(Do It Yourself Dashboard)

Recently, Angie of The Learning Channel, turned me on to an article written earlier this month about something interesting the Obama administration is doing – publicly showing real time information about the federal IT portfolio.

The article, titled “Obama administration rolls out 'IT Dashboard'” by Martina Stewart (probably no relation to Martha…..) explains:

“Using charts and graphs, the new dashboard displays IT information by federal agency or department. Users can also share or embed the charts on their own Web sites or blogs or on social sites including Facebook, Twitter, and delicious.”

What a great idea!  How could creating your own dashboard apply to you and your channel?  Consider your MDF (marketing development funds) programs.  The instant benefit to your channel partners is real time information about MDF and related programs they can engage in, which helps their and your ROI alike!  The dashboard can then connect to individual program pages or contacts for the partners to get started.  Of course there are more applications than just MDF programs, but start small, and asking for “What else would partners like to see in real time?”  It’s a great way to expand this concept while keeping your channel partners in mind.

Check out the US Government IT Dashboard here.

WANC
(What a Novel Concept)

What did you do on your summer vacation?  Me, I reviewed (together with Lori and Lauren) nearly 3,000 technology partner web sites for two separate clients who wanted to know more about the partners in their program and those who, maybe should be in their program.  When things got a little tedious, I’d call upon my imagination and pretend that I was a buying customer visiting their site for the first time—“Would I buy from this company?”  If I were a customer visiting these web sites, here is my impression of what I might see:

• If the site has 3 different ways to navigate, it makes me think that you may tend to arrive at solutions to make everyone happy vs deciding on one direction. 
• If you stray from standard navigation language (if “About us” is “Our gig”), it makes me think you’ll force new (and maybe unnecessary) components on my project that may not make sense.  Let’s just agree now:  Everyone needs to have “About us”, “Contact”, “Our products/services”, “Our Partners” and “Testimonials” in their nav. (more on testimonials below).
• If the site contains and enormous amount of text, I think you’ll talk too much and too long.
• If you use Flash as your intro page and I have to wait until I can get to the information that I am seeking, well, it makes me mad and quite frankly, I’m not impressed by your fancy.  (Might it beself-serving?) 
• If you convert text to graphics on your site (to excess), you limit a healthy amount of copy/pasting (sharing information) that customers might find useful from your site (like directions to your location).  Also, remember that web translators* cannot translate your site if you make everything a gif or jpg image and you may not get new business in other countries. 
• If you don’t have customer testimonials on your site, you may have no experience at all and I’m not sure that I’d feel confident that you know what you are doing. DON’T OMIT testimonials with real names from your site!!!

There’s much more, but maybe worthy of another post.  Afterall, 2,712 experiences is enough to either make you smarter, crazy or both - but it sure helps to identify trends and personalities. 

What this means for channel managers:  It’s healthy to conduct a site review of some of your top partners.  Get to know them.  You can learn a lot from simply visiting their web site.  And, if you can provide some healthy tips on how to improve their site, you can mutually benefit by drawing more customers to them.   Your interest in them will go a long way to building loyalty.  People love people who love them. 

Call us if you need help understanding more about your partners.  

And, if you request a partner web review project, please bring eyedrops!

Seth Godin wrote a profound perspective today.  One that we inherently know but don't acknowledge much:  That people make emotional decisions. On a more basic level, they make decisions based on chemicals in the brain that define emotion, perspective and judgment. Then, AFTER the fact, they justify their decision and apply logical reasons for what they did.

Apply this to your partner program.  You probably focus a lot of your attention on proving the logic of why to join your program:  What's the margin, the membership fee, the stats, the ROI when maybe, just MAYBE, your partners are signing up with you because you're cool, they like your philosophy, your logo, you donated to their cause, a friend talked about your company or maybe they had coffee with one of your most fantastic employees at a seminar.  Maybe, they just LIKE you and they want to be a little piece of your world.

You may not know exactly what it is you did but don't overlook those little things that you do with or around partners that might make a likeable impression. 

Generally those are:  You're not a afraid to lead, you're humble at the right times and confident at the others. You know your competition and know you're not necessarily always going to win, but you have a love of the game.  You talk with your customers, respond to blogs and make positive changes based on what you're told. These are the likeable traits that might just be winning you partners. 

That, and a good ROI.   

PS:  One of our campaigns that ranked high on the "likeability" scale and was talked about for months and many different countries adopted it.   www.wevegottaguy.com where we invited improv troupe to make a point. 

Call us if you need help. 

Many tech channel managers are sitting in an uncomfortable place right now.  If you're in a fiscal year, budgets are not fully allocated yet and you're stuck waiting in limbo not sure how much you'll get this year. Why not take advantage of this time to pull together your "Good-Better-Best" scenarios?

Paint a picture of what you'd like to do this year and START with the BETTER scenario.   Starting with BETTER gives you a balanced position that can be easily bumped up with extra funding  or lowered in scale to account for cost-cutting steps you'd take to your get to "good" scenario. 

