products. While you cannot push confidential or sensitive information (such as special pricing) through a publicly available site, information can be provided in such a way that partners are alerted about changes, and can then log into a secure site (mobile friendly is recommended) to access more information. Mobile Video Portals– If a picture is worth thousand words, a video is worth a million. Most partners very rarely in an office. So, while they are waiting in the lobby to meet a client, traveling, or taking a break from a partner training conference, they have multiple opportunities to watch three- to five–minute-long information videos. It’s a simple matter today to take and upload videos without needing special production facilities. Get a simple tripod for your smartphone and you are in business. Audio Podcasts– The podcast has been around for years, but still fewer than a handful of vendors use them effectively. It’s incredibly easy to create three to five minutes of relevant audio podcasts and push them via social media or mobile portals. This allows you to get a lot of information out to a very wide audience with remarkable speed. Since most partners drive to work, the audio podcast is a highly effective way of distributing channel updates,