Partner Marketing
Increase your sales through stronger channel and co-marketing programs
- Our services:
- Channel Marketing,
- Recruitment,
- Engagement,
- Nurturing,
- Co-marketing
We extend your reach, amplify your message, and maximize your budget through partnerships
Our partner marketing services are designed to grow your sales pipeline by leveraging the value of strategic and channel relationships. Whether we’re building co-marketing programs, increasing channel partner participation, or finding new partners to sell your solutions.
We’re experienced at working through a variety of partner marketing scenarios, such as multiple businesses aligned to one shared marketing objective or individual resellers promoting a client’s solutions.
From alliance partners to strategic partners to traditional channel partners, we understand the unique nature and business interests of each, allowing you to realize the full potential of these relationships.
Read on to see how we approach Channel Marketing and Co-marketing.
Channel Marketing
Growth, communications, enablement, and support are essential to a strong channel
What do you need to increase sales volume through your channel programs?
More partners—or more profitable partners? Better leads? Perhaps a boost to partner training? Or an increase in engagement?
Individually or combined, these activities work to generate more revenue for you and your partners, and we’ll show you how to prioritize addressing them. Including defining and delivering the services and support you’ll need.
At Sudden Impact Marketing, we’ve been working deep in the technology partner ecosystem for more than 20 years. From recruiting and nurturing channel partners to executing lead generation and sales-enablement programs.
One constant we understand is that organizations must run lean with limited resources to grow their channels in size and revenue. That’s where we come in. We know the language of partners, what motivates them, and how to capture mindshare with them. More importantly, we help ensure your solutions remain top of mind, increasing yours and their success.
We offer solutions to address all areas of your channel program, such as:
Partner recruitment
Expanding your marketing reach includes adding the right partners to your program. We identify target companies, develop programs to attract them, and support channel account managers with appointment scheduling and recruitment materials.
Partner engagement
The goal is to increase partner participation in order to increase sales. We’ll prioritize opportunities within your partner community and use a targeted nurturing approach to drive the type of activity necessary to:
- Motivate your partners to take advantage of incentives and certifications
- Increase attendance at launch calls or events
- Ensure partners are fulfilling program requirements
Partner training materials and sales assets
We create training resources, such as tutorials and presentations, to educate partners about business development tools, as well as sales materials for solution launches and promotions. We distill corporate and solution messaging to a level that drives partner business.
The story you deliver to partners is critical. Partner sales teams have many choices of whose products to sell. To place—and keep—your solutions in a prominent position with partners, your solution must:
- Be easy to sell relative to competitive solutions
- Effectively solve customer problems
- Be profitable for the partner rep to sell
Partner onboarding and training
Successfully bringing partners into your program starts at day 1 and continues through training efforts that make them profitable members of your channel program sooner.
Our approach:
- Provides a personal contact for onboarding
- Ensures partners are going through the proper steps
- Educates partners about programs, such as deal registration and certifications
- Develops a cadence for calls and touchpoints to accelerate engagement
Demand generation
Our experience shows that lead generation programs for partners are filled with challenges. Each partner has a different level of marketing expertise and available resources. It’s one of the reasons MDF or JMF dollars go underutilized or are ineffectively used. Another is the lack of strategy and clear direction from the OEM.
Partners want stronger, OEM-supported programs with actionable leads. We can run a program led by you or work directly with your partners to execute lead generation programs.
Incentive participation
We develop campaigns to drive partner engagement and sales. We offer creative, project management, telemarketing, and digital services to assist in the execution and promotion of special incentives to generate sales.
co-marketing
Get more value from co‑marketing
Cooperative efforts between you and other businesses hold significant advantages over marketing programs run by just your organization. We develop programs that enable businesses to achieve the maximum benefits of co-marketing, such as:
- Enhanced value propositions for your audience
- Broader market reach
- Lower marketing costs
- Shared resources for execution
Make more compelling value propositions
It’s become too easy for prospects to tune out marketing messages from businesses because they’re perceived as “just another email/ad/post from ABC Co.” We see brand fatigue come into play frequently when large companies have several internal groups trying to communicate simultaneously with the same prospects.
What we offer is an approach that combines messages from complementary businesses to provide a more comprehensive story for prospects. Your audience gets more valuable information from the joint narrative and is more likely to engage. It’s like a “one-stop shop” for information about solving their company’s challenges. Instead of addressing only part of a problem through a single solution, a larger portion of that challenge can be solved by combining several solutions into a more comprehensive one.
Lower your marketing costs
Co-marketing allows you and your partners to divide costs and even reduce overall costs for functions such as program management. Here’s a simple way to look at it: if three companies with complementary solutions are targeting similar prospects, imagine the savings if they run one campaign instead of three. These savings can even allow for more substantial campaigns, eliminating the corner cutting that takes place when budgets and resources are limited.
Share resources to lighten the load
Pooling talent and divvying up labor leads to successes that would be virtually impossible for a single business. We serve as project managers to coordinate activities between parties, or offload those duties from them altogether.
Expand your market reach
Each participating business will communicate the program and promotions through their house lists, installed base lists, and channels. Your brand will receive exposure through those efforts to new prospects and markets.
What businesses should you partner with?
Your decision about who you approach with a campaign proposition can be based on many things, from complementary solutions to access to a vertical market you wish to penetrate. We recommend starting the decision process based on which company can create the most valuable and intriguing story for prospects.
Begin by answering these questions:
- What do prospects need most?
- What are the hottest topics or biggest challenges they face?
- What are the most critical business problems in our market space?
- Which companies do a great job providing products to solve these problems?
- Which company has a prominent presence in a market we want to penetrate?
Remember: always keep the focus on providing value to the prospect. If you force fit stories together, it will be disjointed and confusing for prospects.
In many cases, there will likely be some competitive overlap between companies. We’ll help determine up front what the go-to-market story is and who writes each chapter to eliminate those concerns.
How we execute co-marketing programs
Formal agreements might already be in place between organizations. If not, formal arrangements should be executed to protect all parties. We facilitate and manage the details of these arrangements between co-marketers.
Our team then works with all parties to develop the campaign strategy, messaging, and content. This is when we’ll establish whether one brand is the lead brand for the communications or if a neutral approach is preferred. We’ll also assess available assets and resources to determine if we can use existing materials or if new ones need to be created.
To execute the campaign, we use our martech stack to manage the flow of leads and track and report the results. Our martech stack can operate independently of partners’ CRM systems or integrate directly with them to pass leads. This approach avoids corporate red tape, access issues, and delays associated with using one or more of the partners’ business systems to run the campaign. It also allows us to more efficiently convert MQLs to SQLs using our telemarketing team, if that’s the goal of the program.
During the campaign, we monitor all activity, from the most effective lead sources to which content or offers are being consumed the most. Adjustments based on this information increase response rates, leading to a stronger return on your marketing spend. These insights can also shape ongoing efforts and uncover new opportunities with the target audience.
Ideally, your co-marketing program should be a long-term effort. Only then will you realize the biggest return on your investment.