Gifts All Around

Happy Holidays all.  In the spirit of giving the topic today is .... (Drum Roll) ...Free stuff!!!  Okay, okay, there is a "horn a plenty" of free today.  How about this?  Useful free stuff for the partner ecosystem. 

I recently attended a conference that was truly packed with great info, interesting people and generally was worth the entry fee.  On the last afternoon, 4 hours listening to a wonderful speaker, Susan Sweeney educate the room on different aspects of internet marketing.  One of the sessions Susan lead was devoted to Great Internet Tools and Gadgets.  It provided me the inspiration to sort through internet tools and highlight the ones that I think have the greatest leverage in the partnering business.  I encourage you to visit Susan's site an even broader list of gadgets as well as her books and services.

In addition to Susan's talk and my experience, I surveyed colleagues and business partners to assemble the master list.  A couple of notes.  First, programs like Facebook and LinkedIn that we discussed earlier are not included and secondly this is a much edited list.

MailChimp  These folks offer free mailings for lists under 500 addresses.  The tools to create nice looking email are on the site.  They have a huge library of videos and FAQs to help you run a successful campaign and a dashboard so that you can monitor the progress.  Who doesn't need more SPAM?

Content Circles  Share files with partners outside or inside the firewall at the drop of a hat.  Content Circles allow you to work with together on documents and everyone is kept up to date with the latest version. Think about working on a coop marketing program or trying to get coordinated for a multi-company seminar or sharing working documents with clients during a consulting engagement.  Document management for the rest of us.

Knowem  This site checks a long list of web sites and social media services for your company's name and allows you to reserve it. This is a huge time saver and maybe helps you to check sites that your staff would not get to.

The Way Back Machine  Kind of an interesting notion, you can go back and check versions of web sites.  Maybe you are looking for historical information on a competitor or trying to remember who the old sales VP was for a partner.

Issuu  Very interesting site, PDF can be cumbersome on the web, especially for rich documents.  Well, Issuu will take a PDF document and turn it into a web friendly Flash file.  There are thumbnails to flip through, pages to flip like a book or pamphlet.  Make your price book or parts catalog sexy.

Google Analytics  This is the tool everyone should be using with your web site.  Got to pay attention to the site, but why pay cash to do so.  This should be more than enough for any small or medium sized business.

Free Conference Call  Don't pay for con calls, ATT is big enough.  Signup here and hold your staff meeting with your traveling staff for free.

Enjoy.

Don't Let Complexity Scare You.

"My product is too complex for the channel"!  Have you heard that before?  Sometimes is used as a catch all statement to justify a direct only sales approach to the board, other times it means that the product truly is hard to set up or sell.  Do you buy the argument?  If so you will miss out on sales, but don't worry the competition will handle it.

"I think complexity is mostly sort of crummy stuff that is there because it's too expensive to change the interface."

~Jaron Lanier, (Lanier is best known for his work in Virtual Reality)

In many cases I think that Jaron is right, really clever products have wonderfully simple interfaces, iPod comes quickly to mind.  However as you peel back the onion, complex products fall into one of three camps:

     1)  The Productoid - this product that escapes rather than is finished.  Charitably it can be called a tool kit.  Whatever term you want to use, it is a lump of code that requires lots of labor to make it work, likely is a challenge to work with as the API's if they exist are poorly documented.  The best outcome for this type of product in the channel is to uncover sales leads.  If the product is refined, and polished perhaps more can come from channel partners.  Typically what happens is that the product gets a bad name among channel partners and the vendor returns the feeling saying that the channel provides no value.  The one thing everyone agrees is that the foray into the channel was a failure.

     2)  Integration Nation - This product is in the middle of a number of different systems and must be integrated with each of them.  The skills required are an experienced computer scientist with broad experience, ie they will have implemented many different products.  With an organized approach an army of skilled implementers can be developed from resellers and systems integrators.  As long as the customer sees the advantage of the product, you can succeed in the channel.  This integration challenge is typical in the High-Tech world so firm's can expect to get distribution and implementation leverage.

     3)  The McKinsey Effect - The last category is the product that requires a ton of business process knowledge, either about a particular type of an industry or a functional area.  Examples are Cerner Corporation with it's Health Care Information System a cheerful customer requires this CRM be implemented by people familiar with hospitals, content management software for building and maintaining web sites require companies to establish black and white  procedures for making changes, i.e. who approves what changes or by what processes are changes approved - the functions of the software are easy compared with guiding a company to establish formal procedures which may change the behavior of their employees.  This type of software requires a business analyst rather than a technologist. 

The first step is to carefully decide on your target channel partners, always important it is critical with complex products.  A pharmacy automation tool in the hands of a catalog reseller is a "match made in heck".   For integration challenges, find resellers with experience implementing some of the applications to be integrated with.  They will have to some direct experience and the foundational knowledge to succeed.  In addition, the company will be open to talking with you as they understand the business potential.  

