Communicating for your Sales Partners
17th Feb 2012
Working alongside your sales partners means understanding how to blend the right approaches to create the best possible pipeline. Sometimes, this means going out to market carrying your vendor message in order to capture the right opportunities. Your partners get involved at the back end, receiving well qualified leads attracted in on the strength of the initial offering and managed through to conclusion.
We can deliver some real business value through:
1) Ensure a reliable pipeline that’s ‘Always On’. Through long experience, we know the challenge of getting campaigns into market quarter on quarter. Only minor delays in confirming key sales priorities, funding levels or strategic initiatives can have catastrophic consequences for the timing of campaign implementation. To cut through this, we take a cut of programme funding and dedicate it to ‘Always-On’ activities – marketing campaigns that are consistently happening throughout the year. The result is a sales pipeline that’s always moving, partners who are always engaged and results consistently coming through.
2) A flexible approach to lead generation. Our innovative campaign teams are well versed in translating Always-On campaign funding into direct, digital or tele-based activities. Typically, this will be a mixture of all three. This ensures we’re hitting multiple communication channels with a consistent message, creating well-qualified responses that can be developed and then passed onto your sales partners.
3) Delivering satisfaction through lead quality. Our campaign teams work with you to define what a lead looks like. We work to industry-recognised methodology to define a validated opportunity, and work with your sales partners to ensure they’re comfortable with that definition. Once we know the size and shape of a validated lead, we work to bring in the number of leads we committed to at the outset of the campaign. In an emotive area of channel sales relationships, we pride ourselves in achieving a high level of lead quality satisfaction.
4) Lead nurturing happens long after campaigns have closed. Understanding typical business to business buying processes means any interest we unearth through any of our campaigns gets tracked and nurtured. This is particularly impactful within our Always On campaigns. Going out with a vendor-led message ensures that we can pursue nurture opportunities very easily, both over the phone and through low-cost, multi-touch activities supported by automated marketing management systems. These allow us to pre-define communication approaches until such point we can convert an individual nurture opportunity into a validated lead to be passed to a partner.
5) We pick the right approach for the solution you’re marketing. Taking a vendor-led approach is not only appropriate to an Always On campaign. Sometimes, we take the view that certain niche solutions, or solutions that require the right kind of data, for example, would be best marketed through a vendor-led approach. From here, we create a syndicated campaign, engaging partners at the outset on how we plan to aggregate marketing investment into one specific campaign that will drive results for all of them. We sign them up to a committed campaign investment against a corresponding pipeline target and manage the back-end lead process in the usual, thorough way.
Published by
Peter Smith, Creation Founding Director
peter@creationagency.com, 07764 898007
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