Channel Marketing

This holiday season, many consumers will be forgoing big family dinners and exotic holiday markets and instead playing host to unwelcome guests like worry (for their health) and anxiety (for their finances). This holiday season, everyone just needs a break. Marketers can help consumers make the best of their holidays by making their lives a […]

Online marketplaces have been around in one form or another for decades. Accelerating the trend is a myriad of factors including changing buying behaviors and demographics, companies shifting to subscription and consumption models, and the rising importance of ecosystems. Put simply, the future business buyer will look more and more like a consumer.

In-person channel events are slowly returning, albeit in a modified form. Expect more of these physical/virtual hybrid events to pop up in the coming months.

• In the future of B2B buying, there is a new set of buyer expectations that organizations must contend with
• Direct and indirect buying processes will transform from seller led to buyer led
• B2B channel marketing leaders must anticipate and plan for buyers’ evolving expectations

Ecosystems don’t run on spreadsheets anymore. Principal Analyst Jay McBain provides a detailed look at the channel software market and its ability to help drive business and relationships.

The communications industry is facing a perfect storm of converging forces, from COVID-19 to the rise of influencer marketing and even AI. At Forrester, we research around 10,000 global technology vendors that utilize indirect sales and often get asked about the value of PR in the channel. A trend that is affecting many channel leaders […]

With COVID-19 still spreading and broad quarantines, shutdowns, and other measures to contain it continuing, it is still impossible to make definitive predictions of its impact on the tech channel. Instead, we are using three scenarios that take into account different recovery start times and shapes of recovery graphs. More detail around these scenarios, tech […]

• B2B revenue enablement demands an understanding of the specific combination of personas, competencies, assets, and communications inherent to every buyer and customer journey
• As Forrester SiriusDecisions defines it, revenue enablement is a discipline that seeks to bring the skills, knowledge, assets, and process expertise to all customer-facing roles
• Our research shows that organizations with advanced capabilities around revenue enablement are more likely to outperform others still employing more siloed approaches toward optimizing their customers’ experience

• Top CMO priorities include enhancing partner/channel marketing capabilities
• CMOs’ number one challenge is developing programs that drive (channel) demand
• B2B suppliers continue to struggle with partner adoption and execution of channel demand programs

ALERT:  NEW 2021 VERSION NOW AVAILABLE HERE: https://www.forrester.com/blogs/the-100-best-channel-podcasts-of-2021/     If you haven’t listened to a podcast yet, you’re now in the minority.  According to Podcast Insights, 51% of the US population has listened to at least one podcast. Since the first podcast came on the scene in 2004, there are now over 750,000 podcast […]

• Channel partner success is a product of preparation, planning and execution
• Ongoing monitoring and adjustment of the plan is a strategic imperative
• Nothing is more satisfying than accomplishing a mutual goal together

• Channel marketing has increased organizational visibility and accountability for corporate growth objectives
• Transformative change brings complexity, challenges and opportunities for channel marketing practitioners
• Three universal themes remain top-of-mind for channel professional in annual planning

Channel professionals want to talk about expanding their partner programs and building broad ecosystems, but the truth is that many of their basic program and channel management processes are still painfully manual and error-prone. Before accelerating their channel program, they need to apply basic automation technologies to get their front- and back-end systems to a […]

• One of the most popular topics across the SiriusDecisions client base is insights and guidance on understanding buyers’ needs
• SiriusDecisions’ biennial B2B Buying Study gathers data on buyer preferences across different global regions, industries and buyer personas
• In their Summit Europe 2019 session, Angela Leech and Paul Ferron shared EMEA-focused insights from this year’s study that organizations can leverage to inform sales, marketing and channel decisions at the regional level

• Though sales enablement is making progress via competency-driven support for sales reps, other customer-facing personas receive less formal enablement
• B2B organizations vary widely in their approaches to enabling customer-facing associates, which can significantly affect the consistency of outcomes, scalability and measurement of impact
• In his Summit Europe 2019 session, Peter Ostrow shared how organizations can optimize their revenue engine by using the SiriusDecisions Revenue Enablement Framework

• Organizations frequently think of marketing, sales, service and renewal cycles as independent sets of customer interactions
• Customers are more likely to purchase and renew when their experience is consistent across all interactions with an organization
• Sales enablement is making strong headway via competency-driven support, but other customer-facing personas should receive similar enablement

• The first step on the path to joint business planning success is recognizing that it is not a highly recommended or obligatory annual task, but an ongoing partnership imperative to driving revenue
• Joint business planning with channel partners is one of the most effective means of driving alignment and more profitable revenue growth
• Joint business planning is a learned skill that must be supported by a proven, standardized process, the right data and insights, easy-to-use tools, and ongoing training and coaching

As the artificial distinction between account-based marketing (ABM) programs and everything else we do in B2B continues to dissolve, more firms are realizing that they can leverage the same account-centric strategies, tactics, and technologies to improve the performance of every aspect of their businesses. That includes partner marketing programs, which face two significant challenges today. […]

Channel incentives are used to improve indirect sales performance, orchestrate partners’ behavior, and engender channel loyalty. For decades, channel professionals have used channel incentives to drive behavior, whether establishing new behaviors, suppressing old ones, or repositioning partners for a new opportunity. Incentives are also effective in masking deficiencies in business value propositions. Channel incentives and […]