If a lot of your sales go through the IT channel, or you’re aiming to develop this aspect of your business, you obviously need to think about partner motivation. This is particularly important when introducing new or unfamiliar solutions to them. Partners are as busy as you are and only care about your products and services in so far as they can help them drive their own business. You therefore often need to spell out why it’s in their interest to switch time and resources to your offerings. Otherwise, they’ll continue to focus on what they’re used to, which is likely to include competitor options.

This might seem obvious when you say it, but I so often see marketing and product marketing teams doing a great job on messaging to the end customer, while paying a lot less attention to the resellers, integrators and other types of partner. Repackaging your customer collateral for them is not what I’m referring to here. It’s about developing a set of messages that articulate a clear and compelling proposition to the partners themselves.

So what might you include in a partner proposition? Well you could highlight how your solution will help them stand out in a noisy market to create leads, change the customer conversation and generally increase conversion rates and deal values. Other benefits likely to resonate include the opportunity to drive spin-off services revenue or increase account stickiness.

Often the assumption is that partners will work it out for themselves, and some of them will. But many - particularly the more successful ones that represent multiple vendors - often need to be prompted to lift their heads and take notice.

So what kind of assets can help with this? Something I’ve seen work effectively is a short guide outlining suggested tactics for driving incremental revenue and margin from your solution in ways they might not naturally think of. Another option is an infographic illustrating the hooks, entry-points and cross-sell opportunities to help them start and develop customer conversations.

The specifics will depend on the product and type of partner, but the point is that the customer and partner propositions are very different, and attention needs to be paid to both. In essence, we’re talking about the need to market to partners as well as through them.