When Marketing Goes Rogue (eBook)

WHITE PAPER

WHEN MARKETING GOES ROGUE:

How platforms empower your channel partners and prevent random acts of marketing

by Mark Iverson Gage VP, CRO Business Development

BRINGING ENGAGEMENT TO LIFE

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Expand the loyalty of your channel through training,

professional development and marketing automation

Every channel marketing chief or director of indirect sales has

experienced it. An outdated brochure that won’t go away.

An email blast with an outdated logo—or worse—featuring a

product that no longer exists. Let’s face it: when you’re working

with your channel’s sales force, it’s possible that their marketing

can go a little rogue.

Every organization that sells through indirect methods wants an

effective way to manage sales and marketing to audiences with

differing goals. (They have differing goals than you because,

by definition of a channel, they are not directly owned by you.)

Without exception, every customer Gage has worked with over

the past 25 years has a platform in place in one form or another,

whether this be a simple spreadsheet or a multi-million dollar

solution which has taken years to fine tune.

WHEN MARKETING GOES ROGUE

However, the need is to have a balance between enterprise-

level scalability and the flexibility to accommodate specific

business requirements, and a platform that is robust enough

to provide enterprise level flexibility to drive training, sales and

marketing resources.

Luckily, this is the 21st century. There are technology-enabled

frameworks and platforms to ensure that your brand stays

on message, current and legally compliant with every sale.

This paper will outline three model strategies that some of the

world’s leading brands use to stamp out random marketing,

and also fan the flame to empower and excite a salesforce with

marketing that drives engagement and advocacy.

The three top-line elements your channel strategy must include

to thwart random acts of marketing and empower your channel:

easy to use marketing resources, engaging channel training

programs, and strong loyalty-building incentive programs. Let’s

look at each of these elements in turn.

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I. EASY TO USE MARKETING RESOURCESChris is a channel marketing and indirect sales director at

a major international cruise line. While working closely on

marketing plans with a fleet of travel agents from throughout

Europe and the United States, a work backlog began to grow,

requiring either additional staff or cuts in service. With so much

to produce based on lines of service and destinations—and too

much to ship out to smaller agency shops—he also found that

costs were accretive with a duplication of effort from sending

identical resources and becoming harder to scale. The calls

for print on demand, banner ads, web page descriptions and

emails were engulfing him and many of his staff. To right the

ship, he overhauled his channel program and launched a new

technology solution to float the market resources to his channel

with an easily accessed platform. Now his brokers could order

the brochures, digital assets and content they needed to remain

competitive without making direct service requests, leaving him

time to act more strategically.

Creating marketing assets requires a disciplined approach

and a thorough plan, but the time required both for delivery

and management can be reduced by employing a

consolidated resource/platform. Imagine

marketing materials drop shipping to

partners, served up as easily

as online shopping.

Always be looking

for ways to lower

the barriers for your

partners, and reduce

the workload for yourself

at the same time.

Channel partners will sell what is easiest to sell. If the

partner thinks you’re making things too complicated, that can

lead to some renegade marketing. Simplifying the process for

retrieval of supporting marketing materials, for example, is one

way a coherent technology platform can reduce the efforts your

partners need to make.

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Channel partners do not always have marketing staff,

especially SMBs. Without a dedicated marketing team that

knows the brand and campaign plan, “going rogue” is the

symptom of a knowledge gap. Assuming tribal knowledge

within your channel around creative, reporting, ad channels,

or any other aspect of marketing, can limit your opportunity to

best serve their needs. If you have time and access, research

your partners’ departmental depth. If you’re unable to find a

marketing counterpart, they will depend on your expertise.

The better you can make you channel partners look,

the more they will sell for you. Can you help position

your partners as trusted resellers/VARs or retailers to their

customers? The credibility you’ve gained as a brand can

benefit your entire sales channel, and help them stay loyal to

you, as well as implementing your strategy. Can you advocate

for your channel partners in the same way you’re asking them

to advocate for you? Set an example. Use social media,

to help them tell their story, even if it isn’t directly related to

your product. Field marketing guidance and advice is also a

consultative benefit too many channel chiefs overlook.

