The second day of CRN Pipeline 2023 began with Mogrify co-founder and director Melanie Unwin on how channel partners can update their campaigns to the challenges of the modern marketing lanscape, and how they can avoid three common pitfalls.
Mogrify’s survey of IT buyers and more than 100 partners found “only three percent of partners believe that their marketing is highly effective for growth”.
“And further, only six percent of the people we spoke to believed that the actions they’d taken to grow and promote their brands had been highly effective,” Unwin said.
Unwin said that three common marketing pitfalls stood out in the survey:
- Failing to communicate the value of a specialist offering to a target customer at the right stage of their buying journey
- Measuring marketing ROI in the short-term instead of the long-term
- Siloing sales and marketing teams
Unwin cited a recent Deloitte survey that found that compared to 2021, 75 per cent more buyers said they use more sources to research and evaluate purchases; the average enterprise buyer consults at least 10 pieces of information before a purchase.
This gave rise to two important questions to answer.
“How do we sell our solutions to increasingly demanding customers with increasingly complex needs?
“How am I going to sell my complex technical solutions to a wider audience?”
Failing to pitch specialist offerings to target markets
Unwin listed the symptoms of an managed service provider not communicating a vendor’s solution or a bespoke offering in a way that speaks of its value at the right stage of a customer’s buying journey.
She asked the room if their teams could clearly define their target audience or break different customers into target personas.
Do they understand how to communicate their solution at the right stage of the business’s buying journey?
Is the customer at the stage where they’ve just identified the problem?
Or are they half way through solving it?
Is the customer in a rapid growth phase?
Or is there a downturn?
“Do we have a segmented database? Did we lose some people by just sending one message too many? Who’s our target market? Is it anyone who needs cybersecurity? That’s too big to be a target!"
Unwin said that for MSPs, “coming up with a brand proposition is really challenging because a lot of you do similar things; so it's about just thinking of your value propositions in a bit more detail,” and which niche to focus on.
A lot of partners were vying for an all-encompassing managed services agreement, she added, when they should be starting with a specialist offering “to get a foot in the door and drive in a wedge.”
Once an MSP has proved their value with a specialist offering for a specific problem in a specific industry and made themselves sticky, “then you can cross-sell and upsell really well.”
Measuring marketing ROI in the short term
Channel partner were making the second pitfal - measuring marketing ROI in the short term - because of “outdated ROI models,” Unwin said.
“Back in the day, you could probably get away with buying lists; blasting it with some messaging; you'd be pushing your services; you definitley wouldn't be personalising the emails; you probably wouldn't be segmenting them; you’d throw everyone into one bucket and ask them ‘this is our solution do you want it?’”
Too many channel partners have been using “traditional models” that focus on “measuring marketing ROI from campaign to campaign,” Unwin said.
“There's an end date; they focus on your use of specific and really easy-to-measure channels, but the don’t work for more mobile marketing.
“And crucially, that doesn’t take into account what's gone into developing your key marketing assets or setting up any marketing infrastructure like automation platforms.”
Channel partner should pivot to models that measure ROI for “more holistic marketing” that uses “multiple channels” and has “multiple goals” such as “brand awareness, customer retention and customer acquisition,” she said; “this is continuous marketing.”
“So for example, if you've spent a fair amount of time tidying up your website or getting some decent market-tech in place, and building out some core assets you're now 30 grand down but you've had no return on that money yet because all you've done is build assets.
“The only ROI you're gonna get is if you spend money on using those assets repeatedly over a long period of time.”
Siloed marketing and sales team
An MSP with a siloed marketing and sales team is easy to diagnose, Unwin said; there are three common symptoms.
“They’ve said ‘let’s hire a marketer and their job is to generate new leads’ or there’s a handover of leads from marketing to sales or they’re using two separate platforms for marketing and sales; generally the sales team is using the same platform as your ticketing/support team.”
Unwin said that if marketing just give sales new leads to put into their customer relationship management system, key information will be lost in transit; they need to share insights about what value propositions are resonating with which customers and why.
“It deprives everyone knowledge of what’s actually working and what marketing activity converts to a close and it can pits the two teams against each other as well.”
Breaking the process into two stages where marketing focus on nurturing demand through digital channels and then sales use qualified leads to close deals face-to-face was also based on an outdated model of buying behaviour, Unwin added.
“Customers are buying using their own research and using both digital and in-person channels.”
She said that Deloitte’s research had found that “67 per cent of the buyer journey takes place on digital channels,” and that there is a rapid increase in online sales via login portals and marketplace.
“Buyers are 60 to 100 per cent of the way through their buying journey before we hear about them.”
Unwin said that Mogrify advised its MSP clients to have their sales and marketing teams hold at least one joint meeting a week .
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