Let's say this year you are tasked with recruiting a new breed of partner into your programs:

Your "better" scenario might include a success-story-based approach where you gather interesting stories using video, audio and written accounts from new-breed partners already in that new space, then extend that message with the traditional media you already use today and offer an incentive to those who qualify by a certain date.

If you were asked to cut your budget, you might lose the video and just go with audio and written stories that are easy to capture by phone. 

If you were given more budget than you expected, you might add a reach into non-traditional media (such as social media) and even sponsor some conferences (or un-conferences).

Better yet, make your extra allocation of budget "performance-based" and challenge your agencies to tap into extra funding if they exceed your goals. 

And, don't forget to ask agencies like us for ideas, we like to get involved in your early stages of planning so we can understand your business all the more and serve you better. 

When we do this approach with our clients, there is a great synergy and results are notably more impressive.  

Call us if you need help. 

Q:  Why is it, no matter how much we invest, it never seems to be enough?
 
A:  It's not how much you invest as much as it is how and where you invest that leads to the highest ROI.

As spring rolls into summer I find it increasingly hard to keep up with the weeds.  They're in my lawn, in my garden, and as they grow they steal the nutrients from the soil;  they're many in number, tough and require all of my limited resources to deal with them…meanwhile, the grass, flowers and veggies in my garden get neglected and as a result will never reach their full potential.
 
I find this a fitting analogy for the programs we build to improve our partner and customer relationships.  If you think of your audience as your garden, and your programs, budget and resources as your soil, does it make you realize you may have some weeding to do?  Can you differentiate between the weeds and the rest?  Could a shift in your attention and resources make a bigger impact to your results if your best were performing at their best?
 
We recently interviewed 20+ top vendors for the HTG Peer Groups to compile a report on their programs.  Throughout the process we uncovered some interesting data - one significantly relevant to this concept of "weeding" is displayed in the graph here:
 
Spending as a % of Annual Budget

This shows, of the overall budget being spent, 60% is going to Recruitment, 30% is going to Engagement, and 10% is going to Retention.  With this distribution, do you think the best are performing at their potential?

There may be multiple arguments as to how to draw conclusions from this, but at the end of the day, if you’re spending the bulk of your budget to engage and retain your best partners, enabling them to perform at their potential -- even IF recruitment is expensive you’ll need to do far less of it.  Your ROI will increase as the bulk of the money you spend is more directly related to money being made.

For many of you, the fiscal year is rolling over and you're getting a fresh and renewed start.  It's spring for you too!  Take a good hard look at your data and determine who in your audience has helped you, who has held you back, and who might not be a big producer today but has what it takes to do something for you later.  If you don't have the historical data or qualifying information to do this, now is the time to include it for tracking in your programs going forward.

(80% upfront, 20% later on)

Do you ever find yourself wanting to get the word out to a select group of partners, regarding an upcoming partner event in their area, or a program that is about to phase out, that they could engage in one last time?  But when you go to send the email, or make the calls, you realize it’s easier said than done.

You don’t really have a list put together of the appropriate partners to speak to about the event (or program), and you can’t remember which ones have engaged in past programs or events, or even when the last time you spoke to them was (Are they even still at the company, or in the same position? And what was their position anyway……)

NW (no worries).  We’ve got you covered. What you need to do is build yourself an organic nurture marketing list.  “Um, a WHAT?”  An organic nurture marketing list!  It’s not as crazy or hard as it sounds.

The basics are this:  take your list of contacts and potential customers, put them into a spreadsheet.  Rank them based on the depth of relationship (fair, good, great, etc.) and then start keeping track of who you send things to.  You might send your newsletter to everyone, but the holiday bowling tourney to just the greats.  Not only does this streamline your connections to different partners, it makes sure that what you’re saying to them is appropriate based on their engagement level and style of communication.

The constant connections you send out is the nurture part, and keeping track as you go is the organic part (See? not so complicated).

Still not sure you want to try it on your own? Don’t fret – we’ve done it before, we’ve got one ourselves, and we’re happy to help you create one for your channel partners.

So, do 80% of the work upfront by setting up your list, and then you'll only have to do 20% of the work each time you want to engage a certain cross section of your potential customers. POC (It’s a PIECE OF CAKE)!

Last year, our Microsoft client was new to WPC and we brought them 296 leads in 2 days!

• We brainstormed and planned with them
• We managed with logistics, messaging and collateral
• We attracted one of the largest crowds at the show with our “MindBall” game promo
• We tied booth, promotion, collateral and theme directly to the value proposition
• We ignited dozens of quality conversations with Partners and even got a press video
• We staffed the booth with them
• We followed up on all of the leads personally within 5 hours of each day’s close
• We highlighted the top 30 “must contact” leads for our client to reach after the show.

Here's a one-minute peek at our work last year:  (Turn up your speakers!)

WPC 2009 is less than 2 months away, July 13-16. 

Here at Extra Mile Marketing, we’re well-versed in all things WPC so if you need any help, please give us a call.

