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What is a partner marketing concierge service?
A marketing concierge service is a third-party agency like Macro that acts as a natural extension of your team. The concierge team augments and extends your capacity for white glove partner marketing initiatives supporting your go-to-market strategy.
The team easily adapts to your current processes and work streams. This results in faster time to execution and the ability to easily scale up or down depending on your channel needs.
Concierge teams usually focus on working closely with your channel partners, advising them on joint-campaign strategies, MDF funding utilization and building relationships with key partners. Having concierge specialists in this role results in more activity with partners resulting in more revenue from the channel.
How can a concierge team fit into your channel marketing strategy?
Besides a better go-to-market alignment with your partners, there are many benefits to a concierge service:
- Build better relationships. Concierge teams’ main focus is in helping partners select and execute campaigns, so they play a crucial advisor role with Partners that may not have dedicated marketing capabilities.
- Manage channel operation. The concierge team should have a pulse on activities in your channel, from your strategies down to how partners execute your plans. They’ll be able to identify opportunities and improve processes.
- Fill in for full-time Partner resources. Sometimes, Partners might not have many (or any!) marketing resources. For them, executing vendor campaigns could be impossible. A concierge service will step into this role, benefiting both partner and vendor.
- Digital technology expertise. A good concierge team is an expert in the ZiftONE channel platform solution. So when partners need help within the ZiftONE platform, they would come to Macro for help. This saves you a lot of effort
- Getting more out of your channel tech investments. Too often, an organization invests in enterprise software only to end up using a third of its capacity. A concierge team with platform experience can often find ways to leverage the technology capabilities to their full potential.
- Regional and local market advantages. If you serve a wide geographic area, you know that one-size-fits-all campaigns can flop in certain local markets. A global concierge team with local market knowledge can help tweak, localize and translate the original vendor strategy into something that resonates with each region.
- Freeing up your internal resources. With a large roster of partners, sometimes a channel marketing manager’s job backslides into a project management role. A concierge team can free up a huge amount of time for a marketing manager allowing them to optimize their time and skillset (and probably making them a lot happier too!)
- Agency back-up. While the concierge team will certainly adapt to your processes, chances are they have a whole set of agency knowledge to pull from. These “external” systems are used to bring new capabilities to the table, create efficiencies, and solve problems. This is all background activity to you—but you reap the benefits in the form of faster and smoother execution.
What should be in the concierge scope of work?
Like with all third-party services, defining a scope of work is critical for managing expectations and budgets. In Macro’s experience running a global concierge service, these are the most common elements of a concierge SOW:
- Partner relationship management and advisory. Developing a strong relationship with a channel partner, understanding their needs in relationship to the vendor, and relaying this information.
- ZiftONE platform adoption. Ensuring partners utilize and get the most value from the partner marketing platform by getting set-up and running campaigns.
- Measuring performance. Both leads and opportunities generated from each Partner and each campaign. We advise not focusing on vanity metrics like clicks and opens, but more deeper program performance and attribution of revenue.
Pitfalls you should avoid!
A concierge service has lost its way if any of the following should occur:
- Puting the Partner objectives before the vendor interests
- Focussing on categories of partners that do not yield results
- Working outside the channel strategy scope
- Dealing with technical issues or tech maintenance more than campaigns
How do you evaluate a concierge service?
Hiring a concierge service is not a trivial decision. They will become a core capability, plugged directly into your channel revenue. The following aspects should be vetted ahead of time and monitored throughout the engagement.
- Partner engagement. Capturing the attention of the partners and keeping their level of engagement high.
- Partner satisfaction. Survey your partners to see how satisfied they are with the agency concierge you put forward.
- Channel marketing manager satisfaction: Review how well the concierge team works with your channel marketing managers supporting their objectives.
- Strong channel revenue track record. The concierge agency should have hard data to support both their past and current success in campaigns performance and driving channel revenue
- Technical knowledge. How well does the concierge service understand the core ZiftONE platform that you use to conduct channel marketing? Are they certified or recommended by the platform itself?
The Zift and Macro Strategic Alliance
As a Zift Strategic Alliance partner, the Macro team has a huge domain knowledge of the ZiftONE platform and channel marketing best practices. Macro has helped launch ZiftONE from the ground up for enterprise companies and provides partner marketing concierge services all across the globe.
Channel marketing teams come to Macro when they need help building teams of global partner marketing concierge with channel tech expertise. Reach out to us to explore what a global concierge team can do for you!