From the PartnerOn Team

“…this idea that if we build it, they will come. And they don’t. We get to look back every year for decades now at what the adoption rates are of different technologies and stuff, and they just don’t. And by the way, when you take the adoption, you actually take the logins and take away the people that are forced to come to your portal to claim money to do a deal registration or to do actual things necessary to maintain their business, the amount of people that walk into your library and go to the Dewey Decimal System and just browse around your portal is zero, literally zero, nobody has the time. – Jay McBain from the podcast Partner Portals Live, Partner Hacker.

Partner Hacker is a relatively new podcast, and the quote was taken from a conversation between Jay McBain  Chief Analyst Canalys, Chip Rodgers Chief Marketing Officer Workspan, Rick Van Den Bosch Founder CEO Channext, and Jimmy Hatzell Director of Marketing Quickpass. The dialogue is among the most relevant I have heard. I highly recommend checking it out.

The question this group discussed is if there is a need for full partner marketing portals and if they should be owned, rented, leased, or maybe it’s a combination. Jay delivers an important point around the need for vendors to qualify to who information is delivered in order to keep it private if needed.  But, organizations need to improve how the partners are drawn into the destination that delivers the relevant content. Keeping the above comment in context, his point was that a field of dreams program doesn’t drive engagement. Vendors need to draw in the partner by offering gateways from destinations at which the partners are actually spending time.  

Chip Rogers introduces the following concept: 

“…how do we all work together, but still have security and still be able to lock down. Like when I’m working with you and I have trust in you, I want to make sure that that is a trusted relationship. But I also want to work with, you know, 10 other people, and they also want to work with other people and manage those trust relationships while you’re able to work with everybody. So I think that’s the architectural that needs to happen…”

To ensure we keep this in context, he is talking about how to create a more collaborative environment, and what that requires. He is not disputing Jay, he is discussing an architecture of a platform where the partner can receive secure information but also engage with others. 

What is most interesting to me, is that through this podcast they define the use case around the challenges of what a vendor needs for their partners. But, less time is focused on partner requirements. Partner useability seems to be the primary challenge all systems have. As Jay says, if you take away the musts-dos to get paid, the usage of these systems is very little to none. 

It is not that a partner or a seller doesn’t want or need the marketing support, it is that they don’t have the time to deploy the campaigns, and the usability of the application tends to not be focused on them. 

Here are examples of how we address needs:

Partner Need and Use Case:

Need: Easy to use solution that can work in line with their workflow.

Use case: Content is updated every Monday so that it works in line with their weekly planning.

Need: Content that is automatically customized and posted.

Use Case: One-time set-up that provides the needed customized fields. 

Need: Leads

Use case: Workflow new opportunities sent to the seller weekly. 

Need: Stay educated and informed.

Use case: Access to content weekly or on-demand that creates a learning track.

Vendor need and use case

Need: Provide messaging to partners regularly.

Use case: Weekly expected emails with targeted messaging to partners about content.

Need: Education

Use case: Educational materials delivered to partners and triggered based on completion of learning track.

Need: Content only for a select audience.

Use case: Partners need to provide qualifying information to receive a content stream.

The podcast really dove into the challenges of the vendor and partner worlds, and as it continues to evolve we will continue to learn more about these challenges.  

“No one ever got fired for buying Cisco” is one of my favorite business quotes. Better Marketing delves into the concept of fear-based marketing and how to effectively use it:

“When using fear-based marketing, it’s best to promote the negative consequences of not using the product than to show the positive outcomes of using it. Marketing in this capacity should not overreach or promote horrific consequences unless a strong position has been established (i.e the “Smoking Kills” campaigns). Be sure to show groups of people and togetherness in fear-based marketing so as to speak to the primal urge to seek comfort in difficult and scary situations.” 

But if you flip the coin on my favorite quote you will also find an element of comfort in the message: if you choose a Cisco product, you are ensured job security. I would argue that combining both fear and comfort into B2B marketing is an even more effective sales tool.

I once had the unique opportunity to use fear to sell a B2B solution. I was in a meeting with the review team who had already selected our service, and the director who was giving the final go-ahead. The salesperson assigned to the account was with me, so they could walk through everything one more time. After the director kept us waiting for 40 minutes in the conference room, she came in and promptly said, “I am thinking about going with this competitor,” who happened to be named after a dinosaur. That was all she said. I was surprised she had us travel to this meeting just to tell us that. As I thought about how to respond, I decided I didn’t want to waste my time explaining point by point why our company was better. 

