Requisite Software

5 Ways to Target and Generate a Lead

One of the common mandates throughout companies today is to increase channel sales. Larger and larger sales quotas are being assigned. Some companies are even requiring higher sales volumes each year for channels to benefit at the higher tiered program levels. How can marketing help its direct and indirect sales teams achieve this goal?

The first thing a company must do is define their target market. Who is your typical customer, what interests them and where do they go for information? Targeting a specific market allows you to focus your marketing dollars on a specific audience that is more likely to buy from you. It's a more affordable and effective way to generate business.

Once you have defined your target market, you need to create different classifications to further target your campaigns and messaging based on the stage they may be in the buying cycle. The method you use to generate the lead and the associated messaging when they are early in the buying cycle (e.g. researching products) will be different than when they are in a later stage in the buying cycle (e.g. generating a Request for Proposal to send out).

Here are 5 Typical Methods to Generate Leads:

- Campaign Email Blasts / Monthly Newsletters
- Tradeshows / Road shows / Seminars
- Online click advertising
- Cold Calling Target Audience and Demo Webinars
- Co-market with Partner/ Partners with MDF funds

It is critical to ensure you have the right system tools in place to capture these leads and track them throughout the process.

You need to be able to capture the lead in a format digestible for your sales person. You need a well-thought-out Lead Capture Form. This is a critical piece because this juncture is where the official lead process begins. However, many companies fail at this step due to a number of reasons including a poorly designed form where the user aborts the form and never submits their information or a lack of quality questions leading to low numbers in both lead generation and lead closure.

A lead capture form needs a good balance between collecting essential information yet not asking too many questions that result in the user not filling out the form. Ask questions that are critical. For example, their name, company and email address as you need to know who you will follow up with and how. Perhaps a question around how soon do they plan to purchase to help you identify where they are in the buying process and how quickly you need to get back to them. Keep the form to a minimum. The detailed, more qualifying questions should be addressed at the next step.

The leads need to be stored in a centralized repository so that you can track follow-up of the leads, report on them, and use the information for next steps.

As you can see, this is a very integrated process that needs strategy at each point in the process to ensure a successful outcome - a high lead closure rate. Analyze your conversion rates across all of your Lead Capture forms, and find out where your high-quality leads are coming from. See if there is a way to capture how many users abort the form. All these questions and analysis will continue to help you identify areas within your process that need improvement.

Good luck and stay tuned for the next blog where we'll discuss the lead vetting process and how to better qualify your leads.

Get to Know our Bloggers

Norma Watenpaugh, Principal of Phoenix Consulting Group (www.phoenixcg.com), is an acknowledged expert in partnering best practices. Phoenix Consulting Group specializes in helping companies realize greater value from their strategic relationships. Norma is the Best Practices Chair for the Association of Strategic Alliance Professionals and has led the organization in developing a professional certification for alliance managers.

Lisa Heydorn, Professional Services Manager at Requisite Software, has over 15 years of experience with channel operations in high-tech, telecommunications and manufacturing industries. She is a proven leader with strong skills in project management, customer service, execution, and on-time delivery. At Requisite, Lisa is responsible for the Channel Management solution.

May 15, 2012

Reward the Right Partners for Driving Sales Through Incentives

Following our last Deal Registration blog post, many readers have been wanting to know more about how to incent partners to register a deal and examples of how "best in class" incentive programs work. Simply put, the purpose of incentives is to influence the behavior you want from your partners through rewards. The issue lies in which partners should you reward, how and with what to reward them.

Incentives can take several forms. The most common method is to award an additional discount off the sales price of the deal, with typical incentives ranging from 5% to 15% off the reseller's normal sales price. Many incentive levels are structured around program tiers where channel partners in more advanced tiers enjoy greater discount incentives. This ensures your most trusted and faithful partners are rewarded for their loyalty. It also drives lower tier partners to engage in the behaviors needed to move to higher tiers and in turn, receive better incentives. This structure encourages more loyal partners and strengthens the value of a vendor's channel program.

Another way to create incentives is through rebates. Other programs provide additional MDF funds. Each incentive choice has their advantages. Rebates are paid after the fact and are harder for channel partners to carry to the bid price but enhance partner profitability. Additional discounts can increase partner competitiveness on the bid price, but can also serve to erode the street price of a vendor's products or services and negatively impact partner profitability. Incentives awarding additional MDF funds encourage partners to invest in future growth. Quality in the end is better than quantity. You want strong sales while still maintaining your brand's reputation and value.

