I'm opinionated.

I guess every blogger is. :-)

But I have particularly strong feelings about the critical components to a scalable partner-led marketing engine.

First, we don’t want to guess where the opportunities are.

imageNor do we want to guess which products are the ones where we should focus.

Nor which customers are the ones we should call.

We need to crunch the data to help us find the “needle in the haystack.”

Secondly, no matter what, the engine we’re going to build MUST meet three criteria

  1. Scaleable—by adding 1 more TPAM, we can support 50 more partners
  2. Operational—as automated as possible and NOT dependent on the knowledge of any one person. The “get hit by a bus” part of the business.
  3. Trackable- we want to spend our time analyze and acting on data, not assembling it.

 

image

Lastly, we want an alignment of Right Partner telling the Right Story and doing the Right Activity.

  1. Are we working with a partner that understands that Microsoft is in the licensing business and can help create/influence that outcome?
  2. Are we enabling the partner to focus on the right customer and educate them to tell the right (whole) story that creates a solution vision?

    The story needs to be Aligned to partner competency and, since many of the partners, no matter how good they are at selling, may not be as good at the marketing point, we need to encourage them to leverage the relevant story from us, when possible. And it's our job to provide that story. Plus There’s no shame in that at all.

    And this story, btw, includes the RIGHT Call-To-Action, Offers, and Licensing solutions.
  3. And are we engaging the partners in the Right Activity?
    image

I'm heavily biased towards events because

  • they work
  • other activities either don’t scale or can’t be tracked easily

Clearly, we don’t want to be overconfident and we need measure to make sure it’s working the way we hope it will.

If we can make this engine hum, we'll have a great vehicle for partners to engage and Microsoft to leverage as we seek closer relationships with the 250,000 breadth State and Local Government and numerous Academic institutions out there.

Should be fun.

Next up, we'll talk about the inside of the engine looks like for the partners...