Episode 23 - Heather Margolis

Welcome to ChannelWaves, the podcast where channel leaders share success strategies, best practices, and emerging trends brought to you by StructuredWeb. Here's your host, Steven Kellam. Welcome everyone to ChannelWaves. I'm your host, Steven Kellam. Very excited to have my good friend Heather Margolis join us today. Welcome, Heather. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Sure. And Heather is a longtime thought leader. She is the founder and CEO of Channel Maven, along with other companies in the past as well. But she's been doing this for a little while and she had a great idea. She wanted to talk about the value of end-to-end marketing for partners. I really liked it because, Heather, I live and breathe this, right? Every time I'm in any channel situation, somebody asks me a question or even when I think, I always take back to when I was a partner and I try to put my partner hat on and I try to think about what end-to-end partner marketing looked like for me back then and what it looks like today. So maybe you can start with, maybe explain a little bit what is end-to-end channel marketing and why it's so important today. Yeah, I mean, it really, if you split the buyer's journey into awareness phase, like, they know that they have a problem, maybe they know how to solve it, maybe they don't know how to solve it yet. Consideration is when they're deciding between a couple of different options and then their decision phase is, I know what I want. I've narrowed it down to two or three companies and or options or solutions, and I know where to go from here. In the last few questions that I have in every single one of those phases, there are different things that, that a company needs to make sure they are doing to get in front of the customer at that right time. Someone once explained to me that, that it was like being on a merry go round. And when the merry go round stopped and the person went to get off, like, what was right in front of them. So if I'm searching for something, a company needs to be doing things like SEO and SEM. If I'm trying to get more information, I'm going out to referral sites or I'm asking my peers, well, then there need to be customer testimonials and there need to be email campaigns that are, that are landing in their inbox. So it's really about being with the prospect every step of the way to ensure that your brand is getting noticed, your solutions, there's enough information out there for them to see all of that, and then that you're continuing to hit them, that you're continuing to be where they need you, when they need you at every step of the way. Because people get distracted, people have deadlines, people end up doing things that take them out of their buying process for the moment. So you want to make sure that you're continuing to be in front of them. Gosh, it sounds so simple when you lay it out that way. It's not. It's not. So maybe we can talk about some of the challenges that you see and then I'd be glad to throw in some of the challenges that I actually live through. And I can think of a challenge that I live through on each one of those steps. Right? Yeah. I mean, where to begin. So making sure that your brand awareness is where it is, so that you're even considered. You're doing things like SEO SEM. You have a website that is easy to find information on and has verticalized content. So if I go to a website and it looks like they're just talking to somebody in medical devices, I immediately assume that's not for me. So if you've taken so much trouble to get somebody to your website, make sure that when they get there, the information is actually relevant to them. Um. Man, I feel like this is when I feel like I wish I had slides. I don't do slides, but, um, you know, the act of getting someone to pay attention to you is, is hard enough. But then once they get there, what are they seeing? Are they getting the information they need at their fingertips? Are the things that you do have at their fingertips answering the questions? Because everybody wants to be on their own journey, right? They don't necessarily want to have to go and get a demo or ask a salesperson. They want to figure out as much information as they can. Having a ton of content out there in the right places is really challenging and making sure that it's either evergreen or updated. So I think it's hard across all partners. And I always go back to, I think of how vendors interact, the one-to-one big SI's, the one to the few, the managed partners, and the one to the many. And there's so many, many, so. And I was in the one to the many and we were pretty good at that. But even that first part of the awareness is really hard. When you're trying to run a business with 20 people, sub $10 million, you wearing multiple hats, and maybe you're getting some MDF dollars and you're trying to figure out how to do this. And that's the majority of partners. Right. So how do vendors come alongside maybe in all three? Because each one has a different challenge, but it's all the same thing. Right? Awareness, awareness, awareness. And then one thing that I think about digital marketing now, even more than what it was before, is I do think that those one to many, and a lot of the small partners have an opportunity to look much bigger and to look much better if they do this one thing right. It's absolutely hard. And I think a lot of times when you're working with partners, you're talking to people who are technologists first. They're salespeople first. They're not marketers. This isn't something that they've seen a lot of value in because they've gotten a ton of business through word of mouth. But the market is changing. Right? Like, it's getting a lot more competitive. The economy is down. We need to make