Channel Incentives and Your Marketing Certification Program

Claudio Ayub

Channel incentives cannot compensate for the absence of an easy to use channel marketing automation tool or competitively superior campaigns offering, however, they can be effective as part of a holistic strategy for improving partner engagement at both the organizational and individual levels.

You need only pay the individual starter incentives once per training course and per campaign, as these campaigns should yield results that will earn the partner marketing manager top recognition within the business, which in many instances is as important - if not more important - than the incentive itself.

Allocate the reward where the effort is being made to accomplish your objectives.

This is different from incenting the partner only. If you think about it, it is the partner’s employee (marketing associate) who will be doing the work to learn, configure and launch the effort on the channel marketing automation tool. Marketing certification ensures that the partner’s marketing associate gains exposure to key marketing skills that they really need, and commits them to a learning process where they must engage directly with – and in turn grow closer to – the supplier.

SiriusDecisions research indicates partners are three times more likely to respond to a demand creation program offer, after engaging in some form of marketing training.

Rewards should be issued via a point’s program, designed around learning, measurement, execution and proof of performance data. Below is a very simple example on how to get started:

Marketing Activity	Learn metric	Create metric	Share metric
Content syndication	Passed quiz in Incentives Center (quiz posted with training material)	Creation within channel marketing automation platform	Implementation of the code (meaning content deployed on a website)
Landing page + email	Passed quiz in Incentives Center (quiz posted with training material)	Creation within channel marketing automation platform	Email sent to 100 contacts
Event	Passed quiz in Incentives Center (quiz posted with training material)	Creation within channel marketing automation platform	25 registered attendees
Incentive	Learn incentive: 450 points ($50)	Create incentive: 900 points ($100)	Share incentive: 1,350 points ($150)

Learn more about how to improve partner-led demand creation with marketing certification programs.

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About the Author

Chief Strategy Officer Claudio Ayub brings over 20 years of global channel marketing experience to Perks.He has executed major go-to-market programs for a variety of vendors, including Bing, Cisco, Dell, EMC, IBM, Kaspersky, Lenovo, Microsoft, Motorola, Seagate, Symantec, and VMware among others.
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Allocate the reward where the effort is being made to accomplish your objectives.

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