Archives for June 2013

Channel Conduit of the Week: Text with your Channel Partners

Channel Conduit of the Week:

  • Small gestures that make big impacts on channel behavior
  • Commonsense reminders that make the difference b/t you and your competition
  • Elements that should be considered in a Channel Incentive Programs

Text with your Channel Partners

TextingWe text with our spouse, our kids, our parents, our best friends, and everyone we care about, right?  What about our channel partners? Just by sending simple texts, we can connect with our channel partners and really make an impression. Think about when you get a text from a friend that says, “Thx for having us for dinner. We had a blast and can’t wait til next time!” Even though it might seem silly, or inconsequential, that little message actually can have a big effect on our thoughts and feelings in relation to the person who sent it.

Now let’s be honest: If that same message were to come to us in an email, it would still serve as a nice gesture; but I think we can all agree, there is a BIG difference between receiving an email (in an inbox of 3000 or more messages) versus receiving a personal text right to our phone.

If you follow my Move The Channel blog (and if you’re reading this now, I assume that you do), then you know that my personal preference, when it comes to methods of appreciation, is a hand written note. But if you’re writing a hand written note more than a couple of times a year to the same person, it might start to get a little creepy. . . .

A text, on the other hand, can be a great, quick, and easy way to say “Thanks,” maybe for opening up a new door, or maybe for doing a great job on a recent sales presentation. Another perfect occasion for a thoughtful text message would be as a follow-up to something you recently discussed with them, such as “hope you had great time at the NASCAR event. How was it?”

Try and connect in a new way with channel partner customers. If you’ve used text messages to connect with your channel partner in the past, send me a note and let me know about it. Or just text me.

LinkedIn Group collaborates to deliver a very unique Channel Marketing Guides& RIMES Chart.

It wasn’t easy to organize hundreds of ideas from a network of thousands of people from all over the world. But we did it. Move The Channel’s unique Channel Marketing & Sales 1.0 eBook is now available for you to download exclusively on movetheChannel.com.

MTC 1.0 CoverWhat makes 1.0 the first of its kind? As most of you know, this project started over a year ago as a simple discussion in the Move The Channel LinkedIn group. It grew from there to an all-out deluge of ideas from all across the Move The Channel community.

As we began organizing all of the different ideas and channel best practices that were coming our way, distinct categories started to become clear.  These categories are what we now refer to as “RIMES” — Relationships, IT, Marketing & Communications, Enablement, and Sales — and they are what we at Move The Channel consider to be the pillars of any successful channel marketing campaign.

Our goal is to begin to create a line of literature that can be referenced as a valuable tool in the planning and implementation of any channel marketing program. We hope you find this guide to be useful and informative. You can download it right here at movethechannel.com

Enter your name and email address to download Move the Channel Guide and RIMES Chart

Name: Email:

Please provide feedback so we can continue to enhance the Guide & Chart. MoveTheChannel 1.0 is the first step in an ongoing line of literature about channel marketing and sales. Our plan with 1.0 is to throw a net around a wide range of industries and promote the basic tools that have been proven to generate success across multiple access points within the channel. Enjoy!
Move the Channel,
Travis
travis@movethechannel.com

Channel Conduit of the Week #12: Raise the Bar

  • Small gestures that make big impacts on channel behavior
  • Commonsense reminders that make the difference b/t you and your competition
  • Elements that should be considered in a Channel Incentive Programs

In a current Mazda6 TV commercial, the spirit of “Raising the Bar” is captured both literally and figuratively. It also happens to be my favorite commercial on television right now, because it’s got everything you could possibly ask for in an advertisement: an obscure, yet important event in sports history (the reinvention of the high jump); an inspiring cliché (just because we haven’t seen it, doesn’t mean it can’t be done); and of course, a great song by one of my all-time favorite bands, The Who!

When U.S.A.’s Dick Fosbury won gold in the 1968 Olympics, he changed the sport of high jumping forever. Innovative and daring, Fosbury invented a technique (known as the Fosbury Flop) that revolutionized the way track-and-field athletes competed. He broke the Olympic and U.S. high jumping records in 1968, and ever since then the “bar” has been raised. Just like this visionary, your channel partners are always looking for new and creative ways to rise to the occasion and surpass their goals.  Because of this, it’s important for you to clearly communicate to participants the goals of your channel incentive program. Make sure you are always raising the bar by offering higher levels of achievement for your partners to reach. Just like Dick Fosbury, they might surprise you with an unprecedented way of getting things done.

Mobile Up! Top 5 reasons why it’s time for Channel Marketing Mobile Apps

The iPhone 4#1:  Everyone has a smartphone today.  Almost all of your channel partners, channel partner sales, and their sales engineers—basically EVERYONE you want to engage—have a smartphone.  According to a report by NBC News last week, 56% of US adults are using smartphones, up from 35% two years ago.  What’s more, when we segment high-earning professionals like our channel partner’s sales and sales engineers, that number goes even higher.

#2:  Access to your Audience:  Much of our audience is in the field—right where we want them to be. Because of this, Mobile allows us unprecedented access to our partners. In fact, most don’t even need to come back to the office to check their emails anymore. That probably also means they aren’t going back to the office to browse what’s new on your partner portal, either.

#3:  Communication:  Your partner program lives where your audience lives, and nowadays that life is mobile, on their smartphone. Your channel marketing logo (http://movethechannel.com/?p=292) can now sit next door to their Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn apps, like one big happy community. Making your channel program mobile enables your audience to quickly access key information that can help them sell more, determine what to sell, and close more frequently.  In addition to giving them access to these tools, we can also push communications and text messages to them, which comes in handy with promotions and channel reward programs.

#4:  Motivate and Engage:  We’re all familiar with the maxim “out of site, is out of mind.”  With a channel program app, we’re never out of sight. Talk about mindshare! Also, a mobile app means we don’t have to wait for the participant to come to us; now we can come to them.  For example, we can now push notifications about incentive promotions for certain products, offer leaderboard updates, let participants know their percent to goal, and send them an alert when they have enough points to redeem for that family vacation on their program Wish List!

#5: Capture Key Insight:  With mobile apps you can also capture key data that is critical to your business.  One challenge of a channel go-to-market strategy is that you lose a little bit of direct access to the end-user. But now, you can reward your channel partners for uploading pictures of the solution or the competitive product that needs replaced. Do people still talk about conversions as a KPI?  You can also have a claims process on the app so helps ensure you are giving credit to the right sales person or SE at the right partner.

 

The biggest question in terms of going mobile: Where do I get started?  To develop a simple iPhone or Android App starts at around $45,000 and goes up from there. If you are working on a partner platform it is a much smaller investment for Mobile Apps features.  For example we will soon be offering a “Starter App” for our client’s channel incentive reward program that starts at around $10,000.

Looking for some mobile ideas? Shoot me an email with any questions.

Do you have a Mobile App for your Channel Marketing & Channel Incentive Program?

 

Channel Conduit #11 of the Week: Reward a Good Showing with a Big Show

  • Small gestures that make big impacts on channel behavior
  • Commonsense reminders that make the difference b/t you and your competition
  • Elements that should be considered in a Channel Incentive Programs

Reward a Good Showing with a Big Show

Rock ShowIf your channel partner achieves a set goal or went above and beyond the partnership obligations, think about sending them to a sporting event, concert, or theater.  The key here is to let them choose the event, venue, and even their tickets.

There are turnkey event ticket solutions out there that make this easy to do.   The memory of the event will set you apart from the rest.

Have you made event tickets part of your channel incentive solution?  What are the most common events redeemed?

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