The magic of vertical markets is that your message is highly relevant and can become personalized.  I think of Nike offering 13 different “flavors” of shoes:  Basketball, Football, Racquetball, Tennis, Golf, etc. 

Maybe you offer databases for financial services?  A security system for manufacturers?  Sadly, there are hundreds of industries and even more vertical markets within those.  If you plan on tackling verticals, you must have a good market analysis to prioritize which verticals hold the best opportunity for you and your partners.  (And, quite frankly, we find in our work with solution partners that most are reluctant to go vertical as they view their solutions as horizontal.) 

But wait, let’s get back to the Nike shoe example.  Have you noticed that “pronated/supinated” is the new form of personalization?  Gone are the days of shelves upon shelves of Nike Basketball shoes vs. Tennis shoes.  Today, you tell the clerk at the Niketown:  I need a pair of shoes and he/she asks: “Do you pronate or supinate?”

Maybe your technology is better served by looking at the real differentiator between one product vs. another within your line or in a competitors’ line.  Maybe you need “Industrial” vs. “Commercial” versions or “No IT” and “Some IT” versions of your product depending on whether the user is technologically sophisticated or not.  There are many ways to slice it. 
Find your “pronated/supinated” personalization opportunity and you might save yourself some of that valuable budget this year. 

Along the way, you’ll be delivering something easier for your partners to execute. 

Call us if you need help.

Let’s be very clear.  Solution Providers (channel partners to some) do not spend much on marketing.  They’ve had the luxury of growing through their relationships.  So, if they had 50 customers.  This year, they have 54 because they had 4 very satisfied clients tell someone else.  As such, many Solution Providers just don’t get why they should have to spend $10,000 on a campaign to reach out to new customers.  But now it's time to get creative.  Economic reality is setting in and their 50 customers are now reduced to 45-- and 4 referrals has turned into 1 or 0 this year.  “Now I need to step up my game” they say.  But many just haven’t ramped up that side of their business before and it’s scary out there in lead-gen land:  How do I get a list?  How many times do I need to send something?  What kind of event shall I host?  How much do I need to spend?  Will it work?  How can I break through the noise?

Vendors:  How can you help?
Get super-creative and disciplined.  Two things you can do:

1) Get creative with your media.  While “sheepvertising” may not be up your alley, the idea invites you to expand your thinking and discover some mediums you haven’t used before.  Have you tried local cable?  What about community sponsorships with your partners?  Remember, more than technology, your partners are selling relationships (and trust) so traditional mediums may not be most appropriate.   Be receptive to new ideas that your partners may bring you even if it doesn't fit the mold.  If "un-camps" work in one country and event sponsorships work in another, embrace, extend (and fund) it!   

2) Fund, fund, fund (the right partners and proven activities)!  Fund your good partners with good intentions and get good results.   But you have to make that money work hard.  How can you tell who to fund?   Develop a business template that asks questions about their business, targets, campaign, media and typical deal size or close ratios.  (we can work with you if you need any support).  Then, create a contest or invite partners to participate in submitting plans in return for funding.  (we have a process for this if you are in need).  Now, when you invest, you can bump up your dollar amounts and spend it with partners you know will give you a good ROI. 

Solution Providers:   We spend hours of consulting time working with companies on two things: 
1) Improving their conversion rate or
2) Reaching out to more prospects. 
You can take either strategy for similar results, but you have to be willing to try some out of the box ideas on #1.  If you’re sending a postcard, and your strategy is to have a better than average result (we see around 4-5.5% from average partners – we can improve that to up to 10% with some creative ideas).   Remember you need to prove your success so measure, measure measure if you want vendor support next time. 

Maybe you choose to be laser-targeted, offer a really compelling offer or offer a risk-free trial/guarantee.  Be bold if you take up #1.  If you’re not quite ready for some out-of-box ideas, you’ll have to reach out to more people.  Plain and simple.  Get your own list together and then supplement it with a purchased list.  Get creative about where you obtain your lists.  List vendors aren’t your only option.  Sponsor an association event or chamber of commerce conference and get access (at least one time) to the attendees. 

Be creative.  Cast a broad net and find some new relationships in new places.  If you find something that works for you, ask for vendor support to help you do more of it! 

(No Time Like The Present)

Around this time of year, everyone seems to get a little spring fever in one way or another.  Sometimes you find yourself glazed over in front of your computer screen, other times you just can’t seem to read more than a page or two of whatever is at hand.

So there’s NTLTP to break it up with the tried and true act of list making!

If you’ve been putting off reviewing this quarter’s connections made with partners in your channel, start by making a list of the things you’d like to get out of the review.

Even better, if you already know what type of partners within your channel you need to touch base with or re-engage, then start making a short list of those partners.   Then split your list up (either by number of TPAMs or helpers that will do the contacting, or by the number of days it’ll take you to contact them yourself).

Now all you have to do is pick up the phone and call!

GOI! (Get On It!)