sure that these partners have the right resources to be able to market to their prospects and that they can, they can do this multi-step approach, because if they just do one thing and it doesn't go, then they go back to the vendor and they say, that one thing you gave me didn't work. But from a customer's perspective, you can't just do that one thing. You have to do all of the things to get them to participate in the conversation and to actually get that meeting and get that demo. So a couple of things on that. So is the market down or is it just change and what it needs to be? I think that's very interesting. If you look at the, you look at the stock market, that's doing really well. If you. Yeah, I know, I know. I'm in it. I get the updates. But if you look at who's buying and what's happening and why that is, there's still. I agree, in the small business, there's still a lot, in all business, there's still a lot of challenges. Right. I think we're getting hit harder in tech, and this is, listen, this isn't a question for me. This is a question for Jay McBain or Larry Walsh. Right. Like, I am seeing a ton of layoffs in tech right now, specifically in the channel organization. And I think it's because we are reinventing how we work with our partners. I hope that's what it is. I hope it's not that we are not putting the same importance on those partners, especially when it comes to a traditional hardware software company. Heather, there are a lot of things that are going on that causing this shift. Right. Complex consumer buying behavior, digital transformation, the blurring of the lines between marketing and sales. I think all these things are starting to come together. Anything in particular in the ship that stands out for you? Yeah, I mean, I think we as consumers are marketed to all day, every day, and are now getting used to, oh, if I forget to click on that ad now, it'll come up again. We've just sort of been trained that way. And the same is true for our, when we're buying for our business, we're so used to all of the bots and all of the AI and all of the big brother'esque factors I mentioned to a friend or I was searching for. I just got a stand up pilates or stand up paddleboard. You can do Pilates on, but it's very, very challenging. I do do Pilates on. You can do yoga and big shout out to. Yup Sup And Phil Berry and his wife Christine, who have a shop in Massachusetts, so they shipped it out to Colorado. I'm super lazy. I don't want to deal with the pump all the time. I got a pump that just hooks into my car and I pump it up and then I'm good to go. But I searched for that and then I never went to buy it. And on Instagram, all of a sudden I'm getting all of these ads like, your phone is marketing to you at all times. So when you flip it on its head and you say, okay, now I'm a partner who's marketing to a CIO or an IT decision maker. They expect to have that information where they want it, when they want it, without bombarding them. So you have to sort of figure out, how does this end-to-end piece work. One thing that's super interesting is intent data. So I've used, um, Demand Base in the past. I've used 6sense in the past. But these softwares that tell you who's searching for which terms that are going to bring your solutions are important to them. Um, so, you know, we just keep adding more and more layers to our infrastructure stack to make sure that we are selling to the right people at the right time. You're actually living this. You are a business owner that people are trying to sell to. So you're actually, so you've seen it, and people that know you know you well, you've seen it on the vendor side and you've been on the solution side. Now you're a small business actually living on the other side of that. It's got to be fascinating. Yeah, you can just see it from all angles. Fascinating, sometimes annoying, but yes. You know, the messages that hit home, that speak to exactly something I'm having trouble with. I will absolutely open those. Get a demo, talk to a person. Yeah. It has to be relevant for sure. Yep. Okay, so here's the big question on this, and this is once again, you played in all these spaces. You know exactly what someone is, a vendor is looking at is, okay, how do I get this end-to-end marketing message across and help those partners at all those layers? Right. The one-to-one, you got a CAM or a PAM working with the SI thing. Right? That's fine. The managed partners could be interesting. I talked to $100 million partner the other day that was kind of lost around stuff. Right. And there's a lot of them on down. Right. So what do vendors do to help partners either understand this or get through this? What are some of the action items that they can do? You know, I always say, educate, engage, enable. So educate your partners on how to do these things. What are the marketing activities they should be focusing on? How are they doing social selling correctly? How are they ensuring that they are verticalizing their messages, their content, their outreach, so that when somebody in medical devices gets a call, it's different than when somebody in financial services gets a call. Cause they use different vernacular and they use different. They have different business problems that they're trying to solve for. So, and then it's ensuring that you're engaging the partners in the way that you want them to engage a customer. So I tell vendors all the time to use LinkedIn. If that's how you want your partners reaching out to prospects, then you should make sure that you're modeling for them how they should be leveraging LinkedIn. And then finally it's enabling them, giving them the campaign materials, the resources. Leveraging a platform like StructuredWeb to ensure that they have what they need when they need it. Because