The B2B Marketer Spotlight provides a platform for some of our favorite B2B marketers to share insights about their job, their best tips, their B2B skill set, and showcase their marketing and career advice.

This month we are excited to feature Dan Van Meer, Director, Demand Generation & Digital Marketing at VersaPay. I first met Dan at the ABM Summit in Toronto as we were seated next to each other at a vendor-sponsored lunch. Since then, our teams have worked together on creating meaningful thought leadership content for VersaPay.

In working with dozens of enterprise OEMs and ISVs over the years, one of the biggest frustrations we often hear is around the lack of channel partner engagement. Gartner echoes this complaint, stating that, in the average channel program, only 20 percent of partners are engaged and producing.

But if you ask most suppliers, even that number is incredibly optimistic. They’ll even say (mostly off the record) that without their top 5 percent of partners, they might not have any significant channel revenues at all.

We will periodically feature a new B2B marketer answering questions about their job, their best tips, their B2B skill set, and showcase their marketing and career advice.

This month we are excited to feature Mike Moore, Chief Sales and Marketing Officer at Averetek. I first met Mike after attending the “Top 6 Ways to get Channel Partners More Engaged and Productive” webinar that he co-presented. I was impressed by the amount of helpful substance and style of delivery

We will periodically feature a new B2B marketer answering questions about their job, their best tips, their B2B skill set, and showcase their marketing and career advice.

This month we are excited to feature Karen Nguyen, Director of Channel Marketing at Rogers Communications. Karen is passionate about technology and small business success and her job neatly marries these two interests. 

The SiriusDecisions Channel Operating Model is a comprehensive framework on the key processes and activities, by function, required to build, manage and grow a successful indirect business. As an agency, we use it with many of our clients when developing content and programs aimed at partners or their buyers.

The model originally debuted back in 2015 as the SiriusDecisions Channel Program Model and has undergone some minor revisions. In September 2017, a new version of the model was released. 

We will periodically feature a new B2B marketer answering questions about their job, their best tips, their B2B skill set, and showcase their marketing and career advice.

This month we are excited to feature Seth Lieberman. Seth is the CEO of SnapApp, a company that helps marketers create engaging, interactive content. As an agency, we are fans of SnapApp because we create a lot of content for tech and FI clients that are looking for something better than the traditional, boring whitepaper.

There is a clear demand for your SaaS product as a steady flow of users have signed up for a free trial account. However, you’ve done the math and you’ve done some research on industry benchmark rates for trial conversation and your month over month lead conversion rate isn’t where it should be. 

So it’s time to stop focusing on demand generation and it’s time to start putting more attention on getting these trial users converted into paid users.

Ever been on a conference call? Then it’s highly probable that you smiled, laughed or smirked when you recently came across a picture of a bingo card with the squares filled out with common phrases and faux pas that we’ve all heard. It’s also highly probable that you shared it.

The author of Conference Call Bingo is E Gilliam. She’s the Head of Creative Services at Equinix. I met her in the December of 2016 and I was immediately struck by her easygoing nature and her sense of humor.

What percentage of your total revenues are sourced by your partner channel? Is there an opportunity to grow this number?

Regardless of how you answered the 1^st question, I’m sure the answer to the second question is a variation of “of course there’s an opportunity to grow it, but our channel team is really small and it’s hard to get the attention of our partners!”.