A business process product will do better in the hands of a  reseller from that industry who can speak the language and understand the customer's business.  They can be hard to find and harder to engage in a conversation as many times they have a singular focus.  However once your firm gets their attention the value proposition can be a nice match as you have a new product or service for their existing customers.

Okay you have a identified the right profile resellers, what next?  Determine what you want from the channel, drive the organization to be realistic.  Complex products are slow going, so plan to stay for the full journey.  A word of caution, sometimes the need is so great for the product that there is a bow wave of interest and sales which generates excitement but then the implementation challenges slow the process and dampen the excitement as well as sales.  Keep you finger on the pulse of the channel so you aren't surprised.    Data Loss Prevention (DLP) is a recent case of the trend, it is not clear if DLP has yet recovered.  

Leads, leads, leads is what you are going to get initially from the channel and if you do be happy.  Qualified leads cost your marketing department $350 to $750 each.  Focus your attention, program and energies here.  What that means is that your company is going to do the heavy lifting with the product.  So your training goal is to provide a concise knowledge of the product to both technical and business folks at the reseller but then your team will focus on teaching the resellers how to uncover a need and mechanics of a sale, i.e. who is typically the decision maker, who do you initially approach with the value proposition, etc.  The key deliverable from the vendor is a clear explanation of the need for the product and who cares about the problem being solved.  With each sale by a reseller you transfer more knowledge, pretty soon that reseller will take control of more and more of the sales process.  

Once you have the "front end" the process tight then you can move to technical certifications and leveraging the technical resources of the reseller.  One of the classic mistakes is for an organization to fixate on getting technical leverage first, not going to happen until there is a business case.  Steer your organization away from this pitfall, set the expectations of sales first.  When you start the technology transfer phase, be careful not to scare the resellers away by making the coursework too long.  Segment the training into bit sized pieces, maybe teach how to install and configure first if your product is a real "bear" work with.  That all said you should pitch the opportunity for services revenue to the reseller, if only to set the expectations for the future.

Never fear complex product can be sold successfully with partners, you don't have to go it alone.

Not Just for Kids

First things first, thanks to all of the comments and thoughts that people sent about the first Blog.  A quick reminder that my focus in this Blog is partnering, and how to be more successful in this endeavor.  A broad review of social media is not part of my aim.  

Now to business, what does one do with this new found knowledge about social media.  The answer is lots of things, customer support and brand building are two of the most popular, however we are going to concern ourselves here what you can do to enhance the partner business, starting with the partner portal.

If you jump into the old time machine. remember the promise of Partner Portals.  Private secure islands in the wonderful world of the web.  They promised to replace binders, monthly mailers, banks of people on the phone.  Partners could get product information 24x7.  We all spent tons (“tons” is a technical term meaning way more than planned) money on our portals.  Then they grew from informational to active with deal registration, participate in contests, lead distribution, certification, yada, yada.

What happened?  They didn’t get used to the degree envisioned or by the people and partners we most wanted.  Partner portals are a good but not great tool.  The fatal flaw in my experience....too many.  Every vendor and each distributor developed one (sometimes more than one) and it overwhelmed the individual.  A mid sized VAR has 100 to 150 product lines which means for each sales person has an overwhelming number of passwords, all with different formats.  They can end up largely private library’s with few visitors. 

“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place”

George Bernard Shaw

What to do?  Let Facebook or LinkedIn (or your favorite) host your portal and leverage their existing community, make it easy for individuals to use.  There are 250 million people with Facebook accounts, 45 million at LinkedIn, many partner employees will have existing accounts.  Any that don’t have accounts certainly have heard about the services and are likely to be open to joining.  This goes a long way toward solving the access challenge.  Monthly operating cost = 0.  

After you have set up an account for your business, next steps: populate with relevant content, invite individuals at partners, encourage questions and comments to establish a community, make announcements, keep the content relevant.  You are striving for active participation, relevance, a true Web 2.0 portal, not a yesterday’s web portal, which means that your team must be actively involved in the conversations.  To stay relevant you must answer the questions, deal with the controversial issues out in the open.  The process will allow greater transparency with your partners and help build trust, but it may be uncomfortable dealing with issues in the open, be ready.  Both LinkedIn and Facebook have security setting that will help you manage access, it appears to me that Facebook’s settings may be the better fit for this model.  

The next step is to leverage the API’s or interfaces provided by these platforms.  You can use the API’s to write applets to do deal registration, or manage coop funds or integrate into exiting applications.  LinkedIn’s Intelligent Applications platform is designed to get LinkedIn into your applications and the ability to get your applications into LinkedIn.  LinkedIn and others support Google’s OpenSocial set of API’s which promise more options.  Facebook started out open and extendable, heck there is even a “Building Facebook Applications for Dummies” book.  An ancillary benefit of the platforms is that they are already encompass the mobile user. 

