From the PartnerOn Team

In Memory of High-Fives

March 12, 2021 by Jeff Mesnik

One year ago, the world changed. Before that, I was traveling for business two weeks out of every month- meeting people, shaking hands, having meals. I enjoyed the face-to-face personal interactions and moments both serious and hilarious. Did I tell you about the time when the barbecue sauce exploded during a business meal?

I didn’t realize how awesome these times were, even covered in barbecue sauce, until we were no longer allowed to have them. I was developing deep personal connections with prospects, talking with them about life and business, together in the same room. But last March, at the drop of a hat, all of that changed.

As lockdown became the norm, and travel came to a halt, the typical relationships that we had built up were waning fast, and we needed to quickly discover a new path to building and maintaining relationships.

Fast forward to today, and 85% of business decisions are now being made online instead of in person. So, how did we make the switch? We moved our important conversations to video chat and started looking for answers from LinkedIn, websites, and webinars. Where digital marketing and social selling used to be important, they are now essential. These efforts are fostered by great content that opens doors for conversations about needs and solutions- discussions that will eventually lead to sales.

To help you thrive in our new digital business environment, we recently posted our Paths to Success: Social selling for sales professionals webinar, presented by our Learning and Implementation Manager, Amber Shimkus. Amber shows you how to develop your social selling strategy through sharing content regularly and creating your follow-up plan for LinkedIn and email. As sales professionals, we need to share content on a regular basis that builds a storyline about our solutions. Your shared content should touch upon these four elements:

Empathy: Connect the salesperson to the prospect’s challenge

Relatability: Share how others have faced the same problem before and how they resolved it

Resolution: Show the return received from investing in the solution

Solutions: Provide how the prospect can purchase and effectively deploy the solution

The pandemic will hopefully soon come to a close, and hopefully, we will be back to creating relationships and building stories in person. Did I tell you about the time I got a high five from one of the industry’s top executives? Regardless, the need for digital/social selling has been imprinted permanently on the sales process. As salespeople, we need to remember to welcome support from our marketing teams to help us craft an effective storyline for our solution.

3 Email Deliverability Challenges (and Solutions)

March 11, 2021 by PartnerOn Journal

Even the most astute and experienced email marketers face challenges when it comes to deliverability. Read on for a quick summary of three common issues when sending emails and ways to solve them.

Authentication

Are you adding a signature to your emails to verify yourself as an authentic sender? Sender authentication helps protect your email from being spoofed, and increases the probability that your email campaign will land in your recipient’s inbox. It’s best to configure your DNS settings before sending your first email campaign.

Spam complaints

Are your emails being marked as spam by your recipients? If you’re receiving a high number of spam complaints, it’s time to take a step back and figure out why.

Here are common reasons for spam complaints:

You haven’t set up sender authentication (DKIM, SPF)
You bulk-sent your campaign, and the email might not be relevant to the recipient
You’re sending emails too often
You haven’t emailed this list in a long time, and they forget who you are
Your sender or subject line looks spammy
You don’t have permission to send to the recipient

Lists and Permissions

Do you clean your email lists after every marketing campaign? Leaving bounces, blocks, and undeliverables in your email lists can hurt your sender reputation and deliverability stats.

Where did your lists come from? Organically built, permission-based lists have better open and click rates than purchased lists. This is partially because recipients on a permission-based list are expecting to hear from you. Using purchased, rented, or borrowed lists is not only a questionable practice; it can put you at risk for violating CAN-SPAM, GDPR, and other local privacy laws.

Here are some steps to improve your email deliverability:

Request DKIM records for sender authentication. Simply send an email to support@contentmx.com and provide the email address that you will be using to send emails from your PartnerOn account. We will provide you with CNAME records to add to your DNS.

Make sure to also add ContentMX to your SPF record for better deliverability results.

Take advantage of the high-quality email content and subject lines created by our professional editorial team. Make sure that you are segmenting your audience into different lists based on their needs and their status in their buyer’s journey.

On that note, regularly clean your lists for invalid email addresses, bounces, and undeliverables. As a PartnerOn user, we expect that you will only use permission-based lists from a reputable source. Learn more about your email benefits with your PartnerOn account.

Check out our Email Deliverability FAQ for troubleshooting advice, and watch our Email Basics webinar if you’re new to sending emails from PartnerOn.

What is the Value of a Content Marketplace for Distributors?

March 1, 2021 by Jeff Mesnik

In this issue of the PartnerOn Journal, we highlight a great article about the changing role of distribution by Jay McBain, Principal Analyst at Forrester. McBain’s blog dives into the changing financial models based on new consumption sales programs.

I was particularly interested in the concept of marketplaces that distributors are building. Within these marketplaces, partners can research and develop hybrid, multi-cloud offerings, along with products and services that connect the final mile. Additionally, distributors have the unique capability of connecting vendors while offering a single source for both partner and customer solutions.

