Best of LinkedIn: Channel Marketing CW 23/ 24

00:00:00: This episode is provided by Thomas Allgaier and Franis, based on the most relevant LinkedIn posts about channel marketing in calendar weeks twenty-three and twenty four.

00:00:09: Franus is a B to B market research partner helping ICT and tech providers identify niche channel partners.

00:00:15: by compressing the full journey from identification to qualified first meeting into four or five weeks you can find more info.

00:00:23: So, today we're really extracting the absolute top channel marketing trends that we've seen surface across a highly curated set of LinkedIn content from just

00:00:40: incredibly overwhelming.

00:00:41: But imagine leaving like three million dollars on the table this year,

00:00:44: which is painful to even think about honestly

00:00:47: right?

00:00:47: And not because your product failed or you know Your sales team missed their quota but simply Because your partner ecosystem Is running on This dusty twenty-twenty two playbook.

00:00:57: today We're really tearing down The illusion that You can still survive On these random acts of marketing.

00:01:01: yeah

00:01:01: That's the reality check we're seeing across all of data right now.

00:01:05: We are moving into a highly orchestrated, AI-driven and marketplace centric channel... reality.

00:01:14: The era of just throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what partner sticks is officially over?

00:01:18: Absolutely, over.

00:01:19: and let's start with that shift actually because before we even get into this shiny new AI tools or these massive cloud marketplaces.

00:01:26: We have to look at the fundamental mechanics Of how we actually mark it with partners.

00:01:30: foundational stuff.

00:01:31: Yeah

00:01:31: exactly there was a massive pivot happening away from ad hoc one-off campaigns.

00:01:37: the focus Is entirely on building this relentless repeatable partner marketing engine and Will Taylor brought some pretty staggering data to the table on this.

00:01:47: He

00:01:47: really did, we'll point it out that when a partner is involved deals close forty six percent faster right?

00:01:52: And they also run thirty two percent larger.

00:01:54: plus.

00:01:54: companies actually invest in partnerships are twenty four per cent more likely hit their revenue targets so that translates into leaving anywhere from one point for three million dollars on the table annually if you just skip the partners step entirely.

00:02:05: Wait, I'm looking at these numbers.

00:02:06: Thirty-two percent larger deals.

00:02:08: I have to play devil's advocate here.

00:02:10: if it is that lucrative you know why isn't every CRO pouring their entire budget into channel marketing?

00:02:18: Like what is actually breaking down operationally that causes so many of these programs to fail?

00:02:23: well

00:02:23: they failed because companies skip the unglamorous operational heavy lifting.

00:02:29: You Know They Get The Signed Agreement partners logo on a directory listing, they do like a forty five minute kickoff call and then crickets exactly nothing.

00:02:38: They expect revenue to just magically appear out of thin air .They don't actually build the engine.

00:02:43: will Taylor breaks down this required engine into four specific parts?

00:02:46: Okay let's hear them.

00:02:47: first you have to actually document the system so everyone involved has total clarity on the process.

00:02:52: second You run a shared content calendar Just Like A Standard Internal Marketing Team Does

00:02:57: Which Makes Total Sense Right.

00:02:59: Third, you leverage AI to carry the production burden.

00:03:01: You know drafting the blogs writing the webinar promos.

00:03:05: and fourth you automate The follow-through with milestone reminders so deals don't just will die in the pipeline.

00:03:10: that brings up something Christina Carstensen noted.

00:03:13: That feels so relatable.

00:03:15: She asked a room full of partner marketers what their biggest pet peeve was?

00:03:19: And the overwhelming answer was this standalone Webinar.

00:03:23: Oh man...the ultimate random act of marketing

00:03:26: It really is.

00:03:27: Think about how this usually plays out, someone in leadership says hey we need to activate this partner quickly let's do a joint webinar and it's treated as the entire campaign.

00:03:36: A total scramble.

00:03:37: Yeah Usually just a frantic rush to satisfy marketing development funds or MDF.

00:03:41: You know you beg sales for an email list?

00:03:43: You send out a generic invite maybe twenty people show up And then you never speak of that again.

00:03:47: Right obviously it yields zero pipeline.

00:03:50: Exactly Christina makes the point that for a webinar to actually generate revenue, it has to be just one touchpoint in a much broader buyer journey.

