Rethinking Channel Marketing with Channelnomics and Channel Maven

Channel marketing remains both essential and underappreciated in the tech industry.

While everyone acknowledges its importance, it’s often under-resourced and misunderstood.

In this episode of The Network Effect, Larry Walsh welcomes Heather K. Margolis, president and CEO of the newly relaunched Channel Maven consulting firm, to explore how vendors can make their channel marketing more effective.

Drawing on decades of experience, Margolis shares fresh insights on aligning marketing efforts with partner needs, adapting to digital transformation, leveraging ecosystem marketing, and making data-driven decisions in channel marketing. She also discusses Channel Maven’s new curriculum for channel professionals and their innovative fractional channel leadership services, designed to help companies navigate the evolving channel landscape.

Stop Treating Partners as Part of Your Team

Vendors like to think of their channel partners as extensions of their sale force or their technical support capabilities. They build programs to compel partners to make investments in the go-to-market relationship. And they aim to make partners “loyal” to them or defaulting to their brand and products whenever possible. In short, they think of partners as subservient.

In reality, partners are independent businesses with their own operating models, value propositions and objectives. They have relationships with multiple vendors, and some overlap in products and value propositions. And they are advocates for their customers first, not necessarily their vendors.

Practically speaking, vendors need to stop thinking about partners as an extension of their organization and more like customers that need to be sold to, relationships nurtured, and loyalty earned.