This newer way of approaching sales creates a challenge for the vendor as they strive to share a product story that a customer can easily follow. This is where PartnerOn fits into the picture. We work closely with top distributors like SYNNEX, Arrow, and TechData to provide a unique content marketplace for their partners.

Our platform enables the distributors to help partners and customers learn and understand how to develop the best solution story. Leveraging marketplaces means that partners don’t have to go searching for content in multiple portals or systems to piece together their story. Weekly ready-to-use streams of content arrive directly to their mobile phones and desktops. What’s even better is that each week, the content story builds, creating an easy-to-follow narrative of relevant information that answers the needs of customers. Furthermore, with a constant eye towards ROI, we allow distributors to develop new revenue streams so they can leverage the large networks of companies with whom they work.

Our streaming content marketplace provides both marketers and salespeople with an easy solution to drive and increase sales. As vendors move toward consumption models, PartnerOn provides a clear path for more conversations and education on solutions and specific product value propositions.

Our data reinforces the change in distribution flow. Content from our distributors that is sent out through our marketplace reaches a large audience of end user decision makers. Each month content is emailed to over 1.4 million subscribers, reaching across numerous verticals from financial services, manufacturing and hospitality to education, healthcare, and many others. Distributors working with PartnerOn are among the largest publishers of high value content to targeted consumers.

Take a look at some of the companies available on our streaming content marketplace, and reach out to me if you’re interested in learning more: jeff@contentmx.com.

Are you a Digital Selling Master or Apprentice? II

February 10, 2021 by PartnerOn Journal

Part II: It’s about more than just wine

Readers who enjoy wine might appreciate this anecdote.

Like most wine drinkers, I am quite particular about my grape varieties and sweetness levels when deciding which bottle to buy. I am (like your own customers) also one to thoroughly research any product before purchasing.

Recently, I was perusing the Facebook comment section of a post by a popular company that specifically sells only very dry wines (my personal preference). I had taken a look at their website, and while I was interested in trying some of their wines, I was disappointed to learn that their products are only available through a six-bottle monthly subscription of $159. In the post’s comment section, I requested that they consider selling their wines a la carte for the pickiest of customers (me), and for those who might not need a full six-bottle subscription every month.

Not an hour after making this comment, I received a private message on Facebook Messenger. Michelle, the woman who contacted me, had seen my comment on the wine company’s Facebook post. Incidentally, Michelle owns a competing (smaller) wine company that also offers my beloved bone-dry wines. She wanted to let me know that her company not only has similar products to her competitor, but they also sell their wines a-la-carte! Michelle even took the time to suggest a few varieties that she thought I might enjoy, and provided information about the wine’s sugar content.

Needless to say, I visited Michelle’s website and ordered a few bottles of delicious wine to enjoy this winter.

Michelle’s message was instrumental in my decision of what wines to purchase, and (more importantly) from where. While the larger wine company eventually responded to my comment (very corporately), Michelle gave me something that the larger company did not: a personalized answer to my exact request. Her message put a name, face, and personality to her brand that doesn’t often come through with large corporations, who tend to use highly constrained language and boilerplate responses, even in private messages.

What was most interesting to me, though, was how she came to message me in the first place. Be honest: how many minutes do you spend in a week scoping out your competitor’s posts? Well, this might be your sign to start doing so. There’s no harm in sneaking around a little to see what leads are saying about your competitor’s products or services- in fact, feedback aimed at companies similar to your own can teach you how to create an equally (or even more) successful strategy. Michelle’s private message to me wasn’t sketchy nor sales-pitchy; it was genuine and tailored to my situation. It was smart. She won my customer loyalty away from a huge competitor.

Why can’t you do that, too?

Admittedly, Michelle’s success in winning me as a customer required a little extra time and effort on her part. While many PartnerOn users manage to increase brand awareness and score new leads just from consistently posting content, others are looking to up the ante. The second (very important) ingredient to success is engagement, or building a trusting relationship between you and your leads.

I’m assuming that you read Part I and have a solid foundation of digital selling (if you haven’t yet, go read it!). If so, congratulations to all of you newly-minted Digital Selling Apprentices!

I hope that in the past couple of weeks, you’ve taken some time to post consistently to social media and that you’ve started to generate some expectation from your followers. I want to see you level up today with these tips to becoming a Digital Selling Master.

How to become a Digital Selling Master

Continue everything you’ve been doing as an Apprentice, plus make sure that you pay close attention to these steps:

Go where your target audience goes
Be the real deal
Build the relationship

Go where your target audience goes

You might already have mapped out your ideal lead and their customer journey when you started your business or the last time you tweaked your marketing strategy. If you haven’t done that, now is as good a time as any!