Incentives that focus channel sales activities into targeted markets, products, or specializations enhance partner profitability by providing the additional financial incentive for sales that close in those designated segments. They also help to align channel sales to vendor strategies for growth. Let's say you have a new product you're launching and it needs exposure in the market. You may give partners larger incentives for selling this product than for an existing product that's a cash cow.

If you intend to offer incentives based on multiple criteria, be sure to determine whether incentives are stackable. In other words, can a partner earn an incentive for a specific technology sale and a second for a vertical industry at the same time? Carefully examine how the various payouts add up and impact your overall pricing model.

Also be aware that the more complex your incentive model becomes, you will require more flexibility and sophistication in your partner management system to manage it such as a Special Pricing Module. Since money is on the line, partners will need clear line of sight on what incentives they've earned and accurate reporting.

Special Pricing Solution Benefits:

Incent desired partner behavior consistent with your company's sales goals.
Increased visibility into pricing decisions.
Increase revenue and improve gross margins through smarter, faster competitive responses.
Improve partner loyalty.

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April 30, 2012

10 Best Practices for Better Deal Registration

Deal registration is a common element of most channel programs. However, without a solid PRM system behind it, the process can be cumbersome and ultimately fail. The purpose of deal registration is to reduce channel conflict by protecting partner deals. It prevents partners from stealing deals and competing with the direct sales force. It enables vendors to focus their channel efforts in productive ways -- as well as increase the profitability of partners. All too frequently, however, channel partners find deal registration systems difficult to use and are often distrustful that the information they provide will be used to undermine their business pursuits.

Once an opportunity is accepted as a registered deal (in other words, one that is not currently registered by the vendor's direct sales organization or another channel partner), the partner will automatically be notified their deal is protected. Often times the vendor agrees to work exclusively with the first partner registering in pursuit of the opportunity. In order to receive special pricing consideration or sales assistance, you have to register the deal.

One of the purposes of deal registration is to give the vendor greater insight and visibility into the channel pipeline. When used by partners consistently and accurately, this visibility is highly valuable in managing the vendor supply and planning operations. Therefore, vendors are often willing to structure incentives and payouts on deal registrations that close.

Here are tips gleaned from benchmarking activities of PhoenixCG & Requisite Software that are critical for your PRM's Deal Registration process.

Deal Registration Best Practices:

Align incentives to corporate objectives (i.e. incremental or new business, specific industry verticals or technical specializations).
Prevent direct sales and channel partners from working on competing deals.
Avoid predatory conflict between channel partners.
Be very clear and specific about qualifying deals.
Set reasonable deal expiration time frames so that an opportunity doesn't stay open-ended indefinitely. Give partners an opportunity to re-register if the deal becomes active again.
Ensure that if there are different payout levels that "fairness" is maintained.
Keep the registration and approval process streamlined, timely and easy to use.
Articulate clear rules of engagement for opportunities that involve the vendor rep.
Give partners visibility into the approval and payment process and a clear expectation regarding processing period.
Provide regular reporting on all deal registrations in progress.

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April 2, 2012

Channel Partner Communication Best Practices

In our previous blog we discussed challenges with executing and managing MDF programs. One component of the management challenge is the communication of available programs and the dissemination of the information to your partners. So, how can you effectively communicate with your partner community and make sure they are aware of available resources? Verbal communication is one approach, but likely will have a limited impact since channel managers will only focus on their top partners. Part of the answer is to craft highly targeted and personalized messages that notify the appropriate business owner of specific information related to their MDF account and opportunities to leverage its use. Highly targeted communication is much more effective and more likely to solicit a positive response. However, in order to deliver this kind of highly effective communication, you need a complete and accurate partner profile database. Yet most companies put minimal effort into verifying the completeness and accuracy of the information contained in the database. Often the data is entered once and is rarely updated until a problem or event arises that forces action to the taken.

Once you have a central database of who your partners are, which partners are in which program and who their employees are and roles, you can utilize this information to streamline communications. One example would be to send regular updates on MDF programs to the appropriate contacts which could include information on program rules or even available balances. This is particularly critical for COOP base programs where your partners may not be aware of funds about to expire or allocations that have been credited to their accounts.