After all this, get it used. Recruit your most engaged partners to use the platform, to start conversations, to tell other partners how cool and useful your partner “portal” is, get on the phone with editors to tell them what you are doing, give speeches about your creation, publicize successes, create a buzz.

There is an elephant in the room...Advertising.  Yes you will have to put up with advertising (not on the mobile side, today) but it is a small price to pay to leverage existing communities to ease the communications burden with your partners, build communities around your business at a fraction of the cost with easier access for your constituents than a “DIY”(Do It Yourself) portal.  Leveraging the technology is great however the true cost is building the community and these services give you a “leg up”.

Jeremiah Owyang, Senior Analyst, Forrester Research. “Extending useful business applications on top of existing business communities will bring a new opportunity for efficiency — business communities will be more productive.”

Become 3-dimensional in your partner interaction with Web 2.0.  Leverage the platforms and existing communities, build an applet to extend the platform if you need to, but concentrate your effort on keeping to the message fresh, establishing a dialog and electronically reaching out to your partners.  

If the Pentagon is Studying Social Networking Shouldn’t You?

WASHINGTON, Aug 5, 2009  The Pentagon has launched a study of the use of social networking sites designed to help craft new policies on how the military should use services such as Facebook and Twitter.  

Officials said they needed to craft rules that would allow the military to take advantage of the speedy communications without exposing sensitive information or opening computer networks to potential risks.

The answer is yes and yes, you should be studying social networking and should be integrating it into your channel/partnering business.  Why?  

Certainly not a surprise to get this advice, Facebook, Twitter are in your face all the time, who is buying who how does one or the other make money, yada yada yada.  And many of your firms have in fact already engaged in some type of Web 2.0 activity, 88% of marketers in a recent study (Michael Stelzner, March 2009).  However, 72% are new to social media in business and the vast majority have focused on generating exposure for the business.  Great, good, super, however I believe that a stronger value proposition is in cost effectively tightening and expanding business relationships.  Trust, transparency, frictionless access to information will lead to mutually beneficial relationships. The “life blood” of a successful channel, OEM relationship or a business development partnership. 

First “Yes”, study the various social media available.  It is time well spent to learn about the options and how they work, not just technically but etiquette and rituals of the community.  You’re not in Kansas anymore and these are not web sites.  Social media is a medium that can make you seem like a interloper at the cool people’s party in high school if you get it wrong.  Each of the services have established customs.  Run aground of them and your followers or friends or links, etc may turn against you.  Some are established by the provider and you see these in the terms of service or use page at each site.  LinkedIn prohibits you from using a cartoon as your profile picture, it is the “professional tool”, while in Facebook you will see offers to create a cartoon for you and Homer Simpson seems to have dozens of Facebook pages under many names.

The harder knowledge to gain are the codes of behavior that have grown up in the community.  At Twitter for example, there is a conflict inside the community with one side saying one should primarily tell the world what you are doing at that moment and a more liberal side that supports topical Twittering.  The best advice is to follow or listen to what is going on for awhile.  There are a number of good books that happily teach the ins and outs of these worlds.   There are many ways to have social media blow up on you and either waste your time or horror of horrors hurt your firm.  One absolute across all “E” media, social or otherwise anything that looks like SPAM is a no no.  When in doubt, adding value is the path to take.

What tools do you have in your bag of tricks?  Tons, hundreds, gallons....a bunch to be more accurate.  InsideCRM.com offers an article “50 Social Sites That Every Business Needs a Presence on” , Traffikd.com beats that with a categorized list of 400 social media sites.  Interesting references go to it if you want, visit them all, who needs family interaction.  However, I want to highlight a few of the sites with my opinions.

LinkedIn - This is the grand daddy of Web 2.0 professional networking sites.  It is a relationship based tool vs. connection based.  People must accept your invitation to join your network.  LinkedIn has extended itself to offer communities from Red Sox Nation to a CIO forum.

Facebook - It is hard to escape stories about Facebook, it is the social networking giant with 250 million active users.  Interesting twist here is that there are API’s that make it feasible to extend or integrate with Facebook.  

Twitter - Immediate and concise.  Your Tweets have to be 140 characters or less, so get to the point.  This is a great tool for immediate communication to your partners.  Firms can also extend and integrate Twitter.

YouTube - Video beats the heck out of power point slides and it is cheap.  Heck with the Flip video cameras you can upload direct to YouTube and your partners can watch the demo rather than read the script.

Content Circles - Gotcha! this is a new one.  This is an ad hoc document management system, set up a “circle”, invite partners, and develop documents together always knowing the most current version.  Disclaimer, I know the team and have done work with them.  

What do we do with this new Web 2.0 knowledge?  We will deal with shortly