How to get channel partners to embrace and amplify your product messaging

Involve partners early and often throughout creation of your product messaging!

It is the key to getting partners to embrace and amplify your B2B software product messaging.

Start the message creation process by selecting two or three of your most engaged channel partners to a team to do the work plus your best partner manager. Make sure channel partners on the team will be able to gather information from at least one customer and ideally two or three.

By naming two or three channel partners to the team you take the first step in a process that will involve partners in steps along the way to a final message that they had a say in its creation.

The next step in the process is to create a group of several channel partners who will provide feedback when the team is doing research and as new versions of the messaging are created.

Open lines of communication with your channel partners

Involving channel partners throughout the message creation process opens lines of communication and creates shared sense of mission.

The team’s first action is to interview channel partners on the team and the group providing feedback. They are an excellent source of relevant information such as who is the No. 1 target buyer, what are the target buyer’s most pressing problems ranked by importance, challenges in the sales cycle and who do you compete most regularly with.

Also they can quickly describe the ideal prospect shedding light on the sales process and how your new messaging can help it. They can tell you the truth about product strengths and weaknesses. You’ll tap into your partners’ battlefront intelligence by asking these questions:

1. Who is their No. 1 target buyer?
2. What are the target buyer’s most pressing problems ranked by importance?
3. What are our product’s strengths and weakness?
4. Why do you win and lose with our product?
5. What factors tell you that you will win a deal?
6. Who are the key competitors?
7. What are key competitors strengths and weakness?
8. Are there any challenges during the sales cycle?
9. Other questions that will give you useful information your competitors, customers and challenges in the sales cycle.

While compiling the answers to the questions, have channel partners on the team and the feedback group interview their customers to learn the following:

1. Why did you become a buyer?
2. How much research did you do before you reached out to us?
3. Why did you decide to consider us?
4. What competitors’ products did you consider seriously?
5. Why did you buy from us?

Findings from interviews with channel partners and their interviews with customers will be good enough to start creating your product messaging. But there’s another step you can take to involve the rest of your channel partners in the process.

Survey the wider channel to gather additional intelligence

Create a survey with results of some of the most important questions you asked channel partners on the team and the feedback group. At the end include some of the customer results for informational purposes only.
Send out the survey with a short explanation of the message creation process and that the goal of the survey is to either confirm the team’s research or improve it.

After an analysis of the survey results, the team may want to make adjustments to the research that will be used to converge on the ideal messaging. Then the brainstorming begins.

Create an initial version of the messaging and seek reaction from the group of channel partners providing feedback. Based on their input, create a new version.

At this point, you may want to add several more channel partners to the feedback loop who provided useful input on the survey.

It may require several iterations of the message based on channel partner input and feedback to develop consensus and buy-in to the final messaging. The effort is well worth it because at least some of your best channel partners will embrace your messaging and use it in all their marketing and sales efforts.

Get your channel behind your product messaging

Once you finalized the messaging you still have work to do to insure that the rest of your channel partners embrace and continually use it.

These activities will help make sure your channel partners continually execute your product messaging in all marketing communications about your product:

1. Assign an internal champion whose role is to evangelize the product messaging when and wherever appropriate by introducing it and explaining the rationale for it. The presentation includes your research that led the team to converge on the final messaging.
2. Schedule a series of three or four webinars that introduce your new messaging with an explanation for how it was created. Once you have done this schedule a quarterly webinar to encourage adoption and use.
3. Incorporate a presentation about the product messaging into your new partner onboarding process.
4. Educate partner managers with a presentation about the new messaging tailored to their situation and needs.
5. Send out a newsletter either bi-weekly or monthly that includes reminders and tips about how to use your product messaging. Include examples such as your home page copy, marketing content even if channel partners have it, and other marketing communications and buyer touchpoints.

By working closely with your channel partners during the message creation processing, they will be in a better position to articulate it to their prospects. The result is more consistent messaging delivered over and over throughout marketing and sales efforts.

Involving channel partners as much as possible while creating your product messaging and continually promoting it will result in your channel partners both embracing and amplifying it. Achieving this goal requires extra time and effort, and the result is well worth it.

When your channel partners execute your message in their marketing and sales conversations, you take advantage of power of consistency and repetition, the keys to claiming a position and giving it staying power in your market. As a result, you will increase target market awareness and demand for your product.

Look for another article about to get your channel partners to use your product messaging when they weren’t involved in the process.

Note to readers: If you don’t have a formal process for positioning and messaging, I can help you adopt the framework I teach and use. It was created by my co-founder (now retired) when he as at Microsoft in the mid-80s.

The framework was used to position and launch Windows 3.0, SQL Server, Visual Basic, C++ and Word for Windows. It is simple, logical and easy to learn and use.

I have evolved and enhanced the framework over time, written a book about how to do it and created an on-line course. Contact me to set up a quick introduction to the framework.