The first ground rule of a channel relationship, of course, is that both you and the channel partner want to make a profit through the sale of your product. However, it’s important to understand that, while you both want profitability, the ways you pursue that goal are in direct conflict.

You, as the supplier, look to drive down YOUR cost of sales by leveraging the resources (personnel, floor space, etc.) of the channel partner. Meanwhile, the channel partner is looking to you to minimize the cost of ramp up and reduce THEIR cost of sales.

Under the circumstances, the only solution is to create a joint venture relationship that takes into account the resources both companies can bring to bear in order to make the relationship successful. This means that YOU need to invest resources in training, marketing and sales support. Likewise, the channel must commit resources to training and actively promote the solution.

Each channel relationship is therefore a strategic investment. You don’t want to recruit too many of them. Instead, you want the ones that you DO recruit to be as effective as possible.

Geoffrey James How Can I Motivate My Channel Partners? Link to article: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-can-i-motivate-my-channel-partners/

Twitter: @Sales_Source

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Easy to use doesn’t mean easy to ignore. A concluding

thought on the reasons to make your resources as accessible

as possible: partners are always tempted to veer off. Here’s a

scenario with just three variables:

1. You are about to launch a new product bound to disrupt

an existing market. You currently manage channel

partners in 15 countries, however, this product will only

be available to partners in five out of those 15 countries

for the first few months.

The variable here? Placement.

2. Each channel partner has a different incentive structure

base on sales volume and resource commitments.

The variable here? Pricing.

3. To top it off, the channel manager in each region wants

to run a unique campaign to address their specific

market.

The variable here? Promotion.


This may be marketing 101, however, the last thing you’re

eager to do is manage 15 sub-campaigns. This cartoon by Tom

Fishburne captures what we see in channel marketing initiatives

every day.

Building loyalty to your brand requires building trust in your

channel program. Removing barriers to acceptance of your

campaign ease of use is critical to empowering the channel and

stopping random acts of marketing.

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II. CHANNEL TRAINING PROGRAMSFiona is a channel chief for a global B2C software and devices

supplier. Her channel partners include retail chains in 30

countries, and thorough research had revealed that if customers

weren’t already decided on a purchase of her brand’s

products when they entered the store, they were likely to buy

competitors’ tablets and productivity software. Experiments with

the retail show floor and placement had some effect, but further

study made it clear that the enthusiasm of the retail sales staff

for competing products had a huge impact. This led to Fiona

developing a business team to evangelize and educate retail

sales professionals.

Beyond simply providing bullet points which could be read off

of the placard in front of her brand’s products, she directed

the team to implement a worldwide campaign, built on an

online platform, for generating excitement and passion for

what their products could do for customers. Features, benefits,

and technical details were all still central to the message, but

wrapped within a presentation dynamic that recognized the

unique interaction challenges that retail workers experience with


shoppers browsing the floor. The lines of business relevant to

her brand created content, evangelists maintained community

relationships and, over time, the knowledge gap and the

enthusiasm gap were closed. This empowered retail sales pros

to grow the brand’s in-store sales by 17 percent in one year.

An innovative, integrated and well-managed reward component

is just one tactic for preventing random/rogue behavior

via your channel marketing platform. As it gets easier for

customers to transact through online e-commerce, customer

experience needs to continually improve while adding value

to communications between the Channel and customers.

Improving the customer experience requires well-trained,

knowledgeable, positive partner staff: inside and outside sales

people need more than product details. They need clear,

consistent, disciplined guidance on the benefits of your offering

and a reason to be enthusiastic. Random acts of training along

with random acts of marketing create confusion, not only in the

minds of the customer, but also in the minds of the sales rep—

and the confused mind always says “no.” Empower them to

say “yes.”

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Platforms must provide value to all participants, to grow.