00:04:00: You have engineer before warming up this shared audience with co-branded content and social outreach

00:04:06: And you absolutely need after too

00:04:08: For sure Turning that recording into white papers, social snippets and moving those specific registrants in to a targeted nurture sequence.

00:04:15: I mean the webinar is just middle of funnel not whole funnel.

00:04:19: That's so true!

00:04:19: And if we zoom out bit perfectly illustrates what Ricky Currier has been seeing out on market.

00:04:24: He spoke six global heads partner marketing at major tech companies.

00:04:29: We're talking many north billion in revenue.

00:04:32: So these are serious players.

00:04:33: What do they say?

00:04:34: The consensus was brutal.

00:04:35: honestly Partner marketers are basically stuck operating as glorified event coordinators.

00:04:41: They're bogged down in just reactive tactical planning,

00:04:45: but leadership needs something entirely different from them now.

00:04:48: I mean, they don't need someone to order branded stress balls or book Zoom rooms.

00:04:52: No!

00:04:53: Leadership needs them to be CMOs of partnerships.

00:04:55: They need strategic orchestration.

00:04:58: That means building real infrastructure You know?

00:05:01: Lead intelligence sharing Providing deep sales context partners Mapping out multi-touch nurture streams.

00:05:08: Okay let's unpack this for a second.

00:05:10: It is like carrying buckets of water from the river Versus taking time to build a pipeline.

00:05:15: Running one-off partner webinars is carrying a bucket.

00:05:19: It feels like hard work, it satisfies the immediate thirst but the moment you stop walking... The

00:05:24: water stops flowing!

00:05:25: Exactly building the engine through the shared calendars?

00:05:29: The automated followups.

00:05:30: that's building the pipeline.

00:05:32: Is it like buying a gym membership at only going once a year?

00:05:36: if You don't build the daily habit your just wasting money and leaving that three million dollars Will Taylor talked about up for grabs.

00:05:43: I love that framing But here is the critical next step, right?

00:05:46: You can't pump water through a broken pipe.

00:05:49: And you certainly can't run a strategic marketing engine without clean data!

00:05:53: The data is essentially the central nervous system.

00:05:55: It tells the marketing body how to move

00:05:57: Exactly.

00:05:58: Which brings us to second major theme from last two weeks which is program design and data hygiene.

00:06:04: it's wildly unglamorous but absolute prerequisite for scale.

00:06:08: Yeah, and Tushar Ranka had a brilliant post dissecting this.

00:06:12: He pointed out that every single partnership pitch deck this year features the exact same slide AI agents running your partner program.

00:06:20: Naturally, everyone wants the AI fix right

00:06:23: but he bluntly states that most partner programs simply aren't ready for AI

00:06:28: because they lack clean connected data.

00:06:31: I mean if you're data lives in four disconnected tools.

00:06:34: a i cannot predict Your next big partner.

00:06:36: it doesn't even know what It's looking at exactly.

00:06:38: If You are listening to This Right Now Think About Your Own CRM.

00:06:42: How many co-sell opportunities are sitting in stage two that haven't been touched since like Q three of last year?

00:06:49: Probably a lot more than anyone wants to admit.

00:06:51: Oh, definitely because before you go pitch your boss on deploying the fancy AI partner agent You have to realize that AI doesn't magically fix a broken foundation as Tushar said it just makes the cracks run faster.

00:07:03: That's a great quote.

00:07:05: It really is.

00:07:05: If your CRM is full of garbage data, the AI's just going to confidently index that garbage at lightning

00:07:11: speed.".

00:07:11: And

00:07:11: Trudeau will be echoed this perfectly when he was examining AWS Partner Central... Now To Be Clear The AI agents inside AWS are genuinely powerful today.

00:07:21: They can read your meeting notes, turn them into structured opportunities fill out the required fields

00:07:26: which is amazing.

00:07:27: whoa

00:07:28: it's huge.

00:07:29: they can even flag cost sell funding that you're eligible for but didn't know about.

00:07:33: so the manual data entry has historically made co-selling so miserable finally going away.

00:07:40: But the catch?

00:07:41: Is an agent only act on what already there.

00:07:45: Trunel points out that if your CRM is basically a graveyard of stale opportunities, the agent doesn't revive your pipeline.

00:07:51: It just moves through the mess faster.

