 As a partner marketing veteran, Mike Gallagher understands the urgency of the moment: Time’s a wasting, let’s install a through-partner marketing automation platform, flip the switch, and get some new campaigns going. Just hold your horses, Gallagher says, there are a few things to think through before you get too far down the road, not the least of which is how the platform will fit into your overall marketing program.
In his most recent role as senior director for worldwide & Americas partner marketing at Hewlett Packard Enterprise and, prior to that, as a senior partner marketing executive at Cisco Systems and Sun Microsystems, Gallagher has seen more than one company seduced by the siren song of these platforms. But, over time, larger companies have demonstrated the value of these platforms, and many more are starting to give serious consideration to bringing them on board themselves. They just shouldn’t leap into it without some careful thought.
TPMA Benefits Partners and Vendors — Big Time
What the TPMA pioneers have proved is that once all of the hard work is finished and the platform—and all the support needed to run it—is in place, partners will find they can be more productive than they ever imagined. However that productivity can be enhanced exponentially if the partner works with a TPMA platform provider that offers “concierge services.”
This one consideration when making a TPMA agency part of the marketing program can work miracles in terms of securing partner buy-in. These services work quietly behind the scenes to enable the partner to run very sophisticated digital and social media marketing campaigns. They can help to drive lead-passing and lead-capture processes, and then pass information to the partner and the vendor that helps both the parties understand whether the leads turned into opportunities and then, hopefully, into revenue.
The vendor can use the platform for syndicating web content. That one function alone can take a ton of work off the shoulders of a partner’s typically understaffed and overworked marketing department. The vendor creates the content once—web content, social media posts, new product data sheets, white papers, and video demos. The TPMA syndicates all that product content and places it on the partner’s website without the partner having to manage the process.
Beyond improving partner marketing, TPMA platforms can also create vast improvements in channel management. |