Don’t architect a platform that only serves the needs of one

product range, or one side of the business, such as the inside

sales force. Think comprehensively: the high priority area may

have dependencies in what you perceive to be a lower priority

line of business.

Choose one that enables and empowers all the stakeholders

within a partner. What does this entail? For one thing, taking

the time to really understand the personas within your

channel partner and the personas of their customers—

distinct motivations, distinct expectations.

Instead of providing a 60-minute webinar on effective

sales techniques that will never be consumed (yet alone

comprehended), consider providing training content to your

channel partners in the form of three- to four- minute segments

(videos, for example) that can be encountered in real-time, or

on-demand. (Google refers to this “snackable content” trend as

a micro-moment).

Gage refers to this as the “storytelling experience” to engaging

with your brand, or the “meta” experience. The manner and

form of the content, as well as the delivery method, can be as

relevant to the content being delivered. Think about it: even a

great movie is hard to enjoy in a bad theater. And a great book

is hard to enjoy in an unreadable font. Make the investment to

provide an entertaining, easily absorbed training content set,

and deliver it in an easy to consume manner.

Ease of sharing valuable training. Platforms must be able to

provide relevant training material to the most relevant audience

in real-time.

Platforms that unify your campaign efforts allow you to share

and target training/content to your partner-specific audience to

drive true behavioral change, advocacy and long-term loyalty.

Make the investment to

provide an entertaining, easily

absorbed training content set

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Only by serving needs based on the key attributes of your

audience at the individual level will you be able to drive content

and promotions (incentives) more effectively. This is a mandatory

item for any channel platform you pick.

Creating training that is engaging often includes Gamification

options. Training, from an employee perspective, can often feel

like one more burden, and one more distraction. How can you

engage, grow mindshare, add reward incentives and mental

triggers to keep them self-motivated? How can you empower

your partners’ staffs? Activate a training platform that uses

multiple reward systems, intrinsic and extrinsic, as an integral

part of its offering.

Yes, money can be a huge motivator for driving sales behavior.

However, economics research shows that for driving long-term

engagement and advocacy, financial incentives are not always

sufficient. Some individuals are driven by recognition from their

peers. Others want exclusive access to unique content or

experiences. If you can incorporate teams into your channel

programs, the chances of “finite variability” are lessened and

your channel program continues to capture attention. (For a

more in-depth discussion on the power of variable rewards,

refer to Chapter Four of “Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming

Products” by Nir Eyal.)

Channel training leads to increased sales and advocacy.

Whether it’s a B2B buyer or a consumer in a store, an informed

sales representative will always instill more confidence than

someone who isn’t sure about the facts. Think of all the effort

and expense that brands expend to get someone to know

about their product, to be aware of the problem and the

proposed solution set, which lead to your indirect sales force

facing a prospective customer.

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Don’t lose the value invested in that journey by tripping at the

finish line. Ensure your channel partners are thoroughly edified.

Randomly conducted research or DIY training by an eager

sales rep may be admirable, but it can lead to inaccuracies and

eventual confusion on the part of your potential customer.

Research has proven time and again: an effective training

program boosts channel sales professional productivity.

Continuous training can give 50 percent higher net sales per

employee. Tie up the loose end of marketing campaigns—be

sure your sales force can close the deal.

III. CHANNEL INCENTIVES AND REWARDSSarah is a channel marketing manager for a large paper

products manufacturer in the Midwest. Her brand faces

enormous shelf-space competition, mostly from lower-quality

(cheaper) brands, and she’s done the research to determine

that newer partner marketing managers have less name

recognition and feel less loyalty for her company’s well-known

brand name than prior generations. Knowing that margins were

thin and that prior pricing incentives hadn’t moved the needle

adequately, she spent time with channel partner representatives

on the phone building relationships, and getting surprising

insights about their customers. With the information she

obtained, she created an incentive program using intangible

rewards, such as a blog post interviews along with social

mentions of marketing managers and sales reps, writing

recommendations for their LinkedIn profiles—all of which are

intended to boost the reputation and standing of the marketing

professionals with whom she was working. Her rewards

platform helped her manage the difficult task of categorizing,

assessing, prioritizing, and managing communications with

these channel partners.

