How to Build Brand Loyalty with Partners
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The Loyalty Effect states that “Making loyalists out of 5% of customers would lead, on average, to an increased profit per customer of between 25% and 100%. If such a small improvement in customer evangelism can so greatly impact your business, imagine how valuable the loyalty of your partners — your resellers, distributors and agents — could be. Being that most channel partners are supplier-agnostic, you, the supplier, must strive to foster partner loyalty to nurture and grow both your partners and your common customer base. In this 30-minute webinar, you’ll learn how to build brand loyalty with your partners through transparency, trust, and true collaboration.
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How to Build Brand Loyalty with Partners
- 1. WEBINAR How to Build Brand Loyalty with Partners @goallbound #NeverSellAlone
- 2. Jen Spencer Director of Sales & Marketing jspencer@allbound.com @jenspencer Hey! It’s nice to meet you. • Legit Content Marketer • Loves Gadgets • Thinks Animals are Sometimes Cooler than People • Total Social Media Geek
- 3. Today’s Agenda • Top 3 Partner Loyalty Failures • Channel Partners — What do they want? • Tips for Creating Brand Evangelism in your Channel • Q&A
- 4. #NeverSellAlone Channel Partners • Driving new sales growth • Channel partners’ revenue growth & profitability • Improved competitive advantage Channel Partner Loyalty
- 5. The Loyalty Effect states that “Making loyalists out of 5% of customers would lead, on average, to an increased profit per customer of between 25% and 100%.” #NeverSellAlone
- 6. #NeverSellAlone 3 Channel Partner Loyalty Failures
- 7. Failure #1: Your Channel Is a Revolving Door #NeverSellAlone
- 8. Failure #2: Your Channel Partners are Supplier Agnostic #NeverSellAlone
- 9. Failure #3: Not Defining Value to Your Channel Partners #NeverSellAlone
- 10. #NeverSellAlone What Do Channel Partners Want?
- 11. Communication and Collaboration Partners need channel-ready solutions #NeverSellAlone
- 12. Communication and Collaboration Partners desire coaching, guidance and alignment #NeverSellAlone
- 13. Innovation Partners want to join the market leader #NeverSellAlone
- 14. Messaging and Audience Creation Your channel partners want to stay on target #NeverSellAlone
- 15. Data Partners are hungry for the facts #NeverSellAlone
- 16. Empower Channel Resellers Improved communication, innovation, messaging & data #NeverSellAlone
- 17. #NeverSellAlone Creating Brand Evangelism in your Channel
- 18. #NeverSellAlone Do … Leverage user-friendly, cloud- based software for communicating with channel partners.
- 19. #NeverSellAlone Do … Provide support and training at an individual level for vendor employees.
- 20. #NeverSellAlone Do … Reward channel partners.
- 21. #NeverSellAlone Do … Facilitate advertising opportunities for local and regional businesses in your channel.
- 22. #NeverSellAlone Don’t … Ignore or delay responses to your loyal partners.
- 23. #NeverSellAlone Don’t … Create an “us vs them” mentality between yourself and your partners.
- 24. #NeverSellAlone Don’t … Make partners pant for your product.
- 26. For information about Allbound, visit www.allbound.com or call us at 480.685.5474
Editor's Notes
- JEN Thanks for joining Allbound for our webinar, “How to Build Brand Loyalty with Partners.” We’re excited to share some great content with you over the next 30 minutes, but first let’s take care of some quick housekeeping. We are recording this webinar, so if you need to step away, or during the webinar you think of a friend or colleague who might also enjoy this content, you’ll have a recording delivered right to your inbox tomorrow. Our marketing team will also be live tweeting throughout the webinar, so you can contribute to the conversation by following @goallbound on Twitter.
