There are many benefits to be gained from focusing effectively on partner marketing (and if you think it’s easy, you’re new to the game!).
So how do you improve your strategy?
Be innovative? How do you take your program to the next level so your partners continue to work with you? That’s what we wanted to find out as we vnpay database tuned in to TechTarget’s Michael Latchford, VP of Strategic Alliances and Partner Marketing Services. A partner marketing expert, he hosted industry marketing and sales leaders including Susanna Parry-Hoey (SoftwareONE), Kimberly Payton (Infosys Finacle), Andy Sayare (NetApp), and Jeff Wood (Lenovo). The following insights are taken directly from their discussions.
The best partner marketing strategy is developed methodically
Successful partner marketing teams think a lot why does my law firm need an seo-friendly website? in terms of strategy. As part of a continuous process of calling for innovation, they hypothesize and test concepts well before they actually and sustainably integrate their programs and are therefore deployed to their teams. This very rich upstream activity is key according to our panelists for whom too often partner marketing locks itself into stereotypical approaches that are not open to innovation and strategic thinking. There are several areas in which this approach has brought value.
when building a program to constantly assess market opportunities
Kimberly Payton of Infosys Finacle recommends taking a step back fairly regularly: “What is the story you need to tell that is going to be influential and where do you see it from your competitors’ perspective? How are you going to asia phone number differentiate yourself from them and their message? A good example is when Unix was around. There was a good opportunity to do a “Unix to Linux” type campaign to enable migration, and it aligned well with most of the OEM deals from vendors around the world that were building applications on top of these infrastructure layers. So it was not just about making the case for choosing a technology (“come to Linux”) but also positioning it in the market by saying, “you’re on Unix but we can help you move to Linux.”
Together and with clear and shared objectives
Building on this approach, SoftwareONE’s Susanna Parry-Hoey adds that partner marketing teams should be keen to include a phase or cycle in their strategy Partner marketing processes specifically dedicated to reviewing overall business objectives and identifying exactly how and where their partner strategies fit into their respective organisations’ overall business strategy.
“At the strategic level – if I look at SoftwareONE
we’ve been working on a very distinct strategy that shows us where we have the right to play, what the future direction of the company is, and that’s really defined by the board and by the executives.” She continues: “Where I really see that coming to life is under the leadership of our CEO, Dieter Schlosser. We’ve been following five growth paths, from using FinOps to optimize your cloud and our software, to mission-critical workloads like SAP, to application services, both modernization and cloud native, and some of the automation around that, to vertical geographic expansions.”
Supporting innovation through partnerships
As Parry-Hoey points out, the best partnership strategies Partner marketing scale and contribute to the operationalization of the overall business effort. And then, over time, their steady progression depends on continuous improvement. But building a culture of collaborative innovation with partners, and with the rest of the business, is not easy. Such an approach starts with understanding why we matter and emphasizing our role as a driving force in the long-term success of partners and alliances.
NetApp’s Andy Sayare sums up why collaborative
Inovation is essential for businesses to remain competitive within partner ecosystems:
“Because companies are working together to build solutions, you end up creating more value for the customer. So if you think about it, selling storage alone is valuable to customers. But when I can combine storage with IT infrastructure and everything. Else that goes into building the IT, I’m adding that extra layer of value. “We can leverage this new capability because all the pieces are there. The business case is that they work together, they’ve all been tested, and they work well together.”
Lenovo’s Jeff Wood highlights another example of how the building blocks of innovation can come together in an exchange context:
“A few years ago, we saw a lot of high
Partner marketing systems, whether it was in design, automotive design, or oil and gas exploration. We saw a technology bottleneck. So we partnered with AMD (a big technology partner) to offer high-end interfaces with. A single processor, which allowed for more cores on the processor. That allowed a lot of application vendors to get a more linear. Performance solution with a higher core count than some of their competitors. We were very different in the industry … which allowed us to grow our market. For people who absolutely have to have the fastest systems in the industry.”