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You may have too many channel partners for a high-touch

program, such as the one Sarah undertook, to be workable.

The point is that incentive programs often need a creative

implementation with a clear technological management

workflow to be operable.

A correctly-structured incentive programs shifts support to

your brand over your competition. Incentives/rewards have

a high influence on channel professionals’ willingness to sell

your products and services. How can your brand create ”True

Loyalty” in the Channel?

This requires a combination of rewards that support both

short- and long-term behaviors and are relevant to a variety

of motivations. (We’re thinking beyond a rebate program,

which too many partner programs pursue, or another sort of

incentive based strictly on sales.) This has the potential to open

up several project paths and workflows to avoid the perils of

rogue marketing—again, technology can be your friend. Find a

platform that helps you manage and direct the effort.

Here are some incentive/rewards guidelines for your channel

programs:

Reward program essentials. For channel marketing

professionals, there’s a basic understanding: you need to gain

incremental volume within a contained reward budget. The

approach for rewards must be engaging, yet flexible enough to

deal with your unique situation and company structure. In order

to ensure a high participation level, tracked data, such as sales,

must be captured in a non-intrusive way as close to real-time

feedback and reporting as possible. When it’s not possible:

we’ve actually managed programs where channel sales is

recorded, but not reported for up to 90 days. To overcome this,

we established an algorithm to distribute sales figures based on

historical data to track the channel program—as close to real-

time as possible.

How can your brand create

True Loyalty in the Channel?

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Above all, the incentive offered must be perceived to be worth

the effort. This is the same as any optimization regime applied

to marketing or content: user feedback, A/B testing, research,

can help you determine what incentives drive behavior and

which ones are easy to ignore. Look for reward platforms with

that feature.

Simple, simple, simple. Your program must be easy to

understand, requiring minimal effort in order to participate. To

accomplish this, put robust systems in place behind the scenes.

Automate processes, and provide user-friendly tools and

features to make participation effortless.


For example, if you are asking channel partners to register

through an e-mail message, append a unique CRM tracking-

code to e-mail links, and pre-populate details in the registration

form. The key benefits to this simple action? One, you’ve

provided a simple and elegant user experience. Two, you either

confirm or provide an easy way to update key fields—location,

company name, and company designation. (“Reseller and

Channel, LLC”, “R and C, LLC”, “R&C” may all be the same

organization, but ended up being entered into the partner

database as three different entries, a common error).

Basic structure. A common structure is to provide reward

members with points for purchases of eligible product, either by

SKU or invoice dollar volume. If tracking by SKU, experiment!

Your program could vary point offers to help drive specific

product purchases.

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For example: you could offer higher points for items with greater

margin, or offer bonus points for discontinued items that

need to be liquidated. Another possibility is award lower point

values for best sellers to create balance. Wherever you can

add variability to the engagement by overlaying time-sensitive

promotions, such as BOGOs, rebates and contests, integrate

a communications plan with targeted and meaningful emails

carefully scheduled.

Company, individual and champions. Ideally, rewards at the

individual level produce more memorable impact. Thus, your

data should include “sales per individual.” This can often be

challenging, if not impossible. If this is the case, look to reward

the office instead, and encourage the earned rewards to “trickle

down” to those who’ve made the greatest impact. For example,

if sales can only be tracked by office, then target or nominate

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Nicole attends an event and discovers the REWARDS program.

2 3 4 5

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Nicole knows that bigger prizes are more common for companies with higher sales volume. She orders promo materials to generate enthusiasm and motivate her team to take them to the next level.

Nicole enters her team into a sweepstakes for a chance to win even bigger rewards. They don’t win.

She gets recruited as a Champion, enrolls her company in the program, and registers her team.