00:07:53: Exactly The partners who are going to win the AI era aren't the ones with the flashiest generative AI strategy.

00:07:59: They're the one's put in the boring painstaking work keeping their CRMs synced and clean In real time

00:08:05: Which means we also have to completely rethink how design programs themselves Because you know If we are tracking the wrong data, The AI is optimizing for the wrong outcomes.

00:08:17: Rahul Sharma posted about the death of the static tiered partner program.

00:08:21: you know?

00:08:28: gets platinum status and then just coasts on those margins forever.

00:08:32: Exactly, Those legacy tiers are built entirely on lagging indicators.

00:08:37: they reward what a partner did in the past not.

00:08:42: Rahul argues that these traditional structures actively hold your highest potential partners back.

00:08:47: How so?

00:08:48: Well, the legacy partners at the top get complacent because their margins are fully protected.

00:08:52: Meanwhile The mid-tier partner is getting demotivated by impossible revenue jump requirements and the new hungry startups Are starved of the financial margins they need to actually scale your product today.

00:09:03: Wow It's like judging a stock entirely on its performance from a decade ago rather than looking at it current R&D pipeline.

00:09:10: It makes no sense in a fast moving market.

00:09:12: No sense at all, instead

00:09:13: we are seeing a shift toward dynamic behavior driven ecosystems.

00:09:18: these our programs that reward real time milestones things like early deal registrations joint business planning or proof-of-concept deployments.

00:09:29: And they reward the partner at that exact moment when they hit those milestones.

00:09:32: Right, and Corey Johnathan backed this up by comparing outdated programs to legacy technology.

00:09:38: He noted old programs measure activities like How many portal logins did we have this month?

00:09:43: Or

00:09:43: how any basic certifications were completed.

00:09:45: Exactly,

00:09:46: how much MDF was drained?

00:09:47: Vanity metrics We get so caught up in measuring the activity that we forget to measure the outcome.

00:09:52: Right whereas The Modern Dynamic Programs Measure Actual Business Outcomes Active Sellers Qualified Pipeline Generated Revenue Per Partner Time To First Deal.

00:10:01: What's fascinating here is if twenty percent of your partners are driving eighty percent Of Your Revenue You Have To Ask Yourself Is the program actually underperforming?

00:10:10: Or are we just obsessing over vanity metrics, right.

00:10:12: Exactly!

00:10:13: Instead of fixing data architecture so that you can focus on rewarding the right behaviors...

00:10:18: It always comes back to the data architecture.

00:10:20: So okay You've built this engine and cleaned it up.

00:10:23: The fuel is pure.

00:10:25: Now where does actual transaction happen?

00:10:28: The data from these past two weeks points into a massive undeniable shift toward marketplaces and co-selling as new commercial backbone?

00:10:38: Absolutely.

00:10:39: Marketplaces are no longer just digital storefronts where you buy a single software license, they

00:10:53: regarding this.

00:10:54: The Microsoft

00:10:54: one, right?

00:10:55: Yes the expansion of microsoft marketplace multi-party private offers or MPOs across Europe and eventually other regions.

00:11:02: Let's actually break down the mechanics of an MPO because it sounds like heavy corporate jargon But it is fundamentally rewiring how enterprise software has bought and sold.

00:11:11: It really is historically in Enterprise customer bot technology in complete frustrating silos.

00:11:17: Let's say they wanted to deploy a new security solution.

00:11:19: They had to negotiate and sign a contract by the software from one vendor, then they have to negotiate a separate contract for services from consulting firm.

00:11:27: Then they had to find deployment partner somewhere else And support form yet another vendor Basically act as their own systems integrator manage multiple billing cycles and stitch it all together themselves

00:11:40: Which you know takes months involves endless legal reviews and is just an absolute nightmare for the buyer.

00:11:47: An absolute nightmare?

00:11:48: MPO changes the mechanism entirely, it allows multiple partners so that software creator or reseller service provider to come together into one integrated commercial

00:11:58: offer.

00:11:58: That's huge!

00:11:59: Yeah...

00:11:59: The primary vendor packages the software, consulting and implementation in a single custom offer on Microsoft Marketplace.

00:12:06: The buyer clicks Purchase once-one contract one billing cycle.

00:12:11: And the marketplace automatically routes the correct margins and payouts to each respective partner behind scenes.

