Love Child: How to make sure your channel marketing program is not misunderstood by the channel you are trying to help, and not seen as “different from the rest” by your Executive Team. (This is what happens when I listen to the Supremes on the 60’s radio station)

The Problem:

If you have to stop and look at what is the best of all possible worlds for channel marketers (and the Enterprises that support them) it would be the one stop, the destination, the store…that let them take care of promoting their business while using tool that was officially blessed by the Enterprise they are representing, and made everyone more money.

This has always been easier said than done. Every single time “The Enterprise” thinks they have the secret combination that will make their channel sales people happy and help them sell lots of product, the Channel quite clearly lets them know where they fell short.

It breaks down to three areas:

• Generic approach: Treating the channel as a single entity, rather than a group of businesses, engenders a sense of completion between the Enterprise and the Channel. “What you gave me promoted you (The Enterprise) more than me (The Business/channel marketer) and I think you are going to steal my customer(s).

There are plenty of good reasons why an Enterprise will treat their channel this way, but the main reason is: Limited resources on the part of the Enterprise, and nearly infinite requests for special attention by the channel members. One side can’t live up to the demand, the other side is never happy. (Most of us have been in relationships of this nature…on one side or the other.)

• Different Values: What you gave me as a promotion the customer does not find any value in. Basically, this is the channel saying “You don’t know the market, I do.” If you offer a discount on gadget X, and the market wants Widget Y, everyone has wasted a great deal of time.

The conflict between what the folks in the field know vs. what the folks at Corporate know vs. what Executive Management wants to sell is businesses longest “love triangle”.

• Analysis Paralysis: We have tried things before, and they failed, so we want to get this right, but we don’t know what to choose, and all of the data says different things.

Understanding what the market wants is easy. They want the product that personally helps them, at no cost with high quality and in unlimited quantity. Understanding what they will pay for is much the same, but folks drop out as the price increases unless the value is very compelling.

Understanding what YOUR market will pay for, and what your Executive team wants to get behind, and what your channel will sell is a problem for a Graduate Thesis, but there is one piece of advice that will let you solve 50% of your problems with the channel with the next channel marketing program you launch.

I am just not going to tell you what it is.

(until next week).

Wrich AKA So Misunderstood!