Avaya Helps Partners Learn How to Market

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. 

Xerox's Real Business Campaign - Too Much of a Good Thing?

Yesterday Xerox launched a new global marketing campaign titled, Real Business.  Xerox is calling it their most ambitious and innovative campaign ever created. Realbusiness.com includes interactive billboards, innovative media, video, and what they are calling “attention-grabbing digital units” showcasing Xerox’s clients, featuring brand icons, such as P&G’s Mr. Clean.   

The launch of the website will be followed by TV ads and a global roll-out...Europe is up next.   It has all the “bells and whistles” any good digital campaign could want with Twitter Tags, Multi-media, and cookies for display advertising.  If you visit Realbusiness.com and then a business publication site like Forbes.com, keep an eye out for Xerox’s placement ads with the Marriott, Notre Dame, and NY Mets commercials.  This is not a coincidence.

The website and the campaign are really well done from a creative standpoint.  The campaign is multi-media, multi-channel, multi-tactic and multi-message.  And that's the problem, the messaging seems to be the Achilles heel of the campaign.  I’m sure that this campaign, by Y&R, will win many awards, especially digital, however, they nearly overdo it.  See for yourself: Visit the website, watch the videos and ads, and then ask yourself what did you retain.  

After spending much longer than I expected on the site, I remember the fighter pilot blasting through the ceiling, the Ducati bike racing around, and the Mets mascot burying his head in his hands…but I do not recall how Xerox helped those customers, or what they have to offer me.

I’m also sure that the campaign will meet its targeted objectives for engagement levels and interaction times but does style overwhelm substance?   It raises a relevant concern for marketers, how do we keep the focus on enhancing and ensuring the delivery of the message through digital tools, and not get caught up in all the interesting and entertaining things they can do?  

I truly enjoyed the site and most likely, stayed engaged longer than the Agency would have predicted, but can a digital campaign be successful if the audience doesn’t hear and retain the message?   No doubt, it is entertaining, but will it be effective?  

The Top 10 Laziest Sales Tactics

The amount of "lameness" on the part of sales people (and some marketers) has now come to a point that I think a public flogging is in order. To those Michael Scott’s of the world (and I like Michael), know that we are on to you. The following tactics have never, and will never, produce a lead.

1. Filling out a company's contact form on the website with ”contact me if you need…” Yep, I’ll get right on that.

Mike, for example, was able to jam an entire spam email onto our company contact form...impressive.  Sure, I will take the time to read the entire message box and get back to you. 

But wait, sensing that I might not take him seriously, he submits the form again 2 minutes later.

2. Sending an email blast with the generic intro of "Dear Sir." Forget everything you've learned about 1 to 1 marketing, personalization, relevancy, this just might work.  Just get a list, and go.  

3. Even better, the telemarketing version of the "no effort" approach.  Cold calling and asking; “can you please tell me who handles…”  Instead of you doing your job, you're now asking me to do it for you -- beautiful. 

4. Some telemarketers have taken it to a whole new level. Love the folks who leave a message without saying why they are calling, but then ask you to call them back. And my personal favorite -- the rep who invented the "I'm returning your call..."   It's like the guy you knew in college that spent hours figuring out how to cheat for a test, instead of using the time to study.

5. Advertising your services in the comment section of a blog.  Let's take Jeff D, he didn't even try to hide it in a link.  He went straight for the kill.                

It's not all bad because he does give me "props" at the end of the ad..."I like your information it is helpful to me."  Mmm, is it helpful because it gives you an opportunity to display spam?   Apparently so, because Jeff D comes back 6 days later, this time pimping new services, Website design and development.  Notice I get no "props" this time.  Pretty tricky changing the name of the company, almost didn't catch him.  

To Jeff D, and all the other spammers, know that bloggers decide whether or not to post your comments.  The comments above never made it public, I saved them for my own personal enjoyment, and this blog post.   Also, know that Blogspot, as well as other platforms, now have enable spam filters.  Good luck on future postings. 

6. Posting a discussion within a Linked-in group that isn’t a discussion, but rather, an advertisement for your company…it’s not a discussion; it’s spam, and it’s annoying.

Take Mr. Gupta for example, at Web Box Office. He's advertising "Learn the secrets to success with attendee-funded webinars." Sounds good, huh. Guess who's paying for the webinar...you are, Mr. attendee, if you register.

7. Using the yellow pages as your prospect database. I’m not kidding, people are still using it. Just wait until they find out about the internet.

8. Offering something FREE, unless it is truly FREE.  Taking a credit card number so you can start billing a customer after a "free" trial is not free.  This is not selling, it's scamming.   There are rules, some people call them laws, governing this practice.  See FreeCredit Report.com for an example of how not to do it.   

9. Any email coming from Nigeria, or any other country, offering a fortune if you could just help them  by giving them your social security number, bank account number, etc.  To good to be true, something for nothing?  Any of this ringing a bell?  Ok, maybe I'm a little bitter because I'm still waiting for my $1M from the British Lottery Authority.

10.  Actually, couldn't think of a 10th, but I'm sure there's one or more out there.  I'd love to hear your experiences.  Add your "Top 10" story in the comment section, but please easy on the spam.  Jeff D takes up a lot of my time.    

Social CRM - "Many to One" Marketing...or is it Sales?

Social Relationship Management and Social CRM are terms that are now being thrown around for new technology platforms that are enabling multichannel execution.  Companies like Lithium Technologies have created platforms that allow companies to run hosted communities, listen across a variety of social media channels, and manage content to and from social networks in one integrate tool.

While marketing has steadily evolved from "one to many", to "one to one", Social CRM is now creating the opportunity for "many to one."  For example, a customer tweets a question about a product (e.g. is it worth the money) on Twitter, a customer advocate brings that comment into a company's online forum where another customer answers it.  The customers response to the question is then tweeted by the company to promote sales of the product.

The promise of Web 2.0 has always been about customers selling to customers.  New Social CRM tools are now enabling that by consolidating platforms.  But this has the potential to raise issues over who gets credit for the sale.    If the true ROI on social media is revenue, which many research studies are now suggesting, then who gets credit for the sale by a customer to a customer?   Does marketing get credit for creating the customer advocate who convinced the customer to buy or does the sales person who "owns" the customer?   And what about the customer who made the sale...what do they get?

One thing is certain: social media is blurring the line between sales and marketing interactions and dialogues.   And given that, we may have to rethink our traditional views of customer coverage and relationship management.   Perhaps in the future, marketing will be responsible for managing customers online relationships, and sales for the offline experience.

Someone call HR and give them the heads up.  Territory planning, revenue crediting and roles and responsibilities might need a refresh soon.

Partner Marketing Model Webcast

On June 16th, I hosted a live webcast along with Bob Ray, President of GyroHSR's San Francisco office. The theme of the webcast centered on how new technology trends, like the Cloud, and shifting partner business models are opening the door for vendors to redefine the partner relationships.
Other highlights include:

• Tech trends have shifted the focus of executives, and the recession has caused customers to be more cost conscious
• A new focus on professional services/managed services has caused a longer sales process which means reps and partners need help selling.   
• The average ramp time for a productive IT sales rep has gone from 7 to 10 months
• Generally, IT execs do not feel sales reps UNDERSTAND their business
• Engagement through data sharing, pre-packaged marketing solutions, and program planning with partners are ways to create more mindshare.

The rehearsal presentation was recorded and is now available OnDemand Presentation.  
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