00:12:17: because customers don't want silos anymore, they want complete business outcomes simpler procurement and trusted ecosystems.

00:12:25: here's where it gets really interesting.

00:12:27: Roman Kersanov shared a case study from David Maurer at Lucidlink that proves how powerful this is.

00:12:33: Oh I saw

00:12:34: Lucidlink managed to get thirty nine percent of their net new annual recurring revenue.

00:12:39: To run through partners and there's secret wasn't some magic marketing campaign, it was designing the channel architecture around every single buying path

00:12:48: right?

00:12:49: The philosophy is always yes!

00:12:51: Yes if a customer wants to buy thru traditional reseller...the answer is YES.

00:12:56: If they want use their committed cloud spend by the AWS marketplace....yes If they want a managed service provider and MSP to handle the entire thing, yes.

00:13:04: It's brilliant!

00:13:13: You aren't running separate competing transaction desks.

00:13:18: They all attach to the same customer-centric

00:13:20: motion.".

00:13:21: And, The financial results of this approach are just undeniable.

00:13:24: Nicole DeZenne from Microsoft shared data showing that partners who were using the marketplace for COSEL are seeing seventy five percent faster deal closures.

00:13:33: That's a massive acceleration.

00:13:35: It is not to mention sixty nine percent larger deals.

00:13:38: When you remove friction from procurement process when stop forcing buyer sign four different contracts Everything accelerates.

00:13:46: Okay, so we have the marketing engine running The CRM data is clean and the marketplace highway Is completely open for business.

00:13:52: but how on earth do you manage?

00:13:54: The immense Daily scale of this ecosystem?

00:13:57: I mean We are talking about tracking Thousands of partners and potentially tens of thousands Of daily interactions globally.

00:14:04: it's a logistical mountain

00:14:05: right.

00:14:05: And this brings us to our final major theme from the sources AI & partner execution or what people were starting To call the agentic era.

00:14:13: Yeah, this is where AI shifts from a broad high-level ecosystem narrative into hyper specific daily operational execution.

00:14:22: Dominic Garabidian had a crucial warning for anyone owning co-sell motions right now.

00:14:28: he said if your playbook doesn't explainately evolve around the ai priorities of the major cloud providers specifically things like aws bedrock and agent core Your pipeline is going to stagnate.

00:14:39: Let's clarify those terms.

00:14:41: If you are an ISV and independent software vendor building your own tech core, why does your playbook need to care about AWS Agent Core?

00:14:49: Because you have to look at the incentives of the AWS account executive.

00:14:53: Their sales reps are heavily incentivized and measured on AI attach rates.

00:14:57: right now they need to sell workloads that utilize Amazon Bedrock which is their foundation model service And agent core which powers autonomous AI agents.

00:15:05: Okay I see where this is going.

00:15:06: Yeah, if your software product doesn't connect to that specific AI story the AWS Rep has zero financial incentive.

00:15:18: Dominic argues you have to lead with the AWS workload, not your own product.

00:15:23: You have to show how your solution makes an agent core work load run faster or make it more secure and cheaper to operate.

00:15:30: If don't align their compensation metrics just a feature in someone else's pitch

00:15:36: That makes total sense.

00:15:38: You have to engineer your playbook around the financial incentives of The Giant you are partnering with, and it's not just about selling AI.

00:15:46: It is about using it to manage their relationship.

00:15:48: We saw a post from Matt Yankeeshin in Rubal Borno discussing how AWS partner central agents Are fundamentally changing daily administrative game.

00:15:56: Oh, absolutely.

00:15:57: These internal AI agents which are actually built on Amazon Bedrock Are cutting partner administrative time by up to forty percent.

00:16:03: That's almost half their week back

00:16:05: Right!

00:16:05: Partners can now create co-sell opportunities using simple natural language.

00:16:10: Instead of a partnership manager spending two hours on a Friday afternoon filling out massive rigid forms, they just describe the parameters of the deal to the agent and the AI handles the structured data entry.

00:16:21: It instantly finds qualifying opportunities and flags

00:16:24: funding.".

00:16:25: And John you showed exactly what this looks like in The Wild.

00:16:27: his company Sugar has an AI agent that monitors inbound AWS referrals.

00:16:33: twenty four seven think about what happens usually.

00:16:37: A referral comes in, it gets assigned to a rep.

00:16:39: The rep gets busy and the deal stalls out and dies.

