Winning in the Wild West

When I first started working with a leading indirect channel client years ago, the owner described their market as akin to ‘the Wild West’. This was during a boom time and fortunes were being made and multiplied at record speed, with a lot of players flying largely by the seat of their pants. Often, high double-digit annual growth required little more than keeping tightly latched on to a few key clients whose own rapid growth would drag you up and up to more dizzying heights.

The channel has matured rapidly but is still a unique world to operate in for marketing leaders. The diversity and complexity of the ecosystem offers huge opportunities and also huge pitfalls. Even more so than in many areas of B2B, the breadth of effectiveness of marketing on display is notable.

There are some outstanding B2B marketing leaders in the space who thrive on their understanding of the nuances of the market and their partner ecosystem, have the acumen and authority to play true strategic roles in their organisations, and who devise smart marketing strategies that drive sustainable long-term growth. There are also some who find themselves buffeted along on the winds of changing leadership direction and find themselves frustrated and viewed as essentially a sales support function.

The winners and losers in the space are facing many of the same challenges and complexities. The big difference is how they meet them. In this article, we’ve looked at four key tips from our experience of working with marketing leaders in the indirect channel and some of the ways you can put them into practice.

1) Play the long game

One of the biggest mistakes some channel marketers make is focusing too much on meeting short-term needs- usually on direct lead generation. Whilst generating leads is essential, focussing straight on the end goal and ignoring the fundamentals rarely leads to sustainable growth. Often this blinkered focus actually harms your ability to achieve the goals you’re so focussed on reaching.

It's important to have both a long-term and short-term focus in your marketing efforts. This means, yes, having a robust programme in place to provide consistent warm leads up to your sales team, but also having a long-term focus on the upper end of the funnel that will make your future lead generation efforts so much more effective (and efficient). This is not unique to the channel but is even more important here than in many other B2B markets. In a large part, this is due to the lack of differentiation that customers typically perceive between their channel suppliers.

There is no standard budget split that is correct for all between long- and short-term focus. It depends on your own unique position, the nature of the market and your growth ambitions. However, achieving a balance is vital and worth reviewing. It can be a tough sell into the organisation (especially in cases where Head of Marketing reports to Sales) and a well-thought-out business case is vital.

2) Think broad

Channel marketing is dominated by email, display ads and events. On paper, they can offer an attractive equation- work out your conversion rate at each stage, plug in the data and deliver predictable numbers of attendees at physical and digital events that your Sales team can take on as warm leads to then convert into customers.

But in practice, whether or not it ever worked, it does not consistently work now. Narrow marketing with highly specific touchpoints along a linear journey does not work where a) your customer has a high degree of control over their own purchasing journey and b) they make decisions as part of a complex buyer group. Both of these are the case throughout the channel.

Instead, you need to ensure that you’re reaching your customers across numerous marketing channels whilst providing them with the ability to enter the buyer journey at a stage that works for them. Broadly speaking, the more quality touch points before a prospect reaches the sales stage, the more successful the conversation will likely be. And these touchpoints need to be considered on an account level rather than solely at a contact level.

3) Be more daring

Most channel businesses offer a similar product set at a similar price to their direct competitors. It is possible to differentiate here with a uniquely packaged offering or through highly competitive pricing, but channel organisations that can (or want to) do this in a meaningful way are in the minority.

However, when it comes to how and where businesses in the channel promote to their prospective customers, there is currently very little differentiation in the market. But this is where the opportunity is. A misguided focus on staid professionalism over effectiveness has crushed creativity in channel marketing and is an area ripe for shaking up.

You don’t need to go crazy, but being distinctive and memorable in a sea of similarity helps to cement your channel business in potential buyers’ minds at all stages of the buying journey. The distinction can come from where you show up versus competitors, in what you say, or in how you say it.

4) Be Consistent

A common experience amongst channel marketers is to find the business at one moment demanding leads, putting significant time, effort and budget into short sharp lead generation campaigns, for Sales to then reach capacity, and for the campaign to be turned off. And then for the situation to repeat itself a few weeks or months down the line.

There are two big problems with this approach. The first is that significant cost goes into the setting up of this type of activity which then needs repeating each time it is spun up in a new iteration. The second (and more important) one is that the organisation loses the opportunity to communicate a consistent message to the market over a longer period. The communication of a consistent message over the long term dramatically enhances the effectiveness of lead generation. It means that future campaigns are not starting with a totally cold prospect base but rather are communicating with an audience who already have a level of awareness and understanding of your offer.

Consistency not only saves significant time, effort and budget, but leads to significant incremental improvement over time.

Conclusion

No two channel organisations are the same. Funding may be in the millions in the form of MDF or a hard-fought-for few thousand. The world of a one-office MSP is different from a multinational cloud disti. The IT needs of 10 person plumbing company customer are different from the needs of a global shipping company customer. However there are challenges that the whole industry faces and by following the top tips we’ve explored above, there is always an opportunity to find and drive growth for your organisation.

If you recognise the challenges in this article and are wondering about how to put the recommendations into practice in your organisation, please feel free to reach out to me at jminchin@nyalamarketing.co.uk.