Struggling with partner attribution and ROI? You need Christmas cake!

Ok, if you’re thinking it’s too early for the C word I’m here to tell you, it’s really not. The tree is up in St Pancras and I’m halfway through my Christmas shopping! But what has that got to do with partners? I’m getting to that…

Last night I had a lovely dinner with a past colleague, still in a global partner marketing role. We had a great catch up and talked about the challenges of partner marketing, past and present. Her biggest challenge – apart from the usual stuff like channel conflict, not enough resources on partner marketing and loads of money spent on corporate marketing, and agencies who show up with a great person that you never see again…was attribution. Yep, that old chestnut of how to prove your partner marketing is working.

So here comes the Christmas cake.

We all know that in any technology company, there’s a few partners that consistently make up a large chunk of your number. Let’s call them the dough. (See what I did there?) You’ve got good working relationships with them; your connections are across both businesses and you’ve probably got similar values and approaches to market. To me, it makes absolute sense to invest in these larger partners but do it in an intelligent way. Rather than just chucking money over the fence, work out where your best joint opportunities are. Are they a specific vertical, or use case? Are there end customers you could go after where your joint proposition is stronger and you’re both bringing value? Build a strategy and campaign around those areas. Make it bespoke and work out how to manage it. Who has the data? Who can own the project? Who is doing the design and content development? Who will execute the campaign and track results?

You probably won’t be surprised when I tell you that an external agency is good for this. Often, it’s hard for someone from one company to take full ownership, and sometimes you need a clear, external view of what the combined proposition actually is. Plus, it’s easier to share the truth with someone external – and let them take it off your plate! I have done a bunch of these campaigns over the last couple of years and had some great results. (Just saying.) Attribution in these cases can be tricky to track and measure as you’re collating information across your business and that of your partners. So, it’s important to agree on the stats you’ll report on to demonstrate your shared success. Some of this will be marketing metrics – opens, clicks, downloads, enquiries. Ideally it will go further up the funnel – appointments, proposals, pipeline and deals. Again, you’re probably relying on both sides sharing and it’s often helpful to have clear stakeholders in place on both sides in marketing and sales ops who can do this together.

Then your next important group of partners is your strategic alliances. Businesses that are probably adjacent to yours, where you’re not stepping on each other’s toes and your offerings don’t cross over but do complement each other. Here’s your marzipan. (Yuk, I hate marzipan. But I do love alliances, so I’ll get over it for the purpose of this analogy.) Again, the approach is similar to that for large partners. Select a group of target customers that make sense for both of you. Agree how to talk to them, what needs can you both fulfil, and then where’s the best place to find them and what’s the right approach? Then how are you going to measure the results? Again, this might require some data work in bringing together results from both your businesses, and agreeing on reporting systems and results will be important.

Mid-size partners can often bring you some juicy extra deals. They’re usually less reliable as an income source and can be a bit hit and miss, but now and again, if you’re looking after this bunch of partners well. They can bring you something tasty. They’re the dried fruit. A bit unpredictable, but nice when you find them. From an attribution point of view, you don’t want to be investing with them on a 1:1 basis but you do need to make sure you’ve got good coverage with them. You want to be listening to them, communicating with them, answering questions and dealing with queries and quotes effectively and efficiently. From a marketing point of view, you want to make sure you’re making materials available for them to easily use and re-use – do the hard work for them, and don’t ask or expect them to do it for you. Make working with you easy for these guys and they’ll keep bring you the good nuggets. You need to track them through your own systems to check your ROI – but this should be more straightforward as they will be placing orders with you directly.

And lastly, you’ve got the icing on your Christmas cake. Here, this is coming from your long tail of small partners, that you are hopefully funnelling through distribution, or at least working with in a pretty ‘hands off’ way. You’re likely to have bigger numbers of small partners which leads to more complexity and just volume – it can be hard to manage if you’re not efficient in your systems! For these partners you can work with your disties to get accurate numbers. Self-service systems which make it easy for partners to understand the benefits of working with you, starting with your website, are important here. If partners can’t easily understand not just what you do, but what’s in it for them, you’re making life hard for both of you.

So, all of these different partner types are important. They all go in to making your Christmas cake and while some may be more valuable to you, the trick is getting them to all work well together.

Want some help on your recipe? I love getting my teeth into this stuff. And in case you’re wondering if I’m the right person to help you, check out this quote from one of my customers from work we’ve done together this year.

‘I worked closely with Gemma at She/Her at every stage of the campaign. True collaboration is hard to find with an agency, but she understood our brief and our business from the start and has an extensive background in channel partners which is critical. We worked closely and openly together to get the best results for our internal stakeholders as well as the target audience. The campaign went across our website, emails, social and targeted LinkedIn ads to reach as many new prospects as possible.' Christy Kenyon, Marketing Manager Avnet Integrated

Now according to Nigella, you should start making your Christmas cake 2-3 months before Christmas. That means, if you want to get your partner marketing and attribution in order before the new year, you need to start right now! Take the first step by dropping me a DM and let’s get cracking. :)

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