The Business Marketing Association (BMA Colorado) is producing a book later this year entitled: “Advice From the Top – The Expert Guide to B2B Marketing. I'm authoring a chapter on collaborative partner marketing. As part of my research, I was fortunate to interview Patti Moran, Worldwide Channel Marketing Director at Avaya. Patti shared with me how Avaya is helping partners improve their marketing capabilities, competencies and outcomes. It's a good success story worth sharing.
The Situation
Because of their traditional focus on converting, rather than creating demand, Avaya’s partners lacked an understanding of how to effectively manage customer accounts, nurture relationships, build awareness and create new opportunity by marketing their business services and solutions. Not only did they lack the marketing insight to generate demand but even apart from this gap in knowledge, partners also lacked the marketing tools, resources, skill sets and experiences to market, sell and deliver their solutions.
According to Patti Moran, Senior Director of Worldwide Channel Marketing at Avaya, 90% of their channel partners lacked a dedicated marketing support individual in-house. Noting this dire situation, Moran contends that ultimately “It’s not enough to just be a sales organization. To be successful at growing and adapting to the market condition partners have to have a marketing functions."The Solution
Recognizing the need to educate, train, and then arm their partners with the necessary materials and resources to remain competitive, Avaya created a series of global workshops titled Marketing Masterclass with distributors to educate and provide resources and tools to enable mid sized and small partners. During the workshops, Avaya helped partners evaluate their strengths and weaknesses, allowing them to better understand how to position and differentiate themselves in competitive markets.
To continue the momentum generated by these workshops, Avaya created an education curriculum called provided partners with “How to Guides,” covering marketing topics ranging from delineating how to write marketing plans to delineating how to build websites or leveraging social media. Finally, Avaya developed a spectrum of shared services to support their partners’ marketing efforts, both full and self service.
Avaya providing access to supporting services, databases, events, content, and preexisting templates and pre-built product pages, either for free or at highly discounted costs. Avaya, for example, created a self-service “Partner Marketing Central” portal that provides free and easy to use email blast technology, seminars and whitepapers, and access to over 200 customizable marketing materials with a full range of media. Avaya also created “MarketLeaders" a full service campaign program that delivers integrated campaigns with end-to-end support in order to achieve a range of goals from relationship management, demand generation to customer engagement, enabling partners to use MDF or BDF funds to drive leads, nurture relationships, and build awareness.
Financially, Avaya even sought to ease their partners’ cash flow concerns by invoicing and debiting against their funds rather than insisting partners pay up front, thereby increasing partners’ speed to market by providing more current resources. The Results
The success of Avaya’s efforts, characterized by full classes, newly engaged partners, and efficient MDF and BDF spending, has been met by requests from partners for even more education. Furthermore, the global breadth and overall extent of participation speak volumes to Avaya’s success—and because of this success, components have been provided in multiple languages, and offerings such as the self-service Partner Central have been utilized across country borders by over 2,500 worldwide members to create over 33,000 highly customized and targeted marketing materials to date. In addition, in the Americas alone over 1,200 partner companies have taken advantage of MarketLeaders Campaigns to generate over 1,950 of their own strategic campaigns.
