Vendors have a big job when it comes to budgeting for sales and marketing activities. Compared to channel partner enablement, it is simpler and more cost-effective to empower internal teams by helping them communicate a marketing message, providing them with sales tools and tracking success metrics. This is because vendors have to run a complete communications campaign just to get channel partners to use all of the tools available to them. It’s easier to get a direct sales team on board.

Yet, no direct sales strategy can compete with a partner channel that is both agile and streamlined. The trick is being able to control a cohesive message, provide sales tools and show ROI for hundreds or thousands of channel partners. That’s where content syndication and marketing automation come in to play.

When you increase the body over which you are broadcasting that message — through a partner channel — it becomes exponentially more difficult to maintain and update. But a channel strategy increases the number of touch-points a vendor has with the end customer. No direct sales strategy can even come close to meeting the same volume. Thus, there is a trade-off. It is much simpler to control a marketing message about a product or other offering if it is confined within a direct sales organization. However, if a vendor’s main POS is on partner websites, a content syndication strategy is the best way to control and update content on hundreds or even thousands of partner websites. And as a complement, a marketing automation platform makes it easy for partners to drive leads to those partner websites with cobranded email campaigns and auto-generated landing pages, complete with lead capture and ROI tracking. In the end, controlling a marketing message becomes just as easy and cost-efficient as doing it through direct sales, plus you increase the number of leads.

With a direct sales strategy, it is vendor vs vendor. There is only competition for the customer’s attention. In an industry where so many vendors sell similar products, it becomes necessary to increase the number of places for customer interaction to stand out. With a partner channel, vendors can compete on two levels: the customer and the channel partner. And channel partners will showcase a vendor over its competitors if vendors make it easy enough for them. So a vendor could potentially beat the competition not because it has a better product, but because it has a better relationship with partners.

One key way to help channel partners become better marketers of vendor products is by automating processes that take additional time and resources for them to implement. With a direct sales team, a vendor must have a complete infrastructure to support any enablement efforts. With a partner channel, vendors can use a content syndication and marketing automation platform to make it easy for partners to perform marketing activities. For example, if you have email campaign templates partners can download, cobrand and send, don’t just put them in a partner portal for partners to download. That isn’t what a vendor would do with a direct sales team. It would be sent for them. Give partners the same — an automated place where they can select a campaign template, upload or purchase a list and create all the appropriate lead capture and metrics tracking in a few easy steps. Also, vendors don’t make direct sales teams update content on the corporate website, so you can’t expect your partners to have the appropriate resources to update product content on their websites. Setting up a content syndication pipeline will dramatically improve a partner’s website and your relationship with them.

Whether it’s with direct or channel sales, it is important for companies to find the most cost-effective methods of getting product information and promotions in front of the end consumer in the quickest way possible. The bottom line is that vendors need to do things that will increase partner loyalty and dependence while improving channel partner relationships without sacrificing direct sales resources. With that being said, the methods channel marketers use to make their partners better marketers will largely determine which vendor partners focus their time and resources on selling.

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