For the last few years, I’ve had a severe case of FOMO during late February. It’s the week of the B2B Marketing Exchange (B2BMX) conference, and I had only heard and read good things about it. This year, I decided to bite the bullet and spend a week in Phoenix. Of course, both my wife and daughters got sick while I was gone, so I couldn’t gloat too much about the warm sunshine. Not all heroes wear capes.

I spent most of my time on the Channel Marketing Track and picked up a lot of great ideas. Here are 5 of my key takeaways.

Managed Service Providers face marketing challenges that are not inherently present for all B2B companies.

Due to the technical nature of MSP services, crafting marketing communications is more complex. The sales cycle is longer, necessitating nurturing to keep you top of mind. A deluge of constant information, updates and noise is vying for the attention of your target audience.

In late September, a few of us from the GET LIFT team had the opportunity to attending Relevance ‘19, 360insights’ first-ever channel-focused conference in Toronto. It was a full-day event with over 100 attendees and I’m pleased to say it was definitely worth our time. Here’s one takeaway from each of the speakers. 

Many members of the GET LIFT team attended ConEx 2019 in Toronto last week. It was 3 intense days of education, networking and idea sharing on everything to do about content.

We would recommend this conference to B2B marketers as there were plenty of excellent sessions that contained real world examples, engaging speakers and plenty of little gems worth writing down.  

Marketing mistakes aren’t unique to Managed Services Providers (MSPs). Anyone who has ever worked on any form of marketing campaign has stumbled, to some degree, when rolling out new initiatives. What’s interesting is, collectively MSPs seem to be tripping themselves up with the same core issues.

As a B2B Channel Marketing Agency, we’re very interested in the latest stats and trends that reflect the vendor and channel partner dynamic. Our clients often ask us about best practices and stats as they can be helpful when building a business case or when trying to create change within their company.

To help you keep pace with some of the latest data in B2B channel partner marketing, we’ve compiled a list of 20 intriguing statistics and charts from recent studies (there’s a lot of outdated info in many of the lists that we researched!) 

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.

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. 

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!”.