even if they're using their own marketing automation tool and they're marketing multiple different technologies as more of a business outcome instead of just a feature function type of campaign, they need to have the content at their fingertips that they can leverage to attract that prospect and bring them into the fold. Having that content, would you say that that's a big miss for both partners? Is that one of the biggest challenge? What are some of the biggest challenges for these partners? On that, yeah, I think what I'm seeing now, being back in it much, much closer, is that partners are either their messaging is great, the content is fine, but they're stopping at the awareness phase, like they're doing all the things you're supposed to do in the awareness phase. SEO SEM, they're doing social. Maybe they send one email or they do one webinar, but then there's no follow through, there's no like, oh, this person didn't join the webinar, let's send them the replay, and then a week later send them an ebook that also talked about what the webinar talked about. Then the next week send them an invite to another webinar. It just sort of ends or it picks up. Six months later there was a webinar, they had some great content, but they don't do anything for six months. And then the person either forgets who they are or is like, oh, that's right, I remember when I was thinking about this company, but then I forgot about them and I bought something else. So you don't want to miss that perfect moment. And then the, or the other issue I'm seeing is that they just don't verticalize the content and it's like speaking to the masses, or they use the same campaign for medical devices that they use for financial services and they're just not using the right semantics. So how do you solve both those problems? Is automation is a key to it, but you could give someone a great platform, but if they lose focus or they don't stay on track, okay, you have the great platform, you still have a problem. So what is that? Is that two partner marketing? Is that case studies? Does it make it relevant? Is it training them and enabling them and showing the benefit of staying through it? Is it even rewarding them for your journey to end? Or is it all the above? Yeah, I mean, I think it's all of the above. Different for each. Some people are more receptive to incentives. And, you know, my time at 360insights taught me a lot about how to build the habits with the partners that are going to make them more successful. I'm a huge advocate for that. And for incenting the behaviors that are going to continue to. You're like teaching them to fish without them realizing it, right? Like partners go out and connect with a lot of their prospects. Maybe they send a campaign through LinkedIn, which, you know me, I love social, um, how do you incent them for that? So that they continue to do that the next time without getting the incentive, like have them do it once, and then the reward becomes that they actually got some leads from it and they actually got some meetings from it and maybe a few closed deals. So I think incent them to do the habits that are going to make them successful so that the success becomes the reward. Okay. What do you see the future holding on this, right. Where are we trending on this? Everything that you talked about sounds great, but if you looked at the resources that vendors have today, maybe that's not so easy. So how do you manage that? What is the trend on that? Are we going to get better? Are we going to get worse? Who's going to win? Lose? Why? Well, there, there are certainly some things coming that, you know, I'm still pretty involved in a bunch of different software companies. I'm seeing a lot of leveraging AI to remind partners of things in a non sort of overwhelming, annoying, bombarding way. I'm seeing a lot of just trying to make their lives easier wherever possible so that they can do the more strategic things, like take the tactical stuff off their plate, whether it's through CAMs or software or AI, so that they can do the more strategic things. Okay. All right. Wrapping this up. Any advice? I mean, do that right? Make life simple for partners way for them to get there. You know, everything that you do with partners to make yourselves easier to do business with, to ensure that they know that you actually care about their business. And it's not just like, where are my leads? What are you doing? I'm not seeing results that it's, hey, what's going on in your business? How are you growing your business? How can we help you focus? I think especially the smaller partners who aren't managed need sometimes a little bit of that coaching and it can be through a platform, but they just sometimes need, like atta'boy, atta'girl. There you go. You're doing all the right things. Here's some incentive. Here are some more programs. Here are some more resources for you. The one thing that always surprised me when I would do concierge work with partners is that they didn't realize how many resources were available. And having run channel marketing, that was like a dagger to the heart. Like, how did you not know that we do all these things for you? Or you have all these programs that are free for you to use, but they're, you know, they're in their cars, they're on the phone with customers. The vendor is not their priority. You just need to tell them. Tell them what you told them and then tell them again. Okay. All right, Heather, thank you for joining us today. Thanks you're in the middle of all of this. What's the best way for people to reach you? Be engaged. What's the best way for people to connect with you? Just certainly connect with me on LinkedIn. Heather K. Margolis or email heather@channelmaven.com Okay, thanks, Heather. Have a great day. Thank you.