So, closed my laptop, stood up, and said. “We are the leaders in the industry (and named the top five vendors in the industry who use us), if you want to tell your bosses you chose a company named for a dinosaur over us, go right ahead”. And I walked out to the dismay of everyone, including my salesperson. A week later we had the deal. 

At that moment I provided the director all that she needed, fear of choosing wrong, and comfort in knowing other top vendors use us as well. 

Applying this to our content marketing strategy means we need to think about how to gently express the fear, and then apply the comfort.  For example, would you rather have a channel enablement solution that has 5% usage or 40% usage? By showing 40% engagement rates we offer comfort to potential buyers knowing that others receive high value.  

The reality is we spend a lot of time thinking about awareness in our content marketing, but what is really needed? It is to comfort the fear of choosing wrong. What information can a buyer fall back on to defend a decision that leads to your product? Cyber security solutions have an easy and difficult time with this. The baseline for cyber security is fear of being compromised, but they too need to focus heavily on comfort.  

Let’s look at some of the article titles from PartnerOn that performed the best.

“Don’t let AI Security Risks out weight the benefits”  – The title invokes fear and resolution.

“Hacker Hunting and Built-in Protections” – Similarly, this invokes fear and leads to a resolution that will bring comfort. 

“Thales and Google Cloud taking charge of solving the complexities of your data in the cloud” – While this one is less about fear, it does evoke comfort and provides a resolution to a challenge we all face.

Here are some recommendations for how I would structure messaging around content:

1. Provide information that both addresses a concern and helps solve the problem, such as, “Hybrid work can be challenging, but these five steps will help improve productivity”.
2. Offer recordings or webinars that address the fear. Today we will listen to what keeps top CIOs up at night, and how they ended those sleepless nights.
3. Often B2B sales require meetings. Offer a counseling session: “Share with us your concerns around Hybrid Work, and we can develop the right solution together.” This should lead to an online or 1:1 meeting.

The challenge is consistently sharing so that the morning after the CIO’s sleepless night, your content is right in front of them, grabbing their attention, speaking to their fears, and comforting them with a solution. All you need to do is stay consistent and follow the path, and you will earn the win.

Want to gain comfort in your content marketing program Contact us at sales@contentmx.com 

I had a conversation in the middle of the lockdown, with a president of a large B2B marketing firm, during which we discussed the future of B2B marketing and sales. The debate centered around if we will ever go back to large events again. My thought was that the longer the pandemic went on, the larger the demand for in-person events would grow.  

I based my reasoning on a few of my general thoughts on human behaviors:

1. The more you tell me I can’t do something, the more I want to do it.
2. While travel is never easy, it is actually productive.
3. People like to have well-designed formal opportunities to engage with each other, especially those of us who tend to be a bit awkward or introverted. 

We also spoke about how buyer behaviors have been affected. Overall the data has pointed us to the idea of purchase by committee, which has created the need for a way to take everyone on the journey together. This requires easy access to different content that will help answer the questions of the committee.  

The behavior of the people in these situations, I would argue, requires the following: 

1. Easy sharing of relevant content to help answer the questions
2. Online conversations, or social media interactions with the leader of the buying committee to help define the needs and outline the potential questions from others (there is always the person on the call who will challenge the solution).
3. Then a virtual meeting with the committee that is designed to answer the questions (even though content is accessible online, people don’t always want to read, they want to listen and challenge the premise with someone online).

As B2B marketers and sellers, we need to learn how to juggle the many different approaches to the buying process our customers and prospects take. Carl Jung described it best: 

“…people either derive energy from relating to others or from internal thoughts. They also tend to gather information in different ways, either by focusing on data, or by intuitively seeing the big picture. They express themselves in different ways, either with a focus on rational thinking, or on feelings and values. And they also have tendencies to make decisions rapidly with planning and organization, or to be more spontaneous and pressure-prompted. Using the Myers Briggs Type Indicator and other assessments, these dichotomies can be measured to indicate type preferences  –Working Resources

Here are some things to always think about: 

1. Education comes first. The buyers who tend to be rational thinkers by focusing on data will seek out content to answer their needs, while the big picture people will look at the total sum of the content and make a decision based on intuition and values.

