Not worth the paper it’s written on
In fact, much of the vendor collateral that crossed my desk until recently was never rolled out because the messages and themes didn’t align to the brand or value proposition that my previous organisation was promoting. This issue is widely felt, as less than 10 percent of the people Demuto surveyed felt that vendor marketing is suitable for use with their customer base.
So, could it therefore be argued that the marketing campaigns are targeting the channel sales people? Alas, that also appears to be unlikely. Just 25 percent of respondents felt that their sales teams could understand, and deliver, the messages within the collateral.
Does this matter if the marketing has the desired effect and generates business?
Probably not… but the vast majority of those surveyed felt that the marketing rarely generated customer pull.
Some larger vendors have reached out to external agencies to centralise and manage their marketing budgets, claims process and marketing initiatives. These have, however, been heavily criticised by resellers as being inflexible, whilst to marketing and training agencies they seem expensive and often arrogant as they fiercely control access to the supplier list.
Ultimately, to be effective, marketing needs to attract and motivate each layer of stakeholders. Marketeers need to consider how they grab airtime in distribution, how they motivate a reseller sales person with many products in his portfolio and finally, create demand for their product with the end user. A one size fits all approach will never work as campaign material produced will be largely irrelevant to a significant percentage of the audiences that start to read it. Much of the marketing is also still focused on technical performance when most CIOs are now equally interested in business performance, for example.
Yet, despite the vast sums of money being wasted I don’t believe that budgets should be cut. Instead, in a tough market, vendors with good products need to work harder to grab attention from both the channel and end users. Vendors also need to get smarter with their budgets, set clear objectives for what they want to achieve and then work closely and individually with channel partners to design creative and effective ways of reaching the target audience, with messages that resonate.
An often overlooked opportunity is that a lot of marketing effort will be wasted if the follow up mechanism is ineffective. How thoroughly do the telemarketing team or salespeople understand the subject, its key messages and can they deal with objection handling? All of this needs to be focused on, in detail, as part of the pre-launch planning phase.
Of course, it’s impossible and inefficient to consult with the entire channel before launching a new campaign but it would be an effective use of time to trail the messages and the focus with those people working closest to the coalface - the channel.
To address this, organising and facilitating planning workshops between vendors and resellers becomes key. Whilst running multiple sessions obviously involves a large time commitment from a vendor there are ways of ensuring it isn’t wasted time. Expectations should therefore focus on what they get in return; a number of tailored campaigns targeting different end user sectors, increased visibility of investment and return, increased execution and increased channel engagement. The investment required to arrange the workshops then quickly and easily outweighs the money wasted on generic collateral.
From a reseller perspective, they also get something that is relevant to them, easy to administer, within their control and provides then with something that differentiates their organisation from their competitors. Here’s hoping that the additional effort and focus greatly improves the level of channel satisfaction in next year’s survey.