- Hi my name’s Jen Spencer, and I’m the Director of Sales and Marketing here at Allbound. Since we’re going to spend the next 30 or so minutes together, I figure you might want to know a little bit about me. First, like many other awesome marketers I’ve had the pleasure of meeting, I was doing content marketing before content marketing was a thing. Second, I’m totally an early technology adopter. I can’t wait to get my hands on the latest and greatest device or gadget – and I’m totally swayed by awesome marketing. Third, if I’m at your house for a party and you have a dog or a cat, I WILL find it, and by the end of the night we’ll be best friends. Finally, I’m a social media geek, so connect with me on LinkedIn or follow me on Twitter, and I’ll follow you back and we can tweet back and forth about content marketing, our smart watches and the latest thing my dog ate that wasn’t food.
- JEN Today we’re talking about LOYALTY – And specifically, we’re talking about how to build brand loyalty with your channel partners. Top 3 Partner Loyalty Failures What are Channel Partners Looking for in a Supplier? Tips for Creating Brand Evangelism in your Channel Also, as time allows, we’ll close with Q&A, so jot those questions down, or plug them right into the question portal of your control panel. As time allows, we’ll tackle as many as we can live during the session, and we’ll be sure to answer each and every question directly should we hit our 30 minute mark.
- When you think of channel partners, what’s the first thing that comes to mind? - Driving new sales growth - Channel partners’ revenue growth and profitability - Improved competitive advantage What’s missing from this list? Channel partner loyalty.
- The Loyalty Effect states that “Making loyalists out of 5% of customers would lead, on average, to an increased profit per customer of between 25% and 100%. The loyalty effect was originally defined by Frederick F. Reichheld and Thomas Teal in the mid-nineties, and the concept “provides a bridge between the world of corporate ethics and the world of hard-core economics. So today, we’re talking about how your organization can no longer afford to ignore the loyalty effect when it comes to channel partners.
- Let’s look at the top three channel partner loyalty failures to determine how the loyalty effect can help.
- Partner Loyalty Failure #1. Your Channel Is a Revolving Door The reason behind channel partner failures? Businesses are using new technologies (and spending valuable budget dollars) like never before to step up their game regarding cloud and data technology, but no one is paying attention to channel partner success. Partners leave as often as they sign up because you’ve delivered a string of stitched-together portals for the management and control of partners without a “wow” factor. Technologies that focus on helping partners succeed will eliminate the channel-partner revolving door.
- Partner Loyalty Failure #2. Your Channel Partners are Supplier-Agnostic Remember that stat from “The Loyalty Effect”? “Making loyalists out of 5% of customers would lead, on average, to an increased profit per customer of between 25% and 100%.” If such a small improvement in customer evangelism has such a great effect on your business, imagine how valuable the loyalty of your partners —your resellers, distributors and agents— could be. Don’t leave room for your channel partners to be supplier-agnostic. Instead, deliver an experience that not only gives them the tools they need, but takes it one step further: Help them deploy content campaigns that will revolutionize the way they interact with prospects.
- Partner Loyalty Failure #3. Your Company Fails to Define Value to your Channel Partners Why do your channel partners go to a competitor when the contract expires? Why don’t they recommend you to other industry connections? If you define your value by delivering a model of collaboration and empowerment, outline a channel experience that’s impossible to ignore, and ask for referrals from mutual industry contacts, your organization will reap the rewards of the loyalty effect.
- What are Channel Partners Looking for in a Supplier? Your channel partners aren’t searching for the lowest priced option or even for a single product in today’s solutions-based environment. Most importantly, they’re not looking for mediocre results with a supplier who is only focused on sales.
- Do you have channel-ready solutions for improved communications between your partners and their customers? Email has become the catch-all for our business lives, making them noisier and more confounding than ever. What happens when you multiply that 10x in the channel, where the announcement of any new training, content, incentive, or tool seems to require a Channel Manager sending an email to an oversaturated, outdated list?
- When’s last time you sat-in on a partner’s weekly sales meeting? Or a partner sat-in on yours? Chances are, it’s been a while because, in its very nature, a channel is geographically distributed, as it should be. And because your partners can’t simply turn around to chat with an engineer or fire off an email to a marketing coordinator, they tend to be (or at least feel) left out on an island. Encouraging collaboration, using tools and technology to coach them through processes and guide them to closed deals, and making them feel aligned to your culture and vision are all as critical to building a successful channel as they are to building a your internal team.