Another use of the database is to notify your partners of various ways they can leverage the money you have provided with suggestions on campaigns in a can or approved vendors to help with advertising. If you combine the profiling, communications and streamlining of funds management you will see an improvement in the adoption of these programs.

We suggest the following best practices:

Stop using MS Excel and invest in a database your partners and channel managers can manage
Implement processes and policies or even incentives to encourage routine maintenance to verify accuracy of the data maintenance in the database
Just like a CRM tool for direct sales, if it isn't updated in PRM it doesn't exist

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March 13, 2012

Why Aren't Your Channel Partners Using their MDF Funds?

If there is one consistent trend in MDF, it's that partners rarely use all their MDF allocation. I heard one frustrated channel manager say it was criminal that VARs and resellers do not take advantage of this "free money".

Why don't our partners take advantage of MDF funds? Well, I've heard lots of reasons: "too many rules, it is very complicated to get reimbursement", "too many vendors, we can't possibly do marketing for each of them", "not enough time, we can barely keep up with the operations", "we don't have the staff to design, deliver, and keep on top of marketing", "we didn't know what was available and it expired".

So the gist of it is that "free money" is not really free. There are costs in time and resources to build and launch marketing campaigns, plus a need for expertise smaller partners do not have. Yet failing to use these funds short-change both vendors and partners. This is capital that is not working for you to build your business.

In response, there has been a shift from partner-led marketing to vendor-led marketing, making it easier for partners to leverage the expertise, resources, and MDF programs provided by vendors. Many vendors have taken the lead in building campaigns in a can. These are pre-packaged marketing programs that are easy for partners to deploy, reducing the time it takes to deploy demand generation marketing. And because they are pre-packaged, they come with messaging, calls to action and offers already built in. The best advantage is that many vendors have preapproved these campaigns for MDF funding, which helps partners to leap-frog the sometimes complicated reimbursement process.

So if you are a vendor, take a look at your partner tool portfolio to see if you need to refresh or add a demand generation campaign in a can. Can you do the execution for your partners? How can you make it easier to engage with you so that your partners spend more time selling and less trying to navigate your process? How can you implement the right metrics in your PRM system to track the effectiveness of your campaigns?

If you are a partner, talk to your vendors and find out if they have pre-packaged, pre-approved campaigns. And if they don't, don't be shy (I know you aren't!) and ask for it. It could make all the difference in filling your pipeline with good, qualified leads.

Tips for successful campaigns in a can:

An easy to follow process. If partners can see an easy, step by step online process to sign up for and execute a pre-packaged campaign, they will be much more likely to engage - and spend that MDF!

Low qualification criteria. If there are too many hoops to jump through, partners won't spend the time to use it. Plus, high bars for qualifying mean that partners won't come back next time to try to do a campaign with the vendor - they just might go to the vendor's competitor.

Set limits. Many partners will want to engage in a pre-packaged campaign in a can thinking that they will get access to vendor lead databases. Vendors should be clear on what lead databases (if any) partners have access to.

Solutions focused. Campaigns in a can shouldn't be all about the vendor's product. They need to provide for equal space for the partner to add their "value add." Do they provide services? Training? An industry domain solution? Make sure that the message that goes out to prospects incorporates the entire partner-vendor solution.

Drive Awareness. Leverage your PRM systems email communication and content management functions to increase awareness of the tools you are making available to your partners.

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February 20, 2012

Welcome!

Requisite Software is proud to announce the launch of our new blog. 2012 brings you a fresh Requisite Software with more thought leadership, webinars, and even a new website. We want to be your partner in everything PRM by addressing the issues that are inhibiting you from meeting your key objectives.

Requisite will be partnering with Norma Watenpaugh from Phoenix Consulting Group, a management consulting firm focused on partner development, on a series of blogs centered around Demand Generation Best Practices. By combining our software knowledge with Norma's extensive consulting experience, we will provide a unique vantage point into what we are seeing works best with partner programs worldwide. These posts will help you to see how you can keep your partner program at the forefront of innovation.

As thought leaders in the PRM space, we want to hit on all the hot topics to ensure our followers are getting the information they need, when they need it. Email marketing@requisite.com if you have certain topics you would like covered or if you have any questions. We look forward to having an ongoing dialogue with you!

February 14, 2012