Channel and partner marketing improvement guide and template

Assess your maturity and take the first step to optimizing your channel and partner marketing

How will this guide help me and my business?

Partner marketing as a concept has been around for a long time and continues to grow, particularly in the technology industry. For partner marketing to work and fulfil the promise offered by each partner, it’s critical to have all the elements of people, strategy, and culture in place and at all times.

But even when a partner marketing approach is taken, the potential can be doomed by time wasted in endless meetings, unspent marketing development funds (MDFs), not using a defined process, and inadequate training.

That's why we've created this guide and accompanying template to help you assess and improve your channel marketing and partner marketing approach. In it, we'll show you the seven factors that you should use to audit your channel and partner marketing activities before giving you a simple template to complete your assessment, plus our best practice recommendations to make improvements.

We also provide a series of diagnostic tools to help you plan the communication activities that partners can potentially collaborate on across the customer lifecycle of RACE.

How is this guide structured?

• Introduction to partner and channel marketing
• Using RACE to plan partner marketing
• How can I optimize my partner marketing staff?
  • Marketing skill
  • Proactive communications
  • Rapport
• How do I make sure my marketing strategy supports successful partner marketing?
  • Decision making
  • Differentiated propositions
• How do I create the right corporate culture so that partner marketing flourishes?
  • Resources
  • Managerial support

Who is this guide for?

Whether you are trying to sell your products and services via a third-party organization, or are wanting to optimize joint marketing with your suppliers (vendors), this maturity assessment will help you assess your organization against seven key success factors that need to be in place for an optimal partner engagement, resulting in compelling joint value and effective lead generation.

The guide is aimed at helping marketers working in these roles:

• Channel marketing
• Alliance marketing
• Partner marketing
• Proposition, solution, and product marketing

The audit will be particularly relevant for business-to-business partner marketing delivered through distributors and value-added resellers. However, we also include consumer marketing examples and the assessment will be useful for brands selling through channel partners.

Resource Details

• Author: Helen Curtis
• Format: Online long-form article and downloadable spreadsheet template

About the author

Helen Curtis

Helen Curtis is the founder of Coterie Marketing. She is a Partnership and Proposition Marketing expert and trainer with twenty-five years’ experience of marketing and sales in B2B and B2C IT and Telecoms. Helen is specialized in the challenges of proposition and collaborative marketing for ten years, including working on joint strategic marketing plans, best practice for collaborative programmes, defining propositions, leading campaigns, and measuring return on investment for companies for major systems integrators and vendors across security, CRM, UC, and networking.

Helen has lectured at the University of Huddersfield and Coterie Marketing has won and been shortlisted for many awards including the Chartered Institute of Marketing best partnership marketing, B2B Marketing Best Multi-Channel programme, B2B Content Award winners.