Lead generation with OEMs using Partners
How do you keep Channel Partners aligned?
You have brought on partners to be able to serve more markets. 
You build the product and the brand, letting partners handle sales and possibly customer service. By title, they may be distributors, dealers, retailers or value-added resellers, but regardless, they exist to fulfill orders for you at scale. This is a good model, but for each new market you open and new revenue goals you set, your marketing challenges become more complex.
Acting as the Hub for Leads
Channel programs expect partners to do prospecting on your behalf, but until they build up a self-sustaining pipeline, you need to provide new partners with leads to ensure the program’s success. You are willing to fund this effort, but you don’t want to pay any more than you have to.
Your website is the natural source of these leads, as it’s the hub already visited by people who are interested in the product. Smart marketers can keep up with partner demand with a locator on their site that captures contact information and then feeds it to a partner who will qualify and close the sale.
Leads not Evenly Distributed to Partners
When search engines bless you with organic traffic, it’s often not in the regions where you really need it. Perhaps Google is sending people in EMEA to your new product page even though you haven’t yet briefed your EMEA partners on it. Many marketers counter this problem by using paid traffic to reach more markets, distributing traffic according to how much performance they need out of each region.
Executing this strategy on Google Ads and social platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter is challenging. They all use artificial intelligence, which makes it hard to use pinpoint targeting. Sometimes they bring traffic from geographies with the highest search volume, sometimes there is no apparent logic – they spend wherever it suits them, instead of according to where sales are most profitable.
Leads Not Ripe for Sending to Partners
Whether you pay for traffic to your site or not, it’s possible that paid traffic will generate leads that do not close as sales. This may be because your partner assumes all leads are sales-ready, when in reality, they need time to research and consider options before talking to a partner. However, this involves tedious manual work to screen each lead, and doesn’t bring into account different languages or regional considerations.
Hard to Evaluate Lead Follow-up
Whether your site uses a locator or not, once a lead is routed to your partner, it’s hard to know what happened with them. Leads seem to fall into a black hole. If you aren’t looped in, you won’t know who is at fault when sales are down. It’s not certain whether your site underperformed in sending them leads or if they are not following up enough on them?
Helping your Lead Generation
Contact Us to obtain leads your international channel partners at scale, with:
- PPC campaigns run on a region-by-region basis, to adjust for how competitive and costly each region is.. You have control over how much lead volume is moving in each of your markets. We train their artificial intelligence systems to spend where it’s most cost-effective according to the geographies or vertical markets that are strategically important to you.
- Website mechanisms that intercept leads going to your partners. Analytics dashboards that show what leads and opportunities each region has received, so you can learn whether the leads became closed sales.
- Email follow-up with leads (localized for their region or language) to further screen them before forwarding to a partner. This use of a Marketing Automation or email platform ensures that leads are only forwarded to a partner when they are ready.