Make ‘em stick!

A few days ago, I happened upon a gag gift that my husband and I received for an anniversary early in our marriage. As I recall, this gift was intended to bring humor and teamwork to our lives (likely given to us by one of our single friends). This ridiculous game requires each player to wear a colorful cap covered in Velcro. Players take turns throwing foam balls at one another’s heads in an attempt to get them to stick. While I cannot speak from personal experience, it turns out it’s not very easy to hit a bobbing head with a foam ball. As when throwing spaghetti against the wall, sometimes you have to throw a lot of pasta before something sticks.

So it may be no surprise that spaghetti thrown against the wall reminded me of partner marketing funds. Companies allocate a staggering amount of marketing dollars (be it market development funds [MDF] or Co-op) each year to help their channel partners market, promote, and sell their products and services. Unfortunately, some 25 percent of those funds (that’s billions of dollars) go unused. Flash to the head-scratching finance person (sans Velcro cap) trying to rationalize the return on the 75 percent that is utilized, and it’s all just a little confounding.

More often than not, when asked why they leave that “free money” on the table, business partners cite lack of time and resources to put those funds to good use. When you dig a little deeper, they often confess that it’s not worth the effort to comply with vendor restrictions or tedious claim processes. Translation: too much work; too little pay-off.

While re-engineering the MDF approval/claim process is outside the scope of this post (not to mention a real yawner), we offer the following practical ideas for maximizing the dollars you’ve dutifully set aside for partner marketing. (You have set aside dollars, haven’t you?):

1.    Take it from the top. Build a snapshot of your company’s top initiatives for the year. When will you be announcing and releasing new products and services? What new markets will you pursue? When will important corporate marketing and demand generation initiatives hit throughout the year? What marketing themes, if any, will your company promote?

2.    Identify how partners fit (or not). From this picture, identify if and how your different partner types plug into these objectives. What, if anything, can you package up and extend to partners in a “low-touch” manner? What opportunities are there for partners to participate in direct mail, advertising, and seminars (including web-based and social-networking media), effectively extending your reach into their customer bases?

3.    Share the plan. Create a brief deck of slides to articulate these opportunities for your partners (10 slides max!). This creates a foundation for planning and starts the creative juices flowing. Presenting a picture of where you’re going and how you see them fitting into your initiatives goes a long way toward helping partners understand their role in the equation.

4.    Identify the gaps. Once partners understand where you’re headed, listen to their objectives and jointly identify the gaps. At this point, you can decide if their marketing initiatives make sense in context of your plan, and entertain funding those as well.

5.    Enjoy a beautiful thing. The appeal of this approach is the ease with which both parties can rationalize direction, choose their participation, and get the most from their respective investments. It also eliminates the mystery around what you are likely to approve and hastens the process because you’ve agreed to a plan ahead of time.

Finally, make sure your channel account managers have the tools and skills needed to drive partner marketing planning. Oftentimes, channel account managers are focused on other operational and selling tasks, and don’t have the time or DNA for marketing.

Companies that master delivery of coordinated partner marketing treat their partner marketing funds as a strategic asset. They arm their channel marketing teams with the tools and information to optimize each dollar, and hold them accountable. If they lack channel marketing resources, they outsource the function (shameless plug here) to ensure every dollar is spent wisely…keeping them, of course, ahead of the curve.

Jacqueline Franklin, the founder of Routes2Market, brings over 20 years of experience helping companies solve their marketing and sales challenges.

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