00:16:42: Happens all of time!

00:16:43: But Sugar's AI agent monitors the pipeline constantly... ...the second an opportunity goes quiet — the agent surfaces.

00:16:48: it explains exactly why its stall based on communication history….

00:16:52: …and hands the account owner everything they need to revive the deal with perfect context.

00:16:57: No digging through CRM notes no missed follow-ups just getting that deal back into motion instantly.

00:17:02: It is incredible but you know this raises massive question If AI is doing all the deal registration, if it's monitoring the pipeline to four seven finding the co-self funding drafting.

00:17:13: The follow up emails.

00:17:15: does the human partnership manager eventually become obsolete?

00:17:18: It's the elephant in the room and Rob Moyer tackled it beautifully.

00:17:21: he argued that the more partnership work gets automated by a I the more important Human Judgment actually becomes.

00:17:29: technology accelerates relationships but it absolutely cannot replace the foundation of them.

00:17:34: I'll push back on that a bit.

00:17:36: Why not?

00:17:37: If the AI is doing ninety percent of heavy lifting, why do we need the human in loop at

00:17:41: all?".

00:17:41: Because nobody's in partnership to run a charity!

00:17:44: We're here for profitable revenue and best partnerships create business annuity.

00:17:49: Repeat referrals repeat executive introductions repeat customer wins over years.

00:17:53: AI is exceptionally good at automating operational tax data entry forms scaling basic activities.

00:18:00: but Long term business annuity is created by human trust, strategic alignment and mutual commitment.

00:18:08: It's the trust that comes into play when things go wrong like When an account executive decides to take a risk And give your partner a chance on a highly competitive multi-million dollar deal or

00:18:19: when someone picks up The phone on a Sunday because deployment went sideways in.

00:18:22: the customer Is angry.

00:18:24: precisely

00:18:25: no AI agent No matter how advanced creates That kind of trust.

00:18:29: ai scales the activities but humans create the annuities.

00:18:33: The best partnership leaders aren't fighting the AI, they are using it to automate all that repeatable administrative work.

00:18:40: so

00:18:45: That is a critical distinction to make.

00:18:47: The AI handles the activity metrics so that humans can focus on business outcome metrics.

00:18:52: But before we wrap up today, I want leave you with one final kind of sobering data point to mull over regarding this A.I era.

00:18:59: We've talked about how AI manages your internal data but what about How AI views your company from outside?

00:19:07: Alaina Zapp did a fascinating study looking at one hundred and twenty mid-market B toB tech companies.

00:19:12: To see if their partner programs were actually discoverable.

00:19:16: Discoverable meaning what?

00:19:17: Like, If I Google...

00:19:18: Ah!

00:19:18: Google.

00:19:18: Discovered by AI search tools in large language models like ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity.

00:19:25: Buyers and potential partners are increasingly skipping traditional search engines and asking AI to find solutions and recommend partner programs for them.

00:19:32: Oh wow okay

00:19:33: Yeah.

00:19:33: And Alaina found that Seventy-eight percent of these midmarket BtoB tech partner programs were completely invisible to AI discovery tools.

00:19:42: Wait, seventy eight percent invisible?

00:19:44: Entirely invisible!

00:19:45: It's not that they are broken companies.

00:19:47: They have real teams and portal pages That look perfectly fine for a human scrolling on the web browser.

00:19:52: But their websites aren't structured in way that allows the AI engines To read, scrape or index information.

00:19:58: So the AI just ignores them

00:20:00: Exactly.

00:20:01: When a potential buyer goes into chat GPT and asks, find me an integration partner for this specific security software those companies just get skipped.

00:20:09: they aren't on page two of the results.

00:20:11: They are not listed.

00:20:12: all

00:20:12: that is terrifying.

00:20:14: you could build The perfect marketing engine have pristine CRM data And be fully integrated to the marketplace but if the AI can't read your public footprint You don't exist to the next generation of buyers.

00:20:26: It is terrifying, so the ultimate question you have to ask yourself this week.

00:20:29: As buyers and partners increasingly use AI to search for solutions does your carefully crafted partner program actually exist in the eyes of the AI or are you operating entirely?

00:20:52: Thank you so much for joining us on this deep dive into the evolving world of channel marketing.

00:20:56: Don't forget to hit subscribe,