At a high level, VARs aren’t marketers. Rather, they’re technically-minded and traditionally market-by-committee. Think of ‘marketing-by-committee’ as giving the role of the professional marketer to persons who simply have the most free time to execute brand strategy. What’s missing from this equation is an understanding or experience of managing a brand and its supporting accouterments. This lack of expertise and experience not only negatively impacts the VAR but the OEM as well. It impacts the VAR for the reasons mentioned earlier. OEMs depend on VARs to sell and implement their products and solutions. When VARs fail to build brand equity, the OEM is also adversely, if indirectly, affected.

As you might have guessed, this is a golden opportunity for the OEM to tighten its relationship with the VAR at a general business level. Most partner programs make available technical training and marketing assets to their partners, however these marketing assets are useless if the VAR doesn’t:

• Understand the role branding and marketing plays in their business
• Know how to use or when to apply the assets and selling tools
• Have basic solution selling skills
• Understand the foundational tenets of marketing and how to apply them (e.g. marketing plan development, campaign creation & management)

For example, take Ford and their new F-Series line of trucks. They’ve developed a campaign that showcases the truck’s capabilities and the capabilities’ alignment with the target audience’s typical issues. The associative content is delivered primarily via video @ fordvehicles.com/2011Superduty/. Here, the prospect can gather the obligatory head-to-head comparisons to the competition, but that’s just the beginning.

Ford has (apparently) invested a ton into making their trucks the most capable in their class. I know little to nothing about trucks, however after being walked through numerous real-world demonstrations, I’m convinced. Rather than appealing to the 5-year old in me by having the trucks jumping rings of fire (see Dodge) and racing around the desert, Ford educated me. Their message is about the alignment of their trucks’ capabilities and their practicality. Interwoven with the capability speak are reference-able case studies. Regardless if you’re selling software, trucks, or pharmaceuticals this is a winning approach.

This approach gives the audience the ability to relate their experiences and needs to a particular set of capabilities. In other words, it contextualizes the product’s capabilities. In the case of Ford, it’s these capabilities that sell F-Series trucks, but it’s Ford’s personalized and conversational presentation of them that make the difference.

Thinking about you and your products and services:

What capabilities sell or should sell you products?

How do you communicate the relevance of your product’s capabilities to the real-world challenges your end-users face?

How easy is it for your end-users to see your products solving these real-world issues without having to communicate with a sales person?

How can you leverage your website to make easy the dissemination of your message and relevance of your products?

Think about these questions when crafting your next pitch on why an end-user should buy your products or why a reseller should sell them. Jumping rings of fire is cool, but when was the last time you did so?

The question I’m most often asked by organizations who are in the process of developing a channel is, “Where should we start?”  Realistically, before you can intelligently address questions about factors like market vertical, target customers, and internal organizational structure, you need to clearly understand that in order to justify the existence of a channel…

“Business generated by the channel must exceed your current margins in order to justify the effort”

• Are the right metrics being used to evaluate the health of the sales channel?
• How many under performing partners are members of the channel?
• What do partners need to be successful?
• Are we providing this needs in an easily consumable fashion?
• Are we listening on the same frequency that our partners are speaking to us on?
• How effective are the programs associated with recruiting, onboarding and nurturing partners?
• Is the process for removing under-performing partners elegant or do we stick our heads in the sand and hope they’ll just fade away?
• If we differentiate our partners by way of verticals how does that help them help their customers?
• How can we get partners working with each other to improve their effectiveness while subversively bolstering our brand?
• Is our channel strategy sensitive to the changing needs of our customers, partners and the market overall?
• How does our channel differentiate itself from our competitors’?
• What does it mean to have ‘enabled’ a partner?
• What are the costs associated with enabling a partner?
• Is our channel sized appropriately to close the amount of business we need it to?
• Is our internal structure a help or hindrance to our channel’s success?

The departments responsible for supporting the channel, spend a tremendous amount of time and energy assembling the right content and smartly organizing it. Too bad the neat and orderly organization of content is almost a complete waste of time.

The typical sales enablement experience progresses like this, a sales person, or customer, enters a portal and is presented a menu of all the available educational material. Often there’s an RSS capability that enables them to receive an alert when content is added or changed. Largely, this mechanism of consuming content is cumbersome, time consuming and most importantly it lacks personal context.

Personal context is the key to providing a rich learning experience. Succinctly, it’s the presentation of supplemental educational content to an audience member based on their previous actions. This includes, but is not limited to, the frequency with which they’ve consumed content, the recency of this consumption, and the basic clickstream data of website visits. Taken as a whole, their digital actions form their digital body language.

The ability to analyze behavior and deliver pertinent content that corresponds with the audience’s implicit or explicit interests moves content delivery away from a pull-action model to a push-action delivery model.

The pull-action delivery model of learning is highly ineffective. It forces the audience—in this case the sales person—to be self-aware of what they don’t know. This is analogous to a shopping experience where you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, but you’ll know it when you find it. In this mode, you could be browsing for hours and from store to store. If you have the time, I suppose this might not be an issue, but who has that kind of time? We have an economy to support and deadlines to meet. Conversely, if you’re pressed for time, this ‘browsing process’ can be a nerve-wracking, highly inefficient experience that will probably end fruitlessly.

To apply this example to the behavior of sales professionals: if they are spending time browsing through your mountain of educational content, regardless of whether the content is readily available in easy to consume formats, or if it is neatly organization, they aren’t selling. To minimize their time spent toiling away in your content library, present to them content that is most relevant to their immediate needs. Be their personal shopper.

An effective personal shopper knows their customer’s purchase history and preferences, and is able to translate the subtle cues of what catches their customer’s eye into what they are most likely looking for. Effective personal shoppers thin-slice.

To truly enable sales people and technical people alike, it’s imperative to minimize their time spent searching for the right content and maximize their time spent consuming and applying it.

-       Product Marketing & Management

-       Engineering

-       Channels Enablement

Each group is responsible for disseminating information commensurate with their job responsibilities. As follows, they bear the burden of creating slides and presentations that communicate sales and technical concepts from multiple perspectives. This often leaves the audience to sift through a number of slides and discern which slide or set of slides best suits their needs.

Solving this issue saves time and helps to preserve, promote and strengthen your brand. On the surface the process of creating an effective slide library seems cumbersome. I can assure you it is less complicated than it seems and will prove more valuable than you can imagine.

Step 1: Make the slides easily available

Making the slide library easily accessible is a no brainer. Making it available regardless of the office productivity suite (MS Office, Open Office, etc.) is another story.

Most slides are authored in PowerPoint although they are often consumed, edited and presented via Google Docs and Open Office. Although these office platforms are designed to work together, formatting nuances don’t always translate.

Deploying a slide library where the user can output a presentation in PDF, Open Office or Microsoft Office formats solves this problem handily. Enriching the slide library with the ability to search, sort and order the slides inline only enhances the experience overall.

In short, this capability:

-       Alleviates the need for the entire library to be downloaded

-       Ensures branding and formatting are consistent across versions

-       Guarantees current versions of the library are always available

Step 2: Communicate how to use slides and presentations

Communicating how to use the library of slides is key to their effective and ongoing usage. This will limit the creation and use of rogue presentations that use outdated and/or off brand material.

To effectively communicate the “How To” for slides and canned presentations use the following guidelines:

-       Communicate the value of the library to the audience upfront

-       Demonstrate how to use and build presentations

-       Communicate which audiences the slides and presentations address

-       Organize the slides and presentations by audience type

-       Retire old information regularly

-       Provide a method for communicating when library updates have occurred