Encouraged by Nicole and motivated by rewards, Hugh sends an email alert to drum up business and earn points.

After three big sales, Hugh checks his profile. He realizes he has earned points for the email, as well as the sales.

Hugh checks the REWARD site and sees that he has enough points for a Nab It item; he nabs it just in time.

To supplement his growing point total, Hugh takes training courses and signs up for the next REWARD event.

When flush with points, Hugh bids on an Xbox — and wins.

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one key individual inside the company and identify them as a

company “Champion” who will manage the company’s reward

points and redemptions. This is the individual who will enroll,

and with whom you will communicate, as the main point of

contact. If offices have others in the organization who influence

the purchase decision, encourage the Champion to share

rewards to motivate these influencers as well.

Reward structure challenges. Your relationship with your

partner’s customer presents a data challenge: not all channel

partners are willing to share sensitive sales data. If that data is

shared, it is likely at the channel partner level rather than the

channel sales professional level.

To add even more complexity, your incentive program is

competing against numerous other incentives and promotions

offered by your competitors, and other channel partners, and

adherence to a budget for maximized results.

Summary on approaches. In comparison with training and

marketing resources, the reward line item in any given channel

program is typically the greatest ongoing expense. Incentives

have an accrued cost, along with the work output costs for

management and execution.

The goal with rewards, then, is to optimize for the greatest

member motivation for the least cost. Ensure that you have

offers which are enticing enough to change behavior … without

spending more than needed to reach that impact. Look for your

partner to assist with financial models to help determine the

correct award budget. A correctly structured channel reward

program prevents random acts of marketing, and can save you

a significant amount of money in the immediate and long term.

As you start to increase the performance of your channel

through easy-to-use marketing tools, micro-moment training

and a structured reward program, the fun part for channel

partners is reaping their rewards: the loyalty and relationship

which emanate from that helps keep them from going rogue.

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The following is a brief discussion on the pros and cons for

some common approaches, from the basics to the more

complex:

Online catalogs. This is probably one of the easiest and most

common forms for rewarding channel partners. In essence, a

variety of items are categorized and assigned point values and

if the partner has enough points, they are able to redeem the

item. Members have a large variety of items to choose from and

can redeem at any time. This is the easiest of all redemptions to

understand (and probably the most common). The downside is

that this approach requires significant point liability management

and it can be difficult to control your reward budget. On-

going maintenance is needed to ensure items are current and

available—and as most online catalogs go with a cash-card

redemption, the rewards may not have as much significance as

something that is physically shipped.

Auctions. A structure very similar to popular consumer auction

sites, partners can leverage points to bid on items. Auctions are

gaining popularity for one key reason: these types of rewards

allow precise control over your budget. There can be limited

or no point liability management. Points technically have no

value, although they have perceived value to channel partners.

The integration of offers, and a gamification component, spurs

competition and an emotional drive. A key point here is to

ensure that offerings are never stale; update frequently. Because

of the nature of an auction, you will see high activity to your site.

On the downside, items expire; points can only redeem when

an item is offered. As this is chance-based, there can be no

guarantee the item a member wants will be the item they’re able

to win.

A time-tested strategy for auctions is to complement a

traditional points redemption plan with experiential items

(experiences money just can’t buy). For example: exclusive

backstage access with a prominent keynote speaker at your

company channel partner event. Loyalty to your campaign plan

to obtain a unique experience: a great way to reign in random

acts of marketing.

Sweepstake promotion with points. Partners can use their

point to buy chances to win a number of weekly/monthly prizes.

All partners—even partners with few points—can participate,

with the opportunity to earn prizes. You can also tout high-value

prizes, garnering excitement for minimal cost. From a financial

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perspective, you acquire a precise reward budget. The obvious

downside is that this is chance-based; with no guarantee to

win, there are those who ignore the opportunity.