In the world of digital selling, as in real estate, location is extremely important. Are your target leads using LinkedIn to connect with others and find opportunities? Have they all but abandoned Facebook? Make sure that you understand who your audience is and how they research and gather information in order to make a decision. There are endless websites and books all about market research and personas. Knowing more about these topics (and putting tried-and-true strategies into practice) will amplify your selling game.

If you’re at a loss, take a leaf out of Michelle’s book by simply scoping out the competition. Who is your biggest competitor in your geographic area and in your target verticals? Where are they posting? How are they engaging with their own audience and responding to inquiries?

Be the real deal

You know by now that millennials (whether consuming as B2B or B2C) crave authenticity in their business interactions. That means you can’t fake it and still make it with a good chunk of today’s workers. If you’re sliding into your lead’s DMs (as the kids say), you had better have something high-quality to offer them – drop the sales facade. The best strategy is to be personable and on-brand.

When you do find that opportune moment to privately message an interested lead, be careful about what you write to them. You only get one shot with a private message, and you don’t want to be ignored, rejected, or even blocked! Write a sincere message that addresses your lead’s pain points and that brings them closer to their goals. Here are a few tips for a good opening DM.

Offer value first

Michelle had the chance to provide something that I was actively looking for: a non-subscription order of very dry wines. She immediately said, “I saw your comment on my competitor’s post, and here is what I have to offer.” She didn’t ask me to order her product, or even for me to visit her website; she first offered me a solution of value without asking me for a thing in return.

To continue the conversation with your leads, you might recommend a thought leadership piece, share a free version of your ebook, or provide quality deliverables that you received from PartnerOn.

Keep it short

Michelle’s message was a paragraph long, and only included enough information to address my pain points. She ended it there, but offered to send me more information if I wanted. Her initial message intrigued me, and my follow-up questions to her about sugar content brought me closer to my goal of ordering wine.

There was nothing fishy or disingenuous about Michelle’s message, and it wasn’t “sales-y” enough to turn me off. Your messages can just as easily accomplish the same end, as long as you keep them simple, authentic, and purposeful.

By the way, this was Michelle’s actual first message to me:

“Hi Amber! I saw your comment on (competitor’s page) and wanted to let you know about my wine company! We also sell organic and vegan wines that are dry and free of all preservatives and pesticides. Unlike (competitor), you can buy our wines a la carte without a subscription. I would love to send you more info, if that’s ok?”

Build the relationship

What happens when I run out of wine?

Although Michelle and I haven’t gotten this far in our business relationship, I wonder what will happen once I’ve received my shipment of wine. Will she reach out again to ask what my favorite variety was, recommending similar selections based on my taste? Will she offer a discount if I remain a loyal customer? Or, will another competitor sweep in with a better offer and steal me from her?

I’m curious about the actions you take, reader, when a lead becomes a customer. Do you have a follow-up process mapped out, whether that’s a classic phone call or a monthly newsletter to keep customers up-to-date? Do your customers remember you the next time they need to update their equipment, and are they aware that you offer the newest security system that they could really use right now?

Your B2B relationship doesn’t end with the sale. Since most technology gets updated at least every few years, you would be remiss to treat someone as a one-time customer and lose out on the compound revenue that often comes with a loyal business relationship. If you don’t have a follow-up plan, carve out an hour this week to draft a couple of email templates and plan a few calling campaigns to your current customers. You might be surprised at how happy they are to hear from you.

Are you a Digital Selling Master or Apprentice?

January 25, 2021 by PartnerOn Journal

We’re excited to welcome Amber Shimkus as a new staff contributor! Amber is an experienced writer and a valued member of the PartnerOn Team. Read more about Amber here.

Sometimes, I’ll follow a social media account or blog just because of ONE really interesting and engaging post. I’m talking about the kind of post with short, quippy messaging, a focused topic or promising call-to-action, and the right hashtags for me to have found it in the first place.

When I get a taste of great content, I want more of the same. So I check back every week or so in search of the next post. But the post never comes. How disappointing. More often than not, that blog or account eventually loses me as a follower (and therefore, as a customer for the foreseeable future).

The same thing might be happening right now with your brand. You found some great content and put on your writer’s hat, researched hashtags and keywords, and one day you crafted something incredible. The likes kept coming, and some unexpected LinkedIn comrades enjoyed the post enough to share it with their own networks.

But the next time you had time to post, it was weeks (or months) later. You didn’t quite get the LinkedIn salute that you had expected after your exalted initial post. There isn’t a “share” to be seen. What happened?

Your second post flopped because you forgot about two golden rules of content marketing: consistency and engagement. These important tools will take you far when it comes to setting yourself apart from the competition (aka, the ones who never post). Depending on the time and energy that you’re willing to put into your content marketing efforts, you can become a Digital Selling Apprentice, or even a Digital Selling Master, using a few simple strategies.