- Partners want to establish their brand as a market leader. They aren’t interested in manual processes or the same old sales and training methods. Indirect sales and marketing is one of the most important and complex roles in modern-day commerce, and yet countless suppliers continue to be stuck on what have been called the seven most dangerous and expensive words in business: “we’ve always done it this way.” Channel partners are hungry for innovation and leadership.
- Messaging and Audience Creation: Partners know they need to sell to a specific target audience, and they want help in identifying and creating relevant content to attract that audience. Just like you, your channel partners don’t market and sell to companies; rather, they market and sell to people. And that’s why the creation and maintainance of buyer personas is one of the most important exercises you can perform for your business – and this exercise needs to be shared with your channel partners.
- Data: Partners want to know the reasons behind supplier decisions, and providing access to this data can build trust. Share information such as product roadmaps, success stories and expected changes in the supplier’s business model. Today’s partner wants and should expect great data about, at a minimum, your business, the market, buyer personas, and how to be successful selling your solutions. Big changes without providing data can undermine trust and value.
- By working to empower channel resellers through improved communication and innovation, and by focusing on messaging and data, you will be poised to grow not just a strong, effective channel, but a loyal one as well.
- Tips for Creating Brand Evangelism in your Channel
- Do leverage user-friendly, cloud-based software for communicating with channel partners. Nothing says “you aren’t part of the group” like leaving someone out of the loop, and it’s easy to forget a vendor when sending product information, warranty updates, or invitations for events. Software helps you manage communications across your channel while including partners in an online community.
- Do provide support and training at an individual level for vendor employees. American business models attempt to integrate suppliers into brand channels in such a way that all elements of the distribution chain work together to facilitate improvements. Providing support at the employee level for partner companies helps ensure your products and services are represented according to your brand and invites loyalty at the individual level.
- Do reward channel partners. Statistics show customers value programs that reward them in various ways for brand loyalty, and you can bring that same ROI to your business channel. Reward partners at a company and individual level for performance that includes not just closed business, but also behavior-based incentives. These might be monetary, recognition, or special perk rewards.
- Do facilitate advertising opportunities for local and regional businesses in your channel. Small and mid-sized businesses can’t always compete in advertising arenas. Collaboration between your brand and companies throughout the channel creates more recognition and better quality advertising than any one entity could manage on its own.
- Don’t ignore or delay responses to your loyal partners. When vendors have to wait days for a call back, they don’t feel like an elite participant in your brand. While prioritization is often necessary, don’t treat smaller partners in your channel differently than larger partners. Each partner is valuable, and small-but-loyal partners can be strong evangelists for your brand.
- Don’t create an “us and them” mentality between yourself and your partners. Brand evangelism works best when vendors and partners feel they are part of the party and can invite others in. Free feedback is a valuable asset, so when your distributors or resellers provide you with constructive criticism, take that information to heart and use it to your advantage by looking for areas of improvement. When interacting with your partners, keep in mind that they are often the link between you and your customers, and you need to maintain a strong bond. To keep them returning to you, rather than moving on to your competitors, you must invest in your relationship, which includes finding a balance between proper communication to ensure results and allowing them enough independence to conduct business as they see fit.
- Don’t make partners pant for your product. When partners are enthusiastic about your brand, they want to share it with others. Do your part to ensure products and services are available as needed. Creating brand evangelists throughout your channel often comes down to common sense, courtesy, and collaboration. I encourage you to reach out to your partners – heck, do it today -- to find out what you can do to make it easier for them to love your brand.
- Now we’d like to open the webinar up to questions from our attendees. If you have a question, please go ahead and enter it in the question field of the webinar control panel. If you have a large channel of resellers, how do you provide them with authentic content and avoid having them run into each other in the market? Some partners are interested in having information about certain products or features that aren’t necessary for others. How do you avoid dividing up relevant information without it being someone’s full time job?