Intermittent rewards/flash offers/“Nab It”. This approach

is based on the psychological truth that anticipation of a unique

offer can be as motivating as actually winning a prize. Retailers

such as Amazon or Costco use a treasure hunt approach to

driving traffic (foot or web). The mechanics are straightforward:

a randomly timed offer is sent by email announcing a limited

quantity of high-interest items, offered at value pricing—when

they are gone, they’re gone. You can control the exact budget

of your offer. The downside: you have no guarantee for a win,

and a relatively small number of channel partners can win.

The “if you build it, they will come” approach to having your

channel partners engage you’re your portal is a fallacy. The

biggest challenge you will have is driving active engagement.

Using intermittent rewards creates significant traffic to your

channel site as well as excitement about the program—and

engaged partners don’t go rogue.

Segmentation. Because channel partners can be very small to

very large, we recommend segmenting members into like-sized

groups once a volume of points have been earned. The reward

platforms/website will be dynamic with certain content exposed

based on the segment the partner falls into once purchase

data is known. This allows you to segment the message

appropriately both online and via email, providing personalized

and relevant offers and messaging.

There are numerous options you can integrate into your existing

channel programs: align the business objectives with the long-

term behavior you want to reinforce, such as adherence to a

channel marketing strategy. As you have probably experienced,

the best programs combine a variety of the techniques and

approaches listed above.

The case for preventing randomness by employing Platforms.

As mentioned above, very few organizations are starting from

scratch when it comes to managing their channel initiatives.

Best practices revolve around identifying simple behaviors that

can be rewarded in some form. For example, with a channel

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platform in place, you can start to leverage your other activities

to tie into a cohesive, ROI-based campaign to drive decades

of results.

Here are ideas for channel partner rewards which leverage

your current structure:

• Points for taking (or conducting) training

• Ordering and using marketing materials

• Conducting or producing promotions

• Attending events and tradeshows

• Recruiting other members

• Social sharing

As stated above, every organization that sells through

indirect methods wants an effective way to manage sales

and marketing to audiences with disparate goals. (They have

differing goals—they are not directly owned by you.) Without

exception, every customer Gage has worked with over the

past 25 years has a platform in place, whether this be a simple

spreadsheet to a multi-million dollar solution which has been

fine-tuned over several years.

The modern channel marketers needs a balance between

enterprise-level scalability and flexibility to accommodate

specific business requirements, as well as a platform that is

robust enough to provide enterprise-level flexibility to drive

training, sales and marketing resources.


Mark brings extensive experience

providing global sales, operations

management and business

development for a variety of

firms, ranging from start-up to

multinational, across financial

and technical industries. He also

serves as a board member for

local nonprofit Read Indeed and

received his Bachelor’s degree

from the University of St. Thomas.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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Since its inception, Gage has been leveraging marketing and technology to help clients sell more. After 24 years of never wavering from this philosophy, the engagement marketing firm recently introduced the Gage Channel Performance Suite, which is designed for brands to work more effectively with their channel partners.

The suite comprises three platforms that focus on common pain points often encountered by companies that sell through distribution:

· Brands can drive channel partners’ knowledge and excitement for its products and services with Gage EDUCATE. The platform offers an easy to use content creation tool to easily create and publish a variety of content—including quizzes, videos and resource materials—using brand-compliant templates. Administrators can also measure and assess user participation and comprehension with EDUCATE’s robust reporting tools.

· The Gage MARKET platform provides partners with all the tools they need to quickly and effectively create and launch localized marketing campaigns—print, email and web—that are brand compliant.

· Gage’s REWARD platform enables brands to consolidate all sales promotions into one place while utilizing a wide range of programs—including auction, sweepstakes and loyalty rewards—to help marketers to deliver the right sales incentive at the right time.

Gage’s platforms can be used independently to address specific challenges. Use one or combine two or three to provide channel partners with powerful learning, marketing and rewards experiences. Gage’s platforms are used by some of the world’s leading brands, including Microsoft, Norwegian Cruise Line, Skype and Rich, and are backed by Gage’s marketing specialists.

Visit gage.com to learn more.

© 2016 Gage. All rights reserved.