How to become a Digital Selling Apprentice

Apprentice, here are your tips:

Automate your process
Develop a regular cadence
Capture what you need the most

Now, not everyone has the time to scour the worldwide web for the best piece of content and rack their brains for the best bit of copy to go with it. Lucky for you, you don’t necessarily have to with all of the content and tools available to you in PartnerOn. But, you do need to be consistent about posting and emailing your lead lists to see results.

If you’re starting from square one, follow these tips to lay your digital selling foundation and become a Digital Selling Apprentice.

Automate your process

Having personally met with dozens of PartnerOn partners, I find that the ones who are seeing the most success are taking advantage of one key feature: automated posting. These partners are usually the super small businesses, and the one-man operational superheroes. They truly don’t have the time to squeeze in anything extra- even the things that are worth squeezing in, like content marketing.

Like we saw in my example, if you’re not generating expectation and consistently providing quality content, you can drop valuable leads with just a few underachieving (or non-existent posts). Since automated posting takes the work and the thought out of posting, you have no excuse not to be achieving Apprentice status right now! Log in today, set your posting schedule, and let your PartnerOn account do the heavy lifting for you.

Develop a regular cadence

If you’d rather be a bit more intentional about your posts by sharing content manually, that’s just as awesome! If you have a few minutes each week to curate your own content, just make sure that you’re creating a content calendar for yourself to develop a consistent cadence. You can even use the suggested schedule in each of your weekly PartnerOn content episodes to get your content strategy on track. With just this bit of extra effort, you’re exceeding that first golden requirement of consistency, and instantly capturing more of your leads’ attention.

Before you know it, you’ll have leads who look forward to seeing your company name pop up on their feed a few times per week, and you’ll be front of mind when they need your services.

Capture what you need the most

While you’re developing that valuable cadence to keep leads and prospects engaged, make sure that you’re also sharing content that helps you capture their interest level – and email address. The Build Your List items in your PartnerOn account are gated assets that require your leads to provide basic contact information in order to read the whitepaper or ebook that you’re offering them. Leads who fill out these forms are considered to be highly interested in learning more about your products and services; that’s why we call them your Level 4 leads!

When a lead requests your content, you’re also automatically (and immediately) notified by email, so that you can start the follow-up process. Follow-up is a HUGE part of engaging with your leads, and it’s a key strategy of relationship building, which we’ll discuss when we help turn you into a Digital Selling Master.

Interested in becoming a Digital Selling MASTER? Subscribe to PartnerOn Journal to get notified when Part II of this article is available.

A closer look at who you are reaching by putting your content on PartnerOn

January 11, 2021 by Jeff Mesnik

Our goal with PartnerOn is always to stay engaged with our users so we can provide the most relevant streams of content. We know that the architecture of our streaming service has to start with understanding our audience. Every week, we help fill the digital footprint of partners with stories that help them increase awareness and drive new sales opportunities.

The content we stream must not only fill the needs and wants of partners; it must also help the consumer understand how partners will address their business challenges. In order to ensure that PartnerOn is providing the most valuable structured service we can to our users, we dove deeper into answering two questions: who are the partners on our platform, and to whom are they selling? Here is what we found…

Who are our users?

Over 50% of our users describe themselves as IT Solutions Providers, Cloud Service Providers, Managed Service Providers, and Consulting Firms.

What verticals do our users sell to?

Our users serve a variety of industries; their most-served industries are Manufacturing, Healthcare, Retail/Hospitality, and Banking/Finance.

What solutions do our users provide?

The top solutions provided by our users include Managed Cloud/IT Services, Security, and Training/Support.

We also looked at anecdotal evidence to help us better understand who our users are and how we benefit their content marketing efforts. This evidence informs how we will continue to evolve and grow our program. Here are some quotes from PartnerOn users:

“Our client base is in the 10 to 50 user base in the professional services, construction, and marketing agencies.”

“It has helped me look 1. Professional 2. Ready to work at all times 3. Accessible “

“I have more conversations now with prospects about posted content than I used to have. Traffic to my site and my LinkedIn content increases with each post.”

“I have noticed substantial traffic increase to our company website and social media accounts.“

We also learned some interesting things about our users’ customers!:

“My customer produces and sells food for animals.”

“A home-grown renowned Fashion Apparel retailer with more than 15 retail stores across Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia. Working on Cloud Hosting as part of their digital transformation plan.”

“A K-8 charter school in Michigan that has been working to adopt new solutions for their staff and students. Shifting them to Cloud from on-premises servers.”

With a detailed understanding of the sales channel, PartnerOn is accepting requests from new vendors/OEMs who believe their content will enhance the experience of over 18,000 partners who are already using the PartnerOn platform.

If you would like PartnerOn to consider your vendor’s content for the program, please email Jeff@ContentMX.com.