Commanding Q4: Three strategies B2B marketers must put to work for partner channel success
Change gathers momentum then rewrites expectations. In the Cloud tech ecosystem, 2023 has been among the most transformative years in memory. The key to sustainable growth now lies in seamlessly integrating your marketing and sales strategies with your partner channel to amplify reach and impact. As we gear up for the critical 4th quarter, we thought we’d share some of the B2B marketing and strategy observations that have had the biggest impact on recent work.
Earlier this year, we analyzed macro trends that since January have resulted in 236,000+ lost jobs in the tech sector among 952+ companies (source: layoffs.fyi). It was a massive downshift that took marketing spend with it. We spent the first half of the year helping clients make educated investments driven by where they wanted to be when economic growth returned. We’ve been proactive and so have they.
The tech industry isn’t through the woods yet, but there are glimmers. Demand trends have improved, confidence is up, and marketers are spending more than at this point last year. (As one measure, digital ad spend is up 9.5% and forecast to exceed $600BN in 2023.) In B2B, we’re responding to an uptick in partner channel activity matched by forecasts that worldwide IT spending is expected to grow by 4.3% in 2023 and 8.8% in 2024 (source: Gartner). We like what we see.
What we’ve learned from 2023 (so far) and how you can put it to use to crush your 4th quarter targets:
Effective channel partnerships start with scalable systems. Whether markets are up, down, or sideways, systems thinking and program operations for partner channel activation at scale consistently pay off. This means empowering your partners with integrated GTM strategies, aligning with expert execution teams, and investing in modern technology and processes that will guide partners through proactive co-marketing as efficiently as possible, then gathering data for ongoing optimizations and performance improvements. It’s driving demand with conversions in mind by creating compelling joint value prop-based content for each stage of the buyer’s journey (considered critical by 61% of B2B organizations), and enabling validation and trust by showcasing quantifiable business value. With the right system, doing more with less becomes imminently attainable.
When buying conditions rebound as we anticipate they will soon, marketers working in proven systems will have a big advantage. We see best-in-class vendors doubling down on their partner channel systems and strategies with this in mind.
Keys to success: Understand your partner ecosystem maturity, identifying the areas which offer the greatest opportunity to increase impact and revenue growth to, through, and with your channel partners. When working with clients, we consider: Partner program design (Is your partner recruitment and segmentation strategy optimized to scale?), Marketing and Sales enablement (Do your co-marketing and co-sell offers meet the needs of your partners today? Align to your business objectives?), Organizational Design (Is your team optimized to successfully execute and manage your program?), Technology & Data (Do you have the technology platforms to enable execution efficiency? Span of control? Performance measurement?)
Learn how a scalable go-to-market (GTM) solution—featuring rich, templatized assets and automated processes—helped a cloud enterprise technology company transform their partner marketing practices to enable 100s of their most strategic partners to generate more revenue opportunity.Winning new customers takes new understanding. Today’s tech buyers are increasingly millennial, race and gender representative, and can quickly tell the difference between truth and almost-truth. They want use cases to be relatable, “look like me,” and address real-world problems. They also settle for nothing less than controlling the pace of the sales process (say goodbye to your content gates) and rely heavily on peer recommendations when researching cloud tech solutions.
In an environment of intensifying criteria for buyer engagement, the question becomes: How do you stand out when you’re competing for eyeballs in a sea of sameness? Answer: Look beyond target demos and invest more time in psychographic data to understand your buyers’ needs and preferences on a deeper level. Weave these insights into differentiated value props that convey powerful partnership stories told in clear human language. Then prepare to hyper-scale by creating content and offers to meet them wherever they are in their journey.
Keys to success: Know your audience front-to-back and how your product helps to get them unstuck. Then articulate your solution clearly across formats and channels. Lacking a joint value prop with punch, you’re just another better together story which is nice but often insufficient.
As a B2B partner marketing agency, we make our living helping clients identify strategic opportunities to drive demand with partners and consistently outperform their ROI targets. Learn more in our recent e-book: Driving Growth Through Your Partner Ecosystem Now.Increasing marketplace transactions will require consumer strategies. Making it easy for customers to self-serve product information and transactions in marketplaces will require B2B brands to become more personable, inviting, and convenient. In short, more consumer-like and human-centered. Given the length of sales cycles and depth of buying committees, you want your brand to be not only memorable, but also display the characteristics of someone your customers will enjoy spending time with.
Successful hyper-scalers are making their marketplace a welcome destination for partner brands to increase reach, revenue, and personal touchpoints. They’re accomplishing this by: 1) enabling seamless customer opportunities from engagement to transaction, 2) empowering partners to articulate their brand promise on a level playing field, 3) investing in evergreen marketing strategies to drive customer traffic to their marketplace listings, 4) offering buyer control preferences to accelerate the sales process, and 5) streamlining their media strategy for maximum efficiency. A win-win-win-win-win.
Keys to success: Put yourself in the shoes of buyers who are short on time and under pressure to do more with every dollar. In visiting marketplaces, buyers are showing intent, which is terrific. As a vendor, it’s your job to help partners optimize for your marketplace capabilities by delivering the user flows, access to partner content, connection points, and purchase options customers desire. Help partners capitalize on what makes them special and work together to drive revenue. It’s what being a partner is all about.
Achieve bolder aspirations
Whether it’s evolving your partner marketing programs to be more impactful, shortening your co-sell cycles, or driving deep demand gen campaigns, Knack is here to help. Our strategic methodology and operational processes enable our clients to unlock greater value and efficiency across their partner sales and marketing programs. In this new era of tech marketing, we enable our clients to embrace bolder aspirations – going beyond incremental change, so you can be ready to win today and continue to evolve no matter what comes.