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In a recent Partners GTM Survey, 73% of companies with a partner program said that they rely on partners for +25% of their revenue. However, partner marketing teams are most often lean and responsible for the entirety of the partner lifecycle. This means that partner marketers are under more pressure than ever to juggle multiple priorities and enable partners to accelerate their sales, build pipeline and meet revenue goals. To say that partner marketers are strapped for time and constantly facing new challenges is an understatement, particularly as revenue goals for 2025 start to shift even higher in the partner and channel spaces.
TechTarget recently sat down to discuss the reality of limited resources in partner marketing with partner marketing leaders Pooja Golechha (Pegasystems) and Tonya Vincent (CyberArk) in a Partner Marketing Visionaries episode What’s Keeping You Up at Night? Overcoming Common Partner Marketing Challenges. Both speakers agreed that with a lack of resources and constantly shifting priorities, partner marketers need to be efficient and creative.
Pooja highlights, “Top of mind for me is to do more with less. Of course, we’re here to drive growth, whether it’s accelerating deals or new business. When budgets are tight and resources are limited, we are constantly trying to see how we can do more and add speed to our programs.”
Doing more with less isn’t always easy – but our speakers recommend three strategies to be more efficient in partner marketing.
1. Align with broader teams
It’s 2024 and all marketing teams are strapped for time, resources and budget. Why not work together to help each other achieve goals?
Pooja suggests, “The opportunity here is to align with those teams and see what we can do together. As partner marketers, we’re always building a strategy with our partners. But can we align with our field teams to then lead the execution or take their help in executing regionally?”
In addition to working with field marketing teams, aligning partner marketing efforts to other marketing teams may also work more effectively. For example, Pooja is also speaking at TechTarget’s upcoming Reach Summit, where she’ll be walking through A Practical Guide to Getting Started with ABM in Partner Marketing. If account-based marketing (ABM) is the right fit for your partner marketing strategy, consider working with your ABM teams to support partner campaign execution.
Furthermore, there’s no reason to make joint campaigns more complicated than they need to be. Why not leverage product marketing teams from your partner organizations to ensure that joint messaging is aligned, consistent and accurate?
Tonya has had good experiences working with campaign strategy teams for partner marketing efforts. “We have an amazing campaign strategy team. Not only are we working with them to build partner campaign kits for consistency and alignment of message for how we want to go to market, but when a partner is interested in executing a campaign, we’re leveraging a campaign strategist for their expertise.”
There are so many ways to work with broader teams across multiple partner organizations, whether they are focused on sales, marketing or product.
2. Leverage specialized partner marketing agencies
Small partner marketing teams may be challenged by the sheer amount of effort it takes to stand up joint campaigns. In this case, our speakers recommend leveraging specialized partner marketing organizations/agencies to scale programs.
TechTarget offers multiple ways to scale partner marketing programs through our Partner Marketing Services, including strategy, content, demand and channel solutions. Whether you’re looking to execute campaigns-in-a-box for joint campaigns, validate your joint messaging, create sponsored content or generate high-quality leads, TechTarget can help.
Contact us to learn how TechTarget can help you be more efficient and effective in your partner marketing goals.
3. Create repeatable and scalable programs
Pooja questions, “If we’ve had success with one partner in a particular region or industry, how can we take that success to other regions, to other markets?”
Creating repeatable and scalable programs can help partners go-to-market more efficiently, ensuring a quicker build in demand. These scalable programs can also help with joint brand consistency and sustainability.
Partner marketing campaigns, particularly through-partner campaigns relying on MDF funding, typically span one fiscal quarter (three months). By creating repeatable and scalable programs, partners have a reliable, tried-and-true approach that they can leverage to garner more success over multiple quarters.
TechTarget’s Anita Covelli, who moderated this discussion, believes that repeatability is incredibly important to partner marketing and partner success. “Finding a campaign structure that works and repurposing it – that’s the secret sauce. Being able to duplicate a campaign-in-a-box across other partners to help scale that demand creation is really effective,” Anita agrees.
Furthermore, Tonya suggests, “Utilize a campaign strategist to ensure partners are using the right channels themselves within the campaign that we have found effective, across that customer journey from awareness to consideration to decision to purchase.” Integrating teams in order to create effective scalability with the right amount of differentiation across partners may be the “secret sauce” for partner marketers.
In our Partner Marketing Visionaries Community, we’re always looking for ways that partner marketers can be more effective and innovative in their partner marketing strategies. If you have ideas for how partner marketers can do more with less, consider joining our LinkedIn Group to share your best practices.
If you’re interested in learning more about how to maximize partner marketing impact, watch the full webinar here.