iAgent is an email marketing business to channel partners. Vendors pay to have their ads sent to the iAgent email list. They are also posted on to the iAgent website. I don’t know why I looked at it so different today, but today all I can see are so many businesses begging for attention. While there are over 600 vendors in the Agent Channel, iAgent represents less than 80 of them that show up repeatedly.
AT&T, Verizon and the cable guys are like Coke and Pepsi: they need to keep advertising because they need to salient. During the pandemic, Coca-Cola cut advertising and saw an 11% dip in revenues, prompted by a decline in impulse buys. That’s why they just keep emailing.
Vendors who are not household names, need to do Marketing, but, honestly, most of that just appears to be spray and pray. They do random stuff for indeterminant amounts of time and hope for results. I see it all the time.
The way Microsoft, Cisco, AT&T, Verizon, Charter, Comcast and T-Mobile approach the channel is very different from how most vendors should. The Big 7 have a Big Brand. Their products are mass market and appeal to everyone. Most vendors are not a monopoly and should stop acting like it.
Partnering with RingCentral is more like dealing with AT&T than any partner would like. Yet Dialpad, 8×8 and others have not really accepted that fact.
CyberSecurity vendors think everyone should be selling their stuff, but time has proven that not to be the case for a variety of reasons. Yet they don’t address that void.
Resellers forgot the reason Partners once sought them out.
In channel marketing, the message is to the Partner. Why give us a chance? What are we good at? Who are our Customers? That’s where the message should be. It often isn’t.
But then many vendors have no idea what they are doing channel wise. They hire someone and put all the chips in that basket and hope it works out. The only measure: revenue.
There are so many ingredients that go into a successful partner program. Some of those ingredients are garden variety Marketing. Some of the ingredients are Operational. A big one is product-market-partner fit! You need a feedback loop, too.
They want a free sales force and to be like AT&T. I shake my head at all of that.
Start with my book: Channel Myths, in paperback and as an ebook at Amazon Kindle.