2. Get involved. Go to the industry events and get involved with the audience, meet as many people as you can, and have meaningful conversations. The face-to-face opportunities will support the need of those buyers who need to have a trusted, personal connection with the seller.

3. Flexible awareness. The final step to many of the purchases will be that moment when you will have a call with all the different buyers on the committee.  As marketers and sellers we need to be flexible, and be able to identify the needs of each person in the meeting.   

The truth is, the effects of Covid, like a pendulum swinging, will continue to impact our B2B marketing and sales for quite some time.  But I believe we will settle into a more integrated style of marketing and selling with a mix of in-person events and online meetings, and of course, a lot of content to support every step of the way.

There is a secret map found deep in the data provided by the ContentMX content marketplaces.  Only PartnerOn provides unparalleled access to these secrets.  The starting point? Understanding the path the content takes.

In order to grow your business and understand who both your partners and end-users are, you probably find yourself firing at a moving target. But what if there was a way for vendors and partners alike to gain a deeper understanding of both partners and consumers? What would you want want to learn? ContentMX content marketplaces offer a unique view into the behaviors of the technology marketplace. Take a look at just some of the pieces of the puzzle that we have access to…

Every month PartnerOn creates:

• Over 25,000 consumer clicks
• Over 1,600 social MQL’s
• Over 6.5 million impressions

Through consumption patterns we can see that businesses are looking to learn more about:

• Moving to the cloud
• Hybrid Work 
• Hybrid cloud
• Cloud Security
• Multi-cloud
• Data and CRM
• AI
• Devices

Based on our partner profiling we know that the clients they serve are In multiple industries:

• Manufacturing
• Farming
• Medical
• Financial Services
• Education
• Government

The engagement numbers grow every month, as more companies in the channel discover the value of one destination for all the marketing content to grow their business. Additionally, companies are saving dollars on paid marketing services by using a free service from PartnerOn, all while maintaining the same level of privacy for their data. 

Content consumption from our marketplaces provides members of the channel, suppliers, and vendors a single source of information about the interest of the consumers, the needs of the partners, and the response to different types of content. PartnerOn blindly aggregates the data around consumption of content at all levels. Providing the answers needed to continue to support a market. 

We can then see what types of engagement lead to new sales. Was it…

• Registering for an assessment? 
• Engaging with a white paper, or a case study?  
• Attending a webinar?

By looking at content consumption users can draw lines that connect content to closing a deal. And while the buying process may not be linear, partners can see what components help the buying process move along.

Our insights grow every month while keeping all the information private.  Join one or all of our content marketplaces, and learn more by clicking here. 

At ContentMX we continue to review the data to not only understand topics of interest, but to also understand what type of content drives the interest. 

One of our content marketplaces boasts over 2800 users who have published over 12,000 pieces of content to over 400,000 prospects in January alone.

The content originated from top suppliers such as Microsoft, Cisco, Red Hat, Intel, HPE, Lenovo, and many others.  

Our reports are able to help us tell the story of what the consumers engage in. The first chart shows us what type of content was shared by the users of our application in January.

The second chart helps us understand, what content created the most reactions, or MQL’s.

Let’s look at two types of content and how they compare in the two graphs. In the first graph you can see that solution briefs are 17.9% of the content shared by our users. In the second graph you can see that the majority of the social media reactions came from social briefs (38.8%).  If we look at infographics we can see that they are the second most popular item to share by our users, but only 7.9% of the reactions came from those posts. Clearly there is a disconnect between the perceived need and the actual interest.  

If we think about the analysis and how it compares to the scatter graphs of the buyers then we can understand why the solution brief would be so popular. It becomes the start of the dialogue, and is relevant for all the parties who are engaged in the decision making process. The promotional and branding materials become relevant for the executives. They use this information to help trigger which organizations to present against the solution briefs, while white papers and analyst reports help validate the solutions about to be selected.  

The analysis is just the beginning. As we continue to evolve, add new features and offer co-selling and lead sharing services between suppliers and their partners, we will be able to help track the content to a marketing qualified lead and to sales qualified lead. Thereby helping convert content engagement into a shared opportunity.

As the largest content marketplace for the channel, we are among the very few organizations who can recognize how content is engaged with through the entire sales channel. Allowing suppliers who work with ContentMX a very unique view that crosses over many vendors, partners and different consumers.