The most commonly missed step in making your products and services channel ready
By Kit Craig, Channel Consulting Director
I love the excellent product quality today. We’re surrounded by technology that works well inside products that are generally well-designed. The vendors behind these technology products are mostly well-governed businesses that comply with our extensive consumer protection laws.
Perversely, that is often a problem when those same vendors want to sell their hardware, software and services through the indirect channel.
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How do you know it’s time to hire a marketing manager?
By Adam Benson, Director
In the B2B sector it’s common to find businesses that have been successful without much focus on outbound marketing (by their own admission).
If you do a quick scan of their marketing there’s a ‘what we do’ kind of website, some designed company credentials documents, a PowerPoint deck for presenting to customers and prospects, maybe some data sheets that explain the range of services and a quoting or proposal template, possibly a customer newsletter and an on-again, off-again attempt at regular blogs or LinkedIn posts.
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How selling your sofa could help with your B2B sales strategy
By Adam Benson, Outsource Director
My family recently moved house. We were packing up and trying to find a home for a few surplus items of furniture that won’t fit in the new place. As a result, I got the job of wrangling with eBay.
As I was trawling through my ‘selling’ list of larger, more costly items, it occurred to me that there are some good lessons to be learned when comparing this experience to lead generation for B2B companies.
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Why is B2B content marketing important for your business?
Creating a content marketing strategy for your B2B business is easy and comes with many benefits. If you want to find out what content marketing is, the types of content marketing you can use, how you can use it in the B2B space, and the benefits you’ll reap from your efforts, read on.
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What really drives your channel performance? A history lesson for IT vendors
By Kit Craig, Channel Consulting Director
Outsource regularly works with IT vendors struggling to maximise channel sales. Usually, according to the vendor, the technology they sell is red hot and should be flying out of their distributor’s warehouse (or the cloud, as the case may be).
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How to choose the right marketing automation solution
By Adam Benson, CEO
I was at the SalesForce World Tour Sydney event this week and there were lots of delegates trying to make sense of what exactly was on offer, why they’d need it and whether they were the right fit for specific solutions. There were a lot of options to consider.
Why LinkedIn should be part of your B2B lead generation strategy
Thanks to business social networking channels like LinkedIn, it is easy to identify potential B2B prospects based on criteria such as industry, role, and seniority. Organisations that are not taking full advantage of this tool are missing out on the opportunity to generate more leads, often at a significantly lower cost than traditional outreach methods.
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How to increase channel sales
By Kit Craig, Channel Consulting Director
What’s important to your indirect channel?
It’s an all-too-common question from IT vendors: “How can I get my resellers to sell more of my stuff?”
OK, it’s usually put in more business-like terms such as “wallet-share”, “percentage of business” or “partner penetration”; but it’s always the same question.
How to generate more B2B leads: five types of interactive content to try
B2B tech audiences love interactivity. For a decade or more, they’ve been on starvation diet of whitepapers, fact sheets and case studies. If any market was ripe for an interactive content marketing makeover, it’s B2B tech audiences.
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Digital Transformation for IT Sellers
By Kit Craig, Channel Consulting Director
Last week I read an excellent article by Nicole Laskowski, Senior News Writer at CIO.com, about Goldman Sachs’ new consumer lending business.
The article is an interview with Goldman’s CIO, Martin Chavez, who talks about having to compete with small, agile, ‘born-in-the-cloud’ lending companies. To compete, Goldman Sachs has to play the born-in-the-cloud game, embracing cloud services and open source software to be a “fintech start-up with 147 years of experience”.
There are four profound lessons in this that IT vendors and their channel partners should be taking to heart, especially those targeting enterprise customers.