How Vendors Are Using Channel Data to Select Channel Partners for Co-Marketing Campaigns

Joint marketing campaigns between vendors and their channel partners are viewed by the industry as both a potential boon and a poisoned chalice. When they work, they bring in new customers for both parties and deliver additional value for customers. Unfortunately, more often than not they fail, leading to wasted resources and negatively affecting the channel relationship between vendor and partner.

What can channel professionals do to improve the odds of success in co-marketing? A recent interview between Laura Seymour, Senior Director, Global Partner Marketing & Operations at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and Channel Marketer Report suggests that the solution may lie within channel data.

According to Seymour, channel teams at HPE are using data to more effectively enlist the right partners for specific initiatives. This is boosting the performance of HPE’s channel programs by being more informed and data-driven when engaging partners on specific marketing programs.

For example, when it comes to digital co-marketing campaigns Seymour claims that the data allows HPE to conduct an independent assessment of their partners’ digital capabilities. These insights enable HPE to score their partners according to digital skills so that they can really segment their partner base according to partner’s capability.

Seymour says, “Clearly we don’t just take one data point and make decisions and go. But it adds that richness of insights around what our partners are doing, how capable they are to engage in different programs. And we use that with a broad spectrum of data insight and local knowledge from our local teams when making targeted decisions.”

Seymour was surprised at how few of HPE’s partners had developed effective digital marketing capabilities. This in itself is surprising as it is well known in the industry that vendors digital marketing capabilities have always been significantly more advanced than medium and small sized partners. It is a common complaint across all vendors at how poor most channel partner’s digital skills still remain.

The interview suggests that vendors are starting to use data to prioritise the partners that they work with, excluding those who simply do not have the relevant marketing or technical expertise for certain campaign. Seymour states, “(The data) helps us determine what types of programs we might want to work with that partner, what type of investments from an MDF perspective we might want to see that partner engage in. And even with which areas of the portfolio they are active in, or maybe they’re more active with a competitor, and we want to get more share of wallet with that particular partner. It gives us a good opportunity to maybe identify partners we want to invest more in from a digital perspective, so that we can increase our presence with that partner as well.”

The message for channel partners seems to be that if you want to get your vendor’s attention (and funds!) you will need to demonstrate not just technical skills, but also marketing and digital co-marketing capabilities.

The Channel Institute provides support for vendors and their channel partners through the Certificate in Digital Co-Marketing , the Certificate in Channel Marketing , Certificate in Channel Management and Certificate in Channel Sales .