The marketing money that high-tech companies spend to help drive channel sales is well intentioned, but perhaps not well spent. Advertising builds brand awareness, trade shows and telemarketing campaigns generate leads, but the real currency of marketing is creating sales meetings and those activities have little direct bearing on sales meetings.

 

This isn’t a new conundrum for marketing organizations, but it’s becoming more prominent as companies look for concrete return on their marketing investments. Anxious to see tangible results, many of them are emphasizing lead-producing activities such as events and telemarketing campaigns. These programs produce a measureable output, but they create relatively few sales meetings compared to the number of dead-end leads. The leads that trade shows and telemarketing campaigns create are usually so raw they’re often of limited value to VARs. For example, on a list of 100 leads from a trade show booth, how many of them signed up because they were interested in the vendor’s product versus how many were just trying to win a free iPod? Telemarketing has similar pitfalls. A prospect might be taking the sales meeting just to get the telemarketer off their back, with no real intent to buy the vendor’s product. VARs don’t have the time or resources to separate the real prospects from the pretenders. They are geared to implement and integrate technology, not to sift through a 100 leads to find two real prospects.

 

The best thing vendors can do to help their VARs score sales meetings is to mobilize an asset they already have: their own information. Non-promotional information about products, technology developments and market trends is a solid foundation for electronic information campaigns that VARs can use to land sales meetings with solid prospects without vetting dozens of useless leads to get to the real ones. A growing array of integrated software platforms give marketing managers the tools to create ready-made packages of content for VARs to customize and self-brand for marketing to prospects. In this scenario, VARs customize pre-populated templates with their own graphics, logos and colors, then send them to prospects either as e-newsletters or pages on Web portals. This gives the VARs direct exposure to customers while still associating them with their vendors.

 

Although compelling content is the main ingredient of e-newsletter marketing programs, the secret ingredient is analytics that reveal what content a prospect reads, which in turn can indicate how likely they are to buy. By clicking on relevant content in e-newsletters, the customers are essentially qualifying themselves as good prospects for a sales meeting. These systems also enable them to schedule meetings with sales representatives, delivering the VAR an opportunity for very little time spent.

 

The cost of these interactive marketing programs is relatively modest — often no more than the expense of buying the software or contracting with a hosting company. The only ongoing expense is creating content, and vendors are already doing that to support their sales and customer service organizations. The problem is that the content is buried on Web sites where a prospect might come across it — but probably won’t. Even if they do, the content is useless for marketing in this form because neither the vendor nor their VARs know when a prospect has looked at it. Proactively pushing the relevant, engaging content toward prospects exponentially increases the chances that it might influence their buying decisions.

 

At the beginning of the online boom, the battle cry was “content is king.” In this content-push vision of marketing, content is the substance that draws the prospect’s attention and keeps them engaged. However, content shares the throne with analytics that reveal the good prospects among the casual browsers. Together, they enable marketing organizations to pay off in the currency that really makes a difference in a VAR’s fortunes — meeting qualified sales prospects face to face.

 

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